And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East (22 page)

Ten minutes after we crossed into Syria, the road was blocked by about fifteen men who fanned out around our cars. They were dressed in black, wore black ski masks, and carried AK-47s. As they herded us into a nearby container truck, Abdelrazaq protested that he was from the Sunni-led Free Syrian Army. We assumed we were being captured by pro-Assad
shabiha.
They were dressed in all-black like
shabiha.
They spoke with the appropriate accent generally used by
shabiha
. They were praising the Assad regime. The kidnappers kicked Abdelrazaq in the face, then smashed a rifle butt into his back.

The kidnappers wrapped duct tape around our mouths, eyes, and wrists and stripped off our belts and shoes. Abdelrazaq’s bodyguard was taken off the truck, and the leader of the kidnappers—who called himself Abu Jaffar—said, “Finish him.” We heard bursts from an AK-47 and the thud of what sounded like a body hitting the ground.

Our captors took us to a farmhouse, where we stayed for several hours. Pro-Assad graffiti was sprayed on the walls in green paint. The kidnappers made a video of us saying more or less what they wanted us to say. All the while, Abu Jaffar bragged about how many Sunnis he planned to kill. He threatened to shoot Ghazi in the leg, but when he pulled the trigger, Ghazi didn’t scream. Abu Jaffar had fired into the ceiling just to scare us. Then they took us to a house nearby and served us coffee in cups and saucers that had Shia logos on them.

For the next five days, we were moved from house to house, almost always blindfolded, tapping each other on the leg to make sure everyone was accounted for. On the second night we were given food and cigarettes. Then a new group of captors arrived. They seemed to rank higher than Abu Jaffar, who called them sir.
They showed little concern for our well-being. One day we were given only an apple to eat, and during one stretch I wasn’t allowed to use the bathroom for thirty hours. They seemed to know what they were doing and have experience at moving prisoners. I was convinced they’d kidnapped people before.

I found that, at least for me, an effective way to cope with the stress of being a hostage is to think about something that takes a lot of concentration and drives out the dark thoughts. The dark thoughts come often. They bombard you. It’s hard to keep the noise out of your head. Thoughts of torture, of relatives you’ll never see again. I love to cook, so in my mind I invented a pasta meal I wanted to have when I got out. I followed it step-by-step, painstakingly chopping onions into a perfect mince, peeling garlic, and dicing mushrooms and plum tomatoes. I stirred the sauce with my favorite wooden spoon and took a sip of red wine. I could taste the red wine go down my throat. I could hear the clank of the bowls when I set the table. I could smell the truffle oil as I drizzled it over the pasta and let it cool before I sat down to eat. My then girlfriend (and now wife), Mary, set the knives, forks, and spoons on napkins on the table. I made ice cream for dessert. I concentrated on every detail, each fall of the knife, every stir of the pot, every sound and smell and smile from Mary. It took me away.

One of my biggest fears was that we would be separated and interrogated one by one. Then the kidnappers could use the old police trick: “Well, Ghazi says this and you say that. Which is it?” I knew we wouldn’t be able to keep our stories straight for long. Ghazi and I were concealing that we spoke Arabic. If they found out that I did, I felt sure they would accuse me of being a CIA agent and force me to make confessional videos at the point of a
gun, then kill me or sell me or trade me to another group. We were meat to be bought and sold. Speaking Arabic made me a curious and unusual product. I didn’t want to be special. I didn’t want them to be curious about me. I just wanted out.

On the first day, Abdelrazaq disappeared. On the fifth day, our driver, Taher, went missing. That left six of us: me, Kooistra, Ghazi, Aziz, Mustafa, and our British security consultant, who had clammed up and sat as rigid as a stone for most of the time we were held.

On the fifth night we were told we were going to Foua, a stronghold of the Shia militia Hezbollah. About seven minutes into the trip—I tried to count the seconds to keep track of distances—the driver slammed on the brakes and yelled, “Checkpoint! Checkpoint!” He jumped out and started firing his AK-47 in short, quick bursts, shots that seemed aimed to kill. We stripped off our blindfolds and looked for a way to get out of the van. Abu Jaffar jumped out of the vehicle and I watched him fire toward the checkpoint. The kidnappers’ trail car behind us sped off, apparently not wanting any part of the fight.

Our security man clambered over Abu Jaffar’s front passenger seat. Aziz got out through the driver’s door, kneeling by what he said was a dead body and using the van for cover.

