My Education on the Border of the Syrian War
In the spring of 2013—when I was twenty-two and had little sense of the direction my life might take—I travelled to the Turkish-Syrian border, to learn how journalists work in war. During the previous two years, the security forces of the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, had carried out a brutal crackdown on peaceful protesters, and the situation had spiralled into armed conflict, with thousands of civilians dead and hundreds of thousands of refugees spilling into neighboring countries. Rebels had captured half of Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, and most of the territory north and west of it, including the official crossings into southern Turkey. In practice, that meant any freelancer, humanitarian, or jihadi could simply fly to Turkey, head south, and walk across the border.
I had taken a year off from college to figure out whether I would professionally pursue music or journalism, and so I tried both. I had no plans to enter Syria—only to meet war correspondents as they went in and out of the country, and to learn how to navigate the moral and logistical challenges that arise in conflict reporting.
A journalism professor of mine gave me contacts in Kilis, the last Turkish town on the north-south road to Aleppo. There, I would meet a Syrian activist, a software engineer and hacker who went by the code name Harvester. “You will find Kilis very interesting,” another reporter told me. “There’s a cheap fleabag hotel where many journalists stay. . . . Hotel Istanbul.”
Harvester arranged for a taxi-driver named Deniz to pick me up at the regional airport and bring me south to Kilis. The drive ordinarily takes about forty-five minutes, but Deniz always pushed his old yellow Mercedes to do it in thirty. A blue road sign caught my eye as we sped past a donkey cart: straight for Aleppo, slight right for Kilis. Deniz turned right, and minutes later we pulled up to the peeling green exterior of the Hotel Istanbul.
Before the war, a room at the hotel had cost the equivalent of five euros a night. Now it was almost fifteen. I walked upstairs, to Room 407. The drains stank. The walls were yellowed, the toilet seat broken, the sheets full of cigarette burns. (Some days later, I realized that the air freshener dangling from my bathroom mirror was, in fact, a urinal cake.) I dropped my backpack on my cot and wrote to Harvester that I had arrived. He asked for my room number. I told him that I’d meet him in the lobby.
Several men sat in the lobby, eying new arrivals and playing on their phones. A slender man in a black suit, a silver tie, and mirrored sunglasses bounded down the steps from the guest floors and extended his hand. “My name is Ahmed,” he said. “People call me Harvester.” His teeth were stained brown, and he had greasy, shoulder-length hair. Another man, dressed similarly, stood by and nodded. “That’s Hassan, my security,” Ahmed said.
Was this really Harvester? The man in front of me was so conspicuous that I wondered whether I had walked into a trap. Nobody had told me that Harvester had a room in the hotel; I’d read in the news that he was a refugee in hiding. Had the software engineer been captured? Was a regime intelligence officer now taking appointments in his place?
Ahmed grabbed my hand and pulled me in for a kiss on each cheek. “That’s how we greet brothers in Syria,” he said. He reeked of cigarettes—Gauloises Blondes, smuggled across the border and sold on the streets of Kilis by refugee children for the equivalent of fifty cents a pack. We walked out of the lobby, with his bodyguard, and set off to eat.
Out of the chaos and bloodshed of the war, an opportunity for English-speaking Syrians had emerged, a dangerous but well-paid role for those who were willing to take foreign journalists to the front lines. The best of these fixers cost a couple of hundred dollars per day—far more than the average Syrian earned in a month. But their local expertise, connections, courage, and instincts could stave off death or captivity. The good fixers knew where the sniper alleys were, and many of them had grown up with the rebels who were now running the local checkpoints. The only means of finding a reliable fixer was word of mouth.
I had read in the Irish Times that Ahmed was a founder of an anti-government hacker collective called the Pirates of Aleppo, and on NPR’s website that he was developing a remotely operated robot for rescuing wounded people from sniper alleys. Neither of these projects paid the bills, and Ahmed had taken to connecting freelancers and war tourists in Kilis with fixers and drivers in Syria, for a fifty-dollar fee. “I have sent eighty-seven people in and out of Syria without a scratch,” he told me that evening. He paused dramatically, then corrected himself. “One guy was grazed by a bit of concrete when a bullet hit a wall next to him,” he said. “So, eighty-six without a scratch and one with a scratch. That bastard broke my perfect record.”
Ahmed was popular with journalists. Even though he was reportedly being hunted by the regime, he readily gave interviews. According to the Belgian outlet La Libre, he had been detained by Assad’s security forces twice—first for trying to buy a music album that had “Freedom” in the title, then, a few years later, when his apparent expertise in robotics led to accusations that he was a spy. GlobalPost reported that he had undergone “extreme torture with electric shock, cigarette burns, beatings that broke countless bones, spikes forced under toe nails and a contraption he spoke of only as the ‘dentist chair.’ ” Then, early in the revolution, the regime’s electronic-warfare unit allegedly tried to recruit him. According to several news outlets, he was taken to a dilapidated computer shop in Aleppo, where a secret door opened into an underground bunker filled with state-of-the-art equipment. There were “rows of routers and high-spec machines, including American-made components I’d never seen in Syria before,” Ahmed told a reporter, a few months before I arrived. “They were using this technology to track activists’ I.P. addresses, so the police and the Army could locate their homes.”
Instead, Ahmed teamed up with activists to subvert the regime, hacking into the Facebook accounts of people who had been arrested and replacing their anti-government images and posts with pornography, “to keep the investigator busy,” he told a Middle East correspondent. According to the correspondent, “It worked.” In the absence of evidence, Ahmed explained, those who had been arrested were soon released: “They were tortured a little bit, but not serious.” Ahmed and his team also reportedly hacked into a pro-regime television station at least thirteen times, once altering a breaking-news banner so it announced that Assad had stepped down.
Ahmed fled to Turkey about six months before I arrived. According to GlobalPost, he was tried in absentia for his cyber actions twice and sentenced to death both times. At dinner, I asked whether the regime had managed to break into his own accounts. “I hope they try, because then I can hack them back and take down their computers,” he said, laughing. This seemed unlikely. I struggled to reconcile the man in front of me with the man I had read about in the news. When I tried to pay for the meal, he snapped his fingers at Hassan. “My bodyguard—he takes care of it,” he said.
