A Smuggler and His Son

The smuggler looking back through his rear-view mirror

Hacipaşa, along the Syrian border - Syrian refugee Muhammed and his eldest son, Akeem, have begun a new form of family business: human smuggling. Beginning in 2012, the father and son duo have joined forces to illegally smuggle an average of 70 Syrians per week out of Aleppo and other parts of the country and across the Turkish border to safety. Muhammed and Akeem each cover half the journey, with Akeem working from within Syria to transport people to the Helleh River crossing, and Muhammed smuggling the refugees into Turkey once they make it across the border. Due to the massive influx of Syrian refugees, Turkey is surpassing their allocated resources to aid the newly arriving multitudes. As each refugee camp in Turkey has exceeded its capacity and no longer admits new families, the Turkish military is enforcing stricter border patrols and entrance regulations; a policy that only increases the need for sly smugglers such as Muhammed.

Dawn was beginning to break when I accompanied Muhammed along the Turkish-Syrian border toward the Helleh River in his rumbly, dented, white 1982 Mercedes-Benz, in hopes of documenting the experiences of incoming refugees. Passing through a Turkish military checkpoint along the road, Muhammed recalled his own experience illegally crossing into Turkey three years earlier. Born and raised in Aleppo, just like his father before him, Muhammed, 56, worked as a general handyman for most of his adult life, raising 12 children in the same Aleppo neighborhood where he grew up. When Syria slipped into brutal civil war in 2011, Muhammed and much of his family fled to Turkey along with hundreds of thousands of other Syrian refugees, while a few of his oldest children—those with homes and families of their own—chose to remain in Aleppo.

Driving to the Syrian border

Getting out of Aleppo and other besieged cities is difficult and dangerous, and the physical risks and financial costs of crossing into Turkey are even more extreme. Yet, after finally making the crossing, legally or otherwise, countless Syrians are left stranded just across the Turkish border, stuck in a country with an unfamiliar language, currency, and culture. This reality was clearly visible as we drove through the smuggling border town of Hacipaşa, its streets lined with dozens of newly-arrived Syrian refugees sitting idly on the sidewalks with looks of confusion and desperation, unsure of what steps to take next. Facing the same experience when first arriving in Turkey with his family, it was this dilemma that led Muhammed to his new career as a smuggler. After a year living as a refugee in southeastern Turkey and struggling to get by, Muhammed began looking for more unorthodox job opportunities, and with his personal experience of illegally crossing the border still a fresh memory in his mind, he called his 35-year-old son Akeem and began setting his plans in motion.

That was two years ago, and the savagery of the Syrian civil war has only worsened since then. With over 40 percent of the Syrian population now displaced, millions have fled to neighboring countries. While thousands of Syrians are still stuck inside their war-torn country, unable to afford the cost of smuggling themselves and their families out, many working- or middle-class Syrians are able to pull together the necessary funds—enough that Muhammed and Akeem can earn a steady living.

Approaching a military checkpoint nearing the Syrian border

"Not all Syrian people can afford to become refugees," Muhammed explained to my fixer and I as we neared a small border village, where a second van waited to take us to the crossing point. "It costs them the amount of $40 US dollars for my son to get them out of Aleppo or Idlib. Once they cross the border and I meet them, I will drive them to any outlying border city for another $30-$40, but that doesn't include the bribes they need to pay to secondary smugglers who take them across the No Man's Land between the two countries illegally. That is done by different smugglers who charge by the person and can change their price anytime depending on the situation or their needs. It is very dangerous, but there are always more people."

His last sentence strikes a cold, simple truth: there are always more people. It is almost impossible to truly comprehend the atrocities happening to the Syrian people, the everyday suffering of innocent people stuck in city siege. Internationally, most people are left to rely on bits of information, trickled in from media outlets: footage of combatants destroying one another over a street of rubble and refugees living in dire conditions; one humanitarian crisis after another with a lack of medical care and food, but a surplus of weapons and human suffering. The violence has even escalated to the point where the UN no longer counts the casualties of the Syrian civil war due to the carnage and difficulty of confirming their sources. The Syrian regime indiscriminately blanket bombs entire sections of a city, rogue militias and gangs have free reign to impose their rule over whatever strips of land they can seize, and humanitarian aid is routinely denied by the regime to civilians living in rebel-controlled areas, under threat of torture to the aid workers delivering desperately-needed supplies. It is a crisis beyond description, without moral bounds, and with no solution on the horizon. Instead, we simply stop counting the dead, and Muhammed’s business thrives, because, in the end, there will always be more people.

