Blindfold

by Theo Padnos

  When we arrived on the outskirts of the southern city of Deraa the roads were safe enough for us to drive in columns. Our columns sped through checkpoints, which had once been manned—but were manned no more—by the Western-friendly rebel army in Syria, the Free Syrian Army. Every once in a while, our convoy slowed to examine the roadside shacks from which the Free Syrian Army soldiers had once monitored their checkpoints. The shacks had been painted in the red, green, and white of the Free Syrian Army, as had the curbs nearby. The Free Syrian Army soldiers, however, had faded away. Now various black flags, all of which bore the words “there is no god but God,” fluttered above the checkpoint shacks.

  During this voyage, I was often seated over the Jebhat al-Nusra bank. It took the form of plastic shopping bags stuffed with cash. It was located on the floor behind the driver’s seat in Abu Maria al-Qahtani’s Toyota Hilux. It held US dollars and Syrian liras.

  As we traveled, I watched the sub-commanders withdraw money from this bank. They would put the cash in the breast pockets of their robes, return to their trucks, then speed away in a cloud of sand. The more I watched these transactions, the easier it was for me to guess at how the Islamic armies had overcome the other rebel groups.

  When the Jebhat al-Nusra brigades moved through Syria, many of the soldiers traveled in bare feet, as I was traveling then. The soldiers dressed in shalwar kameez, clothing for an Arab army of yesteryear. They used head scarves to control their hair rather than, say, a barber. This is how the Prophet of God is thought to have dealt with his hair. He ate with his hands, as we did, and brushed his teeth with a siwak, or minty stick. So did we. In our army, the soldiers didn’t necessarily ask for food—or anyway, the fighters were happy to subsist on bread and NGO-donated tinned sardines. They slept in the sand when necessary. On those occasions, the soldiers made their ablutions with dust rather than water—a tradition of the pious and the poor.

  They weren’t doing this, as they often reminded me, to advance a military purpose; still less were they interested in politics or money. They fought to make the golden time of Islam come again. And now Muslims from across the world had noted its coming. And so they, too, were pouring into the Land of Sham.

  In other words, Jebhat al-Nusra had an excellent myth for Syria then. In the areas in which we traveled, that myth prevailed because an army of believing storytellers, excellent salesmen all, carried it from village to village. In each place, they recited the sacred texts, then lived out the myth. No doubt the villagers assumed, as I had assumed when I was a prisoner, that the army itself was propelled by inhuman powers, a force of nature. The villagers’ role was to be bountiful hosts and to thank God for victories. This they did with appropriate, customary respect for ceremony—also with delicious tea.

  * * *

  Of course the scholars played a role in dressing up Jebhat al-Nusra’s doings as natural phenomena. The scholars’ function, as far as I could determine, was to tweet. As I discovered later, on coming home, they tweeted about ISIS’s transgressions against the sharia, the foreignness of ISIS versus the Syrianness of Jebhat al-Nusra, and of their hero, the fourteenth-century philosopher Ibn Taymiyyah, who also had an apocalyptic turn of mind and also led a war, eight centuries ago, against the Alawites.

  When they were not tweeting, the scholars sat on cushions next to Abu Maria al-Qahtani. They nodded as he spoke and embraced him when he finished speaking. (For instance, like this: On the next page is a photo of one of the big Jebhat al-Nusra scholars, Abu Hassan al-Kuwaiti, sucking up to his hero, the Iraqi Abu Maria.)

  * * *

  Qahtani needed these men’s authority in small matters, for instance in deciding whether or not to permit the sale of cigarettes, and in more consequential ones, for instance in deciding when to deploy the explosive-laden suicide truck.

  That summer in Jebhat al-Nusra, impassioned discussions concerning martyrdom operations swirled among the lower-ranking fighters. ISIS was thought to use the bombers much too frequently and at the behest of unlearned, uncaring commanders.

