by Joby Warrick
“There was a lot of ‘This is on the table’ and ‘That is on the table,’ but then none of it really was,” Moustafa said. “As time went on, that became clearer. The sense was: ‘Look, the president came into office saying we were going to get out of these wars.’ ”
Back in his own office, Moustafa would hold long chats over Skype with Syrian protest leaders, some of whom he later met in person after he began shuttling between Washington and the region. Some refused to be downcast, believing it was inevitable that the Americans would come to their aid. After all, Obama had declared that Assad must go. “The rhetoric from the administration and the rest of the international community was that Assad was over—he has to step down. So their thinking was: ‘Let’s come out in droves,’ ” he said. “And they came out. I thought to myself, ‘They’re getting shot at now, they’re going to stop.’ But then they’d be back the next week, and the next. And they kept coming out.”
Among the defiant ones was Noura al-Ameer, a young Sunni woman from the Syrian city of Homs whom Moustafa met online and eventually befriended. When the first protests erupted, al-Ameer was twenty-three, a petite brunette and college student who liked political debates and brightly colored head scarves. In the early days, she gushed about the extraordinary unity she observed in Hama’s streets, as Syrians from every ethnic group and social class joined in the demonstrations. For a time, nearly every rally featured a pair of protesters carrying a Christian cross and a Koran to symbolize the harmony between faiths.
“There were merchants and workers, doctors and engineers, students and journalists,” she remembered later. “All the different sects were there, and all the social classes from across society.”
The sense of unity somehow made protesters feel less afraid, she said. Sunni shopkeepers and Alawite law students locked arms, even when riot police began ripping into the crowd with batons and tear gas. The first time it happened, al-Ameer assumed she was going to die. But it didn’t seem to matter.
“Even if the regime killed us, we would die happy,” she said. “After all the repression we had lived through, it felt wonderful. And it was novel for us. It was almost a fantasy to think we would die for a cause we all believed in.”
Al-Ameer did not die, but something else did. Slowly, the symbols of unity disappeared, as stories circulated about sectarian killings and assaults. In her mostly Sunni neighborhood, flyers began appearing in doorways, warning of coming attacks from Alawite death squads. At the same time, al-Ameer’s Alawite friends were getting similar warnings about Sunnis. Meanwhile, the regime’s notorious goon squads—hired gangs called shabiha or “ghosts”—snatched women and children from the streets and then returned them, sometimes dead, other times beaten and tortured, with tales about being brutalized by Alawite thugs. By late 2011, a new chant was added to the repertoire at the daily protests: “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to their coffins.”
Then it was al-Ameer’s turn to be caught. She was on her way to a visit with her mother when police officers pulled her off a public bus and brought her to one of the intelligence service’s special interrogation centers in Damascus. Again she believed she would die. Instead, her captors locked her in a cell and forced her to listen as they beat and tortured one of her friends. When al-Ameer still refused to break, the officers strapped her into a chair and attached electrodes to her temples and chest. The pain shot through her body like liquid fire as her captors laughed to see if she would cry out.
“We’re going to exterminate all of you, you Sunnis!” one of the officers said, using epithets that al-Ameer, years later, could not bring herself to repeat.
After she had spent eighty-five days in prison, family members won her release with a bribe paid to one of her jailers. She slipped into Turkey to join the opposition in exile, but by then the mood inside Syria had changed. The unity marches, when the young and old locked arms and carried flowers and olive branches, were gone, replaced by an ugly sectarianism she barely recognized.
“When I was protesting, I was surrounded by all these men and women who were like me, dreaming the Syrian dream,” she said. “Today if I go there I won’t find them. The regime has stolen them from us.”
20
“The mood music started to change”
On January 24, 2012, a previously unknown Syrian rebel group posted a short video confirming what Western intelligence agencies already suspected: the al-Qaeda network’s first franchise in Syria was officially open for business.
