by Mark Dawson
There were twenty metres between him and the nearest of the two sentries. They were both toting assault rifles, but they were relaxed and at ease. They were unprofessional and unaware of the danger they were in. The two men were still close, but he knew that the second shot would be the more challenging of the two. He heard the sound of laughter and watched as one of the two men clapped the other on the shoulder and then started to move away. Pope centred the first man in the reticule of the sight. He drew in a breath and then exhaled, emptying his lungs, and put the pad of his index finger against the trigger. He squeezed, feeling the give of the smooth mechanism, feeling the pressure, and then pulling back through it.
The rifle barked, the report echoing out into the desert.
The first sentry fell.
Pope aimed again as quickly as he could manage without sacrificing accuracy. The second sentry had had his back turned as the first man had fallen, but he had heard the crack of the rifle, and when he spun around, he saw that his comrade was sprawled out on the road. Pope ensured that the mass of the man’s body was square in the sight and fired again. The rifle boomed, seemingly louder this time, the echo rolling back from the hills behind the sentry hut.
The second sentry dropped.
Pope stood and, with the butt of the rifle pressed into his shoulder and the muzzle aimed ahead, he came away from the hut and crossed the scrub to the margin of the road. He checked north and south. The road was empty, with no vehicles approaching. The sentry had dragged himself across the dusty asphalt to the block with the black flag wrapped around it. He had left a trail of blood across the sand. Pope approached, covering him with the rifle. The sentry had pulled his headscarf away from his head, and Pope saw a young man’s face. He had white skin and wide, frightened eyes. His weapon was on the ground beside him, but there was no prospect of him threatening Pope with it. He had been gut shot, his stomach perforated, and as Pope watched, his breathing slowed and then stopped.
Pope went back into the hut. There was a bundle of clothes that had been left on the floor. Pope sheathed his knife and rifled through them. There was a black robe and a black and white chequered headscarf. He took the robe and put it over his head, arranging it so that it fell neatly, obscuring the bulk of his tactical jacket with the ammunition and grenades. He collected the scarf and wound it around his head, leaving a strip clear for his eyes and nostrils.
He collected his backpack from the almond tree where he had left it and hauled it, and his weapons, to the armoured Ford Ranger. The keys were in the ignition; he supposed that the guards did not expect to have someone attempt to steal their wheels. He hid his pack in the back of the cabin, started the engine and drove into town.
PART TWO
Al-Bab
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Aqil stopped for a moment to take a breath. It was unbearably hot and he was gasping and covered in sweat.
“Why are you stopping?” the instructor yelled at him. “Move! Run!”
He started again, closing the distance to the others and then matching their pace. He was wearing the same outfit as the others: blue and black camouflage fatigues, sand-coloured desert boots and a yellow headscarf that covered his head save for a narrow slit that allowed him to look out. The recruits looked almost identical, and their trainer—an ex-soldier from Saddam’s Republican Guard—ran them through an exercise regime that required them to match each other precisely. They had been instructed to complete the three-mile run through the desert in less than an hour. Aqil was reasonably fit, but the sun was brutal and his uniform wasn’t built with running in mind. He had blisters on his feet, and two of the toenails on his right foot had turned black.
They completed the course, and after just a ten-minute interval so that they could take on fluids from a table laden with plastic bottles of water, the instructor moved on to a session dealing with hand-to-hand combat. They were given knives and taught how to use them, including a five-minute break during which the Iraqi described the most efficient way to decapitate a hostage. It wasn’t like films, the man said, not like how the crusaders portrayed it. It wasn’t a single swipe and it was done. You had to pull them back by the hair, expose the throat and then hack all the way through until you were through the windpipe, and the rest almost fell off.
They worked hard for another fifty minutes before they were allowed to take a proper break to eat. Aqil tugged the scarf down a little to let some fresh air flow around his face and so that he could take a drink from a pitcher of water that had been left at the side of the dusty square where the training took place.
This was their third day at the camp. They had arrived at the Omar oilfield at noon on the day that they had crossed the border. He had seen a map. It was to the south of the city of Deir ez-Zur, two hundred and fifty miles from the place from which they had been collected. It should have been a six-hour drive, but it had taken twice that because the driver had followed a route that took them away from areas of the country that were still held by the government.
Aqil had looked out the window for almost the entire duration of the journey. They passed through towns and villages that had been razed to the ground, left as smouldering piles of wood and rubble. Hungry children stared at their bus with empty eyes. Every additional ten minutes had moved Aqil another mile from Turkey and the chance to rectify the mistake that he was certain that they had made.
Their first evening had been spent in individual interviews with the instructors who ran the camp. Aqil had faced a barrage of questions—Where was he from? Why had he come to the caliphate?—and then followed an intensive session where he was expected to demonstrate his religious piety. They had asked him about his feelings toward the Nusayri regime and the Free Syrian Army and all the other groups that were contesting the embattled country. They asked him whether he accepted the strict Salafist tenets that governed the group. Aqil had been frightened and did not know what would happen to him if he failed their tests. Would they return him to the border? Would they shoot him? He had answered with as much conviction as he could muster, hoping that they would not see through his lies.
