One morning in the summer of 2015, I woke early to the sound of my cell phone. A voice called my name—jubilant at first—and then began an anxious monologue, interrupted by what sounded like thunder. “God help us, Mr. Robert. The sky is raining bombs on us. Yemenis are dying. The Saudis are killing us by air, and Ali Abdullah Saleh is killing us by land. They are all criminals.”
It was Saeed, the Yemeni who had led the forty-year rebellion against the Sheikh of Ja’ashin. I had never heard him sound so frightened. He was still living in the tent that had been his home since the start of the revolution, but now the bombs were falling in the Taiz foothills, he said. It sounded close. Yemen had been under Saudi bombardment for months, and the country was almost entirely cut off from the world. Food and water were getting scarce, Saeed said. The native cheerfulness that had held firm through four decades of war and revolution was starting to fray. I wanted to tell him something encouraging, but I couldn’t think what to say.
It was the same with many of my Arab friends in 2015. The whole region seemed to be sinking into a dismayingly familiar chaos, with dictators (or would-be dictators) and jihadi groups killing and yet somehow sustaining each other in a weird symbiosis. Yemen had once been the Arab world’s exception and stepchild. Now it was becoming almost typical: a failed state where new divisions formed all the time, like a pane of glass shattering into ever-smaller shards. The only thing being democratized was violence.
Saeed told me he no longer understood his own country. The revolution’s one achievement seemed to be getting rid of Ali Abdullah Saleh, yet now the wily old man was back, and in league with his own devils. Saleh still had the billions he’d stolen as president. He had the support of the Huthis, the northern rebels he’d fought against as president. It was as if the worst nightmares of the Tahrir Square protests had come to life: the dictator and the zealots in a cynical pact for power. The Huthis, of course, claimed the revolution’s mantle as their own.
Saeed had watched in amazement throughout 2014 as this strange alliance marched southward like a many-armed monster, taking one Yemeni province after another. In September of that year they conquered Sanaa, the capital. The Huthi movement’s teenage soldiers wandered the streets, spraying the sky with bullets, setting up checkpoints wherever they liked. The nominal president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, was granted a puppet’s role for a few months and then fled, first to Aden and then to Riyadh, the Saudi capital. No one would miss him.
Saeed had called me one day in early 2015 and told me that the city of Taiz, where he lived, had become an independent republic. I had heard the same kind of thing in Libya, in Syria, in Iraq: it was as if the whole region was devolving back to city-states. Saeed sounded proud. The city had refused to side with either party in a stupid war. It would survive on its own. But none of these proud declarations lasted long. The Huthis were soon at the gates of Taiz. The country was polarizing in their wake, with money flowing in from outside: Iran backed the Huthis, and Saudi Arabia paid the tribes to fight on the other side.
Then in late March 2015, the Saudis upped the ante. They declared war on the Huthis, dropping thousands of American-made bombs onto the Arab world’s poorest country. They swore they would continue until President Hadi was restored to power. Gigantic explosions lit up Yemen’s cities by night, and daylight revealed medieval stone towers—one of them a UNESCO Heritage site—reduced to rubble. Hundreds of civilians were killed. The bombing did not stop the Huthis, who continued their march across Yemen.
Saeed told me there had been huge explosions on the edge of Taiz. He wanted to see his wife but was afraid to travel to Ja’ashin, he said, for fear of the bombs.
“Mr. Robert, I don’t know if we will speak again,” he said, as one of our conversations came to an end. “Please pass my word to the world: Do not forget us.”
Those words sound melodramatic on paper. They were becoming oddly commonplace. “Can I ask a favor?” an Egyptian friend wrote to me on Facebook around the same time. “If you do not hear from me again tomorrow, can you send word to my friends? It will mean I am arrested or dead.”
