A boy of fourteen pushed through the circle and shoved one of the men doing the beating. The man’s colleagues reached for the teenager, but he escaped. They shot at him, chased him on foot. He was caught, shoved into one of their cars, and driven away. The boy was never seen again.
Abu Ammar was not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, but his younger brother, Abu Hassan, was. In 1982, Abu Hassan helped party members flee the crackdown by smuggling them across the mountainous border into Turkey. He hid their weapons in oil drums he buried along the frontier, and then he escaped to Mosul, Iraq, where he remained until the self-proclaimed Islamic State group took the city in June 2014. (He now lives in southern Turkey.)
Abu Ammar was not the only one punished for the actions of his brother that day. As the sun started its descent, the mukhabarat pulled Abu Ammar’s elderly mother into the circle. They ripped off her clothes until she was naked, a shocking act in a village where every woman wore a headscarf. They beat her, threatened to rape her. Abu Ammar immediately relented. He said he’d tell them whatever they wanted to hear, he’d confess to anything. He was taken away.
“We went home and nobody said a word about it. My mother didn’t say anything,” recalled Mohammad more than two decades later. “I can still see it all in front of my eyes as if it’s just happening. I still feel that feeling, like I’m in a nightmare. It’s impossible to forget, it’s imprinted in me. They planted hatred in me that day, it became rooted.”
Shortly afterward, Mohammad’s father moved his young family to a mixed Christian–Alawite neighborhood in Latakia City, part of the regime’s heartland. “The aim was to be forgotten, to get away from everything that might remind me of where I was from,” Mohammad’s father said. A friend in the government helped him get a job as a civil servant in an arm of the Defense Ministry. It was as different a life from his old one as he could imagine.
Across Syria, the regime sought to deny a base to the Muslim Brotherhood, its offshoots, and other Islamists by eliminating people and intimidating places that might provide them shelter. But for Mohammad (unlike his father), the scorched-earth policy had the reverse effect: “When they imprison my uncle, my cousins—his children—will hate them. I will hate them, my other cousins will hate them, his neighbors will hate them. They did the opposite of what they wanted to do. Instead of uprooting his ties in society, they cemented them.”
Abu Ammar was charged with aiding the Brotherhood and spent eleven years in the notorious Tadmor Prison in Palmyra. He returned home on May 30, 1997. By chance, Mohammad was at the older man’s house that evening. He was in the guest room late at night when a car rumbled toward the isolated hilltop cluster of homes. Abu Ammar’s two sons, traumatized by their father’s detention, slept in the hills, afraid of being snatched by the mukhabarat, as their father had been, so Abu Ammar’s wife asked Mohammad to see who was outside. He opened the door to a man he didn’t recognize who was crying forcefully. He threw his arms around Mohammad, planted kisses on his face. “My son, you are a man,” he kept saying. “You grew up without me. You didn’t deserve to.” Mohammad didn’t know what to say. All he could do was hug the older man and welcome him home.
Abu Ammar had been released but not really freed. Every month for fourteen years, until the fall of Jisr al-Shughour in summer 2011, the farmer had to check in with the security and intelligence branches in the city, unsure each time whether he’d return home. Bribery became a regular expense, like a utility bill. It all made him feel “confined and humiliated again,” but he dared not complain. “The security had eyes everywhere,” he said. “I didn’t even trust to speak in front of my own son.”
MOHAMMAD GREW UP seeking answers to questions that were taboo in Assad’s Syria. Questions such as what happened in Jisr al-Shughour, and why an older generation of Sunni Islamists was defeated. It was a dangerous teenage curiosity, one that Mohammad’s father tried to smother. His son’s questions could land a man—or a high-school student—in jail. Mohammad’s older brother, Hossam, didn’t care about the ahdass of the late 1970s and ’80s. The siblings were two years apart, and although they shared the same group of friends, they were very different: Mohammad was sociable, Hossam reserved and apolitical. Mohammad wanted answers, but he knew better than to ask the sheikh at his local mosque.