It appeared that they had not. The new recruits had been gathered together and told that they would receive one month’s training before they were sent to fight. The instructor had explained that they would receive a mixture of military and political tuition delivered by a cadre of five instructors. There would be lessons in Arabic and religious instruction. After they graduated, they would remain under supervision and could be expelled or punished if they did not maintain their standards. The instructor had taken special care to explain that the punishment would be severe, and that it would include being lashed if the recruits expressed reservations at being at the camp or questioned any of the teachings.
They had been assigned a bed in a building that had once accommodated the workers at the oilfield. Aqil and Yasin had succeeded in taking cots next to one another, and the murmured late-night conversations that the proximity allowed had been the only thing that Aqil had been able to find to take his mind off what had happened to him.
Things were beginning to settle into a pattern now. The morning started at six with an hour of religious instruction delivered by a sharii, a young cleric who had recently been recruited to the organisation in order to make up for the lack of imams. The lessons focussed on three main subjects: tawhid, or the requirement for monotheism; bida’a, or the forbidding of any deviation in religious matters; and wala wal baraa, or loyalty to Islam and disloyalty to anything that was considered un-Islamic. They were given a simple breakfast of hummus, sliced cucumber and sheep’s milk yoghurt, and then the physical training began.
Aqil hated it. He existed in a state of perpetual terror and regret. He was scared that his fear and self-loathing for allowing himself to be brought here would be obvious, and even though it was always unpleasantly hot, he looked forward to when he was able to pull on the headscarf or balaclava that he had been given. It hid his face, and his hot tears w
ere absorbed into the fabric before they could be seen.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Yasin found him and they ate together.
“You okay?” Yasin asked him.
“What do you think?”
“You’ve got to keep that to yourself,” he urged. “If they see what you think about it, it won’t go well for you. For both of us.”
“What about you?” Aqil asked his brother. “You all right?”
“The sooner we get out of here, the better.”
They had spoken for an hour last night. They had conversed in low whispers, for fear of being eavesdropped upon by any of the zealous recruits who slept in the hut with them, and Aqil had confessed to his brother how he was feeling. Yasin had said that he felt the same way. Aqil had been flooded with relief. Yasin had admitted that he had made a terrible mistake and said that he would fix it. He would get them out of the country. Maybe they would be able to return to Turkey and pick up as if nothing had happened. Aqil doubted that—he expected that it would have been easy enough for the government to work out where they had gone—but he didn’t care. He didn’t care if he was prosecuted. He didn’t care if he was given a prison sentence. He just wanted to get away.
“What are we going to do?” Aqil asked his brother.
“We have to wait for the right time. We can’t just walk off into the desert, can we?”
Yasin looked over Aqil’s shoulder, and his face changed. Aqil turned and saw their instructor jogging over to them.
“You two,” the man said, pointing at them.
“What?”
“Come here. There’s someone who wants to talk to you.”
Aqil turned to Yasin. “It’s all right,” the older boy said. “Come on.”
The instructor sent them over to the main accommodation area. There was a car parked there. Most of the vehicles at the camp were utilitarian pickups and four-by-fours, but this was a dusty but reasonably new Mercedes. There was a man leaning against the car. The brothers went over to him. His eyes were hidden behind a pair of dark glasses.
“Hello,” Yasin said timorously. “Did you want to speak to us?”
“Do you know who I am?”
“No,” Yasin said. “Sorry—I don’t.”
“My name is Abu Buhar. I’m in charge of the camps in this province. What are your names?”
“Yasin Malik.”
“And him?”
“That’s my brother, Aqil.”
“English, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I have something for you both. It is important. You will go now to al-Bab. Infidels have been delivered to the caliphate, Allah be praised, and they are English. We need English-speaking guards to watch over them. You and your brother will do it.”
Aqil noticed the confusion in his brother’s face, but Yasin mastered it quickly. “No problem. When do we go?”
“Now. The bus is waiting.”
There were twenty of them, and they were to be transferred from the camp to al-Bab aboard a bus that had seen much better times. The windshield was held together by a lattice of tape, and the aluminium flanks were studded with bullet holes. The front of the bus was decorated with a number of red and blue lights, a traditional Syrian flourish, and a cheerful scene had been painted above the window. The bus was a strange sight, both colourful and decrepit; Aqil had little confidence that it would manage ten miles across this terrain, let alone the distance between the camp and al-Bab.
Aqil and Yasin waited in line as the men were embarked. The others were graduating from the camp and being sent to the various front lines where the caliphate was contesting its enemies. There were men of several different nationalities, and there was talking and laughter between them and a palpable sense of anticipation. Yasin climbed aboard first and Aqil followed, grabbing the handrails and heaving himself up. The entrance was a third of the way down the vehicle; there were double seats on either side of a narrow aisle, and the driver was already in place, a fat man wearing a keffiyeh in Palestinian black and white. Yasin took an empty seat halfway down the bus and Aqil slid in next to him. The seats were as uncomfortable as they looked, with no padding and with sharp edges where the vinyl had been sliced with a knife. Aqil looked up and saw that the air vents had all been torn out of their housings, the wires that would once have served overhead reading lights now hanging loose.
