The Day I Came Face To Face With Islamic State
Updated: 7:53am UK, Tuesday 16 September 2014
By Stuart Ramsay, Chief Correspondent
I was told to wait on the side of a road outside a mosque in the Syrian city of Aleppo. An Emir speaking in the mosque would see me after prayers.
As hundreds of worshippers streamed through the open doors, a young man with long, black hair emerged surrounded by the most thuggish bunch of gunmen I had ever come across in Syria, and that takes some doing.
They fired up matt black cars, jeeps and trucks with anti-aircraft guns welded to the floor. He stopped briefly and shook my hand while my trusted translator introduced me.
He never took his eyes off me as he was asked if we could film in his area. He nodded and told us to follow them.
His convoy screamed down the road past their headquarters and crossed two blocks into the territory of another gang. The trucks split into sections and they surrounded a building.
Then they started firing. Hundreds if not thousands of rounds smashing through doors and windows, brick work pulverised into dust, walls collapsing. If there was anyone inside they died. It was brutal. I had just met ISIS.
It was in the early months of 2013 and ISIS was growing stronger by the week. I would regularly come across them or other groups who would soon join them, over the next few months.
It soon became clear to me and my translators and guides that the usual dangers of travelling through Syria that I had been dealing with since the winter of 2011 had got a lot worse.
Stories of violent roaming checkpoints, abductions, killings and the imposition of strict Sharia law in previously relaxed secular areas began to grow.
We heard of local people, aid workers and journalists, some of them my friends, being taken. But we had good relations with the fledgling ISIS leadership and by keeping a very low profile and with a network of drivers who knew every road we managed to avoid the checkpoints and disappear into the teeming streets of Aleppo.
In a school room converted into a court another Emir, Abu Al Homam, ruled on local disputes. Handing out judgements with a ruthless uncompromising efficiency.
He told me they did not execute people although he insisted he could. At that stage he said cutting people's hands off was enough to instil order over Aleppo's growing problem of crime.
But as I asked about a beheading we had been told of, one of my team saw the Emir's adviser shaking his head indicating that he should not admit to ordering the death penalty. Later locals told me it was common.
Abu Al Homam was not strictly speaking ISIS at that point. But he talked of the creation of a caliphate in Syria and Iraq and warned Western governments not to interfere in the business of Muslims.
All sounds pretty familiar now, beheadings and caliphates and the like.
With remarkable speed ISIS grew. From Al Raqqha to the east of Aleppo, with access to oil fields and out of the reach of the Syrian government forces, they stabilised, launched their takeover of much of northern Iraq and changed their name to Islamic State.
While some of the myriad jihadist groups in Syria are fighting IS they have become the pre-eminent power. Their ruthlessness and total disregard for reasonable norms have surprised everyone.
A senior intelligence officer in Iraq explained the difference between IS and even al Qaeda's most extreme members.
"With AQ I could rationally argue that what they did in beheading a person was against the Koran. It might take days, but they would listen and often they would accept it and agree it was wrong," he told me.
"IS are totally different. They do not care. They are bloodthirsty and pure evil. They need to be destroyed as an organisation and then killed," he added.
For people like me who have worked so hard reporting the uprising in Syria against the regime of Bashar al Assad, this is all very depressing. Whatever anyone says, the uprising was real. It was not a jihadi-inspired takeover. But in many ways it is now.
Travelling was always dangerous, but with IS spies in areas they don't control and desperate people prepared to hand over foreigners to IS for cash it is probably too dangerous to go there right now.
Last year I set out for Al Raqqah. A long, dangerous trip with multiple car swaps. Finally we reached a house and were told to wait for people in the city to fetch us.
They never arrived, but after a day some other rebels did and offered to take us in. We thought long and hard. To go would break all my own safety rules, but I was tempted. Had they driven the road? Was it okay?
After hours of talk they admitted they had not been to the city in four days. I declined their invitation and they waved to us as they headed off.
An hour down the road they drove into a checkpoint. All four were killed on the side of the road. These are the days of IS.
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