On a scorching afternoon in July, 2013, a taxi driver in southern Turkey pledged to take me from Gaziantep Airport to Kilis, near the Syrian border, for a curiously low fee. I had travelled this route twice before and was wary of favors, but a Syrian friend had vouched for this driver and arranged the pickup. So I followed him through the airport parking lot—past U.N. vehicles, a bus filled with arriving refugees, and bandaged fighters leaning on crutches—to his small yellow Opel, where it became clear why the price had been reduced: I was not the only passenger.
The man seated next to the driver had a long, dark beard, which brushed against his pristine white djellabah at the belly. He wore a traditional Muslim cap and clutched a leather purse in one hand and an iPhone in the other. I climbed in behind the driver and offered a quiet hello, but the passenger, who appeared to be in his thirties, did not glance back or return the greeting. For half an hour, the car hurtled south on the empty highway, past dilapidated homes and dusty, lifeless hills, and no one said a word. As we approached the outskirts of Kilis, I noticed that the passenger was reading an article from the Guardian on his iPhone. I leaned forward and asked where he was from. “London area,” he replied. He was “helping the brothers” in Syria as a field doctor in Azaz, a small town just across the border, which, at the time, harbored a fearsome ISIS presence. He asked where I would be staying, and I told him that I’d be in Kilis for the summer. Hearing this, the driver asked to confirm that my destination was the Hotel Istanbul, in the center of town. I wished he had not done so; after speaking to the passenger, I had resolved to disembark before reaching the address.
The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham was not yet a household name in the United States, but journalists and aid workers operating in the area feared the group more than any other and were leery of those associated with it. While encounters with other jihadi brigades were sometimes cordial, ISIS fighters were methodically transforming northern Syria into a black hole. Formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq, the group announced its presence in Syria in April, 2013. By June it held at least eleven Western hostages, two of whom had been kidnapped out of a van I had once ridden in. That summer, ISIS terrorized Syrian villagers and murdered a child for blasphemy in front of his mother. Other rebel groups appeared reluctant or afraid to confront them. Taking on both ISIS and the Syrian government seemed an impossible task, rebels said as they stirred sugar cubes into tiny cups of tea at the Kilis cafés. Besides, ISIS occasionally helped break stalemates in battles against the regime.
The man in the front seat implored me to accompany him into Syria, promising I’d be in good hands. I declined, but asked for his name and phone number and proposed that we arrange a daytime interview in a public spot in Kilis. If he proved willing to meet on my terms, I wanted to understand what had drawn him to Syria. He deflected the invitation; it seemed our mistrust was mutual. He did, however, browse through his phone contacts and give me the number of his friend Malik, whom he said could be our intermediary. I asked again for his name. He replied inaudibly, so I repeated the question, and again, I didn’t quite catch it, but it sounded like “Afshar.” We had reached the bustling center of Kilis and pulled up in front of the Hotel Istanbul. I stepped into the hotel’s shadow. Afshar said goodbye, and the car continued down the border road.
The holy month of Ramadan was under way, so food and drink and sex and cigarettes could only be enjoyed after dark. Across the border, Ramadan meant an escalation in the intensity of battles, though fighters were tired, starved, and dehydrated under the blistering summer sun. On most days, the sounds of explosions in northern Syria would reverberate throughout Kilis’s dusty maze of streets. Rebels shared photographs of comrades’ corpses, claiming that they had reached paradise, and citing, as evidence, the smiles that had been pressed into their lifeless faces. They said the holy month was the best time to die as a martyr.
Back then, foreign jihadis streamed into Syria without discretion or consequence. They stretched off the twenty-hour journey from Istanbul at the bus stations in Kilis and Gaziantep. They logged their names in the guestbooks of border hotels, like the Paris Hotel, in Kilis, an apparent favorite among Chechen fighters, and the Hotel Istanbul, which was frequented by a peculiar mix of journalists, aid workers, war tourists, and jihadis. A growing number of hospitals and rehabilitation clinics hosted bedraggled foreign fighters, and sometimes jihadis crossed into Kilis just to take breaks from the war.
Roughly once a week, for the first three weeks, I called Malik and asked to speak with Afshar. He was never immediately available, but he always called me back a few minutes or a few hours later, sometimes from Malik’s number, sometimes from a blocked one. Our conversations were brief and predictable: I would invite him to break his Ramadan fast at a public restaurant in Kilis, and he would counter with the proposal of a home-cooked meal in Syria. I didn’t need to worry about transport, he said; he and his friends would pick me up in Kilis and drive me to their apartment. Finally, each of us would decline the other’s invitation and wish the other well, as if there were nothing strange about this ritual.