In Egypt, Muhammad Beltagy was beyond anyone’s help. After a long show trial, he was sentenced to death in May 2015, along with dozens of other Muslim Brotherhood leaders. Egypt’s former president, Muhammad Morsi, was one of them. The accusations against them were a wild brew of conspiracy theory, involving a prison break plotted by Hamas and Hezbollah. Beltagy’s family had not seen him in months. He had grown a long beard in prison, and he now resembled the cartoon zealot the Egyptian authorities had labeled him. He’d been tortured, he told the judge. He had long since made clear that he was prepared for martyrdom and did not expect to survive. Once, when the charges against him were read out loud, he and his fellow defendants—crowded into a wire cage, like animals—burst into helpless laughter. You wondered what was going on in their minds. But you could not hear them: after the initial hearings, they were kept behind a soundproof plexiglass wall.
When the death sentence was affirmed by Egypt’s rubber-stamp Grand Mufti, the chief judge delivered an ode to President Sisi that scarcely touched on the legal accusations. The presidency of Morsi had been a “black night,” the judge said, followed by “the dawn of human conscience” in the form of Sisi’s coup. “All Egyptians came out, all over Egypt, demanding the building of a strong and cohesive Egyptian society that does not exclude any of its sons and currents, and ends the state of conflict and division.”
Outside the courtroom, the judge’s fantasy was getting harder to maintain. The insurgency in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula was growing fiercer. At least two thousand soldiers and police had been killed in the preceding two years. Each bombing led to indiscriminate government raids that left civilians dead, deepening resentment and fueling jihadi recruitment efforts. The violence was creeping from the desert into the heart of Egypt. In late June 2015, Egypt’s most senior prosecutor was killed in a car bombing in Cairo. Afterward, Sisi visited a group of Egyptian judges and browbeat them, on camera, for taking so long with the Brotherhood trials. “Revenge for his murder is upon you,” Sisi says in the video clip, as the cowed judges listen silently. “We haven’t interfered in your work for the past two years … All the Egyptian people are saying, and I am saying, We must implement the law!” The judges nod obediently.
The Brotherhood’s exiled leadership denounced the jihadi violence, but it was hard to avoid the sense that their voices no longer mattered. Egypt’s Islamists were taking sides in a conflict that was beginning to look like war. In late May 2015, 159 Muslim scholars from twenty countries issued an open letter declaring all those who collaborate with Sisi’s regime to be murderers and calling for them to be punished as such. The Brotherhood publicly endorsed the letter the next day, and within two months more than six hundred thousand people had signed their approval online. More and more young Brotherhood members were openly demanding violence against the state.
Some Brotherhood members went off to the jihad in Syria, but there was a much nearer option: Libya. ISIS had founded a ministate there, too, in the middle of a civil war so fragmented and mercurial that it defied all efforts to distill a larger meaning. Jalal Ragai, the Libyan militia leader I’d befriended in 2011, was another regular voice on my telephone, in a series of calls that documented his own country’s descent into chaos. Like Saeed, Jalal had been an optimist who always insisted that the revolution would triumph. He had acted on that belief, handing over the prisoners in his basement to the state, or what passed for it. This was back in 2012. He had since come to regret it.
“We wanted them to have a trial,” Jalal told me. “We wanted justice. We brought the prisoners to the military prosecutor in Tripoli, and we gave him everything. All the videotapes you saw, plus the confessions we videotaped, and signed confessions, and military documents, and even all the ID papers. Boxes and boxes of it. The case was all there, one hundred percent.” Nasser Salhoba, whose brother had been murdered, watched uneasily as the killer was marched into a Tripoli jail cell guarded by militia fighters.
For a while, it seemed as if Jalal’s gamble would pay off. After the killing of American ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi in 2012, a popular movement to disband all the Libyan militias gained strength. Huge crowds of protesters overran the barracks of the Benghazi militia whose members were responsible for Stevens’s death, chanting “No, no to the brigades” and “The blood we shed for freedom shall not go in vain!” The gunmen fled. But not for long. Within six months, the civilian resistance faltered, and Islamist militias bullied the Parliament into passing legislation that favored them. The government was irrelevant after that.