The next day, I met Ahmed for tea at an open-air café called Muzzo, a short walk from the hotel. We were soon joined by a twenty-year-old Swiss engineering student named Raimondo Pictet, who was on his way to Aleppo to photograph the war, in what he described as a “trial run” for Agence France-Presse. The arrangement granted A.F.P. exclusive rights to his photographs in perpetuity. In return, the outlet would pay him fifty dollars for each of the first three images that it put on the wire each day, and nothing for the rest. Transportation and fixer fees would exceed his maximum potential earnings, but he regarded this trip as an investment in his future as a photographer.
Ahmed called him Tintin, because he looked like a teen-age boy. He had already photographed in Myanmar, North Ossetia, and Chechnya, and had been to Syria once before. It was spring break at his university, in Lausanne. He was late in submitting a paper and hadn’t told the professor why he couldn’t work on it that week. He hadn’t brought a razor, because he couldn’t yet grow facial hair.
Ahmed pulled a folded piece of paper out of his pocket: a black-and-white satellite image of Aleppo. As Pictet stood over his shoulder, Ahmed sketched the front lines in blue pen: Free Syrian Army (F.S.A.) here, Kurds there, regime troops across the road. “This roundabout is surrounded by five snipers,” Ahmed said. “And don’t take out your camera around Jabhat al-Nusra”—the Syrian Al Qaeda affiliate—“or they might like you too much and keep you forever.”
Pictet seemed sensitive to the moral risk of going into Syria for the wrong reasons. “I’m leaving if I get a real adrenaline high,” he told me. “This is supposed to be a humanitarian project.” He advised that I at least cross a few hundred metres into Syria, to witness the wretched conditions inside a growing camp for internally displaced civilians who could not enter Turkey. “It’s safe, and it’s the only way you’ll be able to understand the war,” he said.
Pictet left to retrieve his body armor from the Hotel Istanbul. He paid the bill wearing a flak jacket and helmet that he had borrowed from a French N.G.O. Deniz pulled up in his yellow Mercedes, drove Pictet to the border, and returned to the café for a muddy black coffee. A few minutes later, Pictet called Ahmed. He had met up with his rebel contact, and they were on the road to Aleppo. He would soon be out of range for Turkish mobile phones, so this was goodbye for the week and hopefully no longer.
Ahmed lived in Room 306 at the Hotel Istanbul. It was about ten feet long and six feet wide, with a small cot and no bathroom. His mattress was lumpy foam, his pillow a couch cushion. The room smelled of cigarettes and sweat; the floor was littered with clothes, junk-food wrappers, and empty packs of Gauloises. Ahmed had cut a deal with the hotel managers to pay less than six euros a night for his room. When he couldn’t cover the bill, he helped them with cleaning and other chores.
Ahmed always kept his laptop plugged in, because the battery could not hold a charge for more than a few minutes. It was a crusty black Lenovo, with missing keys, that sat on a Formica bedside table next to an ashtray and a remote-controlled car. It was from this setup that Ahmed claimed to be hacking the regime. By the time I was invited inside, on my second or third day in Kilis, I had been convinced by Pictet and others that Ahmed was, in fact, Harvester. But the scope of Harvester’s reported achievements was at odds with the fact that the hotel’s internet connection was so poor and intermittent that sending an e-mail usually took several minutes. Some of the things he said sounded almost satirical. “I’ve got my pirate software at the ready,” he once told a reporter.
Ahmed gestured at the remote-controlled car. It had exposed wires, and pincers were screwed onto the front. The pincers looked sophisticated, but they didn’t actually work. “This is my prototype,” he told me—a model of his rescue robot which he showed to journalists.
Ahmed said that the idea had come to him early in the revolution, after the brother of an acquaintance was shot in the leg by a regime sniper. He recalled witnesses looking on helplessly as the young man bled out, crumpled on the ground and pleading for help, in the course of thirty minutes. There was no way for the bystanders to retrieve the wounded man without exposing themselves to the sniper. Doctors in Aleppo later reported a pattern of regime snipers shooting to maim civilians, rather than to kill them—partly to maximize suffering, partly to invite rescue attempts. “Often three or four people die trying to save one person’s life,” Ahmed told me.
Ahmed’s idea was to construct a set of enormous titanium robotic arms, to be affixed to the front of a remotely operated wireless bulldozer. He had a rudimentary rendering on his laptop, but imagining it in the field required some suspension of disbelief. The contraption resembled a giant mechanical cockroach with claws at the tips of its antennae. The claws, he explained, would grab the injured person and shove him into a cavity below, to protect him from additional sniper rounds. Inside would be loudspeakers playing reggae music, to calm the person. “If you think I’m crazy, I am. You are right,” Ahmed said.
Ahmed spoke about his robot the same way he spoke about women: relentlessly, obsessively, and unconvincingly. He spent much of his time in chat rooms and on Skype, flirting with women in Western countries, but confessed that he had never slept with anyone. Although the robot didn’t exist, he named it Tena, after a Finnish woman he claimed to have met on a plane. “She had this red hair—Oh, my God! ” he said, falling back on his mattress. “I fell in love with her, and she didn’t love me back. But RoboTena will always be mine.”
The day we met, he told me that the Syrian regime was not the only organization that had sought his skills. “I had a visit from Jabhat al-Nusra two weeks ago,” he said. “The guy wanted to talk to me about outfitting RoboTena with guns.” Around that time, Nusra was designated a terrorist organization by the United States and several other Western governments. The group was involved in the abduction of foreign journalists and aid workers and in the summary executions of captured regime soldiers. But many Syrians living in rebel-held territory preferred the jihadis to some of the more moderate, less disciplined rebel brigades, which were prone to corruption and looting.
The identity of Nusra’s leader was not public—he was known only by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani—but he set about trying to improve public infrastructure in wartime Aleppo. The group opened bus lines, collected garbage, and delivered flour to the city’s bakeries. Nusra also had a reputation for policing other armed groups and punishing criminal gangs, with swift convictions in its own Sharia courts, often followed by executions.
