Nine Lives: My time as the West's top spy inside al-Qaeda

by Aimen Dean

  Once an important agricultural centre on Syria’s wide northern plains, with a population of some 30,000 before the war broke out, Saraqib had suffered extensive damage. The Syrian army had seized it early in 2012, destroying large portions of the town and killing dozens of residents. In turn, Syrian soldiers had been killed in cold blood when rebels retook the town later that year.19 It now had the air of a ghost town. Walls were daubed with primitive depictions of Assad’s helicopters bombing mosques; the water tower had received a direct hit and there was no running water. But there was an air of defiance among those who remained. In just a few neighbourhoods, roads were being swept; market stalls were open; mechanics tried to breathe new life into ancient, battered cars.

  I could not tell whether the house where I was sheltering was unfinished or had been damaged, and might have said the same about dozens of others. The furnishings were bare: tattered chairs and tables scavenged from other homes that had been wrecked, threadbare carpets. Supplies of cooking oil, rice and cracked wheat were stacked to the ceiling in preparation for the winter.

  The charity’s director had come to meet me. So had local Syrian fighters of Ahrar al-Sham, Jund al-Aqsa and al-Nusra – all militant Islamist groups who had a presence in the town. They had not yet started killing each other. The Syrian revolution was still a noble cause, for these young Syrians and for the outside world.

  Thin and unkempt with apprentice beards, they had apparently not seen a shower in weeks. They were simple local boys, dressed in mismatched civilian and military clothing with trainers rather than military boots on their feet, but they had aged beyond their years thanks to months of fighting.

  I quickly calculated none of the al-Qaeda-aligned Nusra fighters posed an immediate threat. None had been beyond the local area and it seemed highly unlikely they would be aware of the fatwah to kill me. These young men insisted the tide was turning against the army and the hated regime militia known as the shahiba. Plenty of soldiers – especially the lower-ranking Sunni – were not going to spill their blood for Assad, they predicted confidently.

  The fighters were kind, honest young men for whom the rebellion had yet to lose its meaning. The absolute distrust among different groups that would eventually cripple the insurgency had not yet reared its ugly head. One young man with a wispy beard and thin, angular face expressed the hope that I would join them. If only he knew, I thought.

  Another fighter pressed me on why foreign governments seemed so willing to allow Assad’s killing machine to continue its work unhindered.

  ‘And now we have to fight Hezbollah, too,’ he said. ‘Why is it okay for Assad to have foreign fighters from Lebanon, Iraq and Iran, but not for foreign fighters to help us?’ I had no answer but heartfelt sympathy.

  ‘I don’t understand it either,’ I said. ‘But I grew up in Kuwait; I can’t speak for the West, and I wouldn’t want to.’

  As night fell, I lay down on a bed-mat among the rice and lentils and pulled a heavy rug over me. I had brought diabetes tablets with me to regulate my blood sugar levels, but I felt dizzy and weak. Perhaps it was the shock of what I had seen. Every sinew seemed to ache from the stress of the journey. The dust of Atarib had permeated my clothes; it smelled of death.

  More than once I asked myself whether I really was here in northern Syria. I felt the shape of the Beretta tucked under the bed-mat; I imagined pulling it out quickly. And every minute I saw the girl pulled from the wreckage. I understood warfare well enough to know that I was deeply traumatized.

  I slept uneasily, dreaming repetitively that a group of jihadi gun-men had entered the safe house and ordered me to come with them.

  As we drove across the plains the next morning, we witnessed widespread and often random destruction. On several occasions we had to stop the car and head for the nearest ditch as barrel bombs were dropped on nearby villages. Idlib province was under daily bombardment; the regime’s helicopters and planes were overhead most of the day. But in 2013 they had not yet been joined by Russian airpower. Much worse was to come.

  Orcan’s frustrations boiled over. He may have been a smuggler, making money off all sides, but he had compassion for the Syrian people.

  ‘You have connections in the West. Tell them what you see here; tell them to come and bomb Assad.’

  It was a message I heard constantly. Local aid workers and civilians all had the same refrain: ‘Why are we getting no help when Assad massacres everyone?’