The formal unveiling came with a media rollout that might have befitted a new car model or the latest Apple gadget. For two days, Islamist Web sites ran banner ads promising a “special announcement,” against the backdrop of a clock ticking down the hours. When the time arrived, the al-Nusra Front was introduced with a sixteen-minute video that summed up the group’s capabilities and special features. The chief salesman spoke enthusiastically, though carefully keeping his face away from the camera.
“We hereby bring the Islamic nation the glad tidings of a long-awaited event,” said Abu Mohammad al-Julani, the man dispatched into Syria five months earlier by the Islamic State’s central branch in Iraq. A call for help had been heard, Julani said, and “what else could we do but answer the call?”
By the time the video aired, Julani’s band had been offering its brand of assistance for at least three months. A few weeks earlier, a pair of perfectly synchronized car bombs had exploded outside one of the Assad regime’s security offices in Damascus, killing forty-four people and serving notice that a new type of combatant had entered the fray. The al-Nusra Front later claimed responsibility; terrorism experts had already concluded that the culprit was likely al-Qaeda or someone trained in the group’s methods.
The original parties to the conflict denounced the introduction of suicide bombers into the fighting. “We said from the beginning, this is terrorism,” said a Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Fayssal Mekdad. The main rebel opposition force disavowed the use of weapons that killed indiscriminately. The Free Syrian Army “does not use car bombs—it never did before and it never will,” declared its spokesman, Ammar al-Wawi. Yet, from that day forward, car bombs were a regular addition to Syria’s catalogue of horrors, along with truck bombs, suicide vests, and improvised explosive devices.
Julani, in his occasional video messages, would maintain that his al-Nusra Front was targeting only the regime’s forces and not civilians, even those from Assad’s Alawite sect. And he insisted that his methods would work, whereas the many others being tried—from nonviolent resistance to hit-and-run guerrilla warfare to a useless reliance on Western aid and Western-brokered peace accords—would not.
“Al-Nusra Front has taken upon itself to be the Muslim nation’s weapon in this land,” he said. This would be a harsh campaign, but also a holy one, he said, requiring all devout Syrians to “rally around the banner of ‘There-is-no-god-but-Allah,’ ” the black standard borne by the Prophet Muhammad’s ancient army and appropriated in modern times by jihadists.
Far from Syria, other Muslim audiences—including those that Julani likely envisioned in recording the video—were more receptive. In the Sunni Arab countries of the Persian Gulf and North Africa, many thousands of religious Muslims began mobilizing in the early months of 2012 to support the jihadists who were at last inflicting real blows on the Syrian tyrant. Young men from Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Tunisia who had watched Assad’s massacres of fellow Muslims, shown nightly on Arabic-language cable news channels, began trekking to southern Turkey to join al-Nusra and other Islamist militias that were running recruitment networks in the border towns. In far greater numbers, sympathetic Arabs began donating cash, gold jewelry, and supplies to the Syrian Islamists’ cause. Arab governments secretly sent aid as well, usually the lethal kind.
In Kuwait, one of the biggest providers of private funding, a preacher named Hajjaj al-Ajmi, launched a Twitter campaign to persuade his 250,000 followers to donate money to special bank accounts set up to he
lp the rebels. “Give your money to the ones who will spend it on jihad, not aid,” al-Ajmi exhorted donors in a video pitch posted to YouTube in 2012. Other supporters held Twitter “auctions” to sell off cars, boats, vacation properties—anything that could be exchanged for cash to help the Syrian rebels. A few wealthy donors—sometimes called “angel investors” by those who benefitted—arranged visits to the battlefield to hand-deliver suitcases full of cash, and were sometimes rewarded by having a rebel brigade rename itself in the patron’s honor.
“It’s anyone’s game,” a Middle Eastern diplomat acknowledged at the time, after conceding that his own countrymen were among the benefactors for extremist fighters. “You see different players looking to create their own militias. It is beyond control.”