Our rescuers approached the van and said they were from a Sunni religious group. They would eventually take us to the Turkish border. There were just five of us now. Our security consultant had run off into the night. He walked for miles in flip-flops until he was driven back to the Turkish border by friendly villagers.

We later learned that the kidnappers had accidentally set off an emergency GPS beacon when they were going through our
things. NBC had been alerted to the distress signal, pinpointing the farm where we were taken on the first day for several hours as a key location and circulating a satellite photo to sources around Washington and the Middle East. The network kept our families informed and asked for a news blackout, a request that was respected by major news outlets.

From Turkey on the day we got out, John, Ghazi, and I recounted the kidnapping on the
Today
show. I spent two days in Turkey, then flew to New York to see my family. I went to a psychiatrist (NBC insisted we all go) and told her I had been through traumatic experiences before and understood that the kidnapping would leave “fingerprints” on me for a while. The key was knowing what to expect. If you get blind drunk, you know you’re going to wake up with a hangover. By the same token, I expected post-traumatic stress symptoms—anger, irritability, a sense of isolation—and I experienced those feelings, off and on, for several months. It’s like having the monkey on your back again, and being self-aware helps shake him off.

For us the story of the kidnapping was over after we got out. We had survived and reported about what we had seen and believed to have happened. We moved on. About two years later, however, the story would come back into the news. I was contacted by a reporter from the
New York Times
who said the paper had information that we weren’t in fact captured by pro-Assad
shabiha,
but by a criminal gang linked to the rebels, and that the Syrians who had rescued us actually had ties to the kidnappers. It was a total shock, but in Syria, and in all wars, strange and murky alliances are not uncommon.

An NBC producer and I immediately started checking with US law-enforcement and intelligence sources. We spent the next
month trying to piece together events and interview everyone who might know anything about what had happened to us. Working with Syrian exiles in the United States and Turkey, we contacted dozens of activists and rebels inside Syria. We spoke to people associated with armed groups in Ma’arrat Misrin, the town where we were held. Many of the key players were dead or missing. Others didn’t want to talk or couldn’t be trusted. What we were able to piece together is that the kidnappers in all likelihood were Sunni criminals pretending to be Shiite
shabiha
so that if we ever got out we wouldn’t have been able to identify them. The rebel group that rescued us did in fact have a past relationship with one of the kidnappers’ ringleaders, but apparently had a falling-out in part because of our abduction. Like any reporter faced with new information, I updated the account of what had happened.

When I look back on our decision to take that trip, I see now that we were far too confident. We had grown so accustomed to traveling with Syrian rebels that we didn’t give enough thought to the possible dangers.

All that changed afterward. NBC created a special team for me, including a producer with extensive experience in conflict zones. But I think Syria was becoming too dangerous to cover for any Western reporter. It would certainly become that once ISIS gained strength.

I went back to Syria for the first time after the kidnapping on June 25, 2013. I reported that a rebel commander outside Aleppo rarely saw Assad’s forces anymore, just Shiite fighters from Hezbollah, Iran, and Iraq, and that a group of dangerous Sunni fanatics was growing. ISIS was coming into its own.

By this time, ninety-five thousand people had died in the civil war, but one attack made the others pale in comparison.

On August 21, 2013, we showed footage of what we said “may be the worst chemical attack anywhere since Saddam Hussein gassed Iraqi Kurds in 1988.” The attack took place in Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus. The next day, we reported that the White House had called for an investigation. Some speculated online that the videos were fake. “But how can anyone fake rows of dead children?” I asked on the air. “No apparent injuries, no blood. Just lifeless bodies, their arms folded.” The United States later estimated that upward of fourteen hundred people had died.

Almost exactly a year earlier, President Obama had made his “red line” warning. But by the time of the Ghouta attack, the situation on the ground had become even more complicated. Al-Qaeda and other radical Islamists had streamed into the country, and it was becoming almost impossible to distinguish between Syrian rebels and extremists exploiting their cause.

On August 30, 2013, back in Syria again, I described the dilemma facing Washington: “The US, frankly, faces bad choices for Syria: do too little and it looks weak; do too much and it could create chaos in the region.” Two weeks later the United States decided it was not going to intervene in Syria—at least for the time being. The Syrian opposition felt betrayed and abandoned. Worse, Syrians were now completely without hope, which is the most dangerous human condition. A man or woman with no hope is
capable of anything.