Libya’s internecine militia battles soon grew fiercer. Jalal was in the middle of it: he was shot and almost killed by fighters from the Qa’qa’ brigade, an outfit notorious for its involvement in arms smuggling and drug dealing. He spent months in bed recovering from the bullet wounds, and eventually flew to Germany for more surgery on his shattered legs. When he got back to Libya, in late 2013, the country was well on its way to civil war. Two camps had formed, each with a cast of international sponsors, each touting a crew of lawmakers from Libya’s collapsed congress. Jalal took the side of what he called the “revolutionary” camp, because the other side included some of Qaddafi’s former generals. That made him an ally of the Islamists, for whom he had no sympathy. But like for many Libyans, his loyalty was mostly a matter of local politics.
By midsummer of 2014, a battle for control of Tripoli had left the country’s main airport in ruins, its control tower toppled and the runways pocked with craters. Around that time Jalal got a text message from an acquaintance who worked in the military police building. This was where Jalal’s old prisoners were being kept, including Marwan, who had killed Nasser Salhoba’s brother. Jalal asked his friend if anyone was guarding them. The friend wrote back that the prisoners had all been released. Not only that, they’d been given guns and uniforms, and they were fighting for one of the militias. Jalal asked about the boxes of documents and videotapes, everything he had so painstakingly gathered to document the crimes committed by Qaddafi and his men. “Forget it,” his friend wrote. “Everything is gone.”
Libya was not the only place where militias had replaced the state. You could say the same about Iraq, where armed groups loyal to Iran now did much of the hardest fighting, and the national army was better known for running away. Even in Bashar al Assad’s Syria, the regime was turning into a shell. Assad was still in charge, but he was utterly dependent on a diverse and toxic mix of volunteer warriors and “popular” militias, some of them manned by criminals. Not all of them were Syrian. A whole Shiite counter-jihad had formed—with fighters coming from Lebanon, Bahrain, even Afghanistan—under the supervision of Iran, Assad’s patron. The commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force, Qassim Soleimani, was regularly photographed supervising troops in Syria. As Russian planes began bombarding the rebels in the fall of 2015, some Muslim clerics seemed almost to welcome the news, calling for a jihad against Russia that recalled the glory days of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
In the regime bastion of Jableh, on the Syrian coast, Aliaa Ali watched the Alawi funeral processions come and go throughout 2015. She seemed to spend much of her time in an Internet bubble of Assad loyalists who shared nostalgic photos and memories of their old secular Syria, along with tirades against the hypocrisy and terrorism of the West. She started learning Russian. Her Facebook posts hinted at a sense of frustration and encirclement, often hidden under cheerful self-help maxims: “A free spirit cannot thrive in still waters.” “We shall overcome.”
Across the border in Turkey, her former friend Noura Kanafani was living in an eerily parallel world of aggrievement and isolation. She had retreated further into private life and had a second baby in the summer of 2015. On Facebook, she posted her own greeting-card mottoes about getting through hard times, along with occasional photographs of children mutilated or burned beyond recognition by the Assad regime’s barrel bombs.
One night in the summer of 2015, I went to see Noura’s aunt Maha and cousin Mihyar at their home in Antakya, near the border with Syria. It was Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. After we finished the ritual breaking of the fast, an argument broke out about the opposition’s many mistakes since 2011. “We can no longer speak of a revolution,” one guest said, a former rebel from Latakia. “We are the ones who destroyed it.” He laid out a long and sorry list of charges, starting with the Syrian rebels’ failure to adhere to a nonviolent ethic. The revolution’s mantle, he said, had been claimed early on by self-important exiles who bickered over the future of a country they hadn’t seen for years. It was tainted further by the childish proxy battles of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which funded rival opposition spokesmen. The Syrian National Council had been succeeded by the Syrian National Coalition, among a cluster of other front groups. The acronyms proliferated along with the conferences in five-star hotel ballrooms in Cairo or Istanbul or the Gulf. All this served only to erode the exiles’ influence inside Syria, where jihadist groups were gradually destroying or displacing everyone else.
