It was old-school, on-site intelligence gathering: geolocation using mobile phones; close surveillance; photos of personnel, training camps, barracks, and checkpoints shot with Nikon DSLRs; eavesdropping devices planted near bases; and—when possible—recruitment of moles within factions or people close to them. The young Hazm operative, the former university student, had a monthly budget of $15,000, drawn from Hazm’s account, from which he paid salaries to his six cells. The CIA provided neither equipment nor training and did not request specific information. It took what it was given on flash drives the Hazm operative delivered in person to Americans, including women, who identified themselves as CIA agents. The exchanges—always in five-star hotel rooms—were most often in the southern Turkish city of Adana, home to the İncirlik Air Base and its US military presence, but sometimes in Ankara or Istanbul.
Latakia, part of Nusra emir Mohammad’s area of operations, with its high concentration of muhajireen, was a focal point. The Hazm agent communicated regularly with his sources, using the same enhanced Turkish cell-phone signal (thanks to new towers along the border) that Mohammad had relied on to send his daughter messages via WhatsApp.
In early 2014, the operative gave the CIA the GPS coordinates for the home of the Iraqi ISIS emir in Latakia, as well as the real-time movements of the Chechen Abu Omar al-Shishani, a former Georgian soldier-turned-senior-ISIS-emir responsible for all of northern Syria, who would become the ISIS overall military commander. “We had Omar al-Shishani’s exact location several times, with the make and color of his vehicle, and even the Skype address of his assistant,” the operative said. The information was relayed to the CIA immediately. “The Americans didn’t do anything about it. It was high-value information. The only other thing we could have topped it with was [ISIS leader Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi’s location.”
Detailed regional reports were updated monthly on Latakia, Raqqa, Aleppo, Deir Ezzor, Idlib, and specific towns within the provinces. They included pages of coordinates for ISIS barracks, Internet cafés, weapons warehouses and IED factories, checkpoints, training centers, and prisons—including the dungeon at the Tishreen Dam where Bandar had languished. The Hazm operative and his sources kept tabs on ISIS personnel, mapping out hierarchical command structures down to names of those who interacted with the regime’s fuel traders. They also monitored all of the muhajireen groups in Latakia who pushed into the eleven Alawite villages in August 2013, capturing the 106 Alawite women and children and tearing Talal’s family from him. They provided the CIA with details of satellite devices used by Chechen, Tunisian, and Moroccan emirs, including the serial numbers and locations of the devices. “I said, ‘Let’s bug the devices, sabotage them, do something to know what they’re planning,’ ” the Hazm operative said. “The Americans said no. I could get the photos but I couldn’t hack the devices. I am sure the Americans could.”
Hazm surveilled the Latakian bases of several different Chechen groups. In one muhajireen training camp, located in a well-worn clearing near olive trees, they photographed eleven men sitting in a circle around a bearded instructor with shoulder-length brown hair, identified as Abu Osama al-Amriki (“the American”).
Abu Osama was not of Arab heritage. “Abu Osama is a convert. He was a soldier, US Special Forces, and he became a Muslim in the Iraq War,” one of his Syrian colleagues fighting alongside him told me in Latakia. “He’s here with us and his family. He named his son Osama. He brings him to the training camp sometimes. The camp is open to mujahideen from other groups, too, it’s not just us.” Abu Osama was honored among jihadists. “His American wife doesn’t know how to speak Arabic. She converted, too,” said Abu Osama’s Syrian colleague. “You should see how they live, so humbly among us. Some of the shabab at first thought he might be a spy, but he has entrusted his family to our protection, knowing we can harm him and them if we suspect him. He is a respected brother.”
In April 2014, the Hazm operative and his reconnaissance teams noticed a new group of foreigners—Uighurs—moving into abandoned Alawite villages in Latakia. The four villages had been looted, the homes stripped of everything, including wooden shutters and electrical wiring. “Suddenly we noticed a few buildings had windows, newly installed. There’s a washing line, so somebody is now living in it. There’s a car. They weren’t many at first—they came in the dozens. We thought, ‘Who are these people?’ They didn’t have weapons or a flag, but in the next months they started carrying weapons, and more of them came,” the Hazm operative said. They soon numbered about four hundred and raised a banner over their settlements—the flag of the Turkistan Islamic Party.
