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

by Engel, Richard

  One of my biggest fears was that we would be separated and interrogated one by one. Then the kidnappers could use the old police trick: “Well, Ghazi says this and you say that. Which is it?” I knew we wouldn’t be able to keep our stories straight for long. Ghazi and I were concealing that we spoke Arabic. If they found out that I did, I felt sure they would accuse me of being a CIA agent and force me to make confessional videos at the point of a gun, then kill me or sell me or trade me to another group. We were meat to be bought and sold. Speaking Arabic made me a curious and unusual product. I didn’t want to be special. I didn’t want them to be curious about me. I just wanted out.

  On the first day, Abdelrazaq disappeared. On the fifth day, our driver, Taher, went missing. That left six of us: me, Kooistra, Ghazi, Aziz, Mustafa, and our British security consultant, who had clammed up and sat as rigid as a stone for most of the time we were held.

  On the fifth night we were told we were going to Foua, a stronghold of the Shia militia Hezbollah. About seven minutes into the trip—I tried to count the seconds to keep track of distances—the driver slammed on the brakes and yelled, “Checkpoint! Checkpoint!” He jumped out and started firing his AK-47 in short, quick bursts, shots that seemed aimed to kill. We stripped off our blindfolds and looked for a way to get out of the van. Abu Jaffar jumped out of the vehicle and I watched him fire toward the checkpoint. The kidnappers’ trail car behind us sped off, apparently not wanting any part of the fight.

  Our security man clambered over Abu Jaffar’s front passenger seat. Aziz got out through the driver’s door, kneeling by what he said was a dead body and using the van for cover.

  Our rescuers approached the van and said they were from a Sunni religious group. They would eventually take us to the Turkish border. There were just five of us now. Our security consultant had run off into the night. He walked for miles in flip-flops until he was driven back to the Turkish border by friendly villagers.

  We later learned that the kidnappers had accidentally set off an emergency GPS beacon when they were going through our things. NBC had been alerted to the distress signal, pinpointing the farm where we were taken on the first day for several hours as a key location and circulating a satellite photo to sources around Washington and the Middle East. The network kept our families informed and asked for a news blackout, a request that was respected by major news outlets.

  From Turkey on the day we got out, John, Ghazi, and I recounted the kidnapping on the Today show. I spent two days in Turkey, then flew to New York to see my family. I went to a psychiatrist (NBC insisted we all go) and told her I had been through traumatic experiences before and understood that the kidnapping would leave “fingerprints” on me for a while. The key was knowing what to expect. If you get blind drunk, you know you’re going to wake up with a hangover. By the same token, I expected post-traumatic stress symptoms—anger, irritability, a sense of isolation—and I experienced those feelings, off and on, for several months. It’s like having the monkey on your back again, and being self-aware helps shake him off.

  For us the story of the kidnapping was over after we got out. We had survived and reported about what we had seen and believed to have happened. We moved on. About two years later, however, the story would come back into the news. I was contacted by a reporter from the New York Times who said the paper had information that we weren’t in fact captured by pro-Assad shabiha, but by a criminal gang linked to the rebels, and that the Syrians who had rescued us actually had ties to the kidnappers. It was a total shock, but in Syria, and in all wars, strange and murky alliances are not uncommon.

  An NBC producer and I immediately started checking with US law-enforcement and intelligence sources. We spent the next month trying to piece together events and interview everyone who might know anything about what had happened to us. Working with Syrian exiles in the United States and Turkey, we contacted dozens of activists and rebels inside Syria. We spoke to people associated with armed groups in Ma’arrat Misrin, the town where we were held. Many of the key players were dead or missing. Others didn’t want to talk or couldn’t be trusted. What we were able to piece together is that the kidnappers in all likelihood were Sunni criminals pretending to be Shiite shabiha so that if we ever got out we wouldn’t have been able to identify them. The rebel group that rescued us did in fact have a past relationship with one of the kidnappers’ ringleaders, but apparently had a falling-out in part because of our abduction. Like any reporter faced with new information, I updated the account of what had happened.

