No Turning Back

by Rania Abouzeid

  Armed men on motorbikes roared through empty streets. Most families, including Ruha’s, hid in their homes. A crowd stood outside the Hassan Hospital, waiting to receive the wounded. Men shouted for stretchers as cars disgorged bloodied passengers. There weren’t enough stretchers, so armed locals, many in mismatched military attire and civilian clothing, carried in their wounded colleagues, or their neighbors. A man died on the street outside. His bright red blood formed a thick pool in a dip in the asphalt, as the sad, angry, frantic crowd around him cried out, “Allahu Akbar!”

  “Tell the people that there is no more room here!” a man yelled from the hospital steps. “Send them to Shifa [Hospital].” The cars kept coming. Broken bodies carried in, others carried out, mainly the dead. Grown men cried openly. The hospital floor was a mess of bloody footprints. The foyer was bursting with armed men trying to find out who was hurt, who was dead, even as the few remaining doctors shouted at them to get out to ease the overcrowding. Women asked about their sons.

  A man hobbled in, unaccompanied, looking as though he’d been dipped in soot. Two children—a little girl, her head bandaged, and her younger brother, also wrapped in white gauze—walked out of the hospital, both covered in a fine concrete dust. Their tears had mixed with the dust, creating pasty rivulets from their eyes to their jawlines. Within two minutes, more than a dozen people were carried in. There weren’t enough gurneys, so they lay on the bloody white tiles.

  A woman in a striped burgundy-and-navy floor-length, long-sleeved dress made her way up the few broad steps to the hospital entrance. “Where is Saddam?” she screamed to anyone, to everyone. She turned from one man to the other with the same question: “Where is Saddam? I have lost his father today, I cannot lose him, too! I want my son!” She could barely stand. She seized on Khaled, a tall, middle-aged fighter with graying hair who wore a black ammunition vest and a Kalashnikov across his back. “Where is he?” she yelled. She grabbed him by his black vest. Khaled did not respond, could not even look at her. She slapped him across the face. “Where is my son?” Khaled turned away from the mother. Twenty minutes later, Saddam’s mother ran out. “He’s dead! He’s dead!” she shouted. “My boy is dead!” She crumpled on the street outside the hospital, next to a pool of blood. But Saddam’s mother would turn out to be wrong: A bullet had grazed her son’s head, covering him in blood and leaving him unconscious, but he was alive.

  “Empty the area, empty the area! Three tanks are moving toward us now!” The crowd outside the hospital scattered. Two teenage boys stood rooted in place, waiting with an empty orange stretcher.

  Back at an FSA outpost at a school, armed fighters trickled in from the front and the hospitals. The Kaban Checkpoint was destroyed and the fifteen or so soldiers manning it all killed. “Nobody expected this kind of retaliation,” a young fighter said. “They knew where we were, why didn’t they come after us instead of the families? They are cowards.”

  At 9 p.m., the Hassan Hospital was still receiving wounded. A young girl, no older than four or five, was carried in by her father, followed by an older woman on a stretcher and a middle-aged man. “Get out!” the doctor told an armed man who had followed them in, sobbing like a child. “She is my aunty, this is my uncle,” he said, pointing to the middle-aged couple, who were bleeding onto the floor.

  The little girl begged for her mother. A nurse searched for a pair of scissors to cut away her blood-soaked pink T-shirt. “Don’t be scared, my darling,” the male doctor told her. The child had shrapnel in her bloodied left eye and at least two small pieces lodged in the left side of her neck, which was spurting blood. Her short black hair was in two ponytails tied with pink bands.

  The base of the child’s head was sliced open. The hospital generator hummed and sputtered and cut out three times within twenty minutes. The doctor paused, waiting for the power to come back on, before he resumed stitching the scalp at the base of the little girl’s skull. There was no anesthetic.

  By 10 p.m., the death toll was twenty-five. It would climb to thirty-five. Nobody counted the wounded. The armed men outside the hospital were angry, hyped up, ready to head back and fight, but in Ruha’s home, her family questioned whether the attack on the checkpoint had been worth it. “Too high a price,” Mariam said, shaking her head. “So much blood. Too much blood.”

