Several Turkish airports were jumping-off points to different parts of Syria: Hatay was the gateway to Idlib and Latakia Provinces. Gaziantep led to Aleppo, and Şanlıurfa was on the road to Raqqa. The 822-kilometer Turkish–Syrian frontier, in all its variegated beauty, was a sieve. Smuggling routes, like those used by Mohammad, predated the Syrian revolution. Many were so well known they had names: the barrel; the fishery; the olives. They varied in length, difficulty, and terrain. There were goat tracks etched into pine-covered slopes, grassy clearings with no tree cover (you had to sprint through those sections). Routes through foliage so thick it could whip you in the face if you weren’t careful. Steep climbs that tested footing on loose stones and dirt. Streams crossed via fallen logs or by climbing trees.
After Syrian border posts with Turkey fell in mid-2012, it became easier. A person could walk through the formal crossings—even without a passport if it was a one-way trip into Syria. Some illegal routes operated in full view of the Turkish military. In the Turkish village of Hacıpaşa, where a constriction of the Orontes River marked the border, it was like a game. Smugglers on the Syrian side openly waited and watched soldiers on the other bank. When the Turkish armored personnel carriers drove away, the smugglers ushered clients into a round metal tub, and, guided by rope strung from tree to tree, crossed the river. From there, it was a tractor ride to the main road. Getting to Atmeh, a border town in Idlib Province visible from Turkey, meant dashing across flat red earth under Turkish guard towers and stepping over coiled razor wire or through a hole in the chain-link fence into an olive grove near a field of cucumbers. A good smuggler would time the dash to coincide with personnel shifts in the towers. (Atmeh and Hacıpaşa were the two sites where the Farouq’s Bilal Attar and Abu Hashem first smuggled weapons into Syria.) Night crossings were hardest—relying on the light of the moon in darkness so intense it was difficult to see the person ahead. Turkish border guards either were willfully blind or shooed people back. Sometimes (especially at night), they unleashed dogs. Some expected bribes. The polite ones didn’t specify amounts. A guard once allowed me to squeeze into Turkey through the vertical bars of a locked border gate. It cost less than $10.
Mohammad focused on trails into his area of operations—Idlib and Latakia Provinces. He checked every muhajir’s references, or tazkiya. It was part of Jabhat al-Nusra’s mandatory vetting process for foreigners—somebody within Al-Qaeda had to vouch for the recruit. “If a man came without formal tazkiya,” Mohammad once explained, “I’d contact somebody I knew from the same country who was working and tell him that I wanted a background check on him before I brought him in.” He didn’t turn away those lacking tazkiya—he sent them to his old prison friends who now headed battalions in a Salafi armed group called Ahrar al-Sham. Some found their way independently to other Islamist fighting cadres, or, less commonly, to units of the Free Syrian Army. Sometimes Mohammad sent them to a small camp of foreign fighters near Atmeh run by a Saudi-born Syrian dentist, an “Afghan Arab” who had trained with Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The man, Firas al-Absi, was independent of Al-Qaeda in Syria. Mohammad didn’t get along with him. He met Absi twice and twice rejected Absi’s offer to join him. “There was an ideological dispute between us,” Mohammad said. “Absi believed that what he’d liberated was Islamic land and the rest was the land of disbelievers, whereas our view was that it was all Islamic land that needed to be liberated. He was ideologically inflexible.”
Absi was ISIS before there was ISIS. On July 19, 2012, he strutted along the broad boulevard of Bab al-Hawa (Gate of the Wind), the first Syrian border post with Turkey won by rebels. Clad in a white short-sleeve shirt under an ammunition vest, a green camouflage cap hiding his bald spot, Absi casually carried his rifle upside down, flanked by three armed men and a fourth waving the black flag of the Islamic State of Iraq. Absi made a proclamation at Bab al-Hawa that day: “Praise be to God, we triumphed over the dogs, the dogs of Bashar and their allies,” he said. “We, the mujahideen, announce from here the establishment of an Islamic state by the will of Almighty God. We will rule by Sharia and will not disobey the commands of God on his earth.”
He wouldn’t rule anything. Abu Azzam’s Farouq Battalions would see to that.
MOHAMMAD DID more than smuggle muhajireen across the border and farm them out to battalions. He was a hustler. Street smart, ruthless, calculating, and—until 2013—covert. The muhajireen with whom he interacted knew he was Jabhat al-Nusra and Al-Qaeda. That was, after all, why they contacted him. But others, including Syrian rebels in the political and armed opposition, didn’t know who he really was—not even that he was with Jabhat al-Nusra. He had honed the practice of hiding what he termed his “other self.”
