The Social World

Tag: Syria

  • Inside the gruesome world of the ‘human safari’

    Inside the gruesome world of the ‘human safari’

    “People don’t actually do that, right?” my publisher asked nervously. “No one actually goes on a human safari, do they?”

    Eight years ago, I didn’t know for sure. There had certainly been rumors for years that wealthy foreigners were traveling to conflict zones to kill civilians at random. Gradually I had concluded that some people were indeed heading off to complete their bucket list of horrors.

    In my novel To The Lions, I placed the “human safari” in a fictional refugee camp in southern Libya. Concrete proof, however, was almost impossible to find.

    Several times during my years as an investigative journalist, I heard stories about nightmarish things going on in places where law and order had collapsed. As part of my job, I visited refugee camps close to the Syrian border and in southern Bangladesh, where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees have fled over years of conflict.

    Anyone who has spent time in refugee camps knows that human trafficking is almost routine. If someone isn’t worried about trafficking a preteen girl into a brothel, it’s not an enormous leap to assume that they might be open to enabling other forms of abuse. Slowly, depressingly, I started to realize that if you really wanted to – and, importantly, you had the cash – human safaris were indeed possible.

    And now evidence is finally starting to emerge. Prosecutors in Milan have just opened an investigation into Italians who allegedly visited Sarajevo during the Bosnian war in the 1990s to shoot at people trapped in the besieged city. Early on in that war, the main street running into Sarajevo became known as “Sniper Alley.” Thousands of people were killed there over a four-year period. Now prosecutors believe some of these deaths occurred because rich foreigners allegedly paid members of the Bosnian Serb army to escort them to the hills above Sarajevo to shoot and kill citizens.

    The prosecution in Milan doesn’t surprise me. When societies collapse, some people will go out and do exactly what they want. While I was reporting in Libya shortly before Muammar Gaddafi was killed in 2011, I watched excitable young men drive very expensive cars extremely fast along the seafront. They’d always wanted to do it, they said cheerfully, and now they could. A few days later they all ran out of gasoline and that was that.

    But what would you do if there was no risk of being caught? Some people want to kill. And in our globalized world, I believe that some of those people jump on a plane and head off to those collapsed societies in order to embark on the worst sort of tourism.

    The rumors were almost impossible to prove. The people who went on human safaris weren’t going to talk. Those in their sights – some of the most vulnerable people in the world – had no way of knowing what was going on until it was too late. Even if they had their suspicions, they had no one to tell. The rumors continued to emerge in odd places. While I was chasing Somali pirates around the Indian Ocean with the British Navy, the Royal Marines took several captives. It hadn’t been the most equal battle – a US Navy ship on one side of the tiny pirate ship, a British ship on the other and a Lynx helicopter firing rows of bullets straight over the pirate ship’s bow – but the pirates themselves were heavily armed with guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

    In the aftermath of the arrests, I went out to the tiny pirate ship with the Marines and spoke to the captives. Most of them were uncommunicative. One pirate – who memorably had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot – was rather more chatty. He soon realized I was a journalist and attempted to spark up conversation with me first in fluent Italian and then in fluent German. He couldn’t speak English, but we eventually established that we could both speak French.

    After we had discussed the pirate’s cousin (who lived in Manchester), and he had suggested that we get married – a proposal I had to turn down – we moved on to stories he had heard about Russians prowling around the Red Sea attacking Somali pirates. These people, he insisted, were not Russian armed forces. They weren’t mercenaries hired by shipping magnates, either. These were people on expensive, glamorous yachts who wanted to kill someone – anyone. They were there for fun, the pirate said, and it was clear that no expense had been spared.

    As my would-be fiancé pointed out, absolutely no one was going to care if a Somali pirate was killed. Out on the high seas, no one would ever even know. And if anyone did find out, they might conclude that the pirate had got what he deserved.

    It is this gray area – where people manage to convince themselves that they’re meting out “justice” – that I suspect drives some “human safaris.” It is easy to find videos on social media of vigilantes claiming to have gunned down illegal immigrants who are attempting to cross the US/Mexico border. Heavily armed groups of civilians routinely patrol the border areas.

