Nine Lives: My time as the West's top spy inside al-Qaeda

by Aimen Dean

  The ways of the Communist Party of the People’s Republic, I thought to myself. Inside the envelope was $25,000; a bonus in addition to the $25,000 I had been given before the Turkey trip. It was indeed agreeable, but I couldn’t escape a pang of guilt. I had no desire to see news reports that Abdul Majeed or Tumturk had been found dead with a bullet wound to the head.

  Outside, I caught up with my initial Chinese contact. She was, as always, immaculately turned out – wearing a lime green silk dress to her ankles.

  ‘How does someone like that become the head of counter-terrorism?’ I asked, splaying my hands wide.

  ‘Party politics,’ came the soothing reply. ‘He’s one of the old gang; they stick together.’

  A few days later, I sent the Chinese an encrypted email profuse with thanks but politely declining the proposal to return to Zeytinburnu. It was just too dangerous, I said, unless I had a budget to buy food and hire chefs, a way to reinforce my ‘legend’.

  Funding the enemy was a step too far in Beijing’s eyes.* But the Uighur pipeline into Syria continued to expand. Within three years, intelligence estimates had some 4,000 Uighurs of fighting age inside Syria – with another 3,000 family members. They were mainly based in Idlib, the stronghold of Jabhat al-Nusra.16 A few hundred had thrown in their lot with ISIS, and later died in their scores defending Mosul.

  The aftermath of 9/11 had touched every corner of the world; even China was not immune. The Taliban might have been ejected from Kabul, but their continuing resistance had provided the Uighurs with an escape route. How ironic that the government of Pakistan had gone with its begging bowl to Beijing seeking investment and trade even as its security services continued helping the Taliban on the quiet.

  But my dalliance with China’s security services would soon be overtaken by personal tragedy.

  Below me was Dubai in its extravagant modernity, the buildings piercing the late afternoon sky through a soup of haze. I wasn’t looking forward to my visit; pitching clients was one of my least favourite occupations.

  It was 5 September 2013. A glowering sun was sinking into the endless desert of Saudi Arabia. An hour earlier I had left Bahrain with a sense of unease that I could not explain. And now I had to face the prospect of glad-handing corporate climbers who knew nothing about the Middle East (beyond the Gulf property market) and cared less.

  Sometimes I was annoyed by this bubble of ostentatious wealth in the Emirates. I looked out at the rest of the Arab world – Yemen, Iraq, Libya, above all Syria – and saw the suffering and chaos that the Gulf States had only aggravated with their billions and their ‘favoured parties’.

  As the plane taxied to its stand, I flipped out my phone. Fifty-six WhatsApp messages? All but two were from a family group created to keep the Durrani clan connected across time zones and lifestyles. I read the first from a cousin in Saudi Arabia.

  ‘Deepest condolences on the martyrdom of Ibrahim.’

  I didn’t understand and hurried down the chain. Dozens more messages.

  ‘Sadness and pride Ibrahim should have sacrificed his life with such bravery.’

  ‘Too young to be accepted by God . . .’

  As my fellow passengers began the usual scramble to the exit, I buried by head in my hands.

  Ibrahim had been killed somewhere in Syria, his youthful idealism cut down before his twentieth birthday.

  I didn’t know where or why or how, just that he was now gone.

  I cursed the era of the app. A private phone call, words of warning and preparation, a sympathetic voice would have been more dignified than a stream of messages to decipher, piecing together a tragedy from the discontinuous reaction to it.

  I wearily picked myself up and left the plane, avoiding the quizzical glances of the cabin crew. Everyone else was long gone, rushing to their next appointment or a connecting flight. But the life had been kicked out of me. I wandered in a daze through the bustling terminal, oblivious to all but my private grief.

  I had spoken with Ibrahim just a few days earlier. The Skype call kept breaking up, but we had persevered. Now every word came back to me. He was happy, full of news from the battlefield, confident in the cause. He had the optimism of a young man who felt he could change the world. I remembered the feeling. I was in a way proud of him for following his beliefs, but my pride was vastly outweighed by alarm at his naivety and the growing savagery of the Syrian conflict.

