In the longform essay Theo Padnos recounts his time as a hostage under Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, at the time known as Jabhat al-Nusra. And with them in power, he still recalls the ways many members and fighters thought.
>Maybe the Christians in Aleppo really believe in a new era of calm? Certainly, they hope for one. Yet over every scene in which members of a minority religion in Syria greet the conquerors, there hovers the feeling of the crocodile who smiles at the canary. The canaries in Syria tend to read the lay of the land well. They know that the crocodile cannot always contain himself. As soon as the minorities gather the necessary cash, and as soon as they have somewhere to go—which is to say, tomorrow, perhaps, but also, possibly, never—they will fly away.
>
>To its enemies, the conquering army hasn’t been so nice. Government soldiers have been made to kneel in the dirt as they plead for their lives. The rebels amble around, chat among themselves, then spray the surrendering soldiers with gunfire. Kurds are being dragged from their pickups, then carried away (because they are thought to have cooperated with the regime), and Shia families are being tied up in their living rooms (presumably for similar reasons). Anyone who has encountered the rebel soldiers when they are in this frame of mind will have the script these scenes follow engraved on his heart. The rebels’ first priority is to establish, preferably by means of the detainees’ own words, on camera, that the human beings they’ve arrested aren’t really humans. “Kneel!” the soldiers scream at their captives in some of the recent videos. “Howl like a dog!” “Owee,” the men on the ground reply, “owee, owee.”
And regarding the possibility of a caliphate, this was a conversation he had with a captor.
>My skepticism never failed to make the guards frown. They would furrow their brows. Eventually, one of them would deliver his verdict on my doubts. Yes, of course the world’s Muslims would flock to our caliphate. “Millions are here now and more are coming every day,” a cordial but unyielding guard told me one afternoon, as we were chatting through the food hatch.
>“If a mom cannot afford to buy an egg, sooner or later, her family will run away,” I replied.
>“No, they will not run,” the guard insisted.
>“But why would anyone stay?”
>A worried look passed over the guard’s brow. He lost himself in thought for a moment, squinted at a distant window. “They will stay because they are Muslims?” he guessed.
>Such was the Jabhat al-Nusra logic. Around and around it went. In those days, it felt unlikely that I would ever escape from my prison. Somehow, I felt it more unlikely that they would escape from theirs.
And the future?
>Towards the end of my time with Jabhat al-Nusra, I began to feel as though the commanders were so in love with their armaments, so determined to blow up their enemies, and so reconciled to the enemy’s retaliation that they were preparing a perpetual bloodbath for Syria. To be sure, they told themselves that they were fighting because they wished to see rivers of prayer-goers in white robes streaming into the nation’s mosques—but every day they woke up with murder on the brain. Why? Couldn’t they make their dream come true through persuasion? Over time, I must have put my “why must you kill and torture?” question in a thousand different ways to hundreds of Jabhat al-Nusra men. Eventually, I concluded: they killed because there was no one around to stop them.
>Now they have an entire nation at their feet.
PauLBern_ on
Nice article that provides a more pessimistic perspective on HTS to temper the expectations some people are having on here.
2 Comments
In the longform essay Theo Padnos recounts his time as a hostage under Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, at the time known as Jabhat al-Nusra. And with them in power, he still recalls the ways many members and fighters thought.
>Maybe the Christians in Aleppo really believe in a new era of calm? Certainly, they hope for one. Yet over every scene in which members of a minority religion in Syria greet the conquerors, there hovers the feeling of the crocodile who smiles at the canary. The canaries in Syria tend to read the lay of the land well. They know that the crocodile cannot always contain himself. As soon as the minorities gather the necessary cash, and as soon as they have somewhere to go—which is to say, tomorrow, perhaps, but also, possibly, never—they will fly away.
>
>To its enemies, the conquering army hasn’t been so nice. Government soldiers have been made to kneel in the dirt as they plead for their lives. The rebels amble around, chat among themselves, then spray the surrendering soldiers with gunfire. Kurds are being dragged from their pickups, then carried away (because they are thought to have cooperated with the regime), and Shia families are being tied up in their living rooms (presumably for similar reasons). Anyone who has encountered the rebel soldiers when they are in this frame of mind will have the script these scenes follow engraved on his heart. The rebels’ first priority is to establish, preferably by means of the detainees’ own words, on camera, that the human beings they’ve arrested aren’t really humans. “Kneel!” the soldiers scream at their captives in some of the recent videos. “Howl like a dog!” “Owee,” the men on the ground reply, “owee, owee.”
And regarding the possibility of a caliphate, this was a conversation he had with a captor.
>My skepticism never failed to make the guards frown. They would furrow their brows. Eventually, one of them would deliver his verdict on my doubts. Yes, of course the world’s Muslims would flock to our caliphate. “Millions are here now and more are coming every day,” a cordial but unyielding guard told me one afternoon, as we were chatting through the food hatch.
>“If a mom cannot afford to buy an egg, sooner or later, her family will run away,” I replied.
>“No, they will not run,” the guard insisted.
>“But why would anyone stay?”
>A worried look passed over the guard’s brow. He lost himself in thought for a moment, squinted at a distant window. “They will stay because they are Muslims?” he guessed.
>Such was the Jabhat al-Nusra logic. Around and around it went. In those days, it felt unlikely that I would ever escape from my prison. Somehow, I felt it more unlikely that they would escape from theirs.
And the future?
>Towards the end of my time with Jabhat al-Nusra, I began to feel as though the commanders were so in love with their armaments, so determined to blow up their enemies, and so reconciled to the enemy’s retaliation that they were preparing a perpetual bloodbath for Syria. To be sure, they told themselves that they were fighting because they wished to see rivers of prayer-goers in white robes streaming into the nation’s mosques—but every day they woke up with murder on the brain. Why? Couldn’t they make their dream come true through persuasion? Over time, I must have put my “why must you kill and torture?” question in a thousand different ways to hundreds of Jabhat al-Nusra men. Eventually, I concluded: they killed because there was no one around to stop them.
>Now they have an entire nation at their feet.
Nice article that provides a more pessimistic perspective on HTS to temper the expectations some people are having on here.
I guess we will see how it plays out.