Syria’s conflict is drawing a motley crew of adventure-seekers and
adrenaline with murky motivations—and little experience with surviving
in war zones.
When
Tyler Smith visited northern Syria this January, he found himself in a
dance-off with Syrian rebels at a training area near al-Bab. “I tried to
show them how to do the worm,” the 20-year-old American chuckles. “They
taught me how to disassemble and reassemble an AK-47.”
Two young Syrian refugees pose with toy guns in Kilis, Turkey, a town within sight of the Syrian border. (Ben Taub)
The
trip was Smith’s first-ever venture to the Middle East, a five-day
jaunt to a war-ravaged village in rebel territory north of Aleppo with
his two friends, Joe Alencar and Karar Mousa. The guys all attended
different colleges, so they timed the trip to align with a break between
semesters.
“Most
people on their holiday go out partying, but we decided to do something
a little different for once,” says Smith. They had “no contacts or
anything like that” in southern Turkey or the northern part of Syria
controlled by opposition forces. Nonetheless, they flew to Istanbul,
hopped on a bus, and made their way to Kilis, a small, dusty town barely on the Turkish side of the Syrian border, the last safe stop on the road to Aleppo.
Smith
is pale and gangly, sporting a flop of dirty blond hair and a
strikingly deep voice. He grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and loves
his dog Eddie, who climbs on Smith’s lap and showers him in licks.
Freshly
out of his teens, Smith’s bent towards idealism and revolution drew him
to follow the sweeping changes of the so-called Arab Spring. He watched
horrific video footage of the Syrian war online, and his life began to
feel increasingly incongruous.
In
late 2012, his friend Mousa—who now lives in Chicago, but who was born
in Iraq and lived in Syria for five years—lost a friend to the war in
al-Zabadani, a village near the Syrian capital of Damascus. The conflict
was now personal. Smith felt compelled to action.
“I
wanted to help out in any way I could,” he says, especially in refugee
camps and hospitals. Though he lacked medical training, Smith decided to
go to Syria himself, without contacting any of the numerous NGOs that
operate official and makeshift refugee camps on both sides of the
border.
He
floated the idea with Alencar, a 24-year-old Brazilian who grew up in
Miami and describes himself as “militant.” For Alencar, who “wanted to
experience what it would be like in a war,” the notion was appealing,
and they agreed to head to Syria. Their objectives were vague, and they
had no concrete plans on how to achieve them.
Mousa
decided to tag along, for reasons he wouldn’t disclose. “Seventy
percent of my whole purpose of being in Syria—even Tyler and Joe
themselves know nothing about this,” he told me. “It’s really personal.”
In one photo, Smith is on his knees, hands in the air, while a rebel
points a Kalashnikov at his head. The caption reads “I figured this
would be a good postcard to send home.”
When
the trio got on the bus heading southeast from Istanbul, they began
asking random Syrians for help crossing the border into the war zone.
When this elicited suspicion and accusations of espionage, they decided
instead to seek out war correspondents at the border for advice.
Predictably
enough, the three young men spotted a few journalists nursing beers at
Kilis’s only bar, where the mustachioed proprietor sometimes raises
prices if he thinks a patron might be drunk.
Journalists
who cover war grow quickly accustomed to the strange assembly of
characters who show up in border towns looking for a battle. In the past
six months alone, Kilis has housed a French woman armed with boxes of
antidepressants to hand out to refugees; a Japanese man who went to
Aleppo several times a week just to do a bit of shooting; an Italian
woman whose fixer claims she went searching for alien DNA on the front
lines; numerous foreign jihadists; and amateur photographers whose
blunders have created extremely dangerous circumstances for locals on
the ground.
After
a brief exchange to decipher why Smith, Alencar, and Mousa wanted to go
to Syria, the journalists told them to go home. “Tyler’s heart was in
the right place, but he didn’t know what he was doing,” recalls one of
the journalists. “And he really seemed to be under Joe’s influence.”
“I
wanted to prove to myself that I can handle this with my own bravado,”
said Alencar, “that I can throw myself into the ring and survive.”
Though
the three young men recognized that the journos “had been to multiple
conflicts,” they “kind of put them to the side” and decided they’d go in
anyway, help or no help. “We didn’t come thousands of miles to have
some people at the last minute tell us not to do it,” says Smith.
The
following day, they encountered a Syrian “fixer” living in Kilis, who
said he could make arrangements for them to cross the border, as he had
done for many journalists before. “I asked why they wanted to go inside,
you know, it’s crazy,” the fixer recollects over a cigarette. “They
told me they want to be like Matthew Van Dyke.”
