Finalist: Los Angeles Times, by Raja Abdulrahim and Patrick McDonnell
For their vivid coverage of the Syrian civil war, showing at grave personal risk how both sides of the conflict contribute to the bloodshed, fear and corruption that define daily life.
Nominated Work
August 21, 2013
In divided Aleppo, Syria, residents must cross a bridge where a government shooter waits
By Raja Abdulrahim
ALEPPO, Syria — Battoul makes her way around the smashed bus full of sandbags and steps into sniper territory. A man balancing a large box of produce on his left shoulder, cilantro peeking out, is close on her heels.
“Hurry, hurry,” he says. “This is not the time to walk slowly.”
She tries to blend into the crowd making its way over the 300-yard stretch of no man’s land that divides the two Aleppos: one held by the rebels, one by the government.
Every day, a government sniper holed up in City Hall picks off at least a few people. On good days, no one dies.
People call it the crossing of death.
Once, Battoul and her sister saw a 4-year-old boy pleading with his mother not to take him over the bridge that spans the Queiq River, the scariest part of the crossing.
“I don’t want to die,” he said, crying. The boy continued to beg his mother, who was holding a baby in her arms, until Battoul’s sister scooped up the boy and carried him, crying and screaming, across the bridge.
The first time Battoul crossed, she kept replaying all the terrifying stories she had heard. But once across safely, her fear slipped away.
“Life has to go on,” she says. “People cross and someone gets shot and they pick up the martyr and keep going.”
For months, the Karaj al Hajez crossing has been the only link between the two sides of Aleppo.
It used to be a main road connecting two neighborhoods. Now it’s a dangerous walkway, with the bridge in the middle.
Despite the risk of being shot on the bridge or detained at the checkpoint on the government side, thousands cross each day, attempting to navigate what remains of their old lives in the shadow of war: making their way to jobs, college, hospitals or just to buy groceries.
The government holds Aleppo’s western and southern neighborhoods, and rebels have seized the rest, creating a misshapen yin/yang of control. A documentary by activists exploring the divide described the city as the “Berlin of the East.”
Most of Syria’s cities, and indeed much of the country, now find themselves partitioned. Residents are cut off from families and jobs by front lines and dangerous crossings.
With no victor or peace accord in sight for a war well into its third year, the fragmentation promises to be a long-term prospect for the country.
In Aleppo, the ebb and flow of life is often dictated by what happens at the crossing.
For a week in early July, rebels with the Free Syrian Army prevented residents from taking food and fuel to government-held districts. Protests led to a relaxing of the ban, but rebels still limit how much food can be carried over the bridge.
Since then, rebel groups have threatened to launch an offensive against government forces and close the crossing.
Recently, rebels attacked City Hall, where the sniper is perched, with three tank shells, six rockets and 60 mortar rounds.
Hours after the attack, the sniper began firing again, killing three people.
In a dusty alley at the entrance to the crossing on the rebel side, Um Abdo and Dr. Sami sit waiting for the first shot of the sniper.
The pair used to wait at a triage center a few blocks away, but a month ago, after too many victims had bled to death before arriving, they moved here to be able to treat patients immediately.
Um Abdo, an evening-wear saleswoman turned volunteer paramedic, looks at her watch.
“It’s almost 2 — by 3 p.m. at the latest,” she says, referring to when the shooting is likely to begin. Then she adds hopefully, “Maybe the day will pass and there will be no shooting.”
A few minutes later, the crack of gunfire sends a group of crossers ducking for cover. Then they rush to make it to the other side.
Dr. Sami, a cardiologist, looks at his watch. “He has begun his shift. He is telling the people that he has arrived.”
Those who depend on the crossing often theorize about the unseen person behind the scope. Like detectives figuring out a serial killer’s method of operation to predict murders, the residents parse the victims and their wounds to find patterns and, within those patterns, ways to avoid his bullet:
The sniper begins shooting in the afternoon because he stays up all night and sleeps in the morning.
He mostly shoots women and children.
He targets the genitals, but also likes kill shots to the head and chest.
He is more active when there are clashes in the city.
Whatever the theories, it doesn’t much matter; people continue to cross.
When residents arrive at the crossing during a gunfight between rebels and government forces, they dutifully wait until the fighting subsides and then pass through.
Debo, a factory worker, was returning home from his shift in a government-held neighborhood at 3 p.m. when he was shot in the stomach. He was taken to the hospital in the back of a pickup.
Despite the serious injury, he says, “I’ll go again to make a living.”
“There’s no work here, so it’s a necessity,” Debo says from his hospital bed, tubes in his chest and nose, his breathing slow and labored.
In a city where death makes regular house calls, residents reason that crossing conflict lines isn’t always riskier than staying home.
Recently, a shell struck the modest apartment building where Battoul and her family live. A 9-year-old girl was killed.
A few days later, Um Muhammad, Battoul’s mother, made the crossing with her other daughter, an economics student, for university exams.
As Um Muhammad was returning, the sniper fired one shot, then followed it with a spray of bullets.
“Everyone hit the ground; the eggs were on the ground and the vegetables were spilled,” she says. “The women were frightened and the little children began crying. It breaks your heart.”
Rather than wait for the shooting to end, Um Muhammad sprinted toward the parked bus that marks the beginning of opposition territory. Later, she heard that an elderly woman had been killed.
“But I don’t know,” she says. “You don’t look back. You just keep running and looking ahead at where you are trying to go.”
March 26, 2013
By Patrick J. McDonnell and Nabih Bulos
AL QASR, Lebanon — Each evening, Ali Jamal and other men in this border town grab their Kalashnikov assault rifles, jump on their motorbikes and ride across the irrigation canal into Syria to protect their homes.
The enemies are Sunni rebel "terrorists," he says, who target Jamal and his neighbors because they are Shiite Muslims.
"Imagine, these people used to be our neighbors," said the 40-year-old farmer, perplexed by the transformation. "Now they want to kidnap and kill us."
Tensions gripping the villages along the border here between northeastern Lebanon and Syria illustrate the increasingly sectarian nature of the 2-year-old Syrian conflict and the risks it poses for the entire region.
The predominant narrative of the Syrian war is that of a tyrannical government largely run by members of a Shiite sect, the Alawites, brutalizing a people yearning for freedom.
However, in the largely Shiite towns and villages of Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, people who have fled Syria tell a different story. They speak of an "ethnic cleansing" campaign carried out by rebels intent on creating an Islamic state run by Syria's Sunni majority.
In the face of rebel attacks, Shiites in dozens of villages just inside Syria have fled here to a part of Lebanon dominated by the Shiite militant group Hezbollah, the villagers and Hezbollah representatives say. Those who have been displaced credit Hezbollah, which is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S., with providing shelter and security.
Hezbollah counts Syrian President Bashar Assad among its staunchest allies, along with longtime patron Iran. The three players make up what they call the "axis of resistance" against the United States and Israel.
The Shiite militants' alleged involvement in the Syrian war has become a major topic of contention and one more reason for those pushing the West to arm the Syrian rebels, who have their own baggage, including the presence of Al Qaeda-linked Sunni militants.
Hezbollah has acknowledged training, arming and providing logistical support to Syrian Shiites with family ties to Lebanon, who it says face attack from Syrian rebel forces. Hezbollah fighters have been killed in Syria, but they were defending towns along the border and were not deployed alongside Syrian troops, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has said.
A visit to the border area arranged with Hezbollah representatives provided a glimpse into a war raging along the Orontes River basin in towns and villages near the city of Qusair, just a few miles from the Lebanese frontier.
