Al Queda in the Flesh
The white building down the street to my left is crawling with little ants in black with beards. They are slinging heavy machine guns and RPGs as they stare at us vaguely. They don’t seem to be perturbed by me or the other French journalists on the balcony of the media center. Omar, a gaunt FSA soldier with a limp, stays hidden as he smokes and peers out through the curtains onto the second floor balcony where Antoine and I are sitting. He puts down his absurdly large HK G3, a gun they call “NATO.” He sits cross-legged on the floor of the classy apartment that has been converted into the wartime media office for the opposition. Technically, Omar is our bodyguard, but he doesn’t speak English. “What’s going on?” I ask.
“Jabat Nosra arrested two judges at the revolutionary courts,” replies my fixer and translator Samir.
“Why?” I ask.
“They said only God’s law applies.”
“What do we do?”
“Just stay here.”
I reach for my camera.
“Don’t film them! You can film them after the revolution,” he says, making a throat slitting gesture.
Jabat Nosra is a tricky question these days. For the time being, normal people regard them with fear and suspicion. Jabat Nosra has a lot in common with Americans in the sense that they treat cigarettes with paranoia and superstition. Jabat Nosra forbids smoking and has pissed off a lot of people because of it. Zealots love Jabat Nosra. Secularists fear their ideology but tolerate them as fighters. Everyone respects their victories against regime forces. In other words, they are here, but they aren’t the law, yet.
“Fuck me, they have some heavy weapons. We’ve got nothing here,” I say.
“Just relax. They’ll leave soon,” says Samir.
“Okay,” I say
“These fucking guys, man. I’m telling you, one day soon we’re gonna have to kill them all,” Samir says with frustration.
It’s February of 2013. Antoine and I have been in Aleppo three days and it’s already looking bad. Scuds are falling — two so far since our arrival. They were fired from military bases near Damascus before slamming into rebel-held Aleppo, killing over 100 people. Samir was supposed to be protecting us, but he’s behaving recklessly, driving into bad situations and waving his gun around like a lunatic all the time. I don’t think he’s slept in weeks.
Three months ago, Jabat Nosra was declared a terrorist organization by the United States. It has been years since the leaders swore allegiance to Bin Laden and Zarqawi. In a backdrop of obvious displays by Jabat Nosra, a weirdo group of foreign extremists calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham is lurking, stealing recruits from Nosra while swearing allegiance to it. Al Qaeda was an amorphous concept to me back in the early days of the war on terror, but here they are, Al Queda in the flesh. To be honest they look a lot like any other regular shmucks.
Depending who you ask, ISIS is an offshoot of Jabat Nosra or Nosra is an offshoot of the original ISIS. The organization, which made itself notorious in Iraq, has been reborn in Syria under the same trademark. Lurking in the shadows, the Islamic State is already making Jabat Nosra look like East Williamsburg hipsters. ISIS has a reputation for beheading people and journalists are vanishing every month. It is not a good time to be this kind of foreigner in Aleppo.
We can’t do anything but hang out and chain-smoke until Jabhat Nosra decides to leave the white building. They know damn well we are Europeans but they aren’t coming for us. The fighters aren’t exactly friendly either. We’d rather not rock the boat in this situation. We sit and watch them like we’re on some kind of Al Qaeda safari. They haul gear around, they scratch their asses and look very bored.
Helicopters buzz across the skyline slowly, like pregnant flies.
Anti-aircraft fire crackles off boom boom boom every time we hear jet engines overhead. Sometimes we actually see the regime Migs stalking through clouds in glimpses. There’s so much going on, but the fighters in black across the way have everyone’s attention.
“Antoine, I don’t think we can be here anymore,” I mumble.
“I agree, man. They don’t give a shit about us right now, but what about tomorrow?”
“I think we should leave today.”
“Me too,” he says.
We stare back across at the gunmen, who are busy for now with something that has nothing to do with us. Whatever Jihadi-on-Rebel bullshit this is, it should be over soon.
We look at them and smoke.
They look at us and don’t smoke.
They finally leave the structure up the street. The entire world seems confusing as we start packing up our shit to get out of dodge. The jets are back and getting louder. Out in the city we hear the anti air gunners go apeshit again.
Patrick Hilsman is a freelance journalist focusing on Syria and the Middle East. He was born in New York and recovered from a heroin addiction without the help of a higher power. He has since made numerous trips to opposition controlled Syria between 2012 and 2015. He is currently a columnist at the Seattle Globalist and contributes to The Daily Beast, Mashable and Vice News.
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