  The despair was all the greater because the United States had recently backed off bombing Assad’s forces despite a gruesome chemical weapons attack on a rebel-held suburb of Damascus. And now the most apocalyptic and brutal of groups, the Islamic State, was taking advantage of the rapidly disappearing space for moderate factions, even trying to devour its own offspring, Jabhat al-Nusra.

  ‘ISIS is taking it to Nusra,’ Orcan told me. ‘I don’t know if they can hold on.’*

  From its strongholds near the Iraqi border, ISIS was lashing out at other groups in northern Syria, trying to extend its territorial control towards the Turkish border. It would hold a huge swathe of northern Syria before being driven back between 2015 and 2017.

  ‘So we have ISIS and Assad. Thank you, world,’ Orcan said.

  I soon saw at first hand how a new generation of foreign jihadis were beginning to graft themselves onto the Syrian rebellion, like parasites looking for a host. They combined passionate belief that the world was approaching the end-of-days with deep Salafi-jihadi chauvinism. There was an unremitting hardness about them that was worlds away from my wide-eyed idealism twenty years earlier.

  At a makeshift hospital run by the charity in whose house I had sheltered, I met two Libyan fighters. They had been wounded fighting against government forces, but despite their obvious pain their eyes shone with intensity.

  One grabbed my wrist insistently.

  ‘We came because the Prophet told us to come,’ one of them said. ‘This is the land where the Islamic State will be created; this is where Jesus Christ will come.’

  And holding his index finger high, he went on:

  ‘A victorious band of warriors from my followers shall continue to fight for the truth . . .’

  As he spoke I saw his eyes fill with tears not of pain or frustration but euphoria.

  ‘. . . They will be at the gates of Damascus and its surroundings, and they will be at the gates of Antioch and its surroundings.’

  I had heard the hadith constantly in Afghanistan, but there it seemed to be distantly aspirational. Now it was real and close at hand. The Libyan fighters were well aware that the very place we were having this conversation – Idlib province – was close to the ancient Syrian city of Antioch.

  The message was repeated wherever I went. Kazakhs, Moroccans, Uighurs – they had all converged on Syria because this was where the Malahem would be fought – the epic battles foretold by the prophecies.* The defeat of the Assad regime was incidental to their greater goal.

  It was the Islamic State that brought the most apocalyptic and tendentious interpretations of the prophecies to Syria and Iraq. The impression I had of ISIS – reinforced by what I heard during that journey – was that it had discipline and coherence. Al-Qaeda under Ayman al-Zawahiri, by contrast, seemed almost quaint. Zawahiri would pontificate from his mountain hideout while al-Qaeda affiliates in places like Yemen and North Africa went about their very particular wars.

  ‘The trouble is,’ I told Orcan, ‘you can take ten members of al-Qaeda and ask them what they want, and get ten answers. Take ten members of ISIS, and you will get just one answer.’ He shook his head sadly. The moderates were even more helpless. ‘The Free Syrian Army have nothing to show, no message to convey, no philosophy. Why don’t they say, “We are here to protect and defend you against ISIS and against the regime”?’

  I looked out at the olive groves, untended amid the rubble of farm buildings.

  ‘It’s like Bosnia, but it’s going to last a lot longer,’ Orcan said with a
heavy sigh. ‘It will end only when the last man is left standing.’

  I looked back towards the demolished structures.

  Like a fever breaking, my emotional impulse to stay and fight had evaporated. It was obvious from what I had seen and heard so far in Syria that al-Qaeda and ISIS were hijacking what had been an honourable uprising. This not only doomed the rebellion to failure because it would lose international legitimacy, but it also meant Syrians would be caught in the crossfire between a brutal regime and merciless jihadi groups. But that was exactly the regime’s calculation.

  On a bridge over the River Bosna, nearly twenty years earlier, I had been torn between fighting against injustice and the futility and despair of war. Nowhere would hope be so cruelly snuffed out than in Syria.

  There was silence for the last part of our journey. As the sun sank towards the horizon and a chill suddenly touched the breeze, we arrived at a desolate piece of scrub on the edge of a village.

