Authors: Joby Warrick
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We hereby bring the Islamic nation the glad tidings of a long-awaited event,” said Abu Mohammad al-Julani, the man dispatched into Syria five months earlier by the Islamic State’s central branch in Iraq. A call for help had been heard, Julani said, and “what else could we do but answer the call?”
By the time the video aired, Julani’s band had been offering its brand of assistance for at least three months. A few weeks earlier, a pair of perfectly synchronized car bombs had exploded outside one of the Assad regime’s security offices in Damascus, killing forty-four
people and serving notice that a new type of combatant had entered the fray. The al-Nusra Front later claimed responsibility; terrorism experts had already concluded that the culprit was likely al-Qaeda or someone trained in the group’s methods.
The original parties to the conflict denounced the introduction of suicide bombers into the fighting. “
We said from the beginning, this is terrorism,” said a Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Fayssal Mekdad. The main rebel opposition force disavowed the use of weapons that killed indiscriminately. The Free Syrian Army “does not use car bombs—it never did before and it never will,” declared its spokesman, Ammar al-Wawi. Yet, from that day forward, car bombs were a regular addition to Syria’s catalogue of horrors, along with truck bombs, suicide vests, and improvised explosive devices.
Julani, in his occasional video messages, would maintain that his al-Nusra Front was targeting only the regime’s forces and not civilians, even those from Assad’s Alawite sect. And he insisted that his methods would work, whereas the many others being tried—from nonviolent resistance to hit-and-run guerrilla warfare to a useless reliance on Western aid and Western-brokered peace accords—would not.
“Al-Nusra Front has taken upon itself to be the Muslim nation’s weapon in this land,” he said. This would be a harsh campaign, but also a holy one, he said, requiring all devout Syrians to “rally around the banner of ‘There-is-no-god-but-Allah,’ ” the black standard borne by the Prophet Muhammad’s ancient army and appropriated in modern times by jihadists.
Far from Syria, other Muslim audiences—including those that Julani likely envisioned in recording the video—were more receptive. In the Sunni Arab countries of the Persian Gulf and North Africa, many thousands of religious Muslims began mobilizing in the early months of 2012 to support the jihadists who were at last inflicting real blows on the Syrian tyrant. Young men from Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Tunisia who had watched Assad’s massacres of fellow Muslims, shown nightly on Arabic-language cable news channels, began trekking to southern Turkey to join al-Nusra and other Islamist militias that were running recruitment networks in the border towns. In far greater numbers, sympathetic Arabs began donating cash, gold jewelry,
and supplies to the Syrian Islamists’ cause. Arab governments secretly sent aid as well, usually the lethal kind.
In Kuwait, one of the biggest providers of private funding, a preacher named Hajjaj al-Ajmi, launched a Twitter campaign to persuade his 250,000 followers to donate money to special bank accounts set up to help the rebels. “
Give your money to the ones who will spend it on jihad, not aid,” al-Ajmi exhorted donors in a video pitch posted to YouTube in 2012. Other supporters held Twitter “auctions” to sell off cars, boats, vacation properties—anything that could be exchanged for cash to help the Syrian rebels. A few wealthy donors—sometimes called “angel investors” by those who benefitted—arranged visits to the battlefield to hand-deliver suitcases full of cash, and were sometimes rewarded by having a rebel brigade rename itself in the patron’s honor.
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It’s anyone’s game,” a Middle Eastern diplomat acknowledged at the time, after conceding that his own countrymen were among the benefactors for extremist fighters. “You see different players looking to create their own militias. It is beyond control.”
Some countries made an earnest, if belated, attempt to stem the flow of private aid headed for jihadist groups. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates ultimately tightened restrictions and increased scrutiny of bank transfers to cut down on illicit giving. But others showed little inclination to close the taps. In Qatar and Kuwait—both wealthy Gulf kingdoms and allies of the United States—the Islamists’ backers included government ministers who believed the jihadists offered the best chance for defeating the Assad government. Officially, both governments denounced extremism, even as individual ministers privately defended rebel groups that Western governments labeled as terrorists—including the al-Nusra Front, according to U.S. and Middle Eastern officials who participated in such discussions.
