Once They Were My Captors. Now They Rule Syria
A personal essay on regime change in Syria.
Like so many others, I have for the last days been following the stunning events in Syria with a mix of joy and fear. It is impossible not to feel joy at the fall of the terrible regime of Bashar al-Assad. It is also impossible not to feel fear about what the victory of Islamist rebels once associated with al-Qaeda will mean for the future of Syria, and the whole region.
So I am particularly proud to be publishing this haunting essay by Theo Padnos, a journalist who was held captive by Syria’s new rulers for two years, and can speak to the complex events on the ground with an authority lacking from many news reports.
- Yascha
In the fall of 2012, when Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the military power now in charge of Syria, was a mere minor terrorist organization, a band of their fighters in Aleppo took me prisoner. Back then they were known as Jabhat al-Nusra. I remained in the group’s custody for two years—often in solitary confinement cells, but not always. During this time, it often happened that news of some stupendous victory would make its way, via the fighters’ two-way radios, into our prisons. It was a surreal experience then to listen as a government checkpoint got blown into the sky, for instance, or a truckload of government troops fell into my captors’ hands.
What’s going on now, however, is surreal beyond anything I saw or heard when I was in Syria. I’ve spent the past few days watching my former captors’ wildest dreams come true. Actually, I suspect that all Syrians, in every corner of the world, are watching these events unfold in a mood of unremitting shock and awe.
Nevertheless, certain sights have become familiar. Those who’ve been following the rebels’ advance have gotten used to seeing them standing in the midst of the government armories and air force bases surrounded by expensive-looking military kit.1 “By the grace and favor of God, the Almighty,” the men scream into the camera as they pump their Kalashnikovs into the sky, “we are in complete control here.”
Technically speaking, they ought not to be quite so astonished. I’m sure they know this. This is a religious army, after all. According to the dogmas, God wrote down every last detail of what’s occurring now at the beginning of time. In the presence of an act of God, however miraculous, the correct attitude is calm submission to His will. Somehow, in their enthusiasm, the footsoldiers sometimes forget this. But the leadership never does. They know the religion much better than their underlings do, have internalized the law more deeply, and enforce such discipline as there is. It won’t be long before the leaders put a stop to the soldiers’ love of making a show of themselves.
In the early days of my capture, the flags on all the fighters’ pickups bore the legend “Victory Front, the al-Qaeda System in the Levant.” It was imprinted on the stationery and scrawled across their t-shirts and bandannas. Even back then, however, the thinkers within the high command were doubting the wisdom of presenting themselves to the world as terrorists.
On one hand, people within the army generally liked the brand image of al-Qaeda, since it suggested fearsomeness and a dark, globe-spanning power that could spit in the eye of each great Western nation, one by one. On the other hand, the Western nations could not be brought around to seeing even a shred of good in al-Qaeda. By the summer of 2014, their intelligence agencies had all but cut off the flow of weapons and cash with which they had earlier nourished the Syrian rebellion. That summer, after the day’s work had been done, when they were lounging on their pillows and scrolling through their iPads, the high command sometimes allowed me to sit with them. Though many learned men debated the question at great volume late into the night, even then it was obvious, at least to me, that the al-Qaeda brand was about to be kicked into the gutter.
“They called us terrorists/ I told them, what an honor you’ve done me.” This was the opening line of one of Jabhat al-Nusra’s most crowd-pleasing, brand-amplifying anthems. It certainly filled the rank and file with esprit de corps. It brought along the schoolkids too, as it had a catchy tune and audacious lyrics (“We destroyed the trade towers/with civilian airplanes we did it/ reduced them to dust, ahh!”) Increasingly, however, the outside world was failing to understand. Thus, that summer, whenever a media contact outside Syria rang up a commander inside the truck, whoever was closest to the stereo system made sure to kill the volume.
