Attar despised the Islamist group whose failed insurrection was the reason for his family’s exile. So Attar and Abazeed decided that if there was going to be an uprising in Syria, they wanted no ties to the past. “We felt very strongly that we didn’t want to work with anybody over the age of forty,” said Attar. “They had their turn in the last era. They failed. We wanted to be different.”
The other SNN cofounder, Abazeed, was from the same clan as most of the Daraa youths detained for antiregime graffiti in February 2011. Through his family in Daraa, Abazeed connected with activists in the southern city and told them he would disseminate their footage. The activists were close enough to Jordan to tap into its cell-phone network and bypass the Assad regime’s strict controls. Footage was also physically transported to Jordan on flash drives and uploaded from there. The images trickled into SNN, two or three videos a day, but by mid-2011 the platform was receiving up to six hundred videos from across Syria every Friday. The footage, stamped with SNN’s logo, was often picked up by international news agencies, increasing the site’s visibility. Donors in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates took notice. They funded about forty Inmarsat and Thuraya satellite telephones, devices banned in Syria, that were smuggled into the country overland in commercial buses. Other donations helped finance 264 Astra 1 satellite devices, as well as rechargeable 3G accounts for activists in areas that still had cell-phone service and DSL Internet.
In August, SNN received an e-mail from a little-known Lebanese Shiite politician, Okab Sakr. Sakr belonged to the Future Movement, a Lebanese political party founded by the late Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who was assassinated on Valentine’s Day 2005 in a one-ton car bomb in Beirut that killed twenty-two others. In the months before his murder, Hariri had challenged Syria’s almost-thirty-year political and military domination of its smaller neighbor, Lebanon. Hariri’s killing was widely blamed on Damascus and prompted hundreds of thousands of Lebanese to demand Syria’s departure from their country. After two months of sustained protests, and intense Western pressure, the Syrian army withdrew.
Rafik Hariri’s son Saad inherited the leadership of the Future Movement and sharpened its anti-Assad rhetoric. He blamed Bashar for his father’s death. In early 2011, when Bashar’s kingdom of silence and fear cracked, Saad Hariri and his Future Movement wondered, Why not help it crumble?
Okab Sakr was the party’s designated sledgehammer, the messenger. In his e-mail, Sakr had asked to meet with SNN. The first rendezvous was in August, at a café in Paris. “Sakr said, ‘How can we help you?’ ” Attar recalled. The SNN cofounder asked for satellite Internet devices. Sakr said cash was easier. At their next meeting, at a café in Brussels (where both Sakr and Attar lived), the Lebanese politician slipped a thick wad of crisp 500 euro notes across the table. They fit neatly in Attar’s pocket.
Okab Sakr was interested in sending all sorts of messages to the Syrian regime. Soon, Sakr and SNN’s two cofounders, Abazeed and Attar, would help lay the foundations for the organized arming of the uprising in Syria.
But Suleiman didn’t know any of that, didn’t know Attar or Sakr. He just knew that SNN had set up Skype chat rooms for each of Syria’s fourteen provinces, linking protesters who were connected only by the Internet. He was added to SNN’s “Homs room,” where activists shared tips and information. That’s where he learned about live-streaming sites like Justin.TV and Bambuzer, and how he obtained direct contacts to Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya.
Suleiman’s other network, on the ground in Rastan, was also developing. Suleiman and his cousin added Maamoun, a video activist and mobile-phone repairman, to their group. They didn’t know him but knew his older brother. That was enough to trust him. Maamoun brought to the arrangement more than just video skills. He owned a small mobile-phone store (and a DSL line) near Al-Kabir Mosque, which Suleiman would later use to livestream demonstrations. Others, too, were emerging as natural organizers in the protests, telling stragglers to keep up, suggesting chants, and maintaining a general sense of order. Some served as unarmed lookouts. They all soon came together, a core of about ten men. They called themselves the town’s Local Coordination Committee (LCC), or tansiqiya. Tansiqiyas were emerging across Syria, anonymous clusters of local activists who pushed through tight media control to directly disseminate information. They were the seeds of a grassroots civil society, young Internet-savvy volunteers working in their hometowns and learning as they went.
