March 2012
FROM THE OUTSIDE, IT LOOKED LIKE A TYPICAL SUBURBAN house, painted white and nestled in a small village in southeast Turkey. But after some time in this ‘safe house’ of the Free Syrian Army, we realised what it was: a place where everyone wanted to bring down the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
There was something suggestive of the old IRA about this place: a nondescript house in which men in their 30s and 40s sat on the floor drinking coffee. Boxes of ‘blood stoppers’ – medical goods used in emergencies – lay on the floor. There was no furniture, just piles of mattresses and blankets. Between dozing or talking, the men were on their mobile phones, quietly coordinating one side of a war.
I was with Australian video journalist Ed Giles in Antakya, or Antioch, and from this house we could look across a valley into Syria, which was about a kilometre away. Suspicion levels in this area were high. This village had a long history of trading across the border – weapons, cigarettes, alcohol, anything. But if goods could cross a border so too could fighters and spies, and this part of the border had become crucial for the movement of weapons and supplies into Syria.
On a later trip to this border, without my knowledge, my fixer started asking a shopkeeper about how much it would cost to take weapons across the border. The shopkeeper even offered a valet service where your weapons would be waiting for you on the other side after you crossed. There were youths at illegal crossings who would help you cross if you gave them US$30. A whole industry had grown up based on the war just on the other side of the hill.
Ed Giles and I wanted to come to this border to try to work out the role that Turkey was playing in the Syrian conflict. Turkey was trying to give the impression that it was not helping the rebels to fight the regime of Bashar al-Assad, and I thought that by spending time along the border we could observe whether in fact there was tacit support being given to the rebels by allowing easy transit of supplies and fighters from Turkey into Syria. Syria had become unpredictable, and we’d figured our best chance of getting in – and out – was with the Free Syrian Army. For now, they were the government’s main opposition. But within a year, their uprising against Assad would collapse amid divisions and distrust.
We visited the safe house three days in a row, trying to get to know the commander, who told us he might be able to get some of his fighters to escort us across into Syria. The commander, a former Syrian Army officer, expressed anger at the role Russia was playing in this war, selling weapons to both sides. He said the price he had to pay for bullets had gone from US25c to US$3 in recent months as the Russians profiteered.
I asked the commander what strategies he was employing, given that the Assad regime had a serious advantage in terms of firepower. ‘Shoot and hide,’ he replied. ‘We are snipers. We shoot, we run, we hide.’ He said his fighters were under instructions to attack only Syrian soldiers who were not backed up by tanks, and if they killed them it was their chance to take weapons. The commander was overseeing a guerrilla movement, some of whose fighters were teenagers.
On our fourth day in the safe house, the commander finally gave approval for one of his fighters to take us across the border. The three of us headed down the valley and walked through a field of Turkish orchids. A red sign about 200 metres from a Turkish Army tower warned us that we were entering a Turkish military zone. We had no idea where we were going.
We walked through the military zone and along a deserted road. We were now entering Syria.
We walked down a mountain track. Ahead, through a forest, we heard voices.
Our guide said, ‘Don’t worry, they are our people. I won’t put you in a situation where you are in any danger.’
We walked another 50 metres and came across tents, barbed wire, trenches, guns and a campfire, around which about 50 fighters sat chatting and drinking tea. They showed us a command post they had built on the hill.
From the lookout, we could see across the valley to where soldiers were walking around houses taken by the Syrian Army the night before. The fighters that Ed and I were with knew that they could be the targets of an attack. To try to defend themselves, they’d erected a wall of canvas so that anyone attacking would not be able to tell how many fighters were behind it. And if any attackers got this far, there was a final line of defence. ‘Look here,’ one of the fighters said, pushing aside some bushes. Underneath was an explosive device which, he told us, would be detonated from further up the hill if the army attacked.
