His choice locations were spots on the city’s northern outskirts, where fancy waterfront apartments gave way to older, less salubrious suburbs. There was a tree-shaded park between the main road and the water where he would take his customers in late afternoon, telling them to pose as families throwing a birthday party as the sun set. A few miles further on there was a small, seasonal beach town, a few hotels gathered around a stretch of sand and deserted in wintertime.
‘In the summer this place is amazing,’ Abu Laith said. ‘There are lots of people and parties. Coves all along the coastline. But in the winter all the work in this area is related to smuggling.’
Moonless skies were the best, he said – less likelihood of being spotted. In the blackness his customers abandoned their fake celebrations and climbed into eight-metre motorboats that took them out past Turkey’s sea border into international waters, where they would meet up with others and transfer into bigger vessels that could take hundreds of people at a time. Then they would set a course west for Italy, with an estimated journey time of a week. The captains of the boats – usually Syrians from the port cities of Latakia and Tartus – would also claim asylum once they hit European shores. The bigger boats were ancient eighty-metre fishing vessels bought from Egyptian traders and often destroyed by the Italian authorities once they had sailed their final voyage.
Abu Laith told me proudly of a wheeze he had cooked up in the hotter months: hire one of Mersin’s party boats, stage a wedding party, and drift just far enough out into international waters that the passengers could transfer to the main vessel. That was a luxury service, organised for people with tens of thousands of euros to spare. At the very top end of the market, would-be asylum seekers could buy fake or stolen European documents and travel by plane from Istanbul to London, Paris or Berlin.
But in Mersin Abu Laith catered to the mass market, not the big spenders. Only 300 miles from the Syrian border, it hosted a large population of refugees and was big enough to absorb the illicit industry. Passengers could buy lifejackets in the city’s numerous sailing shops before they embarked. Hotel owners could be persuaded to turn a blind eye to the unusual numbers of Syrians staying in their establishments in the off-season. All of the town’s smuggling middlemen said that money was crossing the palms of Turkish officials to keep the whole thing running.
But the smugglers had got too cocky. In December 2014, a ship with no captain, stuffed with nine hundred desperate, hungry, dehydrated people, had almost crashed into the Italian shore. After the survivors revealed the details of their route, the Turkish authorities began clamping down in Mersin.
In the meantime, new opportunities were opening, Abu Laith said. The Greek islands dotted around Turkey’s Aegean coast, 600 miles west of Mersin, are often so close you feel as if you could wave to someone standing on the foreign shore. The complicated operation and long journey the smugglers had picked out from Mersin to Italy would not be necessary there – Abu Laith could send his customers over to Europe in rubber dinghies in a couple of hours. He could give one of the men on board a crash course in using the motor, insist on one small bag only per passenger to create as much space as possible, and then point them in the right direction. No need for boat deals with Egyptians, no need for sea captains from Syria. All his smuggling needs could be bought in the nearest outdoor shop.
Abu Laith was one of the Syrian war’s great opportunists. He had a handy self-exoneration for every shady deal, every new misery he brought upon his countrymen. Before the conflict he had run a money-changing business in Azaz, a Syrian town next to the Turkish border long known as a hotspot for cigarette and drug smuggling. When the war kicked off and anti-Assad rebels captured Azaz and its nearby border crossing with Turkey he restyled himself as a gunrunner, carrying weapons across the frontier.
‘I wanted the revolution against Assad to succeed!’ he said.
Next, when foreign jihadis started heaping into Syria, he set himself up as a relocation agent, smoothing their journey across the border and ensuring they were provided with living quarters and weapons. ‘I thought they were coming to help the revolution!’ he said.