Vying for Arms

Commander of the Free Syrian Army's 'Shab Unit'

Procuring the weapons:
Aleppo, Syria - The sky is the major front that defines the Syrian Civil War. Civilians keep their eyes locked to the open blue skies, fearfully anticipating the next brutal strike. Opposition forces have no air power and extremely limited access to anti-aircraft technology, leaving the Assad regime with supreme air superiority and the ability to barrel bomb or air strike any city at will. Over the past several months, the Syrian Air Force has exploited this critical advantage to progressively regain territory lost to rebel groups during the past four years of war. For the fighters of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) facing these bombardments, the only possible path to victory is clear: eliminate the Syrian government's air superiority. This is only possible, however, with Western military support and anti-aircraft weaponry, which has only recently been offered, and so far only to certain small sub-factions of the FSA.

Contrary to popular belief, the FSA, the armed opposition structure established by Syrian army defectors in 2011 to lead the fight against Assad’s forces, is not a single standing army with centralized coordination. Rather, the FSA operates through multiple cells of various sizes, each capable of independently carrying out its own military strikes. Each unit has its own commander and hierarchal structure, and each varies in politics, tactics, and ideology. As a result of these distinctions, certain factions of the FSA, such as the “Hazm” movement, have been selected to receive Western weaponry and military support, while many smaller and less organized factions have not.

Driving through the crumbling neighborhoods of Aleppo, Muhammed, a fighter who switched factions to join the Hazm movement, explains: "I left the Islamic Front because the chain of command was beginning to break down. So I switched to Hazm because they are strong and organized. We are part of the FSA but we do not work with other units. If another unit committed a crime, and we were affiliated with them, that crime would stain us too. If one of our soldiers commits a crime, we know who did it, and when. Because of this control, we receive help from other countries."

Aleppo, Syria: Man digging through the rubble of his house after a bombing.

Currying Western Favor:

While all cells fight under the banner of the FSA and struggle for the same goal—the overthrow of Bashar Al-Assad—there is some level of understandable rivalry between the various units, particularly over this issue of Western military support. To date, Western governments have been extremely hesitant about providing major arms to largely unknown rebel groups, for fear of seeing them fall into the hands of radical actors such as Al Qaeda, ISIS, or Hezbollah. The result is that many FSA factions struggle to accomplish military operations or to hold on to their territory due to a lack of funds and equipment, while only a handful, such as Hazm, have been documented using American and European made weaponry such as Stinger missiles as of earlier this year. While no Western governments claim to provide weapons to the FSA, the end result is that these heavy, shoulder mounted, armour-piercing weapons make all the difference in pushing back against Assad’s forces. With Western military support, Hazm is able to intensify  their military operations in Aleppo's neighborhoods as well as in their ongoing battles at Kesaab and Latakya.

"Aleppo can be taken," an anonymous officer from the Shab unit, a smaller FSA faction that has not yet received any Western weaponry, told me. "The revolution is being destroyed by these splinter factions breaking away, but this is the revolution of the Syrian people. All we need are heavy arms such as Stinger missiles to destroy his tanks and to stop the bombings from his helicopters and jets." For smaller and less established units of the FSA, the only way to procure this military hardware is to somehow win foreign support and negotiate a deal with Western governments. But how? For the commanders of the Shab unit, the answer is to raise their international profile by securing the release of Western journalists kidnapped by radical jihadist groups inside Syria and Iraq. Yet paradoxically, in order to secure the journalists' freedom, the leaders of Shab must negotiate and collaborate with radicalised, historically anti-western groups that would raise valid concerns for any government open to providing Shab with military aid."

By invitation, I joined commanders from the FSA's Shab unit who managed to gather other unknown delegates from oppositional factions inside Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq currently waring with the FSA, for a meeting to discuss various options for securing the safe release of a handful of the 20 plus journalists still held in captivity. The journalists being discussed (whose names will be concealed for their safety) were kidnapped by the Islamic group Dias and by ISIS, the jihadist group that has recently become famous for their sweeping victories in northern Iraq. Usually, the factions attending this meeting are bitter rivals, but when dealing with the growing power-house that is ISIS, the enemy of your enemy is a friend. For hours, the discussion continued concerning the options of multi-million dollar ransoms, prisoner swaps, weapons trades, or lastly, a full assault to secure the prisoners’ freedom by force.

Meetings of this style continued several times a week for a full month, yet, in the end, no major agreement could be reached, save for the one consensus that none of the groups working to secure the journalists’ freedom would seek a financial reward. Shab leaders were insistent on this point, believing that not pursuing a monetary reward would allow them to more effectively curry the favor of foreign governments, in the hope of receiving Western military support. Without a financial reward, however, it is unclear how Shab would repay whatever unspoken, background arrangements may have been made with other parties at the meeting, raising serious concerns when arming groups like the Shab unit. Thus, despite their commitment and desperation, the FSA units engaged in the talks came no closer to securing the freedom for any of the kidnapped journalists. At the same time, the search to procure anti-aircraft weaponry continues, and the war in Syria rages on.