A Stranger in Your Own City by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad

Author:Ghaith Abdul-Ahad [Abdul-Ahad, Ghaith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781529151541
Publisher: Cornerstone
Published: 2023-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

The hills outside al-Shadadi were dotted with oil pumps that resembled giant long-legged birds dipping their beaks into the earth. Most of the wells were not functional after fighters and local tribesmen looted motors, stripped away electrical cable and other machinery; but the few that remained operational – controlled by tribes, FSA battalions or the jihadis – were generating a large revenue, turning the wells into the most lucrative spoils of the civil war. Throughout the day, oil tankers, pickup trucks with large drum barrels stacked in the back, and even a school bus gutted from inside and converted into a tanker drove to these wells along dirt roads that skirted the hills, leaving long trails of black oil sludge behind them.

Al-Nusra’s most valuable asset lay in these hills: a gas refinery run by a young Nusra emir, whose title was shortened from ‘The Emir in Charge of the Gas Refinery’ into the ‘Emir of Gas’. He wore an old dishdasha frayed around the edges and sat on a green mattress on the floor of his office, conspicuously eschewing the desk and its computer and preferring the simplicity of his warrior life.

He was almost skeletally thin, his handsome face framed by long black hair, parted in the middle and wrapped lazily around his ears, giving him the air of a mischievous playboy. When the rebels first captured the refinery, it was run by a joint committee that represented all the battalions in the area, but the emir decided to kick them out because of ‘their petty thefts’.

‘The Free Syrian Army are poor, and they have no funding, so they steal stupid things, anything,’ he said contemptuously of the FSA battalions around him. ‘We don’t need this petty money; we are only taking the big assets and use the revenue to help the people.’

The refinery lay idle; a tentative deal was reached to start pumping to the government refineries in Homs, but that collapsed when other factions objected.

‘Most of the fighters are against pumping to the government, but this is something related to the leadership and it will decide, not the fighters.’

The emir explained to me why the Nusra had become such a powerful economic entity even when most of the world was supporting their FSA rivals. The most significant difference, he said, was organisation. For example, all their captured loot went into Bayt al-Mal, the centralised treasury, which oversaw wealth distribution to the different battlefronts.

Like a shrewd businessman, he said: ‘If your money is scattered around you can’t succeed, but if you centralise your resources, you can do much. We don’t get any of the aid the FSA gets, but we are not rich and powerful, because when we seize cars or weapons, we don’t keep anything with us. It’s all sent to the Bayt al-Mal. As for me,’ he hastened to add, ‘I am as poor as I was before joining the revolution.’

He said he had been a law student when the uprising started, and back then he identified

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