And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

by Engel, Richard

  Western airstrikes proved more effective than the rebels expected, obliterating dozens of Gadhafi’s tanks and armored personnel carriers and creating a corridor of destruction that cleared the way for ground advances. By March 28 the rebels had followed it west for 340 miles, almost equal to the distance separating San Francisco and Los Angeles. They were more than two-thirds of the way to Tripoli, but they got bogged down at Sirte, Gadhafi’s hometown and military bulwark.

  Even with their successes, the rebels were still a ragtag army. They had virtually no lines of communication, and their commanders were woefully inexperienced. What they had were weapons—artillery, mortars, even surface-to-surface missiles. Unfortunately, they often had no idea how to use them. We were with a rebel unit outside Ajdabiya on March 30 when they were preparing to fire a rocket from a huge launcher. We set up our cameras to film the launch because this was the most advanced weaponry we had seen in rebel hands. When they fired it, the rocket went backward, landing not far from a hotel. By some miracle, no one was hurt.

  Meanwhile, one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the war was intensifying in Misrata, Libya’s third-largest city (pop. 500,000). Misrata’s location—500 miles west of Benghazi (about 150 miles past Sirte) and only 115 miles east of Tripoli—made it strategically vital. The rebels had taken control of the city in late February, holding it even as Gadhafi solidified his control of the western part of the country all around it. On March 6, the government moved to reclaim Misrata, ultimately laying siege to the city by cutting off access to it by land, leaving its Mediterranean port the only way in and out. It was sometimes called Libya’s Stalingrad because of the intensity of the fighting and the hardships endured by civilians.

  We were stuck in Benghazi trying to find a boat that would take us there. Whenever we thought we had a way in, our editors back in New York thought it wasn’t safe enough. One time we came upon a craft that looked seaworthy, only to find that it was laden with explosives. We didn’t even mention it to the editors in New York because we knew the boat was a death trap. If someone dropped a cigarette, the boat would have been blown to smithereens.

  But reporters from ITN, Al Jazeera, the BBC, the Guardian, the Independent, and, most gallingly, CNN did get into the city, usually on fishing boats. On March 29, CNN uploaded video of the horrific violence. Gadhafi units made daily forays into the city, stationing snipers in buildings. Then the main body of government soldiers would pull back so that heavy weapons—mortars, artillery, tanks, and truck-mounted rocket systems with forty launch tubes—could pound the city.

  One of the problems about getting into Misrata was figuring out how to get back out. The fighting was not only heavy but, often, random. Hundreds, some claimed thousands, of people were killed, many of them noncombatants. The rebels would have been routed if it wasn’t for NATO jets, which destroyed tons of Gadhafi’s heavy weaponry and often kept his tanks at bay simply by flying overhead.

  A government mortar attack on April 20 killed two journalists—British documentary filmmaker Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, an American photographer whose work had been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Not long afterward, Gadhafi’s helicopters started dropping mines into Misrata’s harbor. We were shut out for good. The rebels finally regained full control of the city on May 15, 2011.

  As the battle for Misrata raged, I reported on April 1 that rebel forces had dug trenches 120 miles east of Benghazi and were holding their line. They probably did so at the behest of NATO, which knew the rebels could not fight their way through Sirte, circumvent Gadhafi’s forces outside Misrata, and then mount a frontal assault on Tripoli.

  What I had no way of knowing at the time was that yet another front was forming in Zintan, a city of fifty thousand in the Nafusa Mountains, only eight-five miles southwest of Tripoli, not far from the Tunisian border. So now Gadhafi’s forces were stymied in the east, embroiled in Misrata, and trying to fend off Zintanis, who had the advantage of fighting on familiar mountainous terrain.

  You never know how big and turbulent the world is until you try to cover it. While I was in Benghazi on May 2, monitoring the escalating NATO air campaign, I got a frantic call from NBC in New York: “Get in front of the camera. There’s going to be a presidential announcement coming up soon, and Obama is going to say bin Laden is dead.” My crew and I muttered, “My God, we’re in the middle of nowhere.” But I knew bin Laden’s history like the back of my hand and managed to put together a credible report from eastern Libya.