    “We were going out huntin’,” Bryan C. Perry, of Clarksville, Tennessee, announced on TikTok as he set out his plans to head down to the border in 2022. And he was going to “shoot to kill.” If you’re off to kill someone and you’re clearly going to enjoy it, where exactly is the line? Perry is now serving several life sentences.

    The late critic A.A. Gill faced a storm of complaints after he admitted that he had shot a baboon to “get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger.” He was open in his curiosity, at least. Some people are fascinated by the idea of killing. They want to know how it feels to kill a man, a woman or a child. And in some parts of the world, they can satisfy that urge – and absolutely no one will stop them.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • ISIS is stirring once more

    ISIS is stirring once more

    Indications that the Islamic State (ISIS) has begun to employ artificial intelligence in its efforts to recruit new fighters should come as no surprise. At the height of its power a decade ago, Isis was characterized by its combination of having mastered the latest methods of communication with an ideology and praxis that seemed to have emerged wholesale from the deserts of 7th century Arabia.

    In 2014 and 2015, ISIS recruitment took place on Twitter and Facebook. YouTube was the favored platform for the dissemination of propaganda. The group’s videoclips of its barbaric prisoner executions, including the beheadings of a series of western journalists and aid workers and the immolation of a captured Jordanian pilot, became the organization’s gruesome trademark.

    When the self-declared ISIS “caliphate” stretched across an area of Iraq and Syria roughly the size of Great Britain, these modes of communication and propaganda drew thousands of young Muslims from across the West and the Arab world to enlist under the terror group’s distinctive black banners. Current indications suggest that in an atmosphere of renewed relevance for political Islam, the organization is stirring.

    Islamic State never really went away, of course, though it has faded from the headlines over the last turbulent half decade. The caliphate’s final holdings were retaken by US-led coalition forces in the Baghuz area of the lower Euphrates river valley in the summer of 2019. ISIS fighters were transferred to the archipelago of prisons maintained by the US-aligned Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Their wives and families went to the sprawling al-Hol and Roj encampments, maintained until now by the same organization.

    But far from the centers of power, Islamic State has maintained in the intervening years a kind of “ghost caliphate” on the lands it once held, as well as beyond. Support networks, hiding places, weapons supplies and the relationships with tribes and clans which alone make possible safe passage across the remote areas and deserts of Syria and Iraq have all been maintained.  

    In places with names not widely known or noticed in the West, ISIS has maintained fighters and infrastructure. The Karachok mountain chain in Iraq, with its remote caves ideal for hiding and storing food, water and weapons; the poverty-stricken lower Deir al Zur province in Syria; and the vast Badia desert in central Syria are but a few.  

    In the Roj and especially the al-Hol camps in Syria, meanwhile, a new generation of ISIS fighters is being educated. Many of the residents of these facilities are simply displaced refugees. But a hardcore group of ISIS families dominate. There are 38,000 residents of these camps, along with 9,000 ISIS fighters in the SDF’s jails.

    Visiting al-Hol in mid 2024, I encountered a reality in which the under-resourced, western supported SDF personnel merely guarded the perimeters of the large tent encampments which comprise the camp. Within, Islamic State was in control. The organization was educating and indoctrinating its young. It was maintaining its own system of “justice,” up to and including passing death sentences, which were then carried out, the corpses left for the authorities to collect outside the compound. Escapes were also frequent and often involved bribing the guards.  

    The usual destination of the escapees was of particular note. At that time, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which now rules Syria, was in control of only a small enclave in the northwest of the country. HTS was not an ally of ISIS, and in fact suppressed the organization in its area of control. But it emerged from the same Sunni jihadi origins. ISIS men knew that if they could reach the HTS-controlled enclave, they would be left alone as long as they did not seek to organize against the de facto authorities in the area. Escapees headed in this direction.

    The collapse of the Assad regime late last year left a security vacuum in Syria, at least outside of the 30 percent of the country controlled by the SDF. HTS commanded less than 40,000 fighters when it took Damascus. In the first months of its rule, its grip on the more remote parts of Syria was nonexistent.

    Driving across the Badia in January this year, I found the checkpoints of the former regime deserted. Nothing had come to replace them yet. Lacking manpower, the new government has concentrated on securing the vital urban centers. ISIS has been quick to take advantage of the vacuum. The organization is reckoned to have around 2,500 fighters now in Syria and Iraq. A sharp uptick in attacks has taken place in the course of the year. Weapons have been stockpiled in the vast and still largely unsecured Badia. Recruitment is taking place in the poorest tribal areas where Islamic State and al-Qaeda have traditionally flourished. An ISIS insurgency is now a solid possibility.