  Jebhat al-Nusra was better because it sought religious counsel in every case. Perhaps the counselors quibbled from time to time (I wasn’t present during these consultations), but because Qahtani controlled the army’s physical force and because the scholars seemed to leap whenever it was time to wrap their arms around the sheikh, I had the impression that Qahtani generally got what he wanted.

  From Abu Hassan al-Kuwaiti’s Twitter feed in October of 2014: Abu Hassan, a Jebhat al-Nusra religious authority, hugs Abu Maria al-Qahtani, a military authority.

  In their own way, the suicide bombers themselves conferred moral authority on Qahtani. In this part of the world, when young men come to you who do not cling to life but plunge themselves into death, when they keep coming, year after year, the coming is understood as a natural phenomenon and a sign from God. “Our terror is a blessed thing,” says a line from a Jebhat al-Nusra war hymn. “All the soldiers have pledged themselves to the mullah, and our souls are now with God.” “To heaven we will go, martyred in the millions,” goes another street chant, and also: “We are all of us Jebhat al-Nusra.” The children on the street know the words to these chants. Often, as I discovered later, on YouTube, the children lead the crowds.

  So Qahtani’s power over nature derived from the religious men who accompanied us, the poverty of the soldiers, the soldiers’ piety, their willingness to be used as suicide bombers, and in a deeper sense his power derived from the plastic shopping bags. What if he were no longer able to buy gas for the trucks? Explosives for the suicide trucks? What of the future of the jihad then? Everyone knows that there is no future without the plastic shopping bags. Similarly, everyone knows that the millions of dollars in cash a rebel army requires to pursue its war comes from only two sources: the sale of Western hostages and control over the oil fields.

  The sixty-odd trucks following us through the desert were moving west to open up new fronts: Some were to establish themselves in the embattled Damascus suburbs, some were going to the Lebanese border at Qalamoun, and some would set up in the Syrian Golan. No one would have traveled a centimeter farther if everyone were not confident that the black plastic bags were essentially bottomless, an ever-flowing stream.

  This is what I learned during my voyage: that the jihad is a conjuring trick, that it shimmers like a mirage but is yet real because everyone agreed that Abu Maria al-Qahtani and his former childhood friend, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, would have cash until the end of time.

  Most sheikhs in the jihad are wise. Many are wise and violent. Many have wealthy friends in Qatar and Kuwait who throw them a suitcase of cash now and then. But that kind of cash is pocket change compared to what you get for a Western hostage. It’s less than zero compared to the amount you get from an oil well. In order to get the oil wells, you need the suicide bombers who will drive the kamikaze trucks that open up the roads. Once you control the roads, it’s easy enough to control the prisons that house the Western hostages.

  Only a few sheikhs have the religious learning that attracts lieutenants, the wild violence that subdues the public, the will to get the Western hostages, the prisons to hold them, the wherewithal to negotiate with foreign governments, and the power to deploy the suicide bombers. Those sheikhs are at the top of the ISIS chain of command and at the top of the al Qaeda chain. There are other leaders out there in the field, of course. But no one brings in the cash, the suicide bombers, and the hostages like al Qaeda and ISIS. Since these were the essential elements for victory in the Syrian jihad, and since all the young men wanted to win, all the young men wanted to be with these two groups. The humbler, smaller, less ambitious military bands eventually picked up sticks, then faded into the undergrowth.

  * * *

  I found during this voyage, I could not take my eyes off the destroyed cityscapes but when you spend a few weeks traveling the countryside in Syria in the company of Jebhat al-Nusra, the changes that really take your breath away are the psychological on
es. By the summer of 2014, the parts of Syria through which I was traveling had been under attack from the air for three and a half years.

  You can observe the effects of the violence the world has been sending to Syria in the behavior of the children. When the planes left the sky, the eight-year-old kids would come running. They sprinted through the rubble, kicked their soccer balls into destroyed storefronts, and stared at the sky. They had been spared yet again. You could hear the joy in their voices. They had been terrorized. You could hear that in their voices, too. “God is greater than you, O Bashar!” they called out. They chanted, “O Allah, O Allah, we have only you, O Allah.”

