Abu Othman bought four guns from the town of Sarmada in Idlib Province, plus “sprays that would put you to sleep” from Turkey. “It was the time of the civilian protest movement,” he said, “with no ability to do much more than basic preparations.” His “basic preparations” involved working in a jihadi intelligence cell in Aleppo, which at that point was still a firmly controlled bastion of the regime. His job was to monitor government soldiers and shabiha, the paramilitary pro-regime thugs. He passed the intelligence to colleagues, who would detain or kill the suspect. “When we started, I have to admit, I can’t deny that Al-Qaeda was basically finished in Syria,” Abu Othman said. “So when we started, we did so without instructions or orders. We started to gather ourselves, to vouch for each other and for others.” In Sednaya, they had been told simply to wait for their new leader—so wait they did.
THE LEADER, a Syrian who went by the nom de guerre of Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, arrived in August, the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. He stole across the Iraqi border one night with five colleagues—their beards trimmed, explosive belts fastened, pistols and grenades concealed in their clothing. They navigated berms and trenches, traversing two-way smuggling routes used to ferry cigarettes, livestock, weapons, and jihadis to enter the northeastern Syrian province of Hasaka, where two Syrian colleagues were waiting for them.
Jolani and his team were part of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State of Iraq, the latest name and incarnation of an Al-Qaeda affiliate founded by the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. Jolani was also a prison graduate—of the US-run Camp Bucca, in the sunbaked sands of Iraq’s southern desert near Kuwait. He spent six years there, misclassified by his American jailers as an Iraqi Kurd from Mosul. The future ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and men who would become his senior lieutenants, were also in Camp Bucca, although Jolani didn’t know Baghdadi inside the wire. They would meet later.
The Camp Bucca inmates, in their bright yellow and orange jumpsuits, passed their time painting, playing table tennis outdoors, and being “re-educated in Islam.” There was a mural at the entrance to the prison called The Road to Freedom. In five illustrated steps, it outlined a prisoner’s path out of Camp Bucca—health services, Islamic discussion, “freedom schooling,” workshops, and court, which all led to a blue “happy bus.” The jihadi leaders, cocooned in Bucca from the worst of the sectarian bloodletting ravaging Iraq, took the happy bus and regrouped outside the wire. Camp Bucca was to Al-Qaeda in Iraq what Sednaya Prison was to become for Al-Qaeda in Syria—a recruiting pool and ready-made network of vetted men.
Jolani and his colleagues, eight men in all, spent their first night in Hasaka, Syria, in the home of a former Sednaya inmate who was originally from Hama. Three of Jolani’s team were Syrian, two of whom met him on the Syrian side of the border: Saleh al-Hamwi and a man with three aliases—Abu Ahmad al-Shami, a.k.a. Abu Ahmad al-hudood (of the borders), a.k.a. Abu Ahmad al-idari (the administrator). A third Syrian, Naseem al-a’lami (the media officer), had traveled with Jolani from Iraq. Also part of the group were a Saudi named Abu Imad; an Iraqi, Abu Khadija; and two Jordanians—one known as Abu Samir, and another, Abu Julaybib, who was a brother-in-law of Al-Qaeda in Iraq founder Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
They were the founding fathers of a new Al-Qaeda franchise that hid its lineage, one Jolani was authorized to set up by Baghdadi and Al-Qaeda’s central command. It was called Jabhat al-Nusra l’Ahl as-Sham, or the Support Front for the People of the Sham, the latter word referring to Damascus, Syria, and/or the Levant. At the time, Al-Qaeda looked like a spent force. Osama bin Laden had been killed months earlier. His successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had bin Laden’s passion but none of his charisma, and the Middle East was in the throes of revolution, experimenting with peaceful protests rather than violence to effect change. Jolani’s nighttime crossing would recast all of that. Jabhat al-Nusra’s first unpublicized operation was a December 27, 2011, attack on a State Security branch in Damascus. Almost a month later, on January 23, 2012, the group announced its presence in an audiotape broadcast on a well-known Al-Qaeda platform.
RUHA
Ruha didn’t tell any of her friends what was happening at home, that Baba—Maysaara—didn’t live there anymore, that she didn’t know where he was, that he’d steal visits when he could. She even kept it from her best friend, Serene, with whom she walked to school every day. Serene lived at the foot of Ruha’s street, at the bottom of its gentle incline.
