WINDS SHIFTED FROM WEST TO north, their peregrinations mirrored by the whirls of dew I found frozen each dawn on the roof of the polyethylene greenhouse that now shielded our crops. After the sun sank, the wind’s direction would whisper prophecies about the temper of the coming day. A western current meant irritating winter weather. Eastern wind was belligerent, conjuring up dust monsters. Northern wind brought frost, and with it trepidation. That sleepy winter, only a vast change of circumstances could warm me inside.
Twitter said that the Islamists were debating whether the proper time had come to declare an Islamic State. Baghdadi said yes. Adnani said yes. Al-Zarqawi said that Ibn Tamiya said yes. So did Abu-l Waleed al-Muhajir, Abu Suhaib, and Muhammad al-Maghrebi. But wait: Iyad Qunabi said no. Al-Turaifi said no. Al-Muheisni, al-Zawahiri, Abu Qutada, and al-Maqdisi said that Abu Tamiya said no. Ahrar’s neo-scholars said that they didn’t know.
Ahrar al-Sham neo-scholars on social media debated more fundamental questions about which school of Salafism they belonged to. Methodical Salafism? Jihadi Salafism? Najdi Salafism? The Salafism of nonviolent preachers? They still don’t know.
I turned off my laptop and silenced the debates. I had enough Arabic history books to read by my lighter’s dim flame.
IT WASN’T MERELY FROSTY. White balls of hail poured forth from the sky, “incinerators” as the farmers call them. They came with treacherous western winds. On my own little plot, the wind liberated the cloche tunnel from the bricks that pinned it to the earth, leaving the field of planting only half-covered. Green, youthful. The next month, the plants’ buyers would arrive, pick the healthy ones, and leave the weak and ailing behind. If the prices didn’t drop, I’d make enough money from the sale to at least solve my Internet conundrum.
The last three months had been eventful and grisly—in contradiction to the easy victory foretold by Tareq.
Tareq was still alive. He had escaped the death that swallowed his comrades and stayed in the fight. He didn’t give up, although many advised him to. I wished he’d give up too, but I didn’t tell him. His uncles did. His mother did. His brother in that Gulf country did too. Tareq didn’t listen. He had found his god, and who could change his mind against God? Not me. I wasn’t a preacher. Everyone had his own mind, his own capacity to think, to distinguish between right and wrong.
A plastic chair, an enclosed balcony, a blanket and me shrunken inside. A virus-infected Asus laptop was my preferred heater on winter nights, even though its battery died quickly. Late each evening, I plunged into my last Internet session before I slept. When the electricity in our house cut out, I relied on an acquaintance’s faint Wi-Fi signal, which didn’t reach indoors. Even out on the balcony, the signal was weak and disconnected every few minutes. The speed was achingly slow. During those lucky moments of connection, I’d type the light mobile addresses for the sites I wanted so they’d load quickly before I was thrown off. I adjusted my position. The blanket beneath me kept some of the cold from seeping into my body. Occasionally, I warmed my left palm by hovering it above the CPU vents on the laptop. In the city below, I could hear bullets buzz. The sounds came from the east. From the north. Their pace accelerated. The buzzing of bullets had been a familiar sound for the past year, but this was different. Something uncanny was happening.
My Twitter feed told me that the infighting between anti-government groups had already erupted elsewhere. It had started in Atareb; a bunch of FSA factions who called themselves the Mujahedeen Army had attacked ISIS headquarters. It wasn’t a surprise when ISIS attacked FSA factions, but FSA factions attacking ISIS was news. Something in me was gleeful to hear of the ISIS invaders being checked—back then, ignorant of history, I believed that no side’s victory could be guaranteed without the people’s support. The rebels progressed fast: In just a few days, ISIS lost massive territories in Aleppo’s countryside. These battles were not just unusual but also long desired by anti-Assad activists. As of January 5, 2014, the infighting still had not reached Raqqa—but at a little past nine that winter night, the show began.
That night on the balcony, the spectacle came to me without images, only sounds, distant and confusing, that spoke of grave and ominous consequence on the ground. My psychopathic fondness for serious action was aroused, but it wasn’t bloodlust that drove my curiosity. If you lived in a war zone, you had better watch what was unfurling around you. The events I heard that night were the ones that Tareq had confidently described during our last long night in my basement. I could picture him, wrapping his fringed scarf around his face to defeat the piercing weather, dodging bullets or thinking he was. In my attempts to imagine scenes of violence, I invariably had trouble visualizing the individual fighter’s behavior on a battlefield or inhabiting his consciousness, but whenever I managed the feat, it unnerved me profoundly. How could you recognize the silhouette that popped up in front of your eyes as an enemy, oh Tareq? You wouldn’t have time to think. You were always a quicker responder than me in the game Counter-Strike, in counterattack, in tackling ideologues’ fires, but with real bullets, in the dark, in the shivering cold, in the last hours of a long day, how, Tareq? Was I sounding like your mother? How was she doing now? Was I worried, or was I devilishly curious? Or both? Oh Tareq, you were terrifying me.
