In Mohammad’s area, Nusra had much bigger relief programs, with free medical clinics and pharmacies, a system mirrored throughout northern Syria. Nusra ran its own bakery, selling twenty loaves of flat Arabic bread for 70 Syrian pounds, and posted guards outside other facilities to prevent less-disciplined rebel groups from pushing into line and demanding free bread. In certain neighborhoods of Aleppo, after regime air strikes targeted bakeries, Nusra made home deliveries of bread, a goodwill gesture that endeared it to locals, while enabling the group to collect detailed demographic information about who lived in its vicinity.
Mohammad’s brother heard his name called from outside. Several of his Nusra colleagues, including the Saudi donor and two Algerians, were waiting for him. He lugged the plastic bags down to his black Kia Rio, loading up the trunk and most of the backseat of a vehicle that bore a Jabhat al-Nusra license plate (but no number), and white lettering across its hood that spelled out the same. The Algerians relayed the morning’s news—three roadside bombs had detonated near a Jabhat al-Nusra car, killing two of its three passengers. “May God rest their souls, and may we follow them soon,” said Mohammad’s brother. He suspected ISIS. The Saudi nodded and sat in the front seat as the Algerians walked back to their base.
MOHAMMAD’S SISTER, Sara, busied herself in a living room now free of the clutter of her younger brother’s black bags. She dipped a cloth into a bowl of water and wiped a fine ash powder, deposited like a thick layer of dust by the blocked sobya the night before, from the few items of furniture. It was a crisp, sunny Friday.
The midday call to prayer floated in through the open window. The Tunisian ISIS emir was giving the day’s sermon, broadcast over loudspeakers. He began with a rant against the evils of democracy and those who advocated it, a view shared by Nusra. He had seen what he termed “the reality of these people” in Tunisia, before his pilgrimage to Syria. “They curse God and the Prophet, peace be upon him, and say it is freedom of expression. They walk around naked and say this is freedom! If you are a Muslim and express your opinion, you are a terrorist! If you call one of them an infidel, they say you are an extremist!”
He turned to the news of the day—the rebel attacks against ISIS—but did not directly address Al-Qaeda’s repudiation of his group. “Look at our enemies. Who are they, what is their ideology, and who are their backers?” he asked. “Their financing is from countries that don’t want an Islamic project in Syria or Iraq. Think about it! How can we accept those in Syria who sit with Turkish and Qatari intelligence?” The Tunisian led the congregation in prayers: “God keep us far from fitna [discord]. God help us create an Islamic state. God make us victorious over the infidels. God grant us victory over Bashar.”
The men streamed out of the mosque. Sara peeked from behind a curtain, pointing out those she knew. There was a Syrian teenager, drowning in a sea-blue shalwar kameez, who had publicly declared his father an infidel because he opposed ISIS. A redheaded Chechen Nusra fighter passed under the window, walking alongside a Syrian colleague who lived next door to Sara. The Syrian, Sara said, “killed his own father and uncle after Nusra found them guilty of collaborating with the regime. He shot them dead. See the front porch? He killed them there.” She spoke without emotion about a man who had made his mother a widow.
She had once had another life. A city girl, Sara had grown up in the capital of Latakia and worked on the assembly line of a honey factory in the southern Turkish town of Antakya while her husband was incarcerated. He was released five months ago. “I enjoyed working. I worked for three years, and I can work now if I want. People think that if we wear a hijab, we are from the Stone Age. We are not the same as the Qaeda of Pakistan or other places. Our society is different here,” she said. “Look at Saudi Arabia, they’re not Al-Qaeda, but women there have fewer rights than we have here. They can’t come and go freely or drive cars. I can. Look at my brother Mohammad. Where is his wife? She’s in Turkey. She’s working, living in her own apartment. She doesn’t wear niqab or anything like that, and he’s a Nusra emir.”
Sara took pride in her current role. “The thing that makes me happiest now is to see my brothers after they come back from an operation. I’m the first to see them, to cook for them, wash their clothes, and the same for my husband. This is enough for me now. There is no need to think about another life.”
To Sara, Al-Qaeda wasn’t simply a group her family was part of. While she did the housework, she listened to Osama bin Laden speeches archived on a Samsung laptop, and she read the group’s manifestos.
