Authors: Joby Warrick
“
We have crossed the boundaries that despicable hands demarcated between the Islamic states to thwart our movement,” Baghdadi would later say of his Syrian experiment. “This is the state for which Sheikh Abu Musab al-Zarqawi paved the way. It will not retreat in any shape or manner from the territory to which it has been extended.”
—
Weeks had passed since Barack Obama and European leaders had delivered their call for Assad’s departure, and Assad was not taking heed. The Syrian’s response was to toss a few verbal barbs at the “colonialists” and turn up the violence against the protesters and the volunteer brigades that had sprung up to defend them.
At the White House, the splintering of the country was a subject of concern, but not yet alarm. The consensus among the president’s national security aides was that Assad would leave—eventually, according to two officials who attended high-level meetings on Syria that fall. By all appearances, the regime was in trouble, losing territory, soldiers, and even generals to a new rebel force called the Free Syrian Army. History itself was arrayed against Assad, and there was little the United States could or should do on its own to speed up the inevitable, the officials said.
“
There was a sense that this thing would run its course, and we would do all we could to contain it,” said one senior official present at the discussions. “We really didn’t think it would drag on.”
But it did. As the conflict edged closer to full-scale civil war, the Obama administration grasped for a lever with which to nudge the sides toward a settlement. There was none to be found. When protests erupted in Egypt and Yemen, the United States had been able to call in old chits, IOUs that had piled up over decades of heavy U.S. economic and military support for the countries’ governments and security establishments. In Libya, the Obama administration secured critical legal and moral backing in the form of United Nations resolutions authorizing collective military action to protect civilians and support the rebels. But in the case of Syria, there was nothing like this: No military relationships, no economic aid, not even a significant trading partnership. At the United Nations, Syria’s longtime Russian ally blocked even the mildest resolutions criticizing Assad for killing his own people. When European countries voted to boycott the relatively meager imports of Syrian oil, Assad’s other major ally—Iran—more than offset the losses by supplying Syria with billions of dollars in bank loans and cash.
And so Assad stayed, month after month, erecting fortresslike defenses around the capital while seeking to wear down the rebels through the wholesale demolishing of neighborhoods by tank and artillery fire. Already, more than four thousand Syrians had died, including nearly three hundred children. Thousands more fled their homes, and those who stayed lived in darkened, ruined communities, desperately short of everything except rage and fear.
Publicly, the Americans pushed for concerted action against Assad at the United Nations and the Arab League. Behind the scenes, the White House worked with allies in seeking inducements that might persuade Assad to accept asylum and leave the country voluntarily. Unspoken altogether, except in the secure meeting rooms, was the acknowledgment that the conflict had at least one salutary effect: as long as it lasted, the uprising would serve as a financial and moral drain on the government of Iran, Assad’s most important ally.
One thing appeared certain: there was no appetite, even among the president’s most hawkish advisers, for another military entanglement in the Middle East. Even a minor engagement, such as air support or the supplying of arms to rebels, was problematic as long as Russia blocked a UN resolution needed to provide legal cover. The
practical obstacles were just as formidable. Unlike Libya’s rebels, the Syrian opposition lacked a sanctuary from which it could organize and resupply in safety. And though the rebels had small arms, the Assad regime enjoyed a monopoly on the heavy weapons needed to tip the scales in the rebels’ favor. The Obama administration could offer humanitarian aid such as medical supplies, and some nonlethal gear, such as computers and cell phones. But those seeking to defend themselves against Assad’s forces would simply have to look elsewhere for rifles, armor, and ammunition. And beyond the reluctance to engage in another war in the Middle East, there were those on the U.S. team who felt arming the rebels would be pointless.
“The reality was, the opposition was not adequate to the task,” said the senior security official who participated in debates over action against Assad. “You would have been hard-pressed to find anyone in 2011 who thought the moderates could prevail with enough arms. The truth is, they already had weapons. And it was clear to most of us that we should be pushing for a de-escalation, and not ramping things up even more.”
