Confessions of a Mastermind: Inside Abu Muslim’s World
A Reporter’s Journey into the Hidden Life of Syria’s Most Wanted Bomber
I have met many jihadis and fighting men but rarerly masterminds. I found him, quite by chance, in the guesthouse where I was staying in Idlib province in 2015. I have only met two people like that, one was a senior al-Qaeda figure, who I didn’t even want to shake hands with in case some drone decided to release its weaponry and obliterate me and the other was Abu Muslim.
Abu Muslim, that is what he called himself, was different precisely because he was so ordinary— an everyman. The Levantine Arab you saw standing next to you when you caught a servis or greeted you in the cafe. You’d pay him little regard unless he asked you for directions. The only distinguishing feature was his generous beard and hair that gave clues to his religious affiliation, otherwise he wore a T-shirt, tracksuit bottoms, sliders, a sun-bleached cap and a pair of glasses perched on his nose. Your paths would probably never cross. He could have been an agricultural worker from Homs or a tailor in Cairo, but it was the glasses I suppose, that gave him that engineering mien. He looked like he had a technical background too. I saw him riding pillion criss-crossing the town going from one place to another always on the move meeting important men. That’s all he seemed to do all day.
And though he was never the emir of the guesthouse I stayed in, there seemed to be an unspoken consensus that he was indeed its undisputed emir. His suggestions seemed to be carried out. His men too didn’t have that typical characteristic Jihadi-look, none of those things were displayed on his closest followers. Two of them were beardless with open faces, they wore jeans, T-shirts had their handguns stashed discretely in the back or just slung lazily on the coat hooks when they weren’t outside. They played with the cats, talked about such and such but generally they were as obscure as you could possibly think. If they sat in a minivan going through a checkpoint, the guard would probably let them pass thinking they were local barbers or worked in the market. I don’t know if that was the reason they sported that look but they certainly embodied it. They were inquisitive, friendly and often asked me what the world outside looked like.
Whenever Abu Muslim came in to the guesthouse I saw how they got up, not because he was an Emir, but because he was their older brother and they just made sure that he was okay. And he did the same. When he saw signs of tiredness in me and in the men, Abu Muslim reached for the lemons growing in the garden, grabbed some ice in the fridge squeezed the lemons, crushed them and added sugar. He made us a drink reminiscent of a mojito. Whilst I knew something of the other men, he seemed very elusive. I only caught his story from snatched snippets of conversations at the end of the day when I was putting my equipment away.
He had kids tucked away somewhere safe. He moved unhindered or seamlessly through the Levant as if borders weren’t even an issue, as if he operated on multiple passports bought from a hustler in Istanbul. When the guest house had a visitor or two, these brothers sat in a circle exchanging stories that only fighting men shared, but ultimately it was him they had come to visit.
I got an idea of his importance when a visitor, a young fellow with a short beard, came in, shook hands and joined his two companions in the verandah waiting for him. He was like all of Abu Muslim’s men, Palestinian. The three men were soon joined by a Maldivian fighter, the visitor asked about one of his countrymen he had fought alongside a long time back. The Maldivian Jihadi informed him that he had been martyred. The visitor smiled, sighed and said he was brave in a short statement that served as a eulogy. Silence. Death had intangibly brought them closer. The other two men recalled some other events and it became apparent that each man were seasoned fighters. I was told much later that the visitor had been close to Abu Muhammed al-Jolani perceived as some sort of legendary figure by the men, and I guessed that perhaps the Palestinian had some business with Abu Muslim, and he did.
On one of the days I was working I realised that my GoPro camera was missing. There was a suspicious voice within that convinced me that maybe one of the men I was sharing the room with had stolen it. GoPros are expensive and moreover, very useful for filming combat footage for propaganda films. Of course I didn’t express those sentiments openly but I did ask if anyone had seen the camera. Abu Muslim just said it was impossible that it could be taken. It was as if he guaranteed it. He insisted that I take my backpack apart, that it would be there, somewhere in my bag. He was absolutely certain that the GoPro was there. He believed in the integrity of his men. He was right, late in the evening when I did unpack everything I found the camera exactly where it was. I felt ashamed of thinking so badly of my hosts.
In the evening Abu Muslim served us some Kebse a levantine rice biryani type dish. He brought it out from the dark kitchen and put the large round dish on the verandah where all of us sat down together to eat. I could only liken him to a doting mother, not a father. I heard the creaking sound of the iron gate open and one of his Palestinians brought over two chickens that had been steam cooked so that their flesh fell off the bones. Abu Muslim invited us to eat but felt that I was too shy with the food, he chucked in bits of chicken to my side of the large steel dish as all the men sat round eating the food chatting. It was crude but exactly how I would have expected him to behave. After the meal they prepared some tea and I saw Abu Muslim relaxing and that’s when I asked him as to what his story was.
Surprisingly Abu Muslim was not shy in telling me that he was a master bomber - a master mind. Of course I couldn’t confirm his story, but according to Reuters, in March 2012, Damascus experienced two car bombs that killed twenty-seven and injured a hundred. The cars had targeted the headquarters of the Syrian Air Force intelligence services and the Criminal Police Head quarters. Syria had fifteen such spy agencies each competing with each other to make them supremely effective and brutal. They had been responsible for killings on an industrial scale. Abu Muslim had succeeded in destroying them both. The Syrian regime held al-Qaeda affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra responsible for the actions but it was Abu Muslim and his boys that did it.
“For three years I was the most wanted man in Syria”, he told me satisfied as if it was a badge of honour.
