A Syrian soldier at the ancient Temple of Baal in Palmyra, Syria, in March 2014, before the Islamic State overran the area. The group blew up the site last year. Credit Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
New York Times: Syrian Officer Gave a View of War. ISIS Came, and Silence Followed
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Ours was an unusual, sometimes operatic, correspondence that unfolded over more than a year. Abu al-Majd, a Syrian police officer who was being deployed more and more often like a soldier, texted at all hours, sending news from the front lines and grumbling about boring, sunbaked patrols, his complaints sometimes punctuated by expressions of terror, pride or doubt.
For us, it was a critical window into the raging war in Syria that we were too often forced to follow from afar. For him, it seemed, as much as anything, about having a connection to people who lived outside the claustrophobia of war, yet cared about what he was going through.
On May 19 last year, Abu al-Majd sent a pair of snapshots. One showed him in fatigues, smoking a water pipe and starting to smile, as if a friend had just walked in; two cups of Turkish coffee, still foamy, stood on a table.
He was about to board a bus to Palmyra, the Syrian desert city that was in the process of falling to the Islamic State. Many government troops had fled, but Abu al-Majd and a few dozen others had been ordered to fight what he believed to be a doomed battle.
He had taken the photos specially. “These,” he texted, “might be the last pictures.”
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WNU Editor: The international media covers the big picture .... but what is quite often ignored is what the fighter on the ground is experiencing. This is one story.