The largely agricultural area, with snowcapped peaks in the distance, is of considerable strategic importance. Rebel forces covet it as a transit corridor for fighters and weaponry, a flow the Syrian military is trying to choke off.
Shells allegedly fired by rebels have been landing here in Al Qasr, so far without casualties. The rebels counter that Syrian government bombardment has targeted the nearby Lebanese area of Arsal, a mostly Sunni border zone where residents sympathize with the rebellion and where arms and personnel are reportedly smuggled to opposition brigades.
In Al Qasr, unmarked Hezbollah units in trademark black SUVs maintain a discreet security presence. Here and in the neighboring town of Hermel, posters bear heroic likenesses of Assad, fallen Hezbollah members and Iranian political and religious figures such as the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The isolated zone is reached via an Iranian-built blacktop highway featuring light posts powered by solar panels, a jarring site in a zone where most roads are of the washboard persuasion.
Hezbollah representatives say those fighting the rebels inside Syria are Shiite townsmen defending their homes across the border, not on-duty party militiamen.
"My loyalty is with Hezbollah, but I am not controlled by them," said Jamal, a father of four.
He spoke outside a house in this Lebanese border town where, he says, four Shiite families totaling 29 people — 21 children and 8 adults — from the Syrian village of Zayta, two miles away, have relocated because of rebel attacks. Hezbollah pays the rent.
"Before this war, we all got along, no one cared about sects," said Jamal. "Now everything has changed completely."
He said he sold a pair of cows to purchase two AK-47 assault rifles for about $2,000 each, and keeps them stashed near the border. Each evening, he, his brother and other men from Zayta cross and set up guard to protect their homes and property in Syria. Their wives and children remain in Lebanon.
Jamal and others interviewed here said Sunni rebels, many of them from neighboring villages, have attacked Shiites, chasing people from their homes and in some cases shelling and setting fire to their enclaves.
His home was shelled last year, Jamal said, and he moved his family to Lebanon. He has Lebanese citizenship, a lingering consequence of how borders were drawn after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire nearly a century ago.
"Why should I be forced to leave my home by armed groups?" he asked. "We don't have much to fight with, just our rifles, but we will defend what is ours."
Near Al Qasr's main mosque, bedecked with yellow Hezbollah flags, a shattered stone fence marks a spot where residents say a mortar shell landed in February. "It would have blown up the entire mosque if it had exploded," said a Hezbollah militiaman, Khader, who declined to give his last name for security reasons.
Nearby, a concrete irrigation ditch marks the border. Across the way, relaxed Syrian troops, including several in sneakers, staff an observation post as farmers tend to wheat fields and olive groves. They were the only Syrian soldiers visible during the visit to the border area.
Standing at the irrigation canal, another militiaman showed a reporter a grisly cellphone video in which a man said to be a Syrian rebel appears to use a machete to decapitate a captive. Such videos circulate freely on all sides of the divide. The Hezbollah fighter, who gave his name as Mehdi, claimed the victim was killed because he was a Shiite.
In the adjacent town of Hermel, Ali Haydar Kheyr Din, 46, recounted how he was kidnapped by rebels on a Syrian road and held for four days. His captors went through his cellphone contacts one by one and accused him of being a Hezbollah operative, said Din, who says his family owns a factory in Homs.
"You're Shiite, of course you're Hezbollah," said one of the captors, according to Din. He said he was blindfolded for most of the time he was captive. "Tell us how you get the arms into Syria," the rebel interrogator demanded at the home where he was held.
Din denied involvement with Hezbollah. He doubted from the beginning that he would get out alive, but the rebels didn't abuse him physically and an associate in the area managed to get him released, he said.
"I didn't want to be maimed, to have an eye gouged out or a leg cut off with a power saw, because I had heard that kind of thing happened to some people," he recalled. "I told them I preferred it if they just sprayed me with a machine gun and get it over with quickly."
July 24, 2013
By Raja Abdulrahim
On the windowsill next to a photo of her four sons, Ahlam Suood kept her cell phone in the same spot, where the reception was best. Throughout the day she would run to the phone, thinking she had heard it ring, worried she had missed a call.
“You can’t even leave the phone, you keep checking it, maybe someone called,” Suood said. “Any unknown number that rings, I call it back — maybe it’s Abdullah.”
She last saw her son Abdullah more than a year ago, when the 24-year-old university student was taken away by security forces.
The family was forced to flee their city of Maarat Numan in northern Syria’s Idlib province late last year, and Suood stayed awake at night worrying that Abdullah would be released and then be unable to find her if he returned to the family home.
She refuses to even think about joining the growing exodus of Syrians who are leaving the war-torn country. Here, even in a town not her own, she feels closer to her son.
“I won’t leave before Abdullah gets out,” she said. “I’m not worth more than my children; I’m not worth more than Abdullah.”
The Syrian civil war, now in its third year, has left more than 100,000 people dead, according to the most recent United Nations figures. About twice that number have disappeared inside government prisons or other security detention facilities where they languish in inhumane conditions, according to the opposition Syrian Network for Human Rights.
About 70,000 have not been heard from since they were taken, said the group’s spokesman, Sami Ibrahim. For families, the lack of information can foster hope that the detainee will eventually be released. On the other hand, the relatives may wait forever for closure.
Mothers like Suood live from one bit of news to the next.
Almost a year ago, a man was freed from prison and sent word to the family that Abdullah was alive and was expected to be released soon. Then, nothing. No release and no further news.
Whenever Suood heard of a newly freed detainee in Idlib province, she would make the trip to congratulate the man and his family and inquire about her son. It is a largely futile practice repeated by other families desperate for any word of a loved one.
In late May, a rebel fighter contacted the Suood family and told them he had been with Abdullah in a Damascus intelligence compound known as the Palestine branch. The fighter, released as part of a prisoner swap for government soldiers, said Abdullah was in relatively good health despite the difficult conditions. But even that bit of good news was laced with the ominous.
In the Palestine compound, the freed fighter said, prisoner executions had become regular occurrences. At times, he told them, the hallways flowed with blood.
But Suood’s hope persists. “You dream every day that tomorrow he’s going to be released,” she said, wringing her hands. “When my (other) sons come, I dream that it’s going to be him ringing the doorbell.”
Abdulrahman Suood can’t remember his experience in government detention without thinking about his older brother Abdullah.
“When you first fall into the hands of the security forces, you don’t know what your fate is or where your destiny lies,” the 22-year-old said. “You know you can die in any way.”
The brothers were crammed into 13-sq-ft cells that held dozens of men. They were regularly beaten, but nothing was worse than the degradation, he said.
Once when Abdulrahman was undergoing a strip search and interrogation, a guard asked him where he was studying.
He said he was a mechanical engineering sophomore at Aleppo University, a public university.
“You’re studying with us and you’re coming out in protest against us,” the guard said, and then spat on him.
Their days were filled with interrogations and waiting in rooms so crowded with detainees that they had to take turns sleeping.
“The wait is very hard. Every night I would pray that the next morning I would hear my name and I would be released,” he said.
In April, Human Rights Watch visited state security and military intelligence facilities in Raqqah province, now under opposition control, where they found documents, prison cells, interrogation rooms and devices consistent with the torture former detainees have described.
Since the beginning of the uprising in March 2011, the rights group has documented the systematic patterns of abuse and torture, which it says amount to crimes against humanity. The group has urged the UN Security Council to refer the situation in Syria to the International Criminal Court.
The last time Abdulrahman saw his brother was on April 20, 2012, when they were taken out of their cells in Damascus to be interrogated.
