No Turning Back

by Rania Abouzeid

  Lunch was cleared and the men said their good-byes. Bandar and his friends returned to Raqqa. Abu Azzam’s deputy, Abu Mansour, who was also his cousin, walked into the room, bade his cousin farewell, and told him he was going to check on his family just across the border in the Turkish town of Akçakale. Abu Mansour walked the short distance home. His niece had just served him Turkish coffee when one of his two cell phones rang. “What? Where are you? I’m coming now!” he said, before rushing out the door. It was a little before 5 p.m., and Abu Azzam had just been shot.

  Minutes earlier, on the other side of the border, Abu Azzam had also received a call. It was from one of his men. Jabhat al-Nusra had set up a random checkpoint at a spot dubbed “Liberation Roundabout,” on the main road in Tal Abyad, and was detaining and trying to disarm Farouq fighters. Days earlier, eleven Farouq men in town had been picked up by Nusra and were still in its custody. Abu Azzam grabbed a PKC machine gun and ran out the door to intercede on behalf of his men. According to his mother, he didn’t ask anyone to accompany him, although two of his men followed him anyway. He had just reached the roundabout and stepped out of his car when a Nusra fighter tossed a hand grenade in his direction, and then opened fire. It was over within minutes. Abu Azzam and other wounded men were ferried by passersby to the border crossing into Turkey, where Abu Mansour waited to rush his bloodied commander in a taxi to the local hospital in Akçakale.

  The hospital foyer was crowded with unarmed Farouq fighters in plainclothes. Um Mohammad paced up and down, carrying a blue garbage bag containing her son’s clothes. She held up his bloodied indigo jeans, stared at the tear above the right knee. Abu Azzam was shot three times, twice in his left abdomen and once near his heart. Both his hands were bandaged from shrapnel wounds that also peppered his legs, as well as just above his right eye.

  A phone rang. It belonged to one of the Farouq men. “Don’t do anything until we get men and ammunition,” he told the caller. “Calm down! Calm the men down! Here, speak to Um Mohammad and do whatever she says.”

  Um Mohammad took the phone. “Please, you are all my sons. This is not the time for rash decisions. We must be smart. Calm down. We are all angry. This has become personal, but we don’t want unnecessary loss of life. Please calm the men down, I’m counting on you.”

  Abu Azzam was taken into an X-ray room. His mother leaned forward through the crowd to cover his naked shoulder with the mauve bedsheet. Another gurney was wheeled out of the emergency room toward the elevator. The crowd in the foyer gathered around it as the bedsheet was lifted, revealing a dead man. He had shoulder-length hair and looked to be in his early twenties. Um Mohammad and members of the Farouq didn’t recognize him, but a short man with a close-cropped, graying beard did. He said the dead man was a member of Jabhat al-Nusra, and he even knew his name. Um Mohammad started crying. “He’s so young, may God rest his soul,” she said. “I buried a son weeks ago. May God help his mother.” Another dead man was wheeled out, also identified by the short man as a member of Jabhat al-Nusra. “They have eyes and ears everywhere,” Um Mohammad whispered, looking at the short man. By 6 p.m., four policemen were guarding the entrance of the hospital and using a handheld metal detector to check everyone coming through the doors.

  Abu Azzam was transferred to a larger hospital in Şanlıurfa, some fifty-three kilometers away. He let out a cry as he was wheeled into an ambulance. A thin stream of fresh blood escaped from under the large bandage over his right eye. Later that night, Abu Azzam’s sister and other female relatives crossed into Turkey in the dark, along with their children. They were taken to Abu Mansour’s home. Two Farouq men sat outside the front door, guarding it, although they were both unarmed. “If this is what it has come to—us fighting each other—then I want to sit at home and support Bashar,” one man said. His view was not shared by most of the Farouq, who were itching for a fight. In a bid to calm tensions, Nusra released the eleven Farouq fighters, along with twenty-two others it had detained. “The problem is that they have forgotten that we are all fighting Bashar,” Abu Mansour said of Nusra. “They want an Islamic emirate. They say that they are Islamists and we are apostates, but we will not accept that they have any sway or authority over us or others. Their fight is not to liberate Syria or against Bashar. It’s to control Syria. May God heal Abu Azzam, that is the main thing, but in every province now, we will fight them.”

