Abu Azzam had left the FSA’s military councils and regretted ever having been part of them, of command bodies that were façades, hostage to foreign powers. He paid the rent through a few hours of Arabic-language instruction at a local school for Syrian refugee children. Months earlier, in the winter before his teaching job, he and his family had smuggled themselves back across the border into the Aleppan countryside. He was ashamed that he had let death threats cement him in Turkey. His life and death, after all, were in God’s hands. Why, he wondered, had the university student who entered Baba Amr without a gun, at a time when doing so meant “walking in dead,” become a commander-in-exile afraid of dying? He returned to Syria to see what he could do, because, he said, “I don’t want to stand before God one day and say I didn’t search for that opportunity.”
He entered Syria to fight Islamic State but returned to Turkey a week later, convinced that IS was “the most honorable” group on the ground. He went to Azaz, a town in the Aleppan countryside. At the time, it was a front line against Islamic State. The many factions aligned against ad-Dawla, he said, were “thieves in every sense of the word. Frankly, they were worse than the regime. I looked around me and thought, Islamic State is cleaner than them, a thousand times cleaner, even though you know how much I dislike them and the bad blood between us.” Yes, he admitted, some of his Farouq fighters “dipped their hand into the money at the border crossing, and some took from people and I looked the other way because I didn’t have the money to feed them,” but what he saw in Azaz and across northern Syria was something else. “Banditry! Banditry! Banditry!” he said. “My worst men, if you compared them to the best emirs of the groups in Azaz, would seem like companions of the Prophet.”
One of the measures of a man, he said, was “to speak the truth and what is right even if it contradicts himself.” The truth, he’d come to believe, was that life in Islamic State’s caliphate was better than in FSA- or Nusra-controlled zones. “At the very least, civilians in ad-Dawla areas deal with one faction, not the chaos of elsewhere. There’s no looting or stealing, civilians are safe except from Russian and American and regime planes.” That’s what his wife’s family in IS-controlled Tabqa told him, as did his many other friends and relatives living in the east.
Islamic State’s errors, Abu Azzam said, were the errors of individual commanders, not policy. “I suffered a lot because of this faction. They declare people like me apostates for no reason, but I won’t taint them all. When I see that ad-Dawla is removing the oppressors within its ranks and putting better people in place, I am prepared to join it. I was taught to hate the mistake, not the wrongdoer, especially if the wrongdoer fixes his errors.”
He insisted that he hadn’t fundamentally changed. “Did I say before that I didn’t want Islam and now I do?” he asked. “What has changed is that I’m seeing a difference in the running of areas based on the emir in charge. Some are better than others. Ad-Dawla made many mistakes and I am not hiding their faults, but, all in all, they are the most honorable faction fighting on the ground.”
In August, a daughter joined Abu Azzam’s family. Over the summer before her birth, he’d become more convinced of Islamic State’s path. US and Russian air strikes that killed civilians in his hometown and other parts of the east angered him. Only IS stood against the foreign aggressors, he said, even though IS’s presence had drawn the air strikes.
He didn’t agree with everything Islamic State did—not its sexual enslavement of Yazidi women, nor its imposition of a female dress code, although he advocated conservative dress, but not forcing it. He still believed in choice. He had a ready answer for some of the group’s other actions, like beheadings, which, he said, were “more merciful” than other ways to die because nerves were quickly cut, dulling pain. The aim of the punishments was also to “plant terror in the hearts of their enemies the same way their enemies are doing it with their planes and rockets and drones.” Even the muhajireen he once despised weren’t that bad, he said. “They shouldn’t have been allowed to take control of areas and battalions instead of the sons of the country. Many mistakes were made because many of them didn’t understand Arabic. But, in the end, all those who have come to defend us, we cannot but thank them. We should have restricted their entry, but it wasn’t in our hands, it was international policy. Why did the Turks let them cross?”
