by John Lyons
There was something different about the six Australians waiting near a border checkpoint between Turkey and Syria. By now – two years after I’d walked across the border with the Free Syrian Army – thousands of foreigners had ventured into Syria. But for the owner of a café about 50 metres from the Turkish border, this group, on 28 April 2014, was different.
‘It was clear they were not rookies,’ he told me. ‘They seemed to know what they were doing.’
The owner was struck by several things. Firstly, only one of the men spoke Arabic. He seemed to be their leader, and looked to be in his 40s, while the others were younger. Secondly, they were supremely confident, well resourced and well dressed: they were wearing new walking boots and had backpacks packed to the brim, a contrast with many of the bedraggled jihadists who departed from this café to join the battle for Islam. They were physically very large and were wearing crocheted caps, popular with some Muslim men. All were ‘very beardy’, one local said. They all had Australian passports. The fact that most of them were not Arabic speakers suggested that they were second- or third-generation Australians.
The café owner drove them to an illegal crossing a few kilometres away. The most likely reason they didn’t want to cross through the checkpoint was that they didn’t want anyone – particularly the Australian Government – to know they were going to fight. That way they would leave no paper trail showing they had been in Syria.
As the car arrived at the crossing spot, the café owner saw three Syrian men waiting – all with handguns. He watched the men walk across fields into Syria.
Six more Australians had just gone to the war, joining the scores who had travelled there since the conflict began in March 2011.
I asked the café owner to drive me to the spot he had taken them. There was no fence. Further along, where there was a fence, I found a hole that had been stretched so you could walk in and out. I did a piece to camera to illustrate how easy it was to get from one country to the other.
The Australians reflected the new world created by Syria’s war. It’s a conflict increasingly drawing in foreigners, who will return home – if they survive – with new skills, including bomb-making. The ease with which the six Australians were able to join the war highlights the reality: there is, in effect, an open border for jihadists into Syria.
War in the Middle East can sometimes become a spectator sport. On the border between Turkey and Syria, it had become an outing for the whole family.
It was September 2014, and I arrived at the border to see a crowd spread across the hill watching Islamic State trying to take the Syrian town of Kobane. The Kurds in Kobane were trying to defend it. Kobane was a prize Islamic State wanted because strategically it would give them an entry point into Turkey. But the Kurds were the toughest opponents they had faced. As the battle of Kobane escalated, I’d flown from Tel Aviv to Ankara, then on to Gazientep, the closest airport to Kobane. Then, with a fixer, I’d driven to the hill overlooking the besieged town.
The crowd was barracking for the Kurds: each time a missile was fired towards the hills where Islamic State was positioned, they let out a roar. Every so often, though, when a stray missile from either the Kurds or Islamic State came our way, there was a very different sound – part excitement, part fear.
Hundreds of people would go along there on a Saturday afternoon and sit drinking coffee. They would check out the war for an hour and then go back to their towns in Turkey.
Islamic State fired three mortar shells into Turkey. Turkish tanks near us did not respond. But Turkey had retaliated with significant firepower two years earlier, when Syria’s army fired mortar shells – it claimed accidentally – into Turkey. On that occasion, five Turkish civilians had been killed by the shells, and Turkey had responded by pounding Syrian Army installations.
It was revealing that Turkey responded to fire from the Syrian Army but not from Islamic State. Turkey had always been conflicted about Islamic State. It had been reluctant to allow the US-led coalition to use its air bases to launch attacks into Syria against Islamic State. While Ankara was revolted by Islamic State’s tactics such as beheading, the Kurds, one of Islamic State’s main targets, were bitter enemies of the Turkish Government. In the Middle East, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Of all the groups I’d reported on in the Middle East, Islamic State was different. They could not be negotiated with. Beheading became their signature, and they were killing indiscriminately. They were showing no mercy in their crazed effort to establish a caliphate, or Islamic State, across the Levant, the ancient region covering what is today Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Gaza, Israel, the West Bank and Lebanon. Along the border, I saw the Islamic State flag flying in many towns on the Syrian side; Islamic State’s list of conquests was growing by the day. They would just decide someone wasn’t a real Muslim and shoot them. There was no discussion. They locked out Western media in terms of access. And we saw too many videos of people in orange jumpsuits being beheaded to even want to try to get near them.
About that time the Americans came into the war and were bombing Islamic State around that area, but we could tell it was making little difference. We could see the Islamic State fighters, spread out in groups of two or three, so it was almost impossible for the Americans to bomb them in large numbers. The reason that fighting them is so problematic is that they don’t act like a conventional army. From talking to Syrians who had fled to Turkey, I learnt they don’t use military vehicles, but commandeer civilian cars, and stay in civilian houses. So the Americans and their allies don’t know who they are – similar to the way the Vietcong would blend into villages during the Vietnam War. That was why in the end the US coalition concentrated on the cities of Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in northern Iraq, because they could see identifiable headquarters.