And now, with his ravaged homeland haemorrhaging refugees and its neighbours roiling under the influx, he had reinvented himself again, this time as a people-smuggler’s agent touting for customers and dealing with the payments and logistics. He was relatively small fry, the bottom of the feeding chain, working for the big guys above, the mafiosi who carved up the Turkish coast between them, reaped the profits and never dirtied their hands or names with the grunt work. The Kurds controlled Mersin, he said, and the Russians Bodrum and Antalya. They were already making millions each month from their trade. Meanwhile, for each passenger who paid 6,500 euros for their journey to Italy, Abu Laith got a cut of 1,500 euros. With an average of seven or eight customers each month it was a tidy income. But he wasn’t doing it for the money, he insisted.
‘I want to help Syrians find a better life in Europe. This is a humanitarian project,’ he said. ‘Don’t blame the smugglers, blame your governments. Why are they not accepting asylum applications through their embassies? Europe is a partner of the mafia.’
Over the course of the next year I followed the mass exodus of more than a million people from the shores of Turkey into Europe, as they travelled on rickety boats in the hands of men like Abu Laith and then took long, silent night treks through the mountains and valleys of the Balkans. It turned into one of the defining stories of my career: a huge humanitarian crisis on one level, a massive and fascinating crime investigation on another, and moreover the trigger for events that would rock the European Union, and Turkey’s relationship with it, to the core. But during my first encounter with Abu Laith in the winter of 2014 he had mentioned the growing people-smuggling industry as an aside; we had actually met to speak about Isis and the war in northern Syria.
My interest was piqued when he mentioned how he was earning a living. I was also picking up snippets from Syrian friends of a slowly swelling exodus from Turkey, like a dripping tap that has finally filled a sink and is about to overflow. The Syrians I met in my first months in Antakya were mostly educated and urban young Damascenes who had skipped their military service or been sent out by their families. They had quickly found decent apartments and NGO jobs in the Turkish borderlands in 2013, but were now talking about how they would take a boat to Europe. They swapped information on the best country to get to, where they could get passports quickest and integrate the best: Sweden was favoured at that time, Germany a close second. These middle-class, law-abiding Syrians could easily reach out to the organised criminals running the industry. Men like Abu Laith set up Arabic-language WhatsApp groups and Facebook pages where they outlined prices, information and contacts. They had innocuous names: one was called ‘Syrians in Mersin’, another ‘Information for asylum in Europe’.
Though the Syrians were largely safe in Turkey, Isis’s rout of the rebels in northern Syria in 2014 had crushed their hopes of returning to their homeland any time soon. Meanwhile, Turkey’s generosity took them only so far. The middle classes who arrived earliest, when the refugee population was still in the hundreds of thousands, settled quickest and snapped up the best jobs. Others who came later found most of the NGO jobs taken and the cheap apartments occupied. For those at the other end, the very poorest who flooded into Turkey in huge waves every time there was an outbreak of raw violence in Syria, Ankara built a network of high-quality camps to house around 300,000, a tenth of the total refugee population. But life was tough for those in the middle. Some lived in farm outbuildings or shanty towns in deserted corners of the border cities. In the early mornings, huge crowds of young Syrian men lined the main roads to the countryside to wait for farmers who would pick them up for cash-in-hand day work. Others rented the cheapest apartments and packed as many families into them as they could. When my then boyfriend heard that the flat above his in Antakya had come free we decided to take a look at it. Within two seconds of o
pening the front door we realised that several women and their children had been living there: children’s drawings were tacked up on the cupboards, mattresses propped against the walls of every room, and, because they couldn’t afford curtains, white paper had been placed over the windows. They had kept so quiet in all the months they lived there that we never once heard them.
The activists
The rise of Isis in northern Syria also meant banishment for Aleppo’s activists, the young, educated men and women who had been working for what they called ‘the revolution’, back when there was still a revolution to speak of. These students and young professionals opposed Assad but were too urbane to join a rebel faction. Instead they set up media centres, providing much of the early footage of what was happening in their city, and then worked with foreign journalists as translators and fixers. The more secular among them sensed the danger straight away as the war in their city took a dark Islamist turn. While they tried to maintain smooth working relations with the masked men taking over Aleppo, they knew it was a matter of when, not if, the group would turn against them. Meanwhile the rebel brigades had tolerated the presence of Al-Qaeda but were warily eyeing Isis, even though they never said it publicly at first.