Her husband had returned home after prayers and headed into the shower. “Hand me the nail clippers!” he yelled from the bathroom.
“Where are they?” Sara bellowed.
“Next to the grenades,” he said. She reached into the walnut-colored wood-and-glass display cabinet for the nail clippers and pulled out a bottle of moisturizer she applied to her hands.
“Look at my hands!” she said. “When did my nails ever look like this? I feel like I’m on a front too. I have to do everything here, and all by hand—the laundry, the dishes. I used to use cucumber face masks, take afternoon naps, comb my hair, wear makeup. My whole life has changed.”
A FEW DAYS LATER, Mohammad came to Sara with a request. The detained Alawite women and children, including Talal’s family, were now under the supervision of Syrians from the Free Syrian Army (instead of the group of foreign fighters), although Nusra controlled their fate. Nusra needed women who would see to the Alawites’ needs. Mohammad asked Sara whether she would volunteer. She shook her head. One of her friends was helping the captives, she said, but she wasn’t interested.
“I used to have Alawite friends,” she told me. “We never in our lives thought of sectarianism in our country, we never talked like this. I never thought that I would want to live far from the Alawites. Never. Now I do. I am scared of them and they are scared of us. There is blood between us, both ours and theirs. I feel bad for those women [in detention], but I feel worse for our women in Assad’s jails. At least the Alawites aren’t being raped. I will not help them.”
Her previous life in Latakia, the one with her Alawite friends, was a distant memory. “We have nothing to do with the other parts, the regime areas, or the people in them. We are two different countries now.”
BANDAR
There was no point in sleeping. The first flickers of a January sun, impatient to crack through a dark sky, would soon bring light, but no warmth. Bandar slid behind the wheel of a black Hyundai Avanti he’d borrowed. Two of his cousins, aged sixteen and seventeen, climbed into the backseat, while a friend in his midtwenties got comfortable in the front. They had a long drive ahead—from Raqqa City to a small village on the outskirts of Aleppo, where Bandar’s two cousins lived. He had promised to get them home. He always preferred traveling in the darkness, when the roads and the skies were empty. Assad’s pilots generally worked day shifts.
The fighter at the ISIS checkpoint just outside Raqqa City assured Bandar the road ahead was clear. The ISIS fighter even offered the men in the vehicle an early morning coffee, but they politely declined. Two hours later, a little before 6 a.m., Bandar slowed at another ISIS checkpoint, this one just ahead of the Tishreen Dam on the Euphrates River. The dam was in the northeastern Aleppan countryside, no more than twenty kilometers from his cousins’ home. There was just one armed man, his face covered in a scarf, at the checkpoint. He asked Bandar where he was going and his family name. “We know you,” he said.
“How do you know me?” Bandar replied. “I’m just a civilian. What’s going on?”
“What’s going on?” the ISIS fighter asked. “You don’t know what’s going on? Your Free Army is killing our brothers and raping our sisters.”
“What are you talking about, and what do I have to do with any of that?” Bandar asked. It was January 4. He hadn’t heard the news. He didn’t know that on January 3 a rebel uprising had been unleashed against ISIS, and that it had started in the countryside a
round Aleppo.
The ISIS fighter radioed for backup. “Routine procedure,” he said. A pickup truck of armed men arrived, their faces covered. Bandar was ordered to drive behind them to a nondescript concrete office adjacent to the dam, some five minutes away. He remembered looking at the still waters on either side of him, the way the morning sun glinted off the surface like a mirror. He felt as calm as the waters until the men rushed out of the vehicle, pulled their guns on him and his friends, and dragged them out of their car. They were marched, confused, into the office, where another man who seemed to be in charge was waiting for them. The commander’s accent revealed he was from Hama.
“Your family is Free Army,” he said. Several of Bandar’s clansmen were indeed part of a Free Syrian Army battalion in the Aleppan countryside.
Another ISIS fighter reached toward the bulge created by a pack of cigarettes in Bandar’s shirt pocket and crushed the pack under his feet. “Look at what the infidels smoke,” he said, laughing.