Ahmed had declined the Nusra offer, he said, and then decided to take RoboTena to the press, to solicit funding without having to cater to the demands of fundamentalists. In fact, Ahmed continued, Vice News would soon run a story about him, but the writer had not taken photographs. I had bought my first camera two months earlier, so Ahmed asked me to take the pictures, giving me the opportunity to have some small thing of mine published for the first time. He picked up the toy car, walked down to an alley behind the hotel, and placed it on a pile of rubble. I snapped a few frames. “Don’t show my face, brother,” he said. “There are people that want me dead.”
One day, Ahmed and I were joined for tea at Muzzo by a local F.S.A. commander, a lieutenant in the brigade that controlled many of the nearby Syrian villages. They spoke for several minutes in Arabic. “He says you look Syrian,” Ahmed told me. “He’ll take you to Aleppo and look after you.”
A part of me yearned to go. I wanted to produce meaningful journalism in a place where it mattered, and here was a chance. But I had no substantive contacts at news outlets, and, more important, I did not know how to write. I imagined a mother in Aleppo on the worst day of her life, disclosing her suffering to me under the belief that she was speaking to someone who would tell the world what had happened to her—only for my writing to fall short and the story to go nowhere. So I declined the offer.
In addition, I had been told by my professor of an emerging pattern of abductions in rebel-held territory. There had been two the previous summer, three in the fall, and at least three more since then. Syria had become a freelancers’ war. I met none of the established correspondents I expected to; in light of the abductions, they had mostly stopped coming to Kilis. The reporters who remained were largely young people with few contacts and little, if any, backing. Some risked their lives for journalistic ideals, others for no clear reason.
Most of these freelancers stayed in the Hotel Istanbul, which was home to a rotating cast of war tourists, jihadis, drifters, and spies. A German magazine called it the “Hotel of Madness.” Shortly before I arrived, a middle-aged Japanese trucker took out a life-insurance policy, then travelled to Kilis. He spent the next week running around Aleppo’s front lines in military fatigues, taking photographs. “I’m not afraid if they shoot at me, or that they might kill me,” he told a reporter from A.F.P. “I’m a combination of samurai and kamikaze.”
One evening, I went out for beers with two young freelancers, Patrick and Paul—Brits in their late twenties whom I thought of as examples to emulate. They had come to cover the battle for Menagh Air Base, a small regime outpost near the border which had been besieged by rebels for months. I asked about the camp for internally displaced persons, overseen by an F.S.A. faction, that abutted the Syrian side of the border, and they said that it was fairly safe to go there.
Paul finished his pint and stood to leave. “I’m on the late hop back to Istanbul tonight,” he said. “London in the morning.” He turned to Patrick: “Where do you think you’ll go next?”
“I’ve been thinking about Mali,” Patrick said.
“Are the French still fighting there?”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe I’ll see you in Bamako, mate.”
The next morning, I walked across the border into Syria, to visit the I.D.P. camp. The Turkish border guards at the official crossing point, Bab al-Salama, asked no questions. The road through no man’s land was fenced on either side and cut through a lush green minefield with yellow flowers. On the Syrian side was a large concrete structure, topped with rebel flags and a sign reading “Free Syria. Wish you Safty.” People were milling about in flip-flops, holding water jugs, smoking cigarettes—little to do, nowhere to go. Young men in mismatched military garb and sportswear stood by the gate with Kalashnikovs. Ahmed had promised that the F.S.A. commander he’d introduced me to would be waiting for me at the Syrian gates. With him, I’d be “untouchable,” he had said. But the commander was not there.
I tried to be inconspicuous. A warning from my professor consumed me: “Think about who would hold the press conference announcing your abduction.” I grabbed a discarded five-litre water bottle, as if I needed to fill it for my family, then sat on a cinder block and called Patrick. He asked what I was wearing, then contacted a Syrian fixer who worked at the A’zaz press office, the propaganda arm of the local brigade. A few minutes later, a bald man in his early thirties named Alaaeddin limped over and extended a hand. He’d been a fighter for the F.S.A. but had been shot in the leg nine months earlier, and now worked with the press office.
Most of the Syrians living at the Bab al-Salama camp had fled shelling in and around Aleppo. Some wanted to cross into Turkey but didn’t have the necessary documents. Others had passports but no money to start a new life. Many clung to the belief that the war would soon be over. “Bashar will fall in less than two months!” someone said. His children cheered. More than half the occupants of the camp were children.
There was not enough food. One man told me that he could collect only three small loaves of bread each day to feed his family of six. Several camp residents said that at least one person in every tent was sick, mostly with scabies or diarrhea. There were large puddles of waste around the camp and in the gullies between tents.
A man named Asad Hoammed invited me into his tent and started making tea. He had left his home, in a nearby village, a month earlier. His wife had developed a serious heart condition and was in desperate need of valve surgery. But the Turkish authorities would not let them through. Without the operation, Hoammed said, she would likely die within the week.
Hoammed handed me a glass of tea. As we sat, we heard a Syrian fighter jet approaching. No one said anything. I clenched my jaw, so as not to visibly react. It seemed unlikely that it would bomb the camp—and if it did no amount of fear would help the situation. It felt profoundly unfair that I could simply walk back into Turkey while Hoammed and his ailing wife could not. We soon heard a distant explosion, likely aimed at the rebels laying siege to Menagh Air Base.
On my return to Kilis, a Turkish border officer asked why I had been in Syria. “A student?” he said. “You know there’s a war on.” I started to explain myself, but he interrupted: “Relax—I don’t care what you were doing.” He stamped my passport and waved me through.
Back in the Hotel Istanbul, I started drafting a story about Hoammed and his wife. I had made my inexperience very clear to him. But a part of me believed that if I could somehow get the story published the Turkish gates might open to them. I sent a draft to my professor. “Great story, Ben,” she replied. “The bad news is there are thousands of stories, maybe a million stories, just like this one. Placement doesn’t really matter. There are no good guys coming to the rescue. Now you see the tragedy of Syria up close.”
