In a smoke-filled room in eastern Syria, two brothers talked about the destruction of Raqqa as birdsong mixed with the laughter of children playing outside in the baking heat.
Tucked into a hillside outside the city, the village of Al Sahl, where their family’s simply furnished house is located, escaped the worst of the devastation that reduced 90 per cent of Raqqa to ruins.
Sat on carpets arranged around a stove used to heat the single-room home during the biting cold of winter, the two old men leafed through a well-ordered box of photographs and childhood memories.
What was once a collection of keepsakes has become an unlikely intelligence trove detailing the early life of Ali Moussa Al Shawakh, better known by the nom-de-guerre Abu Luqman, a son of Raqqa who orchestrated the ISIS takeover of the city and meted out brutal justice as the extremist group’s "emir" in the province.
Living in an unscathed corner of Syria, the brothers, Abdulla and Ibrahim Al Shawakh, embody a conflict that has torn families and the country itself apart.
Abdulla is a quiet farmer and a committed Baathist who backs the regime of Bashar Al Assad. He said he was never swayed by the promises of Syria’s revolution when it erupted in mass demonstrations in 2011.
Ibrahim, his louder and more dominating brother, is different. His long, greying beard hints at his deep-rooted Salafist convictions – an austere interpretation of Islam that often found itself at violent odds with the Baathist regimes not only in Syria but elsewhere too.
The strong bond of brotherhood has allowed them to reconcile their opposing world views, and, on the day The National visited Al Sahl, they joked with and teased each other.
But Abdulla’s son, Ali Moussa, had a darker vision that his closest relatives failed to foresee.
This is the story of how one of Raqqa’s own helped to stamp out the nascent civil revolution in his home town and usher in ISIS.
Ali Moussa finds religion
It was while studying law in Aleppo that Ali Moussa began to engage with religion. Academically, he was not especially gifted. His father Abdulla showed a graduation certificate with a final grade of 57 per cent.
But he was pious, polite and searching for a deeper meaning in life, said his uncle Ibrahim.
Faith led uncle and nephew to develop far closer bonds than father and son.
Ibrahim would furnish his nephew with money for expenses and to buy Salafist literature. He put him in contact with clerics in Aleppo.
Soon, Ali Moussa was returning to Raqqa for holidays with his beard long. He turned down cigarettes and insisted on his female relatives wearing the niqab, a black robe that covers much of the face.
“I was the one who introduced him to the Salafi thoughts – they called us the Wahabiyeen,” said Ibrahim.
But Ali Moussa’s interpretation of Salafism soon outgrew the ideas to which his uncle had introduced him.
After his graduation, he was conscripted into the Syrian Army and served in Homs for two years as a lieutenant.
This period of service saw his religious ideas morph into something more radical.
After the US invaded Afghanistan in retaliation for the September 11 attacks, Ali Moussa told his uncle he wanted to join the thousands across the region who travelled to the war to fight alongside the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
The logistics of how to make the journey and join the fight foiled the plan. But only two years later, the US-led invasion of Iraq to topple dictator Saddam Hussein presented a more accessible option.
Ali Moussa spent several years crisscrossing the rugged and remote desert border between Iraq and Syria, funnelling new recruits to fight against coalition forces.
The Syrian regime at least turned a blind eye to the militant ratlines to Iraq.
In 2005, with Iraq’s insurgency in full flow, Ali Moussa travelled to Anbar province where, his uncle said, he made contact with Abu Musab Al Zarqawi – the head of Al Qaeda in Iraq who helped to fuel the bloody sectarian conflict in the country.
The party did not last forever and on a return trip to Aleppo in 2007, Ali Moussa was arrested and thrown into the Saidnaya prison in Damascus.
Though Mr Al Assad’s military intelligence, the mukhabarat, had been happy to watch as extremist networks funnelled people it saw as problematic away from Syria to join insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, it did not anticipate their return. Most of them were dumped in Syria’s jails.
Saidnaya would later become notorious as reports of widespread torture and the execution of more than 30,000 people during the 2011 revolution came to light, but at this time it was simply the regime’s dumping ground for hardliners and extremists.
Ali Moussa’s father remembered the long bus rides to Damascus for monthly visits and said it seemed at the time that his son might never be released.
Release from Saidnaya
While he was behind bars, the demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience in 2011 that became the Arab uprisings spread to Syria.