With growing distress, the Hazm operative relayed his reports to Syrian colleagues and American contacts. “We watched as these foreigners took entire villages and nobody did anything, not Turkey or America or anyone, and we didn’t have the means to attack them, because we didn’t have a presence in Latakia,” he said. Hazm’s thirty-eight bases were mainly in Idlib, Aleppo, and Hama. The operative was getting frustrated with the Americans. “I told them, ‘We are providing you everything, exact locations of some high-value targets, but I don’t see that you’re doing anything with it.’ Even my agents on the ground said, ‘And? What now? What next? What are we doing? What’s the point?’ They were giving me information and I wasn’t sending them a silenced pistol to kill the targets, nor a team, nor air strikes. What’s the point of what we’re doing? It killed motivation.”
All he could do was monitor the groups, most of whom fought alongside Mohammad’s Jabhat al-Nusra. Many of their leaders were Mohammad’s friends. One day, the operative stumbled across a Nusra IED factory and a small training camp with a dozen tents, but, apart from noting it for future reference, he did little with that information. Nusra wasn’t the focus. And besides, its main training camp was elsewhere—in Ras al-Hosn, in Idlib Province.
JABHAT AL-NUSRA
The Ras al-Hosn camp, adjacent to the village cemetery, was the site where, in 2013, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had summoned Nusra’s emirs and slaughtered a Syrian officer midmeeting, shortly before he announced his intention to subsume the group into ISIS.
The Nusra emir in Ras al-Hosn was a local named Abu Ratib, in his early thirties and a father of three. He arrived at the Nusra checkpoint at the entrance to the town in a gray Mitsubishi Jeep with opaque windows. Abu Ratib’s area of operations extended to Atmeh, the Syrian town across from Turkey that served as a major conduit for foreign fighters. He agreed to speak to me in principle but first needed the permission of the general emir for Idlib Province, who oversaw Nusra’s nine other senior emirs, including Mohammad. The emir was traveling.
Abu Ratib drove to his home, nestled among olive trees with gnarled trunks contorted like dancers midpose, and scattered Byzantine ruins. I was to wait with his family in case he heard from the leader, who happened to be his brother. Abu Ratib’s wife, a harried twenty-seven-year-old with deep dimples that made her look younger, led me into the women’s room, where she spent most of the day with her children: two girls under three and a son born just sixty days earlier. Her mother-in-law sat on the carpeted floor, rocking her grandson from a swinging cot attached by rope to a hook in the ceiling.
Female neighbors joined them, trading news and gossip over coffee and dates. A local female doctor was killed by her husband, an Egyptian ISIS member, one woman said. He had branded her an apostate for working alongside a male colleague. “Now, who is going to treat us?” Abu Ratib’s wife asked. “They say he slit her throat,” a neighbor added. The emir’s mother relayed a story she’d heard from her sons about a woman who marched into their Nusra base recently: “She was hysterical, crying and screaming. She took off her hijab and said that she no longer wanted to be a Muslim.” The emir’s mother lowered her voice, as if embarrassed to continue: “She was forced to be with seven ISIS fighters, they married her one after the other on the same night.” It was gang rape. “This is not our religion,” the old lady said. The women tut-tutted and shook their
heads. “These men are not like our men,” said a neighbor.
I left the next morning and returned to Syria weeks later, on April 14, with formal permission to speak to Abu Ratib. Rather than head straight to Ras al-Hosn, I detoured to Kassab, a Syrian Armenian village along the Turkish border, a summer resort town that had fallen to a handful of Islamist rebels, including Nusra, in late March. I needed to see someone there.
ABU OTHMAN, Mohammad’s old cellmate in Palestine Branch, was in Kassab. He had escaped from ISIS. He sat on a plastic chair, alone on the flat rooftop of a two-story villa that Nusra had turned into a base. ISIS was easier to join than to leave. Abandoning it, as far as the organization was concerned, meant abandoning Islam—for which the penalty was death. ISIS hunted defectors.
