RAQQA CITY
Saleh, the aide to the Jabhat al-Nusra leader, drove into Raqqa City the day after it became the first of Syria’s fourteen provincial capitals lost by Assad. The takeover in the first week of March was more of a surrender than a battle, one that lasted just three days. After that, nothing in Raqqa would be as easy as its fall.
Saleh was in the city to see an old friend and Nusra colleague named Abu Loqman. They had been cellmates in Sednaya Prison. Now, Abu Loqman was the new power in Raqqa. He had appointed a local metal worker, Abu Saad al-Hadrame, as Nusra’s emir in the provincial capital.
The city was won by men who called themselves mujahideen, not revolutionaries. Abu Azzam did not participate in the fight. He stayed in Tal Abyad, a hundred kilometers away, although his middle brother, the defector, was killed wearing a Farouq uniform in battles on Raqqa City’s outskirts. The lead Islamist groups largely locked out the Free Syrian Army during and after the fall of Raqqa City, although a few small groups were present. They didn’t want to replicate the chaos, looting, and lawlessness of Aleppo. Raqqa was supposed to be the anti-Aleppo.
The city’s streets were swept clean, its two churches untouched. Even some of Assad’s portraits remained in place. Graffiti signed by Jabhat al-Nusra warned against stealing. The group’s fighters, their faces covered, stood guard outside banks and other institutions. A Nusra pamphlet dated March 17 invited civil servants back to work. An eleven-point manifesto, plastered on store walls and other public places, outlined what Raqqa’s new leaders considered the collective responsibility of the city’s people. “Do not dwell on the past and disputes between individuals,” read the first point. “Act with Islamic morals and forgive rather than maintain enmity. Stand in line outside bakeries. Report suspicious parked cars or objects in the street. Pray and seek God’s forgiveness and guidance.” The list included a complaints hotline: 117.
The sky-blue sports stadium was the place where rebels, civilian activists, and a representative of the political opposition were trying to forge a new order. A handwritten cardboard sheet taped to the entrance asked mujahideen not to bring their weapons inside. Civilian activists sat at plastic tables arranged in a circle, laptops open, a printer purring in a locker room two floors underground. They called themselves the Raqqa Media Center and debated options for a logo. A few doors down, in a closet of a room, a bald, mustachioed lawyer with closely shorn gray patches over his temples sat behind a desk near a fax machine. Abdullah Khalil wore a slate pin-striped suit, white shirt and tie, three-starred revolutionary pin on his lapel—looking as out of place among the bearded men in military camouflage as the fax machine was out of date. Khalil was part of the Syrian political opposition and the head of the new provincial council. In reality, he was the council. The size of his office reflected the (non)importance the battalions afforded him. He mainly dealt with complaints.
Khalil the politician insisted the Free Syrian Army had a commanding role in Raqqa City and that Jabhat al-Nusra would not change social mores, even though the group was distributing glossy pamphlets of what it considered appropriate female attire. A red X near trousers, wrist-to-ankle abayas cinched at the waist, and buttoned-up long overcoats. The only clothing worthy of a green tick was an amorphous black floor-length sack and a headscarf extending to a woman’s thighs that covered her face and eyes. Raqqa’s Muslim women wore jeans, tight shirts, and hijabs; abayas embellished with diamantés and other adornments; or colorful long-sleeved, ankle-length dresses paired with bold headscarves. Khalil the politician was adamant that Nusra’s ideas would not stick. “The people who are bringing down Bashar Assad can bring down anyone else,” he said. But he and his ilk didn’t bring down Bashar al-Assad in Raqqa. Nusra and its allies did.
Jabhat al-Nusra was headquartered in the governor’s former seat of power, a sand-colored, multiarched building in a square lined by palm trees. A bronze statue of Hafez al-Assad in the square had been felled, and a man’s dress shoe was attached via a flexible wire to its head—for those who didn’t want to use their own shoes to beat “Hafez” around the face. TOMORROW WILL BE BETTER was spray-painted on the statue’s back. Nusra had raised a massive black flag in the square and distributed flyers calling for replacing the three-starred revolutionary flag with a black one bearing the Shahada.
