And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East (23 page)

Mosul was ISIS’s break-out moment, but the group had been slowly building for months. We, and others, reported on its rise time and again. We reported how its fighters were slipping into Syria from Turkey’s southern border. I’d seen them as far back as 2012 at the Istanbul airport and in Antakya, a city of 215,000 only a dozen miles from the Syrian border. (The ruins of the ancient metropolis of Antioch, known as “the cradle of Christianity,” lay on the outskirts of the modern, overwhelmingly Muslim city.)

The ISIS recruits were as conspicuous as college kids on their way to Cancún for spring break. I especially remember a group of them in Antakya, Arabs with beards, all in their twenties and thirties, with military builds, carrying backpacks and wearing sneakers or hiking shoes. So what were they doing walking through the middle of Antakya? They weren’t there to pray at Saint Peter’s Church. They weren’t there to see the Byzantine mosaics. And they weren’t there to look at the beautiful scenery or sample Antakya’s famous cuisine. They were there for one reason: to cross the border and bring the fight to Syria. If a journalist could see them, Turkish intelligence and the CIA could certainly see them too.

Arab speakers often call the group Daesh, a tag rejected by ISIS because the Arab word
daes
means “crush underfoot.”

ISIS follows Salafism (the Saudi version of Salafism
is called Wahhabism), but the group effectively stole al-Qaeda’s ideology and expanded on it, embracing the most grizzly and brutal aspects of Islam’s history like enslaving female captives and beheadings, while rejecting the faith’s long traditions of tolerance. It would be like a group that claimed to act in the name of Christianity, but only accepted the worst practices of the Spanish Inquisition at the expense of all others. ISIS nonetheless proved to be appealing to a certain segment of Muslim society because it offered the possibility of living without modern rules. It appealed to psychopaths and to Muslims who felt outraged by the racism they encountered in Europe. It is a disturbing aspect of human nature that if there is a place where there are no consequences and where the most grotesque murders are tolerated in the name of a cult claiming to be a faith, a certain type of person will be attracted to it.

My first face-to-face meeting with ISIS recruits came in early December 2012, shortly before I was kidnapped. I was traveling with rebels in the Free Syrian Army in the vicinity of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, which is located in the northwest corner of the country close to the Turkish border. The rebels’ system was communal and loose. We would hop from one safe house to another, spending a few hours at one and maybe a few nights at another. These houses provided a place to sleep, some food, and use of a bathroom—much-needed creature comforts when you’re living rough.

One night we were at a house not far from Aleppo. It was cold. We’d been there for several days and were sleeping on blankets and rollout mattresses on the floor. We were comfortable and enjoying the company of our hosts, who were secular revolutionaries, moderates who wanted to overthrow the regime and create a more or less democratic and tolerant society. They were the kind
of rebels the United States talked about supporting but never really did.

Then another group of opposition fighters turned up. In the rotating system of safe houses, this was not unusual. The newcomers were different, however, in their appearance, their behavior, and their attitude toward us. They all had beards and wore more military-style uniforms. They carried their guns with them inside, all the time, instead of leaving them at the door as the other fighters did. They were deadly serious, not at all like the Free Syrian Army rebels, who would slap everyone on the back, take off their shoes, plop down on a pillow, and light cigarettes. Their beards made it clear they were Islamists. They didn’t introduce themselves.

Our host brought out plates of food, and we all sat down on the floor, on our legs or with legs crossed Indian-style, a typical communal meal in Syria. The Islamists who had just arrived weren’t talking to us, apparently because we were Westerners. They weren’t rude to us, but they were hard-eyed and aloof. I was sitting next to one of them, a man in his late thirties or early forties, heavyset, built like a construction worker. He eventually started speaking to me, if only because I was next to him. He harped on the coming of a new caliphate.

I said, “Oh, why do you say that?”

“We’re building it. It’s happening. The caliphate will return, and will return soon.” Then he looked in my eyes and said it again. “Soon. The caliphate is coming back, imminently.” He was sure about this—in December 2012.

When the bearded gunmen finished their meal, they got up and left. I got the feeling they didn’t feel comfortable there because of our presence. If that meal had been
a year later, I’m sure we would have ended up leaving with our hands tied behind our backs, kidnapped.