  When I look back on our decision to take that trip, I see now that we were far too confident. We had grown so accustomed to traveling with Syrian rebels that we didn’t give enough thought to the possible dangers.

  All that changed afterward. NBC created a special team for me, including a producer with extensive experience in conflict zones. But I think Syria was becoming too dangerous to cover for any Western reporter. It would certainly become that once ISIS gained strength.

  I went back to Syria for the first time after the kidnapping on June 25, 2013. I reported that a rebel commander outside Aleppo rarely saw Assad’s forces anymore, just Shiite fighters from Hezbollah, Iran, and Iraq, and that a group of dangerous Sunni fanatics was growing. ISIS was coming into its own.

  By this time, ninety-five thousand people had died in the civil war, but one attack made the others pale in comparison.

  On August 21, 2013, we showed footage of what we said “may be the worst chemical attack anywhere since Saddam Hussein gassed Iraqi Kurds in 1988.” The attack took place in Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus. The next day, we reported that the White House had called for an investigation. Some speculated online that the videos were fake. “But how can anyone fake rows of dead children?” I asked on the air. “No apparent injuries, no blood. Just lifeless bodies, their arms folded.” The United States later estimated that upward of fourteen hundred people had died.

  Almost exactly a year earlier, President Obama had made his “red line” warning. But by the time of the Ghouta attack, the situation on the ground had become even more complicated. Al-Qaeda and other radical Islamists had streamed into the country, and it was becoming almost impossible to distinguish between Syrian rebels and extremists exploiting their cause.

  On August 30, 2013, back in Syria again, I described the dilemma facing Washington: “The US, frankly, faces bad choices for Syria: do too little and it looks weak; do too much and it could create chaos in the region.” Two weeks later the United States decided it was not going to intervene in Syria—at least for the time being. The Syrian opposition felt betrayed and abandoned. Worse, Syrians were now completely without hope, which is the most dangerous human condition. A man or woman with no hope is capable of anything.

  NINE

  AFTER 9/11, TWO WORDS—AL-QAEDA—BECAME shorthand for Islamist terrorism anywhere in the world. After that, US troops battled Islamist fanatics in Iraq. In the media we called them insurgents and terrorists and documented their horrors in Baghdad. With the help of a huge troop surge and a seemingly unlimited budget, the insurgents were ultimately overpowered. But they weren’t completely defeated. They found new life in Syria. The group founded by Zarqawi was reborn in the crucible of Syria and had three main goals: controlling Syria, restoring Sunnis to power in Iraq, and establishing a Sunni caliphate. The wider world was shocked into noticing the rise of ISIS in June 2014. The group had captured Mosul, an industrial city in Iraq roughly half the size of Chicago. When Brian Williams, then the anchor of the NBC Nightly News, introduced my report, he was also introducing the American public to a fearsome new jihadist group.

  “Tonight a heavily armed fighting force, in some cases using [captured] American arms and vehicles, is making lightning speed from city to city across the Iraqi countryside. . . . They are known as ISIS, standing for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which happens to be their goal.” On June 29, ISIS proclaimed a “caliphate” called the Islamic State, with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
holding the title of caliph, or successor to the Prophet Mohammed. Abu Bakr was in fact Zarqawi’s successor. ISIS now controlled broad swaths of territory and the lives of millions of people in both Iraq and Syria.

  The capture of Mosul probably surprised ISIS as much as it did the Iraqi and US governments. Mosul, a large Sunni city 250 miles north of Baghdad, was once a bastion of the Iraqi army. It was where Uday and Qusay, the two sons of Saddam Hussein, went to hide and were ultimately killed by American soldiers after the fall of Baghdad. But when the United States ill-advisedly disbanded the Sunni-led Iraqi military after the invasion, the newly empowered Shiites ran roughshod over their former rulers. The people of Mosul came to hate the government and its security services.

  When ISIS fighters arrived in Mosul, they were outnumbered by an enormous margin. Just hundreds of jihadists attacked two or three divisions of the Iraqi army, upward of twenty thousand men.