Several hundred people publicly protested the move, while others, like Bandar, Abu Azzam’s old university roommate from Homs, who lived in Raqqa City, complained inside the privacy of their homes—and, in Bandar’s case, to a visitor from Jabhat al-Nusra who had come to see me.
The Nusra fighter, a twenty-one-year-old former literature student, knocked on Bandar’s door and then stood several meters away from it, his back turned to avoid seeing the lady of the house should she open it. He wore a gray shalwar kameez and a black scarf wrapped around his head. Only his eyes, brown and bespectacled, were visible. Bandar and his friend Abu Noor, who was also in his twenties, answered, then called me to the door. Bandar came back with the Nusra flyer about the flag.
“What is this?” Bandar asked the Nusra fighter standing in the stairwell. “We were just talking about it, we don’t like it.”
The masked man, who was unarmed, smiled through his face covering. “And what don’t you like about it?” he asked. “We are all Muslims, so what is the problem with a flag that bears the Shahada?”
“We are not all Muslims,” said Abu Noor. “You and I are, but there are Christians here, too. You have insulted them. And besides, what gives you the right to change the symbol of the revolution?”
“We protected the churches,” the Nusra member said. “The Christians came to [Nusra emir] Abu Saad. He said, ‘You are protected, you can return to your homes.’ Let’s not talk out here. The neighbors will hear us. Do you have coffee?”
The men walked into the living room. Two gray-haired men, Moayad and Ahmed, rose from sky-blue couches to greet their guest.
Abu Noor, a wiry young man who worked in a pharmacy by day and at night volunteered to guard the post office near his home against looters, was concerned the flag would invite US drone strikes. “They’ll think we’re extremist Muslims!” he said.
“There is no moderate Islam or extremist Islam,” the Nusra member said calmly. “There is only Islam, and Islam is under attack in the West, regardless of whether or not we hoist the banner. Do you think they’re waiting for that banner to hit us?”
Ahmed, an older man in a tan leather jacket and a white galabiya, interjected: “What we’re saying is, put the flag above your outposts, not in the main square of the city. We all pray, we all say, ‘There is no god but God,’ but I will not raise this flag.”
“We are not forcing anything on anyone,” the Nusra member said. “We offered it as a choice. We did not take down the revolutionary flags in the city—even though we could have.”
Outside, the night air was cool. Warplanes, which had been continuously rumbling over the city during the day, retreated, prompting bakeries, shuttered because of the threat of air strikes, to open. Long queues, segregated by gender, formed as night fell, just as they did every night, guarded by armed men with black scarves covering their heads and faces.
“With this banner, you have cleaved us from our country Syria,” Moayad said. “Why is it here? We are not an Islamic emirate; we are part of Syria. This is a religious banner, not a country’s flag.”
The Nusra member leaned forward and looked the older man in the eyes. “This is a lack of self-esteem, something we were conditioned to feel toward our religion by a regime that didn’t let us practice it,” he said. “Do you know how many people a day come to pledge allegiance to us, to try and join us?”
At that, Moayad lost his temper. He stood up, moved a few steps across the room, and wagged a finger in the masked man’s face: “The Syrian revolution rose up to step on Bashar’s neck, but I swear I am with Bashar against this flag!” he yelled. “That is how strongly I feel about it! You are causing fitna [discord]!”
/>
The young man remained seated. “What did you do for the revolution?” he asked.
“I used to transport ammunition smuggled from Iraq to towns in Raqqa Province.”
“That’s great, thank you,” said the Nusra member, taken aback by an answer he didn’t seem to have expected. “But why do you say that this flag will cause fitna and all of the problems of the Free [Syrian] Army—the thieving and the looting—aren’t fitna?”
The comment only enraged Moayad, whose relatives were Farouq fighters, although he kept that from the masked man. “Whoever wrote this is a Zionist!” he said, grabbing the leaflet.
Things quickly escalated. “You have blasphemed because you accused somebody of being an infidel!” the Nusra member said, raising his voice for the first time. “I know the man who made this flyer; he is not an infidel!”
“God will judge me, not you!” Moayad said. “How old are you, anyway? I can’t tell with that scarf covering your face. Where are you from? I don’t want to know your name or see your face, but where are you from?”
“I am a son of Syria,” the young man said.