But at the time, ISIS was relatively weak. It was in re-formation. The moderate rebels still had the upper hand, and since we were their guests, these hard-core guys couldn’t hurt us. They didn’t call themselves ISIS fighters yet. They just described themselves as warriors for Allah. They had a quiet fierceness common to true fanatics.

I was kidnapped less than two weeks later, and in retrospect it seems clear that if I had been held longer, I probably would have been sold to or taken by guys like this, whether they called themselves ISIS or not. James Foley, a freelance correspondent, was kidnapped thirty miles from Aleppo three weeks before the Sunni-connected criminal gang grabbed me.

I went back into Syria in June 2013 with Salim Idris. At the time, Salim Idris was chief of the Free Syrian Army. I had a good relationship with him. He was secular, eager for American support, and happy to have me tag along. I think he wanted to show me that the FSA was still in charge. But what he ended up showing me was that the FSA was not in charge, not by a long shot. He had two protection vehicles when he went into Syria, one in front of his SUV and one in back. The three SUVs were packed with gunmen. Probably seven armed guys were in the front vehicle, six in the trail car. Another three rode in his car with him. So we had sixteen or seventeen guards, all heavily armed, all fully trusted by Salim Idris.

On the road from the Turkish border to just outside Aleppo, about a forty-minute drive, we passed seven checkpoints, none of them controlled by the FSA. Some were manned by independents keeping an eye on their villages. Some were controlled
by ISIS. Remember, this was only six months after my dinner with what I presumed were ISIS fighters. Back then they were keeping a low profile. Now they seemed to be advertising their affiliation. They had black flags and wore ski masks. Salim Idris was trying to say, “Hey, look, I’m still in charge. I’m still the big guy. I can take you into Syria.” Frankly, I was worried he wouldn’t be able to get me out.

At one ISIS checkpoint, the militants stopped us and started talking to the driver. You could see them trying to figure out what to do: “Do we take these guys on? Do we remove Salim Idris and his Western journalist and crew from the car?” I’m not a mind reader, so I can’t be 100 percent sure what they were thinking. But judging by their body language, the tone of their questions, and the spirited conversations they had among themselves, it sure looked like a kangaroo court had been convened.

They eventually waved us through. A few months later, I don’t think we would have made it. By then, the FSA was no match for ISIS. Salim Idris no longer had any clout. We would have just been taken. And ISIS wouldn’t have been concerned about the consequences. There would have been little if any political backlash, just pleas from NBC and the US government to let us go. I know this sounds melodramatic, but anyone who’s crossed a lawless border—in Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan—knows the feeling. You can simply disappear and no one would be the wiser.

When I went into Syria again in August 2013, this time to collect soil samples to test for evidence that Assad had used chemical weapons, the first person I saw was an ISIS gunman with a ski mask and a headband with an Islamic slogan written on it. The ISIS fighters were sending a message to the FSA and al-Qaeda and everyone else in Syria that they were now in charge.
ISIS evolved in plain sight, right under the world’s nose and often in front of our camera. ISIS is not a virus that came from nowhere. It started in Iraq, and then expanded in Syria, cannibalizing the rebel movement and capitalizing on Syrians’ dashed hopes and growing anger.

ISIS also learned to market itself. The group is obsessively concerned with its public image, knowing that it’s key to recruiting and to its jihadist preeminence. So it reacts swiftly to any development that raises doubts about its control of its caliphate in Iraq and Syria. In late June 2015, for example, Kurdish fighters stirred ISIS’s ire when, with the help of US warplanes, they captured the Syrian town Tal Abyad. This was not just any town. It sits astride a key supply line for arms and fighters bound for Raqqa, ISIS’s command center in Syria. Raqqa, a city of 220,000, lies fifty-five miles south of the Turkish border and a hundred miles east of Aleppo.

ISIS responded with a barrage of snuff videos. In one, five men described as spies were put in a cage and lowered into a swimming pool while a camera captured their drowning throes. A second group was crammed into a car that was then blown up by a rocket-propelled grenade; the scene was made all the more gruesome when the car burst into flames. In the third, seven men were decapitated simultaneously by an explosive cable strung around their necks.