Kassab was emptied of its people, some two thousand members of a centuries-old Armenian Christian community. A few elderly, too slow or sick or stubborn to flee, were evacuated to the borders of regime territory, or to Turkey, by the armed strangers who now occupied their homes. The town was taken without resistance. The strangers planted their black flags on balconies and lampposts, placed their improvised mortar—known as Hell Cannons, tall and black and tubular—among the shocks of yellow wildflowers and blood-red poppies carpeting the pretty hills. They shot up the crosses on the local church and turned the rectory into a Hayaa Shar’iya, an Islamist administrative body.
A Nusra checkpoint at the entrance to the town turned away everyone except fighters from the handful of Islamist groups that had taken Kassab. I was waved through. Abu Othman had returned to Jabhat al-Nusra. He had trimmed his once-chest-length beard, clipped his shaggy locks, discarded his nom de guerre and chosen another. He had served as a senior judge in an ISIS Sharia court in Aleppo. The group wasn’t the Islamic utopia he expected. He saw his chance to escape in the rebel backlash against ISIS in early 2014. The group was in retreat, his colleagues busy trying to survive and hold ground. He figured they wouldn’t notice if he slipped away, so one day, he said, “I just disappeared.”
He feared revenge from his many enemies—because he had been ISIS, because he had decided the fates of men in court, because he had defected. Paranoid by nature, he now was more so. He needed to leave Aleppo, so he turned to Mohammad, his old cellmate, who had long urged him to defect back to Nusra. Mohammad dispatched his two brothers to Aleppo to facilitate Abu Othman’s safe passage to Latakia. He placed his old friend in Kassab, among men who didn’t know his past.
ISIS had withdrawn from Latakia Province, simply disappeared one night in early March, abandoning its bases and everything in them. It was a covert, coordinated, and hasty withdrawal, one keenly noted by the Hazm operative in his reports. Mohammad appropriated a Mercedes sedan and a pair of BMPs (armored vehicles) from an ISIS base near him. He was glad they were gone. So was Abu Othman—a once-feared man who was now afraid. He peered over the edge of the rooftop, watched fighters in the garden lining up mortar rounds in shin-high grass. “If you’re going to ask me about ad-Dawla [the State] and my ties to it,” he began, “I was with it for a while, but I left because the Sharia I learned told me that ad-Dawla’s actions were incorrect. I cannot say more about what I think because I fear for myself.” Some of his new Nusra colleagues, he said, could be ISIS spies.
The conversation shifted, and then we moved to another border town, another Nusra home, another flat rooftop, this one belonging to a Sednaya graduate with whom Abu Othman felt more comfortable. He hadn’t left ISIS because of the group’s barbarity, he said. Abu Othman was not squeamish, he had killed men. He believed in the application of hudud punishments, which he viewed as a deterrent. “After one public punishment,” he said, “who will then steal? Sharia doesn’t mean walking around cutting off hands and crucifying people, because there’s no need for that after the first example.”
It wasn’t the punishments per se, it was the application of them. He said the courts where he’d served were a sham. “The judiciary was politicized in the interests of Daesh’s politics,” he said, using the Arabic acronym for the group. “In a real Islamic state, the word of the Shari’iy, of Sharia, is paramount. A judge’s ruling is supposed to be final and obeyed, but there were other sides, the group’s security agents, the amniyeen, who politicized the judiciary and imposed their views on it. I can’t accept this and they came to know it.”
If the amniyeen wanted a person disappeared, but with a religious cover and the suggestion of an institution at work rather than a silencer, the judges had to deliver that verdict. Religious novices and men unschooled in religion were elevated to senior positions based on their loyalty to ISIS. “They don’t want old ones like me, who have been Salafi Jihadis for years, members who are aware of our ideology, who have studied its books and teachers,” Abu Othman said. “They wanted people who would follow their orders and not know that they were wrong.”
For Abu Othman, Al-Qaeda’s disavowal of ISIS was a deep blow. He realized he was on the wrong side of a group whose ideology he had followed for more than fifteen years. “I was too afraid to speak against what they were doing,” Abu Othman said of ISIS. “There is a certain politics, and anybody who doesn’t follow it is killed or sidelined. They kill a lot of people,” he said, “and they kill for the slightest reasons. They make you feel that at any moment, they could easily kill you. Its end will come from within. There are many assassinations within their ranks, different factions. Some are more conservative than others, and they will clash and kill each other.”
