The Joint Command was less than a week old at the time, but it had already made clear its intent to take Bab al-Hawa—and Tal Abyad—from the Farouq. “We don’t want the Farouq to be present at Bab al-Hawa,” General Idris said. “It’s a difficult time to discuss this now, but we are working on it.” What the generals didn’t reveal until years later was their plan to wrest the covert distribution of arms and ammunition from the Farouq. General Ibtaysh asked Major Abdulrahman Suwais, one of the trio of defectors who first met with the Qataris back in March, to take over the Farouq’s transportation role. Suwais did not accept the offer. “Farouq was well established,” he said later. “They were the heroes of Homs, so how could I? Even if I wanted to act clever and deliver the weapons, the Farouq controlled the routes.”
The Joint Command was receiving arms and ammunition, most of it gathered from Libya, every week via Atmeh. Rather than deliver the goods, General Ibtaysh told beneficiaries to travel to Atmeh and pick up their own supplies. “The Farouq was responsible for the transportation. I took that from them,” said General Ibtaysh, “because they used to charge transport fees—a third. That is why I eliminated their role.”
The Joint Command’s new system was plagued by old problems, the same ones that had handicapped the Istanbul Room. “What do you think we get?” General Ibtaysh asked. “Sometimes twenty thousand rounds, sometimes one hundred thousand rounds. What does that do for an army with fourteen military councils? Imagine that a commander would come to me from Damascus, the distance he’d crossed and the danger, so that I could give him four thousand bullets. How many bullets is that per man and how long will it last?”
As with the Istanbul Room, state sponsors and private donors soon bypassed the Joint Command’s distribution mechanism to supply their favored rebels directly. This weakened the Joint Command, just as it had weakened the Istanbul Room, and fomented rebel rivalries. “This matter is the reason why we were no longer listened to,” General Ibtaysh said. “I told sponsors, even if it’s a gift from you to a group—inside or outside the FSA—let it come through us. But to give it to them directly while we are present? It was insulting. I wanted to enforce a chain of command, make groups on the ground reliant on us, but the foreign sponsors and other internal forces did not want that. They wanted it to fail,” he said. “May God not forgive them.”
ABU AZZAM HEARD the whispers in Tal Abyad, felt the rivalry and discontent of some of his allies just as surely as he could feel the ground rumble with every explosion. He had grown used to the physical brutality of war but not its bloodless scheming. Weren’t they all supposed to be on the same side? He didn’t want to be dragged into what his late father had called “the pollution of politics.” What an apt description, he thought, for the machinations of men. Why were some of the other rebels so distrustful of the Farouq? He knew some didn’t like the fact the battalion took a cut for delivering arms and ammunition. As far as he was concerned, “we should have taken two-thirds, given the work we were doing.” He heard about smuggling across the border, by his men and others. “Transgressions occur—I’m not telling you we’re angels,” he said. The Farouq didn’t charge fees at the borders it controlled, unlike the group overseeing Jarablus, for example, a small outpost about 120 kilometers from Tal Abyad. But the Revolutionary Council in Jarablus—which controlled that border—was composed of locals and didn’t face local opposition. Members of the Farouq were considered outsiders in Bab al-Hawa and Tal Abyad.
Abu Azzam had no intention of staying in Tal Abyad. He was in talks to establish a civilian committee of locals to oversee the crossing while he pushed inward toward Raqqa City. He was soaking up local armed groups—some seventeen had joined the Farouq within days of Tal Abyad’s fall—but Abu Azzam still felt “attacked from more than one side.” How much simpler things were in Baba Amr, he thought, when they were fighting for God and country and each other. What had happened to his revolution? He had seen rebels clash over war spoils. “They raised their weapons against each other,” he said. “Can you believe it? For what?” The revolution had gone on too long. It had devolved into anarchy. Rebel groups competed with each other for foreign funding, for territory, for the power and reputation of certain commanders. Perhaps nowhere was the chaos more evident than in the great northern metropolis of Aleppo. The city was in many ways the anti-Homs, dragged into the uprising in July 2012 like a hostage by men who were not its sons. The rebels who pushed into Aleppo were from the poorer, more religiously conservative countryside around it. A band of rivals, not brothers, who weren’t welcomed by locals—men with little camaraderie, undisciplined groups, some of which looted the homes of civilians they claimed to be protecting.