The location of the camp was instructive. It was about 100 metres inside the Syrian border, between two Turkish military towers. It was clear that it had Turkish approval: Turkish soldiers in the towers watched us come and go. Not only could these Free Syrian Army fighters cross in and out of Turkey freely, but they could bring ammunition and supplies in too.
It was clearly a case of plausible deniability: the Turks could still deny accusations that their soil was being used, but at the same time could undermine Assad. It would also be difficult for the Syrians to shell this camp, as they would risk hitting the Turkish Army towers. Because of the relative sizes of the two armed forces – Turkey’s army is the second largest in NATO, and dwarfs the Assad army – Syria did not want a war with its neighbour.
But on this day, the fighters from the Free Syrian Army made one thing clear to us: they were being beaten. ‘We are exhausted and depressed,’ one said. ‘We don’t have enough weapons to defend ourselves.’ He, too, was critical of the way Russia ‘has been playing both sides’. Russia’s exports of weapons into the Middle East were believed to have increased 20 per cent in the first year of the Arab Spring. Profits from this conflict might have been one reason why Russia would repeatedly oppose any UN resolution calling for Assad to step down.
We departed with a clear sense that as long as Russia and China opposed any meaningful intervention, Bashar al-Assad would be free to turn Syria into a killing field.
The last time I’d been to Syria with Sylvie and Jack, two years earlier, it had been a beautiful place. Then the conflict started in March 2011 in the southern city of Daraa, where a peaceful protest had escalated when President Assad sent in his security forces.
Assad had seen what had been happening in Egypt and Libya, and his thinking would have been that he could not let a small group of protesters become a large group, and that he should crack down early, and hard. Mubarak had allowed the protesters to build up in the streets of Cairo. Millions massed in the streets for 18 days, crippling the economy: the unions refusing to work, massive national strikes. The message to Assad would have been: ‘Crack down, be ruthless, and you have more chance of toughing your way through this.’
So Assad sent troops in to break up the protests, and instead of just the usual tear gas, they used live ammunition and shot several protesters dead. Assad’s brutality added a new dimension to an already highly stressed population which had endured a harsh drought. Researchers from NASA and the University of Arizona estimated that it had been the worst drought in 500 years, according to media agency Vice News. It reported that between 2006 and 2011, the drought caused 75 per cent of the country’s crops to fail, forcing as many as 1.5 million people off the land and into the cities where they were unable to find jobs.
Assad had thought that it would end things, but the crackdown was so brutal that it created a sudden welling up of anger across Syria and induced others to come onto the streets. The more security forces Assad threw at the uprising, the more people pushed back – and out of this the Free Syrian Army was formed.
At Damascus University at the start of 2012, about a year into the violence, Assad gave a speech that had a big build-up. It was his first public speech in months, and there were expectations that he was going to either resign or say something historic that would signal genuine reform.
Instead, Assad decided that he was digging in. He blamed the West and took no responsibility himself. He had done what the hard men around him urged him to do. The same hard men who had urged his father to slaughter 20,000 people in Hama. He went against his own instincts, which were more liberal. He agreed to go down the hard road of brutality.
Thus he signed the death warrant of any chance of peace in Syria. It was a historic decision. The country was at a crossroads and the President took the wrong road. And now hundreds of thousands of people have paid the price, either by losing their lives or by becoming refugees.
The Free Syrian Army had been a moderate group that wanted democracy. But a significant portion of the population was against the revolution. The civil war continued because some people benefited from the status quo and didn’t want to lose their power.
The rise of the Free Syrian Army was quickly derailed by an extraordinary number of outside influences, waging proxy wars. Syria soon became Jihadist Central. The civil war broadened to also become a war against the West.
With the help of Alawite militia, Assad’s army was involved in a series of massacres of the regime’s opponents. Russia supported Assad from the beginning. Syria hosts a huge Russian naval base on the Mediterranean and Assad is Russia’s major ally in the Middle East. Later, Hezbollah forces came across the border from Lebanon and started to help Assad, and were involved in some decisive battles.