When he was released after three months, Abdulrahman at first couldn’t believe it. He still doesn’t understand why he was let go and Abdullah wasn’t.
“I can’t forget what happened. I try not to think about it, but there are some things that you keep remembering,” he said. “Abdullah doesn’t leave my mind at all.”
When Abdullah Suood was released after his first detainment, he vowed never to be taken alive again.
“Let them kill me rather than detain me,” he would say.
Before the uprising began, Abdullah was one of many online activists trying to organise protests to emulate the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. He went to Aleppo three times in February 2011 for planned protests that never materialized.
On his fourth trip, just before demonstrations broke out across the country, Abdullah was arrested and held for two months, enduring what he described as regular beatings and electric shocks.
It was Abdullah who inspired his family to join the uprising. His father, a doctor, volunteers in the field hospital and two of his brothers work in Maarat Numan’s media office. Ahlam Suood knits scarves and sweaters in the colours of the opposition flag.
“He wasn’t afraid,” Suood said of her son.
But his time in prison changed him.
He began carrying a handgun wherever he went in case he was caught again. He didn’t plan to use it against the security forces, but to make them kill him once he brandished the gun.
But a twist of fate robbed him of the gun in February 2012.
Abdullah and Abdulrahman were on their way from their hometown to Aleppo to attend upcoming protests. They were halted on the highway by Bedouin thieves who took the gun, their money and their cell phones.
After the robbery, the brothers continued to Aleppo. At a fuel station there, they were stopped by security officers.
In his pocket, Abdullah had a list of activists and the phone number for Col Riad Assad, then head of the rebel Free Syrian Army. Abdullah was accused of being an opposition co-ordinator. From there he disappeared into the labyrinth that frightened him more than death.
July 30, 2013
Syria's military and allied militias are trying to rout rebels from Yarmouk, a Palestinian camp
By Patrick J. McDonnell
DAMASCUS, Syria — A chaotic passageway through blasted walls, blood-spattered floors and bullet-pocked rooms leads to the narrow stairway where a teenager pokes his Kalashnikov rifle into a sliver of light slicing through the sandbags.
"If we don't protect our camp, who will?" asked 18-year-old Yehya from his perch on a landing, keeping watch on crumbling apartment blocks and debris-laden streets outside.
The battle for Damascus, the capital, has become a brutal fight for the suburbs. The Syrian army and allied militias are trying to push rebels out of Yarmouk and Dariya in the south, Jobar and Qaboun in the northeast — and kill as many of them as possible. The rebels' goal is to advance to the seat of power of President Bashar Assad.
It is a street-by-street, building-by-building conflict that grinds on as daily life proceeds in the heart of the city. Traffic police in Damascus still stop motorists for driving without seat belts, garbage trucks pick up the trash, and families flock to festive eateries at dusk after the daily fast during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
No one takes much notice of the fighter jets that periodically scream overhead en route to drop their payloads on rebel bastions, or the constant thud of outgoing artillery aimed at opposition-held suburbs. Impossible not to notice are the seemingly countless checkpoints and the occasional car bombs and mortar rounds that strike within the city limits.
Yehya is fighting in Yarmouk, long a thriving settlement that some call the capital of the Palestinian diaspora. Today, it is a largely depopulated battleground where the Syrian military and allied Palestinian militiamen such as Yehya are trying to push out rebels, many of them also Palestinians, who still control most of it.
At times, the battle is personal. The two sides are so close that they can trade insults.
"We are fighting our neighbors, people we know by name," said Hassoun, 22, a member of a pro-government militia. Like others who were interviewed, he did not want to be identified by his full name for security reasons.
Rebels in Yarmouk move stealthily in a labyrinth of tunnels and paths created by holes blasted in adjoining buildings. The networks can stretch for hundreds of yards and connect with other routes, some of them given numbers for identification purposes.
The pursuing soldiers and militias use the same routes if they capture them.
On Monday, militiamen led visiting journalists along passageways cutting into adjacent buildings and leading to a point close to the front lines.
The route passed through apartments that held traces of their former residents: a picture of a young girl's birthday party on a wall with a large Tweety Bird superimposed in the background; a pile of well-worn books in a former study conveying a sense of peace and order so at odds with current circumstances. Some rooms were charred and gave off a burnt odor. On occasion, shots rang out.
Bullet casings and spent shells littered the floors. In one alleyway, fighters were trying to repair the motor of a badly damaged Chevrolet Caprice Classic.
All fighters seek to avoid too much time away from the protective cover of buildings and exposed to the ubiquitous snipers. Running and ducking is required in exposed alleyways. Tea breaks are taken in secure areas. Fighters grab sleep on stray mattresses and beds in abandoned apartment buildings, schools and shops.
Each side lobs mortar rounds across the other's lines. The military also has heavy artillery and aircraft at its disposal. The result has been the utter devastation of broad stretches of suburban Damascus. Still, rebels survive amid the ruins.
The government has said it is making progress. Daily reports boast of success in clearing the capital suburbs and the surrounding countryside of "terrorists," the government's term for armed rebels.
On the ground, however, it is hard to judge who has the upper hand. Car bombings and mortar strikes within the city limits appear to have declined, perhaps an indication that the rebels have been pushed back. But major swaths of the suburbs remain no-go zones.
The highway from the capital north to Homs cuts through an apocalyptic gantlet of burned-out, bullet-strafed and collapsed buildings. Thick black smoke rises from fires of uncertain origin. Gunfire crackles. A series of smashed car dealerships hints at what was once a thriving commercial stretch in the town of Harasta. Bullet-riddled vehicles sit stranded along the highway.
"We've cleared [more than 750 yards] on each side of the highway, but it's really not safe to go in because of the snipers," said a Syrian soldier at a checkpoint on the edge of Qaboun.
Fighting in Yarmouk began in December. Rebels quickly overran much of the Palestinian enclave, and many of its estimated half a million people fled. The army and allied militiamen sealed off the area.
Rebels still hold about 75% of Yarmouk, according to Jumah Abdullah, an official of the pro-government Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. Several thousand civilians remain stranded inside, he said.
"We tried to negotiate to get the armed groups out," Abdullah said in an interview in an apartment building on the edge of Yarmouk.
"But they wouldn't leave. So we had to take action," he said as exploding mortar shells shook the ground.
Abdullah said his group began pushing deeper into the camp in the last week. Fighters said progress had been slow but steady. One fighter said five days of combat had gained 75 to100 yards of ground.
The militiamen have now taken up positions in some of the captured buildings, using the same routes through the walls long traversed by the rebels. Graffiti on the walls extol rebel groups such as the Farouq Brigade and Al Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda-linked faction whose ranks include many foreign fighters, some with combat experience in Iraq or Afghanistan.
"The foreigners have experience and are well-trained," said one pro-government squad leader known by his nickname Abu Dumoo, or Father of Tears, a short, muscular man in a tank top and black skullcap.
The plan is to push ever deeper into the camp. A major landmark, Reijeh Square, is only about 165 yards away, the pro-government militiamen said.
At strategic points, snipers such as Yehya peered through openings in sandbags and walls, alert for activity in rebel-held buildings and streets and the no man's land between the two forces. When unused, the openings are plugged with cloth and T-shirts.
The snipers' slits provide narrow views into the enemy's territory. Sheets are hung across narrow alleys to provide a measure of cover. A green-and-black flag of Al Nusra Front fluttered in a slight breeze.
"If I see movement," said Yehya, "I fire."
Special correspondent Nabih Bulos contributed to this report.