The engine rumbled to life and the doors were closed. The bus rolled out.
Chapter Thirty
The journey took five hours. They drove northwest through the regime’s stronghold in Raqqa, crossing the Euphrates River at the northern boundary of Lake Assad, and then continued to Manbij before they turned west for the final run along the highway to al-Bab. The route took them through small villages and hamlets where frightened-looking children would stare at them from the open windows of their fallen-down hovels.
Eventually, they crested a hill and saw a town spread out in the valley ahead. The road descended into a wide depression, the buildings arranged around a river. Aqil looked out and tried to assess how large the town was. It was difficult to say. It was evident, even from this vantage point, that some of the buildings had been destroyed. He saw a spiral of smoke rising up from the far side of the town, and some of the buildings that he could see through the haze ahead of them had been flattened.
“Al-Bab,” called the driver.
“Look at it,” Yasin said. “It’s a war zone.”
Aqil stared at the grim panorama and felt a fresh twist of anxiety in his stomach.
Yasin reached across and took his brother by the wrist. “We just stay together,” he said. “Okay?”
“Okay,” Aqil said.
Yasin lowered his voice. “And we look for a chance to get out. We’re north. I saw a sign for Aleppo, and we’re farther up than that now. There’s only thirty miles from Aleppo to Turkey. Maybe this isn’t so bad. Maybe this is lucky.”
The roads, which had been potholed and unreliable, now became a little more passable as they followed the road down into the bowl of the depression. The driver slowed as they approached a line of vehicles that had been left in the middle of the road. There were four cars, and each had been burnt out so that all that was left was a blackened frame. The driver turned the wheel and directed the bus onto the rough desert, the suspension squeaking in protest as they rumbled slowly by the devastated convoy. The atmosphere became subdued as the men and boys gazed out at the wreckage, each of them in no doubt as to what had happened here.
The driver called out again, his sentences full of aggressive confidence.
“What did he say?” Yasin said to the man on the other side of the aisle from him.
“He said not to worry. He said this is the work of the infidels, but that we are too strong to be dissuaded by their drones and planes. They are cowards,” the man went on with animation. “They should send their soldiers. That is what we want. The final battle between the crusaders and the believers. The end of the world.”
Yasin swallowed, his larynx bobbing up and down, but he didn’t answer.
They rolled to a halt at a checkpoint next to an orchard of almond trees. Security seemed to be particularly tight, with half a dozen heavily armed men stationed there. One of them gestured impatiently that the driver should open the door, and when he did, the guard climbed aboard and walked down the aisle. He smelt strongly of sweat, and he made a show of the big pistol that he held in his right fist. He spoke in harshly accented Arabic, and one of the men behind Aqil and Yasin answered nervously. The jihadi laughed and Aqil heard the sound of him hawking up a mouthful of phlegm and spitting it out. He dared not turn, and froze as the man stalked back down the bus and disembarked.
The bus pulled around the obstacles in the road and continued into al-Bab.
The bus stopped in the town’s central square. It was surrounded on all sides by one- and two-storey buildings, with several roads leading into it. A wooden platform had been erected in the middle of the s
quare, and on it three wooden crosses had been put up. The bodies of three men had been nailed to the crosses, and around their necks, notices in Arabic had been hung to announce their crimes. Aqil and Yasin disembarked from the bus and stared at the grisly sight.
One of the other men noticed that they were slack-jawed. “Can you read Arabic?”
“No,” Yasin said.
The man pointed at the three dead men one at a time. “‘Apostasy.’ ‘Cursing Islam.’ ‘Spying for infidel interests.’”
He clapped Aqil on the back, laughed and set off with the others for another bus that would take them to the front. The bus driver saw them dawdling and pointed to a car that was slowing to a halt next to the bus.
“They take you to English prisoners,” he said.
The car was driven by another fighter. It had been a taxi once, and a scratched Perspex screen separated the driver from his passengers. The brothers slid inside. Aqil forced himself to look away from the three dead men as the car reversed and set off.
“We shouldn’t be here,” he said again quietly. “What were we thinking?”
Yasin hushed him, then said, “We need to be careful. You know what happens if they find out you want to leave? Back there—that’s what happens.”
“So what do we do?”
“We keep our heads down. Let’s see where we’re going. Maybe we’ve got lucky. We’re just guards. Maybe they don’t watch us the same way they watch the others. We wait, see what it’s like and then work out how to get away.”
They were driven to the north of the city. The prison was located within an area that had obviously been an industrial quarter before the war. There were factories and warehouses that had since been destroyed. The driver was forced to skirt piles of rubble that had spilled into the road, and they bounced through several shallow craters where the asphalt had been torn up.