  The ISIS gunmen were willing to die for their cause, but the Iraqi soldiers decidedly were not. They cut and ran, leaving behind uniforms, weapons, and thousands of Humvees. (Some of these were later packed with explosives and used as suicide vehicles when ISIS overran Ramadi, some seventy miles west of Baghdad, in May 2015.)

  ISIS had tapped on the Iraqi army and found that it was as fragile as an egg. The group’s leaders drew a reasonable conclusion: “This is easy. Let’s keep going, we can take the whole thing.” But even they couldn’t have imagined the rot they had exposed. The Iraqi army crumbled in almost every early battle because it was corrupt, riddled with nepotism, and debilitated by ghost ranks. Ghost ranks are soldiers on the duty roster who don’t show up. It’s a kickback racket for officers. An officer will find a young recruit and say, “Okay, it’s better if you go home. I’m going to keep you on the roster and you’ll still be paid. But you go home and find another job as a taxi driver or a house painter or whatever. And I’m going to keep two-thirds of your salary. So you don’t have to do any soldiering, but I’m going to still give you a third of your salary.”

  Imagine a US army platoon commander who’s a lieutenant and has to give a percentage of his salary to his captain, who then kicks back a piece to his senior officer, and so on up the chain of command. Who’s going to fight and die for that kind of army?

  Mosul was a game changer, the moment when ISIS surpassed al-Qaeda as the region’s dominant jihadist group. ISIS flaunted its newfound power. The group formally broke from al-Qaeda and even declared war on its affiliate in Syria, the Nusra Front. ISIS also wasn’t content to embarrass the Iraqi army and take its weapons. It brutalized the soldiers it captured, lining up and executing seventeen hundred prisoners in a single incident. ISIS put the whole gory exercise online, and some Sunnis secretly cheered, as if they were saying, “Hey, our team won. Okay, it was our extreme team, but it was still our team.” Some were cheering because ISIS, radical as it was, was marching toward Baghdad promising to replant the Sunni flag removed by the United States. The idea of the caliphate, even one stained in blood, also resonated with Sunni Muslims. It harked back to a time when the Islamic world, and Arabs in particular, were strong and leaders, instead of weak and divided as they have been for the last century.

  Mosul was ISIS’s break-out moment, but the group had been slowly building for months. We, and others, reported on its rise time and again. We reported how its fighters were slipping into Syria from Turkey’s southern border. I’d seen them as far back as 2012 at the Istanbul airport and in Antakya, a city of 215,000 only a dozen miles from the Syrian border. (The ruins of the ancient metropolis of Antioch, known as “the cradle of Christianity,” lay on the outskirts of the modern, overwhelmingly Muslim city.)

  The ISIS recruits were as conspicuous as college kids on their way to Cancún for spring break. I especially remember a group of them in Antakya, Arabs with beards, all in their twenties and thirties, with military builds, carrying backpacks and wearing sneakers or hiking shoes. So what were they doing walking through the middle of Antakya? They weren’t there to pray at Saint Peter’s Church. They weren’t there to see the Byzantine mosaics. And they weren’t there to look at the beautiful scenery or sample Antakya’s famous cuisine. They were there for one reason: to cross the border and bring the fight to Syria. If a journalist could see them, Turkish intelligence and the CIA could certainly see them too.

  Arab speakers often call the group Daesh, a tag rejected by ISIS because the Arab word daes means “crush underfoot.”

  ISIS follows Salafism (the Saudi version of Salafism is called Wahhabism), but the group effectively stole al-Qaeda’s ideology and expanded on it, embracing the most grizzly and brutal aspects of Islam’s history like enslaving female captives and beheadings, while rejecting the faith’s long traditions of tolerance. It would be like a group that claimed to act in the name of Christianity, but only accepted the worst practices of the Spanish Inquisition at the expense of all others. ISIS nonetheless proved to be appealing to a certain segment of Muslim society because it offered the possibility of living without modern rules. It appealed to psychopaths and to Muslims who felt outraged by the racism they encountered in Europe. It is a disturbing aspect of human nature that if there is a place where there are no consequences and where the most grotesque murders are tolerated in the name of a cult claiming to be a faith, a certain type of person will be attracted to it.