  ‘This is it,’ I said simply.

  I climbed out of our dusty, rattling car. I knew I didn’t have long. To drive the back roads of northern Syria at night was a risk too far. There were a few simple gravestones sunk into the hard ground. They had nothing but names, quickly painted because there were so many more to paint, I guessed.

  I moved from one to the next; all seemed recently dug. In the distance I could hear the thud of artillery or mortars, and again the distant whirring of a helicopter.

  Suddenly, Ibrahim’s grave was in front of me. Scrawled in black paint was the name Abu Khalil al-Bahraini – his kunya. Concrete had been poured roughly in front of the headstone to protect his burial place.

  I imagined his burial: a hurried affair attended by just a few fellow fighters, who no doubt had buried many comrades before Ibrahim and had wondered whether the next prayers would be said for them.

  I asked Orcan to take a photograph of the site; in time I would show it to Moheddin. I was gripped by an immense sadness, but also anger and no little guilt. Of course, it was a tragic waste of a young life, but it was also a mere blip on the Syrian battlefield that would change nothing. It was an utterly futile death, as futile as the victims of Atarib; that is what I hated so much.

  I recalled Moheddin’s pride at his son’s sacrifice, that he had been martyred defending his religion. It suddenly struck me how much I disagreed. Young, impressionable men from all over the Arab world – and Muslims from further afield – were being seduced by the call of jihad. They came here as moths to a light. Many were assigned suicidal missions or impossible defences; others had been duped by a perverted interpretation of Islam. And not a few had brought their psychopathic tendencies with them.

  Suddenly, a conversation I had had two years previously came back to me. It was with a former British intelligence official. On a bright morning early in 2011, as the Arab Spring seized the world’s imagination, we had met for lunch.

  ‘What’s going to happen in Syria?’ he had asked, two weeks after protests had first erupted against Bashar al-Assad.

  I remember feeling deep unease at the time. ‘Civil war,’ I had told him. ‘Perhaps a million dead, and it will last ten years.’

  ‘The worst-case scenario,’ he suggested.

  ‘No, the most likely. And I have a feeling that some of my own family will fight and die there.’

  I, too, had once felt the thrill of marching to war – with rose-tinted expectations of defending fellow Muslims against Crusader aggressors. I was even younger than Ibrahim when I had set off for Bosnia in a whirl of religious fervour. I had wanted to be part of an Islamic Vanguard far removed from the obsolescent ruling classes of Arabia. Nineteen years earlier, I had stood at the graves of other fighters, burning with the same sense of devotion and purpose that had inspired my nephew. Just like me he had gone to wage jihad to fight injustice.

  In time I had become disenchanted with the way the likes of Sheikh al-Muhajir manipulated the sayings of the Prophet for the narrow end of attacking the ‘Crusaders’ or spreading chaos in Arab states, setting Sunni against Shia and seeking to justify the deaths of innocents as part of a global religious war.

  Ibrahim would never know the luxury of such reflection nor the perspective that comes with maturity.

  I said a short prayer in the gathering gloom and briefly looked at the names scrawled above other hastily dug graves. A few leaves from a stand of poplars drifted across the graveyard as the breeze picked up with the onset of dusk.

  Orcan, standing a few feet away and smoking his twentieth cigarette of the day, was beginning to shift from foot to foot. I could almost feel him checking his watch. I turned and murmured my thanks to him. I did not look back.

  * During stints in Afghanistan before 9/11, Mohammed had grown close to a number of Libyans in al-Qaeda, including Abu Yahya al-Libi.

