We met in a European city where he didn’t live, a neutral location on a quiet side street far from the crowds of shoppers and sightseers. To passers-by, he looked like a hipster, dressed in rust-colored skinny pants and a gray polo shirt. But he was not. I had known him for years in his native Syria. He was a onetime confidant of Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, then the leader of Al Qaeda in Syria.
Saleh, as I called him, was a former member of the small inner circle of the Nusra Front, a group of men so young that, as Saleh put it, “none of us have any gray in our beards.” He was part of the machinery that helped Al Qaeda’s local affiliate plant its black flags in Syrian rebel territory. He had been since late 2011, just months into a peaceful uprising that became a war so ghastly it killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced half the population of 23 million — a war that is still killing and displacing Syrians.
I had covered the conflict from inside Syria since the first protests in 2011. Saleh had joined the throngs that left his shattered homeland for Europe, escaping a battlefield that was as complicated as it was horrific.
He had defected from the Nusra Front with the leader’s tacit blessing, claiming to have left his old life behind. In the year since he’d fled, he’d added two European languages to his English and Arabic, busying himself, he told me, “with learning something, anything, to quiet the thoughts in my head.” He reflected on Nusra’s mistakes, on his path to militant Islamism, the Jihadi infighting between Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, and a Syria he’d worked to cloak in Islamist black.
“Now I can see the whole chessboard. Before, I was a piece,” he said. “I wasn’t a regular soldier, I was with the command. I saw things,” he added, pausing for a long while. “There are many people we oppressed.”
With distance, he saw that members of the rebel Free Syrian Army weren’t the “kuffar,” or infidels, he had been conditioned to despise, the men Nusra planned to destroy after the fall of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Nusra was just as unscrupulous as the groups he’d self-righteously berated and could be as ruthless as its foes in the Islamic State. It killed Muslims and non-Muslims alike. It stole from civilians and institutions. It had commanders hungry for power and money, driven by ego and fame, men who Saleh said “wanted to be the next Osama bin Laden,” who could kill a friend as easily as drink a sip of water.
The infighting with the Islamic State proved that. That was Saleh’s breaking point: “We were brothers and days later we were killing each other,” he said. “I started wondering, what are people like this made of?”
He was a man who had never been photographed with the Nusra Front, who was careful to never appear in any of the group’s video or audio recordings. He had a fake Syrian ID for entering Turkey and could blend into a cafe in Istanbul as easily as into a Nusra training camp.
He sneaked into a Europe that feared men like him, a Europe that, after absorbing millions of refugees, was shifting right, under pressure to close its doors after terror attacks in France and Belgium in order to keep men like him from slipping in.
Saleh had been an aide to Syria’s Al Qaeda leader. He claimed that he’d discarded his ideology, along with his nom de guerre; that Europe had taught him to live and let live; that he wasn’t a threat
“I have no problem now with all of these people walking in the street,” he said. “Before, when I first became a Salafi jihadi, I had a problem with everyone who wasn’t like me. It was planted in me — why is this woman not in a hijab? Why is this woman in heavy makeup? But I am not a god to hold people accountable. If I consider things wrong, I learned that I should not do them, but others can do as they please. What I’ve seen here in Europe, of the kuffar, as we used to call them, I’ve met people who are so much better than the people I met in jihad. They mind their own business and are respectful of others.”
But did he mean it? Could a man like that really change? Were his old extremist ideas merely dormant, awaiting activation? He spoke with sincerity, but could Saleh really assimilate into a society he’d once despised? Was he a threat to Europe, or is redemption possible, even for a man like him?
He had entered the world of Salafi jihadism in his late teens, exposed to the banned writings of Islamist leaders before he was detained by the Syrian regime, just shy of his 19th birthday. He didn’t even pray regularly, let alone consider himself an Islamist, before he was imprisoned. “I was a kid,” he said, jailed with Qaeda members. The prison, he said, “made me what I became.” A six-year “sleep” (in prisoner parlance) ended when the regime opened his cell door in April 2011, releasing him with no formal charge as part of an amnesty.
With Syria in the throes of revolution, he formally joined his freed cellmates in Al Qaeda. “Ten years of my life like this,” he said. “I haven’t lived a normal day. You know what I do now? I work in a restaurant. I clean tables after customers. I wipe them down. That’s my job and I’m happy doing it. When I wipe a table, I feel normal, like this is what a normal person might do.” It was also one of the few jobs he could get. “What was I going to put on my C.V., that I’d graduated from a sniper training course?”
He had European friends who surprised him with the kindness they showed a Syrian refugee. His former Nusra Front colleagues didn’t know where he was. He avoided Syrians and other Arabs, lest they learn his background. Only his family knew his whereabouts. He had once been an “amni,” a security agent, tasked with finding and surveilling Al Qaeda’s enemies and defectors in Turkey — men like him. He knew what might happen if an amni found him. He didn’t dwell on it, although he had trouble sleeping, sometimes for days.
A European friend introduced him to a psychiatrist, thinking he was traumatized from witnessing war, not knowing he had been a senior member of Al Qaeda. Saleh attended a few sessions and then stopped. “What was the point?” he said. “I was lying to the doctor and to myself. I couldn’t tell him who I really was.” He had killed men in battle but said he never executed anyone. He had watched others do it, though, “many, many times.”
“Humanity died in Syria,” Saleh said. “I was dealing with monsters.” He wondered whether he was right to leave his country. He’d abandoned its children to Assad’s warplanes, he said, or to brainwashing by his former colleagues and the Islamic State, or to drowning in the Mediterranean while trying to flee both.
He still believed in a conservative Islam, in a future Syria that was “not like the Europeans and not like Daesh” — an Arabic acronym for Islamic State — but “something in between.” He was torn and confused. “I can’t speak to anyone except my family. You’ve known me for years now,” he said. “Be honest with me, do you think I made the right decisions?”
Rania Abouzeid is the author of No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria, from which this essay is adapted.