September 21, 2013
Syria's now well-organized neighborhood militias provide a vital boost to the military
By Patrick J. McDonnells
DAMASCUS, Syria — At age 70, Ahmad Saidi took up arms after the slaying of his son, a father of five who was killed when a remote-controlled bomb blew up his car.
A neighbor suspected in the attack was later overheard bragging about his "gift" for the Saidi family.
"This is our homeland," Saidi, a textile merchant, said this week as he stood in camouflage pants amid the shrapnel-scarred interior of the Zubair Mosque, where even a stack of Korans had been shredded by bullets. "We will die defending it."
The defiant septuagenarian with the patrician crown of snow-white hair and matching beard is not a soldier with the Syrian army or a militant in a rebel brigade. Rather, he belongs to a neighborhood branch of Syria's National Defense Forces, a government-backed umbrella group of militias that has emerged as a kind of parallel national army.
Saidi said his son Imad was killed Feb. 2 in the Tadamun neighborhood of Damascus, the Syrian capital, for refusing to join the rebellion against the government of President Bashar Assad.
The many pro-government militias that sprang up with official encouragement after the uprising began in 2011 have been transformed in the last year from ill-organized neighborhood watch groups into a coherent paramilitary organization. The militiamen are near-ubiquitous in the capital and other government-controlled areas of the nation.
The emergence of the militias has provided a crucial boost for the overstretched army, which has suffered heavy losses in a grinding, 21/2-year war on multiple fronts. More than 100,000 people have died, according to the United Nations.
The arming of loyalist militias is a classic if not always winning tactic of counterinsurgency doctrine, employed in Vietnam, Central America and Iraq, among other war zones.
The pro-Assad militiamen, carrying AK-47 rifles and usually decked out in military fatigues and combat boots, sometimes appear indistinguishable from regular army troops, though their numbers usually include some aging and scruffy combatants and others lacking proper gear. On Wednesday, one pro-government gunman near the sand-bagged entrance to the Tadamun district sported a T-shirt, jeans and sandals, with the only sign of authority being a pair of hand grenades and a pistol tucked into his belt.
The militiamen are considered a crucial factor in turning the tide of battle in the government's favor in recent months. They number in the tens of thousands, and their ever-expanding ranks have allowed the military to dispatch its best troops to vital fronts and leave rear-guard duties to the generally lightly trained militiamen.
The citizen-soldiers man checkpoints, search bags, check IDs, question people deemed suspicious and take on sundry other security tasks, such as trying to spot bomb-laden vehicles and hidden weapons caches. They work in close coordination with the army, and sometimes fight alongside regular forces in the fierce daily battles that mark the conflict.
"We took the burden off the army and let them deal with wider and more extensive operations," said Abu Elie, nom de guerre of the militia commander in Tadamun, a heavily contested urban patch divided into government- and rebel-held zones.
As he spoke in a second-floor office in an anonymous apartment block, the building shook from the thud of government tank rounds, periodically answered by mortar shells fired from the rebel side. It's the area's unvarying soundtrack, along with sporadic gunfire.
No regular troops were visible during a two-hour visit Wednesday to the strategic district, which is an important conduit for rebels trying to infiltrate the capital from the south. Heavy fighting has left swaths of the southern tier of Tadamun in ruins. Much of the population has fled, though children can still be seen playing in the streets a few blocks from the front lines. On one day last year, 98 rebel mortar shells hit the district, according to Abu Elie, who said he was a former army intelligence officer.
"What you hear now are our tanks," said Abu Elie, boasting that the militia had armored vehicles, artillery and other heavy equipment at its disposal. "As the armed groups have gotten better weapons, so have we."
The militiamen's training and other operational details remain hazy. Various fighters interviewed described training sessions ranging from brief refresher courses (most Syrian men must do compulsory military service) to two weeks or even several months for those assigned to fighting in hot spots.
Some describe the militias as a strictly voluntary affair, while others say they are paid, generally the equivalent of about $100 a month — a not insignificant sum in war-ravaged Syria, where jobs are few and prices are rising fast. The units serve as an alternative for men of all ages (and some women) who don't want to make a long-term commitment to the army. Many members are ex-soldiers. Militiamen often patrol the neighborhoods where they live, giving them an intimate familiarity with the terrain.
"Once this is over, I go back to my job," said a 46-year-old militiaman in the Old City district of Bab Salam who goes by the nickname Abu Majd and is a goldsmith in civilian life. "We are not fighting for a name, Bashar Assad. We are fighting for our country."
Many fighters interviewed said they decided to join after losing relatives to the rebels. Raneen, 21, who serves in Tadamun, said she joined after two of her brothers were kidnapped by insurgents. One was later seen in an Internet video being sentenced to death for his pro-government stance, she said. She doesn't know the fate of her older siblings, but knows both may have been executed.
Rebels have inflicted heavy casualties on the militias, though the government provides no casualty numbers. In Tadamun, which is relatively compact by Damascus standards, 80 militiamen have been killed and more than 100 wounded in the last year, Abu Elie said.
Many militia members appear fiercely loyal and don buttons or T-shirts emblazoned with images of Assad, a clear provocation in some precincts. The militias include disproportionate numbers of generally pro-government minorities — including Alawites, Shiites, Christians and Druze — but in Damascus, many Sunni Muslims are also members.
The capital, like much of the country, remains divided. Opposition activists have complained of harassment and unprovoked attacks by pro-government units, both uniformed fighters and so-called shabiha, notorious plainclothes enforcers ultra-loyal to Assad.
"More than 70% of the people in this area are against us," a pro-government militia leader confided in the central Sadat neighborhood, where the militia's presence along bustling King Faisal Street was viewed with cold stares. Informers were probably reporting the fighters' entry to the opposition, the commander said. His predecessor, he noted, was assassinated with a bomb placed outside his house.
The area had been hit the previous day by three mortar shells, apparently fired by rebels, that left eight civilians dead, including at least three children, he said.
"We shouldn't linger around here too long," the wary commander added before escorting visiting journalists from the area. "We could be targeted."
In the Old City district of Shaghour, where antigovernment protests were common in the first year of the rebellion, the tide has turned in Assad's favor. Tension between Sunni and Shiite residents that roiled the historic district last year have calmed, according to militia commanders and residents. Some former rebels have even joined the pro-Assad militia and now help keep the peace, they said.
"The armed groups tried to create divisions here in the Old City but it didn't work," said Rafiq Lotof, a pro-government media activist and former New Jersey resident who supports the militias in the area. "People saw how other neighborhoods were destroyed, and they didn't want the same thing to happen here."
Special correspondent Nabih Bulos contributed to this report.
April 2, 2013
The fighters say they, not expatriates or educated outsiders, deserve to hold leadership roles
By Raja Abdulrahim
JABAL AL-ZAWIYA, Syria — The rebel commander Jamal Maroof was fiddling with his iPhone when a young man brought him news.
People were complaining about the rebel checkpoints that dotted the more than two dozen villages under the control of Maroof's Martyrs of Syria Brigade.
"The people are saying — " the young man began.
"What are they saying?" Maroof demanded. Without waiting for an answer, he told an aide to prepare a statement about the checkpoints to be read during Friday sermons.
"No one is opposed to the checkpoints and no one is allowed to object, because if he objects that means he wants chaos," Maroof said.
Maroof is among the rebel commanders who could threaten efforts to establish a civilian government for post-conflict Syria.