ON MAY 29, a foggy Sunday morning, the regime’s tanks, military trucks, and armored personnel carriers rumbled into Rastan. Suleiman was in Homs at his sister’s home. He woke to his phone ringing. “All hell is breaking loose over here,” an uncle told him. “Don’t come back, stay where you are.” Suleiman tried contacting his parents but couldn’t get through. He dialed and redialed every relative’s number he knew. The telephone and Internet lines were cut. After several hours of trying, a cousin answered, a lawyer named Samer Tlass. Samer was on a hill east of Rastan. He suggested a rendezvous point: a gas station on the road to Salamiyeh at the intersection leading to the town of Umm al-Amad. He said he had important videos.
The spot was flat, brown, agricultural, treeless. Nowhere to hide. Suleiman pulled into the gas station. So did five trucks full of soldiers and four Peugeot 505s (along with the 504, the cars of choice for the mukhabarat). Paranoia set in. Were they looking for him? Had they eavesdropped on the call? Were the mukhabarat really that good? I’m done, Suleiman thought. If Samer arrives now, we are both screwed. He considered driving away. It might look suspicious, but then so would loitering. All they had to do was ask for his ID and see that he was from Rastan to haul him in for questioning, especially on that day. Just act normal, he told himself, but he couldn’t. He turned the ignition and drove up and down the road. He saw the convoy head out just as Samer arrived. The cousins embraced. Samer slipped a memory card into Suleiman’s hand and left.
The videos were mainly of injured children in hospital beds. A quiet girl in a pink T-shirt, her head wrapped in bandages. Another child, this one whimpering, her shoulder covered in a cast, a sling around her right arm. They were on their way to the Rawafidh School when their bus came under fire sometime between 7 and 7:30 a.m. The driver was shot but survived. A first lieutenant from the Tlass family who was traveling back to his military service wasn’t so lucky. He died, along with a schoolgirl named Hajar al-Khatib who had turned eleven that day. Hajar’s body was released to her father, despite his refusal to sign a paper saying she had been killed by terrorist gangs. Her devastated father said, “I told them, if that’s what they wanted they could keep her body.”
On May 31, the state-owned Tishreen newspaper reported both deaths. It said the pair were “martyred” in an attack by “extremist terrorist groups” and that their flag-draped bodies were honored as they left Homs Military Hospital. A few years later, in January 2014, at the opening of Geneva peace talks between the Syrian government and the opposition-in-exile, the head of the Syrian rebel delegation would begin his speech by recounting the story of Hajar al-Khatib and calling her the first female child martyr.
SULEIMAN WATCHED the videos on Samer’s flash drive with horror. Children had been shot! The images provided proof of the security forces’ indiscriminate fire. He needed to upload them to SNN, but his sister in Homs didn’t have DSL. He didn’t know anyone in the city who did. Anger clouded his judgment. He walked into an Internet café, handed over his ID (as was obligatory), and started uploading the videos. It was impossibly reckless, but no one noticed. Luck was on his side.
That same desperation and luck drove him to run the gauntlet of checkpoints back to Rastan a week later. He had no idea if his name was on the lists of the wanted. Dressed in a suit and tie, Ray-Bans affixed to his clean-shaven face, and driving an expensive car, he figured he didn’t look like somebody the low-level loyalists would stop to question. He was right. He wanted to be home to document what was happening, but he had another reason to return: One of his r
elatives, a twenty-four-year-old first lieutenant named Abdel-Razzak Tlass had defected from the army in response to its attack on Rastan. He was one of the first officers to break from the regime, a split steeped in symbolism. He was a relative of former Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass, defecting from Daraa, birthplace of the revolution, where he served with Division 5, Brigade 15, Battalion 852.
In an emotional statement aired on Al Jazeera on June 7, Lieutenant Tlass said he’d witnessed officers he named killing peaceful protesters. “Is the army supposed to steal and protect the Assads?” the young mustachioed man asked. He sat in what looked like a tribal tent, dressed in battle fatigues and cap, two yellow stars on each lapel. “The honor of Rastan is under attack! Rastan is being destroyed by artillery, mortars, and tanks! Where are you, honorable officers of Rastan? Where are you?” Lieutenant Tlass called on them and others to defect. “Where are your consciences? You did not join the army to protect the Assads!”