“What is left of the original revolution?” the guest from Latakia said. “Nothing. The opposition has failed totally, and we should honestly admit that if we want to make any progress.”
Mihyar would have none of it. “I consider the revolution my mother,” he said. “I will not speak ill of my mother, even if it is true that she did some bad things when she was young. These are things that can be discussed only later, after we have defeated Bashar.” The struggle against the regime, in other words, was all that mattered, never mind who was carrying it on. He said he was confident the spirit of the revolution in its original form would prevail. This was a little hard to swallow. I asked Mihyar whether it was realistic to expect the nonviolent opposition—now mostly moribund—to prevail over the jihadis and the regime. “God willing, yes,” he said.
But the dreams of Mihyar and his fellow revolutionaries were starting to collide with other dreams, and not just those of ISIS. Days earlier, at a crossing point on the Turkey-Syria border, I had spoken to refugees fleeing the fighting. I had expected them to talk about the horrors of life in the caliphate. Instead, several told me they were much more worried about the Kurds, whose fighters had forced ISIS from an important border town and now seemed poised to expand their own territory. The hard reality of ethnic difference trumped ideology. These shop owners and construction workers—all of them Arabs—were willing to live in a place where music was forbidden and children watched beheadings in public squares. They were not willing to live in a reborn Kurdistan. Some veterans of the nonviolent protest movement went further, saying they would rather join ISIS and fight in its ranks than see the Kurds carve out their own state on Arab land.
Many of those fleeing Syria stopped only briefly in Turkey before continuing northward. By the late summer of 2015, the exodus of migrants toward Europe had grown so large that even ISIS became alarmed about it and began issuing warnings not to go to the land of unbelief. It was too late. Tens of thousands of families were making their way along the same route, on rickety boats to Greece and onward to Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, Austria, and Germany. I met a thirty-one-year-old teacher from the Syrian city of Deir al Zour who was on his way north, and when I warned him about the dangers of the crossing, he laughed incredulously. “You do not know what we have been living in Syria,” he said. “We left because we see no future in our homeland at all. You have a choice: to fight with one of the parties, or get arrested or killed. Or you get out.”
Even in Tunisia, where Rached Ghannouchi and Beji Caid Essebsi continued their pas de deux, the sounds of war were getting closer. In late June 2015, a lone gunman slipped into a beach resort in the Tunisian coastal town of Sousse and murdered thirty-eight Western tourists. ISIS claimed credit. This second atrocity, coming after the March attack on the Bardo Museum, meant that the Tunisian tourism industry was effectively dead, probably for years to come. Essebsi went beyond the usual martial rhetoric in response to the attack, declaring that another massacre would cause the country to “collapse.” The prospects for Tunisia’s economic revival were dimming. And more jihadist violence, people said, might endanger the entente between Tunisia’s two grand old men.
ISIS had become the great menace of a new age, and not just in the Arab world. It was capable of inspiring people as far away as France or even California to murder in the name of God. The massacres in Paris and San Bernardino in the fall of 2015 forced a new reckoning in Europe and America. Terrorism now seemed to lurk everywhere, like a spore that could drift unseen until it transformed a harmless suburbanite into a merciless killer at a holiday party. Every attack deepened the fear, fueling greater suspicion of the masses of Arab and Muslim migrants struggling to escape northward to Europe, and fiercer divisions about how to handle them.
For some Arab journalists and men of letters, the spectacle of young people flocking to join ISIS seemed to signal the end of Arab civilization. An old order was ending, they said, and there was nothing to replace it but madness. One of the more hard-nosed columnists in the pan-Arab press, Jihad al Khazen, disavowed his Arab identity in a cri de coeur published in March 2015. He asked—without a hint of facetiousness—if the End of Days was at hand, and declared that he “would not be surprised if the Antichrist emerged from among us tomorrow.”
And what about the protesters who had kicked off the Arab Spring? They had scattered in many different directions. Most had given up on politics. A few brave ones were in jail for defying the authorities. Many were very depressed.