  Benghazi became my watchtower on uprisings in Libya and Syria, where protests against Bashar al-Assad were turning bloody, and on the pincer movement beginning to threaten Tripoli.

  All across the Middle East, events were now unfolding quickly and in completely interconnected ways. The uprising in Syria began while the war in Libya was still raging. All day long, people in Damascus, Aleppo, and Daraa watched NATO airstrikes on television. They saw Washington use its military might to defend those who went out in the streets to call for democracy. But already there were signs of what was to come. Egypt was starting to unravel. The protesters who overthrew Mubarak kept coming back to Tahrir Square. They returned with every grievance big or small. Egyptians found success once in Tahrir, and kept trying to repeat it, which made the country ungovernable. Egyptian protesters also expected the same amount of international interest and US support every time they started to cheer and hold up posters. After Mubarak was overthrown, competing protests began, sometimes at the same time and in the same place. I was back in Cairo on July 15 reporting on a demonstration by one hundred thousand people in Tahrir Square who were protesting the hijacking of the Egyptian revolution by the military and Islamic groups. It was odd because some were standing against the growing influence of the military after Mubarak, while others were denouncing the military’s old enemy, the Muslim Brotherhood, which was also gunning for power. Others were protesting against both groups, claiming they were in an alliance together. I saw people protesting against Israel too, for good measure it seemed. The Muslim Brotherhood would ultimately win the first round after Mubarak.

  Within weeks of the revolution, the small apartment that served as the Muslim Brotherhood’s headquarters was replaced by a palatial, six-story villa with chandeliers and gilded furniture. Their logo—crossed swords and the Koran—was prominently displayed on the outside of the building. The Muslim Brotherhood certainly felt confident back then.

  I rushed off to Somalia to cover the famine there that took 250,000 lives by the time it eased in 2012.

  I was back in western Libya in August amid reports that Gadhafi planned to flee. On August 20, 2011, the rebels waged an all-out assault on the capital, and residents began to celebrate—a bit too soon, at least judging by the sniper cross fire that kept us pinned down. Two days later I managed to get within a few hundred yards of Gadhafi’s compound, which was still defended by loyalists with tanks and mortars.

  I reported on August 23 that the final battle for Tripoli had begun that morning with NATO airstrikes. For five hours, loyalists maintained their fire from Gadhafi’s compound. Then came a noise we hadn’t heard before: silence. I climbed down from the rooftop where we had been filming and drove rapidly to Gadhafi’s compound. Rebels were already looting the place, mostly taking weapons but also furniture and cars. We drove down to Green Square, which was packed with thousands of rebels firing into the air. The din practically drowned out my report.

  Only one piece was missing: Gadhafi, who had given a radio address urging his supporters to clear Tripoli “of all the rats.” I reported that chaos was already setting in. The rebels had no central military command, and the political leadership was six hundred miles to the east in Benghazi. On August 25, I explored Gadhafi’s compound and marveled at the maze of underground tunnels that stretched for miles. By then Gadhafi had become a figure of ridicule. At a checkpoint, rebels showed a picture of what he might look like dressed as a woman.

  We stuck around for another couple of
days to see if Gadhafi would be caught—September 1 would have marked the start of his forty-third year in power—but it didn’t make sense to stay when other stories were growing more urgent. I was already seeing glimmers of the Arab Summer. Things were worsening in Syria and Yemen, where street fighting continued despite the overthrow of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, and Egypt seemed ever more addicted to revolution.

  I still had high hopes for Libya. It had a thousand miles of beautiful Mediterranean coastline, abundant oil, an established trading partner in Italy, and a population of only 6 million, which should have made it manageable. This was not Egypt, with 80 to 90 million people, pervasive poverty, little oil, a polluted Nile, and a landmass consisting mostly of desert. As I said on the air, “If [the Libyans] can’t get this one right, they have some serious problems.”