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One June afternoon in 2011, as Robert Ford was contemplating what the U.S. Embassy could do about surging violence in Hama, a small group of U.S. congressmen and staff members gathered in the Capitol basement for a private briefing about the events in Syria. Leading the discussion were three American citizens with an unusually keen interest in the fight over Syria’s future. The youngest, a twenty-seven-year-old Syrian immigrant, was also a veteran Capitol Hill staffer, well known to many in the room. For Mouaz Moustafa, it was a first introduction to a new job that would prove to be exhilarating and heartbreaking, often in the same day: enlisting American support for Syria’s embattled opposition.
For more than an hour, Moustafa and his colleagues answered questions from lawmakers who seemed genuinely concerned and eager to help. Moustafa, experienced at gauging the interest of elected officials in hearing rooms, felt encouraged.
“Everything was still early stages, and people in Congress really wanted to know what was going on,” he said, recalling the meeting.
“They were asking good questions. We were hoping that they would be outraged.”
It was the first of many such visits for Moustafa, who seemed born for the part he was now playing. A Syrian-born resident of Hot Springs, Arkansas, he possessed communications skills in English and Arabic that had impressed his Capitol Hill bosses as well as influential figures within Washington’s small community of Middle Eastern political exiles. Now, in 2011, he stepped into the spotlight in an unexpected way, speaking directly to the American government many Syrians saw as their last resort. Working as a lobbyist for Assad’s opponents in a Syria he barely knew, Moustafa was among a handful of Washingtonians who would witness the unfolding calamity from both countries.
“
It was that slow car crash where you’re trying to yell at the people at the wheel,” Moustafa said. “You just want to say, ‘Correct the course—just barely, just a bit. We don’t all have to die.’ ”
Moustafa was an ardent believer in American-style democracy, though his path to politics was indirect. The son of an airplane mechanic, he immigrated to the United States as an eleven-year-old whose only knowledge of English came from the
Power Rangers
children’s TV show. As an olive-skinned foreigner in his mostly white Arkansas grade school, he was teased mercilessly by other boys, until an adolescent growth spurt turned him into a lanky athlete with exceptional soccer skills. He was a star player through high school and college, and then, after graduation, landed unexpectedly in Washington as an intern for Arkansas Democratic representative Vic Snyder, a member of the House Armed Services Committee. He so impressed his boss that his summer gig turned into a staff position, first with Snyder and then with Arkansas’s second-term U.S. senator, Democrat Blanche Lincoln. After Lincoln’s defeat in 2010, he worked briefly as a TV journalist before being discovered by a group of Libyan opposition officials who were seeking a lobbyist fluent in both Arabic and the language of official Washington. This was his job in April 2011, when Syrian exiles prevailed on him to work for them instead.
Soon Moustafa was briefing Congress and the White House as director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a nonprofit that sought
to provide real-time information about conditions inside Syria, as well as the thinking and plans of the anti-Assad opposition. So armed, U.S. policymakers could provide the kinds of assistance that would best help Syria’s rebels.
Or they could choose not to.
“The point was to convince people of something that already seemed logical,” Moustafa said. Americans are naturally sympathetic toward those who seek to liberate their country from dictatorship, and here U.S. democratic principles “had aligned with U.S. national interests, in terms of what we need to do in Syria,” he said. “And we just thought the policy would shift in that direction.”
Moustafa made regular trips to the White House to meet with senior members of the president’s Syria team, sometimes at his initiation but often at theirs. He sat through long West Wing briefing sessions with Samantha Power, Obama’s adviser on human rights who would later become ambassador to the United Nations, as well as Denis McDonough, the president’s tough-talking deputy national security adviser, and senior officials from the State Department’s Syria desk. All spoke sympathetically about the plight of Syria’s embattled opposition. But any talk about possible remedies came with a long list of caveats, legal provisos, and qualifiers.
