“I’ve never been in a bleaker, darker setting; it’s a godless place. Whenever I go in I feel like, ‘Just let me get out alive.’” Stephanie Freid who covers the war in Syria for the Chinese CCTV network

At least 30 journalists have disappeared covering the war in Syria. Their fate is one of the conflict’s most terrifying mysteries.

ANTAKYA, TURKEY—In the ancient southeastern Turkish city of Antakya, about 30 kilometres from the border with Syria, a plump Syrian merchant who calls himself Abu Nabil can be found most evenings drinking tea in the Bellur, a pleasant open-air cafe.

Abu Nabil is the kind of mysterious middleman who germinates spontaneously in war zones. His specialty, or so he says, is arranging the release of journalists and activists kidnapped by the regime of President Bashar Assad in Damascus.

When I met Abu Nabil, in the first days of October 2013, he told me he was negotiating for the freedom of James Foley, an American freelance journalist who had disappeared the year before. I said I had heard that Foley was held by rebels, not by the regime. Abu Nabil shot me a masterful look.

“The company” — Kroll Risk and Compliance Solutions, the private security firm working the case — “doesn’t know anything; the government doesn’t know anything; nobody knows anything,” he said, through an interpreter. “James Foley will come to his family in 15 days.”

It didn’t happen; whatever hole Foley has been deposited in, he is there still. Abu Nabil’s tale, like so many of the narratives emerging from a vicious civil war now well into its third year, was a compound of outright lies, exaggerations and, quite possibly, truth.

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From deaths to disappearances

The fate of journalists kidnapped in Syria is a terrifying mystery. At least 30 journalists, as well as a number of humanitarian workers, are languishing in captivity. In only a few cases do their colleagues or employers know where they are or who is determining their fate. Most of their captors have made no effort to communicate. It is as if these unlucky men and women have simply disappeared.

The early days of the war saw a number of tragic deaths of journalists, including the Sunday Times of London’s Marie Colvin and freelance photographer Remi Ochlik, killed by regime shelling during the bombardment of Homs.

And then things took an even nastier turn. On Aug. 13, 2012, Austin Tice, a former U.S. Marine, law student and sometime journalist, was nabbed, apparently by the regime. Nothing has been heard from him since October 2012. Two months later, NBC reporter Richard Engel and his team were kidnapped by what Engel described as the pro-regime militia known as shabiha. They escaped after five days when their captors drove into a rebel checkpoint. Those were just early mile markers on the road to anarchy. Today, rampant kidnapping has become the norm.

Covering wars is, of course, a dangerous job; that’s one of the things many war correspondents like about it. But Syria is dangerous in a way that is less thrilling than sickening.

“I’ve never been in a bleaker, darker setting; it’s a godless place,” says Stephanie Freid, who covers the war for the Chinese CCTV network. “Whenever I go in I feel like, ‘Just let me get out alive.’”

While some major news organizations continue to work inside Syria, many of the world’s most experienced war correspondents stopped crossing into Syria in September 2013. It’s not death they’re afraid of.

“I can take anything but kidnapping,” says Newsweek’s Janine di Giovanni.

Thus at a moment when Syria’s destiny hangs in the balance, and states opposed to Assad’s regime debate how, if at all, to support the rebels, it has become almost impossible to know what is actually happening inside the country.

Though YouTube videos and citizen journalism of various bias and veracity litter the Internet, the average engaged person knows less and less about the real balance of forces, both between the regime and its opponents, and among the rebels themselves.

The Assad regime has arrested journalists and probably targeted others like Colvin for death. That is what pitiless regimes do in the midst of wars. What makes Syria unique is the growing role of foreign jihadi forces among the rebels. Since the summer, the Al Qaeda affiliate known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) has spread like a contagion across the “liberated” region of northern Syria, from Idlib in the west to Raqqa in the east.

Journalists who travel there are thus all too likely to come in direct contact with Al Qaeda, which rarely happened even in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Al Qaeda has made clear that it views Western journalists as infidels and worse — CIA agents. They seize them not in order to get something in exchange, as criminal gangs and even “moderate” rebels brigades do. They seize them as agents of the enemy. The only mystery is why ISIS doesn’t kill them.

Abdul’s story

A Syrian photojournalist whom I will refer to as Abdul moved back to Damascus from the Gulf just as the popular revolt was getting underway.