  SALEH

  To Nusra foot soldiers like Mohammad, the leadership presented a united front. Mohammad wasn’t privy to the machinations of the group’s senior emirs. He didn’t know that Nusra’s Iraqi parent, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, wasn’t happy with what his moles in Jabhat al-Nusra’s inner circle were telling him. There were two principal informers, both of whom were part of the second group of leaders Baghdadi dispatched from Iraq to join Jabhat al-Nusra in Ramadan 2012, a year after the first expeditionary band headed by Jolani. The pair were Abu Ali al-Anbari, the jihadi veteran whom Jolani revered like a father, and Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, the young firebrand general amni Jolani didn’t see eye-to-eye with.

  Baghdadi’s Syrian franchise was doing well—too well, his informers told him, and its leader Jolani was popular—too popular. Nusra’s disciplined fighters were enmeshed in a local armed movement focused on Syria. Its men, including muhajireen, were encouraged by the leadership to marry local women to further integrate beyond the battlefields into communities where they were based. Baghdadi’s Syrian spawn threatened to overshadow his own less-successful organization across the border. It didn’t even need his money anymore. He’d once paid half its bills. Now Jabhat al-Nusra sent him funds—including a one-off gift of $2 million—in crisp US bills stuffed into bags and transported to Iraq in Toyota Land Cruisers. In late 2012, Nusra began paying monthly salaries: $200 for a married fighter, $100 for singles. “We had so much money and wealth, we were trying to figure out how to get it to Khorasan to support it,” Saleh said, using the term jihadists apply to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was based.

  The money came from several sources. In mid-2012, Jabhat al-Nusra robbed a state bank in the eastern city of Mayadeen, netting the equivalent of about $1.63 million in Syrian pounds and some $108,000 in foreign currency. Aleppo, Syria’s commercial heart, served as a steadier source of income, and later, so did the oil and gas fields of eastern Syria. Nusra stripped Aleppo’s multimillion-dollar factories bare and sold their equipment in Turkey for millions. It overran regime bases and added Assad’s military stockpiles to its own. “We had everything,” Saleh said. “Power, wealth. I would drive around and people would fall over themselves just to tell me Salam alaykom [Peace be upon you]. Men were throwing themselves at us, just for us to allow them to join us. In Iraq, Baghdadi and his group had none of this. They were not liked. We were loved.”

  Baghdadi’s moles in Nusra, Abu Ali al-Anbari and Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, cared less about popularity. They were cut from vintage ISI cloth—work alone, trust no one, be feared rather than loved. “They started trying to control things, to remove emirs from their positions, bring in others,” Saleh said. “They weighed a person’s worth based on his loyalty to Iraq.” They weren’t pleased with him, said Saleh, because “they knew I wasn’t on their team.”

  Jolani sensed a growing threat from Adnani, but not initially from Abu Ali al-Anbari—not until Jolani’s moles in Iraq informed him of the reports Abu Ali was filing to Baghdadi. Each leader—Jolani and Baghdadi—had spies in the other’s inner circle. Baghdadi sent Jolani letters via couriers, demanding he reveal his group’s lineage. Jolani demurred. He discussed splitting from Baghdadi with several trusted aides, including his deputy, the Iraqi Shari’iy Abu Maria al-Qahtani, as well as Saleh. Abu Maria strongly urged Jolani to split from an Iraq-based group that he said didn’t have policies or a strategic plan beyond “assassinations, mass killings, silenced pistols. They kill without planning or thinking through the consequences. It’s a hobby for them.” Baghdadi and the ISI leadership weren�
�t “the type to run a dawla—a state,” Saleh remembered Abu Maria saying. “They will ruin what we are setting up,” said Abu Maria. “In the history of the tanzim, its strongest period is now, here in Syria, with what we are doing. This is not an opportunity to be wasted on people like this. We cannot afford to lose it.”

  Jolani considered seeking the counsel of Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri somewhere in Afghanistan, but communications were poor. The tanzim still relied on letters sent by personal couriers. A reply could take months. That winter, Baghdadi got wind of Nusra’s discussions and summoned to Iraq the Nusra leader Jolani, the lead Shari’iy Abu Maria, Adnani, and the Saudi Abu Imad, who was one of the original group to cross into Syria with Jolani. “I saw Sheikh Jolani when he returned,” Saleh said. “He was really agitated. I saw him in Al-Bab [in the Aleppan countryside],” along with several other senior Nusra leaders, including the emir of Aleppo. Jolani told his men: “I went thinking we could get rid of Adnani, that he’d stay over there; instead they lauded him.” Saleh laughed. Nusra’s emir of Aleppo had asked for permission to assassinate Adnani and others like him. “If we kick them out, it’s a problem, if we keep them, it’s a problem,” the emir of Aleppo had said. “Let’s finish from them. They are threatening everything we’ve built.” Jolani refused.