Nusra, too, had problems. After its split with ISIS in 2013, it had hemorrhaged men and then relaxed its membership rules to make up for it. Even cigarette smugglers were accepted, despite the fact Nusra considered smoking a sin. Abu Othman, seated on the rooftop of the Nusra safe house along the border, grimaced at Nusra recruits who emerged from the Turkish scrub carrying empty burlap bags fashioned into long, rectangular backpacks. The bags were used to smuggle cigarettes from Syria, where a packet cost about 50 Syrian pounds, to Turkey, where they could sell it for 200.
“We’ll get to you,” Abu Othman told the men, shaking his head. Some of the recruits looked up, grinning, thinking the Shari’iy was joking about reprimanding them. Abu Othman did not smile back. “If we are to pick people the way we did before, Jabhat al-Nusra wouldn’t have more than four or five hundred people in all of Syria,” Abu Othman said. “These people, the new ones, they will not reach the level of decision making. They will be sent to a training camp for about a month, then into battles.”
Abu Othman had changed groups, but his goal remained the same—an Islamic state in Syria—as did his enmity for all those, local and foreign, who sought to prevent it. “God willing, we will implement Sharia in Syria,” he said, “and whoever stands against us we will fight, whoever it is—America or others. To America and its friends, Syria is a swamp for fighting and bloodshed, and let everyone associated with jihad come and work and die in Syria, that’s how America sees it, but the future leaders will come from Syria. This war will not [just] give rise to the next Osama bin Laden,” he said. “There will be Osamas.”
ON APRIL 14, as Abu Othman sat on a rooftop in Latakia, four armed men—three Tunisians and a Moroccan—sneaked through the olive groves of Ras al-Hosn and knocked on Abu Ratib’s door. His brother, the Nusra emir for Idlib Province, was also inside, bedridden, recuperating from a car accident. The door was opened. The muhajireen took a few short steps into the men’s room on the right, shot and killed Abu Ratib, his brother, and another man before continuing to the women’s room on the left. They sprayed it with bullets, killing Abu Ratib’s wife, three-year-old daughter, and thirteen-year-old niece and injuring most of the other children. Abu Ratib’s mother and baby son, hiding in another room, were unharmed. Nusra tracked the ISIS perpetrators to a nearby home. “Two of them blew themselves up, and that led to the death of the third,” Nusra said in a statement. The fourth was captured and executed. ISIS didn’t comment on the murders of the two Nusra emirs in Idlib.
Zawahiri eulogized his friend Abu Khalid and called for an end to the “strife of the blind” in Syria. “Everyone who has fallen into these sins must remember that they accomplish for the enemies of Islam what they could not accomplish by their own abilities,” Zawahiri said in a statement. His words, as before, fell flat on a battleground from which he was too far removed. In May, Zawahiri tried again. If only ISIS emir Baghdadi had stayed in Iraq, “which needs double its efforts,” the Al-Qaeda leader said, it could have avoided the “waterfall of blood” caused by the infighting in Syria. “Listen to and obey your emir once again,” Zawahiri said, addressing Baghdadi. “Come back to what your sheikhs, emirs, and those who preceded you on the path of jihad have worked hard for.”
In May, ISIS’s fire-breathing spokesman, the Syrian Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, sealed his group’s divorce from Al-Qaeda: “Apologies, emir of Al-Qaeda,” Adnani said, addressing Zawahiri, “ad-Dawla is not a branch that is subordinate to Al-Qaeda, nor shall there be a day where it is such.” If Zawahiri wanted to set foot in “the land of the Islamic State,” he needed to pledge allegiance to it and be a “soldier of its emir,” Baghdadi. It was Zawahiri who needed to “recognize [his] fault and correct it and change course,” Adnani said, not ISIS. Syria had precipitated what one of Nusra’s most senior sheikhs termed “the biggest rift in the global jihad since . . . the fall of the Caliphate” in 1924.
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