Mohammad infiltrated rebel circles in Turkey and Syria to gather intelligence on what others ostensibly on the same side were doing. One summer night in mid-2012, he attended a meeting of two British diplomats and several Syrian aid workers in a hotel lobby in Antakya. Mohammad was there posing as a refugee with fresh details about conditions inside Syria. The aid workers had learned shortly before the start of the meeting that the diplomats weren’t bringing a translator, and they asked me to interpret. The British pair did not know I was a journalist.
In theory, the diplomats—a political officer and a military attaché—were there to discuss donating humanitarian aid, but their questions over three hours were about Jabhat al-Nusra and other armed groups. The aid workers tried to steer the conversation back to humanitarian issues, but the diplomats wanted an exchange—intelligence for food and tents. The Syrians resented what was asked of them. Mohammad smirked more than he spoke. He wasn’t impressed with the diplomats’ shallow knowledge of the Syrian battlefield. He rarely attended meetings after that. Instead, he developed moles, men he equipped with cameras concealed in shirt buttons, pens, eyeglasses, and watches. He ordered the devices via the Internet and used muhajireen traveling from Europe as mules. “If they were going to spy on us,” he later told me, showing me the devices, “I was going to spy on them.”
MOHAMMAD WAS ONE type of Jabhat al-Nusra operative, Saleh was another—a young Syrian graduate of Sednaya Prison who was part of the group’s inner leadership circle. Saleh wasn’t impressed with his new Nusra colleagues. He didn’t even think they were really tanzim, Al-Qaeda, because “they weren’t strong, they weren’t what I expected, they seemed like regular guys.” Saleh was an aide to Jabhat al-Nusra’s number two, an Iraqi named Abu Maria al-Qahtani who served as the group’s lead Shari’iy, or religious official. Abu Maria was based in Saleh’s hometown, the eastern Syrian city of Deir Ezzor, where the Nusra Shari’iy had lived since 2010 after he crossed into Syria for medical treatment. Saleh had been with Abu Maria since late 2011. “I understand you don’t believe that we’re really Al-Qaeda,” Abu Maria told his aide one day in spring. “We are part of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, but we came via Iraq. They sent us. If you like, go to Iraq and meet the shabab.”
Saleh had tried to meet the shabab before—in 2005, when America was in Iraq. He was not quite nineteen at the time, a first-year university student in the health sciences, when, along with about a dozen of his friends, he decided to fight the Americans in Iraq. The men didn’t make it across the border. An informer landed them all behind Sednaya’s black door. Saleh didn’t pray regularly, let alone consider himself an Islamist before he was imprisoned, although he’d started reading banned Islamist literature. Six years in Sednaya made him a Salafi Jihadi. He was released on April 28, 2011, with no formal charge, as part of Assad’s amnesty.
In spring 2012, Saleh accepted Abu Maria’s invitation to meet the shabab in Iraq. He spent May in Mosul and the Anbari desert, the last patches of Islamic State of Iraq’s fading influence, an authority exerted through extortion and violence. “They were very weak in Iraq at that time, poor things,” Saleh recalled. “Very weak, but they still controlled areas.” The Iraqi border guards he regularly encountered seemed weaker. “They could see us in our [Toyota] HiL
ux pickups. We were armed, they were armed. They’d turn off the lights and pretend they didn’t see us. They must have been scared. Why would a soldier want to die? We were either smugglers or tanzim.”
Saleh returned to Syria in mid-June, convinced of Jabhat al-Nusra’s still-secret pedigree. Abu Maria dispatched him to Damascus to work with Nusra leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, or al-sheikh al fatih, the conqueror sheikh, as Jolani was called. Saleh joined Jolani’s inner circle, a group of men so young “none of us have any gray in our beards.”
Jolani and his deputy, Abu Maria, were soaking up cells of Sednaya men already active and those waiting for something like it to emerge, through word of mouth and handwritten letters delivered by couriers. The Sednaya graduates knew Nusra was Al-Qaeda, but the group was careful to hide its lineage from others, as per instructions from Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. It wasn’t the first time Al-Qaeda had set such a condition. Its founder, Osama bin Laden, once counseled Somalia’s Al-Shabab group to hide its ties to his organization because, “once it becomes declared and out in the open, it would have the enemies escalate their anger and mobilize against you.”