Some, though, placed a naïve trust in these strangers flocking to their city. ‘They’re good Islamic boys!’ one of my fixers, Soheib, told me one evening in August 2013 as we sat in the Aleppo apartment he and his friends had taken over as a base for journalists. On the floor below was the office of an FSA faction; on the floor below that a makeshift clinic. The streets outside were usually deserted – the apartment block was just a few hundred metres from the front line with Assad’s forces and most of the residents had left. The proximity gave it a strange kind of protection, since it was too close to their own side for the regime’s jets to bombard it.
But nowhere was safe from Isis and its informants. Over that sticky-hot summer, bearded men in pick-up trucks started prowling the street outside the media centre. One day, as I sat in a sleeveless top smoking cigarettes with my Syrian friends, there came a loud hammering on the front door. Mahmoud, an English student in Homs when the uprising started, was in charge of the centre and had grasped immediately how dangerous Isis was. He had fitted a huge steel security gate over the door days earlier. Now, he peered through the peephole and saw an Isis fighter, a local guy he had known before the war who had originally joined the FSA and then been lured to the extremists. He had come over for a chat – and to check up on what Mahmoud and his team were doing. My friends bundled me into a back room with an order not to smoke, and for the next hour I sat in silence trying to pick out words from the conversation across the hallway.
In the years since I have often wondered how I survived, when so many other foreign journalists were kidnapped and handed to Isis that summer. My friendship with Mahmoud and Aymann, a nuclear physics student and also an activist at the centre, was surely a large part of it – they remain the most honest and loyal people I met in Aleppo, and by concealing me that day they risked their own lives. They were also firm with me when I pushed to do stories that were, in retrospect, suicidal. I had wanted to visit a camp for foreign fighters in the countryside between Aleppo and the Turkish border in the spring of 2013, back when the reports of Europeans flocking to join the Islamist factions were nothing more than numerous but unconfirmed rumours. They stopped me. Those same foreign fighters were later revealed to have been instrumental in the kidnappings of journalists.
Being a woman also helped, since I could easily conceal myself with a headscarf and abaya. In my disguise, complete with sunglasses to conceal my eyes, I managed to drift through a Friday demonstration organised by Al-Qaeda and into the city’s Sharia court, where the extremists handed down punishments according to their interpretation of the Qur’an. Women became faceless, ghostly beings in Aleppo as Al-Qaeda and then Isis tightened their grip, floating through the streets with faces covered and heads lowered, studiously ignored by the men they encountered. For a female journalist it was a gift – even though my height and European habit of striding along with quick steps must have looked odd among the diminutive and slow-paced Syrians. But inside I boiled, desperately sorry for the Syrian women and girls I met behind closed doors, who would rip off their coverings and vent fury at the men who were forcing this on them. One day, as I walked through Aleppo’s empty, crumbling side streets with a group of young Syrian activists, a woman rounded the corner with her two young children. She had flipped up the black sheet that covered her face and was tilting her head back towards the sun with her eyes half closed. When she caught sight of us she quickly brought the sheet down over her face again, and bustled past us in silence.
My fixer Soheib’s optimism about Isis was born of his apparent obliviousness of death in all its forms. He was brave to the point of crazy, at odds with the gelled side-parting and pencil moustache that made him look like a middle-aged accountant. Because of that I was never fully comfortable going out to report with him. He would gesture towards checkpoints manned by Al-Qaeda fighters and suggest, in all seriousness, that I ask to interview them. When we went to the front lines, dead zones running through the heart of the city where rebel fighters occupied one building and the regime men another, so close we could hear them lighting their cigarettes, he would bound up ruined steps onto rooftops and stand there shouting for me to come and join him. One day we went to the crossing point at Bustan al-Qasr, the only place left in cloven Aleppo where it was possible to pass between the rebel and regime sides of the city. On the rebel side the road was blocked off a hundred metres up from the crossing by a makeshift barricade, two burnt-out buses flipped onto their sides and piled one on top of the other. It was a crude shield against government snipers, but the people of Aleppo, their reflexes weakened by a year of random violence, still flocked to the market stalls between the buses and the crossing point. A dark brown bloodstain on the pavement marked where a Canadian-Syrian medical student called Sam treated the snipers’ victims. They opened fire every day, Sam had told me, more on Fridays. Sometimes it seemed they were playing games – they would shoot only at children on one day, at pregnant women on another. As he tired of my questions, he started interrogating me.