“These men are worse than infidels,” the commander said. “They are apostates. Take them to the jail.”
“We won’t go!” Bandar blurted out. “You’re mistaken! We have nothing to do with anything!” He didn’t know anyone who’d been released alive from an ISIS prison. “I’m the brother of a martyr from Baba Amr!” he said. It usually garnered him respect, but the ISIS commander just stared at him with eyes Bandar couldn’t read. “Bashar al-Assad wants us and to you we are apostates? We’re Muslims,” said Bandar. “This is ridiculous! A mistake! We won’t go! You don’t know anything about us, you haven’t asked us anything!”
An ISIS fighter whispered into the commander’s ear. “Bring them,” the commander said. Two teenagers, about the same age as Bandar’s cousins, walked in. The ISIS commander told the pair to take a few steps until they were standing in the frame of the front door. They were FSA, he said. He lifted a pistol and, without another word, shot each boy in the head. Bandar feared his knees would buckle. When an ISIS fighter in the room told his new prisoners to empty their pockets, take off their belts, and follow him, Bandar and his companions did so meekly, stepping over the streaks of blood formed by the bodies being dragged away.
ABU AZZAM AND THE REMNANTS OF THE FAROUQ
Abu Azzam despised exile. He couldn’t get used to it. The waiting to return, the wanting, only deepened as time fattened the space between the then of Syria and the now of Turkey. If he couldn’t be home, he had to be as close as possible, in a Turkish town adjacent to a border post he once controlled. Nusra and ISIS and their death threats were on the other side. His new home was a small apartment, cramped and crowded with his mother, younger brother, his late brother’s two children and widow, as well as assorted other relatives.
He missed Syrian dirt on his boots, missed commanding battles instead of reading about them. He wanted to fight—against Assad, Nusra, ISIS, and all those trying to “force Islamist beards on the revolution,” as he put it. He was a pious man, that was his personal inclination, but he didn’t believe in imposing his views on others.
“Exile is just a phase,” he would say, repeating it like a mantra. He wondered which group he would fight with when—not if—he returned to Syria. The Farouq Battalions had collapsed, killed by internal leadership rivalries and the fickleness of international sponsors. They had tried to stay independent, to avoid relying on any one benefactor, but independence was not a virtue that donors cherished. “We were too big,” Abu Azzam said of the Farouq. “If I recruit someone and turn him into a soldier and I’m not feeding him, I’m basically telling him to go and steal. For me, it would have been better to keep two hundred fighters and manage them, relying on spoils of war and donations from here and there, instead of eight hundred I could not feed.”
Elements of the Farouq reorganized, led by its strongest northern branch along the Turkish border, which merged in January 2014 with twenty-one small rebel units to form the core of a new militia called the Hazm Movement. Hazm’s leader was one of the Farouq’s founders, the former realtor Abu Hashem, the man with the foreign connections. Abu Azzam didn’t like him. He wanted to fight, but not with these former Farouq colleagues in Hazm: “They didn’t come and support me during my battle against ISIS and Nusra,” Abu Azzam said. “That’s the reason.”
He still attended meetings as a member of the FSA’s thirty-man Supreme Military Council, a body with no leverage over groups on the ground, but for Abu Azzam, at the very least their peers had elected the members. That alone made it worth trying to salvage. “We need institutions, not the politics of personalities like the Assads,” Abu Azzam would say. “We must build new institutions for a new Syria. Even if they are weak, it is better than if they’re nonexistent.”
The Supreme Military Council’s chief, General Doctor Engineer Salim Idris, had fallen into the same predicament that the Joint Command and Istanbul Room had faced. He couldn’t always count on weapons and ammunition from states backing the revolution. It was now early 2014. The last time he’d unpacked an ammunition shipment was August 20, 2013. Securing the arms pipeline was one issue, what happened to those guns inside Syria perhaps the bigger problem. Some rebel warlords stockpiled and sold what Idris provided. He despised some of these civilians-turned-warlords, and they in turn detested his past military service. “They are upset that Bashar is pillaging Syria only because it means they can’t,” Idris said of them. “They are stockpiling, thinking Bashar will soon fall, and after that, they will need to flex their power to get a piece of what Bashar lost.”
