The Guerrilla Journalists Defying ISIS One Video at a Time
It’s 8:30 am on a blindingly sunny Texas morning in March, and most of Austin is still passed out. Abdalaziz Alhamza—Aziz for short—is one exception. The night before, the 25-year-old had salsa-danced and chain-smoked into the early morning hours with his fellow millennials who flock to this city each year for the 24-7 party that is the South by Southwest music, tech, and film festival.
Alhamza snagged only about four hours of sleep, so when he emerges bleary-eyed from the bathroom of his Airbnb the next morning with pillow marks still etched on his bearded face and a t-shirt that reads F*CK YOU hugging his scrawny torso, he looks, understandably, less than thrilled to find me sitting on the couch waiting to talk to him. “Give me one second,” he mutters before scurrying upstairs to collect himself.
He descends minutes later, this time in thick black glasses and a black hoodie with two faces embroidered on it in white thread. On one side is the unmistakable profile of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. On the other is the visage of some nameless ISIS fighter, with a high turban and long beard. Above their faces it reads “WANTED,” and it looks, at a distance, like one of those novelty sweatshirts you might find hanging outside a boardwalk gift shop. It’s not until Alhamza joins me on the couch that I finally make out the full message. It doesn’t say “WANTED.” It says “WANTED by.” As in: The man wearing this hoodie is on the run.
“My friend made this for me,” Alhamza says, glancing down at his chest. It’s clever, because it’s true. Though he doesn’t quite look the part, sitting here rubbing sleep from his eyes, Alhamza is, in fact, a wanted man, targeted by both the Assad regime and ISIS’s international army of zealots. His crime: Telling the world about what’s really happening in his ravaged hometown of Raqqa, Syria.
Alhamza is the public face of an online news organization called Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, which is comprised of young, mostly anonymous citizen journalists based inside and outside of Syria. Often armed with nothing but their social media accounts, they risk their lives to counter ISIS propaganda with regular dispatches from inside the jihadist group’s capital. Most of their members were among the peaceful student protesters who helped liberate Raqqa from the Assad regime in 2013.
RBSS is a kind of spinoff of that work. The group has more than 600,000 followers on Facebook and some 70,000 more on Twitter. The footage its members have captured has been rebroadcast by international media outlets, including CNN, who would otherwise have no access to what’s happening in Raqqa. For that, ISIS targets the group’s members. When caught, they are executed.
Alhamza is RBSS’s de facto spokesperson, a role he fell into because he picked up English more quickly than his fellow revolutionaries. Which is why he’s here in Austin. Born in Raqqa but granted asylum in Germany three years ago, Alhamza has little use for SXSW’s star-studded panels and branding workshops. He has come to Austin to talk about RBSS and to spread the word about the group’s biggest project yet: a new documentary called City of Ghosts, which opens in New York today and in theaters nationwide next week.
Directed by Academy Award-nominee Matt Heineman and executive-produced by Alex Gibney, one of the biggest names in documentaries, the film goes inside Raqqa with RBSS’s masked reporters and dives deep into the experience of living like Alhamza, as a refugee with nowhere to call home. It’s the first time many in the group have shown their faces. The film tells the story of what it’s like to live in a place where there is no such thing as a free press and how RBSS is using digital platforms to fight an online information war against a radical ideology. “Bombs are not going to fix ISIS,” Heineman says. “ISIS is an idea, and this idea has been disseminated all across the world. We, as a society, have to figure out ways to combat this idea.”
City of Ghosts highlights one approach. After it premiered at Sundance Film Festival, Amazon Studios bought the rights to the film, and it’s already receiving Oscar buzz. In many ways, all of this is the fulfillment of the goal the group set out to accomplish when it was founded in 2014: telling the world Raqqa’s story. But if the film succeeds in giving the members of RBSS widespread exposure, it will be both a blessing and a curse. The bigger the film is, after all, the more wanted they will all become.
Raqqa was never any Pleasantville. Long before ISIS took over the city in January 2014, the autocratic Assad regime jailed and killed dissenters and ran the country as a police state. Still, Alhamza remembers a time when life was somehow, somewhat normal there. Though he was born in Raqqa, he spent the first decade of his life living with his family in Kuwait before moving back. He remembers his hometown as small, quiet, and “lovely,” a place where no one was ever a stranger and where everyone was connected in some way.