There have been other notable changes besides the re-brand. Nowadays, the soldiers no longer want to be seen in long hair and sandals, as they once did. Everyone appears to own a complete set of regulation camo fatigues. Another sign of the changing times: the army’s PR department is much improved. When I was traveling with Jabhat al-Nusra, all the soldiers knew that on entering a new town, it was important to assure the residents, particularly the Christians among them, that the al-Qaeda men would ensure the smooth continuation of everyday life. Yet not all the soldiers who delivered this message had reconciled their hearts to it. Many of the villages within the army’s sphere of control were inhabited by people whose loyalty to Jabhat al-Nusra was of questionable authenticity. Many of the al-Qaeda soldiers believed that every time we passed through a seemingly friendly village, the villagers scurried to an inner room in their houses, phoned up the Syrian Air Force, then piped in a set of bombing coordinates. Those villagers aways grinned at us. But what did their grinning mean? Through the generations, these men would think, almost all the Christians in Syria have done everything they can to pay obeisance to Assad and his predecessors. They viewed him as their protector. They’ve been his collaborators. When it came to citizens of suspect loyalty, many of the Jabhat al-Nusra fighters were keen to put the niceties aside, to call out the greatness of God, and to move on to the slitting of the throats.
Nowadays, the videos coming out of Aleppo and its environs reveal no trace of such vengefulness. In some of these, Christian passersby gaze into the HTS cameras, smile, then proclaim that things in the neighborhood have never been more tranquil. But then… they would say that, wouldn’t they? Having been in a roughly analogous situation myself, I can attest that I have stared into the cameras, blinked, then recited lies far more outrageous than anything I’ve seen on video lately.
Maybe the Christians in Aleppo really believe in a new era of calm? Certainly, they hope for one. Yet over every scene in which members of a minority religion in Syria greet the conquerors, there hovers the feeling of the crocodile who smiles at the canary. The canaries in Syria tend to read the lay of the land well. They know that the crocodile cannot always contain himself. As soon as the minorities gather the necessary cash, and as soon as they have somewhere to go—which is to say, tomorrow, perhaps, but also, possibly, never—they will fly away.
To its enemies, the conquering army hasn’t been so nice. Government soldiers have been made to kneel in the dirt as they plead for their lives. The rebels amble around, chat among themselves, then spray the surrendering soldiers with gunfire. Kurds are being dragged from their pickups, then carried away (because they are thought to have cooperated with the regime), and Shia families are being tied up in their living rooms (presumably for similar reasons). Anyone who has encountered the rebel soldiers when they are in this frame of mind will have the script these scenes follow engraved on his heart. The rebels’ first priority is to establish, preferably by means of the detainees’ own words, on camera, that the human beings they’ve arrested aren’t really humans. “Kneel!” the soldiers scream at their captives in some of the recent videos. “Howl like a dog!” “Owee,” the men on the ground reply, “owee, owee.”
Almost always in these scenes, the captors make sure to curse their captives. “Animal!” they scream. “Filth!” I know that being screamed at isn’t the worst thing in the world. Yet because those words, in that tone of voice, convey imminent bloodletting to me, I find them more frightening than any set of words I can think of, in any language. Surely the captives know what’s about to occur. This is why it’s impossible to look into their eyes. Maybe the captives will survive these encounters? In my experience, the younger, healthier torture victims often did. Yet the older victims, and most of those who went into the torture process (it is a process) with injuries or an ailment did not.
About halfway through my time with Jabhat al-Nusra, in the summer of 2013, I spent about six weeks in an improvised prison, behind a storefront, in the Aleppo neighborhood of Haidariya. Some 35 people—dogs, as we were known to our captors—lived on the floor of this former grocery store with me. They were Palestinians, Alawites, Sunnis, a Moroccan jihadi who had fallen out of favor with his superiors, and, for a brief while, towards the end of the summer, two Shia men. At one point or another, everyone in this room was tortured. Of those 35 human beings, four came out alive.