  The state of mind that comes over you when you’ve lived in a bombing zone for years and have watched others die but remain alert and alive yourself isn’t exactly PTSD. It isn’t radical Islam, whatever that is.

  It is certainly love of God. It is longing for revenge. It is a belief in the sufficiency of the Koran and the rituals, a fear of the consequences of not praying, and a hatred of anyone or anything that would get in the way of the prayer. It is not intense communion with jihadist philosophers of old. Perhaps a few of the scholars keep themselves busy in this way, but I’m not sure many people listen to these talkers. Anyway, the sustenance that people derive from reciting the Koran, a memorized form of music most Syrians learn in childhood, is a thousand times more powerful than anything a philosopher might say.

  I know a bit about this state of mind because when I was held with other prisoners it took over our jail cells. The state of mind is a helplessness before the coming death. It is belief in a miraculous deliverance. It is poring through the Koran in search of a way to survive, then escape, then slip away to a better life. Yet the way out doesn’t come. What then? There is more bombing and more praying. In the streets, deep into the night, by crowds of two hundred men, there is more chanting: “O Allah, O Allah, we have nothing left but you, O Allah.”

  One afternoon, during my voyage through the desert, a low-level fighter, one of the al Qaeda leader’s bodyguards, told me of a prophecy to the effect that in a future time all the world was to abandon the Muslims and the great majority of the Muslims would themselves abandon Islam. In that hour, only a tiny kernel of believers would keep the faith. They would be under threat from enemies abroad and saboteurs within. In this hour of danger, they would memorize the sacred book. They would preserve the faith by laying down their lives at the slightest provocation and by transferring a love of memorizing and martyrdom to converts and to children. There would come a time, this fighter said, when every Koran in the world would be mutilated or burned and the only extant Korans would reside in the brains of the memorizers. God would never kill these memorizers, he told me, but would rather preserve them, even when the walls of their houses were crashing in on them.

  The psychology in the bombed-over areas is a belief in this variety of prophecy. It is a belief that signs of the end of time are emerging in the land now. What is this destruction around us? What is this deepening of the faith? What is this ingathering of the world’s truest Muslims if not a portent of the apocalypse?

  The state of mind is the state of being under siege. Evil lurks in the darkness, just outside your door. Yet the whole world is against you. If somehow you were to kill the wolf at the door, what would this accomplish? Nothing. Beyond lie forests filled with wolves and the entirety of the globe, wherever Islam does not hold sway, is itself such a forest. Your protectors are the people who eat and pray with you. They are your truest, most loving family. The Koran is your moonbeam of hope. This is what will deliver you.

  I was indignant at first when I saw how calm, even satisfied, the scholarly men were when the airplanes appeared in the sky. Every time the airplanes seemed to circle, they had their drivers race them away to hide in bunkers. What about us, the rank and file?

  Later, however, after I got used to the Syrian Air Force, I saw the excitement that pulsed through the soldiers whenever the word “Tayara!” (“Airplane!”) went up from the caravan. The soldiers tried to film the airplanes as they passed over us. They competed with one another in indifference to danger. Toward the end of our voyage, the reasons for the scholars’ satisfaction at the appearance of the airplanes became clearer to me. They needed the planes and wanted them to come. Had they not prophesied of the tiny community of believers surrounded by enemies? So it had come to pass. Had they not foreseen how the enemy would destroy the mosques and the Korans? So it had come to pass. What about the empty cities through which we passed? The trains of refugees on their way, even then, to Europe? Had scholars not foreseen how the Muslims would turn their backs on their brothers, then flee into unbelief? So it had come to pass.