  My first face-to-face meeting with ISIS recruits came in early December 2012, shortly before I was kidnapped. I was traveling with rebels in the Free Syrian Army in the vicinity of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, which is located in the northwest corner of the country close to the Turkish border. The rebels’ system was communal and loose. We would hop from one safe house to another, spending a few hours at one and maybe a few nights at another. These houses provided a place to sleep, some food, and use of a bathroom—much-needed creature comforts when you’re living rough.

  One night we were at a house not far from Aleppo. It was cold. We’d been there for several days and were sleeping on blankets and rollout mattresses on the floor. We were comfortable and enjoying the company of our hosts, who were secular revolutionaries, moderates who wanted to overthrow the regime and create a more or less democratic and tolerant society. They were the kind of rebels the United States talked about supporting but never really did.

  Then another group of opposition fighters turned up. In the rotating system of safe houses, this was not unusual. The newcomers were different, however, in their appearance, their behavior, and their attitude toward us. They all had beards and wore more military-style uniforms. They carried their guns with them inside, all the time, instead of leaving them at the door as the other fighters did. They were deadly serious, not at all like the Free Syrian Army rebels, who would slap everyone on the back, take off their shoes, plop down on a pillow, and light cigarettes. Their beards made it clear they were Islamists. They didn’t introduce themselves.

  Our host brought out plates of food, and we all sat down on the floor, on our legs or with legs crossed Indian-style, a typical communal meal in Syria. The Islamists who had just arrived weren’t talking to us, apparently because we were Westerners. They weren’t rude to us, but they were hard-eyed and aloof. I was sitting next to one of them, a man in his late thirties or early forties, heavyset, built like a construction worker. He eventually started speaking to me, if only because I was next to him. He harped on the coming of a new caliphate.

  I said, “Oh, why do you say that?”

  “We’re building it. It’s happening. The caliphate will return, and will return soon.” Then he looked in my eyes and said it again. “Soon. The caliphate is coming back, imminently.” He was sure about this—in December 2012.

  When the bearded gunmen finished their meal, they got up and left. I got the feeling they didn’t feel comfortable there because of our presence. If that meal had been a year later, I’m sure we would have ended up leaving with our hands tied behind our backs, kidnapped.

  But at the time, ISIS w
as relatively weak. It was in re-formation. The moderate rebels still had the upper hand, and since we were their guests, these hard-core guys couldn’t hurt us. They didn’t call themselves ISIS fighters yet. They just described themselves as warriors for Allah. They had a quiet fierceness common to true fanatics.

  I was kidnapped less than two weeks later, and in retrospect it seems clear that if I had been held longer, I probably would have been sold to or taken by guys like this, whether they called themselves ISIS or not. James Foley, a freelance correspondent, was kidnapped thirty miles from Aleppo three weeks before the Sunni-connected criminal gang grabbed me.

  I went back into Syria in June 2013 with Salim Idris. At the time, Salim Idris was chief of the Free Syrian Army. I had a good relationship with him. He was secular, eager for American support, and happy to have me tag along. I think he wanted to show me that the FSA was still in charge. But what he ended up showing me was that the FSA was not in charge, not by a long shot. He had two protection vehicles when he went into Syria, one in front of his SUV and one in back. The three SUVs were packed with gunmen. Probably seven armed guys were in the front vehicle, six in the trail car. Another three rode in his car with him. So we had sixteen or seventeen guards, all heavily armed, all fully trusted by Salim Idris.

  On the road from the Turkish border to just outside Aleppo, about a forty-minute drive, we passed seven checkpoints, none of them controlled by the FSA. Some were manned by independents keeping an eye on their villages. Some were controlled by ISIS. Remember, this was only six months after my dinner with what I presumed were ISIS fighters. Back then they were keeping a low profile. Now they seemed to be advertising their affiliation. They had black flags and wore ski masks. Salim Idris was trying to say, “Hey, look, I’m still in charge. I’m still the big guy. I can take you into Syria.” Frankly, I was worried he wouldn’t be able to get me out.