The armed uprising against President Bashar Assad is led mostly by working-class volunteers, many of whom resent the expatriates, the better-educated and others seeking to establish political leadership through local or national opposition councils. Some rebels also view the councils as proxies for the West and other outside interests. Many refuse to recognize the councils' authority.
If the men who now lead armed fighters refuse to give up power after the civil war, Syria could become a failed state and fertile ground for warlords and competing militias.
Idlib, along with other provinces, elected a civilian-led provincial government. Although most of the province is in rebel hands, the council operates from neighboring Turkey, and it appears to have about as much authority as a humanitarian organization. That is the gist of its contribution on the ground, where it has largely confined itself to sending aid and helping secure funds to reestablish services like water and electricity.
Meanwhile, the power of the armed rebel forces has extended well beyond the front lines in many areas to include control over roads, distribution of humanitarian aid as well as commerce and the courts.
A court governed by sharia, or Islamic law, and run by a group of Muslim clerics and lawyers has been established. Along with a newly formed highway patrol, it has helped reduce crime and conflicts among the rebels. But the court draws its power from the rebel militias that both recognize and protect it, making it unclear whether opposition fighters would respect its authority.
Rebels insist that militia control now, in a time of war and rampant insecurity, does not preclude a democratic future for Syria.
Some of the fighters talk longingly of returning to their old lives after the conflict, but others believe they are owed something for their sacrifice.
"I am the one who is here every day fighting and dying, and then they want to bring someone else to put them on the council?" asked Lt. Col. Ahmad Suood, military commander of the Slaves of the Merciful Brigade. The brigade is based in Maarat Numan, a city of 120,000 that has seen most of its residents flee in recent months as shells have rained down from nearby military bases.
As class resentments surface, fighters complain that better-educated civilians feel entitled to positions of power.
"They say, 'How can an illiterate person come and rule me?' " said Muhammad "Abu al-Zaki" Aassi, spokesman for the Suqoor al-Sham Brigade, which, along with the Martyrs of Syria, controls the villages of the Jabal al-Zawiya area.
Suqoor al-Sham oversees a court, a field hospital, a bakery and a commissary that sells at regulated costs, undercutting the local shops that were price gouging, according to Aassi.
"With regards to those who made civilian councils, and I have said it a million times, when did they join the revolution?" asked Aassi, who worked as a merchant in Lebanon before the uprising. "How are you going to defect late and then … try to rule over those who made this whole revolution possible?"
Aassi attended the provincial council elections in Turkey months ago even though he wasn't invited, and said civilian activists aren't coordinating with the rebels.
He spoke in a damp, Roman-era cave underneath his home that has been turned into the brigade's media center, with bags and extra blankets stored in rocky crevices. A TV broadcast news about a conference in Istanbul, Turkey, in which the national civilian opposition group, the Syrian National Coalition, selected a Kurdish American businessman as its prime minister, a move that alienated many of the rebel fighters.
"It will fall apart," Aassi muttered.
The resentment can cut both ways. Increasingly, civilians are alarmed by militia behavior that they view as high-handed at best and dangerously abusive at worst.
Recently, as rebels were engaged in intense fighting with army soldiers at the Wadi Deif military base, the military commander of the Martyrs of Maarat Brigade asked the field hospital in Maarat Numan to send an ambulance to the front lines to rescue wounded rebels.
Those injured in the fighting were being rushed to the hospital in the backs of cars and trucks.
But a hospital administrator refused the request, citing the risk as well as a lack of ambulances. Hours later, a group of armed rebels from the brigade stormed into the hospital to arrest the administrator.
Others at the hospital, including city elders, intervened and persuaded the rebels to leave.
"We haven't fought to get out from under one military boot in order to be put under another military boot," said Abdulnassir Malas, a lawyer from Maarat Numan and member of the city council.
Malas is trying to get rebel commanders to sign a pledge supporting elections in Syria and agreeing to hand in weapons after the fall of the regime. Malas said all the groups he approached have signed the pledge so far, including the Islamist Al Nusra Front, whose leaders have said it opposes elections.
Malas, who has been detained five times since the beginning of the uprising, said Syrians are fearful of the prospect of militia rule.
September 17, 2013
A jarring semblance of normality in Syria's capital belies the reality of the conflict raging all around
By Patrick J. McDonnell
DAMASCUS, Syria — The thud of an artillery round hardly drew a reaction from the many people lingering, apparently carefree, Monday near Jaheth Park, a stretch of green in this Syrian capital's upscale Abu Rummaneh district.
"From inside the bubble to outside the bubble," said Maysam, 29, tracing the trajectory of a shell aimed at some rebel stronghold in embattled suburbs. "We all live in a bubble here. No one really knows what's going on outside of our little bubble."
After 2 1/2 years of conflict, the Syrian capital is a deeply divided place. Central Damascus is heavily guarded and relatively secure, but its residents live with the unsettling reality of war raging all around them.
Many know little about the violence engulfing the sundry "no go" zones that ring the capital, including the now-notorious Ghouta area, a scene of the Aug. 21 chemical strikes that killed hundreds of people. The attack remains shrouded in mystery to residents here, even after the United Nations declared Monday that toxic sarin gas was released via surface-to-surface missiles.
"I have no idea what happened," said Bassel, 30, who was hanging out Monday evening with Maysam, his close friend, outside Jaheth Park. "But I don't want 1,500 people to die from poison gas."
The two friends and a third, Jawdat, 27, spoke to a visiting reporter about their lives in the capital during these difficult times. The men, all single, college-educated professionals, asked that their last names not be used for security reasons.
The trio, who say they are neutral in the war — though all are opposed to any Islamic fundamentalist takeover, preferring the government of President Bashar Assad — provided a window on how the conflict has affected Syria's reeling middle class, battered by a collapsing economy and the deteriorating security scenario. The men say their only desire is that Syria return to its stable, secure state before the war.
"People are desperate," said Bassel, a banker who acknowledges being pessimistic about his country's future. "They are out smoking and drinking like nothing's going on, but everyone's worried."
Added Jawdat: "People are just in denial. They can't believe what has happened to Syria."
Occasionally, incoming mortar rounds from rebel enclaves shatter the calm of places such as Abu Rummaneh, where the large Badr Mosque was hit a few months back and the top-floor flat of a smart apartment building remains a burned-out shell because of a mortar strike. But life goes on in this capital with a jarring semblance of normality, despite the many checkpoints and frequent artillery blasts. People make their way to work each day and the traffic backs up in rush hour. Yet the war is never far away.
"Now it's a normal thing that you hear of someone you knew or a friend was killed or disappeared," said Bassel. "Maybe they were kidnapped or hit by a mortar."
The emotional roller coaster in recent days amid the threat of military action by the United States, which accuses Assad's forces of carrying out the chemical strikes, was especially nerve-racking. Some people left the country. Others stocked up on food and scouted out potential shelters.
In Bassel's case, he said he decided to catch up on his Americana Hollywood-style and watched the 2010 film "Green Zone," starring Matt Damon, about the disastrous occupation of neighboring Iraq after the U.S.-engineered ouster of Saddam Hussein. A common fear here is that Syria is on course to be the next Iraq, site of seemingly endless sectarian slaughter and possible occupation by foreign troops.
"The movie didn't make me feel any better," Bassel said.
"If the Americans invade, will we all be treated like the prisoners in Abu Ghraib?" he asked, referring to the prison where Iraqis suffered abuse at the hands of U.S. jailers. "I wonder if what happened to our neighbor is what will happen to us."
For many, the Syrian war has put off plans — marriage and careers, studies and trips. Lives are in limbo.
