In front of us, just beyond our windshield, an old man and woman crouch around a trash fire in the rain. Its flame would barely fill a teacup. Just behind them, a tarp is pulled across a now flooded ditch. This is their home.
The heater in our car blows too strongly. I turn it down and fiddle with the baklava’s wooden toggles. Abed redials Abu Hassar’s brother. He notices my restless hands and assures me, “He is a good guy and excited to meet you.”
I watch the old couple, the woman poking the dying fire, the man turning circles, looking for more trash to burn. Now and then both their eyes wander over to the refugee camp that, for whatever reason, they’ve been refused admittance to. They seem lost as two orphaned children. For a moment, the idea that Abu Hassar will be a no-show leaves me relieved. I will give this old couple my expensive baklava and go home, my good deed done for the day.
“Yallah!”
The Peugeot rocks on its axle. Abu Hassar barrels into the back seat, scaring the crap out of us. He knocks loose the olive-green keffiyeh he wears over his black curls. He tightens the keffiyeh back down and grabs Abed by the shoulders, laughing at how badly he’s frightened us.
Abed leans forward, searching between his seat and the gearshift. He’s dropped his phone. The two begin to speak quickly and in Arabic. Abed smiles, but it is a tight smile that tells me that Abu Hassar has really shaken him and he’s a little pissed off about it.
We pull onto the road. Just a few minutes away, in the town of Akçakale, there is a café where we’ll drink some tea, eat our baklava, and talk. From behind the steering wheel, Abed introduces me as a journalist. Abu Hassar nods and takes a small vial of perfume from his Adidas sweatshirt. He dabs some into his thick and well-creased hands. He reaches up to the front seat, takes my hand by the wrist, and rubs the perfume from his palm to mine. “The Prophet says there are three things one must never refuse: a good pillow, good yogurt, and good perfume.” Abu Hassar presses the perfume into Abed’s palm in the same way. I like the part about the perfume and the pillow. I’m not so keen on the yogurt: a bad experience in western Afghanistan once left me bedridden and on an intravenous Cipro drip for almost a week.
“Abu Ali didn’t answer the phone. Is he all right?” asks Abed.
Behind me, Abu Hassar begins to laugh again. “He is fine. I was taking noon prayers just behind his shop when you pulled up. I told him not to answer. I wanted to surprise you.”
Abed says nothing.
The car becomes quiet, the silence awkward. I make a little small talk. “Is your whole family in the camp?” I ask Abu Hassar.
Abed translates, his eyes fixed on the road.
“Yes, and yours?”
“Yes,” I say. “I mean, they’re back home.”
I ask more about his family. Does he have children? Two boys and a girl, he tells me. The boys are nine and five. His youngest son was born while he was in prison, a topic I know we’ll get to. He doesn’t tell me how old his little girl is, the age of a man’s daughter being a topic of some sensitivity. He asks about my children. I tell him about my son and daughter.
“You are blessed,” he says. “How old?”
I take out my iPhone and show him a picture of Ethan. “He’s one and a half,” I say, stopping myself from scrolling to the next photo, of my daughter.
“A handsome boy,” says Abu Hassar. “He looks nothing like you!”
We laugh, and I am grateful for it. I feel reassured that no band of Islamist thugs is waiting at an impromptu checkpoint to kidnap and smuggle Abed and me across the border to star in our own YouTube video.
Soon we are in Akçakale, a crowded town with a single main road. Along that road are a few cafés. The one we park in front of has an Astroturf lawn and white picket fence. Cold as the day is, the outside seats on the Astroturf are filled. Men laze, drinking tea, smoking Gauloises cigarettes and speaking slushy Arabic. Exiting the car, Abed and Abu Hassar chat as I follow behind, carrying the stupid box of baklava by its wooden toggles. Inside, the café is warm. A large man orders the waiters around in Turkish. He seems to be the owner, and he comes to offer us a seat. As he approaches, I tuck the box of baklava in my coat, not certain if we’ll be allowed to bring it inside. Abu Hassar sees what I’m doing. He steps in front of me so the owner won’t get a good look at my now bulging coat. Abu Hassar then gives me a nod and a sly grin, seasoned smuggler that he is.