  As for the airplanes, at this point, some of them were from Russia. Others might well have been from America. What did we know? What did it matter? Those airplanes showed how united the terrestrial powers were and how apocalyptic their destruction could be. Every bomb they dropped deepens the credibility of the men who channeled the prophecies. As the credibility of these men deepened, so did the power of the true authorities in the jihad: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Abu Maria al-Qahtani, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, and Abu Mohammed al-Adnani. When I was traveling with Jebhat al-Nusra, it occurred to me that one day, the war planners in Washington, London, and Paris would probably conclude that bombing Syria doesn’t accomplish much. Yes, it kills civilians. Yes, it can drive an insurgency underground.

  The state of mind mind in the rebel-controlled parts of Syria is also hatred of the enemy who lurks within. Many of the young men in these areas still listen, in secret, to Michael Jackson and to Britney Spears (pop music there can lag a few years behind the current hits in the West). So they have the Islam-destroying, treacherous thought patterns inside their heads. They are also sheltering the enemy. The state of mind in the rebel-held areas is a will to do violence to all people and things—foreigners, gays, sexy women, DVDs, and laptops—that recall for the fighters how intimate their relations with the forbidden things really are.

  CHAPTER 12 MY WAY OUT

  On the morning of August 20, 2014, when the James Foley video appeared on TV screens across the world, I happened to be sitting on the floor beside a plush divan in a villa outside the southern city of Deraa, with the remote control in my hand. At my back, a half-dozen mid-level al Qaeda commanders were playing video games on their mobile phones. I read on the crawl: “American journalist James Foley killed in Syria.” I glanced at the commanders at my back. They didn’t appear to have noticed what was occurring on TV. I changed the channel, but the man in the orange jumpsuit was on the Syrian state television, Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, BBC, France 24.

  I was living then under a kind of house arrest. During most of the day, I was confined to a bedroom in the back of the villa, but in the mornings, when the important commanders were still asleep, and in the late afternoons, when teatime came around, the villa majordomo, a gracious, timid man called Abu Kenan, would invite me to the divan. Here I watched television and shot the breeze with the al Qaeda middle management.

  The middle management must have tuned in to the news during the course of that day. In the early evening, when the commanders had again assembled themselves in front of the villa television, I was again permitted to emerge from my bedroom. They winked at me as I arranged myself in my normal spot, on the carpet, at their feet. One of them flashed his cell phone at me. It bore an image of a man in an orange jumpsuit, a knife at his throat.

  In fact, all the commanders had the same video on their phones. That afternoon, they played the video for themselves over and over. As I watched them pore over their screens, I could see their admiration for ISIS in their eyes. In their murmurs, I could hear how pleased the sight of an American on his knees, in his last moments, denouncing the American government for its folly in Iraq made them. In the glumness of their remarks about their own video production department, I could hear their disappointment in Jebhat al-Nusra. The world, they felt, had passed them by. N
ow their former colleagues—their old friends from the eye hospital in Aleppo—had made a hit video. It had transfixed the world. The Jebhat al-Nusra commanders had been reduced to idling their days away in in front of the television.

  When at last they tired of watching James Foley’s decapitation, one of the commanders sighed. “You see what kind of a group these ISIS people are?” he said, nodding at his phone. This commander assumed an air of indignation, as if he meant to invite me into a discussion of ISIS’s savagery, but the way he kept fiddling with his phone so that the clip would play smoothly, from beginning to end, told me that the video hadn’t offended him. It had rather titillated him. It was having a similar effect on all the commanders in the room. It made them want to share it with another via Bluetooth, to leer at me, and to brag about how much more Islamic—and humane and decent—their group was than ISIS. Of course, ISIS, having won its war with Jebhat al-Nusra, now controlled the oil in Syria’s east. It could draw on cash reserves from the oil in Iraq. It moved about in flashy, combat-appropriate trucks. It had bigger guns. It was the world’s preeminent terrorist organization, and Jebhat al-Nusra was yesterday’s news.

  I knew these men well enough to know that if an invitation to join the ISIS middle management had somehow popped up on their screens in those moments these men would have leapt into their trucks, then sped away to Raqqa. These men were trend followers, not trendsetters. They wanted the fancy trucks. They wanted their own faces on the news.