After the routing of the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies, a regime-molded Sunni Islam filled the void. Hundreds of new mosques and Islamic institutes were seeded, the houses of worship monitored by mukhabarat, their Friday sermons approved by the state and delivered by co-opted clergy. Sufism, with its emphasis on mysticism, was traditionally Syria’s overarching Sunni dogma. The regime allowed a controlled version of it and demonized the more conservative Salafi branch of Sunni Islam. Salafism preached a return to the purist emulation of the ways of the Salaf (the companions of the Prophet Mohammad and their immediate descendants), but it was not monolithic. Its most extreme adherents were the Salafi Jihadis characterized by Al-Qaeda, although most Salafis eschewed both violence and politics. Some believed in subservience to Muslim rulers and silence on political matters. Others advocated nonviolent political participation. Salafism, in all its forms, was fringe in Syria.
Mohammad sought out the Salafi sheikhs despised by the regime. He was still in his late teens when he approached an older Salafi, Abu Barra al-Haddad, one of a handful in Latakia who rotated in and out of prison. Mohammad didn’t tell his father, whose generation he viewed as weak and servile, as if “the Assads had eaten their hearts and replaced them with fear.”
Abu Barra al-Haddad was a distant relative by marriage. That was Mohammad’s entrée. It was in Abu Barra’s living room that Mohammad met men who, once taken into their trust, provided him with CDs of Al-Qaeda propaganda. He viewed it on a desktop computer at home after his family slept. The men on the screen—the mujahideen, or holy warriors—filled Mohammad with a pride he craved. They represented “dignity, power, victory”—all the things that the Assad regime had denied an earlier generation of Islamists and that he felt his father had relinquished by taking a job in the Defense Ministry. Mohammad watched the videos and “dreamed of being part of their world.”
At university while studying mechanical engineering, he opened a computer café with four used desktops—in part to generate a little income in the evenings, but mainly to view his CDs. In 2000, after Syria was connected to the Internet, he started entering Al-Qaeda online forums, using a program that hid a user’s screen from the mainframe at Internet cafés, and another that masked its IP address, a tradecraft he learned from the men who gave him the CDs. The chat rooms included testimonies of fighters from the 1970s and ’80s, including from Jisr al-Shughour. Mohammad saved it all to CDs.
Then, September 11, 2001, radicalized his brother Hossam. The once-carefree twenty-four-year-old business administration graduate became eager to identify with a group that had shaken the mighty United States. Hossam’s sudden religious awakening was not pious and personal—it was militant, strict, and overbearing, and it clashed with Mohammad’s approach. Guided by a young Salafi recently released from prison, Hossam demanded his four sisters wear face-covering niqabs, which they refused to do. He insisted that his father, a longtime smoker, stop the habit because ultraconservative Islamists consider it a sin. “He didn’t tell him nicely, it wasn’t offered as a suggestion,” Mohammad recalled. “He wanted to force everything on them, so naturally their reaction was to do the opposite.”
Mohammad was pleased when, unlike his family, the brothers’ mutual friends readily accepted Hossam’s new ideas. Their lifestyle of girlfriends, parties, and trips to the beach ended. The small gang, all university graduates, began watching Mohammad’s contraband videos about mujahideen with the same enthusiasm they once had for televised Champions League football matches. The Chechen videos were their favorites, especially The Russian Hell, which featured the Arab foreign fighter Khattab. The meetings in private homes were dangerous. All it would take was one slipup—a word ove
rheard in public, a misplaced CD, one person to knowingly or unwittingly attract the attention of security and intelligence agents or their informers—to expose them all.
In the same way that 9/11 set Hossam and the group on what they all considered a righteous path, the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 defined their destination. President Bashar al-Assad opposed Washington’s war on Saddam Hussein, even though Saddam helmed a rival branch of the Baath Party that had a tortuous, acrimonious history with Syria’s. For Assad, it was a question of sovereignty—and precedent; he didn’t want to be next in line for regime change. So how to hobble an American military force next door that might easily turn to Damascus next? Assad’s solution was simple—allow jihadists, foreign and local, to transit through Syria into Iraq, and in so doing achieve two objectives: identify and rid the Syrian regime of potential threats from homegrown Islamists, while at the same time keeping the Americans busy in Iraq. “The idea was we’ll send them there [to Iraq], if they die we’ll be very happy, if they don’t and they come back, we’ll arrest them because we don’t need jihadists in Syria,” Ayman Abdel-Nour said. Abdel-Nour was a senior Baathist and member of the prestigious Baath Congress, as well as one of Bashar al-Assad’s college friends, before he defected in 2007 and became one of his leading critics. “We set up training camps in the countryside around Aleppo and near the Iraqi border for them,” he said. The operation was overseen by Military Intelligence.