Abed greets the owner in Turkish, requesting a quiet seat. We are taken up a narrow stairway. Here, in the back of the café, there is a picnic table. The owner leaves. Awkwardly, we take our seats, not sure who should go where. I wind up sitting next to Abu Hassar, the two of us on the same bench.
Taking off my coat, I place the baklava on the table. Abed opens the box. As he’s about to offer some to Abu Hassar, our waiter comes over. The waiter is young, maybe sixteen. He has long black hair, almost to his shoulders. A wispy goatee frames his mouth. He says nothing about the baklava, but stands at the end of our table, his eyes resting on me, as if I should order.
“Chai,” I say.
“Français?” our waiter asks me.
Before I can answer, Abu Hassar interrupts. “La, Amerikee. Ithnan chai.”
Abed adds, “Thalatha chai.”
A pink tulip sits in a glass of water on the table. Abu Hassar begins to twirl it between his index finger and thumb. Abed fills his mouth with a piece of the baklava. I need to get our conversation going. “Abed’s told me about your time in Iraq.”
Abu Hassar nods.
“I was there too,” I say, and add, “as a journalist.”
Abu Hassar holds the tulip up to his nose, still saying nothing.
“I hoped we could talk about the war,” I say. Abu Hassar gives me a blank look. I’m not getting anywhere. “There is a story I’ve always liked. It’s one from the First World War. The first Christmas on the Western Front.” Immediately I think, Shit, Christmas stories? Dumb move, Ackerman. But I go on. “The day of the holiday, it snowed. In the cold, the German and British soldiers climbed out of their trenches at a place called Mons. They met in no-man’s-land and spent the day swapping small gifts and playing soccer. This Christmas truce became very famous in the West.”
Abu Hassar looks at Abed and says something I can’t understand in Arabic but that I assume to be “Is this true?”
Abed shrugs.
“What did they do the next day?” Abu Hassar asks me.
“Went back in their trenches and killed each other for another four years.”
Abu Hassar laughs. The waiter returns with our tea. I offer Abu Hassar some of the baklava we’ve brought him. He smiles and takes a piece. “I don’t know how good I’ll be for your story,” he says.
“The story is our conversation,” I tell him. “We talk about our war in Iraq and what’s going on in Syria right now.”
“I’m not as active in the jihad as I used to be,” says Abu Hassar.
“Neither am I,” I answer.
Abu Hassar laughs again. Then his face turns serious. “The war we fight in Syria is the worst kind, much worse than Iraq.” Abu Hassar holds his slender glass teacup by the tips of his thick fingers. He takes a slurp and turns toward me on the bench, holding my eyes with his. “If you lose your money, you can make a new business. If you lose your love, you can find another. Even if you lose your child, you can go to your wife’s bed again. But if you lose your country, what can you do? How can you make another country?”
It seems a strange comment coming from Abu Hassar. His friends, both those who fought with the defunct al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia and those who now fight with Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS, are dedicated to dissolving the current Syrian state. From it, they’ve committed to building a caliphate spanning from Iraq through Syria and all the way to the Levant. It seems to me that they are the ones bent on destroying his home as it once was.
He looks at me, waiting for a response.
“Do you mind if I take notes?” It is all I can think to say.
He shrugs and plucks another piece of baklava from the box, considering it in his fingers for a moment. “When I was first in the jihad, I was like a starving man feasting on the action. When I got older, I learned to eat more slowly, to be more patient. Even al-Qaeda’s best men became too aggressive in Iraq. When they began to kill Christians and Jews who weren’t actively against the jihad, this was a mistake. In the Qur’an it says not to do this. In the Bukhari, it is even written that the Prophet once left his armor in the possession of a Jew so it would be protected!” After making this last point, Abu Hassar grins from ear to ear as though he’s said something mildly outrageous. I nod back, but wonder if he’d think it outrageous to be having tea with a half-Jewish once-upon-a-time Marine. “For years, I ate like this with al-Qaeda. Now my stomach hurts.” I feel I should say something, but before I can Abu Hassar adds, “Still, as much as my stomach hurts, we won, and your country became mired in the Islamic swamp.”