“When you walk down the street in Raqqa, your hand should be up all the time, saying, ‘Hi. How are you?’” he says in his still-evolving English. His biggest gripe back then? All the chit-chat made him perpetually late. “I was paying for a taxi all the time,” Alhamza says.
As a teen, Alhamza was a self-described troublemaker. Not particularly religious or political, he picked up a smoking habit and always appreciated Western culture. (While in Austin, he stopped in the Nike store for some fresh sneakers.) Still, growing up in Syria, free speech itself was a foreign concept, and government surveillance of ordinary citizens the norm. “They used to say, ‘In Syria, the walls have ears,’” Alhamza says.
He distinctly remembers being about 9 years old and catching his first glimpse of the deep-rooted fear Syrians had of then-president Hafez al-Assad, who ruled for nearly 29 years before his son Bashar took over in 2000. Alhamza had just moved back to Raqqa from Kuwait, and his cousin was teasing him about the Kuwaiti president. So, Alhamza teased his cousin right back, yelling, “Fuck Hafez al-Assad!”
“My cousin’s face turned yellow,” Alhamza remembers. “His blood stopped, and he put his hand on my mouth and started to run.” They bolted to their grandparents’ house, where Alhamza’s uncles taught him for the first time just how dangerous words can be. It would be more than a decade before he would truly understand just how right they were.
The Arab Spring swept through Syria in 2011, just around the time that Alhamza, then 19, was waking up to the economic and social injustices in his country. “I started to think, Why is 80 percent of Syrian money controlled by 20 percent of the population?” he says, fiddling with long pieces of his beard as he tells his story.
So Alhamza, who was studying biochemistry at the local university, began joining in the protests. They started small. Seven people protesting for 30 seconds. Ten people protesting for a minute. One hundred people protesting for three minutes. As their ranks grew, Alhamza and his friends created a Facebook page called Raqqa Networking News, where they posted updates about upcoming rallies. By American standards, that kind of online organizing is commonplace. In Raqqa, it was revolutionary. “You’re basically telling the place and time to the police intelligence three hours before the demonstration,” Alhamza says. The arrests soon followed.
Between 2011 and 2013, Alhamza says he was arrested three times. Once, he says he was walking down the street when three thugs pulled him into the back of their car, drove him to a political prison, and held him for a week in a bathroom the size of a closet, where he sat in the pitch black on a toilet as mice scurried around the cell. That time, at least, he wasn’t tortured. But sometimes he says, “Waiting for the torture is harder than being tortured. You keep thinking, ‘When’s it my turn?’”
Another time, he was held for 45 days. Even so, he maintains, “My experience is nothing. I was super lucky.” Lucky, he says, because while he was in prison he met dozens of other organizers who banded together for another demonstration as soon as they were released. “They thought by punishing them, the people would stop demonstrating,” Alhamza says. “It was the opposite.”
Anti-Assad rebel forces took control of Raqqa in March 2013, a period Alhamza refers to as “the honeymoon.” Residents toppled a statue of Hafez al-Assad that had stood in the city’s public square for years, and Alhamza and his fellow students took it upon themselves to keep the university up and running. But the relief that came with beating back the Assad regime was cut short when, just a few months later, ISIS took control and began publicly executing people in the streets.
Even as the violence escalated, Alhamza and his comrades continued to use the Raqqa Networking News Facebook page to speak out against the jihadists’ perverse ideology. “They had weapons,” he says. “We had nothing—only our voices.”
Then one day in January 2014, an ISIS fighter arrived at Alhamza’s house looking for him. He wasn’t home, and he knew then that he could never go home again. So he hatched a plan to escape the city and seek refuge in Turkey using a friend’s ID card to pass through the ISIS checkpoints. “I promised him: If I’m arrested, I’ll say I stole it from you,” Alhamza remembers. If he was discovered, Alhamza suspected he would be killed. “I knew I was crossing death,” he says.
As Alhamza made his way into Turkey and later, with the help of a fake passport, into Germany, ISIS’s killing spree in Raqqa escalated and its ideology spread, all while the international community largely looked away. Meanwhile, ISIS was disseminating propaganda on social media and in YouTube videos that made the caliphate look like summer camp, complete with people swimming in lakes and target practice. “We started thinking, how could we counter the propaganda and show the reality?” Alhamza says.
And so, in April 2014, Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently was born. A team of about 17 anonymous correspondents inside Raqqa began collecting videos: starving civilians waiting in bread lines, a man tied to a cross being driven through the streets, dead bodies strewn around the town square. The videos were sent clandestinely via satellite internet to about 10 correspondents stationed at safe houses in Turkey and Germany, including Alhamza, who would then share them on Facebook and Twitter in Arabic and eventually, English.
