“I thought you were my friend,” British journalist Anthony Loyd said to the Syrian rebel commander who had kidnapped him and photographer Jack Hill. “No friends,” Hakim Anza replied, pulling his pistol and shooting Anthony twice in the ankle just to have the satisfaction of crippling him. A story of flawless treachery, as told by Loyd: Creí que eras mi amigo, le dijo el periodista británico Anthony Loyd al comandante rebelde sirio que los había secuestrado a él y al fotógrafo Jack Hill. nada de amigos, respondió Hakim Anza, sacando su pistola y disparándole a Anthony dos veces en el tobillo por la mera satisfacción de inhabilitarlo. Una historia de traición pura y dura, contada por Loyd: The Times. 17 May 2014. Anthony Loyd. A few hours before he shot me, Hakim Anza sat on a mattress next to me, staring into space. He had been awake all night and when I asked why he could not sleep, he made a twirling motion beside his temple. “The war. Many things,” he said. At his feet a silver automatic pistol lay on the floor beside a cup of cold coffee and a piled ash tray. It was 6.30am and the first rays of the morning sun caught the slow swirl of cigarette smoke that clouded the room at chest level. I had known Hakim for two years. In his early thirties, he had been an accountant who was among the first to rebel against President Assad’s regime, driving the police from the area of Tal Rifat, his home town in northern Syria. By the summer of 2012 Hakim was a mid-level commander with Liwa Tawhid, a rebel brigade that later morphed with other local rebel units to become part of the Islamic Front. Since our first meeting with him, the photographer Jack Hill and I had stayed with Hakim on several occasions: I had seen him cry over the bodies of his dead fighters, exalt over the lives of his three young children, and I had slept and eaten on the same floors with him in Aleppo’s urban frontlines. So I considered Hakim a friend. I knew he had a ruthless streak and that many of his fighters had the semi-feral aura of men imbued too long in violence. But I liked him, and part of the reason that I visited him on Tuesday evening, staying overnight as a guest in his home before setting off for Turkey the following morning, was to congratulate him on the recent birth of his daughter. That silver automatic was no stranger to me either. Hakim never went anywhere without it, and slept with it under his pillow. It was in Hakim’s hands a few hours later, a few hours after Jack and I had bid him farewell. He watched me receive a savage beating at the hands of his men. Bleeding and bound, I could do nothing but endure it. Then, with calculated intent, Hakim leant forward and with that same silver pistol he shot me twice in the left ankle. Hakim and men like him, small-time gangsters elevated to power by civil war, have smeared much of the Syrian revolution’s legitimacy. Their criminality has so clouded the outside world’s perception of the war that most people in the West now regard the conflict as a struggle between two competing and equal evils: the regime and the rebels. Syria’s third dimension — the silent and innocent civilian majority who have found themselves torn apart between two sets of slathering jaws — is too often ignored. The plan that Hakim hatched was an example of flawless treachery. He embraced Jack and me as we said our goodbyes to him in Tal Rifat on Wednesday morning and headed north toward Azaz and the Turkish border. In the car with us were Hamza, our friend and prized fixer, and Avo, a handy young rebel who acted as our close protection. In the vehicle in front three of Hakim’s men drove as escort. We were on his turf and we trusted him. The sky was cloudless blue and I was already thinking of a hot shower in a Turkish hotel . Then a dark blue BMW G8 four-wheel drive vehicle appeared in front of us. A camouflaged arm appeared from the window and waved us down. Certain it was an abduction attempt, I told Hamza to accelerate, but our car was no match for the pursuer’s power. So we pulled in. Four armed men leapt from the BMW, pushing Hakim’s men aside and bundling the four of us into their boot with a succession of hefty blows and kicks. They put a blanket over our heads and sped away. We were taken to an abandoned agricultural building near Azaz, where every item was taken from our pockets, along with our luggage. The eager snatching of our watches and wallets seemed to suggest a criminal group rather than Islamic extremists, but this was little consolation. Two French journalists, Didier François and Edouard Elias, were seized in the same area by unidentified gunmen last year, and they had ended up in the hands of the ultra-fundamentalist jihadi group Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (Isis). Blindfolded