As Washington rolls out the red carpet today for the former al-Qaeda chieftain and now Syrian president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, Syria’s minorities continue to live in terror. An army of destruction, half Mad Max, half Lollapalooza is rolling through the desert somewhere south of the country’s capital, Damascus. Who has ordered these militants into action? No one knows. What do they want? It isn’t clear. But, as a former prisoner of al-Sharaa’s band of jihadists, I can’t say I’m surprised by what is unfolding in Syria.
Whatever else might be said about the old regime of Bashar al-Assad, no one was ever in doubt as to who was in charge. There were statues of al-Assad on roundabouts, billboards plastered with his face on the highways and pop hits on the radio (“O Bashar, the lofty brow, but who is like you?”). These weren’t masterpieces by any means, but they had a certain catchiness to them, and so, over time, they settled into everyone’s mental jukebox. The old power wished to govern a particular place, namely Syria, and to preside over a particular people, namely Arabs, as the national anthem, Protectors of the Realm, was at such pains to point out.
The power looming over the nation’s minorities at the moment has no such properties. Many of the foreign fighters still in Syria drifted in at the beginning of the civil war, 14 years ago. Often enough, those fighters burned their passports on arrival. It is hard to know who they are.
Whoever the culprits, the violence is unmistakable. The powers that have been coming for the Druze over the past few months have also been targeting the Christian community in Syria, which is living through a period of danger unlike anything that has befallen eastern Christianity for over a century. The worst of the anti-Christian violence occurred last June at the Mar Elias Church in Damascus, when an attacker opened fire on the congregation. He killed 25 people before killing himself.
As I was frequently subjected to fake executions, I spent most of my first year in a state of shock and awe
The Alawites are also in jeopardy. A mixture of government and civilian forces, amounting to some 200,000 fighters, descended on the Alawite homeland, along the Syrian coast, in March and April. The massacres there appear to have left at least 1,500 people dead. In July, when a similar mixture of government and irregular forces attacked the Druze capital, Sweyda, they killed some 1,400 people, of whom 765, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, were civilians “summarily executed by defense and interior ministry personnel.”
Anyone who visited Syria before the war will be familiar with the spirit that animates this violence. In the time of al-Assad, whenever the propaganda division wanted to haunt the national imagination, it depicted sectarian strife as a big-bellied gourmand sitting down for a feast. The nation of Syria was laid out before this creature like a meat pie. The cartoons depicted him, bloody knife in hand, about to carve the country into bits. That dark prophecy is alive in al-Sharaa’s Syria.
I happen to know something about what it’s like to live under the power of Islamist extremist rule. In the autumn of 2012, during an ill-fated reporting trip in Syria, a band of jihadis, led by Syria’s then al-Qaeda chief, Mohammed Jolani, now better known as al-Sharaa, took me prisoner. In those days, he and his deputy, Mohammed Adnani, presided over a caliphate-in-miniature which operated out of the basement of the Aleppo eye hospital. Adnani subsequently became famous for his behead-the-journalists-in-the-desert videos, and for directing the November 2015 attacks in Paris.
Almost right away, during the first hours after my arrest, I was told that Islam holds creation to be divided between the realm of the seen and that of the unseen. As Adnani was my first interrogator, I happened to hear his rantings about this important topic most often. In his view, ever since the arrival of the very first Alawite in Syria in the ninth century, the members of this only-in-Syria sect had been inflicting their barbarism and ignorance on the nation. Through the centuries, according to him, the Alawites had lied so subtly, sabotaged Islam so relentlessly and when all else failed, simply terrorized the people, that, eventually, those who truly loved Islam had been forced into hiding. Adnani and al-Sharaa were going to escort all of Syria out of its thousand years of darkness, into the light.
As I was often held by myself in a windowless cell, I was never permitted out of it without a blindfold. And as I was frequently subjected to fake executions, I spent most of my first year in a state of shock and awe. After about 500 days, however, the effect wore off. By that point, I had been transferred to a prison somewhere on the banks of the Euphrates, in eastern Syria. By then, the little family of terrorists I had encountered at first in a warren of rooms beneath a ruined Aleppo hospital was no longer so little. Thanks to an ingenious social media footprint and a “cataract” of American weaponry, as this New York Times article (which I did not have occasion to read at the time) put it, the family now controlled an area the size of Texas.