By my count, 10 distinct outside forces would come to have identifiable roles in Syria, some occasionally and some permanently: Russia, the US and its allies (such as Australia), Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran, Hezbollah, Turkey, Israel, Jordan and Kurdish fighters. US intelligence would later estimate that there were about 1500 different rebel groups operating in Syria.
There was something different about the six Australians waiting near a border checkpoint between Turkey and Syria. By now – two years after I’d walked across the border with the Free Syrian Army – thousands of foreigners had ventured into Syria. But for the owner of a café about 50 metres from the Turkish border, this group, on 28 April 2014, was different.
‘It was clear they were not rookies,’ he told me. ‘They seemed to know what they were doing.’
The owner was struck by several things. Firstly, only one of the men spoke Arabic. He seemed to be their leader, and looked to be in his 40s, while the others were younger. Secondly, they were supremely confident, well resourced and well dressed: they were wearing new walking boots and had backpacks packed to the brim, a contrast with many of the bedraggled jihadists who departed from this café to join the battle for Islam. They were physically very large and were wearing crocheted caps, popular with some Muslim men. All were ‘very beardy’, one local said. They all had Australian passports. The fact that most of them were not Arabic speakers suggested that they were second- or third-generation Australians.
The café owner drove them to an illegal crossing a few kilometres away. The most likely reason they didn’t want to cross through the checkpoint was that they didn’t want anyone – particularly the Australian Government – to know they were going to fight. That way they would leave no paper trail showing they had been in Syria.
As the car arrived at the crossing spot, the café owner saw three Syrian men waiting – all with handguns. He watched the men walk across fields into Syria.
Six more Australians had just gone to the war, joining the scores who had travelled there since the conflict began in March 2011.
I asked the café owner to drive me to the spot he had taken them. There was no fence. Further along, where there was a fence, I found a hole that had been stretched so you could walk in and out. I did a piece to camera to illustrate how easy it was to get from one country to the other.
The Australians reflected the new world created by Syria’s war. It’s a conflict increasingly drawing in foreigners, who will return home – if they survive – with new skills, including bomb-making. The ease with which the six Australians were able to join the war highlights the reality: there is, in effect, an open border for jihadists into Syria.
War in the Middle East can sometimes become a spectator sport. On the border between Turkey and Syria, it had become an outing for the whole family.
It was September 2014, and I arrived at the border to see a crowd spread across the hill watching Islamic State trying to take the Syrian town of Kobane. The Kurds in Kobane were trying to defend it. Kobane was a prize Islamic State wanted because strategically it would give them an entry point into Turkey. But the Kurds were the toughest opponents they had faced. As the battle of Kobane escalated, I’d flown from Tel Aviv to Ankara, then on to Gazientep, the closest airport to Kobane. Then, with a fixer, I’d driven to the hill overlooking the besieged town.
The crowd was barracking for the Kurds: each time a missile was fired towards the hills where Islamic State was positioned, they let out a roar. Every so often, though, when a stray missile from either the Kurds or Islamic State came our way, there was a very different sound – part excitement, part fear.
Hundreds of people would go along there on a Saturday afternoon and sit drinking coffee. They would check out the war for an hour and then go back to their towns in Turkey.
Islamic State fired three mortar shells into Turkey. Turkish tanks near us did not respond. But Turkey had retaliated with significant firepower two years earlier, when Syria’s army fired mortar shells – it claimed accidentally – into Turkey. On that occasion, five Turkish civilians had been killed by the shells, and Turkey had responded by pounding Syrian Army installations.