Abu Azzam stroked his neat, Salafi-style black beard and exhaled slowly—a deep, regretful sigh. “Every three men are now calling themselves a battalion and five are calling themselves a brigade,” he said. It was approaching midnight, the shelling had abated, the regime’s gunners done for the day. Abu Azzam asked one of his men to make coffee, before Bandar and I continued toward Raqqa. I asked Abu Azzam about General Ibtaysh’s request that the Farouq cede the border posts. He smirked. “When somebody other than the Farouq liberates an area, then he can make such a request,” he said. “We are the ones who spilt our blood here, who are sleeping under artillery bombardments.”
As Bandar and Abu Azzam said their good-byes, the Farouq, along with another group of rebels stationed at Tal Abyad, prepared to head out on a mission. The men tied white headbands to their foreheads to recognize members of their own side. The thin strips bore the Shahada, the declaration of their faith. The men gathered in a circle. “We will step on them, we will crush the house of Assad,” they sang. They clapped and danced and then moved out toward the regime position that had been shelling them. It was 17,850 meters away—to be exact.
FOR THE FAROUQ BATTALIONS, the beginning of the end did not come in the rubble of battle amid cries of men at war but rather in a marble-floored Turkish resort overlooking Antalya’s shimmering turquoise waters. The hotel was the setting for the so-called Antalya Conference in early December, a meeting called by foreign backers of the rebels to unify nonextremist armed factions. More than 550 defectors and civilian revolutionaries attended, as well as security and intelligence officials from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Jordan, Turkey, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The Joint Command’s General Ibtaysh was not present. “No one informed me,” he said. “I was in Syria working.” The Farouq delegation included its three founders—the foreign liaison Abu Hashem, the lawyer Abu Sayyeh, and the sheikh and donor Amjad Bitar—as well as the former SNN co-creator and Istanbul Room distributor Bilal Attar. Abu Azzam traveled from Tal Abyad to attend.
On the first day of the conference, the Saudis presented a plan to divide Syria into five geographic fronts, an idea they’d floated a month earlier. It was an attempt to replace the Qatari-backed Joint Command and weaken Qatari influence in the armed uprising. Syrians were expected to pick their regional team. “I was shocked in Antalya to see how the brothers were so entrenched in these regional camps—Saudi and Qatari,” said Abu Sayyeh. “Honestly, we weren’t in either—we were Syrians, that was it.”
Okab Sakr told the Farouq he expected them to vote for the Saudi plan. The Farouq leaders met and decided not to do so. The Joint Command was a Qatari–Turkish initiative. It had challenged them and stripped them of their transportation role, but it was backed by Turkey, rebel Syria’s logistical lifeline and the Farouq’s strategic partner along the border. The Farouq did not want to antagonize the Turks, but its leaders refused to plant themselves in the Qatari–Turkish camp, despite the protestations of the sheikh. Amjad Bitar pushed strongly for aligning not only with Qatar and Turkey but also with the Syrian Islamists—from the Muslim Brotherhood to hard-line Salafi groups, including Ahrar al-Sham—supported by those states. “I completely rejected this, to follow the Brotherhood track,” Abu Hashem said. So did Abu Sayyeh: “There was deep enmity
between us and the Brotherhood that remains,” he said. The Farouq refused to pick a regional team. “Whoever wasn’t standing in a particular line behind a regional player at that time lost out,” said Abu Hashem. “It was that simple.”
By the third and final day of the conference, the 550 rebels in attendance selected a group of 261, who in turn voted for a thirty-member Supreme Military Council to oversee the Five Fronts. General Doctor Engineer Salim Idris, General Ibtaysh’s former colleague, was elected chief of staff of the Supreme Military Council. The command was divided into five zones, based on geography. The Farouq’s Abu Sayyeh was elected assistant deputy chief of staff for the Homs front. The mighty Farouq Battalions had only one position out of thirty in the new Free Syrian Army command structure. Months later, Abu Hashem was elected Salim Idris’s deputy, and Abu Azzam would be appointed to the eastern front, but it made little difference to the Farouq’s declining fortunes.