When ISIS captured the ancient city of Palmyra in May 2015, the world rightly feared for its archaeological treasures. Under ISIS’s austere monotheism, human statues and memorials constitute idolatry forbidden by Sunni Islam.

ISIS had grander plans for Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage site located 135 miles northeast of  Damascus.
On July 4, 2015, a date perhaps chosen for its resonance in the United States, ISIS released a ten-minute video whose cinematic style resembled the early epics of Cecil B. DeMille. In a meticulously choreographed death pageant, ISIS fighters led twenty-five Syrian soldiers into an ancient Roman amphitheater. The Syrians, dressed in dark green fatigues, were lined up on the stage and forced to kneel. Then an equal number of ISIS teenagers, wearing sand-colored clothes and tan headscarves, filed past the stage, with a soundtrack of musical chants giving them a heroic air. They mounted the stage, each taking a place behind one of the soldiers, pointed handguns at the Syrians’ heads, and pulled the triggers at the same time.

ISIS had become more than a savage terrorist group; it had also become a state of mind, a place off the grid of humanity where only ISIS rules mattered. While most of the horrific acts given an ISIS label were committed by “core” members in the caliphate, a growing number were carried out by “branches,” “offshoots,” or “affiliates” inspired by ISIS—or lone-wolf copycats turned on by ISIS snuff videos.

On June 26, 2015, which ISIS called “Bloody Friday,” four attacks were carried out on three continents in the wake of the group’s call for “calamity for the infidels” during Ramadan. In a beach rampage in Sousse, Tunisia, a lone gunman killed thirty-eight people, most of them British tourists. ISIS claimed responsibility, but investigators believed the killer belonged to a separate network of Salafis. The gunman, twenty-four-year-old Seifeddine Rezgui, trained with an extremist group in Libya, along with two other militants who killed twenty-two people at the Bardo National Museum in Tunis in March 2015.

In Kuwait, a branch of ISIS claimed responsibility for an attack on a Shiite mosque. (The same group had previously claimed
responsibility for killing twenty-four in attacks on two other Shiite mosques, both in eastern Saudi Arabia, in May 2015.) In Somalia, a radical group called Al-Shabaab, which several years ago pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda, killed dozens of Burundian soldiers at an African Union base. Al-Shabaab ditched al-Qaeda in favor of an allegiance to ISIS, partly because al-Qaeda was demanding kickbacks from the Somali group and partly because ISIS was the hot new brand in the terror business.

Perhaps the most disturbing ISIS-related attack on Bloody Friday only took one life. A worker at a US-owned industrial plant in southeastern France killed his boss, then decapitated him and put his head atop a fence outside the factory. He also took pictures of the victim’s body draped with an Islamist flag. The suspect had visited Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, was thought to be connected to a Salafist group, and had been under surveillance by French authorities off and on for the last decade. Yet his stated motive for the atrocity was chillingly banal: he wanted to get back at his boss for chewing him out for dropping a pallet of valuable material.

Watching the ISIS videos is disturbing. Meeting the group’s victims in person, however, leaves a mark.

In the summer of 2015, I met Mohammed, fourteen, in the southern Turkish city of Sanliurfa, an ancient city of stone walls and canals filled with fish from a sacred pond. The city looks more like Aleppo than cosmopolitan Istanbul. I met Mohammed in a small apartment where he lived with his brother and a friend of the family who was acting as his nurse. Mohammed was using a wheelchair to move around the apartment on the third floor of a dilapidated walk-up building. It had no air-conditioning. The doorways in the apartment were narrow. His wheelchair didn’t
fit through all of them, so Mohammed, originally from eastern Syria, often pushed himself out of the chair and hopped around the apartment on one foot.

ISIS had chopped off Mohammed’s right hand and left foot two weeks before I met him. ISIS tried to turn Mohammed into a child soldier. The group disfigured him because he refused to cooperate.

Although Mohammed looked like a typical young teenager, pimples and all, he had been part of the Free Syrian Army, fighting against the Syrian regime and ISIS. Mohammed worked as a spotter, using binoculars to help the rebels locate their targets.

“First we were going to [anti-government] demonstrations. Later on we got armed with the Free [Syrian] Army, and we fought the al-Assad regime for three years,” Mohammed said with obvious pride in his voice.