As a journalist in the Middle East, I knew that they were one group that I did not want to get near. But on one occasion I got too close to Islamic State for comfort. My fixer worked with me for a few days, but then had to leave. Unable to find a new one, I decided to go to the border with one of the authorised drivers from my hotel. I figured I’d be safe with him – and I was – but I encountered a different problem altogether. The driver spoke only Turkish.
He took me to the border, where we could see the battle for Kobane. I indicated that I wanted to see the hill where Islamic State fighters had gathered. We headed off along the border, on the Turkish side. We drove through a small village, but there was nothing to delineate the border and barely anyone around. There was a house or two every so often along the border. I tried to tell the driver that I wanted to go back, but he kept saying ‘Daesh’ – the Arabic acronym for Islamic State – and pointing up ahead. I realised that I’d broken my own rules: always make sure you can communicate and don’t become isolated.
On the hill ahead I could see Islamic State fighters in groups of two or three, separated from each other by a few hundred metres. This was as close as I wanted to get to them – but the driver kept going. Finally he got the message and we headed back.
Along the Turkey–Syria border, it wasn’t just mortars from Syria that were spilling into Turkey. I came across thousands of refugees who were fleeing from Islamic State. I’ll never forget the fear I saw in their eyes.
I interviewed a family of 10 who had fled across the border. One of them was a boy aged about 17, who told me that when they heard that Islamic State was coming, they immediately packed up all their belongings and got ready to flee. A neighbour was a quadriplegic, in a wheelchair, and no one could carry him so they were forced to flee without him. Horrible stories were circulating about what Islamic State had done in other villages that might or might not have been true. But it made me realise that fear had become Islamic State’s biggest weapon. Even if people just heard a rumour that Islamic State were coming, they would flee. It meant Islamic State could just come into a village that was essentially abandoned and break into the bank, take money, live in houses full of food, stay ther
e for a few days and then move on somewhere else, raising the Islamic flag as they went. They often met no resistance.
Hamad Mohammed, 36, sat with his family in a disused shop in Turkey. ‘They are savage beasts,’ he told me. ‘I saw a head cut off from a body.’
Mustafa Kurdo, 49, stood with his nine children. ‘Look at this one,’ he said, picking up his one-year-old son. ‘Islamic State want to cut his head off. Who are these savages? It is one thing for men to fight men, but what do these women and children have to do with this war?’
The situation in Syria is now a stalemate, with neither side gaining much ground. They have found each other’s measure and they have carved off their areas and they are holding them. But at a tragic, and ongoing, cost.
CHAPTER 14
The American Factor
March 2013
WHEN BARACK OBAMA WALKED ON STAGE TO SPEAK TO hundreds of Israeli university students, he received a rock-star welcome. It was Thursday, 20 March 2013 and Obama was clearly thrilled by the reception on his first presidential visit to Israel. Before a bank of American and Israeli flags, Obama gave a speech that delighted Israelis. He reaffirmed the bonds between the two countries. He said in his two days in Israel he had ‘borne witness to the history of the Jewish people’. And ‘I have seen Israel’s shining future in your scientists and entrepreneurs’.
But then President Obama said something that took Israelis by surprise – it was certainly something they had not heard before from a US president. He referred to the Israeli Army as ‘a foreign army’ when it came to the West Bank. The Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and justice must be recognised, he said. ‘Put yourself in their shoes; look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of their own, living their entire lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movement of not just those young people, but their parents and their grandparents every single day … Neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer.’1
Obama’s words would stun Israelis. The reference to the IDF as ‘a foreign army’ hit Israeli leaders like a thunderbolt.
In the US, due to the power of the pro-Israel lobby, Israel is regarded as a domestic issue. In the lead-up to his election in 2009, Obama had competed with Hillary Clinton, his Democratic rival for the party’s nomination, as to who supported Israel more. Their two speeches to the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference had shown the competition between them to win support from the Jewish.
But upon his election it became clear what Obama really thought: that Israel’s relentless growth in settlements was disastrous. Barack Obama was a shock to Israel’s system.
From the beginning of his presidency the Israeli media were gunning for Obama; they would frequently refer to him using his Arabic middle name, Hussein. The government seemed pleased to let this undermining occur, especially as Obama’s stocks at home deteriorated. The view in Israel was that Obama was a one-term president, allowing them to stall on peace talks until another president was elected.
But Obama got his healthcare package through Congress and for a while his political stocks went up. In the Israeli media the dogs were called off. In the headlines he became ‘Barack’ once again, rather than ‘Hussein’.
New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman is regarded as America’s most influential writer on Israel. He has long been supportive of Israel. But in a feisty interview on Israeli television he would declare ‘Shame on you, Israel’ for trying to portray Obama as ‘a Jew hater’.
Yet not even Obama could stop the settlements. Friedman went on to say that in the battle between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu, ‘Bibi won’.2 Thanks to the successful campaign by the Israeli lobby to achieve soft media treatment for Israel, Obama and other senior members of his administration would find themselves engaging in the same kind of self-censoring as other US politicians before them.