AFTER 9/11, TWO WORDS—AL-QAEDA—BECAME
shorthand for Islamist terrorism anywhere in the world. After that, US troops battled Islamist fanatics in Iraq. In the media we called them insurgents and terrorists and documented their horrors in Baghdad. With the help of a huge troop surge and a seemingly unlimited budget, the insurgents were ultimately overpowered. But they weren’t completely defeated. They found new life in Syria. The group founded by Zarqawi was reborn in the crucible of Syria and had three main goals: controlling Syria, restoring Sunnis to power in Iraq, and establishing a Sunni caliphate. The wider world was shocked into noticing the rise of ISIS in June 2014. The group
had captured Mosul, an industrial city in Iraq roughly half the size of Chicago. When Brian Williams, then the anchor of the
NBC Nightly News
, introduced my report, he was also introducing the American public to a fearsome new jihadist group.

“Tonight a heavily armed fighting force, in some cases using [captured] American arms and vehicles, is making lightning speed from city to city across the Iraqi countryside. . . . They are known as ISIS, standing for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which happens to be their goal.” On June 29, ISIS proclaimed a “caliphate” called the Islamic State, with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi holding the title of caliph, or successor to the Prophet Mohammed. Abu Bakr was in fact Zarqawi’s successor. ISIS now controlled broad swaths of territory and the lives of millions of people in both Iraq and Syria.

The capture of Mosul probably surprised ISIS as much as it did the Iraqi and US governments. Mosul, a large Sunni city 250 miles north of Baghdad, was once a bastion of the Iraqi army. It was where Uday and Qusay, the two sons of Saddam Hussein, went to hide and were ultimately killed by American soldiers after the fall of Baghdad. But when the United States ill-advisedly disbanded the Sunni-led Iraqi military after the invasion, the newly empowered Shiites ran roughshod over their former rulers. The people of Mosul came to hate the government and its security services.

When ISIS fighters arrived in Mosul, they were outnumbered by an enormous margin. Just hundreds of jihadists attacked two or three divisions of the Iraqi army, upward of twenty thousand men.

The ISIS gunmen were willing to die for their cause, but the Iraqi soldiers decidedly were not. They cut and ran, leaving behind uniforms, weapons, and thousands of Humvees.
(Some of these were later packed with explosives and used as suicide vehicles when ISIS overran Ramadi, some seventy miles west of Baghdad, in May 2015.)

ISIS had tapped on the Iraqi army and found that it was as fragile as an egg. The group’s leaders drew a reasonable conclusion: “This is easy. Let’s keep going, we can take the whole thing.” But even they couldn’t have imagined the rot they had exposed. The Iraqi army crumbled in almost every early battle because it was corrupt, riddled with nepotism, and debilitated by ghost ranks. Ghost ranks are soldiers on the duty roster who don’t show up. It’s a kickback racket for officers. An officer will find a young recruit and say, “Okay, it’s better if you go home. I’m going to keep you on the roster and you’ll still be paid. But you go home and find another job as a taxi driver or a house painter or whatever. And I’m going to keep two-thirds of your salary. So you don’t have to do any soldiering, but I’m going to still give you a third of your salary.”

Imagine a US army platoon commander who’s a lieutenant and has to give a percentage of his salary to his captain, who then kicks back a piece to his senior officer, and so on up the chain of command. Who’s going to fight and die for that kind of army?

Mosul was a game changer, the moment when ISIS surpassed al-Qaeda as the region’s dominant jihadist group. ISIS flaunted its newfound power. The group formally broke from al-Qaeda and even declared war on its affiliate in Syria, the Nusra Front. ISIS also wasn’t content to embarrass the Iraqi army and take its weapons. It brutalized the soldiers it captured, lining up and executing seventeen hundred prisoners in a single incident. ISIS put the whole gory exercise online, and some Sunnis secretly cheered, as if they were saying, “Hey, our team won. Okay, it was our extreme
team, but it was still our team.” Some were cheering because ISIS, radical as it was, was marching toward Baghdad promising to replant the Sunni flag removed by the United States. The idea of the caliphate, even one stained in blood, also resonated with Sunni Muslims. It harked back to a time when the Islamic world, and Arabs in particular, were strong and leaders, instead of weak and divided as they have been for the last century.