A few days later, when I called Alaaeddin to ask about Hoammed’s wife, he told me that she was dead.
While I was in the Bab al-Salama camp, four Italian journalists disappeared at a Nusra checkpoint nearby. After the group’s recent designation as a terrorist organization, many of its fighters regarded the press as a threat. They did not want to be photographed, and competent fixers warned journalists that cameras should stay in their bags at checkpoints. This restriction made photographs of Nusra fighters all the more valuable—which made some photographers try to sneak images from their fixers’ cars.
I left Kilis the following day. I had run out of money and needed to gather my thoughts about journalism. Later that week, an Iraqi named Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi announced the establishment of ISIS in northern Syria. He framed it as the unification, under his leadership, of Nusra and his own group, an Iraqi terrorist organization that had Al Qaeda branding but acted independently. This declaration came as a surprise to Jolani, the head of Nusra. He politely distanced his group from ISIS and renewed his pledge of allegiance to the global head of Al Qaeda.
Five days after Baghdadi’s announcement, Nusra released the Italians. When they got back to Italy, they described their experience as more of a detention than an abduction. “It was a misunderstanding,” one of the journalists told the local press. “They treated us well.”
Soon afterward, the antagonism between Nusra and ISIS spiralled into open conflict. Members of the two groups started killing one another, and each group eventually carved out its own area of operation. Nusra, which was mostly made up of Syrians, and remained largely focussed on the revolution, entrenched itself west of Aleppo; ISIS, whose recruits came from all over the world, set about terrorizing locals—kidnapping and slaughtering ethnic and religious minorities, and even killing Sunnis whom it deemed insufficiently pious.
This period coincided with a surge in abductions of foreign journalists and aid workers. ISIS spies reportedly loitered in Kilis, monitoring Westerners and tipping off colleagues on the other side of the border when, for example, someone checked out of a hotel with a flak jacket and a helmet. After most abductions, media blackouts were requested by the victims’ families, on the advice of their governments. Journalists who had not heard about the abductions kept going in.
Some fixers were suspected of selling out journalists. Others were monitored by isis, or overly predictable in their routines. But it was impossible to distinguish the corrupt from the negligent or the unlucky. On June 6th, isis kidnapped two French journalists from Alaaeddin’s van. ISIS let him go, and this drew suspicion from journalists who pooled advice on Syrian logistics. The following year, two Japanese men were reportedly kidnapped from his van, in separate incidents. The second man was going into Syria to look for the first.
Many publications stopped taking freelance work from Syria, in order to discourage risky behavior, and international coverage of the region dwindled. The thirty-five-mile drive between Aleppo and the Turkish border had arguably become more dangerous for reporters than the front lines.
Back in the U.S., I applied for a grant from my university to research the complicated moral scenarios that arise on the fringes of war. In June, I returned to Kilis and learned that Ahmed was no longer connecting reporters with fixers. He didn’t tell me why, but I heard from others that his casual approach to logistics and safety had contributed to the abduction of an aspiring photojournalist from Denmark.
A young Syrian woman had come to Ahmed, asking whether he could help her get work as a translator. She had never worked with a journalist, but her English was fine. Ahmed arranged for the Dane—a twenty-four-year-old gymnast—to go into Syria under her guidance. In A’zaz, the first town on the Syrian side, a local man objected to the Dane and his camera, and told her to seek permission from the rebel authorities. She walked him into what she believed was the local brigade office, only to find that it was under the control of masked jihadis led by a man with a Tunisian accent. They laughed at her request, handcuffed the Dane, and led him to the basement. No one had heard from him since.
I had left Kilis less than three months before, but much had changed. The rebels’ early progress north of Aleppo had stagnated, and the regime had taken to chucking barrels filled with TNT out of helicopters into crowded civilian areas. It had also bombed the Bab al-Salama camp. Kilis was full of refugees and resting or wounded fighters. Rents had skyrocketed, and there were Syrians living on the roof of a building across the alley from the Hotel Istanbul. They stacked cinder blocks along the edge of the roof, eventually converting the one-story building into a two-story one.
Ahmed’s mother, aunt, and three younger siblings were also in Kilis, living in an unfinished concrete garage in front of a park. The park was teeming with refugees—hundreds of people living in makeshift tents, mostly tarps draped over ropes between trees. Food distribution was insufficient, and the nearest water spigots were almost half a mile away. Children ran around barefoot, wielding toy guns, playing Free Syrian Army Versus Regime. Some of the men tested real weapons around the corner.
Ahmed’s life had changed as well, but not for the worse. He always seemed to float above decay or dissolution, and he had developed a new source of income: love. He told me that he was now with a woman from France. They had recently met online, in a pro-revolution Facebook group—Ahmed as Harvester, she as Isabelle RevoSyria. Weeks later, she came to Kilis, to meet the hero whom she had read about in the news.
Isabelle was fifty-two. She had russet hair, cut just below the ears, and four children from two previous relationships. The youngest was fourteen, the oldest twenty-five. Ahmed—who was twenty-eight—decided almost immediately to marry her. His mother, Aisha, who is seven years younger than Isabelle, was skeptical of the arrangement but ultimately did not object. When the imam arrived at the garage for the ceremony, he announced that the wedding could not proceed. “You need four witnesses,” he said. Four people from the makeshift refugee camp in the park were quickly recruited.
While his family endured the garage, which lacked plumbing, Ahmed traded his room at the Hotel Istanbul for a suite with Isabelle at the most expensive hotel in town, where they stayed in a room next to that of her two younger children. “My mum thinks she is a teen-ager again,” one of them told me.
One afternoon, I squeezed into the back of Deniz’s taxi with the now married Ahmed and Isabelle, and we set off to an industrial zone at the edge of Kilis. The front seat was occupied by a man Ahmed referred to as his “hardware guy”—a Syrian named Bilal. Isabelle had invested several thousand euros in RoboTena after reading about it in the news, and she wanted to see its progress.