Rumors swirled that Abdel-Razzak Tlass had slipped into Jordan from Daraa after making the video, but it was shot in al-Zafarani, a town in the Homs countryside, and uploaded by activists who would become part of the Farouq Battalions. Suleiman knew his relative wasn’t in Jordan. The officer’s father had contacted Suleiman and, using coded language such as, “Meet me where I last saw you at the family barbecue,” arranged a rendezvous. Suleiman drove straight to the location. Abdel-Razzak Tlass had sneaked home to Rastan and was hiding in a farmhouse on its outskirts. He planned to organize an armed uprising to defend and take back his hometown, and he wanted Suleiman’s help.
MOHAMMAD
Mohammad was bringing in guns from Turkey. Pump-action shotguns for 7,000 Syrian pounds each that he sold for 8,000. Profit was not his motive. Once a man carried a weapon, “he was almost forced to continue in this path,” as Mohammad saw it, because, “regardless of whether he had a light weapon or a tank, it was the same thing to the regime.” Mohammad was in his hometown of Jisr al-Shughour. He watched its peaceful protests, weekly events since mid-April, but didn’t participate. He had other plans. He enlisted a small group of Salafi friends from Latakia who, along with the few local men he’d armed, overran half a dozen small police stations in villages dotted around the city. The first raid was in mid-April, the same time as Jisr al-Shughour’s first protest. Mohammad said he let the six policemen go, and netted nine Kalashnikovs and ammunition. It wasn’t hard.
The Baath regime was largely absent from the countryside that had once formed its social base. Local police stations (and informers) were about the extent of its presence. The instruments of the state were concentrated in the big cities. To the urban elites of the largely Sunni mercantile class that decades earlier had sided with the Muslim Brotherhood, the mukhabarat state offered limited economic liberalization in exchange for loyalty, ensuring that the old elites were stakeholders in the survival of the new. Sect mattered less in this arrangement than politics and interests and making money—but only for those closest to the regime and others it wanted to woo. Family came first, and Bashar’s maternal cousins, the Makhloufs, became the richest and most powerful businessmen in Syria, with monopolies in telecommunications and other industries. Former Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass’s family wasn’t far behind. It meant that classism, rather than sectarianism, was a stronger revolutionary driver for many of the regime’s opponents, coupled with the long-suppressed hatred of those whom it had harmed. Like the people of Jisr al-Shughour.
ONE FUNERAL CHANGED the course of events in Jisr al-Shughour and had ramifications beyond it. Basil al-Masry, a twenty-five-year-old father of two, was killed on June 4 as he attacked a security outpost near the Jisr al-Shughour railway station. Few outside his family knew that he had picked up arms against the state. He was not part of Mohammad’s circle.
The Masrys had man-size holes in their family tree, entire branches snapped off in the 1980s, and every subsequent generation knew who had done the pruning. Thousands attended Basil al-Masry’s funeral, including people from nearby villages. The story circulating among the mourners was that he was killed, unarmed, at a regime checkpoint. Masry’s wooden coffin, adorned with olive branches, was carried through the streets of his hometown. “Heaven, open your doors,” the mourners chanted as they streamed across a bridge over the Orontes River toward the cemetery. The crowd returned to wait in a public garden near the post office, to pay condolences to Masry’s family in a funeral tent erected nearby. On the roof of the post office were government snipers. Mohammad watched the crowd from the balcony of a friend’s home. He had concealed his Kalashnikov and brought it with him. His men also had guns hidden in their cars. They retrieved them and fired at the post office. The snipers responded indiscriminately, killing five people in the crowd and wounding dozens more, some of whom were rushed twenty kilometers north across the Turkish border to a hospital. In the hours that followed, entire generations of families fled to the Turkish border.