It was revealing that Turkey responded to fire from the Syrian Army but not from Islamic State. Turkey had always been conflicted about Islamic State. It had been reluctant to allow the US-led coalition to use its air bases to launch attacks into Syria against Islamic State. While Ankara was revolted by Islamic State’s tactics such as beheading, the Kurds, one of Islamic State’s main targets, were bitter enemies of the Turkish Government. In the Middle East, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Of all the groups I’d reported on in the Middle East, Islamic State was different. They could not be negotiated with. Beheading became their signature, and they were killing indiscriminately. They were showing no mercy in their crazed effort to establish a caliphate, or Islamic State, across the Levant, the ancient region covering what is today Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Gaza, Israel, the West Bank and Lebanon. Along the border, I saw the Islamic State flag flying in many towns on the Syrian side; Islamic State’s list of conquests was growing by the day. They would just decide someone wasn’t a real Muslim and shoot them. There was no discussion. They locked out Western media in terms of access. And we saw too many videos of people in orange jumpsuits being beheaded to even want to try to get near them.
About that time the Americans came into the war and were bombing Islamic State around that area, but we could tell it was making little difference. We could see the Islamic State fighters, spread out in groups of two or three, so it was almost impossible for the Americans to bomb them in large numbers. The reason that fighting them is so problematic is that they don’t act like a conventional army. From talking to Syrians who had fled to Turkey, I learnt they don’t use military vehicles, but commandeer civilian cars, and stay in civilian houses. So the Americans and their allies don’t know who they are – similar to the way the Vietcong would blend into villages during the Vietnam War. That was why in the end the US coalition concentrated on the cities of Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in northern Iraq, because they could see identifiable headquarters.
As a journalist in the Middle East, I knew that they were one group that I did not want to get near. But on one occasion I got too close to Islamic State for comfort. My fixer worked with me for a few days, but then had to leave. Unable to find a new one, I decided to go to the border with one of the authorised drivers from my hotel. I figured I’d be safe with him – and I was – but I encountered a different problem altogether. The driver spoke only Turkish.
He took me to the border, where we could see the battle for Kobane. I indicated that I wanted to see the hill where Islamic State fighters had gathered. We headed off along the border, on the Turkish side. We drove through a small village, but there was nothing to delineate the border and barely anyone around. There was a house or two every so often along the border. I tried to tell the driver that I wanted to go back, but he kept saying ‘Daesh’ – the Arabic acronym for Islamic State – and pointing up ahead. I realised that I’d broken my own rules: always make sure you can communicate and don’t become isolated.
On the hill ahead I could see Islamic State fighters in groups of two or three, separated from each other by a few hundred metres. This was as close as I wanted to get to them – but the driver kept going. Finally he got the message and we headed back.
Along the Turkey–Syria border, it wasn’t just mortars from Syria that were spilling into Turkey. I came across thousands of refugees who were fleeing from Islamic State. I’ll never forget the fear I saw in their eyes.
I interviewed a family of 10 who had fled across the border. One of them was a boy aged about 17, who told me that when they heard that Islamic State was coming, they immediately packed up all their belongings and got ready to flee. A neighbour was a quadriplegic, in a wheelchair, and no one could carry him so they were forced to flee without him. Horrible stories were circulating about what Islamic State had done in other villages that might or might not have been true. But it made me realise that fear had become Islamic State’s biggest weapon. Even if people just heard a rumour that Islamic State were coming, they would flee. It meant Islamic State could just come into a village that was essentially abandoned and break into the bank, take money, live in houses full of food, stay there for a few days and then move on somewhere else, raising the Islamic flag as they went. They often met no resistance.
Hamad Mohammed, 36, sat with his family in a disused shop in Turkey. ‘They are savage beasts,’ he told me. ‘I saw a head cut off from a body.’
Mustafa Kurdo, 49, stood with his nine children. ‘Look at this one,’ he said, picking up his one-year-old son. ‘Islamic State want to cut his head off. Who are these savages? It is one thing for men to fight men, but what do these women and children have to do with this war?’
The situation in Syria is now a stalemate, with neither side gaining much ground. They have found each other’s measure and they have carved off their areas and they are holding them. But at a tragic, and ongoing, cost.