Some countries made an earnest, if belated, attempt to stem the flow of private aid headed for jihadist groups. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates ultimately tightened restrictions and increased scrutiny of bank transfers to cut down on illicit giving. But others showed little inclination to close the taps. In Qatar and Kuwait—both wealthy Gulf kingdoms and allies of the United States—the Islamists’ backers included government ministers who believed the jihadists offered the best chance for defeating the Assad government. Officially, both governments denounced extremism, even as individual ministers privately defended rebel groups that Western governments labeled as terrorists—including the al-Nusra Front, according to U.S. and Middle Eastern officials who participated in such discussions.
“In their view, it’s Assad that’s the problem, and groups like al-Nusra are the answer,” said a senior Middle Eastern intelligence official who worked closely with both countries in coordinating policy on Syria. “That’s why they’re OK with money and weapons going to al-Nusra. They’re the best fighters and they’re also Sunni, so, if they win, the new government will be more like them.”
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Qatar, watching the conflict from eleven hundred miles away, could afford to take chances. For Jordan’s King Abdullah II, the men with the black flags and Gulf-financed guns and explosives were already uncomfortably close, so much so that Jordanian border guards could sometimes watch the fighting from the observation towers on the Jordan-Syria frontier.
In the summer of 2012, the Islamists drew closer still. Jordan’s intelligence service began picking up reports of fighters slipping into the country with weapons, apparently with the intention of spreading the revolution to the Hashemite kingdom. The Mukhabarat’s teams watched for weeks as the infiltration teams set up safe houses and began stockpiling supplies for what appeared to be an ambitious plan to strike targets all across Amman.
When the plotters were nearly ready, the Mukhabarat pounced. Eleven suspects were rounded up in a series of raids that seized machine guns, mortars, car bombs, and explosives that had been smuggled into Jordan for the attack. From notes and interrogations, the agency pieced together the outlines of a plan to launch near-simultaneous attacks on multiple civilian and government targets in the capital, from the U.S. Embassy to an upscale shopping mall in the center of town. Had the plan succeeded, dozens, perhaps even hundreds, could have been killed.
The Mukhabarat’s men had scarcely finished their work when trouble erupted on the country’s border. A passing patrol had surprised a different group of armed Islamists as they were attempting to cross into Syria, setting off a fierce gun battle that left four of the militants dead. Also killed was a Jordanian soldier, the country’s first casualty in Syria’s year-old civil war.
The king was furious. For months, he had been warning everyone—the Americans, the Europeans, Arab allies, even Assad himself—of the consequences if a full-blown civil war were to erupt in Syria. Inevitably, the sparks from a sectarian or ethnic conflict would drift beyond Syria’s borders. It had happened in Iraq, and now it was happening again.
“This is not abstract; this is real. It’s next door,” the king told senior aides. “And if it continues, it will be knocking at our door.”
Through late 2011 and 2012, the monarch worked furiously to build firebreaks to prevent the conflict from widening. Already, Syrian refugees were streaming across the border by the thousands—a single camp, Zaatari, held 30,000 people in mid-2012 and would swell to 156,000 a year later, becoming Jordan’s fourth-largest metropolis—so Abdullah boosted his security forces and built intake centers at the border crossings to ensure an orderly and carefully monitored flow into the new tent cities along the frontier. He convened meetings with American, British, and Arab military officials to work up detailed contingency plans for dealing with potential crises ranging from a chemical-weapons attack inside Syria to incursions by Assad’s military jets into neighbors’ air space. He worked with U.S. and British generals to create special-forces teams that could quickly secure Assad’s depots of poison gas in the event of a sudden collapse of central power.