We pulled up to a rusty warehouse that held large machinery, scraps, and metal shavings—but no robot. A staircase in the back led to a small office, where the warehouse owner allowed Bilal to open a file on his computer: the same basic rendering that Ahmed had given to journalists months earlier. “We still have a lot of work to do,” Ahmed said. Isabelle frowned.
Ahmed and Isabelle decided to hold a wedding reception on a hot summer evening during Ramadan. An hour beforehand, we were in Aisha’s garage. The newlyweds sat next to each other on a couch, and everyone else sat on the floor, around a bounty of Syrian dishes. Isabelle’s two other children had just flown in. Ahmed and his family had been fasting since dawn. The sun had just set, but the local imam hadn’t yet launched into the evening prayer—which meant that nobody could eat or smoke. Ahmed’s brother Jouad, who went by Judy, flicked his lighter at a cigarette but didn’t let it catch. “Call it, you bastard!” Ahmed shouted at the mosque. “The sun sets five minutes earlier in Aleppo,” he said. “Let’s eat.” Judy lit his cigarette and sucked on it as if gasping for air.
Aisha and her sister Nadia had spent the afternoon kneeling over a camping stove, preparing a lamb-and-okra stew. Ahmed’s brother Mohammed had shopped for hummus and bread, and Judy had carried a tray of raw chicken through the dusty streets to a pizzeria where he had rented an oven by the hour. Bilal had taken the night off from a twelve-hour shift in the back room of an electronics shop, where he fixed computers for ten dollars a day.
A Frenchwoman named Jeanne-Hélène, whom Isabelle had met through a pro-rebel Facebook group, had flown in from Paris. “I didn’t know where Syria was on a map until after the revolution,” Jeanne-Hélène told me. Now, as a member of the “Facebook brigade,” as she put it, she shared photographs of starving, injured, or dead Syrian children. Isabelle’s activity was similar. She often capitalized the word “ass” in “Bashar al-ASSad.” Some posts included images that were attributed to Syria but were, in fact, from different Middle Eastern wars.
The reception was held in a cafeteria with a small stage at the front. Ahmed’s brothers set up a pair of speakers and plugged in Judy’s phone. Deniz, the driver, arrived to d.j. He and Judy decided that Ahmed and Isabelle would walk into the hall to “Barbie Girl,” by the Nordic pop group Aqua.
Other guests began to trickle in, including a small group of refugee children who had heard the music from the park. Then, as Ahmed and Isabelle came through the front doors, Deniz pressed Play:
Ahmed wore a white suit with a bright-red tie; Isabelle wore a red-and-white dress embroidered with flowers.
Deniz pumped a fist in the air.
Isabelle’s children traded horrified glances.
Ahmed and Isabelle took their place near the stage, against a backdrop of glowing L.E.D. hearts. Guests posed for photographs with the couple, and Deniz toned down the music.
Isabelle’s children spent much of the evening on the porch, eating baklava and drinking wine. As the event came to a close, I asked whether they wanted to go to Kilis’s only bar. They did.
The barman dropped an ashtray on the table. Pierre, the oldest child, lit up, and the concerns and complaints poured forth. Lou, the second-oldest, said that Ahmed and Isabelle had been quietly making plans to cross into Syria for their honeymoon. Jean-Charles, the youngest, piped up. “She won’t tell us when they cross, and Ahmed said they had big plans for tonight,” he said. “I think our mum is in Syria right now.”
At that point, I told them that one of Ahmed’s close associates had warned me that Ahmed was a prolific scammer. For the past couple of years, he had been taking money from women he’d met online. I hadn’t been sure whether it was my place to tell Isabelle’s children, but I had grown worried about the situation.
The first time I visited Kilis, Ahmed had told me that he had a fifty-one-year-old girlfriend in Canada. Later, with the help of one of Ahmed’s friends, I reached out to her—only to discover that she was not the only woman of her age who had believed that Ahmed was in love with her. She wasn’t even the only one in Canada.
“Ahmed told me a story about how he had been to a fortune-teller,” the woman, Janice, informed me. “She said that he was destined to travel very far, to a land of ice and cold, and that he would fall in love with a woman who was very fair and lovely. Then he looked at me, with those eyes of his, and said, ‘Janice, it’s you. . . . I’m in love with you!’ ”
Janice had met Ahmed through Wireclub, a chat-room platform, in the early days of the revolution, when he was still in Syria. She was twice divorced and lonely. A few weeks into their correspondence, Ahmed asked her for fifteen hundred dollars, claiming that he needed to bribe a Syrian official in order to escape conscription into the Syrian Army. Janice refused, and, for the next few weeks, Ahmed’s account was dark. At that point, she noticed that other women were commenting on Ahmed’s Wireclub page in ways that suggested ongoing romantic relationships. Another middle-aged Canadian woman, whom I’ll call Mary, reached out to her, and they discovered that they had been wooed—and asked for money—in exactly the same way.
“It was always a crisis situation . . . desperate . . . money needed immediately,” Mary wrote me. She estimated that she had sent Ahmed ten thousand dollars, most of it, he’d said, to bribe his way out of trouble with the Army or the police. Mary noticed that after she sent him money he would show up to their video chats wearing new clothes or carrying a new phone. Once, Janice asked Ahmed for help with a basic computer issue; to her surprise, he had no idea what to do. “I fixed it myself,” she told me.
Late in the summer of 2012, Ahmed discontinued communication with both women. He surfaced in Kilis three weeks later and told Janice that he had been recruited by the Free Syrian Army and had commanded a company of soldiers in a battle, where he had nearly died. She asked Ahmed for proof; he sent a photograph of himself posing with a shotgun, with a small child on his knee. “He told me that he saved that little boy’s life that day,” Janice recalled. His hair was coiffed, “his clothes immaculate, like he had stepped out of a fashion magazine.”
At that point, both women stopped speaking with Ahmed. Janice was disgusted; Mary was emotionally devastated and financially ruined. (“We were building a life together,” Ahmed said.) In the following months, Ahmed started appearing in the press as a sophisticated hacker and activist whose robot would save countless lives. “The only thing standing in Ahmed’s way are the funds to build that initial prototype,” the Vice story reported. Several of the news stories linked to Ahmed’s donation page.