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In their view, it’s Assad that’s the problem, and groups like al-Nusra are the answer,” said a senior Middle Eastern intelligence official who worked closely with both countries in coordinating policy on Syria. “That’s why they’re OK with money and weapons going to al-Nusra. They’re the best fighters and they’re also Sunni, so, if they win, the new government will be more like them.”
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Qatar, watching the conflict from eleven hundred miles away, could afford to take chances. For Jordan’s King Abdullah II, the men with the black flags and Gulf-financed guns and explosives were already uncomfortably close, so much so that Jordanian border guards could sometimes watch the fighting from the observation towers on the Jordan-Syria frontier.
In the summer of 2012, the Islamists drew closer still. Jordan’s intelligence service began picking up reports of fighters slipping into the country with weapons, apparently with the intention of spreading the revolution to the Hashemite kingdom. The Mukhabarat’s teams watched for weeks as the infiltration teams set up safe houses and began stockpiling supplies for what appeared to be an ambitious plan to strike targets all across Amman.
When the plotters were nearly ready, the Mukhabarat pounced. Eleven suspects were rounded up in a series of raids that seized machine guns, mortars, car bombs, and explosives that had been smuggled into Jordan for the attack. From notes and interrogations, the agency pieced together the outlines of a plan to launch near-simultaneous attacks on multiple civilian and government targets in the capital, from the U.S. Embassy to an upscale shopping mall in the center of town. Had the plan succeeded, dozens, perhaps even hundreds, could have been killed.
The Mukhabarat’s men had scarcely finished their work when trouble erupted on the country’s border. A passing patrol had surprised a different group of armed Islamists as they were attempting to cross into Syria, setting off a fierce gun battle that left four of the militants dead. Also killed was a Jordanian soldier, the country’s first casualty in Syria’s year-old civil war.
The king was furious. For months, he had been warning everyone—the Americans, the Europeans, Arab allies, even Assad himself—of the consequences if a full-blown civil war were to erupt in Syria. Inevitably, the sparks from a sectarian or ethnic conflict would drift beyond Syria’s borders. It had happened in Iraq, and now it was happening again.
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This is not abstract; this is real. It’s next door,” the king told senior aides. “And if it continues, it will be knocking at our door.”
Through late 2011 and 2012, the monarch worked furiously to build firebreaks to prevent the conflict from widening. Already, Syrian refugees were streaming across the border by the thousands—a single camp, Zaatari, held 30,000 people in mid-2012 and would swell to 156,000 a year later, becoming Jordan’s fourth-largest metropolis—so Abdullah boosted his security forces and built intake centers at the border crossings to ensure an orderly and carefully monitored flow into the new tent cities along the frontier. He convened meetings with American, British, and Arab military officials to work up detailed contingency plans for dealing with potential crises ranging from a chemical-weapons attack inside Syria to incursions by Assad’s military jets into neighbors’ air space. He worked with U.S. and British generals to create special-forces teams that could quickly secure Assad’s depots of poison gas in the event of a sudden collapse of central power.
The Western governments were willing to participate in planning exercises, but slow to commit resources. Humanitarian aid trickled in, forcing Abdullah to scramble to find resources to feed and clothe the hordes of refugees on his border. Awkward negotiations began for a clandestine training site in Jordan for secularist rebels, the core of a future “Southern Front” that could advance toward Damascus while Assad’s army was mired in fighting in the north and east of the country. Abdullah agreed, despite his fears about getting caught in the crossfire between rival Syrian armies. The training began in 2013, in tandem with a similar, CIA-supported program in southern Turkey. But after authorizing the program, the White House imposed strict limits on both the scale of the training operation and the kinds of weapons and ammunition the fighters would receive. CIA-backed fighters were paid $100 to $150 a month, less than half the salary offered by the Islamists. Ammunition rations were so meager that one commander complained that his soldiers were receiving on average about sixteen bullets per month. Many of the new soldiers wandered off to join other units, taking their weapons with them. “
We thought going with the Americans was going with
the big guns,” one of the CIA-supplied commanders said. “It was a losing bet.”