His wife was pleased with his views. She wanted to go home. “If my husband could return, I’d return tomorrow,” Alaa said, “and if he can’t come with me, I’ll leave him and go alone, but I fear for my husband. He needs to resolve his situation.” Islamic State still considered him an apostate. He petitioned its members, via WhatsApp, to clear his name.
“Many won’t understand my words for sure, because they don’t understand our religion. I want my religion to rule me,” said Abu Azzam. “I’ve told you many times that I won’t force anybody to live a certain way. Why do those who disagree with me want to force me to live like them? My conviction is that there is no solution except Sharia, and I’ve been honest about that and I’m not embarrassed to say that because Islam doesn’t oppress anyone. If there are mistakes, it is in the application and interpretation,” he said. “If I will be considered an extremist because I follow my religion, then fine, I’m an extremist and I’m proud of it. At the end of the day, we will all die and meet our maker. God Almighty will judge, no one else.”
In November 2016, Abu Azzam, his wife, and their two children crossed into Syria. He intended to fight to the death but was unsure of which group to join. “If I see that ad-Dawla or Nusra or Ahrar [al-Sham] or the Free Army or whatever group you want to talk about returns to working the way we were before, any faction, I will join it,” he said.
“If I live long enough, one day I will tell my son what happened, the same way I have told you,” Abu Azzam said before he left Turkey. “By the grace of God, I will die a martyr because I came out for a cause. My cause was to remove the injustice from the people. I don’t want to die anywhere except Syria, and God will know that I did not pick up arms to glorify myself. On the contrary.”
SALEH
Saleh, the former member of Jabhat al-Nusra’s inner circle, was in a European city where he didn’t live, a neutral location where we’d agreed to meet. Wearing rust-colored skinny pants and a gray polo shirt, he looked like a hipster, not a one-time confidant of Syria’s Al-Qaeda leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani.
He’d defected from Nusra with Jolani’s tacit blessing, claiming to have left his old life behind. In the year since he’d fled, he’d added two European languages to his English and Arabic, busying himself, he said, “with learning something, anything, to quiet the thoughts in my head.” He reflected on Nusra’s mistakes, on his path to militant Islamism, and a Syria he’d worked to cloak in black. “Now I can see the whole chessboard; before, I was a piece,” he said. “I wasn’t a regular soldier, I was with the command. I saw things,” he said, pausing for a long while. “There are many people we oppressed.”
With distance, he saw that members of the Free Syrian Army weren’t the kuffar, infidels, he’d been conditioned to despise, the men Nusra planned to destroy after the fall of the regime. Nusra was just as unscrupulous as the groups he’d self-righteously berated, and could be as ruthless as Islamic State. It killed Muslims and non-Muslims alike, it stole from civilians and institutions. It had commanders hungry for power and money, driven by ego and fame, men who Saleh said “wanted to be the next Osama bin Laden,” who could kill a friend as easily as drink a sip of water. The infighting with Islamic State proved that. That was Saleh’s breaking point: “We were brothers and days later we were killing each other,” he said. “I started wondering, what are people like this made of?”
He sneaked into a Europe that feared men like him, a Europe that, after absorbing millions of refugees, was shifting right, under pressure to close its doors after terror attacks in France and Belgium to keep men like him from slipping in. Saleh had been an aide to Syria’
s Al-Qaeda leader. He claimed he’d discarded his ideology, along with his nom de guerre, that Europe had taught him to live and let live, that he wasn’t a threat. “I have no problem now with all of these people walking in the street. Before, when I first became a Salafi Jihadi, I had a problem with everyone who wasn’t like me. It was planted in me—why is this woman not in a hijab? Why is this woman in heavy makeup? But I am not a God to hold people accountable. If I consider things wrong, I learned that I should not do them, but others can do as they please. Neither I, nor Jolani, nor Osama bin Laden could change anything, and when they controlled things, they became Daesh, killing Muslims before non-Muslims. What I’ve seen here in Europe, of the kuffar, as we used to call them, I’ve met people who are so much better than the people I met in jihad. They mind their own business and are respectful of others.” But did he mean it? Could a man like that really change?