Anti-government demonstrations emerged in towns and cities over the country, changing Syrian society and the nature of politics in the country.
The regime’s violent purge of the protests turned the revolution into a civil war.
The Assad regime and its international supporters quickly highlighted religious extremism within the ranks of those challenging the Syrian dictatorship.
Under the guise of an amnesty for protesters, the regime turned loose thousands of known extremists.
While the foreign militants who came to join the fighting began to make the headlines, Ali Moussa, born in an impoverished village outside Raqqa, was inking his quill to write a black chapter for his home town.
Nearly five years after he was arrested, Ali Moussa was among 23 religious extremists moved from Saidnaya to the Raqqa central jail in the north-east.
Hussein Al Assaf, the village mukhtar, or representative, remembered receiving a call about the transfer.
“We didn’t understand why he had been moved but Ali definitely felt he was going to be released,” he said.
Then, one morning at the end of October 2011, Mr Al Assaf saw a tent being erected outside Ali Moussa’s family home – an indicator that a celebration was to be held.
He asked what the occasion was, perhaps a birthday he had forgotten, or an unexpected marriage proposal.
“Ali Moussa is getting out,” replied a farmer.
Ali Moussa was released on November 1, and for three days the family received guests from the village and beyond to the tent.
Well-wishers were received with a feast of meat and rice.
“We were happy to have him out but we didn’t fully understand what was going on,” said Mr Al Assaf.
Ali Moussa embraced his wife – he had not seen her in about six years – but he did not hang around for long.
“He stayed for three or four days and then he disappeared,” said Mr Al Assaf.
He said Ali Moussa surfaced about four months later in Tel Abyad, a town on the Turkish border which was soon to become a flashpoint in the Syrian war.
‘A deadly mistake’: the roots of the extremist takeover of Raqqa
In March 2013, Raqqa city became the first provincial capital to fall to Syria's rebels.
The Free Syrian Army surrounded the city with the help of a coalition of extremist groups, among them Jabhat Al Nusra, which would later become Al Qaeda’s Syrian branch, and Ahrar Al Sham, a salafi-leaning group and one of the most powerful fighting against the government.
The euphoric toppling of a statue of former president Hafez Al Assad in the city’s centre was recorded on video as young men chanted "Allahu Akbar" and beat the fallen monument with their shoes.
The civil opposition had been preparing for this moment and attempted to set up local government councils to oversee everything from water and electricity to rubbish collection.
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They hoped to show they were serious when it came to governing a free Syria – and Raqqa would be their first test.
On July 1, 2013, the Raqqa Civil Council was established.
“We were 20 groups and a number of independent activists, politicians and people who worked in the services sector,” said Mohammed Abdulkareem Al Howedy, an activist who is still in Raqqa almost a decade later.
“There were 140 people at that meeting – it is still the only democratic experience I’ve ever had,” he joked.
An uneasy period of coexistence followed, with everyone from hardline groups like Al Qaeda to democratic activists vying for control of the city’s future.
“It was a deadly mistake,” a bitter Mr Al Howedy lamented. “We should have known they would grow and control the whole city”.
Abu Luqman
Activists say Ali Moussa immediately set to work on his dark vision for Syria after his release. His ideas had only hardened in jail and his release from prison into the chaos sweeping the country presented him with the opportunity to put his beliefs into practice.
Now known as Abu Luqman, Ali Moussa capitalised on the period of opposition rule in Raqqa, gathering information on the spectrum of activists and armed groups operating in the city.
He kept his extremism hidden and set about laying the groundwork for a different society than the one being managed by the democratic councils throughout 2013.
“After his release, he started to get in touch with revolutionary activists. No one knew he had a radical and extremist ideology. He knew all the people, and which ideology they followed,” said Mr Al Howedy.
A former Free Syrian Army commander in Raqqa, who asked not to be named, recalled a meeting in 2013 with Ali Moussa and several unknown associates.
“It wasn’t clear who they were, or what they wanted, but they asked a lot of questions – we thought they just wanted to help us,” he said.
But Mr Al Howedy said the purpose of Ali Moussa’s fact-finding missions was now clear.
“He laid the foundations of the Islamic State in the city – with an iron fist,” he said.
By this stage, fighters from Jabhat Al Nusra, and the would-be splitters who would go on to found ISIS, were entrenching themselves in rebel-held areas across Syria.