But the most difficult conversations involved other Arab leaders. Jordan, utterly lacking in the oil and gas reserves that fattened its neighbors’ coffers, frequently turned to the wealthy Gulf states for aid during times of economic crisis. But now there would be a price: some of the Gulf sheikhs expected Jordan to serve as a conduit for money and weapons headed to the Islamist militias they supported in Syria.
Abdullah was incredulous. Why, he would ask, would anyone supply arms to jihadists whose central aim is to create a seventh-century theocracy in the heart of the Middle East?
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Where are these revolutions going to stop?” he asked one day during a private chat with one of his Gulf counterparts.
“I hope these revolutions continue in the Middle East,” said the other sovereign, a man who has publicly acknowledged sharing many of the Islamists’ religious views. “I’ve paid for the support of these groups, and they owe allegiance to me.”
“That’s not how it works,” Abdullah snapped. “You have moved yourself down on the menu. But eventually they’re going to come after you.”
The flow of money and weapons into Syria continued unabated. In private talks with his aides, Abdullah could see the possible pathways that history might take. One possibility—that Assad, backed by Iran and Russia, would emerge victorious through brute force—now seemed unlikely. An alternate path would see the “loonies”—radical Islamists—seize control in Damascus, though that also seemed remote. A third possibility, if the region were exceedingly lucky, would be a negotiated settlement in which Assad would be forced to surrender power to a Syrian unity government, one that would oversee elections while leaving essential institutions in place to ensure order and safety for Syria’s citizens.
There was, however, yet a fourth possible outcome: prolonged violence with no clear resolution. In this scenario, the country known as Syria would disintegrate in a maelstrom that slowly consumed other countries in its wake, destabilizing the region for decades to come. Abdullah, in his discussions with aides, imagined a fractured Syria
divided into zones controlled by Sunnis, Alawites, and Kurds, each supported and supplied by foreign partisans. Indeed, the contours of a future divided Syria were becoming clearer, with the regime clinging to defensive positions around the capital and coastal cities and leaving the parched, landlocked interior to the Islamists. “We saw a stalemate coming,” one of the king’s aides said.
The reality was, the extremists were growing stronger, and so was the pressure from Jordan’s allies to back them—passively, if not actively. But Abdullah refused. Alone in his office, he would click through the day’s catalogue of videotaped atrocities: captured soldiers executed at close range, priests and imams butchered like sheep, pale young bodies pulled from the rubble of bombed-out apartment buildings. Sometimes he would send the links to his senior advisers. Nothing like this could ever be allowed to happen in Jordan, he told them.
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I have my red lines,” he said, as one aide later recalled. “I will not allow support for the radicals, because it will come back to bite us. It will come back to bite my citizens.”
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In May 2012, Robert Ford was summoned to the State Department Building’s seventh floor for a rare private meeting with the woman who had been his boss of record for the past three years. Ford had met Hillary Clinton several times before, but it was unusual for a midlevel diplomat to take the elevator alone to the elegant “Mahogany Row” suite that serves as the personal office of the U.S. secretary of state.
Ford was now an ambassador without an embassy. Officially, he remained the chief U.S. diplomat to Syria, but he had been recalled to Washington the previous October because of concerns about his safety. The rooftop scare in July had been frightening enough, but other incidents in the weeks that followed made clear that Syria’s guarantee of protection for foreign diplomats no longer applied to him.
The most terrifying scrape came on a day when Ford paid a call on the leader of one of Syria’s few officially recognized opposition parties in Damascus. When the U.S. diplomat arrived at the man’s
office, a crowd of about seventy-five Assad sympathizers was waiting for him on the walkway outside. Ford and his aides ran through a hail of eggs and tomatoes and managed to slip inside the entrance, just seconds ahead of the mob. The Americans pushed a desk in front of the door to brace it, and Ford turned to his hosts with a sardonic smile. “We’re from the American embassy,” he said. When the meeting ended, there was a second mad dash to the embassy’s cars, which by then had been trashed so thoroughly they could never be repaired. As he ran for his car, Ford convinced himself that he would not survive the day with all his bones and teeth intact. “
I didn’t think they were going to kill me,” he recalled later, “but I thought for sure they were going to beat me up.” Somehow all got away unharmed, but Ford’s next major outing was to the airport for a flight home. He would not return, and the embassy itself was shuttered three months later.