ELEVEN
SPRING. FOR ME THIS WORD now possesses fervent connotations, perfumes of lament and guilt. With little space to maneuver in the city and little chance to escape, I filled the post-liberation void inside me by farming tomatoes and eggplants on my family’s small plot of land in the morning and tutoring the kids of a loyalist teacher in the afternoon. Teacher Qais came to me last October after I was fired from the public school for “lack of prior teaching experience.” He trusted me to teach his kids English more than the “experienced” teacher who had replaced me. Was it because he heard me telling the schoolmaster that her fifth-grade students didn’t know all the English letters even after five years of being taught by experienced teachers? Or was it because he thought I would accept a low wage? In my family’s enclosed backyard, which measured a seventh of an acre, I hushed my anxiety away and turned instead to my innocent companions. The little plants soothed me. They were green and “smiling for you,” as my mother would say. Quiet and sensible. Arranged in classroom rows, like the students I reluctantly taught. Pouring water at their roots did not gnaw at me like drilling kids in the a’s and x’s of English. I visited my plants often. I wished that we had some way to speak, though they gave me a serenity without words. Only the roaring warplanes fragmented the calm of the garden. The planes killed everything beautiful in this country. Even when I managed to crawl far away from their sound and fire, the absurd reality of them awoke in me a rage that matched their own. The pilot released his load from far above. He must have been smiling, an ecstatic victor according to our age’s rules of engagement. He was the master—as long as he kept to the sky.
How do pilots brag in their diaries? “I was elated to be the nightmare of my enemies’ nights, and terrified to be the dream prey of their guns’ muzzles”?
NAEL’S BROTHER TAREQ WAS back from his studies in Beirut, transformed. Losing Nael had left a grave and indelible mark on him. It was the bomb that finally landed on him, drastically changing the course of his life. Tareq was lost in the aftermath, pulled in. Over his soul, he had no control. No one, nothing, no justice or consequence could compensate for the loss of Nael.
Tareq was the unsown soil, fertile in nature, susceptible to the hybrid seed and unfiltered irrigation. A juvenile Juventus maniac who dyed his heart black and white and cried on Champions League nights. Everyone who knew him may have complained about his rambling mouth, but they laughed at his humorous imitations of local dialects. One summer night he had shared with me his plan to travel to Beirut. Beirut was for young locals a city of summer work; he wanted to be there for college life. He arrived there a stranger, fragile as an eggshell, and slept in the attic of a vegetable store. The next day he was selling bananas off a wheelbarrow in Sabra, but the neighborhood’s notorious bullies snatched a banana, and he dared not follow them to get it back.
In July 2013, after two years spent studying Arabic literature and waiting tables at Beirut’s cafés, Tareq came back to Raqqa resolved. From the moment he passed the last checkpoint into the city, he was a soldier of revenge.
When he arrived, the Ahrar al-Sham militia appeared dominant in Raqqa—not merely militarily but administratively as well. Few rebel groups possessed a vision for what would come next, now that the city was liberated from the government, and Raqqa had floundered in anarchy, a state Ahrar had yet to quell. But they did step into some of the government’s former roles. To the public, they were the authority that paid former government employees to resume running the vital facilities that provided electrical power and land irrigation. Ahrar cleaned the streets.
In Ahrar, Tareq saw the future. He applied for their training camp, where he met occasionally with the group’s leaders, which included particularly extreme members of al-Qaeda, like Abu Hafs al-Masri, a veteran of the two Afghan jihads who dropped in to teach ideology to new recruits. How often I told him that these men descended from an organization notorious for chaos and violence—just as often as he, with all the stubborn ignorance of a convert, refused to hear it. He thought that Ahrar would follow the original path of the Afghan jihad, before that infamous generation of al-Qaeda “deformed” it with their brutality and neglect of governance. Those were Abu Hafs’s words, no doubt, emanating from his gifted mimic’s mouth.
Tareq “graduated” from Ahrar’s forty-day training program second in his group. He refused an assignment to serve at the Tal Abyad border crossing—“a path to corruption, far from the front”—and insisted that Abu Abdullah To’um send him to the battlefield. By the time I saw him, he had resumed where Nael left off.