  Years earlier, we had talked about his passion for graphic design and Photoshop, and I had encouraged him to pursue his studies in England, even offering advice on courses and places. Now I only wished bitterly that I had pursued the idea with greater vigour.

  I cancelled my meetings for that evening in Dubai. The thought of a bunch of dry MBAs in expensive suits discussing margins and square footage was too awful. I wanted to mourn alone. As I gazed out of the hotel window at Dubai’s glittering night skyline, I felt somehow comforted by its anonymity, the cloak of solitude and silence. I watched the lights in anonymous living rooms and offices flicker on and off, and felt gnawing guilt. Had my own experiences encouraged my nephew – even subconsciously – to follow in my footsteps? I had left suburban peace to travel to Bosnia and fight for the mujahideen against the hated Serbs only days after my sixteenth birthday. I had desired martyrdom more than anything else.

  Had I said anything to Ibrahim that had driven him to emulate me? Had Moheddin told Ibrahim of my adventures in Afghanistan, of my joining al-Qaeda and meeting Osama bin Laden himself? Among some of my family, that was still something to be celebrated rather than denied.

  I recalled a previous chat on the family WhatsApp group. Moheddin had started it – saying that Syria had become the new Bosnia because so many foreign fighters had gone there.

  ‘Problem with Arab Jihadis wherever they go . . .’ I had responded. ‘They do 2 things . . . they take a national struggle and make it an ideological one. Then they want to lead instead of allowing locals to.’

  Moheddin had joined in.

  ‘So you think they should leave?’

  ‘No, they shouldn’t leave but they must not lead. They need to fit in with what Syrians want to do.’

  The discussion had become heated. Moheddin said I was accepting colonial boundaries, to which I’d replied that I was thinking more of ethnic and tribal identities.

  Now I wished I’d simply said: ‘Yes, they should leave – not their business.’

  At that moment, my phone rang. I glanced at the number. It was Moheddin calling from Bahrain. I breathed deeply, bracing myself.

  He was in tears, of course. I was embarrassed and troubled to hear him so broken and at a loss for words. Within seconds, I felt the tears rolling down my cheeks, too.

  Eventually, he told me what had happened. Ibrahim and a few other fighters had been defending a hilltop position near Areha in Idlib. There had been a surprise attack by regime forces, supported by Iranian militia and Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon. Ibrahim and his comrades had been hopelessly outgunned; the attackers had 23mm anti-aircraft guns and had created a dust storm to confuse them. Then they had come up the hill from the other side.

  ‘Ibrahim and his men thought the guys coming up the hill were reinforcements, so they lowered their guard,’ my brother said, sighing sadly. ‘They were overwhelmed. The enemy was able to close in and killed them.’

  The next day, other fighters had retaken the position and retrieved the bodies of Ibrahim and the two fighters killed with him. They’d been buried in a village near Saraqib.

  As Moheddin recovered his composure his pain suddenly became pride.

  ‘Ibrahim had the courage of a lion; he deserves his place in paradise and he has made his family proud. No death is more honourable than one waging jihad. And he went because he was answering the call of the Prophet.’

  I had thought the same thing in Bosnia, Afghanistan and the Philippines.

  As I listened to Moheddin’s tribute to his own son, I saw the rhythmic flashing lights of a jet dri
fting upward from the international airport and at that moment made up my mind. I would go to Ibrahim’s graveside in Syria to pay my respects. It was morally the right thing to do. But because some in al-Qaeda knew me as a traitor, it was also a rash and dangerous thing to do.

  The following day, I contacted an old friend in Turkey, Orcan, who ran a lucrative smuggling business across the border. We had been in Bosnia together nearly twenty years previously; he also knew Moheddin. Now in his late forties, his relatively youthful features were betrayed by a beard that was almost white.

  ‘My nephew has been killed in Idlib,’ I told Orcan over the phone. ‘I want to go and pay my respects at his grave.’

  There was a moment’s silence.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked, more aware than most of the chequerboard of rival groups that competed in northern Syria. ‘Some people there would kill you if they see you.’

  He knew that I had long ago given up al-Qaeda.