“There was a lot of ‘This is on the table’ and ‘That is on the table,’ but then none of it really was,” Moustafa said. “As time went on, that became clearer. The sense was: ‘Look, the president came into office saying we were going to get out of these wars.’ ”
Back in his own office, Moustafa would hold long chats over Skype with Syrian protest leaders, some of whom he later met in person after he began shuttling between Washington and the region. Some refused to be downcast, believing it was inevitable that the Americans would come to their aid. After all, Obama had declared that Assad must go. “The rhetoric from the administration and the rest of the international community was that Assad was over—he has to step down. So their thinking was: ‘Let’s come out in droves,’ ” he said. “And they came out. I thought to myself, ‘They’re getting shot at now, they’re going to stop.’ But then they’d be back the next week, and the next. And they kept coming out.”
Among the defiant ones was Noura al-Ameer, a young Sunni
woman from the Syrian city of Homs whom Moustafa met online and eventually befriended. When the first protests erupted, al-Ameer was twenty-three, a petite brunette and college student who liked political debates and brightly colored head scarves. In the early days, she gushed about the extraordinary unity she observed in Hama’s streets, as Syrians from every ethnic group and social class joined in the demonstrations. For a time, nearly every rally featured a pair of protesters carrying a Christian cross and a Koran to symbolize the harmony between faiths.
“There were merchants and workers, doctors and engineers, students and journalists,” she remembered later. “
All the different sects were there, and all the social classes from across society.”
The sense of unity somehow made protesters feel less afraid, she said. Sunni shopkeepers and Alawite law students locked arms, even when riot police began ripping into the crowd with batons and tear gas. The first time it happened, al-Ameer assumed she was going to die. But it didn’t seem to matter.
“Even if the regime killed us, we would die happy,” she said. “After all the repression we had lived through, it felt wonderful. And it was novel for us. It was almost a fantasy to think we would die for a cause we all believed in.”
Al-Ameer did not die, but something else did. Slowly, the symbols of unity disappeared, as stories circulated about sectarian killings and assaults. In her mostly Sunni neighborhood, flyers began appearing in doorways, warning of coming attacks from Alawite death squads. At the same time, al-Ameer’s Alawite friends were getting similar warnings about Sunnis. Meanwhile, the regime’s notorious goon squads—hired gangs called
shabiha
or “ghosts”—snatched women and children from the streets and then returned them, sometimes dead, other times beaten and tortured, with tales about being brutalized by Alawite thugs. By late 2011, a new chant was added to the repertoire at the daily protests: “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to their coffins.”
Then it was al-Ameer’s turn to be caught. She was on her way to a visit with her mother when police officers pulled her off a public bus and brought her to one of the intelligence service’s special interrogation centers in Damascus. Again she believed she would die. Instead,
her captors locked her in a cell and forced her to listen as they beat and tortured one of her friends. When al-Ameer still refused to break, the officers strapped her into a chair and attached electrodes to her temples and chest. The pain shot through her body like liquid fire as her captors laughed to see if she would cry out.
“We’re going to exterminate all of you, you Sunnis!” one of the officers said, using epithets that al-Ameer, years later, could not bring herself to repeat.
After she had spent eighty-five days in prison, family members won her release with a bribe paid to one of her jailers. She slipped into Turkey to join the opposition in exile, but by then the mood inside Syria had changed. The unity marches, when the young and old locked arms and carried flowers and olive branches, were gone, replaced by an ugly sectarianism she barely recognized.
“When I was protesting, I was surrounded by all these men and women who were like me, dreaming the Syrian dream,” she said. “Today if I go there I won’t find them. The regime has stolen them from us.”
20
“The mood music started to change”
On January 24, 2012, a previously unknown Syrian rebel group posted a short video confirming what Western intelligence agencies already suspected: the al-Qaeda network’s first franchise in Syria was officially open for business.
The formal unveiling came with a media rollout that might have befitted a new car model or the latest Apple gadget. For two days, Islamist Web sites ran banner ads promising a “special announcement,” against the backdrop of a clock ticking down the hours. When the time arrived, the al-Nusra Front was introduced with a sixteen-minute video that summed up the group’s capabilities and special features. The chief salesman spoke enthusiastically, though carefully keeping his face away from the camera.