Then Isabelle appeared in his life. Both Janice and Mary reached out to her, but she ignored them.
I shared what I knew with Isabelle’s children. Their mother was trying to buy Ahmed a black-market Syrian passport—an authentic blank Syrian booklet, sold for at least a thousand dollars in rebel territory—so that he could move to France. Pierre speculated that once Ahmed had the document he would leave his mother for a younger woman. But the children concluded that nothing would shake their mother’s conviction about the marriage. Pierre shrugged and lit another cigarette. “I want to be a normal French person who watches football on TV,” he said.
I later learned that, for their honeymoon, Isabelle and Ahmed had indeed crossed into northern Syria for a few hours. She showed me a photograph of herself aiming a rifle but said that she hadn’t fired any shots, because the rebels were low on ammunition. Ahmed claimed that they had met with fighters from Nusra. He added that he and Isabelle had been caught by a border guard on their way back to Turkey, and had had to bribe their way back in.
I left Kilis for a few days, to visit a friend in another part of Turkey. On my return, a taxi-driver at the regional airport offered an unusually low fare, so I followed him through the parking lot to his small yellow Opel. It was only when I reached for the door that I understood the reason for the discount: there was already a passenger in the front seat, a man with a long, dark beard, dressed in a traditional Muslim skullcap and a flowing white thawb.
I climbed into the back, and the man ignored me. As we approached Kilis, I noticed that he was reading the Guardian on his phone. I leaned forward and asked where he was from. “London area,” he said.
Small talk followed, polite but strained. He said that he was a field doctor for “the brothers” and that he was based in A’zaz, which had a major ISIS presence at the time and had been the site of recent abductions, including that of the Dane. He asked where I was staying; I said Kilis but did not name the hotel. I decided that, as a precaution, I would get out in the middle of town, but a moment later the driver confirmed that he would be dropping me at the Hotel Istanbul.
The doctor invited me to come across the border with him; only then, he said, would I “truly understand the struggle.” I declined, proposing instead that I interview him over tea in Kilis. I asked for his number, but he provided only that of an Iraqi contact of his, an intermediary whom he called Malik. “Call him if you want to reach me, and I’ll call you back,” he said.
After months of stalemate, the rebels had started weakening the regime’s defense of Menagh Air Base. This was largely the work of Nusra and ISIS fighters, who packed trucks full of explosives and drove them into walls, checkpoints, and buildings at the perimeter of the base. According to Bilal—who had nine cousins in Nusra, six of whom were already dead—these fighters were so keen to die in battle during Ramadan, the best time to be a martyr, that Nusra had to organize a lottery of names for suicide attacks. He wasn’t speculating; two of his cousins had made the list.
For Bilal, the battle for Menagh Air Base was personal. He had grown up in Tal Rifaat, a small town near the base, and had spent the years leading up to the war working as a computer technician in Aleppo. He was extremely diligent and careful in his job. “Everybody knew to call me,” he said. By his mid-twenties, he had saved enough money to help his family build a villa on the outskirts of Tal Rifaat, a few hundred metres from Menagh. But, within weeks of its completion, he had to flee across the border. The villa was shelled. Now he worked illegally in the Kilis computer shop. He and a dozen family members lived together in a small house, several people in each room.
In recent months, suffering and fury had given rise to ugly sectarianism within the various rebel groups. Back in April, Ahmed had insisted that the F.S.A. brigades were fighting for all Syrian people. “We just hate the President and the government,” he said. But this attitude seemed to have evaporated by the end of July. One afternoon, as we sat outside his mother’s garage with Bilal, waiting for evening to break the fast, he said that Syria’s Shiite minority groups were “not even Muslims.” Bilal added that they were “worse than the Zionists and the Americans.”
I was stunned. I thought that I knew both men well, and I had never heard either say anything like this. But perhaps this was just the first time they had said it around me in English. How much was I missing by not knowing more than a few words of Arabic?
Later that evening, we heard a boom in the distance. We bolted into the street just in time to see the faint trail of a Syrian fighter jet disappear into the night.
A few days later, Bilal learned of his seventh cousin’s demise. The cousin had made it to the top of the suicide-bomber list at Menagh, said his prayers, and taken his position behind the driver’s seat in a truck full of explosives. As he was driving toward the base, however, a regime jet flying overhead blew up the vehicle. The air strike detonated the explosives in the truck, producing the boom that we heard from Kilis.
Bilal was disappointed. “My cousin didn’t succeed in his objective,” he said.
The next week, one of his two remaining Nusra-affiliated cousins came to Kilis to take a break from the fighting. He was twenty years old. I met him at dinner at Aisha’s garage one evening. He was reserved and unfailingly polite, and carried himself with an eerie serenity that I have since encountered in only a few other people—all of them jihadis who are so confident in their fate that they appear not to fear death.
After dinner, Bilal’s cousin showed him a photograph of another cousin’s corpse. The man had been shot in battle, but his head was intact. The body had been laid on a blanket, and somebody had carefully opened the eyelids and pressed the mouth into a smile, for the picture.
“Look,” Bilal said, pushing the phone toward me. “He is smiling because he is in paradise.”
Bilal’s cousin bade everyone goodbye. He kissed me on each shoulder—the ritual with which he greeted comrades on the front lines. “See?” Bilal said, laughing. “Al Qaeda is not bad.”
Ramadan proved a difficult time to interview men like the doctor from the U.K. Each time I called Malik, the Iraqi intermediary, the doctor would call back from a blocked number. He would then urge me to come to Syria, saying that he and “the brothers” would cook for me and show me “hospitality.” I would counter with an invitation for him to be my guest at Muzzo. Then each of us would decline the other’s invitation and act as if it weren’t weird.
By now, there had been more than a dozen abductions of Western journalists and aid workers in northern Syria, including several near A’zaz. Even freelancers had largely stopped coming. But bizarre characters kept trickling in. An Italian woman whose son had died while fighting for ISIS travelled to the front lines to see his corpse, which was in a location where it could not be safely retrieved. A war tourist who had travelled thousands of miles told me that he went into Syria each day to shoot guns. In late July, ISIS moved closer to the border, establishing a checkpoint between A’zaz and the official crossing.