  ‘I am offering you $1,000 to get me in.’

  There was a sigh at the other end of the line.

  ‘You will have to shave your beard off and I need $200 for bribes.’

  ‘I’ll keep my moustache and a goatee,’ I replied, reflecting on how surreal our conversation was becoming. I had hated being clean-shaven; it had lasted all of six months.

  His orders, no doubt intended to dissuade me, continued.

  ‘You will leave your phone, your passport, anything that identifies you, in Antakya,’ a Turkish border town where he then lived. ‘You will need to avoid al-Nusra and the Khorasani.’

  ‘And the who?’ I asked. It was the first time I had heard about the Khorasan group, a cell of al-Qaeda veterans who had moved to Syria in an effort to make it a springboard for attacks on the West.* There were not many of them, but they were in the area I intended to visit, around Idlib. And I had known one or two of them in a previous life. I would not be able to explain myself should we meet.**

  I spent a few days kicking my heels in Antakya (modern-day Antioch), a pleasant town in the Turkish province of Hatay framed by steep hills with the broad Orantes river cutting it into two halves. Its old quarter had been preserved and restored in an effort to encourage tourism. But just as Vienna had become a place of intrigue and espionage after the Second World War, so the rivalries of the Syrian conflict had seeped across the border and into Antakya. There were plenty of men idling in cafés who looked at best dubious.

  Orcan collected me in his battered Peugeot and we made our way to Bab el-Hawa, one of the few crossings still functioning, a place where aid trucks queued to get into Idlib province and wounded fighters came the other way in dusty ambulances. Getting across was surprisingly easy; you just had to know the right border officials.

  As a regular visitor to northern Syria, Orcan was well known at some of the checkpoints, which was reassuring. But the sands were shifting so quickly that a roadblock could spring up or a village change hands unexpectedly. Orcan was always checking the insignia at roadblocks.

  I was nervous and alert but not frightened. What will be will be, I thought; my power to change destiny was nil.

  As we drove towards Sarmada, the first place of any consequence inside Syria, Orcan reached under the driver’s seat and pulled out a pistol – a Beretta.

  ‘If it all goes wrong,’ he said drily, ‘use it. At least you’ll go down fighting.’

  ‘It’s loaded,’ he added unnecessarily.

  I checked the safety catch and slid it into the glove compartment.

  There were a few moments of silence.

  ‘We’re at a difficult moment,’ he continued. ‘Loyalties, territory – they are, shall we say, fluid. If we are stopped, be cheerful, greet the guards at the checkpoints. You are a Palestinian Kuwaiti and you’ve come here because you’ve heard your nephew has been killed.’

  The Kuwaitis were generous donors to al-Nusra; it made sense.

  I knew he was taking a huge risk in escorting me: if we were stopped by the wrong people and they suspected me, his life would be in as much danger as mine.

  We jolted over a few more potholes; a pickup truck passed us, loaded with goats that gazed at us as if somehow asking what on earth we were doing here.

  ‘This Islamic State – it’s emerging everywhere. And some of Nusra have defected to it; we just don’t know which,’ Orcan said.

  As we might encounter Nusra checkpoints, this was not comforting. ISIS was developing a reputation for extreme brutality. A few weeks earlier, Orcan told me, a commander in the moderate Free Syrian Army had been beheaded in the town of Dana, which we were about to pass through.

  With a sigh of relief, we negotiated Dana without incident and drove on into the open countryside.

  It was by now mid-September and the weather was glorious: warm, glowing days under azure skies so at odds with the destruction in the towns and villages we passed through. We moved from one safe house to another.

  Orcan turned left and right on dusty tracks and minor roads.

  ‘Why are we zigzagging across Idlib?’ I asked. ‘We don’t have that much time.’

  ‘I want to avoid Nusra checkpoints; pass through Ahrar al-Sham territory wherever possible.’

  Ahrar al-Sham was an Islamist group with Turkish backing; it didn’t have the fearsome reputation of al-Nusra.

  Orcan preferred attack as the best method of defence when we came to a checkpoint in the middle of nowhere.