He had entered the world of Salafi Jihadism in his late teens, exposed to the banned writings of Islamist leaders before he was detained, just shy of his nineteenth birthday. “I was a kid,” he said, jailed with Al-Qaeda members. “Sednaya [Prison] made me what I became.” A six-year sleep ended when the regime opened his cell door in 2011. With Syria in the throes of revolution, he formally joined his freed cellmates in Al-Qaeda. “Ten years of my life like this,” he said, “I haven’t lived a normal day. You know what I do now? I work in a restaurant. I clean tables after customers. I wipe them down. That’s my job and I’m happy doing it. When I wipe a table, I feel normal, like this is what a normal person might do.” It was also one of the only jobs he could get. “What was I going to put on my CV, that I’d graduated from a sniper training course?”
He had European friends who surprised him with the kindness they showed a Syrian refugee. His former Nusra colleagues didn’t know where he was. He avoided Syrians and other Arabs, lest they learn his background. Only his family knew his whereabouts. He had once been a Jabhat al-Nusra amni, a security agent, tasked with finding and surveilling Al-Qaeda’s enemies and defectors in Turkey—men like him. He knew what might happen if an amni found him. He didn’t dwell on it, although he had trouble sleeping, sometimes for days. A European friend introduced him to a psychiatrist, thinking he was traumatized from witnessing war, not knowing he had been a senior member of Al-Qaeda. Saleh attended a few sessions and then stopped. “What was the point?” he said. “I was lying to the doctor and to myself. I couldn’t tell him who I really was.” He had killed men in battle but said he never executed anyone. He had watched others do it, though, “many, many times.”
“Humanity died in Syria,” Saleh said. “I was dealing with monsters.” He wondered whether he was right to leave his country. He’d abandoned its children to Assad’s warplanes, he said, or to brainwashing by his former colleagues and Islamic State, or to drowning in the Mediterranean while trying to flee both. He still believed in a conservative Islam, in a future Syria that was “not like the Europeans and not like Daesh, something in between.” He was torn and confused. “I can’t speak to anyone except my family. You’ve known me for years now,” he said. “Be honest with me, do you think I made the right decisions?”
SULEIMAN
August 2016. Suleiman waited on the pavement outside his apartment, a one-bedroom, third-floor walkup in Heilbronn, Germany. He had moved out of the hostel and was once again a working man with a skilled job—a project manager at a logistics company. He was proud to earn money and pay taxes, to have German residency, to understand and be understood in a tongue that was not his. “I didn’t come here for handouts,” he said. “I just needed help for a few months, I wanted to work.” He had augmented a government-sponsored language course with his own studies in the public library, quickly gaining a fluency that enabled him to pass an advanced language class. He now taught Arabic at an institute in the evenings after work. Bandar, Abu Azzam’s friend, who lived in another part of Germany, was also teaching at an institute, helping new Syrian refugees learn German.
Suleiman paced the sidewalk, the summer sun raining heat on his head. It was a Saturday. Two of his German friends, a retired couple named Werner and Agnes, pulled up to the curb in a black BMW. Suleiman, clad in a crisp pink polo shirt and beige shorts, got into the backseat. They had met each other more than a year before, in March 2015, through a local initiative called the Contact Café, a place where refugees and their neighbors became friends. The café operated for just a few hours every Thursday afternoon, enough time for Suleiman to feel less isolated. He immediately bonded with Werner, an engineer, and Agnes, a teacher.
The German couple had sought out the Contact Café after seeing news reports about refugees in their country. “I thought we have to do something, we should help them,” Agnes said. For Werner, it started with small things—helping refugees fill out government forms and spruce up CVs, but it quickly developed into something deeper, especially with Suleiman, whom they started seeing regularly outside the café. “We really became friends not just to help him,” Werner said as he drove. “We talk about everything and we joke a lot, but not every day is he in the mood to laugh, but we try and keep him laughing. We learn from him, we learn about different cultures.”
