The Ex-Jihadi in Plain Sight

Rania Abouzeid, adapted an essay from her book, No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria, for the New York Times' Sunday Review:

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.