In March 2011, he was seized by regime elements, tortured and then released. He moved to a pro-opposition suburb and began to organize peaceful protests. In June of that year, he started one of the first Syrian opposition Facebook pages. He began to take pictures; when the regime launched a major assault on the eastern suburb of Ghouta, Abdul was there with his camera. In February 2013, Abdul was finally forced to flee to the Turkish border town of Reyhanli, where we met, but he continued to travel back and forth to Syria.

In August, Abdul went to cover the fighting that had levelled much of Aleppo, including its fabled market. It was a trip he had taken many times, always on his own. This time, he was stopped at a checkpoint by ISIS and taken away.

“For the first four days,” says Abdul, “I was forced to remain standing. After that they hung me from the ceiling. They gave me electric shocks. They said I must be a spy. Otherwise, why I would have all that camera equipment?”

Reasoning with them was pointless. After 33 days, Abdul says, “they were finished with me.” He was thrown into a car and dumped in the countryside. Several months after I talked to Abdul, I learned he had gone missing and was believed to have been abducted once again.

Few Syrian journalists who have been kidnapped since August 2013 have been released.

Firas Tamim, a Syrian who returned to the country from Holland in 2011 and now delivers emergency supplies from Reyhanli to his native Latakia province, told me he had tried to negotiate the release of a 20-year-old Syrian journalist who had been seized by ISIS. Tamim felt implicated because he had given the young man his Metallica T-shirt, which the jihadists had interpreted as an emblem of devil worship.

With icy nonchalance, the jihadist leader told him: “Oh, they killed him. But he’ll be seeing Allah soon in paradise, because before we killed him, we taught him how to pray and be a good Muslim.” Tamim has not yet been able to bring himself to tell the boy’s mother, who believes her son is still imprisoned.

A near miss

Anthony Loyd, a correspondent for the Sunday Times and the author of two volumes of eloquent, tumultuous memoirs, may be the greatest war correspondent of his generation. If anyone knows what he’s doing out there, it is Loyd.

In the middle of September, at a time when many of his colleagues had concluded that Syria was a no-go zone, Loyd and his photographer, Jack Hill, crossed into the country near Reyhanli.

Loyd had crossed into Syria at least 12 times during the past few years; he knew the drill. He went in “heavy”: His car had tinted windows and was accompanied by an escort car with four gunmen from a Free Syrian Army (FSA) brigade, later joined by another car with four more fighters. But Syria had changed since his last trip. Everywhere, the FSA was losing out to ISIS. In Atmeh, Loyd’s caravan was stopped at an ISIS checkpoint. A fighter came over to the car and demanded that the passengers roll down the window. They did so; then all hell broke loose.

“They were incensed,” recalls Loyd. “One of them wanted to shoot us.” Loyd and Hill, heeding a basic security protocol, stayed in the car. One attempt on Loyd’s part to intercede drove his captors into a paroxysm of fury.

“It was like an existential play,” says Loyd. “Our fate is being discussed without any input from us at all. There’s a hot sun beating down. We sat in the car staring at the dashboard. Every once in a while, our interpreter came over to say, ‘They want to take you away.’”

In Loyd’s experience in war zones, danger was announced by the thundering boom of shells and rockets. Now he and Hill sat in heat-stunned silence. Loyd thought of pulling out the map of Chechnya he had thoughtfully brought along in case he ran into Chechen jihadis; but he realized that nothing could bridge the gulf between himself and his would-be jailers. An hour, a hideously distended hour, passed. Loyd felt sure he was going to be either taken or murdered. And then a local Syrian interceded; Loyd cannot be more specific without jeopardizing his saviour.

A few days later, a post appeared on a jihadi website in Arabic warning of “a type of spy who collects the news and gives it to their masters in detailed reports, which would hurt the jihadis.”

The author went on: “We must take an important step, that is by capturing every journalist, identifying the equipment they use to report the news, and body search them for chips, which they usually hide in hidden areas.” He listed some of the more notorious news organizations: BBC, CNN, Al Arabiya. If found guilty, “they should be dealt with accordingly.”

Rise of the long journalist

Almost all of the kidnapped correspondents are freelancers. Syria is the war of and on the lone journalist. Several trends have merged to make this so: diminishing revenue has forced major news organizations to cut back on their foreign coverage; the American exhaustion with a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan has reduced the appetite for adventures abroad; and the rise of both web-based and citizen journalism has created an entirely new breed of correspondents, many of them only tenuously linked to an employer, and most of them newcomers to the trade.