"You can't plan anything," said Jawdat, who works for the United Nations. "People don't want to have children or families in these circumstances. We're all suspended in time."
Social workers, he said, advise people living in shelters not to have more children until the situation improves.
Millions have fled the country. But Syrians often encounter obstacles to securing jobs and legal residency abroad. All three men said they feared an even more difficult lifestyle outside Syria.
The increasingly sectarian nature of the conflict has created new rifts in a diverse society where it was long impolite to ask people about their religious beliefs. Now it is sometimes impossible not to know the creed of one's colleagues and neighbor.
"I never knew my good friend Maysam was an Alawite — it never mattered before," said Bassel, a member of the Sunni Muslim majority.
Alawites make up a minority sect whose most prominent member is Assad. The civil war pits mostly Sunni rebels against the president and his Alawite-dominated ruling circle.
The dynamic often means that Alawites face pressure to be ultra-loyalist, Maysam said.
"Sometimes you feel there is no middle ground," he explained. "You are pushed to show your support."
Bassel said he sometimes senses mistrust from co-workers wondering whether he, as a Sunni, is a closet rebel sympathizer. He keeps his face closely shaven so as not to be confused with a bearded holy warrior.
Jawdat, also a Sunni, said he is sometimes mistaken for a Christian. He doesn't bother to venture a correction, he said, because it can smooth tensions in some instances.
New rumors sweep the capital periodically about possible rebel advances, Western attacks, government strategic moves and other scenarios. It's a jittery lifestyle.
"We just want things to be back the way they were before," said Maysam. "We're keeping our fingers crossed that this will happen."
August 14, 2013
Loyalists in Jaramana see attacks as payback from Syrian rebels
By Patrick J. McDonnell
JARAMANA, Syria — They were cleaning up the debris the other day at Alaa's falafel shop, its windows blown out and its interior in shambles after a car bomb detonated in Swords Square, the heart of this bustling Damascus suburb.
"They came to Syria to do jihad," said one distraught resident, whose in-law was among 10 killed in the July 25 blast. "Pardon me, but why don't they go to Israel to do their jihad?"
This teeming district, its population swelled by residents fleeing violence elsewhere in the country because of its relative sense of security, is now under attack.
Just 12 days after the blast hit the main square, an even more deadly car bomb exploded a few blocks away, killing 18 people and wounding dozens more.
Both devices were designed to inflict maximum damage on the civilian population. The scenario is reminiscent of the car bombings that have devastated neighboring Iraq for the last decade.
A black-and-white funeral poster announced the death of a Christian woman, Helweh Hanna, mother of three. She happened to be passing by when the bomb went off July 25, residents said.
No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks in the district with more than 500,000 residents. Each side in the Syrian conflict blames the other. The opposition says the government of President Bashar Assad is masterminding the violence here and in other pro-Assad districts in a perverse strategy to sow sectarian fear and distrust for the rebels.
But residents interviewed say they have no doubt as to the culprit: rebels fighting to overthrow Assad. To furious inhabitants, it makes no difference whether the attackers were directly affiliated with the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army. Like the government, many here lump the disparate rebel blocs under the umbrella of Al Nusra Front, a powerful Islamist faction that Washington calls a terrorist group and Al Qaeda offshoot.
The prevalent view among many interviewed here is that the various rebel brigades are working in concert with the West, Turkey and Persian Gulf nations to destroy what little peace remains in this traumatized nation.
"May God destroy their hands," one disgusted woman said of the anonymous bombers, as she and a friend surveyed a devastated row of shops — including a tire repair spot, a butcher and a vegetable stand — across the street from Alaa's falafel place. "How can we feel safe anymore?" asked the woman, who, like others interviewed, declined to give her name for security reasons.
The strategic suburb southeast of the capital, along the main route to Damascus' international airport, has remained a bastion of support for Assad, denying the rebels a potentially major access point to the capital or an opportunity to consolidate forces. This appears to have frustrated the armed opposition. Many here see the surge in attacks as payback for Jaramana's steadfast loyalist stance.
"Jaramana will never be a hospitable atmosphere for the armed groups," said Father Gabriel Daoud, a Syriac Orthodox Christian priest in the area. "They know that if they come here they will perish."
Jaramana, its population traditionally composed of Druze and Christian minorities, has been a bulwark against the rebel advance and a steady source of volunteers for the government side. Most Syrian rebels are from the nation's Sunni Muslim majority.
Inside Jaramana's confines, militiamen staff checkpoints and patrol the streets, eyeing strangers and their vehicles closely and questioning anyone who doesn't seem to belong. The militiamen coordinate closely with the Syrian army. A strict security regime is in place; plainclothes surveillance teams watch who comes and goes.
Still, the suburb bustles with flourishing shops, gaggles of pedestrians and heavy traffic. Restaurants, fast-food joints and liquor stores did a brisk business, busy even during the just-concluded Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. Jaramana is nothing like some of the capital's haunting Sunni-dominated suburbs, such as Dariya, Qaboun and Duma, sites of near-daily combat and bombardment.
One pro-government militia in Jaramana operates out of a dry-cleaning shop. Inside, husky militiamen stay in touch with operatives in the field on two-way radios and cellphones. In the back, a young man dutifully irons khaki uniforms.
A visiting Druze sheik wearing a skullcap and spectacles sits on a chair, fingering his beads, saying little.
But authorities and residents acknowledge it is virtually impossible to stop every attack in such a large area flanked by rebel-friendly districts.
"How can we provide 100% security, with so many new people fleeing the war coming to live here?" asked Sheik Abul-Latif Kurbaj, a Druze elder in Jaramana, interviewed in his second-floor office above a vegetable shop. "The armed groups have sentenced the people of Jaramana to death."
On the wall in the well-appointed office was a stylized painting of an illustrious Druze hero from a 19th century battle. He is depicted stuffing his turban into an enemy cannon and brandishing his curved sword, giving his life to thwart the invaders of the Druze homeland in what is now southern Syria.
"Our young men are ready to defend our homes, in concert with our Christian brothers," said Kurbaj, a short, stout man wearing traditional baggy trousers and given to lengthy digressions on Druze history and culture. "We want change and democracy and an end to corruption. We have called for these changes for a long time. But we don't agree with destroying the country."
Jaramana was long a sort of Syrian melting pot, absorbing people of many sects, beliefs and nationalities, including tens of thousands of refugees from the violence in Iraq.
Many here suspect that the recent car bombs were manufactured in Jaramana from munitions smuggled into the district. Suspicious cars and drivers, they say, would probably have attracted attention. If true, it is an especially disturbing scenario: The attackers are living in Jaramana, sleeper cells ready to attack again.
Distrust has fallen on some new residents, mostly Sunnis, from war-torn zones such as the eastern region of Ghouta, next to Jaramana. Some displaced people who had resettled in Jaramana have been evicted because of suspected links to rebels, according to several residents here, even as more displaced Syrians arrive daily.
"Of course we cannot refuse to give shelter and food to people in need: This is our creed," says Kurbaj. "But while we are taking care of the women and children, the men are fighting jihad against us. Even our greatest enemy, Israel, has not treated us the way these infidels have behaved."
Some residents cannot hold back their fury at the U.S. government, which many in Jaramana see as backing groups targeting civilians. Some stressed that the violence only bolstered their support for Assad, a sentiment commonly expressed in pro-government districts.
"I pray a hundred times a day that America will experience the terror that we are experiencing!" shouted an enraged owner of a women's clothing boutique, situated across the street from the site where a mortar shell, presumably fired by rebels, struck July 25, the same day as the car bombing, killing three passersby. "We are in great pain. We are dying 100 deaths a day in Syria now."