Ruha loved Serene, a tall, fair-skinned girl with long blonde hair, but she didn’t trust her. Even children had picked sides in the conflict, and Serene was not on Ruha’s. That wasn’t the problem, because, as Ruha saw it, “everyone can have their opinion,” but she thought it safer to keep hers from Serene. “I knew that if I spoke, somebody might tell their parents and might harm us, so I didn’t say a word to anyone.”
The blonde girl regaled Ruha with details of the pro-Assad rallies she attended. She’d recount the chants, what she wore, the route, and how much she loved the president. Ruha didn’t tell her that she’d twice marched with the other side, that she had covered her face with a scarf and walked with women who wore niqabs—not because they were religiously conservative but because they wanted to conceal their identities for fear of retribution. “I knew what I was doing,” Ruha once said. “We are children. If we were to speak of these things, we’d become enemies from a young age. That’s wrong. I didn’t want enemies.” As a child, she had everything she wanted, but she knew older people didn’t, so she marched for them. It was her decision. “When Baba participated, I decided to participate too. Maybe if I was older, I might have been against him, on the other side, but I was young, so I walked with him.”
Maysaara’s absence affected her deeply. Her grades dropped. She didn’t care for Arabic, her favorite subject. She couldn’t focus in class. At night, her dreams left her afraid to close her eyes. She’d wake screaming that she had to hide Baba. The nightmares were always the same—angry knocking at the door, uniformed men swarming into her home, finding Baba, then shooting him dead in front of her. In late spring, her school was shelled during the last lesson of the day; it was English class for Ruha, math for her eight-year-old sister, Alaa. “It sounded like a rocket,” Ruha said. “In the beginning, there were bullets,” Alaa recounted, “then rockets.” Soon there would be helicopter gunships and warplanes and barrel bombs and chemical weapons. It was the fate of their town, Saraqeb, to be crucified at the crossroads of two key national highways: the south–north M5, which linked the capital Damascus—through Abu Azzam’s Homs, Suleiman’s Rastan, and Saraqeb—to Abu Othman’s northern city of Aleppo, and the west–east M4, which connected Aleppo to Mohammad’s coastal city of Latakia in Assad’s heartland. Saraqeb was smack in the middle of land supply routes for the Syrian military.
Alaa remembered diving under her desk like all the other children the day bullets pierced the window of her classroom. “Hide so you won’t be shot!” her teacher yelled. Alaa found it odd that she was shivering, even though it was warm. Her hands couldn’t blot out the ugliness of things breaking around her, even though she was pressing them as firmly as she could against her ears. Ruha and her classmates rushed to their teacher: “She hugged as many of us as she could. We were all gathered around her in a circle, screaming, standing in the corner. I was terrified. I emptied my lungs of air.”
That was the sisters’ last day at school. After that, their mother and aunts taught them. Ruha was happy to be home. It felt like an extended vacation, but it also meant she couldn’t escape household chores. In between lessons, Aunt Mariam, the schoolteacher, taught her how to knit a revolutionary-flag design onto scarves and headbands—black, white, and green horizontal stripes with three red stars. Ruha wore the headbands around the house, especially when her father sneaked back on visits that only raised the little girl’s fears that he would be captured at home.
But when the Syrian army’s tanks stormed through Saraqeb�
��s streets at dawn on August 11 during Ramadan, Maysaara was still in hiding. They were looking for protesters. Gunfire shattered the quiet shortly after suhoor, the predawn meal ahead of the daily Ramadan fast. “To the cellar!” shouted Ruha’s mother, Manal. The children ran across the courtyard and into the vaulted room with thick stone walls. It was the farthest place from the front door. Manal helped her mother-in-law, Zahida, into the room. They were joined by Noora, Ruha’s aunt, whose husband, Mohammad, had gone to the farm early that day. There was no way to warn Uncle Mohammad or Maysaara. The electricity, cell-phone network, and Internet were all cut that morning ahead of the sweep. The cellar door was left ajar to let in light, but it also let in sound.