The Antalya Conference exposed rifts among the Farouq’s founders. “The disputes became clear then between the three of us,” said Abu Hashem. “Me and Amjad and Abu Sayyeh. It reached the point that we cut things off between us. We couldn’t accept each other anymore.” In early 2013, the Farouq asked Sheikh Amjad Bitar to resign. “Amjad Bitar was like a bank,” said one of the Farouq’s original civilian leaders in Baba Amr, “and when he was removed, the bank of the Farouq collapsed.”
After Antalya, “the Farouq was left blowing in the wind,” Bilal Attar said. “The Saudis—because we rejected the Five Fronts—didn’t look at us. The Qataris chose Ahrar al-Sham to replace the Joint Command [as a recipient of their support], and we weren’t friends with Ahrar.” The Turks also backed Ahrar al-Sham.
Abu Azzam watched the politicking at Antalya with disgust. The conference “was a conspiracy against the revolution,” he said, a “project cooked up by foreign states and fed to us.” He left Antalya grateful to head back to the chaos of the battlefield. At least he knew its rules. He had learned them in Baba Amr—shoot or be shot, and do it quickly. But he wasn’t in Baba Amr anymore, where danger was from only one source. Now it was everywhere.
2013
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RUHA
In Turkey, there was no gunfire or nighttime shelling. No snipers real or imagined for Ruha to fear. She could play in the street again outside her temporary home, a fourth-floor walk-up the family shared with wounded Free Syrian Army relatives from Saraqeb. In Turkey, the parks were still playgrounds, not new cemeteries. Ruha hadn’t been on a swing or a slide for almost two years. Her mother, Manal, would sit on a bench and watch her children laugh and run and play without fear of something falling from the sky and exploding. Fifteen days came and went. Ruha’s baby sister, Tala, had pending medical appointments, but away from the war, the toddler’s strange hormonal condition seemed to be slowly clearing up on its own. Turkey’s playgrounds were nice, but they weren’t home. Ruha kept asking Baba when they would return to Saraqeb. She cried when she learned they were staying. “We came to treat Tala,” Manal told her eldest daughter, “but now the planes are as permanent as the birds in the air. We can’t take you back to that. We have to try and keep you safe.”
“Nobody dies before their time,” the little girl replied. Submitting to God’s will—a ready-made phrase intrinsic to her faith and her best argument for going back. It didn’t work on her parents. She’d cry when she spoke over Skype with her Aunt Mariam, her grandmother Zahida, Uncle Mohammad and his wife, Aunt Noora. Her father, Maysaara, had bought the relatives in Saraqeb a satellite Internet device. It was their only connection to the world outside their war zone. Their landline coverage did not extend beyond the limits of Idlib Province, disconnecting them from the rest of Syria. Mother’s Day 2013 was difficult for the little girl. It was usually Ruha’s favorite day of the year. “We’d make sweets, give my grandmother gifts, we’d all play,” she remembered. “I love my grandmother. I know that I’m spoiled, that she spoiled me. When will I see her again?”
In Turkey, the children developed a new habit. At bedtime now, the lights had to stay on. They feared being in the kind of pitch-black of that cornfield the night they sneaked across the border. Ruha and her siblings spent their days watching cartoons on an old laptop, or with crayons and coloring books. They made friends with the Turkish children in their building. They couldn’t converse, but somehow they understood each other the way children often do. Maysaara didn’t enroll them in school. “How can I put my children in school, as if life is normal, when there are children in Syria who can’t go to school?” he said. “My children are no better than those in Syria.” It was his form of survivor’s guilt.
Ruha was happy not to be in school, but the apartment was cramped with the recuperating FSA fighters. The young men were often edgy, impatient to heal and return to the battlefield. “These guys bore me,” Ruha would say. “They sit in front of their computers all day, following the news.” Her mother recognized that the young fighters were “emotionally very tired,” as she put it. She didn’t want her children disturbing them, so she sometimes confined Ruha and her siblings all day to one of the apartment’s two bedrooms. “The children cannot speak, yell, cry, run, some of the shabab get agitated,” Manal said. “I try to keep them quiet, but this is a form of pressure on the children.” For Ruha, it was suffocating, like being stuck in the basement back in Syria but without the fear. She wasn’t good at sitting still.