In early 2014, it became worse for Idris after the FSA’s emergency stockpile of weapons and ammunition—the strategic reserve he kept in a warehouse near the Bab al-Hawa border crossing—was stolen by rebels. Soon afterward, Idris was dethroned in an FSA coup within the so-called leadership body. Meanwhile, covertly, the Americans, via the Central Intelligence Agency, had, since mid-2013, been working on a new mechanism for the distribution of arms and ammunition. It was code-named Timber Sycamore.
AFTER YEARS OF being on the sidelines of the Syrian uprising, the Americans, via the CIA, moved into the lead. The program began with the delivery of nonlethal aid—including the uniforms and radios that General Salim Idris had once scorned—a means for the Americans to establish relationships and the reliability of certain rebels, and to set up supply lines. Within months, toward the end of 2013, the White House approved amending Timber Sycamore to allow lethal assistance. The northern and southern fronts of the insurgency were to be fed from across the Turkish and Jordanian borders, respectively. In Turkey, this new operations room was known as the MOM, for Müşterek Operasyon Merkezi, while its Jordanian counterpart was called the MOC, the Military Operations Command. Unlike Okab Sakr’s Istanbul Room, the Joint Command, or the Supreme Military Council, this newest attempt to coordinate and supervise the flow of arms and ammunition was not staffed with Syrians. Instead, it gathered representatives of several states and their intelligence agencies, including the United States, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Jordan, France, and the UAE. The CIA chose, vetted, and trained select Syrian armed groups, while the MOM/MOC provided them with money and weapons, including—for the first time—US-made TOW antitank missiles from Saudi stockpiles. It was all highly secretive.
Abu Hashem’s Hazm Movement, the new incarnation of Farouq—with its four thousand fighters across Idlib, Aleppo, Hama, and Homs Provinces, as well as parts of the Damascene countryside—was entrusted with the first advanced US weaponry to enter the Syrian battlefield, the TOWs. The group’s commanders had presented the Turks and Americans with a blueprint for their new faction many months ahead of its formal announcement on January 25, 2014. “It was a complete program for a new future army and social movement,” said one of Hazm’s leading commanders. The proposal was divided into phases: the current military effort to topple the regime; then a postconflict transition in which Hazm’s military units would be incorporated into a new national army, and its political component transformed int
o a party in a civil state. “The CIA said, ‘Go ahead, we’ll support you.’ They gave us the green light.”
The CIA vetting was done in batches of between fifty to a hundred Syrians, mainly in southern Turkish hotels and sometimes on the training bases. A few hundred of Hazm’s four thousand men went through the process. Almost all passed the CIA screening. “You could count them on your fingers, the ones who were rejected from all five training rounds,” Abu Hashem said. The Hazm fighters were flown to camps in Qatar and Saudi Arabia for three weeks of instruction on the types of Russian-made light weapons many had been using for years. No more than sixty members of Hazm were trained in operating TOWs. The fighters returned to Syria with new uniforms and monthly salaries of between $100 and $150 a man.
The MOM was based in Turkey, not far from Reyhanlı. Representatives from Hazm, and later other Syrian groups, were expected to present detailed battlefield strategies, including the amount and type of ammunition required. Requests were evaluated by the MOM’s member states. Maps were studied, satellite imagery consulted. It was more of a war room than any of its earlier incarnations, and one that intended to enforce accountability and ensure weapons didn’t end up in nonvetted hands. New TOW missiles were only provided after spent TOW casings were returned. Each launch had to be recorded, the videos of their use submitted to the MOM. Salaries were paid out in fresh $100 bills. Hazm’s monthly budget averaged $500,000 and later expanded to $700,000. “We were comfortable,” a former Farouq commander in Hazm said. At least initially. The MOM was soon plagued, however, by the same problems that affected earlier attempts to streamline supplies: The foreign states played favorites with groups on the ground, picking their teams. “Some states back plans to support factions that are in its interests and its worldview, not the revolution,” Abu Hashem once said. “We, the Syrians, are still a playground for everyone.” Bureaucracy inside the MOM delayed battles. Events on the ground could change within hours, but plans sometimes took weeks to get approval, deliveries of weapons and ammunition just as long.
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