What does life inside an international terrorist organization feel like during its rapid growth phase? It feels like young men who’ve been shunted to the side since childhood – who’ve been poor and rootless and frightened of the police – are coming into their own at last. They are up to their ears in guns, combat vests, grenades, and two-way radios. Each one of these young men dreams of a little Playboy mansion in the desert: the four wives, the children underfoot, the loving community all around. In Syria, especially for the fighters who have access to money from Europe, it’s not so hard to make this particular dream come true.
In a contemporary caliphate, among the fighters at least, much feasting goes on. There is singing. The happiness in the air, the resolve to do away with Syria’s three million Alawites once and for all, the high-tech western weapons, the half-suicidal, half-homicidal foreign fighters: when you live within these phenomena long enough, you will eventually feel that you have drifted away into a country which is just being born, which the outside world has never seen and cannot fathom. You will note how often the citizens here call up the old world on the phone, how they miss it and how much time everyone spends assembling improvised explosive devices.
An al-Qaeda official in Syria who I remember lecturing a roomful of prisoners he was about to execute on charges of apostasy is now a senior minister
Eventually, you will feel about this parallel world as you might feel about a novel in which a high school student – a clairvoyant, let’s say – is laughed at for some essential element of herself, and so withdraws into a netherworld of spirits and spells. The reader of a novel like this might not know how exactly the climactic scene will unfold but long before the spectacular bloodbath arrives, he will feel it coming. Life inside the growth phase of an international terrorist organization is like waking up to find that everyone you know is the lead character in such a novel.
One night in July of 2014, I was let out of my cell. A kerfuffle over who was entitled to the revenue from Syria’s oil fields had broken out. During the subsequent forced march out of eastern Syria, we drove through the desert, always at night, and always without lights. Just before dawn, we would stop at the mouth of a cave or at the base of a sand dune in order to drink tea and catch a few hours of kip.
At least a few of the pick-up drivers who escorted us have since become generals occupying plush offices in downtown Damascus. An al-Qaeda official in Syria who I remember lecturing a roomful of prisoners he was about to execute on charges of apostasy is now a senior minister. On the surface of things, it would appear that the revolution has turned everything in Syria on its head. But have things really changed all that much? I, for one, am skeptical.
Looking back, I suspect that in the summer of 2014, when I was traveling through the desert, the nation had already slipped from al-Assad’s grasp. During the day, his men controlled certain checkpoints. But at night, bands of clairvoyants in pickup trucks roamed the countryside. Somewhere, far away, in a palace on a bluff overlooking Damascus, a president who liked to play both sides off against the middle received foreign dignitaries. He smiled for the cameras. Did he know what was going on in his own backyard? Did he care? It wasn’t clear. Meanwhile, every day, a stream of young Europeans keen on guns, pick ups and being married to four women at once was trickling into the country.
The old stream has begun to flow again, according to a report in Le Figaro. In 2014, some of the men with whom I traveled through the desert were keen on the idea of the slave girl. The markets which used to traffic in Yazidi women are now trafficking in Alawite women. “The matter of the kidnapped women is worrisome to everyone,” an activist, Ihan Mohammed, told France 24. “Every day, two or three women disappear.”
One of the most vexing issues in Syria in 2014 was the Europeans’ tendency to summon their friends back home into the jihad. A few weeks ago, a British TikTokker, standing at the site of an Israeli bombing in downtown Damascus, issued a general appeal. Evidently, he had seen into a nefarious plot. Israel was planning to pave a highway through Syria, into Iran, his visions told him. “It’s some crazy shit,” he says in his video. “My brothers and sisters, it seems that this is just the beginning of the war with Israel. What are you guys doing? Are you just sitting there? All of you can get on a plane right now…”
In Syria, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Syria has a new president who is warmly welcomed in western capitals. But on his watch, the blood continued to spill.