Around that time, an American freelancer named Steven Sotloff stopped at the Hotel Istanbul for a night, on his way into Syria. He checked into Room 303, then knocked on my door, 507, and we went out for beers. Sotloff had experience with war reporting, and he planned to work in Aleppo, though he had misgivings. “I’m sick of this shit—sick of being beaten up, and shot at, and accused of being a spy,” he said. He wanted to apply to grad school, but he had a project in Aleppo that he wanted to finish first.
Sotloff asked me about a fixer named Youssef. I told him that Youssef had a reputation for being reliable but had been compromised in the preceding days, when an amateur photographer had botched his own logistics, exposing Youssef to ISIS. I gave Sotloff the contact information for another fixer and paid for the drinks; Sotloff said that he’d buy the next round when he returned from Syria.
A couple of days passed. I wrote to Sotloff on Facebook, asking how long he planned to be in Aleppo. The message showed up as “read,” but he didn’t reply.
That evening, I had dinner with an Italian journalist who had barely made it out of Syria. “ISIS was closing in,” she said. “We had to leave two days early.” She asked whether I had news of Youssef; his wife had come looking for him at the rebels’ media center in Aleppo. He had gone to meet an American journalist a day or two before, she said, but hadn’t come home.
I wrote to Sotloff, asking whether he had heard anything. Again, the message showed up as read. A few hours later, I learned that he had gone to meet Youssef as planned. Within ten minutes of crossing, they had been kidnapped by ISIS.
I don’t know what I looked like when I found out, but I remember my face feeling numb. Had they killed him? Would they soon? Would there be a tape? Would I watch it? Was I the last person Sotloff had met with in Turkey? Why did he go with a fixer he knew was compromised? Who will tell his family that ISIS has taken him? Will Youssef get out of this alive?
It was only when I lay down, at three o’clock in the morning, that I realized my recent Facebook messages to Sotloff had been sent after his abduction—and that someone had been reading them. This meant his captors likely knew that I was sleeping in Room 507 at the Hotel Istanbul; I had told Sotloff to knock when it was time to go downstairs for beers.
I switched floors but started seeing trouble all around me—even in signals that were almost certainly not related to one another. Three Syrian jihadis moved into a room across the hall; two brand-new Land Rovers with blacked-out windows and Syrian plates parked outside the hotel. A young man brushed past me, and I thought that I recognized him from an ISIS video. I might have left town immediately if not for the feeling that I had to find out what had happened to Sotloff.
I stayed in Kilis for another week, attempting to make contact with anyone who had relevant information about the abduction—or who might find out what ISIS wanted for Sotloff and Youssef’s release. Eventually, I proposed a meeting with the British field doctor. It seemed likely that he would know something, since the abduction had taken place in A’zaz, where he’d told me he was based. He agreed to come to Muzzo at 6 P.M., but he didn’t show. I waited until seven, then gave up.
Then my phone rang. It was a blocked number. The doctor was sorry that he was late, he said; he had brought friends, who had “never met an American before.” He wanted to pick me up at the hotel so that he and his friends could cook for me in Syria. I countered that I could only meet at Muzzo. He said he’d be there in five minutes.
When my phone rang again, a few minutes later, the doctor told me that he was sitting in a van about fifty metres from the café. “Come to the van,” he said. I refused, and he started berating me—reminding me of the effort that it had taken for him and his comrades to cross the border to meet me. He accused me of Islamophobia and shouted at me to get in the van. I hung up and left Kilis. I spent the next few days hiding in a hotel room forty miles north, replaying in my head what had just happened.
Two years later, I found the doctor’s Facebook account. There were pictures of him handing out blankets in northern Syria—but also of him sitting in a tent with a Kalashnikov at his feet. He eventually returned to the U.K., where he apparently lives today. This summer, I looked him up again, and he didn’t appear to be a doctor; he seemed to have run a series of flailing businesses—car insurance, loan financing. There was still jihadi content on his Facebook page. Why all the lies? Why did he refuse to leave the van? Why did it matter to him so much that I get in?
Back in the U.S., I started my senior year of college. I tried to keep my recent experiences entirely separate from my life on campus. I had heard of foreign correspondents bringing wars home with them and taking out their traumas on those around them. But what’s the good in that? I made it about two weeks before I had to ask a professor whether I could leave class early. I had checked Facebook during a break and seen photos of the bullet-riddled body of a Syrian man I had met near the border. ISIS had entered into open warfare with the moderate brigades controlling the Bab al-Salama crossing. It was the first time that I had seen the murdered corpse of someone I knew.
I walked to the psychological-services facility on campus and asked to speak to a professional. I wasn’t sure what that meant—I had never spoken to one before. The person running the desk asked me to fill out a form. In the section asking the reason for my visit, I wrote that a sniper from the Iraqi offshoot of Al Qaeda had shot an acquaintance in the head. She asked me whether it was urgent; the time was four-thirty, and the office closed at five. I remember blurting out, “Well, it’s not like I’m about to kill myself!” I was seen right away.
A doctor with a kind face led me to her office. For the next hour, I talked about the ISIS hostage crisis—how Sotloff had been taken, and my own brush with a possible attempt. Youssef had been released by then; his last memory of Sotloff was their captors torturing him for his passwords in a neighboring room, and he hadn’t heard anything about him since. I also confided to the doctor that the media blackout was contributing to additional abductions. It was an enormous relief to tell someone. I’m not sure why I never went back.
A year later, ISIS made Sotloff’s abduction public, releasing a video of him kneeling near another hostage, James Foley. A British jihadi then beheaded Foley with a knife and warned that Sotloff would be next. The group released his beheading tape two weeks later. It was my first week of journalism school. I watched the tape, then walked into a seminar room sobbing.
Reporting came intuitively to me. Writing did not, so I worked on it. I thought of my inability to write well as a kind of moral failing. What was the use in taking risks to collect information if I couldn’t get people to read to the end?