The jihadists, in turn, left Damascus alone. “It was in the interests of Al-Qaeda in Iraq that Syria be a conduit,” said Abu Othman, Mohammad’s old cellmate from Palestine Branch. At the time, Abu Othman was a member of a small underground circle of senior Salafi Jihadis in Aleppo. “The way we saw it, to us, Syria is a transit point and we won’t undertake any work there, in exchange for them [the regime] turning a blind eye to our people, and that’s what happened.”
The Syrian call to the Iraqi jihad was not secret. It was blessed by the 2003 fatwa from Syria’s grand mufti, declaring it obligatory for Muslims to resist the foreign occupiers next door. Busloads of volunteers entered western Iraq from eastern Syria. The Americans and their regional allies knew what Damascus was doing. In August 2007, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki “directly confronted” Bashar al-Assad in Damascus “with details about these camps and infiltration routes, including specific names and places.” He told Assad he was “sick and tired of interference in Iraqi internal affairs by Assef Shawkat,” according to leaked State Department cables. Shawkat was Assad’s brother-in-law and the head of Military Intelligence. In December 2008, CENTCOM commander General David Petraeus told the Lebanese president that “we know for a fact that Syrian Military Intelligence Director [Shawkat] is aware of this issue, as is President Assad.” Both the Lebanese president and the head of Jordan’s intelligence services warned Assad that “the US knew about these activities and urged him to take action, but their warnings were unheeded.” In 2007, in the Iraqi border town of Sinjar, the US military captured more than six hundred Al-Qaeda in Iraq personnel files detailing a one-year period from August 2006 to August 2007. All of the foreign fighters in the records had entered Iraq from Syria. Syrians made up the third-largest contingent of foreign fighters, after Libyans and Saudis, and almost 42 percent of jihadis in the so-called Sinjar records listed at least one contact in Syria. Many listed multiple contacts. At least ninety-five Syrian coordinators were identified by name.
In Latakia, a handful of Syrians facilitated the journey to jihad in Iraq, including Mohammad’s mentor, Abu Barra al-Haddad. When coordinators were arrested, Mohammad and his associates would watch carefully when they were released, and under what circumstances—wary of infiltrators, mukhabarat spies, and collaborators. Online jihadi forums like Minbar Suria al-Islami warned would-be recruits that if a Syrian facilitator was not operating “in a framework of total secrecy . . . you can be sure [he] is connected to the tyrant’s security services and is nothing more than a trap for the mujahideen.” In 2010, Syria’s Intelligence chief, General Ali Mamlouk, boasted to an American delegation that his men infiltrated ultraconservative groups. “We are practical and not theoretical,” he said in a leaked State Department cable. “In principle, we don’t attack or kill them immediately. Instead, we embed ourselves in them and only at the opportune moment do we move.” Some of the would-be jihadis were arrested by Syrian mukhabarat posing as facilitators before they crossed the border.
Mohammad knew at least twenty-five Salafis from Latakia who went to Iraq, including his brother Hossam and most of their mutual friends. Hossam slipped away without saying good-bye to anyone except his fiancée (the sister of his Salafi mentor), a week after Mohammad’s engagement in early November 2004. Mohammad found a page-long farewell note jutting out of a book atop a chest of drawers. It included short personal messages to his parents and siblings. “He told me that he was certain that this was the right path, and that I should walk along it as well,” Mohammad said, but he had no desire to follow his brother. “Instead of going to die in Iraq,” he said, “they could have helped establish a base for this thought in our society, to actively propagate it.” Hossam’s letter ended with a pledge: “We are coming, Bashar. We will return.” Mohammad’s father burned the note. The father was summoned to several mukhabarat branches to account for his son’s disappearance. “I told them I didn’t know, which was the truth,” Mohammad’s father said. “I was sure they knew more about where he was than I did. A bird could not fly from Latakia to the Iraqi border without them knowing about it, so what about a man?”