    The lingering appeal of ISIS as an idea in the Islamic world should not be dismissed. What exactly is this idea? One of the group’s fighters who I interviewed in the Turkish border town of Cielis in 2014 expressed it to me succinctly: “We want the caliphate, something old and new, from the time of Mohammed. The Europeans created false borders. We want to break these borders.”

    These ideas did not die with the fall of Baghuz in 2019. The last couple of years have been good ones for Sunni Islamism in the Middle East. The Hamas massacres of October 7, 2023 and the subsequent Gaza war returned Islamist insurgency to center stage. The issue of the Palestinians and Israel retains a matchless intensity of appeal for masses of young people across the Islamic world. HTS’s march into Damascus, a byproduct of Israel’s weakening of Hezbollah and Iran, further reinforces the newly returned relevance of Sunni political Islam.  

    ISIS emerged from this milieu. In April, visiting al-Hol again, I was told that the ISIS compounds joyfully celebrated the march of HTS into Damascus. They told their Kurdish jailers that their roles would soon be reversed.

    There is a crucial point here to be borne in mind. The government of HTS and President Ahmed al-Sharaa, following the latter’s recent visit to Washington, are now members of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS group. But while they have clashed in the past, ISIS and HTS come from the same root. There has been much migration of fighters between the two groups. Just this week, government-linked fighters who clashed with the SDF in Raqqa province were photographed wearing patches resembling the black ISIS banner.

    Can HTS forces be relied upon to suppress the terror group’s re-emerging strength in Syria? And if the Damascus authorities attempt to move against Islamic State, will the government’s own fighters, many of them Sunni jihadis of a similar mindset to ISIS, remain loyal? These questions remain to be answered.

    ISIS’s revival is not confined to Syria alone. The organization’s Afghan “province” carried out large-scale and deadly operations in Moscow and Iran last year. A series of attempts have been thwarted in Europe. Jihad al-Shamie, who carried out the murderous terror attack at the Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester in October, claimed allegiance to Islamic State in his phone call to police. In short, Islamic State is returning. It is making use of the full variety of recruitment and operational tools available to it. Vigilance at the security level and coherent policymaking at the political level will be equally vital in meeting its challenge.

  • The jihadist I knew: my life as al-Sharaa’s prisoner

    The jihadist I knew: my life as al-Sharaa’s prisoner

    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.

  • Iran is down, not out

    Iran is down, not out

    The sirens began at about 5 a.m. A Houthi ballistic missile was on its way, over Jerusalem, in the direction of the coastal plain. After half a minute or so, I began to hear the familiar sound of doors scraping and muffled voices, as people made their way to the shelter.  

    It has become a regular occurrence. No one makes much of a fuss anymore. For most Israelis, most of the last 70 years, Yemen was a remote country on the other edge of the Middle East, the part facing the Indian Ocean, rather than the Mediterranean. What was known about it consisted of a few items of food and folklore that the country’s Jewish community had brought with it to Israel when it fled there en masse in the late 1940s. Now, it has become a strange, uninvited nocturnal visitor, periodically launching deadly ordnance at population centers.  

    Outside Syria, the Iranian losses are decidedly less terminal

    The missile, like the great majority of its predecessors, was quickly intercepted and downed. The Ansar Allah government in Sana’a can’t match the Jewish state in either attack or defense. Still, on the rare occasions when the Houthis have broken through, the results are not to be dismissed. They succeeded in closing Ben Gurion airport for a few days back in May, when one of their missiles landed near the main terminal. And in July, a civilian in Tel Aviv was killed when a Houthi drone penetrated the skies over the city and detonated in a crowded street.  

    Israel’s response to the Houthis’ aggression has been swift and consequential. Extensive damage has been inflicted on the Hodaida and Salif ports, the airport at Sana’a, the oil terminal at Ras Issa and other infrastructural targets. Speaking to me in his offices in the port city of Aden a few weeks ago, Yemeni defense minister Mohsen al-Daeri noted the “huge impact” of the Israeli counterstrikes, describing the airport, Salif and Hodeidah as the “lungs” through which the Houthis breathe.  