One night in late July, I was eating dinner with a Syrian activist, sitting on the floor of an industrial space he had rented to house his family, when the lights cut out. He and I stepped out into the street, a dusty block across from a park that had become an unofficial holding place for nearly three thousand refugees. From our vantage point, it appeared the entire town had lost power. All the nearby street lamps had been extinguished, along with the floodlights that usually illuminated the sand-colored minaret and dome of a nearby mosque. Mobile phones still worked, so the activist called a rebel contact on the other side of the border. The rebel claimed that a large supply of Ukrainian weapons was being driven from Turkey to Syria, to Ahrar al-Sham, an Islamist brigade with murky connections to Al Qaeda. The lights came back on roughly fifteen minutes later, and soon afterward I spotted a Syrian jet bombing very close to the border.
The Turkish government insists that such a transport was impossible—that it wasn’t supplying arms to rebel groups in Syria—but multiple reports indicate otherwise. In one case, trucks escorted by Turkey’s intelligence service were found to be transporting a thousand mortars and eighty thousand rounds of ammunition to the Syrian border, according to reports from the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet. The munitions bore Cyrillic markings and, according to a driver’s deposition, were picked up from a foreign airplane in Ankara. The government filed treason charges against the security forces who conducted the search, and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was then prime minister, said they had no right to stop trucks belonging to the intelligence service. A local governor, acting on Erdoğan’s orders, authorized the trucks to continue to the border. When Cumhuriyet published a video taken during the search, a government prosecutor initiated a criminal investigation into the paper’s editor. Erdoğan personally accused him of “attempting to overthrow the government” of Turkey.
In Kilis, ISIS had spotters eying Westerners for abduction. A number of suspected fighters contacted Syrian fixers, who guide journalists through checkpoints and embattled areas, and offered financial reward to any who would help arrange a kidnapping.
On August 1st, the American journalist Steven Sotloff checked into the Hotel Istanbul. We hadn’t met before, but knew of each other and arranged to have drinks. We began with beer cans in his room, then ambled down an alley to Kilis’s only bar, a gaudy joint run by a heavy-set, heavily mustached Turk who rarely saw more than three or four patrons a night but bombarded them with music so loud that we needed to shout our conversation. Sotloff asked me what I knew of Yosef Abobaker, a popular local fixer. As far as I understood, Abobaker’s integrity was intact, but because of a security scare in the preceding days, odds were high that ISIS was monitoring him. Sotloff and I discussed how a fixer’s operational security is contingent on all his prior clients; I told Sotloff he should hire a different fixer. A few days later, when an Italian journalist told me that Abobaker’s wife was searching for him, I wrote to Sotloff asking whether he had any information. I was shocked to learn, the following day, that he and Abobaker had been kidnapped together. They hadn’t lasted twenty minutes south of the border.
It was August 6th, and beneath my note to Sotloff about Abobaker’s disappearance was a worrying notification: the message had been “seen.” A few messages prior, Sotloff and I had traded room numbers. Now I was afraid of sleeping in the Hotel Istanbul. I switched floors, and for the next few days I wandered the town occupied with paranoid assessments: two luxury S.U.V.s with blacked-out windows and Syrian plates looked out of place in the alley outside my shabby hotel; a young man with long, light-brown hair brushed past me on the sidewalk, and I was sure I recognized him from an ISIS video featuring French recruits. One morning, I remembered Afshar from the taxi, and wondered if he might have information about Sotloff’s disappearance. He was in Azaz, near to where several abductions had recently taken place. I called Malik and, as usual, when Afshar called back, I asked him to meet me at the Muzzo Café, a bustling, open-air venue in the center of Kilis. For the first time, he agreed.
Ramadan was over, and with it vanished the daytime prohibitions. Afshar proposed to come at six o’clock, which left at least two hours of sunlight. Jane, a journalist who had recently returned to Kilis from a perilous reporting trip to Aleppo, said she would accompany me. (Her real name is not being used owing to ongoing concerns about her security.) She informed her security contacts of our plans and told them we would check in with a safety update by seven. In case the meeting went poorly, we packed our bags. Then, a little before six, we walked down a back-alley route to Muzzo’s northern gate, and, seeing that Afshar hadn’t arrived, stepped inside.
The outdoor tables at Muzzo Café extend about half a block in every direction. We sat opposite one another, about fifty feet from Kilis’s main road, and mindlessly pushed checkers around a backgammon board while scanning the area for Afshar. He didn’t show. After half an hour, I called Malik’s phone, but it went straight to voice mail. Close to seven, we walked back to the hotel. Then my phone rang. It was Afshar.
In the first few seconds, I only heard the hum of the car, and muffled Arabic. But then he took to the receiver, first to apologize for the delay—“Not all my friends have European passports!” he laughed—and then to ask whether I was “still at the Hotel Istanbul,” so they could pick me up and bring me to dinner at his friend’s place. After considerable hedging, and a lie about my current location, I said that if Afshar came to Muzzo Café, I would still meet him for tea. He promised to arrive in five minutes.