Bin Laden knew Al-Qaeda had an image problem—attributed, among other things, to the methods of its rogue Iraqi affiliate. The group founded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi imposed harsh diktats on Iraqis, beheaded enemies, bombed marketplaces full of civilians, and killed Muslims as indiscriminately as others. In January 2011, according to a letter retrieved from Bin Laden’s Pakistani hideout in Abbottabad after his death in May 2011, the American jihadist Adam Gadahn had advised Al-Qaeda’s leadership to “declare its discontent with the behavior . . . being carried out by the so-called Islamic State of Iraq, . . . otherwise its reputation will be damaged more and more as a result of the acts and statements of this group, which is labeled under our organization.”
Jolani did not intend to replicate his Iraqi parent’s methods or be sullied by its reputation. He had plans to ingratiate Jabhat al-Nusra into the Syrian uprising without the baggage of its heritage. Syria would serve as the stage for an Al-Qaeda reboot, using as foot soldiers the graduates of Sednaya Prison and Palestine Branch. “We will show our values, deal with people well,” Saleh remembered Jolani saying, “and then after a while we’ll tell them, ‘The Al Qaeda that was smeared in the media? This is it. We are it. What do you think of us—Jabhat al-Nusra?’ ”
In July 2012, Jolani left his base in the Syrian capital, accompanied by aides including Saleh. They shuffled between Nusra positions in rebel-held parts of the northern provinces of Idlib and Aleppo, traveling at night, without headlights and guided by GPS. Jolani appraised his men incognito, often using the alias Abu Abdullah and telling local Nusra commanders that he was an emissary of “the conqueror sheikh.” He micromanaged his organization and followed up his visits with detailed handwritten letters to commanders, lauding a certain man or suggesting others be dismissed.
Jolani was calm and confident, disciplined, a man who listened intently and thought strategically. He often hid in plain sight of the regime, at one point taking a public bus to Deir Ezzor to see his deputy, Abu Maria, and at another renting an apartment in Kafr Hamra—a town in the Aleppan countryside that was still controlled by the regime—to escape intense bombardments raining on rebel-held territory. Like Abu Maria, Jolani was always armed with a pistol and an explosives belt, even in the bathroom, even when Saleh said they were “very safe.”
Jolani’s travels made it clear to him that he needed a higher caliber of commander. He could rely on the Iraq veterans among the Sednaya graduates—they at least had experience, but many others didn’t. He asked Iraq to send battle-hardened senior men, and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi obliged. The second wave of leaders entered Syria in the last days of Ramadan 2012, a year after Jolani’s trek. They came in two batches. The first included the Iraqi emir of Mosul, as well as a young Syrian firebrand named Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, who hadn’t been home to Binnish in Idlib Province for a decade. Adnani arrived with a title—Baghdadi had appointed him Nusra’s general amni, or security official, essentially responsible for Nusra’s version of the mukhabarat.
The second group, an eight-man team, was met at the Syria–Iraq border by Jolani himself, and Saleh. It was led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s deputy, Hajji Bakr, a former colonel in Saddam’s army. Jolani had asked Iraq for reinforcements, but he could not have foreseen the impact the new arrivals would have on his organization. “They came,” said Saleh, “and our troubles began.”
BY MID-SEPTEMBER 2012, Jabhat al-Nusra established a more organized system of bringing foreign fighters into Syria, naming an “emir of the borders” to facilitate their entry. The emir, or commander, Abu Ahmad al-hudood (of the borders), was part of Jolani’s original group of eight in August 2011. Al-Qaeda’s central command in Afghanistan pitched in with details of coordinators in Tunisia and the Arabian Peninsula who sent men to Turkey. The muhajireen were picked up outside Hatay Airport, never inside it, to avoid security cameras. Nusra dedicated two cars to the airport run. “On the slowest day, there’d be five; the busiest day, fifteen,” said a Nusra insider with knowledge of the operations. Four halfway homes were rented in Hatay: two in the main city, Antakya, one in Reyhanlı (not far from the Bab al-Hawa border crossing), and one in Kırıkhan, in the northeast, each location functioning as a separate cell, unaware of the others. There were seven phone numbers (changed every few weeks) solely for the muhajireen project. There were so many Tunisians they had their own line.
Mohammad was a cell leader within the operation, focused on border crossings, but he was otherwise unaware of others doing the same thing. It was a common practice within covert groups to run independent cells oblivious of each other so that if one should be compromised, it could not endanger others.
Saleh watched the influx with concern. The muhajireen weren’t heeding Nusra’s instructions to tone down their appearance at airports. The foreign fighters “were coming with long beards, it was obvious what they were there for,” Saleh said. “Some of these people, how were they living in the West? They were so backward.”