  * The Supreme Court had ruled that Article 157 of the Bahraini penal code under which Kamal and the others were charged was unconstitutional because it criminalized ‘thought crimes’. I had mixed feelings about the ruling. On the one hand it was very welcome because it cleared my brother’s name. But on the other hand I knew that Kamal had engaged in much more than thought crimes. The premature arrests meant there had not been enough evidence to to catch them red-handed. The ruling was a reflection of the very different standards applied to Sunni and Shia militants in a Kingdom under minority Sunni rule.3

  * In October 2006, al-Qaeda in Iraq declared itself the Islamic State of Iraq after merging with five other Iraqi insurgent groups. The Awakening Councils were formed in Sunni areas of Iraq, with substantial US support, to turn on the group. For the next four years, the Islamic State of Iraq was under constant pressure, but it survived.4

  * That insurgency persisted after the 2010 capture and execution by Iran of Abdul Maliq al-Rigi, the leader of Jundullah. After his death, Abu Hafs al-Baluchi formed another Sunni resistance group, Ansar al-Furqan (Guardians of the Criterion), whose stated aim was ‘to topple the Iranian regime and raise the word of Allah and lift injustice against the oppressed’. The group appears to have been well resourced, but Iranian authorities announced in 2016 that al-Baluchi (real name: Hesham Azizi) had been killed in a large security sweep the previous year.6

  * The term in Arabic is As Sabat Ashetwee.

  * The group with which he was communicating would in November 2014 pledge its allegiance to ISIS. A qualified engineer in its ranks would have been extremely useful.

  * Jabhat al-Nusra first emerged in Syria in 2011 after Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi dispatched a Syrian deputy, Abu Mohammed al-Julani, across the border to build up the group’s operations there. In 2013 the group split into two factions. One remained loyal to Baghdadi and was absorbed into a new group called the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The other maintained its allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri and continued to call itself Jabhat al-Nusra (it is now known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham).

  * The Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) is the biggest Uighur jihadi group. It built up a significant presence in the tribal areas of Pakistan in the years after 9/11 and subsequently established a significant base of operations in Syria, particularly in Idlib province. Its goal is to create an Islamic State in Xinjiang province in western China and surrounding areas.

  * Abdullah Azzam was a Palestinian cleric who played a pivotal role in rallying jihadis to fight against Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

  * A pseudonym.

  * In the months and years after my mission for Beijing, the Uighur problem only worsened. Not long after my visit to Macau, knife-wielding attackers dressed in black stormed the railway station in Kunming, the provincial capital of Yunnan. At least twenty-nine people were stabbed to death, more than a hundred injured. Authorities described the assault as an ‘organized, premeditated, violent terrorist attack’.15

  * In September 2014, in the opening salvo of the air campaign in Syria, the US launched cruise missiles against camps they believed were linked to the Khorasan group after learning of a plot by them to bomb
Western aviation.17

  ** Another would soon travel to Syria: Said Arif, the one-time chief of al-Qaeda’s London intelligence apparatus who had introduced me to Abu Qatada in London. He arrived in October 2013 and took on a leadership position among al-Qaeda-aligned jihadis. He was killed in a Coalition air strike there in 2015.18

  * In November 2013, al-Qaeda’s leader Ayman al-Zawahiri finally made clear his disapproval of ISIS’s power grab in Syria. He stated firmly that Jabhat al-Nusra was ‘an independent branch of al-Qaeda that reports to the general command.’ ISIS, of course, took no notice, setting the stage for the bitter rivalry between it and al-Qaeda that followed.20

  * Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula named its media arm Al-Malahem Media.

  Reflections

  The battles across Syria continued remorselessly after my brief glimpse into the inferno. Orcan told me in 2015 how the atmosphere had been transformed. America’s obsession with battling the Islamic State had alienated people who had once hoped the US and its allies would rescue them from Assad. Distrust, despair and militancy swirled in a toxic combination.

  ‘If you come now,’ he joked darkly during a phone call in mid-2015, ‘there will be an execution party.’

  When I survey the Muslim world now, I look back to my time in Bosnia and the Philippines, even my first visit to Afghanistan, as almost innocent expeditions in pursuit of an ideal. I felt the call of jihad when it meant something noble and courageous. I have also seen jihad in its most vicious and totalitarian colours. I have literally fought for it and – as it came to be defined by al-Qaeda and ISIS – against it.

  My ‘betrayal’ of the cause earned me a fatwah that is still in force today. I take some comfort from the fact that most of those who would like to see my demise have themselves been killed, including the man who authored my death sentence, Turki Binali, who was taken out in an air strike in north-eastern Syria in the spring of 2017.*