Mohammad’s men weren’t the only armed men present. There were others from surrounding villages. A young, unarmed mourner named Fouad saw groups of men grab guns from cars. He heard the first shots but didn’t know their source. He hid near the post office and watched security forces shoot unarmed protesters. A man he didn’t recognize threw a Molotov cocktail through the wide double doors of the post office. Fouad was a twenty-five-year-old small-business owner. His family, like many in Jisr al-Shughour, bore scars from the 1980s, when his father and uncles were imprisoned for their ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. He hated the regime. The day Hafez al-Assad died was cause for a secret celebration in his home. His sick, elderly father danced in the living room when he heard the news. Fouad had protested every week since mid-April and took pride in his peaceful resistance. Crouched behind a car, he now watched gray smoke escape from the post office. A man who worked in a quarry to the north of the city propelled an incendiary device through the building’s double doors. The explosion ignited a mighty fireball that belched thick smoke and shards of glass that clinked delicately as they showered the street. Men rushed into the building. Both Fouad and Mohammad saw eight blackened bodies slumped in two rooms.
As in the 1980s, helicopter gunships took to the skies over Jisr al-Shughour, emptying antiaircraft ammunition into people, bullets that split skulls. The State Security and Political Security branches were within walking distance of the post office. The personnel there handed over their guns and were given safe passage by the armed men, who numbered a few hundred. Military Security, however, refused to surrender. Some attackers hurled dynamite into the building, others shot at it but missed, killing at least four people on their side. “For God’s sake, enough!” someone yelled. But the armed men weren’t done. A bulldozer rumbled toward the Military Security building, a barrel of explosives in its blade. The barrel detonated, paving the way for men to move inside.
Fouad entered a wide corridor. “There was no place for me to step except on the dead,” he said. Sickened, he walked into a room at the end of the hallway. A man in khaki was still alive. He was a customer at Fouad’s store and pleaded with Fouad to save him. “How can I get you out?” Fouad asked him. “It’s either you or me. I will get in trouble for you. How can I do it?”
“I have never hurt anyone,” Fouad remembered the soldier saying. Before Fouad could respond, a man with a hunting rifle walked in, shot the soldier in the head, and walked out.
Fouad ran out of the building, screaming. He hated the regime, but these armed men and their actions did not represent him. He went home, bundled up his mother and younger siblings, and headed straight to the Turkish border. The sons were exacting revenge for crimes against their fathers and grandfathers, he thought, but he knew it would not end there.
The regime sent 120 reinforcements who were intercepted and killed by armed groups before they reached Jisr al-Shughour. Assad’s dead in the Military Security branch were buried in mass graves. “We filmed them as if they were mass graves full of the regime’s victims,” Mohammad said ye
ars later, “but they were mass graves of their members. Those who oppressed us for thirty years were killed, nobody else.”
Thousands of families from Jisr al-Shughour hugged a strip of territory ringing the foothills of the Turkish border, on the outskirts of the Syrian village of Khirbet al-Joz. The lucky ones had cars or pickup trucks to sleep in. Some fashioned shelters from burlap bags, sheets of plastic, tree branches. Most just sat in the dirt of plowed fields and orchards of apple, plum, and flowering pomegranate trees, with little more than the clothes they wore. Many had fled after the shooting in the garden near the post office, or the following day. Food and clean water were scarce. There were no bathrooms, no showers, no privacy. A young woman rinsed a baby bottle in the flowing water of a nearby stream. Others tried to wash the mud out of their clothes. Young men plied old smuggling routes into Turkey and returned with as many bags as they could carry of bread, bottled water, and clothing. They told each other to say, “ekmek,” Turkish for bread, if they were stopped by border patrols.
While the families cowered in the fields, columns of tanks headed to Jisr al-Shughour. A Syrian government spokeswoman said the people of Jisr al-Shughour hadn’t fled but were just visiting relatives in or near Turkey. At the same time, Syrian state media said its forces were on their way to rescue civilians used as human shields by armed gangs and terrorists wearing stolen military uniforms. “If the people of Jisr asked for the army, we wouldn’t be here, living like this, would we?” said a young woman in her twenties. She sat on a plastic mat in the mud, cradling her two-month-old daughter. Her family had been outdoors for a week. Her older brother was scared of crossing into Turkey. “People are saying we might be targeted in Turkey, that Assad’s men can still find us. Is that true?” he asked. “Should we go from one hiding place to another?”
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