A hailstorm of metallic pings got closer. Ruha’s skittish aunt, Noora, prayed aloud, the same words over and over: “Dear God, don’t let them come in. Dear God, keep everyone safe. Dear God, protect the men.” Ruha’s mother flinched at every bullet, every bang, every scream. The little girl was frightened by the fear of the older women. “If we’re going to die,” she whispered, “at least we will die together.” She knew that the regime was detaining children to lure their wanted fathers. It had happened to a three-year-old cousin on her mother’s side. Let them take me, she prayed, and leave my brother and sisters. Her grandmother, Zahida, drew her youngest grandchildren, Mohammad and Tala, into her soft belly and covered them with a blanket. “Mohammad was screaming, ‘Leave me, I want to fight them!” Ruha recalled. “We all told him to shut up.”
ACROSS TOWN in her three-room apartment, Ruha’s Aunt Mariam heard wailing. Her neighbor’s son was being dragged from his home. She approached the window, parted the curtain slightly, but heard more than she could see. Her elderly neighbor was begging for his son’s release.
“Get inside, old man! It’s none of your business!”
Aunt Mariam crawled along the floor of her living room, afraid her silhouette would draw the men inside. She crept up the stairs to her flat roof, peered over the edge, and saw two buses in the middle of the street, soldiers moving in and out of homes, as well as shabiha, paramilitary regime thugs, dressed in jeans and sneakers. She couldn’t tell what was in the buses. “I saw what I thought were pillows, they were white shapes. It took me a while to realize they were men who had their undershirts pulled over their heads.”
She held up her mobile phone and tried to film the buses, but she couldn’t focus the image. Her hands were shaking. Where were her brothers? Where was Maysaara? Where were her nephews? Were they among the “pillows” in the bus? “God is with us,” she murmured, “and anyone who remains silent against an injustice is a mute devil.” The least she could do was bear witness, and pray for the men in the buses.
RUHA FROZE. Banging on the front gate. Her heart at her feet. Her mother opened the front door and uniformed soldiers swarmed in. Ruha and Alaa screamed when the men entered the cellar and upended furniture. They took her late grandfather’s decorative 1910 musket. It was only the first of two incursions that day. The afternoon call to prayer was echoing when the second group of strangers, these men not in uniform, marched into Ruha’s home. They were the shabiha. Some had their faces covered. “They said ugly things to Mama that made her cry,” Ruha said. “They were very mean and nasty, they swore at me. They told me to shut up and stop crying. I don’t know how, but I stopped. I was worried about Mama. They told Mama, ‘Tell your husband to surrender to us because when we find him, we will step on his neck and break it. We will kill your brothers, too.’ ” They left with Manal’s jewelry, but Maysaara had once again eluded them. Ruha’s Uncle Mohammad, however, was snatched from the farm.
Uncle Mohammad was one of about 130 men detained in Saraqeb that day. He was penned in a warehouse with hundreds of others from across Idlib Province. There was just one bathroom, which constantly flooded, and not enough room to lie down. The environmental engineer was embarrassed to say that he was stuck near the toilet. He slept while seated, couldn’t stomach the stench to eat, and said he lost twenty kilograms in the thirty-six days he was there. They insisted he had demonstrated, even though, unlike his brother Maysaara, he had not. “I was one of those who wanted dialogue with the regime,” Mohammad said after he was released. “If the regime thinks that it can finish off the demonstrations by force, it is delusional, and if the opposition thinks that it can bring down the regime, it is delusional. We need to talk. I believed in that when I went to jail, and when I came out, my brother Maysaara had bought a gun.”
Maysaara had done so reluctantly. “I didn’t want the fall of the regime,” he said. “For five months [until the August 2011 raid in Saraqeb], I didn’t want its fall, just its reform, but its actions forced us to demand it. There was no armed opposition the first time the army entered Saraqeb. Nobody fought it, but after the shabiha, people bought guns with the idea that we wouldn’t let a thug take us or anything we had.”
Maysaara financed the purchase of guns and ammunition for the men of his family and his friends and neighbors. As in Abu Azzam’s Baba Amr, that was how a battalion was born: a man, his brothers, cousins, nephews, friends, and neighbors armed themselves, and with time adopted the military nomenclature. Maysaara was also part of an informal underground network to help military defectors flee. It was as strong and as fragile as a spiderweb. House to house, car to car, skirting checkpoints along back roads, town to town. Maysaara befriended another railroader, a businessman named Abu Rabieh, from the hills of Jabal al-Zawya in Idlib Province. Abu Rabieh was gray-haired, clean-shaven, and a decade older than Maysaara. He had the LG electronics franchise in Idlib Province. They became inseparable—a pair of well-off businessmen turned revolutionaries.