In Raqqa they had found fertile territory for their extreme ideology.
While the fissure had yet to arrive, Ali Moussa was already busy building a cult of loyalty and a security apparatus that would sustain him through the turmoil of the birth of ISIS.
ISIS recruiter and ‘son of the city’
Ali Moussa used his familial connections to recruit fighters. He approached cousins and friends of his father. The tribal identity opened doors in other villages and communities on Raqqa’s rural fringes – a ripe recruiting ground. His charisma allowed him to effortlessly sell a new vision to the disenfranchised and ignored.
Mr Al Assaf, the village mukhtar, said at least 30 young men from Al Sahl joined Jabhat Al Nusra, the group that Ali Moussa was then aligned with, as a result of his recruitment efforts. He tapped into the tribal networks too, and not merely those of his own Ajeel clan.
Decades of Baathist rule had diluted the influence of the tribes in northern and eastern Syria but the sudden retreat of the state from the country’s eastern provinces in 2013 allowed them to become important power-brokers again, said Sheikh Abdul Latif Al Faraj, a tribal leader in Raqqa, and a close friend of Ali Moussa’s family.
Ali Moussa was well aware of this. Several sheikhs in the Raqqa countryside recalled meetings with him, describing how he would sit with them for hours, empathetic to their grievances but keen to bring them round to his ideas.
After his release from prison, Ali Moussa had initially joined Jabhat Al Nusra, the Syrian Al Qaeda franchise headed by Abu Mohammed Al Jolani – a fellow former Saidnaya inmate – which was then allied with the Islamic State of Iraq, the forerunner of ISIS.
When Al Nusra split from the Islamic State of Iraq in April 2013, it forced the group’s followers to make a decision: stay in the group, or leave and side with Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi.
Ali Moussa did not hesitate. In a cold-blooded display of allegiance to Al Baghdadi, he had Jabhat Al Nusra's emir of Raqqa, Abu Saad al Hadrami, kidnapped and personally executed him on charges of apostasy.
Ali Moussa weaponised his reputation as a Raqqa local from a poor family who had fought against the Americans and then survived Mr Al Assad’s notorious prisons. He had paid dearly for his convictions, however perverse they might be.
He was no armchair revolutionary, nor was he encouraging others to rise up from the safety of a foreign land. This helped him bring 90 per cent of Al Nusra’s fighters in Raqqa with him to bolster ISIS and his recruitment efforts continued.
“He was seen as a hero because the people were neglected by the regime for more than 50 years. He was better than an outsider to run our affairs,” said Abdel Hamid El Issa, an activist who was working in the Raqqa's telecoms department at the time. “Primarily, he was a son of the city.”
Home-grown extremism
Tapping into local and tribal networks, ISIS had become the dominant group in Raqqa by mid-2013, even before its takeover of the city. Its forces continued to grow with the arrival of foreign fighters.
Ali Moussa was acutely aware of the reputation of some of these militants and took action where necessary.
“He prohibited Iraqis from entering this territory at the time when the Iraqi organisations had a bad reputation,” Mr El Issa said.
The so-called caliphate would come later and be open to followers from across the world, but for now Ali Moussa wanted to paint the group as a home-grown Syrian resistance force fighting to overthrow the dictatorship which had suffocated the city for decades.
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“He wanted Raqqa to be a lesson for other cities; he wanted to brag and be able to say ‘look at the changes Raqqa saw when the regime was forced out'," Mr El Issa said.
Ali Moussa’s deep knowledge of the important players and rival groups paid dividends in 2013 and 2014, when ISIS cemented its grip on Raqqa with a campaign of kidnappings, executions and disappearances targeting anyone who might stand in the way of the extremists’ rule over the city.
Dozens of activists, lawyers and politicians who had stood against the regime were killed or disappeared, among them Abdullah Khalil, a former presidential candidate and human rights lawyer who headed the civil council.
“He [Ali Moussa] was behind most of the killing operations against activists that happened in 2013, maybe more than 40,” said Mr Al Howedy.
A stay of execution
Maher Al Ayed is one of the few who slipped through the fingers of Ali Moussa.
An activist attempting to document the crimes against the revolution, he was arrested in February 2014 as part of the ISIS clampdown.
He was locked up in a makeshift cell below Raqqa’s football stadium.
Even now, the walls of the prison cells are covered with the scribbles of those once held there. Some were ISIS fighters under investigation, others were activists.
