The ISIS Hostage

by Puk Damsgård

  Daniel jumped out of the landing and grabbed his knee. His friends shouted from the other end of the hall.

  ‘Oh, shit! We thought it was bad!’

  ‘Yes, something went,’ said Daniel, ‘but I don’t think it’s anything to worry about.’ He drove himself home to Aarhus, put ice on his knee and booked an appointment with a doctor.

  ‘You’ve damaged a collateral ligament and a cruciate ligament,’ the doctor said.

  Daniel stared at him. ‘Does that mean that I can’t train and go on tour with the World Team?’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid it does.’

  Daniel burst into tears on the sofa. Then he rang Susanne and cried down the phone.

  It was his final farewell to elite gymnastics.

  Daniel was turned down for a course in photojournalism at the Danish School of Media and Journalism in Aarhus, but he was accepted by the University of South Wales in the United Kingdom, which had an undergraduate course in documentary photography. However, it would cost 250,000 kroner (about £26,000) for four years, which he couldn’t afford. Then he learned that Jan Grarup was looking for an assistant to help him with his photo archives – and to accompany him on a reporting trip to Somalia.

  They wrote to each other over Messenger and Daniel sent some photos, including one of his high-dive in Hong Kong.

  ‘Do you have your passport ready?’ Jan asked.

  Daniel sold his apple-green car to his parents and took the train to Copenhagen, where he alternately slept on friends’ sofas and at Jan Grarup’s place. Jan’s small office was filled with thousands of stock files, which Daniel was allowed to see. Going through the photographic records from Jan’s many years as a photographer in Africa, the Middle East and Asia was a journey of discovery into famine, disasters and conflicts, but the foreign faces came alive through his lens. Daniel gained insight into how to take photographs so that they captured a moment that stood out and told a story. He could feel Jan’s soul in the photos and how he moved with his camera.

  Daniel began to look forward to the trip to Somalia.

  Daniel sped through the streets of Mogadishu on the back seat of a four-wheel-drive vehicle, followed by a pickup with eight guards. They towered over the bed of the truck in their camouflage shirts, tall and thin and carrying machine guns. Daniel was travelling without Jan, who had gone off on a job and hadn’t allowed Daniel to join him. Through the car window, he saw skeletal houses that had collapsed due to bombs or were deserted and riddled by gunfire. Suddenly, in the middle of this spectral neighbourhood, he saw a football goal.

  ‘Stop! Can we stop here?’ he asked.

  ‘You’ve got fifteen minutes, max twenty,’ said the driver and Daniel jumped out with his camera over his shoulder. He knew that the Islamist militant al-Shabaab group would be able to sniff them out if they stayed too long in one place.

  Children and elders in worn-out sandals were running around on the sand after a football, and when the kids saw Daniel, they ran over and passed him the ball, which he slammed into the goal. He squatted for a while with his camera in his lap to get them used to his presence. To the left of the makeshift football pitch, a bombed roof sloped down to the ground at a forty-five-degree angle and now served as a kind of viewing terrace from which people were watching the game. Daniel took photos, moving around between the players and loving the life-affirming fact that they were running about in their football jerseys amid such destruction. When his time was up, he returned to the car as agreed and they drove back to their guarded accommodation.

  The photos from the football match in a bombed-out Mogadishu were part of a black-and-white series called ‘Born in War’, which he was documenting on this trip. It revealed what an incredible amount of hope he had seen in the war-torn city.

  It didn’t occur to him how dangerous it was to travel around Somalia until he was back home, processing his time there. The far more experienced Jan Grarup had been responsible for their security, so Daniel hadn’t paid much attention. But it didn’t deter him. He knew more than ever that he wanted to be a photojournalist.

  · * ·

  Daniel had been travelling in the aftermath of a civil war in Somalia, but in the autumn of 2012 it was the Syrians who were at war with themselves. A popular revolution demanding reform had turned into a full-scale battle between armed rebels and a brutal regime. Daniel read articles and searched for images on the Internet that could give him greater insight into the conflict. He looked at photographs of bombed-out houses, lifeless babies covered in dust who had been dug out of ruins, camouflaged snipers lying in wait with Kalashnikovs, ambulances unloading the wounded at hospitals.