But the Turks didn’t seem to care. Nusra sent more than fighters into Syria from Turkey. It transported satellite communication devices, phones, and fertilizer (for use in improvised explosive devices). Saleh once even sent bullets through the official Bab al-Hawa crossing. “The Turks didn’t even check,” he said. “They didn’t care about what you were taking into Syria, just what you were bringing out.” And even then, they were lax.
SALEH WAS CAREFUL never to be photographed with Jabhat al-Nusra, never to appear in any of the group’s video or audio recordings. He had a fake Syrian ID for entering Turkey and could blend into a café in Istanbul as easily as into a Nusra training camp. Jolani made him an amni, a security official, one of Nusra’s many, to work under Adnani, the man Baghdadi appointed to head Nusra’s mukhabarat. Saleh was tasked with gathering intelligence on “people who had issues with the tanzim in Iraq, people who had defected” and fled to Turkey. He filed his reports to Jolani and Adnani. The two men had different ideas about what to do with the information. Adnani wanted defectors in Turkey assassinated with silenced pistols. Jolani forbade operations across the border. “The sheikh [Jolani] used to say, ‘Do not fire a single bullet outside of Syria,’ ” said Saleh. He ordered his men to disarm before entering Turkey, a rule Saleh disliked: “I wanted to enter Turkey with my [explosive] belt and weapons, I couldn’t go in naked, but [Jolani] would not hear of it. He said he didn’t want problems with Turkey.”
Saleh had issues with Adnani, who had ordered him to assassinate an Iraqi defector Saleh had tracked to Aksaray in Istanbul—an order Saleh knew couldn’t have been approved by Jolani. He reported it to Jolani, who instructed Saleh to ignore Adnani but to lead him on: “Say yes, yes, but don’t do it.”
The rift within Nusra’s senior leadership over working in Turkey soon blew open. The Syrian political opposition was due to hold a conference in a Turkish hotel. By chanc
e, the Turkish caterer was the friend of a Turk who supplied Nusra with security cameras and manufactured the remote detonators for its IEDs, devices Saleh took into Syria. The Turk asked Saleh to deliver a message to Jolani: “He said a friend was going to set up a conference room for a meeting of the Syrian political opposition, and he wanted to know if the brothers in Syria were interested in doing anything about it. It could be arranged.”
Jolani said no. “He said we don’t want to blow something up there, Turkey is our lungs. We don’t want the security services there to turn on us, they will paralyze our movement,” recalled Saleh. Jolani cited Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri’s orders banning attacks inside Turkey, given its role as a major conduit for men, money, and munitions, as well as its anti-Assad policies.
Jolani mentioned the opposition meeting to a senior Iraqi Nusra leader he revered like a father. The Iraqi was Abu Ali al-Anbari, a veteran of both the Afghan and the Iraqi jihads. Abu Ali al-Anbari wanted to blow up the Syrian political opposition in Turkey. So did Adnani. Jolani refused. Word of Jolani’s intransigence quickly crossed the border to Iraq. It did not please Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
EVEN THOUGH NUSRA’S inner circle was bickering, on the ground the new Syrian Al-Qaeda prototype had smoothly become a key player in the armed uprising. The Sednaya men were its backbone. The Turkish border was open. Nusra’s Iraqi parent paid half its bills, while the rest of the funding came from private donors and war spoils. Jolani was organizing his cadres. His Al-Qaeda background remained hidden. Jabhat al-Nusra was disciplined, effective, spearheading some of the most audacious attacks against the regime, using methods like suicide bombings, which few others employed. Its Iraq veterans manufactured IEDs that worked, copper-lined shaped charges that could penetrate armor—the same IEDs they’d once used against Americans. Its men fought alongside others, including the Free Syrian Army, but, after battle, kept to themselves. They were religiously conservative but initially didn’t impose their beliefs on civilians. Later, toward the end of 2012, they began interacting with local communities only to provide social services like distributing flour to bakeries, to keep bread in Aleppo at its prewar price of 15 Syrian pounds. The group avoided indiscriminate civilian casualties and even made an effort—as in one video claiming responsibility for a blast on March 20, 2012, and telling local Christians they were not the target—to reassure the broader population outside its Sunni base. Still, some of its sectarian language was harsh, especially against Alawites, and would only get worse. Nusra considered non-Muslims infidels, but, as a Nusra commander once told me, “That doesn’t mean that if he’s an infidel I should kill him.” But it did afford the person a form of second-class citizenship. That summer, Jabhat al-Nusra’s flag—a stylized Shahada (declaration of faith) above the group’s name—was more often printed in black lettering on white, instead of the black flags of Nusra, ISIS, and other Islamist groups that would soon become ubiquitous. The colors were reversed, one of the printers told me, “so that people don’t think we have Al-Qaeda here.”
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