MAYSAARA WAS DRIVING his red Toyota HiLux pickup truck, Abu Rabieh beside him. A box of syrupy sweets slid gently along the backseat. It was just before sunset on January 24, 2012. Maysaara had pulled out of a gas station that was out of gas. He drove slowly, looking for one of the many roadside fuel sellers who sold gallons of varying quality out of plastic containers. A driver in a three-car convoy stopped him to ask directions.
Ruha was in the souq with one of her seven aunts, buying toys for her sister Alaa, who had just had an operation on her legs to correct in-toeing. Ruha was debating whether or not to buy a Barbie. The dolls never lasted more than a week in her home. She didn’t even bother to name them, such was their short lifespan. They’d break or disappear into a cupboard Maysaara had built especially for his daughters’ many teddy bears and toys. Suddenly, a bolt of sustained gunfire. It frightened the little girl, but her aunt told her it was on the outskirts of town. Ruha returned to examining the toys on display.
Maysaara saw their faces before he was pepper-sprayed. He put the truck in reverse, and, temporarily blinded, floored it toward Saraqeb as forty-eight bullets pierced the vehicle’s metal skin. Drivers honked at him but swerved out of his way. He felt a searing pain in his back. “Quicker! Quicker! I’m hit, I’m hit!” Abu Rabieh kept saying. Maysaara drove until the gunfire stopped. Eyes burning, he cradled his friend’s head in his lap, as Abu Rabieh died in his arms.
Ruha and her aunt walked back to her grandmother’s house, along with an adult male cousin they had seen at the souq. A neighbor stopped the cousin. “How is Maysaara?” he said. “God willing, he hasn’t died has he?” Ruha’s feet buckled. She collapsed in the street, inconsolable. Her cousin carried her to a house that sounded like it was in mourning. Grandmother Zahida was wailing. The old lady had said she had felt like a stone was sitting on her chest all day, that something wasn’t right with one of her children.
A bullet had lodged in Maysaara’s back, another sliced through him near his spine. His bloodied pants, sport jacket, and white striped shirt were returned to his family that night, but it was days before they saw him. It was raining shells when he came home, his family cowering in the cellar. Ruha’s father was carried in by two men. His feet dragged behind him. He could not stand. He could barely speak. He stayed just long enough to kiss every memb
er of his family and then was whisked away. It wasn’t safe for him to linger.
SULEIMAN
Rastan’s tansiqiya, the group of local activists, had two regular meeting spots—the back room of a store that sold small household appliances near Al-Kabir Mosque, and a one-story home at the dead end of an isolated alleyway. Both belonged to Merhi Merhi, a father of two in his early forties, who was responsible for general coordination in the tansiqiya. His graying hair, the deeply etched crow’s-feet around his blue eyes, and prominent nasolabial furrows, made Merhi look like the old man of the tansiqiya, an impression accentuated by his quiet gravitas. It endeared him to the other members of the all-volunteer group. Rastan’s tansiqiya, like most across Syria at the time, paid their own expenses and were not funded beyond donations from community members.
They would gather on Merhi’s front porch after wiping their feet on the sliver of flat, squarish marble he used instead of a welcome mat. It was a remnant of the statue of Hafez al-Assad that once stood at the entrance to Rastan. They sat on blue-and-white plastic mats spread over a cool tiled floor, veiled by a grapevine’s laden foliage, perfumed on summer nights by climbing jasmine that twirled around the porch and the scent of fruit-flavored tobacco from narghilehs. They’d often return there after protests. Suleiman and Maamoun, the mobile-phone repairman, would transfer and organize their video footage. Suleiman’s cousin, the lawyer Samer Tlass, was usually there too, along with several other lawyers. They were all using aliases at the time.
“If Bashar had only asked for a minute’s silence for Daraa, we wouldn’t have gotten to where we are now,” Merhi said one night. “At the end of every battle, the solution must be political, but what will it take to get to that point now?” He was fond of saying that he didn’t have political ambitions, that he’d only finished ninth grade and didn’t care who was president as long as he wasn’t trying to kill his people and he treated them with dignity.
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