They were refugees now, but business-class refugees. Ruha and her siblings didn’t have to hawk packs of tissues or bottles of water on Turkey’s streets. They weren’t reduced to a pair of hands in a sweatshop, or forced to live in the refugee camps, unable to come and go without Turkish permission. Ruha’s parents could afford rent and food, but Maysaara was always away as though at work, busy helping other families, with little time for his own. Manal was again raising the children alone.
When Maysaara wasn’t illegally sneaking into Syria—which was often—to bring in medical supplies, communication equipment like satellite Internet, and donations from wealthy members of Saraqeb’s diaspora, he was visiting his hometown’s wounded in Turkey’s hospitals. One day he was busy sourcing a large quantity of flour and trying to figure out how to get it across the Turkish border. “The people need bread,” he said. “The bakeries have all been hit [by warplanes]. The women will bake, but they need flour.” He called representatives of the Syrian political opposition in exile and pleaded for money or for their intercession with the Turkish border authorities. “Our political opposition is like, what can I call them? They don’t care, they don’t ask!” he said. “They’re too busy at their conferences! They want to go to Doha and other world capitals, they should go to Hell! There’s a war and people are focusing on conferences, on YouTube videos advertising themselves. What about the people inside?” After several days, with the help of Turkish friends, he managed to get a truckload of flour over the border, paid for by donations from Syrians in the diaspora. The political opposition did not help him.
Ruha’s parents turned their apartment into a halfway home for anyone from Saraqeb who needed a place to stay—for those who had accompanied wounded loved ones to Turkish hospitals, or recent refugees unsure how to navigate their new life in a new country with a new language. Ruha took heart from the visits. “It makes me feel like I am a little closer to home,” she said, “even if the people visiting us from Saraqeb aren’t related to us.” For her mother, the guests and their stories had the opposite effect. They compounded her survivor’s guilt. “We are physically here but mentally there, worried about family and friends,” she said. “This is not normal life. It is not normal to live alone in isolation, away from your family and community, to live in limbo. We are living a half-life, permanently unsettled, unstable, temporary.” It affected all of her decisions—from whether or not to buy furniture (“What for? We’re going back soon”) to how her children spent their days (“They’ll go to school in Syria. We will return”).
It w
as the knowing what was happening in Syria, the not knowing, the wondering. Air strikes on Saraqeb meant people would be wounded, some of whom would try and make it to Turkey. Maysaara was often told of impending arrivals. He’d rush to the border to meet the injured and accompany them in the ambulance, or he’d wait for them in the hospitals. It wasn’t unusual to see people staying in their apartment who were discharged from Turkish care but still too weak to cross the border back to Syria. Manal would cook for everyone. One day Ruha walked into the living room to see a man with a ghastly lower-leg wound lying on the couch as her father changed his bloody bandages and cleaned the injury. She didn’t look away. “If, God forbid, you are wounded,” the man told Maysaara, “I will not let anyone clean your wounds except me.”
“Brother,” another man in the living room said, “the line in front of you is long.”
Ruha was eleven now, and she understood why her father was rarely home, and why he seemed preoccupied when he was. “Baba has to do it,” she told me. “He has to help. Do you think that the people who left their studies and their country wanted to? What does your country, your home, your street mean to you? That’s what it means to me. Would you like to leave the home you grew up in? Your family? Who wants to leave those things? If we knew we wouldn’t die if we stayed in our home, we wouldn’t have left Syria.”
AUNT MARIAM RATTLED a small canister of diesel. It was almost empty. She’d been waiting all winter for free supplies promised to the townsfolk by either Jabhat al-Nusra or the secular tansiqiya. Mariam couldn’t be sure and didn’t much care which group had made the pledge. She just needed heating fuel. It cost 150 Syrian pounds a liter, as much as 200 pounds in some places—it used to be 25. She poured the thick liquid into the sobya heater by torchlight. There was no electricity, as usual. It came for only two hours a day now, shortening already-truncated winter light. Ruha’s grandmother, Zahida, had gone to bed soon after sunset, as she often did that winter. There was no point freezing in the dark.
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