While Jane and I were deliberating whether to return to the café, Afshar called again. He said he was parked in a van outside a cell-phone shop, half a block from the café, and instructed me to get inside. I asked him to leave the vehicle and get a table at Muzzo, and said I would join him shortly. “No,” he said, “Come to the van.” I said I would not, so he began berating me, saying I was rude for refusing his hospitality, and reminding me of the effort uninvited comrades had made to accompany him to this side of the border. His accusations grew increasingly hostile, and soon, he started shouting at me, repeatedly, “Get in the van!” I hung up the phone. Jane flew to Istanbul that night, and I spent the next few days in a hotel room forty miles north, in Gaziantep, questioning my own perception of what had just transpired.
For two years, I replayed these events in my mind. Sometimes, when I slept, I had a recurring nightmare in which I woke up in Raqqa and needed to escape from ISIS territory without being detected. I also wondered about Afshar. Living in this vortex of confusion and smuggling and violence and fear, had I misread his intentions?
Earlier this month, with some difficulty, I found a Facebook account that appears to belong to the man from the taxi. Online, he is openly critical of ISIS, and makes impassioned pleas for donations to support Syrian refugees. Photographs show him handing sweaters to Syrian children but also sitting among fighters in a tent, dressed as I remembered him, with a Kalashnikov at his feet. I reached out to him several times, online and through one of his associates in an aid project, but he did not respond. When I told his associate I felt terrible for possibly mistaking a humanitarian for an ISIS operative, he said, “No, no, no, it’s fine. It’s not the first time people have taken him for that.”
Back near the border, in September, 2013, an ISIS sniper murdered a well-known activist in Azaz, marking the beginning of sustained clashes between ISIS and other rebel groups. In the following weeks, ISIS tried to wrest control over the border crossing from the moderate Northern Storm Brigade. Still, a few miles north, in Turkey, ISIS fighters continued to take holidays from the war. In November, the NPR correspondent Deborah Amos travelled to Kilis and interviewed a Syrian ISIS member who had once bought me a kebab. When I met him, several months earlier, he was contemplating the jihadi life style but leaning more toward a degree in engineering. His ambitions had since changed. “I love ISIS now,” he told Amos. When Amos left town, she wrote to me that Kilis had become “Jihadistan.”
Even when Turkey sealed most official border gates, ISIS continued to slip through established smuggling routes with ease. Last October, Turkish police reportedly seized three hundred and thirty pounds of C-4 explosives, twenty-nine suicide vests, and a large number of grenades, Kalashnikovs, and ammunition from a warehouse in Gaziantep. Soon afterward, the F.B.I. warned correspondents that ISIS had identified reporters as “desirable targets” for “retribution attacks.” Other reporters in southeast Turkey shared fears online that they were being followed, and sometimes photographed, by possible ISIS informants.
On July 20th, a twenty-year-old with ties to ISIS detonated his suicide vest outside a cultural center in Suruç, a Turkish border town east of Kilis. The explosion killed thirty-two people. Within days, Turkey announced that it would allow the U.S. military to use Incirlik Air Base, near the border, to conduct strikes against ISIS. For the first time, Turkish jets flew over Kilis and killed ISIS fighters on the Syrian side. Then Turkey also started bombing the P.K.K., a Kurdish militant group fighting against ISIS, agitating a decades-long struggle between Turkey and the Kurds. Later that month, Turkish police arrested more than a thousand suspected “terrorists,” but it later emerged that the vast majority were Kurdish militants, not ISIS fighters. Metin Gurcan, a retired major in the Turkish Army now working as a security analyst, told me that, in the ensuing month, Turkey refrained from bombing ISIS again, while the number of strikes against Kurdish fighters surged into the hundreds.
ISIS has been entrenched in southern Turkey for so long that some residents fear a real Turkish crackdown could inspire retaliatory attacks. A few weeks ago, a computer technician named Mahmoud told me during a video call that the streets of Kilis are emptier than usual, even though, owing to the refugee crisis, the town has doubled in population since the Syrian war began. He’s one of those refugees, and has a pregnant wife and a young child born in Turkey, and thirteen other relatives living in his home. In the event of an attack by ISIS, Mahmoud fears most that Turkish civilians would take out their anger on Syrians like him. Since hearing the first Turkish jets fly overhead, he and a number of friends have been contemplating illegal migration routes into Europe.
Others take comfort in an even more cynical assessment of Turkey’s murky game. A Syrian activist, also speaking via a video call last month, told me that ISIS would not dare attack. “Not in Kilis,” he said, a wry smile spreading across his face. “Because the hospitals are full of ISIS fighters.”