    But with due acknowledgement to Israel’s response, it should be noted that while the Houthis’ lungs may be damaged, they are clearly still breathing. Their continued ability to lob occasional missiles at Israel goes together with their ongoing and far more consequential terrorizing of shipping seeking to pass through the Gulf of Aden-Red Sea route. In the last two months, they have sunk two Liberian-flagged, Greek-owned ships. Traffic through the area remains down by 85 percent compared to the pre-October 2023 period.  

    In June, I visited the frontlines in Yemen’s Dhaleh province, where the Houthis face off against UAE supported fighters from the Southern Transitional Council. The discrepancy in capacities between the sides was immediately apparent. The STC fighters are well organised, highly motivated and able to hold the line. But in weaponry and in particular in the crucial field of drones, the Iran-supplied Houthi fighters have the clear advantage.  

    The evident durability of Iran’s Yemeni allies raises a larger question. In Israel (and in the West, in so far as the west pays attention to such things), a trope has taken hold according to which the successful campaign fought by Israel and the US against Iran in June, along with Jerusalem’s mauling of Hezbollah in 2024 have effectively put paid to Tehran’s regional ambitions and broken the Iran-led regional alliance. The very coining of the term “Twelve-Day War” to describe the June fighting is clearly intended to recall Israel’s triumphant Six-Day War in 1967, in which the Jewish state vanquished the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. The 1967 victory broke the forward march of Arab nationalism. The 2025 war against Iran, implicitly, is deemed to have achieved something similar with regard to Tehran’s Islamist regional bloc.  

    The achievements of the US and Israel against Iran and its proxies in Lebanon, Yemen and elsewhere were without doubt impressive and demonstrated a vast conventional superiority. There are reasons, however, to temper the euphoria and take a close look at the current direction of events. This is important not only or mainly because modesty is a becoming virtue. It matters because failure to note how Iran and its proxies are organizing in the post-June 2025 period runs the risk of allowing them to regroup, rebuild and return.  

    Of the defeats and setbacks suffered by Iran in the course of 2024 and 2025, only one element is almost certainly irreversible. This is the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. Assad’s toppling has removed Syria from the Iranian axis and turned it into an arena of competition between Israel, Turkey and the Gulf countries.  

    Elsewhere, however, the Iranian losses are decidedly less terminal. In Yemen, as we’ve seen, Tehran’s Houthi clients have yet to suffer a decisive blow. They have managed effectively to close a vital maritime trade route to all but those they choose to allow to pass. The West and the Gulf are not currently engaged in equipping their own clients to give them an offensive capacity against the Houthis. Unless and until that happens, Iran’s investment in Yemen is set to continue to deliver dividends.  

    In Iraq, largely ignored by western media, the Iran-supported Shia militias remain the dominant political and military force in the country, commanding 238,000 fighters. They prudently, and apparently on Iranian advice, chose to largely sit out the war of the last two years. But the current ruling coalition of Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani rests on the support of the militias, in their political iteration as the “Coordination Framework.”

    The ruling coalition is in the process of advancing legislation that will make permanent the militias’ status as an independent, parallel military structure. In Baghdad in 2015, a pro-Iran militia commander told me that the intention was to establish the militias as an Iraqi version of the Revolutionary Guards in Iran. The current legislation would go far toward achieving this aim.  

    In Lebanon, too, despite its severe weakening at the hands of Israel, the Hezbollah organization is flatly rejecting demands that it disarm. The government of Prime Minister Nawaf Salam has made clear that it has no intention of seeking to use force to induce the movement to do so. Given Hezbollah’s infiltration of state institutions, including the Lebanese armed forces, it is not clear that the government would be able to employ coercive measures even if it wished to. The continued Lebanese dread of civil war also plays a role here. Only Israel’s ongoing campaign to prevent Hezbollah’s rebuilding of its forces is likely to be effective.  

    So taken together, what this picture amounts to is that Iran has suffered severe setbacks on a number of important fronts over the last 18 months. But in none of them, with the possible exception of Syria, is it out of the game. The sirens in the Jerusalem night sky are a fair indicator. Complacency would be a grave error. Reports of Iran’s demise have been much exaggerated.