  As tensions rose that winter between Jolani and Baghdadi, the ISI leader relocated to Syria in early 2013, moving between Al-Bab in the Aleppan countryside and Nusra’s largest training camp in the area, in Ras al-Hosn, Idlib Province. Another small group of men—veteran Al-Qaeda fighters from Afghanistan and Pakistan—traveled to Syria during the same period, to link up with Jabhat al-Nusra. The group was sent by Ayman al-Zawahiri, men from Khorasan who would come to be known as the Khorasan Group, a cell the United States accused of plotting attacks in Europe and the US.

  In a message hand-delivered by a courier, Zawahiri ordered Jolani to help the men from Khorasan reach Europe. They were not in Syria to fight the Assad regime, and their mission was to remain highly secretive, the letter said. Jolani hid the small delegation, but Baghdadi—through the Saudi Abu Imad—learned of their presence and confronted Jolani about it. “Why didn’t you tell me that you have emissaries from Khorasan? You have a relationship with Khorasan independent of me?” Baghdadi said. Jolani replied that his orders from Zawahiri were clear—the issue was to remain between Jabhat al-Nusra and Khorasan. “And what is Jabhat al-Nusra?” Baghdadi asked. “It is part of us.”

  Baghdadi demanded to see the Khorasan cell. “It’s not a question of ‘you must see them,’ we have our orders,” Jolani said. “We were ordered to prepare them with passports and money, provide them with a few brothers with experience, and send them all to Europe. They aren’t affiliated with us or you, they are from Khorasan.”

  Baghdadi refused to back down. So Jolani relented and took him to the group from Khorasan. They were in Aleppo’s Eye Hospital, which also served as a prison where foreign journalists, among others, were held. (Nusra, and other rebels, had been kidnapping journalists since at least 2012).

  Soon after, Baghdadi called for a general meeting of all Nusra’s senior emirs. Jolani insisted it was difficult and dangerous to gather the leadership in the same place, but Baghdadi didn’t care. The meeting was held in a basement that Nusra had built under its training camp in Ras al-Hosn. The proceedings were interrupted at one point after Baghdadi learned that a Syrian army general was a prisoner at the camp. Baghdadi wanted to see him. He walked the general above ground, shot him dead, and returned to the meeting.

  Jolani felt threatened by Baghdadi’s presence in Syria, and his new direct lines of communication with Nusra emirs. In late March and early April, Jolani embarked on a tour of key Nusra bases throughout Idlib and northeastern Syria, including Raqqa City, to shore up his support. Unlike his earlier field trips, this time he did not hide his identity—he told his men who he was. In Raqqa City, Jolani met Saleh’s old Sednaya cellmate, Abu Loqman, the power in the province, and the local Nusra emir, Abu Saad al-Hadrame. Both men greeted Jolani warmly and renewed their pledges of allegiance to him. Jolani left Raqqa at 3 a.m., continuing to Deir Ezzor farther east, while Abu Loqman headed straight to Baghdadi in Al-Bab.

  Three days later, on April 8, 2013, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi publicly released an audiotaped bombshell. For the first time, he revealed Jabhat al-Nusra’s ISI and Al-Qaeda lineage, and he announced that he was merging ISI and Nusra into one entity—the Islamic State of Iraq and As-Sham (ISIS)—under his command. Jolani was blindsided. He heard the news in the media like everyone else. Saleh was still in Raqqa City. Abu Loqman had not yet returned from Al-Bab. Jolani rushed back from eastern Syria in a six-car convoy toward Idlib and Aleppo, his power bases, accompanied by Nusra’s lead Shari’iy, Abu Maria. The convoy retraced its path. At Tabqa, Jolani switched cars, as he often did, stepping out of a black Toyota FJ Cruiser into a Honda Accord. The FJ Cruiser blew up an hour later, killing the Syrian and two muhajireen in it. The vehicle had been fitted with a sticky bomb IED, most likely at its previous stop in Raqqa City. The Nusra leader quickly released his own public audiotape, rejecting the merger and, for the first time, publicly pledging allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri, while requesting the Al-Qaeda leader’s mediation.