At Alaa's falafel emporium, a neighborhood fixture, workers were clearing a chaotic jumble of broken glass, dangling wires and smashed walls. Upstairs, the Cleopatra photo shop's windows and frames had been blown out.
"Whoever did this committed a blasphemy," said Abu Hassan, a falafel shop employee who was wounded by shrapnel from the blast, obliging him to wear a bandage over his left eye as he assisted in the cleanup.
Owner Afif Zeino, who has been selling falafel at the busy spot for 21 years, insisted he would not be driven away.
"We will renovate, fix everything up, and continue our business," Zeino said as he stood on shards of glass. "Our families and livelihoods are here in Jaramana."
Special correspondent Nabih Bulos contributed to this report.
September 12, 2013
Hostility between Syria's mainstream rebels and Al Qaeda-linked militants grows
By Raja Abdulrahim
BAB AL HAWA, Syria — A group of Free Syrian Army rebels, run out of their hometown in northwestern Syria, hunkered down in an office with blacked-out windows.
Their commander had been killed and beheaded by an Al Qaeda-linked group a month earlier, the rebels said. Now these surviving FSA fighters were hiding here near the Turkish border.
Such mainstream rebel groups, formed to bring down the government of President Bashar Assad, increasingly find themselves in a battle against a different foe.
Walid Shawkan, the new commander of the displaced group, said fighters with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria attacked his men in the town of Dana after a dispute over weapons. The Islamists seized the arms and declared the fighters from the Hamza Lion of God brigade to be apostates.
"They are not coming to fight the regime," Shawkan said. "They are coming to fight us. We're going to fight them first and then the regime."
As the third year of the Syrian conflict drags on, the ambitions of extremist Islamic groups are growing. The presence of those militants has played an important role in the U.S. debate over the Obama administration's plan to launch missile strikes against Syria to punish the government for its suspected use of chemical weapons. Some opponents say it puts the U.S. squarely on the side of groups aligned with Al Qaeda.
When the Islamist fighters emerged last year, many in the Syrian opposition accepted their help while also predicting a post-Assad battle with them because their vision for the country was deeply at odds with that of the mainstream rebels. This year, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria publicly broke with Al Nusra Front, which had been the main Islamist and Al Qaeda-linked group in the country.
Since then, the Islamic State, which has more foreign fighters than other such groups, has grown more confrontational toward some of the rebel militias. Consequently, it seems that the battle with the Islamic State won't wait.
In July, a senior FSA commander, Kamal Hamami, was shot and killed by the Islamic State in what the Supreme Military Council, the nominal head of the FSA, called an assassination. At the time, Col. Qassim Saad Eddine, spokesman for the council, said a member of the Al Qaeda-linked group had called him and threatened to kill all 30 council members.
The Islamic State has since routed three FSA groups from their northern communities — Jarabulus, Dana and, most recently, Raqqah province — part of its practice of establishing itself in areas already controlled by the opposition.
"They have opened a new front line for us; they work for the regime because they have distracted us from our fight against the regime," said Ibrahim Hanano, commander of the Martyrs of Dignity's Armor militia, which had given the Dana group refuge.
The emergence of the Islamist forces has also hurt the mainstream rebels by making the U.S. and other Western powers worry that if they provide military aid it could end up in the hands of terrorists.
Had it not been for the extremists in Syria "cutting off heads," Saad Eddine said, the rebels would have been given weapons long ago.
In making its case for missile strikes, Obama administration officials have argued that the Islamist militants' range and influence are limited.
"The opposition has increasingly become more defined by its moderation, more defined by the breadth of its membership and more defined by its adherence to some ... democratic process," Secretary of State John F. Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week.
In an attempt to ensure Western military support, the Supreme Military Council is forming what it bills as a professional and secular opposition army. Fighting groups are being divided into battalions that are numbered rather than given Islamic names.
Yet even as they seek to distance themselves from the Islamic State, mainstream rebel groups face a complex military landscape: the Islamic State has taken part in some of the biggest victories by the opposition, including the capture of the Mannagh air base near the Turkish border and advances in Latakia province.
Efforts by the FSA leadership to turn rebel groups against the Islamic State — akin to the Awakening movement spearheaded by the U.S. in Iraq — would probably fail in Syria, said Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, a Shillman-Ginsburg fellow at the Middle East Forum and a columnist at Jihadology.net, who tracks the group online.
"It's just so much more fragmented and complicated than what happened in Iraq," Al-Tamimi said. "It would be hard to coordinate a unified Awakening movement against them, especially as long as the regime is around."
Some rebel leaders gladly fight side by side with the Al Qaeda-linked figures.
"Our position is that our only enemy is the regime," Col. Abduljabbar Aqidi, head of the Aleppo Military Council, said recently at his headquarters. He said he thought the differences between the two groups could be resolved through dialogue.
After several rebel groups, including the Islamic State, seized the air base, Aqidi stood in front of a damaged helicopter there. To his left was a commander of the Islamist group, and Aqidi thanked the "immigrants" for helping liberate the base.
The Al Qaeda-linked group, meanwhile, has been clear that its goal is to establish an Islamic state, "not a sectarian, nationalistic or ethnic" one, a group spokesman said in response to written questions.
When Al Nusra Front entered the conflict last year, the mainly Syrian fighting force began dabbling in social services: restoring water and electricity and providing flour to bakeries.
he hearts-and-minds campaign waged by the Islamic State — whose members come from Tunisia, Chechnya, Libya and Saudi Arabia, among other places — is far more rudimentary.
At the intersection of three narrow streets in an Aleppo neighborhood, Islamic State member Abu Waqas Tunisi held up a knife in front of a rapt crowd of children. Behind him hung a mass of black Al Qaeda flags along with colorful balloons and beach balls.
"Where's the cantaloupe?" asked Tunisi. "Whoever finishes the cantaloupe first will get a prize."
Two young boys volunteered for the melon-eating contest and soon their faces were covered with fruit as religious songs played loudly on scratchy speakers.
"Show your prize to the people," Tunisi instructed the winner, who was holding a paddle. "What do you say to the Islamic State?"
"May God protect you," the boy said.
"And what else?"
The boy paused for a few moments, fingering his prize, then said hesitantly, "And ... and God make you victorious."
"The Islamic State is going to start here and you will be part of it," Tunisi said.
A few weeks later, the group held a similar event at a square in Dana, where more than a month earlier protesters had called for their ouster and the town's FSA group was banished.
Though the Islamic State uses religion as the basis of its outreach — in addition to toy drives, it regularly holds Koran memorization contests — the FSA council is trying to move in the other direction, toward a secular army that world powers can support.
On a recent Sunday, Saad Eddine met with more than a dozen Syrian military defectors to record a video statement announcing the formation of three battalions under the council's command.
When he finished, several officers instinctively yelled out, "God is great!"
"No, no, none of that," Saad Eddine said. "Let's start again."
Later he said, "In any army there isn't all this [God is great] or Koranic verses. We don't insert religion into politics and the military."
Months ago, several brigades in Aleppo's western neighborhoods joined together to form a moderate Islamic coalition to counter the extremist groups.
A commander, who didn't want his name published to avoid problems with the Islamic State, said the extremists were more violent. Though other FSA groups had clashed with them, so far his group hadn't, he said.
For now, he said, the two sides were working together.
"I don't like to think about what comes after because it hurts my head," he said, but added, "The people who rose up to oust Bashar have the ability to oust any other Bashars who come after."