I didn’t know how to feel about the bombings. On one hand revulsion twenty-seven people had been killed and a hundred people had been injured. They could have been officers or they could have been innocent bystanders, all of them irrespective of their sectarian affiliations, would be leaving behind some loved ones. On the other hand, I had spent a day inside the very intelligence headquarters that he had blown up, Syrians said that those who go in never came out and they considered my return a miracle. But I am Swedish and so the rules are very different for me. Nevertheless, they had hounded me for six months and changed me into a different person, due to their constant surveillance, harassment and spying in Damascus. I can live in a police state but I also know when a man hasn’t lived in one when he belittles the freedoms we have in London. In Fara’ Filistine they had presented me with a thick file asking me where I had been on such and such place, what my post-graduate research was all about and so on. I saw intelligence officers masquerading as Salafis complete in their kufi and thobe, and I heard the screams and shouts down the corridor whilst I was served tea and cigarettes having genteel conversations with my interrogator. Everyone knew that the Assad regime was a real police state worthy of an Arthur Koestler novel. Some of my friends had disappeared during my stay in Damascus.
Whilst doing research for Peter Kosminsky’s TV Series about ISIS, The State (2016) I met a woman who had spent several decades in Tadmor prison in Palmyra. She only emerged when ISIS had taken the town. She claimed that she gave birth to her child in its dark dungeons underground. That child did not see the sunshine for seven years, and whilst she hated the Islamic State, she hated the Assad regime more. Only later when I returned to Seydnaya prison after Assad had fallen, did I understand why that women hated the Assad regime more than ISIS.
To return, Abu Muslim told me that the whole project had been a partial success. He had planned to launch various simulated attacks in the Golan and Lebanon to provoke an Israeli response and attempt to start a regional war. When the Syrian state would fail to respond to Israeli aggression it would show the Muslim world what Syria really was: a sham and the people would rise up and overthrow it. I didn’t know what to think of Abu Muslim, was he a demented megalomaniac or was there something of the 20th century revolutionary in him?
Abu Muslim was a son of history and geopolitics. He hadn’t learnt his bomb making skills from al-Qaeda but from his older brothers who were Salafi-Jihadis fighting the Israelis. He had been fighting Israelis in his mother’s milk, he didn’t know anything else. Had he been born earlier maybe he would be learning his trade with the leftists and the Abu Nidals of this world but it so happened that his older brothers were Salafi-Jihadists. And as long as there was conflict in the Middle East the Abu Nidals and Abu Muslims of this world would never go away.
When the Syrian uprisings broke out in 2011, Abu Muslim went to Syria like Castro’s Cubans did to Angola, and offered his services. There seemed to be cross-pollination of sorts between his aims and al-Qaeda, and maybe he had become al-Qaeda or perhaps parts of al-Qaeda had become a little like him. I couldn’t quite figure out where exactly that convergence had occurred, but at the same time what exactly was he and what did he represent?
Here was a man whose rage against the Israelis could be understood by all, but he was from the Western perspective at least, on the wrong side of the fight, acceptable only if he renounced political violence against the Israelis. But for Muslims reading this piece, Abu Muslim is not a wholly unsympathetic character, he has some sort of constituency if you will, especially in the Middle East. And so he presents himself as a conundrum for Muslims, was he, Abu Muslim, an expression of modern Jihad? The future of asymmetric warfare? Or was he none of those things? An aberration? The Martial tradition with in Islam would always exist but was Abu Muslim an expression of just that? Or was he doing something that many of us would do if we were put in those circumstances?
Had Abu Muslim been a young al-Qaeda type figure who posted his zealotry on Instagram, he would be less of a question. But in those following days when Islamic State released their latest video, The Flames of War. The whole town went crazy trying to buy enough data to be able to download it and watch it. It was like a movie release or some Fortnite update. One of the men in the guest-house obtained the gigabytes and now all the men sat around the laptop watching the film. It was a surreal experience. Whilst the young jihadis sat round memorising its nasheeds and played the film over and over again like some demented psychos watching it with an immature glee, Abu Muslim watched it like a political scientist. After the film, I asked Abu Muslim what he thought of the Islamic State. He said that they had an admirable project, that only they had a vision to build a state. That, to his mind, was a good thing. He believed that Muslims needed a state to take them out of their humiliated position. Muslims needed to determine their own destinies, all of that had echoes of anti-colonial rhetoric not jihad.
“What will you do if they start fighting other Muslims?” I asked.
“Then I will put my guns down and stop fighting. I didn’t come here to kill my fellow Muslims.”
Yet again here was the Abu Muslim conundrum: he was a crypto-Islamic State supporter, not affiliated to them, not bent on global Jihad, not bent on fighting other fellow Muslims and yet the man justified the bombing of two intelligence head quarters knowing full well that there would be civilian casualties with Muslims amongst them.
So who then is Abu Muslim? A crypto-Islamic State supporter? 20th-century revolutionary revival? Or simply a man made by decades of violence and geopolitics? And perhaps more importantly now that Damascus has fallen, what will he do now? Will he go to Sudan, Lebanon or Sudan or will he hang up the sword?
Just adding a quick note to say that I will be speaking on a panel at the Frontline Club on June 19th. The event kicks off at 7:00 PM. Would love to see you there! Come and say hi! Link is here for tickets.
For those reading this as a forward, my name is Tam Hussein an award winning investigative journalist with a particular focus on conflict. The Blood Rep is my newsletter that covers security, jihadism, militancy and criminal networks. Do read my books To The Mountains, The Travels of Ibn Fudayl and The Darkness Inside.