  It took Zawahiri two months to respond to the feud, in a private letter leaked to Al Jazeera. When he did, Zawahiri rejected the merger, telling Baghdadi to stick to Iraq and Jolani to stay in Syria. He decreed that Jabhat al-Nusra was the official branch of Al-Qaeda in Syria. Baghdadi ignored him. His supporters argued that they weren’t bound by such a decree, since Zawahiri’s division of Iraq and Syria effectively recognized a colonial border, and they pounced on it as proof that the Al-Qaeda leader had gone soft.

  Saleh heard Baghdadi’s announcement in Raqqa, where he was waiting for his old friend Abu Loqman to return. After three days, Saleh decided to head back to Aleppo to join Jolani. He intercepted Abu Loqman on the road.

  “Where have you been?” Saleh asked him.

  Abu Loqman remained in his car. He said he’d been in meetings with Baghdadi. “Did you hear the statement? What do you think?”

  “It’s upsetting,” Saleh replied. “They’ve ruined what we’ve built.”

  “No, no, it’s a good move,” Abu Loqman responded.

  The pair argued about who was right—Baghdadi or Jolani. “Listen, brother, understand something,” Abu Loqman told Saleh. “I am Dawla, Dawla, Dawla [Arabic for state—what ISIS called itself]. I will not change. Come, join us. Let’s stay together.”

  Saleh shook his head, got back into his car, and drove straight to Jolani. It was the last time he saw Abu Loqman, who was soon appointed the ISIS emir in Raqqa Province. Saleh found Jolani upset but calm—a little too calm, he thought. The crisis was a test from God, the Nusra leader told him. “We expanded quickly and people liked us and money was coming, weapons,” Saleh remembered him saying. “We didn’t imagine it would happen so quickly.” Jolani said that he expected trouble within the organization, “like drones, deaths of commanders, but not that we would fall into a dispute with Iraq.”

  Jabhat al-Nusra’s six thousand or so fighters split. Some stayed with Jolani, while others, especially the more conservative muhajireen, followed Baghdadi’s edict and joined ISIS, leaving Nusra more Syrian almost by default. The effect was profound: “All of Nusra became Dawla, and we were few in number,” Saleh said.

  Baghdadi was at a farmhouse in Al-Bab, accepting pledges of allegiance. The troublesome Adnani was appointed ISIS spokesman. Abu Ali al-Anbari also joined Baghdadi. Of the men who originally crossed into Syria from Iraq with Jolani back in Ramadan 2011, only one—the Saudi Abu Imad—became ISIS.

  In the Latakia countryside where he was now based, Mohammad heard the news like everyone else. He lost twelve muhajireen from his unit to ISIS. Mohammad regretted bringing them into Syria. His former cellmate in Palestine Branch, Abu Othman, the Shari’iy from Aleppo, called him. “What do you think?” Abu Othman aske
d him. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m Nusra, and you should stay where you are, too,” Mohammad said.

  Abu Othman didn’t take his old friend’s advice. He joined ISIS, where he served as one of the group’s Sharia judges in Aleppo. “I am with them because the tanzim [Al-Qaeda] was a tool for an aim, and the aim is an Islamic state, and it happened,” Abu Othman told me, explaining his reasoning. “Baghdadi’s view, his ideas affected me. We have reached the end point for a tanzim and the beginning of a dawla [state]. The time has come.”

  IN MAY 2013, ISIS began wresting Raqqa from the forces, including Jabhat al-Nusra, who won it in March. By August, it had consolidated its grip and would soon make the city its de facto capital. The group called itself “ad-Dawla,” the state, which is exactly how it viewed itself—as a sovereign state and not an armed faction among many fighting the Syrian regime. It considered the Arabic acronym for ISIS, Daesh, a derogatory term, because it implied that it was a group like any other whose name could be abbreviated.

  ISIS began setting up its state in Raqqa City. It looked much like the one its earlier incarnation had established in Sunni parts of Iraq after the US-led invasion in 2003. It imposed its austere interpretation of Islam on locals. It removed Christian symbols like crosses from the city’s churches and turned them into dawa, or proselytization, centers. The female dress code Jabhat al-Nusra had suggested was imposed, the city’s women forced into the amorphous black sacks and face coverings. The five daily prayers were made obligatory, and hudud (Sharia punishments, such as cutting off the hands of thieves) were publicly enforced. Conspirators were crucified, others were decapitated, their heads placed on the spikes of a fence that enclosed a grassy traffic roundabout called Naem (Paradise), which locals renamed Jahim (Hell).