Inside Raqqa, where internet access is prohibited, the team would graffiti walls around town with messages like, “Down with ISIS,” and distribute pamphlets disguised as ISIS magazines aimed at dissuading people from joining ISIS’s ranks. “They became their own publisher and a source for multiple other publishers,” says Thor Halvorssen, CEO of the Human Rights Foundation, who met Alhamza in the group’s early days. “It would have been impossible for RBSS to do the things that they do without social media.”
Before long, international media organizations started taking notice. So did ISIS. In May 2014, just a month after their work began, one of Alhamza’s colleagues, 20-year-old Al-Moutaz Billah Ibrahim was stopped at an ISIS checkpoint. He had a satellite internet device with him, and in his laptop the fighters found RBSS logos, videos, and other materials. They arrested Ibrahim and later executed him. Alhamza watched it all play out on video. “It was a horrible thing to watch your colleague being executed,” Alhamza says. “We didn’t think we’d lose someone.”
For a moment, the members of the group took a breath, wondering if they should discontinue their work. But the team inside Raqqa pressed them to go on. “We agreed we needed to complete the work in honor of our friend, who gave his life for it,” Alhamza says. But now they would be more cautious. The group has since undergone training with groups that educate NGOs in how to encrypt their communications and has started using new tools, which Alhamza can’t discuss for security purposes, to collect and transmit photos and videos.
Even so, Ibrahim wasn’t the last RBSS member to be killed by ISIS, and threats on members’ lives have only grown. The jihadist organization has released videos featuring photos of Alhamza’s slain colleagues. “Know that your work in journalism doesn’t protect your blood,” one video featured in the new documentary warns. “So stop fighting us. Or you will meet the fate of those ‘slaughtered silently’ by the soldiers of the caliphate.”
On his phone, Alhamza stores screenshots of some of the many threats he’s received on social media. One tweet includes a photo of a control room, loaded with screens displaying security footage meant to demonstrate that ISIS is always watching. Alhamza scrolls through his photos. “We responded to their tweet after a couple days with this,” he says before passing me his phone. It’s a photo of a security camera on a street in Raqqa. “We told them: You put up these security cameras to catch us? Right now we’re filming you.”
There’s plenty Alhamza doesn’t like to discuss publicly about his personal life, like the fact that his brother died trying to flee Syria. But he rattles off details of what has happened to him and his colleagues with utter stoicism, as if reciting lines from a script. It is, after all, his job to tell these stories.
City of Ghosts picks up the story of Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently when the group is already shrouded in secrecy, several of its members are dead, and the surviving ones—even in the relative security of Germany and Turkey—are receiving daily threats. When filmmaker Matt Heineman contacted the group and asked if they would let him in on the most intimate moments of their lives for the next year, Heineman says, “It was like someone proposing to you to get married when you haven’t even met them.” The consequences, in this case were a matter of life and death.
Heineman had read about the group in a 2015 story in the The New Yorker, on the occasion of their being honored by the Committee to Protect Journalists, and became fascinated by the “war of ideas” RBSS was fighting against ISIS. “Image-making, propaganda—these are tools used throughout history often for evil or to defend evil,” Heineman says. RBSS “is a modern incarnation of that,” only now, it’s being used to combat evil.
Heineman, whose last film Cartel Land documented the equally dangerous work of vigilante groups fighting drug cartels on the US-Mexico border, jumped on a train to Washington DC where Alhamza and several other members of the group were staying. He walked them through his process, explaining that he would often be the only person filming with them and that he would give them a first look at the film to check it for any stray details that might jeopardize their security.
At that point, most members of the group besides Alhamza remained in the shadows, and they understood the risks involved with stepping into the light. A film like this could amplify the group’s message, but it could also make them more vulnerable to reprisals by ISIS. “These are conversations we had from the very beginning. What are the ramifications of making the film?” Heineman recalls, sitting in the Manhattan offices of Cinetic Media, the company that marketed Oscar winners like Moonlight and Boyhood. “Undoubtedly this will raise their profile. Are they OK with that?”
Heineman’s proposal came at an opportune time for RBSS, Alhamza says. Before Heineman found them, rumors were starting to spread that the group was affiliated with the Syrian government, an entity that is, of course, RBSS’s enemy as well. The group’s members had reached a point where they wanted to educate the world about who they really are and why they do what they do. “We had to show our faces, to show our identities, to let them know we’re local. We’re from the city,” Alhamza says. “We grew up there and were forced to leave.”