  He pulled up and wound down his window, presenting ID to the scruffy youth on duty.

  ‘Where’s his ID?’ the boy asked, nodding in my direction.

  ‘You don’t want to mess with this guy,’ Orcan said laughing. ‘He’s very important.’

  The checkpoints we came to were mostly run by Ahrar al-Sham and sympathetic. ‘God bless you, brother’ was the phrase we heard time and again. In the years to come, the group would have its guts ripped out by ISIS and al-Nusra.

  From Dana we drove south to Atarib, another place that might have been a picturesque market town once but was now pulverized by war. We bunked down for the night in a small apartment above a shop. Orcan told me some local Nusra fighters were staying in the same building so I thought it best to keep a low profile.

  Shortly after I woke up the next morning, there was a commotion in the building.

  I went to the window. A faint whirr in the sky became more distinct, though we could see nothing.

  We heard the shouts first. ‘Baramil, baramil!’ – barrel bombs.

  All across Syria, these crude but powerful bombs dropped from regime helicopters provoked terror among ordinary people, who bore the brunt of their random destruction. The weapon had no purpose but to maim and terrorize civilians; it was good at both.

  A detonation shook our building and an immense mass of yellow-grey smoke – the shape of a cauliflower – took over the horizon.

  ‘My God,’ said Orcan.

  We saw the Nusra fighters leave our building and run towards the nearby smoke.

  ‘It’s safer to be outside than in,’ Orcan said, beckoning me to follow.

  We followed the Nusra fighters. Men covered in sweat and dust were running towards the scene with shovels and picks. A fire truck’s brown hose snaked across the road. People were running from neighbouring houses.

  Choking dust filled the air. I coughed uncontrollably; my throat felt parched and caked.

  ‘We must help,’ Orcan said.

  We ran towards what remained of a two-storey house which had been sheared in two by a barrel bomb. A woman – a mother, sister or aunt – was screaming and beating her head. I looked at the mass of pancaked concrete and thought that no one could have survived such an impact.

  The shout went up again – ‘Baramil!’ Another explosion shook me to the core and seconds later – almost gracefully – another mass of smoke and dust rose over the town.

  I had seen death before – on the hillside in Bosnia and in the aftermath of an explosion gone wrong at Darunta. I had seen what exp
losives, mortars and shells could do to the human frame, rendering a body unrecognizable, shredding it. Nothing prepared me for this scene, in a town of ordinary people: these were not fighters but women and children as well as men.

  Despite the horror I could not turn away; somehow I needed to see what had happened. A girl, limp and lifeless, perhaps six or seven years old, was carefully picked from the rubble. I will never forget her tousled black hair made grey by the dust, nor the arms of the man who carried her gingerly from the scene, tears streaming down his face.

  Perhaps even more distressing were the anguished cries of children, carried away in unspeakable pain, limbs nearly separated from their bodies. I knew – the men carrying them knew – there was little other than prayer that could be offered for them. These places had no hospitals or clinics; by the time they reached what passed for a hospital in Saraqib they would be gone.

  I was consumed with a fury that I had never known before, one that outstripped my anger over the tragedy of Fallujah nearly a decade earlier. It was a raw lust for revenge against the Assad regime. I now understood why these people would go on fighting; they were driven by rage against an almost casual genocide.

  Two hours later, we finally left Atarib; there was nothing more to be done. Perhaps a dozen people had been killed – the merest fleck in a war that would count its dead in the hundreds of thousands.

  For what seemed like hours, we drove in silence. Several times I felt tears well up as my mind repeated the image of the little girl being lifted from the wreckage. I clenched my fists until the knuckles were white.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said at last, ‘I will stay here and fight, like my cousin and nephew.’

  Orcan turned to me in astonishment. He, too, was on the verge of tears.

  ‘If you stay here, someone will find out your true identity soon enough and the jihadis will kill you. And what does it achieve?’ he sighed. ‘Nothing.’

  Numbed by what we had seen, we arrived in the town of Saraqib in the late afternoon. It was not far from my destination, a field that had become an improvised cemetery near the village of Kafr Nabl. We took refuge in a safe house belonging to a local charity.