The name Matthew Van Dyke
often triggers eye-rolls among journalists covering recent conflicts in
the Middle East. Though he no longer identifies himself as a reporter,
Van Dyke entered Libya in 2011 as a freelancer, but quickly took up arms
and fought alongside Libyan rebels in the revolution. The next year he
fought with the Free Syrian Army in Aleppo, while simultaneously making a
short documentary on the conflict.
Van
Dyke became something of a spectacle, garnering praise from idolizing
fans—adulation that he evidently treasures enough to painstakingly
aggregate and post on his website in the form of over 700 endorsement
tweets and comments along the lines of “u r a true hero.” But Van Dyke
has also been the target of blistering criticism from those who see him
as less freedom fighter and more war tourist.
An explosion in northern Syria this August, as seen from a hotel in Kilis, Turkey. (Ben Taub)
As
it turns out, Alencar was a big fan of Van Dyke’s, and also wanted to
fight on the front lines of Aleppo for “altruistic reasons.” They even
had a brief correspondence over email, in which Van Dyke cautioned “What
you are planning to do is a very bad idea and is not what the rebels
need at this time… The three of you are going to look like spies for
sure… You guys are just walking into a disaster if you go there now.”
Alencar
interpreted this as envy or condescension, asserting that “Either [Van
Dyke] didn’t want other Westerners stealing his fame” or he “thought we
were naïve adventure-seekers with no idea what we were getting ourselves
into.” At any rate, the three friends had already made up their minds.
Though
Smith insists that the extent of their humanitarian efforts was limited
by being “on a dollar and a dime for everything,” they paid the fixer
$1000 to bring them into Syria for five days under the supervision of a
man who called himself General Abu Hassan. Contrary to his claims and
the fixer’s charismatic assertions, Abu Hassan is not in fact a general
in the Free Syrian Army, but a driver with a dubious record of
punctuality with journalists. The back seats in his banged-up white
Mercedes are bloodstained from transporting wounded soldiers to field
hospitals away from the frontlines.
Smith,
Alencar, and Mousa wanted to go to Aleppo, but instead General Abu
Hassan dropped them off at a Free Syrian Army training facility near
al-Bab, far from the fighting. The supervising rebel brigade, Liwa
al-Tawhid, gave them a tour of the town, showing them bombed-out
hospitals and schools, and introducing them to civilians.
A
life-long Catholic, Alencar converted to Islam on his second day in
Syria. “What better place to do it?” he says with a laugh. He’s now been
a practicing Muslim for ten months. “A lot of people convert, but not
actually in the struggle.”
But
Alencar’s biggest struggle ended up being with the rebels who were, in
the words of his Kilis-based fixer, “babysitting him.” He found al-Bab
too safe, too boring. All he really wanted to do —all he had paid to
do—was go shooting on the frontlines of battle-torn Aleppo. But that
never happened because the supervising FSA brigade swiftly took the guns
away and told them they couldn’t go.
Alencar
had handled guns a few times before, and Mousa had fired occasional
celebratory shots at weddings (as is customary in much of the Middle
East), but when the rebels handed Smith a Kalashnikov for a few practice
shots, his inexperience outed the group.
“Tyler
was shitting his pants when he first got the gun,” chuckles
Alencar. “He couldn’t even cock it. He was kind of trembling … and then
this 10-year-old kid just snatched it from his hands and chk-chk!” No more guns for the three of them, much to Alencar’s chagrin.
Not
that the rebels ever intended to let them fight, as the whole trip was
arranged by the fixer as an expensive tour. Save for a bit of target
practice, they only got to hold guns when posing for pictures with
opposition forces, which Smith and Alencar uploaded to Facebook. In one
photo, Smith is on his knees, hands in the air, while a rebel points a
Kalashnikov at his head. The caption reads “I figured this would be a
good postcard to send home.”
Before
long, the three claim, they had had a brush with Jabhat al-Nusra, a
jihadist group with connections to al-Qaeda, which has reportedly kidnapped Westerners in northern Syria.
Alencar
says the Nusra fighters responded well to his recent conversion to
Islam, but were “messing with [Tyler] a little bit to see if he
flinches.” One fighter allegedly told Smith that Osama bin Laden was his
father. Smith believed him, prompting raucous laughter from the
Islamists. The guys say another one grilled Smith on whether he wanted
to “go to paradise,” to which Smith says he responded “Yeah… but not
now.”
Having
proved themselves sufficiently entertaining to the Nusra fighters,
Smith claims the trio earned an invitation to tea. He says about half
of the Islamists were wearing explosive suicide vests, but overall he
did not feel threatened. Smith says the Islamists left him with a
parting gift of the black flag that marks territory under jihadist
control in Syria, which he keeps in his closet at his parents’ house
near Chicago.