  But Libya’s populism had a dark side that quickly became evident. Militias weren’t disarming and were beginning to turn on each other. It was simply human nature. If a Libyan had been a hairdresser or potato farmer and suddenly became a commander of armed men, saluted and cheered by the locals, why would he want to go back to snipping hair or digging up potatoes?

  I was in New York when Gadhafi was finally captured in Sirte on October 20, 2011. He was trying to slip out of the city when his convoy was hit by NATO warplanes and a US Predator drone. He crawled to a drainpipe under a bridge, where he was found by the rebels. They beat him, ripped off most of his shirt, propped him up on a car, and photographed him bleeding from his head. A photograph of his corpse showed an apparent gunshot wound to the left temple. There were reports, which were believed in many Arab capitals, that Gadhafi was also raped with a knife. True or not, by any account he died an awful death and it sent a strong message around the world about the Arab Spring and US policy. The message was Washington would not stick by its friends, old or new. Gadhafi had come out of the cold and made peace with Washington. He had agreed to give up Libya’s nuclear program and pay reparations for the flight that exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. His reward was to have Washington use force to back rebels who would tear him to pieces and put his body in a meat locker for public ridicule. The message certainly wasn’t lost on Syria’s president Assad. What incentive did he have now to compromise or trust Washington?

  EIGHT

  SYRIA MADE ME APPRECIATE LIFE more. That’s what happens when you’re kidnapped and think you’re going to die. To explain how I got into that fix, I need to double back to the belated arrival of the Arab Spring in Syria, and my subsequent trips into the country. I wish I had spent more time thinking about my border crossings and my travel companions on my trips into Syria in 2011 and 2012. Those gave me a false sense of security, and I guess I got greedy. In journalism, you never want to get greedy.

  The Syrian uprising began on March 6, 2011, when fifteen boys from the southwestern city of Daraa, fifty-five miles south of Damascus, just north of the Jordanian border, painted the now-familiar slogan on a wall: “The people want to topple the regime.” The boys were thrown in jail and tortured. They were released two weeks later. They had been beaten bloody; some had had their fingernails ripped out; the faces of others had been branded with hot knives. The people of Daraa were enraged.

  When thousands demonstrated against the regime, Bashar al-Assad’s government sent in soldiers and tanks to put down the protest. Witnesses said two dozen people were killed. The government kept tightening its grip, and by late April an estimated four thousand to six thousand troops had moved into Daraa.

  Bashar learned about brutality from his father, Hafez al-Assad, who in 1982 crushed a revolt by Sunni Muslim activists in the city of Hama. The death toll there was placed somewhere between ten thousand and forty thousand, many of them members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

  Born on September 11, 1965, Bashar al-Assad was an accidental president. He trained as an ophthalmologist in London and only returned to Syria after his older brother, Bassel, who was expected to succeed their father, died in a car crash. Like his father, Bashar was an Alawite, a Shia offshoot that made up only 12 percent of Syria’s 22 million people, and he understood that there would be no mercy if he was overthrown in a country that was 70–75 percent Sunni, a point made even clearer after Gadhafi’s death.

  Western journalists, especially Americans, found it difficult to get into the country once the uprising began. But the news flowed out anyway, in videos uploaded on the Internet. They came first as a trickle, then as a flood. More than a million videos were uploaded between January 2012 and September 2013, documenting what the Wall Street Journal called the “YouTube war.”

  On May 19, 2011, President Obama said Assad should lead a transition to democracy or “get out of the way.” The Syrian opposition, which had been watching the NATO airstrikes in Libya, assumed that Western help was on the way.

  But Assad played his cards relatively well, especially in the early days. He continued to offer the prospect of change and reform, even as the crackdown intensified. Unlike Mubarak, who didn’t seem to realize that what was happening was serious, or Gadhafi, who called on his loyalists to crush the uprising like cockroaches (when he didn’t call his opponents rats, they were cockroaches), Assad offered both a stick and what appeared to be a carrot. In June he promised to prosecute the people responsible for the killing of protesters and said he would support a new constitution that could end his Ba’ath Party’s monopoly on power. He formed committees of intellectuals to write down what the reforms would be, promising greater freedom of the press and political representation. He seemed to be offering an off-ramp. His critics say it was all a ruse, a ploy to confuse and divide his enemies and buy time. Either way, the promises of change came too late. Even after just a few weeks of protests, too much blood had been spilled, and the demonstrators were overconfident. I doubt that anything short of total capitulation by the Assad regime could have satisfied the crowds. They felt they had momentum. They felt they had Washington behind them. They felt they had the wind of history at their backs. They also had Al Jazeera’s cheerleading coverage.