One of them, a thirty-five-year-old Egyptian named Ahmed Darrawi, disappeared in mid-2013. His friends and relatives made efforts to find him but came up with nothing. Ahmed had been a member of the vanguard known as the Coalition of Revolutionary Youth, and had been one of the rebellion’s more powerful spokesmen. He’d lived in Tahrir through all eighteen days of the revolt and found his life transformed by it. In the months afterward, he neglected his marketing job and his bourgeois life in a posh Cairo suburb. He ran for Parliament as an independent in the elections of 2011. His campaign posters show a smiling young man in a suit, clean shaven, under the banner SECURITY AND DIGNITY. He lost, but he continued speaking and writing about how to fulfill the revolution’s goals.
Ahmed’s friends and relatives told me he became depressed in the later months of 2012, as divisions hardened between Egypt’s political camps. In December of that year, after the bloody street battles between pro- and anti-Morsi demonstrators at the presidential palace, Ahmed’s brother Haythem called him. “It’s over, the revolution’s finished,” he recalls Ahmed telling him. “When you see the people who were together in Tahrir killing each other, there’s no point anymore.” Ahmed grew progressively more withdrawn. Just after the coup that overthrew Morsi, in July 2013, he vanished.
A few months later, in the early winter of 2013, Ahmed posted a video on Twitter. The clip shows a dozen young men around a campfire in the woods of northwestern Syria, singing songs and hunching against the cold. You can hear the wind shuddering in the microphone, and you can see, in the blurred darkness around the fire, the men leaning toward it for warmth, blankets wrapped around their bodies. Someone pours hot coffee from a silver pot that has been heating on the coals. Cigarette ends glow orange and then fade out. The blue light of a cell phone is visible for a moment. The men’s eyes gleam as they sing, raggedly but in unison:
How beautiful is the sound of guns echoing in the desert
We don’t part from our grenades
The moon and stars are our witnesses
And the wilderness sings of our glory
This was Ahmed’s brigade, the Lions of the Caliphate. Several of them were Egyptian veterans of Tahrir Square, like him. They had just pledged their loyalty to ISIS a month or two earlier. Ahmed had a new name: Abu Mouaz al Masri. He was the unit’s military commander. In one photograph that emerged later, he is wearing an Afghan-style pakol hat and black galabiya, with a Glock pistol in one hand and a Kalashnikov balanced on the other shoulder. Behind him is a battered pickup truck, and the legs of two men can be seen in the back, standing by a mounted 14.5 mm machine gun. He stares directly into the camera with an expression of cold certainty. A few months later, in the early spring of 2014, Ahmed wrote on Twitter: “Some wonder about all this love and belonging to the Islamic state. My brothers, it’s an old lost dream since the fall of the caliphate. And we will make it come true and pass it on, even if only through our mutilated bodies, to a new generation.” It was one of his very last postings. Later that spring, Haythem Darrawi received a phone call from an ISIS spokesman congratulating him on his brother’s martyrdom. Ahmed had carried out a suicide bombing in Iraq.
Ahmed kept a kind of journal on Twitter in the months before his death, and his entries suggest that he had transferred all the hope he’d once invested in democracy onto the idea of a rigid Islamic utopia, to be established by force of arms. “I found justice in jihad, and dignity and bravery in leaving my old life forever,” he wrote at one point. “It’s as if I wasn’t alive before joining the call, and hadn’t tasted what good, sweet living can be until I joined the jihad.”
The protesters of 2011 had dreamed of building new countries that would confer genuine citizenship and something more: karama, dignity, the rallying cry of all the uprisings. When that dream failed them, many gave way to apathy or despair, or even nostalgia for the old regimes they had assailed. But some ran headlong into the seventh century in search of the same prize. They wanted something they had heard about and imagined all their lives but never really known: a dawla that would not melt into air beneath their feet, a place they could call their own, a state that shielded its subjects from humiliation and despair.