Suleiman introduced them to Syrian dishes, shared photos of his family and of his new fiancée. He had become engaged to a Syrian refugee in Lebanon named Aime. She was a pharmacist, an old family friend who had escaped Syria three years earlier. Suleiman traveled to Lebanon in late 2015 to formalize the union. The engagement was a small affair—just his parents, her mother, and several aunts. The bride-to-be wore a tailored pink jacket over a black knee-length dress. Suleiman adorned her with gold bracelets and rings his mother had brought with her from Syria. His parents danced around him, his mother ululated and wished blessings upon the couple. Aime could not travel to Germany with Suleiman. She was stuck in Lebanon, waiting for a visa to Germany that was proving difficult to secure.
Werner drove past rows of vineyards on gently sloping hills, fields of rustling corn taller than a man. They were headed to Eppingen, another fairy-tale town some twenty-five kilometers away, to attend its eighteenth annual potato festival. The event opened with odes to the potato and the ceremonial tapping of a wooden beer keg, using a mallet. A Heilbronn MP made a speech and then joined his friends Werner and Agnes at their table. The MP sympathized with Suleiman’s plight. He too was a refugee, he said, a Croatian who fled the Balkans war with his family. But in the same breath, the MP linked refugees with Islamic extremism. Suleiman shifted uncomfortably. He despised the extremists who tainted his faith and was tired of constantly feeling that he had to prove he wasn’t like them. His phone’s ringtone used to be the Muslim call to prayer, and he didn’t think anything of it, but he changed it after noticing it made some people around him uncomfortable.
Werner sensed Suleiman’s unease. “Some people in Germany want to close borders, to live behind a wall,” he told the MP, “but we remember the Iron Curtain. It’s crazy to close ourselves off. What we have learned most about Syrians is their hospitality.”
“And their respect for elders,” his wife added.
The couple had made dinner reservations at a local landmark, Castle Ravensburg, ten minutes away in Sulzfeld. An inflamed sun was painting the sky pomegranate pink as Werner drove into the castle grounds. Suleiman walked ahead, toward the great stone walls of the medieval fortress, pausing at the entrance to watch a bride and groom exchange vows in the grounds near a vineyard.
“You know,” Agnes said, “I often think how difficult it is, how patient he is. Sometimes I think he’s okay, but most of the time he’s sad.”
“I often ask my German friends, ‘What would you do if you were Suleiman?’ ” Werner said. “A man with everything, who had a good job, he was a manager, his family around him, his community, and then he became a refugee. We cannot imagine.”
The bride and groom kissed to applause as their guests released heart-shaped balloons into the sky. Werner hugged Suleiman.
“Don’t worry,” he told him. “Aime will soon be here, and when she arrives we will return to this place and celebrate.” Suleiman smiled and nodded. He stared at the ground. “Inshallah,” he whispered.
On October 19, Aime received her visa.
NOTES
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It was February 23, 2011. Arab uprisings had claimed the Egyptian and Tunisian presidents and Libya’s leader was teetering. I was in Damascus that day to see how one of the Arab world’s most policed states was reacting to the changes around it. Bashar al-Assad had told the Wall Street Journal that Syria was stable. “Why?” he said, in an interview published on January 31, 2011. “Because you have to be very closely linked to the beliefs of the people. This is the core issue.” He was talking about his foreign policy.
I had entered Syria days earlier, legally but clandestinely (not via the Information Ministry, to avoid being saddled with government minders), and found a vantage point—a fast-food restaurant opposite the Libyan Embassy—that allowed me to loiter without suspicion while security forces assembled across the street. I was the only customer. I interviewed three of the fourteen men detained and released after that night’s protest, as well as others present.
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