Some of the newbies are, in fact, plainly way out of their depth. Stephanie Freid of CCTV recalls travelling to Syria in the dead of winter, staying in homes with neither heat nor electricity, with a freelancer who not only hadn’t bothered to bring a flak jacket, a helmet, or a medical kit, but didn’t even have a coat.

Peter Bouckaert, the emergencies director for Human Rights Watch, says that when the war first broke out, he got calls from young freelancers who thought they could just cross from Lebanon and Jordan and get going. “They think it’s like Iraq 2003 and they’re going to jump on a marine brigade.”

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Established news organizations, including the Star, are now wary of taking work from freelancers lest they encourage reckless behaviour. Austin Tice had no journalistic experience when he left Georgetown law school for Syria in 2012. A New York Times profile of Matthew Schrier, who was tortured by Islamic rebels before escaping after seven months, described him as a former film student who had spent a decade processing health-care claims and went to Syria looking for “a fresh start.”

So freelancers are the most endangered — chiefly because they’re the ones left in the field. Most major news organizations have pulled their reporters from northern Syria. (The regime still occasionally supplies visas for travel to and around Damascus, and both freelance and staff journalists continue to travel in the Kurdish areas of the north, which are less volatile.)

Freelancers who have developed contacts and expertise in Syria can’t simply cool their heels in Beirut or Istanbul and collect a paycheque. So even when the shark warnings are posted, they’re the ones likeliest to go back in the water.

Turkey: a window on war

By the time I arrived in Antakya in the last days of September, the journalistic body count had become almost absurd. Frank Smyth of the Committee to Protect Journalists had suggested I look up two Spanish freelance photographers headquartered there; days before I arrived, both were kidnapped on the way to Raqqa. A third Spaniard, Marc Marginedas, whose family agreed to make his kidnapping public, had been seized just outside of Aleppo.

An Italian and a Belgian had just been released after five months. The former, Domenico Quirico, a veteran reporter for La Stampa, described a litany of humiliations at the hands of a band of thugs with an Islamic veneer. The revolution, he wrote, had been betrayed by “fanatics and bandits” who had made Syria “the Country of Evil . . . where even children and old men rejoice in their malevolence.”

In fact, the only Westerner in town was Barak Barfi, an Islamic scholar and fellow at the D.C.-based New America Foundation. Barfi was spending as much of his time looking for his kidnapped friends as he was reporting.

One night, I was having dinner with Barfi when Andrea Bernardi, an Italian freelance videographer, came over to join us.

“Did you hear about the guy that got kidnapped today?” he asked. Barfi, who had been fiddling with his phone, snapped to attention: “Who?” Andrea described the victim. Barfi clutched his head in his hands: a few weeks earlier, the man had slept on his floor in Antakya. Was it really true? Barfi sprang into an all-too-well-rehearsed routine, calling contacts at the U.S. State Department, the FBI, and officials of other governments, while fielding calls and emails from journalists who had just heard the news.

Barfi introduced me to Hamza Ghadban, a Syrian journalist who had worked for an Arabic-language broadcaster in London and then returned to Syria to cover the rebellion. Ghadban now operates from Antakya and travels widely across northern Syria.

He is convinced, as many rebel sympathizers are, that the regime has subterranean connections with the foreign jihadists. He told me that the ISIS camp in Aleppo had been unscathed until the jihadists decamped, while the next-door headquarters of the Tawhid Brigade, affiliated with the FSA, had been levelled by government artillery. In Raqqa, too, the ISIS base had not been shelled.

It’s also widely believed that in the summer of 2012, Assad released from prison some of the Sunni extremists who had fought American troops in Iraq, and who may then have joined with foreign fighters to form ISIS. Those fighters now seem at least as preoccupied with dislodging moderate rebels from key checkpoints and northern towns as they are with fighting the regime.

It was Ghadban who told me about Abu Nabil, the man who claimed to be negotiating for James Foley, the freelancer who had gone missing in 2012. Foley had been seized in Binnish, in Idlib province, along with a freelance photographer whose family, unlike the Foleys, has chosen to keep a cloak of silence over his abduction. The photographer had been kidnapped before in the same region and had chosen to return. Journalists believe that both were taken by Islamists, though perhaps later sold to the regime. (Philip Balboni, the CEO and co-founder of GlobalPost, says that he has no evidence that Foley was ever held by rebels.)