Looking back now, I can see how dangerous a time this was for Aleppo. Half of the Jabhat al-Nusra army was cleaving off in order to form a new terrorist organization. This one was to be called The Islamic State. I know now that just then, the ISIS men were learning to speak of the Syrian bloodbath as if it were a field of dreams, as if a new era of Muslim power was dawning over the nation, as if anyone brave enough to venture out would be tested, and, if he passed the test, would be rewarded with wives, guns, and cash. Those young men were in flight from poverty. They were also in flight from the elder generation in Syria, which has tended to neglect the Koran and to kowtow to the regime. They dreamed of spiritual journeys, of an orderly life in harmony with the law of God, and strings of victories. At some point in 2013, ISIS began to produce videos of young Europeans on the ground in Syria who could speak this dream language well. As soon as those videos hit the social networks, the trickle of foreigners I had seen in my early days as a prisoner, in the fall of 2012 became a river.
Likewise, members of the old crew of Jabhat al-Nusra foreign fighters have today taken to posting their videos on social media. How long will it take for young men in Europe who nurture similar dreams to find these videos? My experience of the Europeans who came out to Syria was of youths undergoing a kind of a crisis. Some seemed a bit suicidal to me, some homicidal, and many, I felt, dreamed of doing both at once. My guess is that the Europeans whose thoughts have drifted along these lines in the past have already seen all they need to see. Now that the rebels are on every street corner in Syria—now that the nation no longer has border officers—the obstacles that once prevented a certain kind of young Londoner—or Parisian or Berliner—from making this kind of voyage of the spirit have fallen away. At the moment, it costs about $100 to travel from London to the Syrian border.
Sometimes, during the late evening in our prisons, when there were no bombs in the air and no one was being tortured, I managed to engage the Jabhat al-Nusra fighters in discussions about the future. “But surely,” I would say through the food hatch door in my cell, “the glorious caliphate to come will need citizens?” At the time, Jabhat al-Nusra wished to have nothing whatsoever to do with the outside world. It was to be a little sphere circling the sun on its own. Contact with the outside world polluted the purity of the faith. It allowed outsiders to send in their spies. The commanders wanted as little of it as possible. Furthermore, the high command wished to reserve the right to send suicide bombers into the neighboring countries. Too much fraternizing with those neighbors was bound to dampen the suicide bombers’ enthusiasm. Accordingly, we were a bit of a planet unto ourselves. Every last tomato had to be shipped in. There was no running water since the mains had been bombed to bits. The electrical grid had died at the beginning of the war. What family, I wanted to know, could plan out a future amid such destruction?
My skepticism never failed to make the guards frown. They would furrow their brows. Eventually, one of them would deliver his verdict on my doubts. Yes, of course the world’s Muslims would flock to our caliphate. “Millions are here now and more are coming every day,” a cordial but unyielding guard told me one afternoon, as we were chatting through the food hatch.
“If a mom cannot afford to buy an egg, sooner or later, her family will run away,” I replied.
“No, they will not run,” the guard insisted.
“But why would anyone stay?”
A worried look passed over the guard’s brow. He lost himself in thought for a moment, squinted at a distant window. “They will stay because they are Muslims?” he guessed.
Such was the Jabhat al-Nusra logic. Around and around it went. In those days, it felt unlikely that I would ever escape from my prison. Somehow, I felt it more unlikely that they would escape from theirs.
I’ve been shocked but not surprised to see how perplexing the recent HTS advances have been to reporters in the West. The BBC presenters I’ve been listening to on its morning program, “Today,” have been genuinely befuddled, though of course we’ve all seen this movie before. Over the line from London, they press their correspondents: Do the recent events bode well for the citizens of Syria? Ill?
Another question that’s been on their minds lately: It would appear as though the HTS battalions overcame the Syrian government, which did possess a modern military, after all, and knew that the rebels were organizing an offensive, with a column of pickups patched together by bubble gum. There was much calling out of the greatness of God—and then, somehow, victory. How could such a thing happen?
The BBC correspondents don’t know the answers to these questions, but because I lived with the HTS men as they were planning out their earlier campaigns—and advancing and inventing new offensives—I think I do.