  The mortars and whistling rockets continued well into the night. At 12:04 a.m., one of the town’s mosques broadcast a message. This time, it wasn’t directed at the loyalist troops surrounding Saraqeb, urging them to defect. It was for the townsfolk. “People of Saraqeb, there is a wounded twelve-year-old boy in the hospital. We don’t know whose son he is.”

  FRIDAY, JULY 20. Another single abrupt event occurred, the kind that could upend everything, this one also relayed in a news flash, this time just before midday. The Russian ambassador to France had declared that Assad was ready to leave office “in an orderly way.” Celebratory gunfire erupted in Saraqeb, just as it had two days earlier.

  Families cooped up in their homes breathed in the streets. Neighbors congratulated each other. “Thank God, it’s over,” an old man in a red-and-white-checkered headdress said to himself. Women ululated. Teenage girls threw rice on fighters as they paraded through the streets. Young children dodged between vehicles to pick up spent cartridges and to gather candy tossed into the crowd. A parade snaked around town, skirting neighborhoods with active snipers before returning to the main street near the souq. Women sprayed the crowd with water from garden hoses, providing relief from a searing midday sun.

  Before an hour was up, there would be whispers that perhaps the news wasn’t true, that the Syrian Information Ministry had denied the comments by the Russian ambassador. Some would murmur it, but nobody, it seemed, wanted to broadcast it openly in the crowd. The war-weary people of Saraqeb needed something to celebrate.

  Basil, a member of Maysaara’s Free Syrian Army unit, leaned on the wall of his post along the main street, puffing on a cigarette. He rested his Kalashnikov on the ground and watched the celebration. “I am crazy with happiness!” said the twenty-nine-year-old. “You know, I only picked up this gun because I was sick of hearing something called ‘peaceful’ while our people were being killed. I felt it was impossible to beat Bashar peacefully. Weapons were the tool, but our strength came from our community.” He was a welder before he became a fighter. He said he didn’t like guns, but he wasn’t ready to let go of his just yet. “My gun will stay with me until we are certain that he is gone,” he said. “After that, I have two options—either I keep my weapon for my son so that he won’t need to beg for a gun like his father did, or I will wait and see what becomes of this army. I will hand in my gun to the army—not Bashar’s army, but the army of the Syrian Arab Republic, and I hope to never carry a gun against a Syrian again.”

  After forty minutes or so, the gathering thinned. People headed to the mosques for Friday prayers. Reality reasserted itself. Shelling resumed in the near distance, the discordant, symphonic cadence of war.

  That evening, Mariam sat outside the family’s front door watching her three nieces—Ruha, Alaa, and Tala—play in their street. The little girls crouched in their starting positions, each placing one leg in front of the other, ready to pounce on the count of three: “One, two, three!” Mariam said as the sisters raced, giggling, to the top of their sloping narrow lane before turning around and sprinting back toward their aunt.

  The night was near pitch-black, the day’s heat trapped in the air. The electricity was out, as usual, so the family moved outdoors into a timid breeze. Mariam watched her nieces play, thinking about the Brek family, who had suffered the rocket attack days earlier. “They were sitting here just like us,” she said. “It’s frightening what we have gotten used to. Death will find us if it wants to, if God wills it, but we are changing, becoming harder as human beings.”

  “Will you be with us at zero hour?” Mariam asked me.

  “What does that mean?” Ruha said.

&nbs
p; “It means when we’ve run out of time, when Annan’s initiative and all the demonstrations mean nothing. When our fate will be decided,” Mariam replied.

  Ruha nodded. She had understood.

  ABU AZZAM

  Assad was losing the border posts. In late July, within days, rebels captured three crossings with Turkey and one with Iraq. Bab al-Hawa was the first, captured on July 19, the same day Saraqeb’s rebels uprooted the Kaban Checkpoint and the town paid such a bloody price.

  Firas al-Absi, the Islamist who was ISIS before ISIS, set up camp at Bab al-Hawa’s so-called new gate, opposite Turkish border guards. Within weeks, the Farouq Battalions were based at the old gate, several kilometers deep inside Syria. Absi ran the black Islamic State of Iraq banner up the flagpole. In response, the Turks shut their end of Bab al-Hawa. The banner angered the Farouq and other rebels. Who was this Islamist tainting their revolution with an extremist symbol? It did not represent them. Even Mohammad, the Jabhat al-Nusra fighter funneling muhajireen into Syria, thought Absi’s actions were foolish. “He was too quick to put up the black flag. It was too early,” Mohammad said. He thought Absi should have moved on from Bab al-Hawa. “There was nothing more for him to do there, and his presence was an obstacle to others. It wasn’t smart.”