That’s where Abu Nabil comes in. A bespectacled man in a green polo shirt with “Aviation Industry” stitched on the chest, he explains to me that he was a prominent Aleppo merchant, a contractor.

“For more than 20 years, I’ve been working with high-ranking members of the regime,” he says, as we sit in the cafe in Antakya. “I have very personal relations with some of them. I especially do a lot of business with intelligence officials.”

Ghadban had seen what he considered convincing evidence that Abu Nabil could deliver. Earlier in 2013, he had been approached by acquaintances from Aleppo who hoped to recover three rebels who had been taken on the battlefield, exhibited on TV and convicted of terrorism. He brought them to Abu Nabil. “He checked,” says Ghadban, “and came back and said, ‘It will cost you $50,000.’ I saw them hand over the money.” Two of the three were released, and the remaining prisoner was expected out soon.

But Abu Nabil was also a brazen liar. Firas Tamim, the fixer who had been ferrying supplies across the border, joined us at the cafe and asked him about an abductee, whom the businessman claimed to know. When Abu Nabil left the table for a moment, Tamim told me he had made up the name.

There was enough truth, or at least plausibility, to his account of Foley’s abduction that Ghadban had, he said, taken Abu Nabil to meet with State Department officials in Istanbul. And Kroll, the security firm GlobalPost had retained, had sent its agents to exhaustively test his bona fides. But when they pressed him for a “proof of life” — an answer to a question only Foley would know — Abu Nabil came back only with answers to inconclusive questions they hadn’t asked. Finally, he claimed that Foley was about to be released, but that never happened.

“He never gave us any reason to believe any of his story,” says Richard Hildreth, managing director of Kroll. Perhaps Abu Nabil can deliver with Syrians, but not Americans.

Perhaps the problem is the private security firms. None of the journalists or other activists who had run across the Kroll agents in Antakya thought they were making any meaningful inroads on the case. (“We don’t tell people what we do,” rejoins Hildreth. “We’re not looking to print a story at the end.”)

I asked reporter David Rohde, who had been kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2008, if the private security firms the New York Times had retained after he had been taken had been able to resolve his case. “No,” he said. But neither, in the final analysis, could American government officials or the gifted and deeply knowledgeable reporters who devoted themselves to the case.

Figures like Abu Nabil thrive on the agonizing mix of desperation and futility that suffuses the atmosphere on Syria’s borders.

In the border town of Kilis, a few hours east of Antakya, Barak Barfi and I walked through Turkish passport control to the no man’s land between the two countries. The border guards could not fathom what we were doing, but ultimately waved us through.

We walked down a well-maintained four-lane road. About 200 metres away stood the Syrian checkpoint, which was controlled by the Northern Storm brigade of the FSA. Beyond that were the low stone houses of the village of Bab al-Salama.

Bab al-Salama had long been a popular crossing, with a good road leading straight to Aleppo. Now taking that route was like playing Russian roulette, with more than one bullet in the chamber. Even the moderate rebels at the checkpoint kept a list of journalists accused of some transgression, usually imaginary; if you happened to be on the list, you could be let through and then seized a few hundred metres down the road. Greater danger lay in Azaz, several kilometres to the south, access to which was controlled by ISIS checkpoints. Even Syrians told me that they had learned to give Azaz a wide berth.

This was the day after we had learned of the new abduction — the man who had slept on Barfi’s floor. At the time, Andrea Bernardi, the freelancer who broke the news at dinner, had plaintively asked: “Why do we still go into Syria? What are we learning? What’s the story?”

Those seemed like the sane questions to ask; whatever there was to be learned seemed small compared with the very real danger of abduction. This was the conclusion almost all major news organizations had reached. And yet I knew that some intrepid journalists, perhaps including Bernardi, who had been held captive by foreign jihadists for several days, would continue to find reasons, both noble and self-serving, to go inside.

Barfi and I stood in the middle of the road, facing south toward Syria. A sharp wind whirled plastic bags and bits of rubbish across the pavement. We turned around.

James Traub is a New York-based journalist. He writes a weekly column for foreignpolicy.com

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