Nael had been killed by a regime mortar during the siege of the Syrian Army’s Division 17 base. The attritional battle, in which at least eight rebel groups took part, kicked the regime out of a specialized subdivision known as the Chemistry Battalion inside the base, in a significant breakthrough—only for the rebels to lose the freshly gained territory within a day. They still clung to 85 percent of the base, though, and they did not give up: The rebels, despite their daily barrage of mortars, could not conquer the rest. They needed the base desperately—not only did victory make Raqqa far harder for the regime to recapture, but the rebels had also already consumed mountains of ammo and manpower battling the government’s well-entrenched, heavily equipped troops. The base’s weapon stockpiles could compensate for those losses. Most important, the rebels chafed under the gazes of resentful civilians, who cursed them as they bungled their operations.
Through October and November of 2013, rebel groups, including Ahrar al-Sham, tightened their siege on the battalion; their troops lay in trenches guarded by machine gunners and mortars, occasionally laughing at the stray, air-dropped aid packages the regime’s planes had meant for its own troops. Nael was gone from their ranks, but Tareq by now had replaced him.
One midnight, perhaps November 20, the rebels began an invasion of the regime dormitories, with a dozen well-nigh suicidal shock troops opening the way. The air was cold enough to burn, and Tareq wore a cheap bulletproof vest and four layers of socks.
Each man received two full cartridges for their AKs, three grenades, and a belt of 250 bullets. “By our standard, that was a great combat load,” he emphasized to me a few days later in his new, precise, military way. It was late in the evening, as we sat in a poorly heated room in his family’s house. He leaned his left shoulder on the pillow next to him and stretched his feet, as he continued with his tale.
Tareq’s unit crawled on their bellies toward the ditches that guarded the dorms, each one filled with regime machine gunners. Frigid air, glacial slowness, the necessity of silence. Snipers equipped with night vision goggles were normally positioned on nearby rooftops to survey the front. “They could snipe us from two miles,” Tareq recalled. “We had to keep quiet in the freezing weather, when the algae-covered ground sucked the warmth from our bodies and replaced it with pain and cold. We crawled very slowly, pausing so long that one of us fell asleep,” he chuckled. Eons passed. They reached the enemy trenches, then hid themselves beneath the outer side of the sandbag parapet. It was time for the maddest phase of their plan. They needed to dispatch the machine gunners with their grenades—or at least keep them busy—so that a major assault force of their comrades could advance in the confusion.
War is a team sport, inimical to personal credit. After Tareq threw his grenade, he was not sure if it killed, or even hit, anyone, but regardless, several gunners lay dead. The stragglers fled into their trenches, allowing the waiting rebels to advance and fight them there. The few hundred rebels who stayed behind in their own trenches aimed their mortars and machine guns into the dorms. Highly inaccurate mortars were nonetheless “the best weapon in largely trench warfare,” Tareq said. Clean words for such a mess. His muscles shook in the mud and blood of combat, beneath artillery shells, beneath the earth. After an hour, the rebels stormed the dorm.
The Chemistry Battalion’s dorm was a single-story concrete box, its interior a maze of dividers, bunk beds for soldiers against every wall. Not that anyone still slept there after months of shelling. Tareq entered the building shooting, and the regime soldiers’ bullets raced to greet him. They were on the other side of the dividers, fifteen feet away. He couldn’t see them amid the clouds of dust, but he could hear their disordered shouts. His brother had died in this base, near this spot, and now he was firing at his brother’s killers.
Far away on that same night, in my room, I remember the sounds of the explosions resounding in my ears, just like Tareq’s enemies’ Allahu Akbars resonated in his. In such chaotic times, one can only imagine God’s hesitation.
Ahrar al-Sham retreated after three hours.