For the next year, Heineman followed members of the group as they traveled from safe house to safe house, emigrating from Turkey to Germany. He stood by as they drafted news stories based on intel from their colleagues in Raqqa. He trained his camera on Hamoud Almousa, a member of RBSS, the day he opened his laptop and watched his father executed in an ISIS video, filmed in the style of an action movie. He watched as neo-Nazis in Germany chanted, “Deport them!” as Alhamza and others looked on. And he captured the one, brief moment, when, faced with a credible threat against his life in Berlin, Alhamza’s typically stony facade finally cracked.
“They wanted to come out from behind the veneer of social media and show that they’re real people,” Heineman says. “They’re modern Muslim men from this city that just happens to be the capital of the Islamic State, and they’re fighting against this extremist group that’s hijacked their religion.”
A crowd is already forming around the Cinépolis Chelsea Theater for a New York screening of City of Ghosts in mid-April, when Alhamza rushes into the nearby donut shop where we were supposed to meet an hour before, apologizing profusely. He’d lain down at his hotel for a catnap and overslept. Dressed in a black flat brim hat and black zip-up hoodie with leather panels, he blends in with the hipster-chic crowd at the Tribeca Film Festival. In audience Q&As and at after parties following screenings, he’s been in high demand, with New York film types taking his hand in theirs and promising to do their best to get City of Ghosts nominated for an Oscar. It’s exhausting work being the star of a film, but Alhamza isn’t complaining. Getting the attention of American journalists—and audiences—is kind of the point of this whole risky venture.
Alhamza whisks me down the block and into the theater where the film has already begun, and tells me he’ll meet me after. For the next hour and a half, the audience is immersed in the horrors he and the other members of RBSS have endured now for years. We meet a masked reporter inside Raqqa who types messages to the group by candlelight. We meet Mohamed, a former high school teacher turned reporter, who is forced to flee Turkey with his wife after his colleague Naji Serf is assassinated. We see Alhamza give the guys a walking tour of their new home in Berlin. We see the executions, the airstrikes, the parades of Syrian children in Raqqa being indoctrinated by ISIS fighters. We take in the enormity of what it must be like to be wanted by ISIS and unwanted by other nations. For American audiences, who are either critical of the press or concerned about the attacks on the media at home, the film is also a glimpse of what it’s really like to live in a place where the press is persecuted.
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As I watch the film, it’s hard for me to square the image of the sleepy kid I met in Austin with the real life hero up on the screen. As Halvorssen put it, “This guy that looks like the character from Where’s Waldo is really a comic book hero.”
But in a way, that juxtaposition of humanity and heroism is the point of City of Ghosts. “These topics—Syria and ISIS—so often get relegated to headlines, to stats,” Heineman says. “I really wanted to let audiences go on this journey, and hopefully, in doing so, gain just a tiny bit more empathy for this group, for the people of Raqqa in general, for the people of Syria, and in an even broader sense for the millions of people across the world who are immigrants being forced to flee their homeland because of violence and extremism.”
RBSS’s story is the tale of how ordinary people with ordinary tools have the ability to fight evil in extraordinary ways. Alhamza knows that, even once ISIS leaves Raqqa, its ideology will live on elsewhere. He only hopes the film can serve as a blueprint for anyone else living through it.
There’s a glimmer of happiness to the end of City of Ghosts (I won’t spoil it here), but the film doesn’t pretend to be uplifting. Raqqa is ruined. As we speak, the US is engaged in a battle to retake the city from ISIS. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has warned about a potential chemical attack being carried out by the Assad regime in Syria. And the RBSS team both inside and outside of Syria still lives in constant danger.
Nestled among the well-heeled film festival crowd, Alhamza remains a wanted man who could be targeted even in the US. As he walks the streets of New York during the festival, he’s trailed by a bald, beefy security guard hired by the film studio. Alhamza initially resisted Heineman’s insistence on the extra security. He doesn’t want another person dying to protect him.
Inside the theater, the movie’s credits begin to roll, and several hundred audience members rise to their feet. I turn around to see Alhamza, iPhone in hand, filming the whole thing. There’s no happy ending here, but at least now the world is watching.
Videos courtesy of Amazon Studios, A&E IndieFilms and IFC Films
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