and plasticuffed, within an hour we were bundled into another vehicle and driven into a lock-up garage in Tal Rifat. I was in the back seat beside Avo. Jack and Hamza were in the boot. It was then that our abductors made a key mistake. They left the boot open an inch to allow Jack and Hamza to breathe and they left only one guard to watch over us. There was no way I could remove my plasticuffs, nor could I properly hear the whispered discussion between Hamza and Jack in the boot. Unbeknown to me, both men had freed their hands. Hamza suddenly jackknifed upwards and kicked the boot open, springing out to tackle the guard, whose identity confirmed our worst fears: it was Alaa, one of Hakim’s gang who had served us breakfast that morning. In the space of a few seconds, as I sat trapped and bound in the car, Jack and Hamza fought with the man using anything that lay to hand, and left him beaten on the ground. It was a violent start to a savage hour. Avo and Hamza burst through the side of the lock-up doors and sprinted up the street, yelling at dumbfounded bystanders that Hakim was holding western hostages. To make good his getaway Hamza jumped on a moped. Jack ran straight into Tofiq, one of Hakim’s henchmen, and the two men began to fight in the street. Hakim appeared from a doorway and laid into Jack too, as Jack, fighting desperately, screamed at him in a mixture of rage and surprise: “You are my f***ing friend!” I had climbed the lock-up stairs and was making my escape across the roofs, my hands still bound. This went well, until the roofs ran out. For a time I squeezed flat in a narrow slash of shadow against a water tank, planning to wait until darkness fell. But people in the street had seen my rooftop dash and were pointing out my position to gunmen below. I scrambled down a ladder and, as women fled a courtyard below, I ran into a private home, clamped a kitchen knife between my teeth and attempted to saw through the cuffs securing my wrists. I had not got very far when two Kalashnikov bullets smacked into the wall beside me. Hakim’s men burst in and dragged me outside, where they started beating me around the head with rifle butts. I was covered in blood and lying on the ground when Hakim walked up. He was white with rage. His double cross had failed, and now he had to contend with a questioning crowd. “I thought you were my friend,” I told him. “No friends,” he replied, pulling his pistol and shooting me twice in the ankle just to have the satisfaction of crippling me. But his chance was over. There was no way, before so many witnesses, of taking us hostage again. Hamza and Avo were already gone, spreading word of what had happened and rousing help. Jack was beaten up and taken to a police cell where he was stripped, before being rescued by some Islamic Front fighters and taken to a safe house. I was dragged outside, still bound, and beaten further with rifles. Just for the hell of it Hakim’s men wheeled up the man who had been felled by Jack and Hamza for him to have a go too. After punching and kicking me for what seemed like eternity, his pièce de résistance was to pick up a rock and smash it across my head. After that they either had to kill me or take me to a local clinic. Fortune was fast leaving them, and our special risk consultant, Russ Finn, had already come across the border with Islamic Front rebels to search for us. Hakim’s continued claims that we were CIA spies or Isis volunteers did not gain much traction with the locals, so they took me to a clinic. Doctors looked horrified at what was happening. They saw me, covered in blood, have every item of clothing cut from my body so that my hands could be kept lashed together. Soon an Islamic Front commander arrived. He looked at me and looked at Hakim’s men. “Get out,” he ordered them. They left. That was four days ago. I do not know if anything ever happened to Hakim as the result of his actions. I doubt it. He sent me a threatening, half-crazed message on Skype yesterday, repeating allegations that I was a spy and alleging that a head torch that Jack had given him was an eavesdropping device. He warned that if this story was ever published he would respond by printing contrived documents that would endanger us. He may have beaten us and hurt us, but his greatest crime was to rob from his own people. Our entire documentation of a week’s work in Aleppo — notebooks, cameras, video — was stolen by his men. The voices of decent, innocent Syrians struggling for life amid abysmal conditions were stolen by Hakim in his bid for personal profit, making him guilty of a crime far worse than abduction with violence.
Posted on: Sun, 18 May 2014 05:32:03 +0000
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