A week later, Hossam called his younger brother. Mohammad had a cell phone with a SIM card that wasn’t registered in his name and couldn’t be easily traced to him. The SIM belonged to a Somali, a client of Abu Ammar’s sons, who had transited through Syria. The sons had made good use of their village’s proximity to the Turkish border to smuggle people across the frontier. It was their Western Union transfers that had landed Mohammad in solitary confinement for 111 days. Mohammad occasionally helped guide the groups over the border, along routes that would come in handy after the start of the Syrian uprising.
Hossam told Mohammad that he had pledged allegiance, or bayaa, to the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers, al tanzim, the organization, as Al-Qaeda was better known. Abu Barra al-Haddad had helped Hossam get there. From Latakia, Hossam traveled to Aleppo, then east to Deir Ezzor, the border town of Al-Bukamal, and across a vast, sandy frontier into Iraq. After 2011, jihadis would reverse the route.
Mohammad fielded calls from most of the Latakians who went to Iraq. They used code words and offered minimal information—just enough for Mohammad to understand they were okay and to physically visit their families and relay that. Without much effort, he had become a node in a network of foreign fighters that was largely Al-Qaeda.
The Syrians fought in what the Americans called Operation Phantom Fury, the second battle for the Iraqi city of Fallujah, in Anbar Province. It lasted from early November until Christmas Eve 2004 and was the bloodiest battle for US troops in Iraq. It also claimed many of the Latakians. The tanzim in Iraq would call families to tell them if their son had been killed. “Sometimes the calls would come through me, but often directly to their families, especially if it was a death,” Mohammad said.
He was never contacted by the tanzim about his brother. Hossam’s last communication was on November 28, 2004. His weeks-long mission to Iraq profoundly changed his family. After his disappearance, his sisters voluntarily did what he had demanded they do, and donned the niqab. The family started praying regularly and studying the Quran. Some of his siblings assumed Hossam was killed in Fallujah. Others, like Mohammad, believed he was detained and was in either an Iraqi or a Syrian prison, or was later killed in detention. Hossam’s fiancée insists he is still alive, although she has no proof. She is still waiting for him to come home, more than a decade later.
HOSSAM DIDN’T RETURN, but from 2004 onward many battle-hardened S
yrian Salafi Jihadis did. Their homecoming coincided with small bombings and shootouts with Syrian security forces, the first incidents since the 1980s. Officials blamed religious extremists and began rounding up suspected Islamist veterans of Iraq. “The Jihadists,” as the former Baathist Ayman Abdel-Nour put it, “were supposed to kill Americans, not Syrians.”
The Salafis were tossed into the three-story Sednaya Military Prison, some thirty kilometers north of Damascus. Each of its three floors was divided into two wings, right and left, which were each further subdivided into three parts. Several hundred Muslim Brotherhood men detained since the 1970s and ’80s were on the second floor. The Salafi Jihadis lived in isolation in most of the third, an area the inmates termed “the black door.” Their jailers called it the Al-Qaeda wing. The Salafi Jihadis were divided into two groups—those who adhered to the ideology and had committed what amounted to “thought crimes” but nothing more were on the right; those who had carried arms were on the left.
There were at least four hundred men in Sednaya’s Al-Qaeda wing. On March 15, 2011, the start of the Syrian uprising, the day Suleiman was on a date, three hundred additional prisoners, including Mohammad’s cellmate Abu Othman, the senior Shari’iy, were transferred from Palestine Branch to Sednaya, to join the four hundred. The men behind Sednaya’s “black door,” and others who were or had been in Palestine Branch, would form the backbone of Salafi Islamist armed groups that would soon participate in a budding insurgency against Bashar al-Assad.
ON MARCH 23, 2011, Mohammad walked away from Palestine Branch as briskly as possible in unlaced sneakers. It was dark and cold. He flagged down one of the ubiquitous Mazda minivans known as micros that flitted and careened around Damascus. It was the cheapest form of public transport, at just 10 Syrian pounds a journey. He headed to a bus terminal near Abbasid Square in the northeast of the capital. There he called his father, intending to go home to Latakia City. “Don’t come here,” his father said. “There’s trouble, shooting, go to the village instead.”
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