Around
this time, the three young men again asked about going to the
frontlines, and again they were belittled by the supervising brigade. No
matter, says Smith, “I had fun. [The rebels] were singing and dancing a
lot.” He enjoyed their more traditional dance moves, but also tried to
show them some moves he’d learned in Chicago, and let the children play
war video games on his computer.
General
Abu Hassan reappeared in his old white Mercedes on day five to drive
them back to Turkey. They say he tried to extort more money from them on
the way out of Syria, but Mousa engaged him angrily in Arabic. Within
an hour they arrived safely in Turkey, Smith and Alencar crossing
legally while Mousa slipped through illegally, since he only had a
single-entry visa for Turkey.
Tyler Smith kneeling while a Syrian rebel holds a Kalashnikov to his
head. Smith uploaded it to Facebook with the caption. "I figured this
would be a good postcard to send home." (Ben Taub)
Was
their trip a failure? Smith says it was because they didn’t end up
helping anybody, but then recalls that he led a successful post-trip
“public relations campaign” convincing his family and neighbors that the
rebels were actually “pretty cool.” Yet undoing all his previous
assertions about idealism and revolution, he admits that they picked the
Free Syrian Army because “the rebels will take us to war and the regime
won’t.” Nine months after the trip, Smith released a short video
documentary on Youtube with his footage from Syria.
“I
hate to say it, but it [was] almost like war tourism,” Alencar
concedes. Having the guns taken away castrated his entire objective. He
wanted to “get involved in the fight,” he stresses, “out of humanitarian
concern for the Syrians.”
Mousa
was disappointed that they never made it through the 180 miles of
violently disputed territory separating Aleppo and Damascus, as he hoped
to visit his friends back in al-Zabadani, as well as his father’s
grave. Today, he is sick of Syria talk, and asserts that all warring
sides are guilty of perpetuating the violence. But for him, the trip
was still worthwhile because while in Syria they learned the secret of
“how the revolution was born.”
“Honestly
what we discovered is, like, the opposite of what they’re telling us,”
Mousa says. In “the real story,” that “the media isn’t showing,” he says
young men in the southern city of Dara’a posted anti-Assad graffiti in
early 2011 only to be arrested and tortured, prompting protests à la
Egypt and Libya, which invited brutal crackdown and thereby sparked a
nationwide revolt.
Yes, that is the real story, but no, it is not hidden. Hundreds of prominent articles in top publications
covered the Dara’a protests, and Wikipedia’s page on the Syrian Civil
War mentions them as well. News organizations ran profiles of the Dara’a
boys who started the war with a paint can.
Smith,
Alencar and Mousa went to see what Syria was like in war time, and
returned home unscathed. But not everyone is so fortunate. Many
foreigners crossed the border this summer without professional reasons
for doing so—some for war-tourism, others to fight jihad.
Among
others, an elderly Italian woman cried her way to the frontlines hoping
to retrieve the body of her son, who had gone to Syria, joined an
al-Qaeda linked group called the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, and
died for jihad. According to her fixer, she converted to Islam in the
presence of the Islamic State, while her son’s body rotted, unfetchable,
in an area surrounded by at least three government snipers. And a
recent spike in kidnappings of foreigners, orchestrated by jihadist
groups and criminal gangs, has made it clear that this war is no place
for curious bystanders.
Rebel-held
territory in northern Syria has grown untenable for professional
journalists and aid workers as well. The Committee to Protect
Journalists reports that at least 18 journalists are currently missing
in Syria, but the actual figure is likely higher because kidnapping
cases are often kept under media blackout at the request of the families
involved. American freelancers Austin Tice and James Foley were
abducted last August and November respectively, and are still missing.
French journalists Didier Francois and Edouard Elias were kidnapped
from their fixer’s car by armed gunmen in June on the road to Aleppo.
Polish photographer Marcin Suder disappeared from the Idlib Media Center
in July, but escaped his captors a few days ago and is now recovering at home.
This August I shared beers with a journalist in Kilis who was abducted
on the road to Aleppo a few days later, and is still being held. Sky
News Arabia lost contact
with a three-man reporting team in Aleppo last week, and Mohammad
Saeed, a journalist working for the Saudi-owned news network Al-Arabiya,
was executed by a hooded gunman
with a silenced pistol this Tuesday. At least 50professional and
citizen journalistshave been killed since the start of the war in 2011.
Back
in Kilis, the Syrian fixer who arranged the tour of al-Bab for Smith,
Alencar, and Mousa still laughs about it today. “I get people like that
coming to me for help all the time,” he says. “Kilis is a zoo. But now I
tell them tourism season is over.”
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Ben Taub is a journalist and philosophy student at Princeton University, and a member of the Frontline Freelance Register.
He spent seven weeks in Kilis this summer doing research for a book on
unusual people and happenings on the fringe of war. Prior work has
appeared in The Guardian, CNN, and Vice UK.
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.
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