TAREQ VISITED ME WHENEVER he had the opportunity. He was a tea guzzler, and he always brought with him an intimate friend, his AK. He briefed me on the intricate, ever-changing drama of rebel military maneuvers. Regardless of our fierce disagreements over priorities and objectives, we liked to discuss everything, but the old Tareq with whom Nael and I had marched only a year earlier was another person now. I feared he was slipping into a jihadi’s ideology. His intolerance of any criticism of Ahrar al-Sham—particularly when it came to the group’s opaque stance toward the revolution’s original aims—solidified my view of him as a soldier who was often clueless about his own fight. He had taken an equally dim view of my inaction. Tareq repeated more than once, “When you work, you are more prone to error. If you just sit around and look for the mistakes of others, you’ll have the cleanest record.”
HIS GROUP WAS WELL aware of the challenges it faced and its position within Raqqa’s balance of power. Ahrar al-Sham was caught in a rivalry with other rebel groups for prominence—a fight to distinguish their virtually identical ideologies as much as to build trust and allegiance among the populace. In this petty snake pit, only ISIS foresaw its path. The foreign jihadists of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham—an extension of the Islamic State in Iraq, which had rebranded itself as ISIS in April 2013—didn’t care about finding reconciliation between God’s words and their own behavior, nor between their behavior and public opinion. Syrian Islamists wallowed in contradiction. They alternately condemned and co-opted the revolution, alternately fought and allied with non-Islamist groups. All the while, ISIS prepared Raqqa as its stronghold. Brazenly, they moved to eliminate competitors. Activists were assassinated. Rebel headquarters were raided. A prominent lawyer was kidnapped, followed by several tribal chiefs. Their aggression put Syrian Islamists in a precarious position; they had to avoid alienating the populace while steering clear of confrontation with the increasingly powerful ISIS. Whenever people alerted rebels to ISIS’s dangers, they argued that a confrontation between them would benefit no one but Assad, the primary enemy.
ONE RAINY DAY IN the last days of 2013, Tareq came to visit me in my basement as usual. What was odd, though, was that he had news he was euphoric about but was reluctant to share. We had frequently discussed ISIS’s rise and its violent policy toward civilians as well as rebels. For activists in Raqqa at the time, ISIS was no less an enemy than the Damascus regime. During these months, I turned to Twitter, where I translated activists’ reports about ISIS violations and posted them on my timeline. Was it a way to appease my anger? Or an exercise for my dying English? Perhaps it just satisfied me to imitate professional journalists.
“War is coming. We are going to oust ISIS from the country,” Tareq informed me. His tone had shifted. My enemy had become his. His—his group’s, rather—sudden change of mind was striking.
Over the previous few months, the jihadists’ climate had been heating up. The Ahrar official in charge of the Tal Abyad border crossing was kidnapped, his body later found mutilated. For Ahrar’s leadership, the horrific incident, like others that had targeted them, bore ISIS’s fingerprints.
“Was a decision made, or is this just your hunch?” I replied, disbelieving.
“The decision has been made. Now we are preparing.”
ISIS was clear and honest about its war. Other Islamists had grown their beards and preached Salafism, but ISIS outdid them, executing all who crossed them and intimidating civil society out of existence. If those Islamists had harmed the revolution, ISIS’s highest priority was its demise. Tareq had no doubt about the military outcome. He knew, with his believer’s certainty, that his side would win.
“Why?” I asked.
“Well, let’s talk numbers,” he said, perhaps naïvely. “We have twelve headquarters spread all around the city, in strategic areas. They have four.” He named them one by one. “We have about a thousand fighters who aren’t engaged at the parapets inside Division 17. We think they have a few hundred.” Tareq explained that Ahrar al-Sham wasn’t the only group preparing for this new war; Jabhat al-Nusra and the leftover bits of the FSA would be joining them. Most importantly, he believed that Raqqans’ hatred for ISIS would strike the decisive blow.
We stayed up late in my dingy basement. In this room, in the time before, we had played videogames and watched movies. We had listened to his favorite musicians: Bryan Adams, the Backstreet Boys, and Natalie Cole. Every time, he had brought his flash memory drive filled with their latest tracks. Now we mainly debated any possible compatibility between democracy and Sharia.
Tareq hung his weapon on his shoulder and waved goodbye. Neither of us suspected that it would be the last time we would see each other in Raqqa.