  He couldn’t find anything to compare with his football pictures from Somalia in the coverage of the Syrian conflict. The faces in the images merged into one another and he wondered what he should photograph to make Danes more aware of the war. How could he focus people’s attention on a bloody conflict far away, where President Assad was sending bombers over Aleppo, the country’s second largest city and industrial centre, in an attempt to put down the rebellion?

  The sound of the bombers had become an everyday occurrence for Syrians, just like the cluster bombs and Scud missiles that rained down on civilian areas. The rebels were fighting in different factions under the Free Syrian Army (FSA), but the opposition couldn’t agree on a common goal and infighting had arisen between several of the rebel groups, who were also committing more war crimes in response to the hardening effect of their environment.

  New groups were springing up each week – some of them with a more Islamist identity than had been seen in the war thus far. One of the largest and most powerful Islamist groups was Jabhat al-Nusra, which later turned out to be the Syrian branch of the terrorist organization, al-Qaeda. Jabhat al-Nusra was growing rapidly, with the goal of ousting the Assad regime and creating a more Islamist government. The group operated under the leadership of a Syrian war veteran, who, like hundreds of other jihadists, had crossed the border between Syria and Iraq with Assad’s approval to fight the Americans in Iraq after the invasion in 2003. The self-proclaimed Emir of Jabhat al-Nusra, who went by the nom de guerre of Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, was a man the world knew very little about and who had for a long time kept the group from being directly associated with al-Qaeda. Instead, it had been created as a Syrian organization that looked after the interests of Syrians.

  Jolani had been held at the US base Camp Bucca in the Basra province of southern Iraq. He had also been imprisoned for a while by the Assad regime and rumour had it that he had been crammed in with hundreds of other Islamists in Syria’s notorious torture prison in Sednaya, near Damascus.

  At the beginning of the revolution in May and June 2011, President Assad granted amnesty to numerous political prisoners from Sednaya – most of them with a pronounced Islamist profile. The president was aware that the prisoners were likely to join the rebellion once they were released and would Islamicize it. This would benefit the Assad regime by supporting its narrative that the revolutionaries were ‘terrorists’, dangerous to Syria and the region as a whole. The plan worked as intended and the threat from the Islamists became a self-fulfilling prophecy, not least because the Assad regime was primarily attacking the moderate factions. As had been seen so often before in the Middle East, corrupt totalitarian regimes and militants kept each other busy and used each other in an almost symbiotic relationship.

  Some of the prisoners released from Sednaya joined Jabhat al-Nusra, and in the autumn of 2012 fighters from the weaker and more secular factions of the Free Syrian Army also began to switch to the more successful Jabhat al-Nusra, where they had access to better weapons and stood in a stronger position alongside more fearless, experienced soldiers. In December 2012 Jabhat al-Nusra was added to the US list of terrorist organizations, because of the movement’s links to al-Qaeda in Iraq, but that didn’t stop its momentum in the Syrian Civil War.


  In March 2013 Jabhat al-Nusra and another Islamist movement, Ahrar al-Sham, announced an offensive called ‘The Raid of the Almighty’ against the city of Raqqa in north-east Syria. Raqqa was the first provincial capital to fall quickly to the rebels. The black Jabhat al-Nusra flags flew over the city and the rebels captured the government’s administrative headquarters, where they recorded a video of the captive governor which was broadcast on the opposition-friendly channel Orient Television. The Assad regime had lost its grip on Raqqa to groups with an Islamist profile.

  Meanwhile, the civilians were caught in the middle. In Aleppo wide pieces of fabric were hung across streets and alleyways to block the snipers’ view into people’s apartments. Schools were either closed or destroyed and it had become difficult to find food. The lines of fire, the battle fronts, and the regime and rebel checkpoints constantly moved around residential neighbourhoods. Those who could packed a couple of blankets, some clothes and fled.