Recent events do not bode well for anyone. Sadly, it is not the case that eight years of life in Syria’s Idlib province, where the Jabhat al-Nusra army has been biding its time since its expulsion from Aleppo in 2016—sometimes starving, sometimes cowering under the bombs, never neglecting the five prayers and the obligatory fasts—causes young men to fall in love with the details of municipal governance in a troubled nation. Eight years in these conditions inspires a longing for revenge. Such conditions bring about a deep, humiliating poverty. They throw everyone more totally into the Koran. “O God, O God, we have nothing left but you, O God!” A decade ago, whenever a throng filled up a city plaza, this was the chant that made the buildings shake. In the intervening time—for all Syrians, really—hope has dwindled. That feeling has intensified.
The army of HTS is more international than it was when I was in Syria, back when it was Jabhat al-Nusra. Chechens, Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Turkmen are participating in the Syrian Uprising 2.0., as the videos show. In fact, they’re not only armed with rusty Kalashnikovs. Operation Timber Sycamore cut off its supply of weapons sometime in 2013 but since then, the Iranians have poured in their guns, as have the Russians, the Lebanese faction, Hezbollah, and that part of the American military that supports the Kurds. Every time the rebels overrun a military base—and they’ve been overrunning a lot lately—they inherit the weaponry that was meant to kill them.
In my opinion, the rebels’ greatest power is their capacity to generate new suicide bombers. The HTS leaders have reduced the alchemy by which they transform the young men of the region into long range, precision-guided missiles to a formula. I saw the formula at work in the basement of the Aleppo eye hospital, the first of 13 prisons in which I lived. That basement was dark enough, and sufficiently cut off from the world to provide an ideal setting. Some candlelight, much prayer, the screaming of the enemies as they “confessed,” and an occasional hanging—these were the essential ingredients of the process.
In fact, Syria does abound with the raw material without which the necessary alchemy could not work: daydreaming, idle young men. Now that a nation’s worth of dark basements have fallen under HTS control, the organization’s leaders are in a position to scale up their manufacturing process. Because there is no unified command structure within the HTS armies (despite the leadership’s claims), and because there is much for the many factions to squabble over, it’s likely that the young men will be fanning out across the country in the coming months. In addition to blowing up enemy factions in Syria, some of the commanders dream of blowing up the faraway enemies of God. This bodes ill for subway passengers in London and Paris.
As I had much time alone in my cell, my thoughts often wandered off in search of the deeper reasons driving the behavior of my captors. To me, it seemed that most of the fighters understood, at least on some level, that some day, the sons of the people they were torturing now would come back to torture their own sons. Today the rebels were in control of this village, and tomorrow they would take that one, but the day after, the government would lay siege to those places. There would be further killing, mostly of civilians, and eventually, the government flag would return to the highest building in those places.
I too want to think that the cycle has come to an end at last. I realize the Assad government was wicked. It was also incompetent to the point of hilarity. “The regime—dumb as rocks.” This was a phrase I often heard on the lips of the Jabhat al-Nusra fighters. Who could have argued the point? Yet I am not reassured now, however joyous the crowds in the streets may be. Twelve years worth of war equipment has been pouring into this nation, often through smuggling routes. Added to the government stockpiles, the flow has created a sea of armaments. What species swim in this sea? Certainly, airplanes in the region which might be taken down by surface to air missiles, which is to say, all of them, have reason to be nervous over the coming years, as the many videos like this one show. How wide is the sea? I can’t see how it would be possible to guess. Anway, militants like these men, who announce here that they mean to launch further October 7-style attacks against Israel right now, will certainly be well armed.
Towards the end of my time with Jabhat al-Nusra, I began to feel as though the commanders were so in love with their armaments, so determined to blow up their enemies, and so reconciled to the enemy’s retaliation that they were preparing a perpetual bloodbath for Syria. To be sure, they told themselves that they were fighting because they wished to see rivers of prayer-goers in white robes streaming into the nation’s mosques—but every day they woke up with murder on the brain. Why? Couldn’t they make their dream come true through persuasion? Over time, I must have put my “why must you kill and torture?” question in a thousand different ways to hundreds of Jabhat al-Nusra men. Eventually, I concluded: they killed because there was no one around to stop them.
Now they have an entire nation at their feet.
Theo Padnos is a journalist and the author of Blindfold, a memoir about his two years in terrorist prisons in Syria.
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