“Bush imagined Iraq as if it were France in the Second World War,” I say. “As if the Iraqis were just waiting to be liberated. That’s what many Americans thought.”
“You were wrong,” says Abu Hassar. There is no satisfaction in his voice. He simply states the miscalculation that has defined much of his life, and mine. “I regret none of the war,” he continues. “When I fought for al-Qaeda, we sent weapons and fighters from Deir ez-Zor into Iraq. Assad left the roads and border open. In Jordan, in Kuwait, in Turkey, not even a dog could wander into Iraq, but from Deir ez-Zor we went where we wanted. Our job was easy. No one asked about our activities. Fighting in the jihad was my true happiness, but Assad proved a greater enemy to you than me.”
Abed translates this last point and smirks a bit, as though there is something tragically sentimental about Abu Hassar’s love of jihad. I think Abu Hassar catches on, because he adds, “I trained men to fight in explosives, marksmanship, and hand-to-hand combat. I would send them across the border on their missions. They were like the point of the spear. I was like its handle, directing them in the fight. There is nothing closer than those types of friendships. If you were one of my men and you asked me for the last of my water, I would give it to you. If you asked for the last of my food, it would be yours. And if you asked for my life. . . . It is something that can’t be understood.”
The smirk on Abed’s face disappears as he translates this for me. Then Abed adds in English, “This is also how it was among us activists, in the revolution’s early days.”
I say nothing. For a moment we sit, three veterans from three different sides of a war that has no end in sight. Not the Syrian Civil War, or the Iraq War, but a larger regional conflict. Amidst all of this, Abu Hassar has hit on a unifying thread between us: friendships born out of conflict, the strongest we’ve ever known. I think that’s why I sought out Abu Hassar: to see if that thread binds two people who’ve fought against each other. And for the first time, I wonder why Abu Hassar has agreed to meet with me, a so-called journalist he knows nothing about, except that I am an American and have spent some time in Iraq. Maybe he, like me, has become tired of learning the ways we are different. Maybe he wishes to learn some of the ways we are the same.
“I think you can tell him,” Abed says softly in English.
“You sure?” I ask.
“I think it would be better.”
I agree, and Abed explains to Abu Hassar that I had been a captain in the Marines and had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. I watch them intently, not understanding their quick Arabic. Abu Hassar begins to slowly nod, and his gaze moves from Abed to me. Then, once Abed is done, he picks up the water that has been set on the table. He pours a full glass in front of him, emptying his bottle. He hands it to me.
“A captain,” he says. “So we were both like the handle of the spear.”
I nod and drink the last of his water.
“Why did you fight?” Abu Hassar asks. “Did you think the war was a good idea?”
“No,” I answer. “I thought it was a bad idea.”
“Still you fought?”
“When you are a young man and your country goes to war, you’re presented with a choice: you either fight or you don’t. And you’ll always remember what you chose. I don’t regret my choice, but maybe I regret being asked to choose. And you? Why did you fight in Iraq? It wasn’t your country.”
“This isn’t true,” says Abu Hassar. “My decision was like yours. I am an Arab and a Muslim. That is my country. America invaded Iraq. As a Muslim man, it was my duty to fight.” Abed translates, but as he worked at the British Consulate during the height of the Iraq War, this last bit of logic seems to choke in his throat.
Abu Hassar explains how in 2005 he’d gotten involved with al-Qaeda. Before this, he describes himself as “the type of Muslim who didn’t fast or pray.” Finding Islam late in life, he wanted to be a holy man, but he felt he needed to catch up. He “thirsted for paradise” and was taught that in God’s eyes the straightest road there was jihad. He tells me, “A friend gave me books on Islam to study. He also introduced me to some of the jihadists who were in Deir ez-Zor on their way to Iraq. These men had come from places like Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and even as far as Mauritania. Some of them showed me their passports. Each one was thick with stamps, and each stamp was like some medal of the jihad. Seeing how far they had traveled to fight, I felt blessed. All of it was right there for me. Being from Deir ez-Zor, I was like a man who does no work for his harvest.”