In early 2014, Ahmed got a French visa, using the black-market Syrian passport. Around that time, CNN ran a segment about him and Bilal and RoboTena. With the help of Turkish metallurgists, Bilal had cobbled together some enormous metal claws. According to the reporter, Isabelle had sold her car to fund the completion of the robot. A contemporaneous story in the Guardian reported that she had “exhausted” her personal savings. Ahmed insisted that he planned to move to France only when the robot was finished. At that point, he said, “I’ll be on a farm with three dogs and the woman I love.”
Ahmed moved to France a couple of weeks later. RoboTena was still incomplete. “We’ve spent fifteen thousand dollars, but we need another seven thousand dollars,” he told El País, in a call from eastern France. The story linked to his website for donations.
That summer, I visited him and Isabelle. There was no farm, and there were no dogs—just Ahmed and Isabelle and her two younger children living together in a pleasant suburban town near Luxembourg. Ahmed’s desk was covered in soldering tools, screwdrivers, and bits of wire. He told me that he was making drones for Jabhat al-Nusra—a troubling development. But when I asked him to demonstrate a test flight in a nearby park, the drone tipped over and broke. I later saw a tab open on his laptop which revealed that he had bought a basic drone kit from a Chinese company and failed to assemble it correctly.
Isabelle had not sold her car to fund RoboTena; it was sitting in the garage. But she was active in a community of French people who wanted to show support for the revolution. They had even persuaded the mayor of a nearby town to declare Aleppo a sister city—but only the half that was “free,” as in under rebel control. One day, Isabelle drove us to a bookshop to see a presentation by a Syrian writer. Ahmed wrapped his face in a red kaffiyeh—the fantasy of a man in hiding, ostentatiously drawing attention to himself. The event was followed by a “solidarity couscous,” organized by a French group called the Humanitarian Aid Committee for the Syrian People. But it took place at lunchtime on the first full day of Ramadan, so none of the Syrians in attendance could eat.
Ahmed was at once stranded in France and thriving in a world where nobody questioned his self-mythology. According to Bilal and his brother Judy, neither Ahmed nor anyone else in his family had ever been arrested or tortured by the regime. He had never hacked Syrian television. The Pirates of Aleppo was a legend—it existed only in Ahmed’s quotes to the Western press, which were in turn cited by a major European defense-research institute as evidence of the group’s activities. (Ahmed insists that his version of events is true.)
Although Ahmed hated ISIS, he forced me to watch a video of an ISIS militant executing a regime soldier by shooting him in the head with an anti-aircraft gun affixed to the bed of a truck, and he laughed when the soldier’s head vanished into a cloud of red mist. It was as if he revelled in shock and in getting others to accommodate him, as a reminder to them that his life had been uprooted by war and theirs had not.
That evening, as Ahmed prepared dinner, he plunged a kitchen knife into an eggplant and grumbled, “I’m coming for you, Bashar!” According to Isabelle’s children, he is an excellent cook. “I think, instead of building weapons for Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahmed should open a restaurant,” Pierre told me.
In early July, I left France for Kilis. I found Bilal, who told me that RoboTena had actually been his idea, after a sniper had killed his wife’s cousin. He and his father—a mechanical engineer—had designed it. Ahmed set up the donations website, but Bilal never found out where the money went. Ahmed’s mother and siblings still lived in the garage.
Bilal drove me to the industrial park but dropped me about a hundred metres from the warehouse. The owner was angry at him, he said, because he was out of money and hadn’t paid the storage fees since Ahmed had left town. He was providing for thirty-two family members in all, across three generations, and his father was in a small clinic in Kilis after being shot by thieves. Bilal had soured on the war—he just wanted it to end so that he and his family could go home.
RoboTena’s useless arms were being dismantled on the warehouse floor. What couldn’t be reused would be scrapped. The owner seemed to have absorbed what he had seen in the news. “Ahmed was the brains,” he told me. “Bilal was just the mechanic.”
I stayed in Kilis for a few weeks. The only Westerners I met were two Belgian fathers whose sons had joined ISIS. They were going into Syria to beg them to come home.
I returned to Kilis twice in 2023, first while reporting on an earthquake, and then to see Bilal. The town was almost unrecognizable—filled with new apartment blocks, expanding in every direction.
Bilal now ran his own computer business and worked long hours fixing laptops and connecting people to his own rooftop internet network, known in town as the BilalNet. He had five children and had bought his own flat, whose walls were now veined with cracks from the earthquake and its aftershocks. A few years earlier, he had contemplated crossing the Aegean Sea to start a new life in Europe, a life like Ahmed’s. But now his life was full, he said—he wasn’t envious of Ahmed.
I walked over to the Hotel Istanbul. The same men worked in the lobby—a little fatter, a little more wrinkled and gray. I had spent perhaps the most formative months of my career in that building. They didn’t remember me at all.
That afternoon, I placed a video call to Ahmed. He picked up in the back seat of a Mercedes, on his way to a barbecue. He looked happy. He was still married to Isabelle.
In the years that I was away from Kilis, Nusra had gone to war with ISIS, then settled in northwestern Syria and focussed primarily on local governance. Its leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, revealed his face for the first time in the summer of 2016, in a videotaped address in which he publicly broke with Al Qaeda. Six months later, Nusra merged with other Syrian rebel groups to form Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, under his leadership.
Jolani gradually transformed northwestern Syria into the best-functioning part of the country. Then, in early December, 2024, he and his H.T.S. fighters stormed south, to Damascus. They encountered little resistance. The Syrian Army was filled with men who would no longer die for their President.
Assad fled to Moscow. His final act as President was to lie to his palace advisers and defenders, claiming that he would fight to the end. He now reportedly spends his days languishing in a Moscow skyscraper, playing video games.
As Jolani’s forces descended on Damascus, he spoke of jihad as a young man’s game. “Everyone in life goes through phases,” he said. “Someone who rigidly clings to certain ideas and principles without flexibility cannot effectively lead.” He pledged to protect Syria’s religious minorities and to build institutions. He dropped the nom de guerre and started using his birth name, Ahmed al-Sharaa. Today, he is the President of Syria. ♦