  While the civilians were fleeing, several thousand foreigners from Arab and western countries came to join the fight in Syria.

  One of them was the Belgian Jejoen Bontinck.

  · * ·

  Jejoen’s friends had already gone to Syria. They had been recruited through the network Sharia4Belgium, which regularly contacted Jejoen to persuade him to take part in the war. He had just turned eighteen and had no girlfriend, no job and wasn’t in school, so there was nothing to prevent him from seeking adventure. In February 2013 he packed his father’s sleeping bag and told him he was going to Amsterdam with some friends.

  It took less than a week for the young Belgian-Nigerian man to arrange the trip from Belgium through Turkey to the Syrian governorate of Idlib. Friends from Sharia4Belgium who were already in Syria described the route for him. Like many other fighters in Syria, he travelled through the official border crossing at Bab al-Hawa and, on 22 February, after a short drive, he arrived at a large villa in the Kafr Hamra neighbourhood, a well-to-do suburb of Aleppo, just north of the city. He didn’t know which faction he was actually joining, but he had been reunited with his friends.

  The water in the villa’s pool was dark green and shallow, while the lawn around it looked like a park where the flowers and shrubs hadn’t been attended to for a long time. Jejoen was far from being the only foreigner. The grounds were huge and teeming with Dutch, Belgian and French men. When he first arrived, he worked out that there were at least sixty of them and eventually some had to be moved to another villa, because there wasn’t enough room.

  Jejoen was welcomed by a man who bore the nom de guerre Abu Athir. Several of Jejoen’s friends just called him ‘sheikh’, as he was the leader of the Mujahideen Shura Council faction. Abu Athir had been hit in the leg by shrapnel and hobbled about the villa on crutches, surrounded by guards. He never carried a weapon, but left it to the European fighters to guard him as he drove around the area, either in a Jeep or a Mercedes.

  There was a hierarchy in the organization and the new recruits had to work their way up and win Abu Athir’s trust before being sent to fight on the front lines. Abu Athir and his men had developed an elaborate vetting process, so recruits went to the front only when they had been tested and were clearly not working for foreign intelligence services. Newcomers were initially given the task of guarding either the villa in Kafr Hamra or Abu Athir himself when he was in meetings or sleeping.

  The fighters whom Jejoen met were roughly the same age as him. Some had left their jobs or studies to fight in Syria; others were like him, with nothing to lose. When they arrived, they responded only to the warrior names they had chosen for themselves. Some of the foreign fighters already spoke Arabic and many of them established themselves in Syria by marrying locally or bringing their wives into the country. They wanted to live their life in the coming Islamic state.

  Jejoen stayed at Abu Athir’s villa only for a short time before being sent to one of the Syrian regime’s old military bases half an hour’s drive away. Abu Athir’s men had seized control of the base and now used it as a training camp for new recruits.

  There were more than fifty people at the base, most of them Europeans from France, Holland, Belgium and Germany. They received military training – physical exercises, target practice, strategic warfare and Islamic teachings. Jejoen thought the training was very professional, which wasn’t a coincidence. His trainer told him that he had previously been an officer in the Egyptian army. Now and then, Abu Athir came by in his Mercedes to watch the recruits at work. Jejoen received not only food and shelter, but also access to a special brotherhood, something he had never experienced before. He ate, slept and trained with other men who had come to join the war. It was easy to feel he belonged.

  Some months later, Jejoen’s path in Syria would cross with those of Daniel and James Foley. It all began with a landmark event that took place on 8 April 2013 and quickly changed Syria and the organization led by Abu Athir.

  On that day, a long audio recording of 21 minutes and 30 seconds was posted on jihadist Internet forums. On the recording could be heard the voice of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader for several years of al-Qaeda in Iraq (ISI). He confirmed what many observers had suspected: that ISI was operating in Syria through the Jabhat al-Nusra faction.