  Nusra’s leadership shared Mohammad’s view. “Who did Absi think he was?” Saleh said. “He had about twenty men, that was it. Firas al-Absi was nothing. He didn’t occupy a minute of our thinking, and he wasn’t part of us. He started acting as if he was a representative of Al-Qaeda in Syria when he wasn’t. Everybody was against his raising of the black flag. We, as Nusra, were against it. We didn’t want a confrontation with the Turks.”

  Abu Azzam was transferred from Uqayribat, where he was securing and transporting weapons and ammunition along his stretch of the Farouq’s secret nationwide distribution network, to Bab al-Hawa, where he was appointed the Farouq’s commander at the crossing. The battalion’s leaders outlined his new mission: “They said there is this guy called Absi,” Abu Azzam remembered. “We want you to try to come to terms with him, given your religious background.”

  Abu Azzam, clad in his Farouq military uniform, waited until nightfall before approaching Absi. It was Ramadan, when the lethargy of the dawn-to-dusk fast, coupled with an August heat, slowed everything. Absi had a cool arrogance, a calmness that only amplified the fearsomeness of his words. Abu Azzam appealed to history. He told Absi that the Prophet carried four flags—white, yellow, black, and red—and that none were inscribed. The problem wasn’t the Shahada or the color of the banner over Bab al-Hawa, Abu Azzam said, “but why this flag that has come to symbolize Al-Qaeda?” It didn’t represent Syrians who had yet to decide the shape of their post-Assad state.

  For Absi, there was nothing to decide except when to implement Sharia. God had decreed rules and laws and a system of governance. It was not a matter of choice. As far as he was concerned, the black flag would remain and Bab al-Hawa would serve as the first outpost of an Islamic state.

  Abu Azzam believed in both Sharia and a democracy that he said meant “nobody is forced to think anything.” Democracy did not contradict his Islam. The imposition of Sharia—or anything else—did. “I won’t put a gun to somebody’s head and ask him, ‘What do you think, should we apply Sharia or not?’ ” he told Absi. “But you and others, in the way you are imposing your ideas and expressing them, you are turning people away from Islam, even Muslims.” The Farouq commander reminded Absi that the Quran they both followed decreed that “there is no compulsion in religion.” Absi branded Abu Azzam an infidel and the Farouq Battalions Western agents. Both men, Absi and Abu Azzam, were Islamists, both Salafis, both Syrians, but they had nothing in common beyond those labels.

  ABU HASHEM, the realtor-turned-Farouq-foreign-liaison, gave the order to remove Absi. The jihadi was alone when he was seized one night in the no-man’s-land between Turkey and Syria at Bab al-Hawa. His body was found in a ditch near the crossing on September 5, days after he disappeared. The Farouq neither confirmed nor denied a role in his death. Absi’s murder was the first shot fired by rebels against ultraconservative Islamists ostensibly on their side. Privately, Abu Hashem said he had no regrets: “We got rid of him and imposed the Farouq’s control of the border crossing. It had to be done.” The black flag came down.

  Absi’s men vowed revenge. His brother, Abu Atheer al-Absi, a Sednaya graduate fighting in Homs, took over his group. Later, Abu Atheer would pave the way for the rise of Islamic State, becoming the first commander in Syria to pledge allegiance to it, but that summer Abu Atheer was focused on settling a score. He issued a “wanted list” of sixteen members of the Farouq he suspected of involvement in his brother’s murder, including Abu Azzam.

  Abu Azzam was in Atmeh with Abu Hashem overseeing a shipment of weapons from Turkey the night Absi was snatched. “I wasn’t there, but I wasn’t against what happened to Absi,” he said. “God bless the hands that removed him. We should have killed them all, every one of them who thought like him, the beards who tried to hijack our revolution. That was our mistake.”