Tareq of the soft, brown skin and the features of both a child and a man. Tareq, who possessed a kindness and generosity that I rarely encountered in others, qualities that stirred my admiration, in spite of what I believed to be the nonsense that often issued from his mouth. When he spoke, his keen eyes held the firmness of a believer. He’d just been searching for something to believe in.
Oh long, bleak nights, oh guardians of light and glories, oh immortal conquerors in the dark, oh architects of wartime strategy and masters of fate, preserve me another friend, one I do not have the luxury to lose.
I went out on Monday afternoon to see a few people, young, scurrying, and standing in corners safe from stray bullets. The buzzing of the bullets hadn’t stopped all that time, though their rhythm was now accented by louder, arrhythmic booms. Bombs. It was fascinating how bustling streets could turn idle so quickly. The explosions deafened my ears and narrowed my mind’s occupation to the abnormality of what my eyes were seeing, but after a minute sound returned, in the form of a crash that brought me back into my own baffled consciousness. The reality that shaped our lives resembled the surreal story of that checkpoint that was taken and retaken, conquered and reconquered, raised and erased and reinstalled by the Islamic State and the Ahrar al-Sham Islamic Movement, interchangeably, all in the space of a relatively warm winter day. This haphazard battle exposed the mismanagement—or the inefficiency—of the battle’s planners. They were amateurs; this was discernible even to those of us not in the battle, those of us who were overtaken, as the fighters were, by the velocity of the street clashes that jumped from avenue to avenue, from intersection to intersection, in daylight, in darkness, under impossible watch.
Dusk or dark, I dimly remember the night but can’t forget the feeling. I was headed home from tutoring when I stumbled across visored faces, wrapped in black scarves. They spoke with wary tones—as they called out to me, their heads twirled right, left, and behind. The scarf-masked men encircled me, terrifying and terrified, and when one of them asked where I was coming from, where I was going to, and why, I wondered too. Where was I coming from, where was I going, and, seriously, though, why?
I now hated teaching kids a language that had beaten me for years. My only consolation was the voice in my head that told me it was a good thing to do, a way to maintain something of the sacred normality of life, a strategy in this madness to save their future. Of course, all that was exaggeration. I still remember the moments with students when we heard the bullets or the planes roaring in the sky. The kids feared the noises I pretended to ignore. I asked my students to finish their assignments and then over-assigned them some more, while the distractions persisted. I ended up yelling at the kids for not delivering their classwork, even though I myself was having trouble remembering the exercises. Kids are less vulnerable to trauma, it might seem at first, but who can claim to know how a child’s inerasable memory might return and distort his or her adult life?
The men in masks were frenetic. One mask asked for my ID, and I handed it to him. He turned on his small flashlight to check it. Another, seated against the wall, shouted at him scornfully: “Turn off the light!” Moments before I arrived, the ISIS sniper atop the six-story red building to the east had sent a greeting to this group. Another mask asked if I had a gun. I asked myself the next question. Why did I have a gun? For some reason, I thought that it would protect me from the night’s owls and bats. I said yes. Yes, I was reckless. Reckless, perhaps, like Nael swaggering toward the patrolmen; only his interceptors were at ease and mine in a frenzy. We crossed the street under the mercy of our shared enemy, the sniper who oversaw our strange encounter. He fired. The scarf-masked fighter handed my ID to the “sheikh”—they called everyone “sheikh.” In this case, he was the unit’s boss, an old man, I could tell. I kept my eyes sharp, as I could not lose track of the guy holding my gun. I wouldn’t leave without my gun. My father had given it to me. It was as precious as Ramadan’s sundown. The sheikh asked the same questions, and I offered the same answers. He apparently believed me, or maybe they just had more urgent matters on their minds. I was freed.
“Go, quickly,” the sheikh said.
“Not without my gun,” I said.
“Where’s his gun?” he asked the masked men.
One fighter spoke up. “Here, with me.”
“Does he have bullets?” the sheikh asked.