  ‘It is now time to declare before the people of the Levant and the world that the al-Nusra Front is an extension of Islamic State in Iraq and a part of us,’ Baghdadi said. He continued, ‘We worked out the plans for them and set the framework and supported them financially every month and gave them men who know the theatre of war, from immigrants to locals.’

  Baghdadi then announced that his organization would now be renamed the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. In Arabic ‘al-Sham’ means ‘the Levant’, so from that moment on both acronyms ISIL and ISIS were used. Baghdadi stated that ISI and Jabhat al-Nusra were now unified under the new name ISIS, which reflected significantly greater cross-border ambitions for an undivided Islamic caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

  At that moment, the world didn’t know what consequences the audio recording would have for the region. Baghdadi wasn’t yet a well-known name in American and European living rooms. There was only limited information about him and a few photographs.

  Behind the nom de guerre Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi hid Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri. He was apparently born near the Iraqi city of Samarra in 1971 and was awarded a master’s degree and a doctorate in Islamic studies by the Islamic University in Adhamiya, a suburb of Baghdad. People who knew Baghdadi in his childhood described him in several media sources as a quiet type who liked football. At the turn of the millennium, he had an education, a wife and a son.

  In March 2003 US and UK forces invaded Iraq. Six months later Baghdadi had formed his own Islamist movement called Jaysh Ahl al-Sunnah wa al-Jamaah, which, loosely translated, means ‘Army of People of the Sunni Muslim Community’. On 31 January 2004 Baghdadi was arrested by US military intelligence while visiting a friend in the city of Fallujah in the so-called Sunni Triangle north-west of Baghdad, where a rebellion had broken out after the ousting of Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein.

  Baghdadi was imprisoned until December 2004 in Camp Bucca, the American prison near the border with Kuwait, where he developed relationships and friendships with other inmates. Jolani, the leader of Jabhat al-Nusra, was in the prison at the same time, but the two men didn’t meet. Baghdadi was released after almost a year because the Americans regarded him as a low-level prisoner who did not pose a significant threat to US forces in Iraq.

  In 2007 he joined al-Qaeda’s Shura Council and in May 2010 Baghdadi was chosen to be the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq (ISI). Under his leadership, ISI conducted a wide range of well-planned and spectacular suicide attacks in Iraq. In March and April 2011 alone, the group accepted responsibility for twenty-three attacks south of Baghdad.

  Baghdadi’s audio recording of 8 April 2013 was the beginning of an ideological and political po
wer struggle between Jolani from Jabhat al-Nusra, who didn’t recognize the merger with ISI, and Baghdadi – a struggle that would lead to ISIS breaking with al-Qaeda.

  From that day on, Arab and western jihadists had to choose between two variants of extreme Islamism. Many of the rebel leaders chose Baghdadi’s ISIS and thereby took many foreign fighters over to ISIS, among them the Belgian jihadist Jejoen, whose group, the Mujahideen Shura Council led by Abu Athir, swore fidelity to ISIS.

  This declaration was the beginning of ISIS’s aggressive expansion into the Syrian Civil War.

  · * ·

  Daniel began his preparations for a reporting trip to Syria in the midst of these political manoeuvrings between Islamist factions. He wanted to portray the Syrians who could not or would not flee, to find out how they were living in a state of emergency.

  At the same time, he began seeing his school sweetheart Signe again. They had kept in touch for a long time after splitting up and wished each other happy birthday every year. One night in October they were out drinking beer at a bar in Copenhagen until 4 a.m. and, after several months of orbiting each other, they got back together. Daniel was happy to once again be with the woman with the most beautiful eyes in the world.

  In early April 2013 he travelled to Gaziantep in southern Turkey to investigate the situation. He came into contact with a so-called ‘fixer’, a person who knows the local area and on whom journalists rely. The fixer, Mahmoud, drove him along the border to the official crossing in the town of Kilis, which led to the Syrian town of Azaz.