After several days in isolation, Mr Al Ayed was dragged to a larger room and thrown to the floor in front of a man he vaguely recognised from grainy photos.
“He was as tall as I am,” he said, holding out his arm to mark his own height as he looked around the cell in which the encounter took place.
“He had a black beard with few grey hairs. He wore glasses and he was balding.”
It was Ali Moussa.
Mr Al Ayed expected to be sent for execution but was lectured on Sharia and told to pledge allegiance to the caliph before being thrown back in his cell. He had come face to face with ISIS’s most important man in Raqqa. He believes his release may have been a result of tribal mediation.
Even as he tightened the screws, Ali Moussa was attentive to local political dynamics.
The Wali of Raqqa
Ali Moussa’s nom-de-guerre took on heightened importance when he was made Wali of Raqqa, one of the most senior positions in the ISIS leadership. Yet he never appeared in the group’s propaganda and was rarely seen in the city.
But his presence was felt across Syria, Iraq and beyond as ISIS captured swathes of territory and shocked the world with its brutality.
As a senior ISIS leader, he was responsible for appointing other commanders, dispatching fighters to the front lines in Syria and Iraq and planning the group’s strategy as its territorial gains began to recede.
A member of the ISIS governing council headed by Al Baghdadi, he also had responsibility over Western hostages and is said to have ordered the beheading of two prisoners in 2014. His father denies he had anything to do with the group’s foreign hostages.
Though he kept a low profile in Raqqa, one person did remain close to the new emir – the man who had introduced him to Salafism.
“I was his uncle and his friend at the same time, there was a friendship between us. We were close friends; I don’t think he trusted anyone like he trusted me – even his father,” said Ibrahim.
Ali Moussa would often disappear for days at a time, only to return and tell his uncle he had travelled to Anbar to meet Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi.
In turn, his uncle was feeding back to him reports of his growing unpopularity. Ali Moussa’s ruthless behaviour was turning Raqqa against its own son.
With ISIS now firmly in control of the city, the emir’s cunning gave way to a heavy-handed approach. His application of the group’s vicious interpretation of Sharia was unrelenting.
When his own father became involved in a dispute with an ISIS member, and yelled at him in a fit of rage “you will not be here forever”, Ali Moussa was unmoved and referred his father’s case to his deputy Abu Ali Al Shari, who jailed him for three days.
“There was no 'wasta' when it came to the Sharia,” said Ibrahim, listening to his brother’s story, using an Arabic word for nepotism.
Once he was in control of Raqqa, Ali Moussa began to neglect the tribal networks on which he had previously relied.
When several sheikhs refused to pledge their allegiance to Al Baghdadi, Ali Moussa had them arrested. He scared several others into complying by their family members arrested. But these moves did not sit well.
“We are living in a tribal area,” said Mr Al Assaf. “We have traditions that should be respected.”
Recovery
About a year before the Syrian Democratic Forces – a largely Kurdish militia backed by the US – began its assault on Raqqa in 2017, Ali Moussa disappeared from the city.
His uncle Ibrahim said ISIS had become aware of his growing unpopularity in the city and transferred him to Mosul.
His father and uncle have heard nothing but rumours since.
In one story, Ali Moussa was killed in an air strike in Mosul. In another, he was killed in an air strike on the Syrian side of the border but there was never any confirmation and Abu Luqman has been reported dead before.
“If he were still alive, he would contact me for certain, I’m the only one who understood him,” said Ibrahim.
Today, life is slowly being breathed back into Raqqa.
Shops and cafes are open, construction is visible – though hardly booming.
In a hotel on the outskirts of the city, a singer serenades middle-aged men nursing large measures of Turkish whisky.
The minaret of a new mosque casts its shadow over Al Naim square – where ISIS used to display the severed heads of its victims.
There is a recovery in progress but it cannot be described as miraculous.
Although the statues of the Assads are gone, those whose dreams sparked Raqqa’s revolution are hard to find. Many were killed or kidnapped by ISIS, and others fled for Europe.
More recently, activists and people once affiliated with the city’s Free Syrian Army brigades have described an increasingly hostile environment in SDF-controlled parts of Syria but they insist the revolution is not dead.
“Nobody believes there were ever real people calling for democracy in Raqqa,” said Mr Al Howedy, “but I’m still here.”