  THE ISTANBUL ROOM wasn’t a physical space with an address. It was more of a concept, a label, a mess. The Lebanese politician Okab Sakr, representing Saad Hariri and the Saudis, was at its core, alongside a Turkish intelligence official and a civilian Syrian representative of Qatar (not a defector). The three distributors were a level below: two members of the Farouq—Bilal Attar (formerly of SNN) and Abu Hashem—and the Latakian Abu Fadel. The next level down were civilian middlemen, about two dozen, drawn from all of Syria’s fourteen provinces, who, along with the trio of distributors, chose the recipients of free weapons and ammunition.

  The middlemen were cycled in and out of the program. Some were accused of accepting bribes to add an FSA group to the list of beneficiaries, or demanding pledges of loyalty. Others sold the weapons and pocketed the funds. The bigger and higher-profile an armed group, the more likely it was to be a recipient, so commanders inflated their numbers.

  Meetings were held in hotel conference rooms. Cell phones were always confiscated at the door. Those who challenged Okab Sakr—or his three distributors—weren’t invited to subsequent gatherings. At one, a middleman from Latakia accused Abu Fadel of setting up his own patronage network. Sakr told the accuser to leave. “You’re kicking me out? You get out! Syria is my country, not yours,” the middleman said. “Who are you to order us around? To tell us where weapons should go and who should get them? You get out!” The Turkish intelligence agent, who rarely spoke during the proceedings, intervened. “Whoever says a wrong word about Okab Sakr,” he said in perfect Arabic, “I am prepared to throw into prison until he rots.” The message to participants was clear. “Either we follow them, and get lots of weapons, or we don’t and die,” a middleman from Damascus said.

  Except there were never lots of weapons. The Istanbul Room was established to funnel supplies to men on the ground, and in so doing assert leverage over them. But the supplies, when they came, were inconsistent and insufficient, prompting fighters to look elsewhere. Rebels found private sponsors, bought weapons from inside Syria, smuggled them from abroad, manufactured their own, or joined non-FSA Islamist groups that generally had stronger support.

  The FSA tried to establish the infrastructure of an institution. It formed military councils, one per province, to gather all the FSA groups in a particular area under its command. The military councils became part of the Istanbul Room operation, in a bid to organize it, although once again, the FSA’s squabbling leaders in exile—the major general and the colonel—were not involved. The Idlib military council, for instance, had sixteen groups under its wing that summer. “We were asked to unite in order to get support,” the defector heading the Idlib council, Colonel Afif Suleiman, said at the time. “The support didn’t come, so people are saying, ‘What did you give me so that I should stay with you?’ ” By August, there was another complication. The Istanbul Room’s sponsors, Qatar and Sa
udi Arabia, fell out over which armed groups to support. The Qataris focused on the military councils but also had strong ties to the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. The Saudis, via Sakr, were vehemently anti-Brotherhood. Sakr started handpicking battalions within each military council to support. He selected three of the sixteen in Idlib, infuriating the Idlib council chief so much that he complained directly to the Saudis. “We clarified the issue to our Saudi brothers about Okab,” Colonel Afif Suleiman said. “They promised that there will be no support, either military or financial, except via the councils.” That didn’t happen.

  Battalions started aligning with either the Saudis or the Qataris, or with private sponsors from Kuwait, the UAE, and elsewhere. The Americans scrambled to try to grasp the complexity of the battlefield. In an August trip to Istanbul, then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with a group of Syrian civil activists in a bid to understand who was who on the ground. “She said, ‘We want you to tell us who we should deal with and who we should avoid,’” one participant said. “I laughed. I swear I laughed. Can you imagine the US secretary of state saying that to a small group of activists, most of whom are under twenty-five? The US has no idea.”

  At the time, Washington was not dealing directly with the armed opposition but had authorized a nonprofit organization, the Syrian Support Group (SSG), to fundraise for the Free Syrian Army. The SSG comprised Syrian exiles in the United States and Canada as well as a former NATO political officer. “I used to talk to the Americans often over Skype via the Syrian Support Group,” said Ahmad Zeidan, the nom de guerre of a member of the Idlib military council. “They used to say, ‘Unite and we will support you.’ This is empty talk. The truth is foreign states each want people who will work the way they want them to. They want to choose our future leaders. We won’t allow them to. This is against democracy anyway, isn’t it? We are fighting to have a democratic country, not so that we can install people with American or European or Saudi agendas.”