Ahmed, the older man in the tan leather jacket, spoke up: “We are all Muslims. Who are you to force a flag on me? I am Syrian, and I have a flag.”
Moayad sank into his armchair. One of the men cracked open a window. Another went to check whether the coffee was ready. The Nusra member calmed things down. “Do you want the Quran to be the constitution in a future state?” he asked the room. All the men said they did.
“I apologize for all of this. We are angry,” a chastened Moayad replied.
“It’s okay, but I tell you that you haven’t convinced me of your arguments,” said the young man.
“I’m telling you that you will lose all the support you have because of this flag,” Ahmed said.
Coffee was served, along with pitted dates on small round plates. The talk shifted to the men they all knew from various brigades, Islamist and otherwise: where they were fighting, who had been killed, and who had switched battalions. “Look, mistakes happen,” the young masked man said. “We weren’t all trained. I was a student before all of this.” He still hadn’t touched the dates or even the coffee he had requested.
“You’re going to starve to death if you keep wearing that thing,” Ahmed said, referring to the black scarf.
All the men laughed, including the Nusra member—but he did not, at any time, take it off.
THE FACE COVERINGS were Abu Loqman’s idea. While Nusra fighters elsewhere, as well as rebels from many groups, sometimes donned scarves to conceal their identities, in Raqqa it was a rule—Abu Loqman’s, not Nusra’s. “He wasn’t in line with Nusra’s general policies,” Saleh said of his old friend. It went beyond the scarves. Abu Loqman’s seven to eight hundred fighters set up checkpoints in and around Raqqa, sparing no one—not even other members of Nusra—from searches. “That wasn’t our policy,” Saleh said. “That was one of [Nusra leader] Jolani’s edicts. He didn’t want checkpoints on the road so that we didn’t create problems with the civilians or other factions, but in Raqqa, there were checkpoints like the mukhabarat, and they covered their faces. So every time a brother passed by Raqqa, honestly he’d complain to the sheikh [Jolani]. The complaints were piling up.” Jolani told Abu Loqman to fall into line. Abu Loqman ignored him.
Abu Loqman held court in Nusra’s headquarters near the fallen statue of Hafez al-Assad, where Saleh often visited him. His old friend, Saleh said, was “a control freak,” one who infiltrated and spied on other groups in the city and the wider province—all the way up to Abu Azzam’s Tal Abyad. Abu Loqman didn’t like the Farouq’s control of the border post. He considered the Farouq arrogant, sitting on both the Tal Abyad and the Bab al-Hawa crossings. “That’s what Turkey wants,” Abu Loqman said. “It wants the Farouq on the borders.”
“Abu Azzam is a good guy,” Saleh said. “They say he is clean, but why doesn’t he change those people around him? Some are thugs and criminals. He’s a poet, you know, like his uncle.”
The two senior Nusra men had known Abu Azzam’s uncle in Sednaya Prison—the one killed in detention, the one Abu Azzam considered a fanatic. The uncle had fought in Iraq with Al-Qaeda in Fallujah. In July 2008, the uncle was one of about thirty-five Sednaya inmates who did not surrender to guards after a violent riot instigated by the prisoners. (Abu Atheer al-Absi, the brother of Firas al-Absi, the Islamist killed by the Farouq at Bab al-Hawa for raising the black flag, was another of the thirty-five.) The holdouts were heroes to the other prisoners, a status only boosted after troops stormed the cells, killing about twenty of them, including Abu Azzam’s uncle. Saleh remembered the uncle fondly. He had even memorized some of his poems.
“At the end of the day, Abu Azzam will join us,” Saleh told Abu Loqman. “He is one of us.”
“If he stays alive,” said Abu Loqman.
“What do you mean?”
“That guy?” Abu Loqman said. “I have plans for him. He’s dead.”
ABU AZZAM
March 24, 2013. The day started like a regular Sunday for Abu Azzam, with meetings around Tal Abyad. By midafternoon, he walked the short distance from the Farouq’s headquarters at the border crossing to visit his mother, Um Mohammad, in her modest first-floor apartment. Mother and son bore a striking resemblance. His face was a photocopy of hers, with the same roundness, the same broad, arrowlike nose, the same wide smile, but his mother was far tougher than he was. Um Mohammad was as feisty as she was friendly, and she was plenty friendly. Abu Azzam called her his chief of staff. Other Farouq men nicknamed her Anissa, after Bashar al-Assad’s mother, a woman considered her son’s key adviser and even, some said, the real power behind the regime.