October 15, 2013
He is essential to the effort to rid Syria of its chemical arsenal, a process expected to last until mid-2014
By Patrick J. McDonnell
BEIRUT — For much of Syria's civil war, President Bashar Assad has been a man in retreat. Rebels control vast stretches of his country. A little more than a month ago, he faced the prospect of U.S. military strikes that might have finally tipped the military balance.
But the U.S.-Russian deal to eliminate Syria's chemical arms, which headed off a U.S. missile barrage, has changed that. Assad is now an essential partner in a process that will last until at least mid-2014, and could drag on much longer.
In a few short weeks, the push to eliminate Syria's chemical weapons under international supervision has, in the view of many, in effect supplanted the goal of ousting Assad.
On Monday, Syria formally became the 190th nation to sign on to the Chemical Weapons Convention, the international treaty outlawing the use and production of such arms.
Assad's surprise decision to allow the destruction of his chemical arsenal has "made a dent in the interventionist narrative that he's an uncontrollable madman who can't recognize diplomacy if it hit him in the face," said Ramzy Mardini, an analyst based in Amman, Jordan. "That growing reality is favoring Assad, not the opposition."
The turnaround has caused profound consternation among Syrian opposition figures and regional powers such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia that have strongly backed the rebels.
U.S. officials still insist that Assad's departure is an essential element to any peace deal.
Secretary of State John F. Kerry on Monday repeated Washington's long-stated policy that Assad must go as part of any revival of the long-stalled Geneva peace process, which calls for creation of a transitional administration in Syria based on "mutual consent" among parties on the ground. Although the Geneva guidelines do not bar current government officials from participating, Washington and its allies insist that Assad must resign.
"We believe that President Assad has lost the legitimacy necessary to be able to be a cohesive force that could bring people together," Kerry said in London during an appearance with Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations-Arab League special peace envoy for Syria.
Nonetheless, analysts say the last thing U.S. policymakers want now is Assad's hasty exit — especially with badly divided rebel forces increasingly dominated by multinational militant factions, including some linked to Al Qaeda. A steady stream of reports linking Syrian insurgents to executions, kidnappings and sectarian rampages has sullied the rebels' image, alarmed U.S. policymakers and bolstered Assad's support in Syria among his key constituencies, minorities and the urban elite.
A damning Human Rights Watch report last week implicated Syrian rebels in the deaths of scores of civilians during a summer offensive in the western province of Latakia, a stronghold of Assad's Alawite sect. Militants from as far away as Europe, Morocco and Russia are pouring into Syria to join the fight.
Still, Syrian government forces appear to be holding their own and, in some cases, advancing. Assad's authority in government-controlled areas of Syria extends not only to regular troops, but also to tens of thousands of loyalist militiamen who form a kind of parallel national army and wield considerable clout on the ground.
With the help of fighters from the Lebanese Shiite Muslim militant group Hezbollah, pro-Assad forces have managed in recent months to push rebels back from some areas around Damascus, the Syrian capital. They also have retaken the strategic town of Qusair and other territory in Homs province, securing a crucial corridor to the Mediterranean coast, a loyalist bastion.
For the moment, Assad is probably the only figure who can ensure implementation of the United Nations-backed blueprint to destroy Syria's chemical weapons.
Assad "is very useful to the process, and I think that's the reason he is being engaged," said Andrew Tabler, a Washington-based Syria analyst who has long called for more robust U.S. intervention to help oust Assad. "Now, his usefulness will dwindle as the chemical weapons stockpile is destroyed."
The elimination of Syria's chemical stockpiles in the midst of a raging civil war poses an unprecedented challenge requiring "temporary cease-fires" in some areas, according to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the Hague-based group overseeing the process. By some accounts, as many as seven Syrian chemical sites, including the sprawling Safira military complex outside the northern city of Aleppo, may be in areas where rebels are operating.
Though the U.S.-backed opposition has said it would cooperate with the chemical disarmament plan, there have been no such guarantees from powerful, Al Qaeda-linked factions such as Al Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. That raises the possibility that Assad's troops may be called on to clear out rebel forces to ensure inspectors access to chemical facilities in contested areas.
Some fear Assad may try to delay the process beyond mid-2014, when the destruction of Syria's chemical arms is slated to be completed. "Assad has an interest in dragging this out," said Tabler, a senior fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
In recent public comments, as his forces have launched new thrusts in the north and outside Damascus, Assad has projected a defiant and self-assured tone.
The prospect of his ouster by opposition forces seems less and less likely. Even if Washington and its allies bolster arms deliveries to Syrian rebels, Assad retains strong backing and regular weapons shipments and economic aid from Russia and Iran.
The threat of direct U.S. intervention, his longtime fear, has dimmed with the chemical accord. Assad has even broadly hinted that he may run for reelection in national balloting scheduled for next year.
"Where is another leader who would be similarly legitimate?" Assad asked an interviewer for the German magazine Der Spiegel this month.
U.S. allies whose leaders view Assad's ouster as an opportunity to reconfigure the strategic map of the Middle East complain that the sudden focus on eradicating Syria's chemical weapons has overshadowed their larger objective. Kerry's qualified praise last week of the Syrian president for cooperating with the chemical weapons plan stunned many.
"How could we praise someone who has killed more than 110,000 people?" a seemingly incredulous Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said last week, citing the estimated death toll in Syria in 2 1/2 years of fighting. "I do not regard Assad as a politician anymore. He is a terrorist who kills with his state terrorism."
Special correspondent Nabih Bulos contributed to this report.
Winners
Prize Winner in International Reporting in 2014:
Jason Szep and Andrew R.C. Marshall
For their courageous reports on the violent persecution of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority in Myanmar that, in efforts to flee the country, often falls victim to predatory human-trafficking networks.
International Reporting
Finalists
Nominated as finalists in International Reporting in 2014:
Rukmini Callimachi
For her discovery and fearless exploration of internal documents that shattered myths and deepened understanding of the global terrorist network of al-Qaida.
The Jury
The Jury
Ellen Nimmons(Chair )
assistant international editor
Hannah Allam
foreign affairs correspondent
Scott Kraft
deputy managing editor
Lydia Polgreen
deputy international editor
Michael Williams
global enterprise editor
Winners in International Reporting
David Barboza
For his striking exposure of corruption at high levels of the Chinese government, including billions in secret wealth owned by relatives of the prime minister, well documented work published in the face of heavy pressure from the Chinese officials.
Jeffrey Gettleman
For his vivid reports, often at personal peril, on famine and conflict in East Africa, a neglected but increasingly strategic part of the world.
Clifford J. Levy and Ellen Barry
For their dogged reporting that put a human face on the faltering justice system in Russia, remarkably influencing the discussion inside the country.
Anthony Shadid
For his rich, beautifully written series on Iraq as the United States departs and its people and leaders struggle to deal with the legacy of war and to shape the nation's future.
2014 Prize Winners
Donna Tartt
A beautifully written coming-of-age novel with exquisitely drawn characters that follows a grieving boy's entanglement with a small famous painting that has eluded destruction, a book that stimulates the mind and touches the heart.
Annie Baker
A thoughtful drama with well-crafted characters that focuses on three employees of a Massachusetts art-house movie theater, rendering lives rarely seen on the stage.
Alan Taylor
A meticulous and insightful account of why runaway slaves in the colonial era were drawn to the British side as potential liberators.
Megan Marshall
A richly researched book that tells the remarkable story of a 19th century author, journalist, critic and pioneering advocate of women's rights who died in a shipwreck.