‘Why do you come here?’ Sam asked. ‘What is it that you’re looking for?’
Soheib and I pushed on further, right up to the sandbags that marked the final metres of rebel territory. My guts started to flip, not only from the knowledge that there were sniper rifles trained on us but also from the fear of being so close to Assad’s soldiers, just on the other side of the crossing. They would love to get their hands on a British journalist, I thought, to parade me on Syrian television as a spy and then throw me into one of their prisons. With my thoughts elsewhere I hardly noticed the growing danger we were in from the rebels manning this side of the crossing. One had caught Soheib’s arm and was demanding to see his papers. Another had spotted my camera. Soheib had assured me before we set off that it was a friendly brigade manning this checkpoint, that we would encounter no problems. But Aleppo’s war was so fluid in those months, it stank so heavily of testosterone that fiefdoms could change hands within hours. The men peering at us weren’t Islamists, I was sure, but they were scruffy and I could smell their lack of discipline.
Our saviour came from an unlikely place: at that moment, one of Assad’s snipers opened fire. The crack-crack-crack rang down the street and the crowd parted in panic. Soheib and I took our chance and melted away with them, scrambling for a market hall opposite Sam’s clinic that had lost all its windows and taken several mortar rounds to its walls. The half-minute it took me to run to the hall and clamber through its window seemed to last an hour: I wasn’t wearing my flak jacket, and I felt the softness of my flesh and spine as bullets flew past me down the street. Once inside my relief turned to sweat that poured profusely down my face, and I collapsed shaking against a wall. Soheib had other ideas. He hopped back through the ruined window onto the street as
the sniper kept firing.
‘What are you doing? Come back out here!’ he shouted. ‘Come and take photos of this!’
‘Are you fucking insane?’ I shouted back, as he stood on the deserted street waving his arms.
I started to believe that Soheib was charmed, a cat with nine lives who would walk away unscathed from everything Aleppo threw at him. I was wrong, of course. It wasn’t his gung-ho nonchalance in the line of fire that did for him, but his geekiness and blind faith in the fundamental goodness of the Isis men. Soheib kept lists of everything – new rebel groupings, how many fighters they had, where their money was coming from and what areas they controlled. He saved those documents and thousands of photos and videos on his laptop, which he took with him everywhere and shared freely with the journalists he worked with. And when Isis called to tell him they had arrested his brother in Azaz, he went to their headquarters there with his laptop and lists.
We never saw him again. Both I and another British journalist who worked with him received Skype messages from him on the same day a few weeks later, before either of us knew he had disappeared. I twigged straight away that something was wrong: the message I received was a single word: ‘Hello.’ Soheib never started a conversation like that – he would always address me as ‘Miss Hannah’, and craft a polite, slightly old-fashioned introduction.
Mahmoud told me what had happened when he himself fled to Turkey weeks later, the steel door and the machine gun he kept in the footwell of his car no longer enough to protect him. Aymann was also arrested but scored a lucky escape when he was placed in the charge of an old acquaintance who had joined up with Isis, and who took pity on him. The extremists had turned on the activists, just as we all knew they would, and on the Aleppo rebels who had misguidedly tolerated the Isis presence in their midst. By January 2014, almost all of rebel-held Aleppo was under Isis control and any activists, fixers or translators who had stayed were rounded up, accused of spying for Western governments.
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