Abu Azzam walked into his mother’s living room. She was sitting with several of his friends, including Bandar, who had traveled from Raqqa. The Farouq commander stooped to kiss his mother’s right hand and put his forehead to it, in a gesture of filial respect, then he kissed her cheeks and embraced her. “Finally, I see you!” she said, shaking her head in mock indignation.
He smiled and sheepishly sat beside her. “You know the last time I saw him he was like this,” Um Mohammad said, picking up Abu Azzam’s two phones, holding one to each ear and pretending to issue orders into them. She interspersed the talk of weapons and requests for battle updates with “Hi, Mother, how are you, how is your health?” The half-dozen men in the room all laughed. Abu Azzam ran a hand through his black beard. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but what can I do?”
He wasn’t in a Farouq uniform that day. He was dressed in indigo jeans, a dark-green crew-neck sweater, a black leather jacket, and navy boat shoes. He reached into his jacket for a pack of Winston Silver cigarettes, then turned to his mother. “Just so you don’t hear it elsewhere, they planted an [improvised explosive] device in my car yesterday,” he told her. The IED consisted of several sticks of TNT wired to the ignition of a BMW Abu Azzam often traveled in. A neighbor alerted the Farouq commander to the presence of the device. Um Mohammad put her hand up to her mouth. She had already lost one child, her middle son, on February 20, in the battles for Raqqa Province.
“May God protect you,” she told her eldest son.
“Nobody dies before his time,” Abu Azzam said. “I know that I am going to be killed either by the regime or by the Jabhat [al-Nusra]. There is no difference, they are both dirty.”
Men on the same side were killing each other. Abu Azzam’s former deputy at Bab al-Hawa, Thaer al-Waqqas, whom he’d left in charge of the border crossing, had been assassinated on January 9. The murder was considered payback for the Farouq’s killing of the Islamist Firas al-Absi, the man who was ISIS before ISIS. Absi’s faction was independent of Jabhat al-Nusra, and Abu Azzam now feared he was in danger from both groups—Absi’s and Nusra.
The Farouq commander rattled off the names of towns and cities he said the Farouq had helped clear of Assad’s forces. “What did they liberate?” he said of Nusra. “They a
re just here to try and impose their rules on us.” He held up his cigarette: “They threatened to label me a kafir [infidel] because of this,” he said. Bandar and other men who had just returned from Raqqa City relayed details of Jabhat al-Nusra’s smear campaign there against Abu Azzam and the Farouq.
“They’re calling us Farouq sarouk,” one man said. (Sarouk roughly translated in this context meant “thief.”) “Some of them say that we are nonbelievers.”
Lunch was spread on a black plastic tablecloth on the floor—store-bought kebabs, grilled tomatoes, and roasted green peppers. “This is the first thing I’ve eaten all day,” said Abu Azzam. It was almost 4:30 p.m. The men seated around him, including Bandar, were all university friends from Homs. They recalled those days with fondness. “I’ve lost so much weight in this revolution,” Bandar said, laughing. “Do you remember how we used to cook in Homs?” Abu Azzam’s specialty was molokhia, green leaves carefully picked and turned into a viscous soup served with chicken and plain rice.
One of the men recounted an incident that had happened earlier in the day in Raqqa City. He had parked his white pickup truck at a street-side coffee stall while everyone in the vehicle placed orders. The truck was flying a generic black flag inscribed with the Shahada. Three young women crossed the street—two in hijabs, skinny jeans, and tight sweaters that clung to their thighs, the third in a black abaya. The third girl stared at the armed men in the truck and midstreet brazenly took off her abaya. Under it, she was dressed like her friends. The men in the truck whooped and whistled and applauded the young woman. “She must have thought we were Jabhat [al-Nusra] because of the flag and wanted to make a point!” the driver said proudly. “So I turned up the music so she would know that we weren’t! See, these are our women! This is Raqqa, and the Jabhat thinks it’s going to control it?”
No Turning Back Page 21