“The magazine is full,” the fighter said.
The sheikh seemed unsure of what to do.
“Did you search him?” he asked.
A bullet echoed. He screamed at his fighters garrisoned across the street to keep their lights extinguished.
“Yes,” the fighter replied.
“Give him the gun,” the sheikh finally resolved.
I AM BOUND BY OBLIGATION to provide you, my honorable reader, with some necessary details. Islam came to Arabia at a time when noble Meccans worshiped gods of their own creation. Omar, the second caliph-to-be, built his god from dates, and when he became hungry he ate it. Arabs adopted Islam by conversion and by force. In the next centuries, but largely under Omar’s reign, the Muslim empire stretched from China to the Kingdom of León. For centuries after, Arab Muslims had a caliph or caliphs, both Arab and non-Arab, who cherished their religion, but since the Great War, the caliph has been missing and Muslims have been searching for him. Some said that he was hiding underground, waiting for epic battles to come in which he himself would lead the unified Ummah to more glories. While some thought that he would be Shia, a true follower of Islam, others argued that he could only be Sunni, a true follower of Islam.
So now, it seemed, our caliph was Baghdadi, of the American prison Camp Bucca, and his cortege from Britain’s Birmingham. Sunnis were unsatisfied and Shia denounced him as fake. ISIS declared itself the caliphate, here to stay and ready to expand.
Islamists, Shiite and Sunni alike, burdened their shoulders with the interests of the Ummah—the global community of Islam—so they drove the Ummah to fight amongst itself. For this very reason, Muslims got Khomeini, Bin Laden, and the kings of Saudi Arabia. We would know no winner, no peace.
In Syria, Sunni Islamists welcomed Baghdadi when they wanted to Islamize the “events.” Then they decided to fight him, when he wanted to declare them non-Muslims as a prelude to removing them—with bullets—from this earth.
The war presented us Syrian commoners with a splendor of options. While a handful thought that the Ummah, now exclusively Sunni, needed a necessary trauma, a wake-up call, others thought that they had found a cause to fight for. Secularists believed that the secular world would crown them presidents. Perhaps some members of the underprivileged masses, poor under the old order as well as the disordered present, were thankful for the opportunity to seek asylum in Stockholm and Berlin. The luckiest, maybe, were those who became agnostic.
Islamists didn’t have to exert much effort to hijack the revolution—it was easily given up by the politically uneducated crowds who had started it. Now it was an arena of jihad, divided into halves, with believers versus unbelievers on one side, and nationalist-believers versus takfiri-mercenaries on the other. Mosques’ pulpits clashed with such clamor that Muhammad and his religion were lost in between. As the situation on the ground tipped in the rebels’ favor, the Assad government—thanks to efforts excreted by the Islamic Revolutionary Government of Iran—invited Shia jihadist militias from Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan to come to Syria and take starring roles in their war movie. More and more, Syrians were excluded from the speaking parts. Foreigners directed the scene.
Every jihadist group was certain of its righteousness, and every jihadist was ready to commit himself to the end, regardless of the sacrifice. Hence, every jihadist group claimed itself as the side that possessed heaven, and every jihadist, it seemed, had already booked his residence there.
Islamist revolutionaries in Syria, who called themselves Brothers, studied previous jihads and raced to emulate them. Ahrar al-Sham, at some point, presented in its camps the teachings of Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, who had spent his life between his house and his Jordanian jail. Or Iyad Qunabi, a Jordanian jihadi theorist who ran a YouTube channel denouncing democracy and promoting anti-West conspiracy theories. They also hosted several al-Qaeda veterans, such as Abu Khaled al-Suri. Other Islamists were importing their ideologies in a similar manner. None, however, had the clarity of ISIS.
By mid-January 2014, the Syrian theater had fragmented into something infinitely more complex than a civil war between two sides seeking absolute triumph, more fractal than a mere quadripartite. It became a proxy war masterminded by global and regional powers to gain influence, and Tareq and his fellow fighters were tesserae in a tarnished mosaic.
The bullets of the Brothers had outpaced their intellectual apprehension and Quranic textual scrutiny. The mechanical noises of stuffing, loading, cocking, and triggering echoed in the Brothers’ ears with more resonance and intuitive logic than Allah Almighty’s coded, polysemic words ever had. The song of powder had been sung, and the debate on His teachings had shyly moved aside. And Raqqa would have to survive its destiny.
“Why were you walking in the evening with a gun in your waistband during the battle of Raqqa?” smug Tareq would, a year and a half later, blow into my ear.