  I had been spending most of my time in Libya covering the anti-Gadhafi rebels and monitoring the early days of the Syrian situation from there. I occasionally made my way to the Turkish-Syrian border, which was a babel of information about the uprising against Assad.

  Turkey had become the home address for all things Syrian, especially the Syrian opposition. Prime Minister, and later president, Erdogan, a Sunni, was sympathetic to the cause. He let Syrian video activists cross the border to buy cell phones and USB sticks to get Wi-Fi connections for their computers. Turkey also boosted its cell-phone tower capacity so that calls and videos could reach deeper into Syria. Turkey turned a blind eye to Syrian rebels and activists, and would later turn a blind eye to ISIS extremists crossing the same border.

  It was like Casablanca in the Bogart movie—Turkey was the place where all spies had come. State Department and CIA specialists operated almost openly on the Turkish border. They tutored cyberactivists on how to craft their messages, how to quickly erase everything on their phones in case they were caught, and how to use encryption software.

  Because the Syrian rebels didn’t initially hold any territory, they waged guerrilla war via social media. A couple of hundred people would turn up like a flash mob, hold a demonstration, then melt away when the police showed up and started firing tear gas. The video activists would record the scene and upload it on the Internet so Syrians and everyone else in the region could see the opposition to Assad in action.

  I wanted to see the flash mobs for myself, but it was dangerous getting into Syria, and even more dangerous once you were inside. But after I conferred with two colleagues, Aziz Akyavas, a veteran Turkish journalist and an old friend, and John Kooistra, my trusted cameraman, we decided to give it a try in October 2011—more than a year before the fateful trip that led to our kidnapping.

  We linked up with some Kurdish cigarette smugglers on the border and set our sights on Qamishli, a
Syrian city of 180,000 near the Turkish border. It had some flash-mob activity, and, significantly, its largest ethnic group was Kurds, who tend to be friendlier toward Americans than Syrian Arabs.

  Our mission was a mixture of derring-do, slapstick, and some enterprising journalism, which was unfortunately overshadowed by the trip itself. Our plan seemed straightforward: The smugglers would take us across the border, skirting Turkish and Syrian watchtowers. Then we’d contact Syrian activists, film and interview them, and get out of Qamishli as fast as we could. After we were kept waiting three days in a dumpy farmhouse on the Turkish side of the border, we argued with the smugglers about the delay and finally went to their boss to complain.

  Probably to show that he was in charge, he summoned his best smuggler and told us, “You’re going now.” It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and we were dressed like ninjas, all in black, expecting a night crossing.

  We were dropped off in tall grass on the Turkish side and followed our smuggler on all fours. He spoke frequently on his cell phone with a compatriot on the Syrian side. We got to a clearing. There was a Turkish guard tower right in front of us. We sprinted for cover amid small trees and bushes. Then we came to another clearing and a barbed-wire fence—and a Syrian guard tower only a hundred yards away. We climbed through the barbed wire and started running again, diving into a gully in a farmer’s field on the Syrian side.

  We finally made it to the road where a car was supposed to be waiting, but there was no one there. Forty minutes later, two Syrian contacts arrived. Their car was tiny, and they were cockeyed drunk. Having no other choice, the four of us—me, Kooistra, Aziz, and the smuggler who’d guided us through the bushes and fields—squeezed into the backseat. The radio was blasting, and the Syrians were smoking with the windows up—until one of them spotted a girl walking along the side of the road and rolled down his window so he could give her a catcall. Then the man at the wheel started driving to the music. He took a left, he took a right, he made the car dance a little as we sped into the city.