The Western governments were willing to participate in planning exercises, but slow to commit resources. Humanitarian aid trickled in, forcing Abdullah to scramble to find resources to feed and clothe the hordes of refugees on his border. Awkward negotiations began for a clandestine training site in Jordan for secularist rebels, the core of a future “Southern Front” that could advance toward Damascus while Assad’s army was mired in fighting in the north and east of the country. Abdullah agreed, despite his fears about getting caught in the crossfire between rival Syrian armies. The training began in 2013, in tandem with a similar, CIA-supported program in southern Turkey. But after authorizing the program, the White House imposed strict limits on both the scale of the training operation and the kinds of weapons and ammunition the fighters would receive. CIA-backed fighters were paid $100 to $150 a month, less than half the salary offered by the Islamists. Ammunition rations were so meager that one commander complained that his soldiers were receiving on average about sixteen bullets per month. Many of the new soldiers wandered off to join other units, taking their weapons with them. “We thought going with the Americans was going with the big guns,” one of the CIA-supplied commanders said. “It was a losing bet.”
But the most difficult conversations involved other Arab leaders. Jordan, utterly lacking in the oil and gas reserves that fattened its neighbors’ coffers, frequently turned to the wealthy Gulf states for aid during times of economic crisis. But now there would be a price: some of the Gulf sheikhs expected Jordan to serve as a conduit for money and weapons headed to the Islamist militias they supported in Syria.
Abdullah was incredulous. Why, he would ask, would anyone supply arms to jihadists whose central aim is to create a seventh-century theocracy in the heart of the Middle East?
“Where are these revolutions going to stop?” he asked one day during a private chat with one of his Gulf counterparts.
“I hope these revolutions continue in the Middle East,” said the other sovereign, a man who has publicly acknowledged sharing many of the Islamists’ religious views. “I’ve paid for the support of these groups, and they owe allegiance to me.”
“That’s not how it works,” Abdullah snapped. “You have moved yourself down on the menu. But eventually they’re going to come after you.”
The flow of money and weapons into Syria continued unabated. In private talks with his aides, Abdullah could see the possible pathways that history might take. One possibility—that Assad, backed by Iran and Russia, would emerge victorious through brute force—now seemed unlikely. An alternate path would see the “loonies”—radical Islamists—seize control in Damascus, though that also seemed remote. A third possibility, if the region were exceedingly lucky, would be a negotiated settlement in which Assad would be forced to surrender power to a Syrian unity government, one that would oversee elections while leaving essential institutions in place to ensure order and safety for Syria’s citizens.
There was, however, yet a fourth possible outcome: prolonged violence with no clear resolution. In this scenario, the country known as Syria would disintegrate in a maelstrom that
slowly consumed other countries in its wake, destabilizing the region for decades to come. Abdullah, in his discussions with aides, imagined a fractured Syria divided into zones controlled by Sunnis, Alawites, and Kurds, each supported and supplied by foreign partisans. Indeed, the contours of a future divided Syria were becoming clearer, with the regime clinging to defensive positions around the capital and coastal cities and leaving the parched, landlocked interior to the Islamists. “We saw a stalemate coming,” one of the king’s aides said.
The reality was, the extremists were growing stronger, and so was the pressure from Jordan’s allies to back them—passively, if not actively. But Abdullah refused. Alone in his office, he would click through the day’s catalogue of videotaped atrocities: captured soldiers executed at close range, priests and imams butchered like sheep, pale young bodies pulled from the rubble of bombed-out apartment buildings. Sometimes he would send the links to his senior advisers. Nothing like this could ever be allowed to happen in Jordan, he told them.
“I have my red lines,” he said, as one aide later recalled. “I will not allow support for the radicals, because it will come back to bite us. It will come back to bite my citizens.”
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In May 2012, Robert Ford was summoned to the State Department Building’s seventh floor for a rare private meeting with the woman who had been his boss of record for the past three years. Ford had met Hillary Clinton several times before, but it was unusual for a midlevel diplomat to take the elevator alone to the elegant “Mahogany Row” suite that serves as the personal office of the U.S. secretary of state.
Ford was now an ambassador without an embassy. Officially, he remained the chief U.S. diplomat to Syria, but he had been recalled to Washington the previous October because of concerns about his safety. The rooftop scare in July had been frightening enough, but other incidents in the weeks that followed made clear that Syria’s guarantee of protection for foreign diplomats no longer applied to him.