When Secretary of State John Kerry walked into the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington on 25 April 2014, he could not have anticipated the coming storm. At a closed meeting, he spoke about his frustration that he’d made no progress after three years of negotiations with Israel and the Palestinians. Unaware that someone was recording him, he nominated the growth of Israeli settlements as a key reason. ‘There is a fundamental confrontation and it is over settlements,’ he said. ‘Fourteen thousand new settlement units announced since we began negotiations.’ He warned of possible violence: ‘People grow so frustrated with their lot in life that they begin to take other choices and go to dark places they’ve been before, which forces confrontation.’ But then he added: ‘A two-state solution will be clearly underscored as the only real alternative. Because a unitary state winds up either being an apartheid State with second-class citizens – or it ends up being a State that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish State.’3
In Israel, the media often reported warnings that Israel might become an apartheid state. Israel’s most decorated soldier and former Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, had warned about apartheid. So had another former Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert: ‘If the day comes when the two-State solution collapses and we have a South Africa-style struggle for equal voting rights then as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished.’
But three Purple Hearts were not enough to save John Kerry. America’s powerful pro-Israel lobby unleashed an attack.
However, rather than argue his case, Kerry retreated. ‘I do not believe, nor have I ever stated, publicly or privately, that Israel is an apartheid State or that it intends to become one,’ Kerry said. ‘If I could rewind the tape I would have chosen a different word to describe my firm belief that the only way in the long term to have a Jewish State and two nations and two people living side by side in peace and security is through a two-State solution.’ But in a hint of defiance, Kerry added: ‘While Justice Minister Livni, former Prime Ministers Barak and Olmert have all invoked the spectre of apartheid to underscore the dangers of a unitary State, for the future it is a word best left out of the debate here at home.’4
‘Apartheid’ is the one word that the supporters of Greater Israel resent. The New York Times’s Jodi Rudoren told me: ‘I think that’s what John Kerry was basically saying: “I lost ground on convincing people by using a word that people put me into a box that I’m one of those people who thinks it’s apartheid and they think they can ignore me.”’
This was not the only time Kerry had retreated. Some months later, Israel stated that the reason it had initiated the 2014 Gaza War was to target Hamas tunnels. But Palestinian civilian casualties had quickly spiralled – with an assault by fighter jets, helicopters, tanks and ships on the 365 square kilometre enclave, Israel had wreaked devastation.
Before an interview on Fox News, Kerry was caught mocking Israel’s claim of a targeted operation: ‘It’s a hell of a pin-point operation!’ The host, Chris Wallace, decided to put these comments to Kerry on air. Kerry took a much softer position. ‘It’s very difficult in these situations,’ he said.5
President Obama’s one-time Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel – now Mayor of Chicago – has also self-censored. Emanuel is regarded as a straight talker. Yet in an interview with New Republic magazine in April 2014, he insisted on going off the record when asked about Israel. The only thing he would say on the record was that he was ‘optimistic’ about a peace deal; it is quite possible that when he went off the record he said the exact opposite.6
Even US Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro – who is Jewish and regarded by Israelis as ‘a close friend’ – came under fire for describing reality. ‘Too much vigilantism in the West Bank goes on unchecked … There seem to be two standards,’ he said in 2016, stating the fact that Israel’s settlers live under Israeli civilian law while Palestinians next door live under Israeli military law. Prime Minister Netanyahu called Shapiro’s comments ‘unacceptable and wrong’. He summoned Shapiro to discuss them.7
Thomas Fri
edman said the sensitivity of discussing Israel for public figures in the US had reached the point where an ambitious young diplomat would not publicly state official US policy: that Israeli settlements are an obstacle to peace. On Washington’s policy of condoning Israel’s construction of settlements, Friedman said, ‘That particular policy is a source for me of great distress.’8
What this sort of self-censorship by the Obama administration meant was that rarely did Americans hear the truth about Israel. The mild resistance of Washington during the Obama years – ‘the settlements are unhelpful’ – was not enough to stop the number of settlers from growing.
Yet the haste with which Israel escalated its settlement expansion upon the inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017 was extraordinary. Trump had made a campaign promise that he would lead the most pro-Israel administration ‘of all time’. His election to the presidency was a godsend to Netanyahu and his government. Trump appointed his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as a senior adviser with oversight of the Middle East. Kushner’s family foundation, of which he is a director, has donated funds to various settlements in the West Bank. According to US tax records obtained by the New York Post, the family donated $US58,500 between 2011 and 2013. This included donations to Yitzhar, a settlement with a well-known history of violence. Settlers from there are regularly caught on camera attacking Palestinians and property in nearby villages, often as the Israeli Army stands by and watches. The Washington Post also reported that the man Trump chose to be the US Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, is on the record as having opposed a two-State solution, and has been the President of Beit El Institutions, which financially supports Beit El and other settlements.9