Abu Hassar then explains the types of operations he was involved in: ambushes, IEDs, raids on checkpoints. He describes a certain attack, one near al-Qaim, a town in western Iraq where I’d been deployed. Abu Hassar’s group of fighters had struck an Iraqi Army checkpoint there. “We dressed in their uniforms and were able to get very close to them before we opened fire. We destroyed the checkpoint and withdrew with none of us getting hurt.”
“Sounds like a good mission,” I reply.
“Yes, very successful.” He grins broadly.
“Fun?”
“Yes, fun.”
“We never got to do anything like that,” I say. “Being in the Marines, most of our missions involved walking around on patrol, waiting to get blown up by you and your friends. We were almost always on the defense.”
“Yes, fighting you, we knew this. It was your nature, but it wasn’t ours. Jihadists are as keen for death as Americans are for life. In my first year fighting, many of the men I smuggled across the border never returned. These were educated and good men. Later on, when a doctor or a lawyer would arrive in Deir ez-Zor for jihad, I would tell him, ‘For you to fight is a waste. If you are a doctor, tend to the wounded fighters. If you are a lawyer, advise the commanders about sharia law. It is your skills that make you most valuable to the jihad.’ But these men were eager for paradise. They rarely listened to me.”
For a moment, Abu Hassar becomes quiet. He looks across the room, at something that seems just out of view. Abed waves our waiter over. Without asking either Abu Hassar or me what we want, he orders lunch for the three of us.
“It’s not like that with all jihad,” I say.
“Like what?” replies Abu Hassar.
“I fought in Afghanistan too. The fighters there weren’t as eager for death. They would attack and quickly withdraw back up into the mountains. To them, it always seemed important to fight another day.”
Abu Hassar nods. “Those who go to Afghanistan are different. It is more difficult to travel there. For them jihad isn’t so much a way to die but a way to live.”
“They were better fighters,” I say.
Abu Hassar frowns. “Perhaps,” he says, “but belief is most important. An imam I knew in Deir ez-Zor used to tell the story of a Jew who once came to his mosque. This man began to film prayers each day.
After he did this a few times, the imam said to him, ‘You are welcome here, it is a house of God, but what are you filming?’ The Jew told him that during early-morning prayers the mosque seemed empty and too large, and during Friday afternoon prayers the mosque seemed full and too small. The imam told him, ‘This is always the way of things.’ The Jew replied, ‘Islam will only become the one message when your mosque is as filled at early-morning prayers as it is at Friday-afternoon prayers.’” Abu Hassar becomes quiet for a moment. He adds some sugar to his tea, stirring it slowly, holding his tiny metal spoon between his thick fingers. “Faith and strength in our ideology is everything.”
“I believe that.”
“It doesn’t require your belief. It is in front of your face to see. The Prophet predicted all that has passed. Before there could be peace, he predicted this period of great wars and many killings. He even predicted what will stop the killings—”
As Abu Hassar rolls into this Islamist polemic, Abed interrupts his translating, scoffs, then turns to me and says with his perfect British accent, “Killing for peace is like fucking for virginity.”
I laugh a little and smile at him. Abu Hassar asks Abed something in Arabic. He replies sharply, translating the same to Abu Hassar, whose face contorts around the idea. I’m worried he might take offense, but to my surprise, Abu Hassar begins to laugh too.
“Who said that?” he asks Abed.
“I don’t know. Do you?” Abed asks me.
“John Lennon,” I say.
“Who’s that?” asks Abu Hassar.
“He’s an old dead rock singer,” I say. “Older than you even.” I point to Abu Hassar’s thick black beard, which has gone salt-and-pepper.
“War is enough to make you old,” answers Abu Hassar. “Assad put the gray in my beard.” Then he points to my sunken cheeks, where a couple of gray whiskers have poked through. “George Bush put the gray in yours.”
Places and Names Page 3