LEBANON
Qamishli Al-Yaroubiya
Ras al-Ayn
Al-Hasakah
Nasiriyah N © S.Ballard (2015)
Dohuk
Irbil
Sinjar Mosul
Idlib Al-Raqqa
Aleppo Idlib Al-Raqqah Al-Hasakah
Aleppo Hama
Homs
DAMASCUS
Deraa Quneitra
West Bank
Ninawa
Irbil
Kirkuk
Sulaimaniyah
Deir ez Zour
Deir ez Zour
S Y R I A
Homs Hama
Rif Dimashq
Al-Suwayda
Deraa
Al-Anbar
Salah ad Din
Baiji Tikrit
Najaf Tal Afar BAGHDAD
Kirkuk Al-Sulaimaniyah Diyala
Samarra Baqubah
Karbala Ramadi Fallujah
Karbala
IRAN
Wasit
Babil
Al-Qadisiyah
Dhi Qar Al-Muthanna Al-Najaf
Basrah
Maysan Al-Basrah
© S Ballard (2015)
Gaziantep Kilis
Azaz Afrin
Reyhanli
Idlib
Latakia Qardaha
Jarablus
Manbij
Al-Bab
Kobane
U R K E Y
Tel Abyad
Al-Raqqa h
Qamishli
Ras al-Ayn
Al-Hasakah
Al-Hasakah
Al-Yaroubiya
R A Q
Raqqah
Marat al-Numan
Hama Aleppo Idli b Latakia
Tartus
Tartus
Tripoli Baalbek
BEIRUT
Sidon
Lake Tiberius
Aleppo Hama
Homs
Al-Qusayr
Laboue
Al-Tabqah
Palmyra
Homs
Deir ez Zour
Deir ez Zour
Al-Mayadin
Al-Bukamal
Al-Qaim
DAMASCUS I R A Q
Rif Dimash q
Quneitra
D era a
Deraa
Al-Suwayda
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book is the result of over four years of research and personal experience of what must be one of the most tragic and deadly revolutions and civil conflicts in modern history. Knowing Syria personally, and having walked its streets, met and got to know its people, and fallen for its natural and architectural beauty and social vibrancy, the violence, hatred and destruction that has swept the country since 2011 is simply heartbreaking. The exponential growth of jihadist militancy is a major source of concern and will continue to be for many years to come. Its emergence, expansion and consolidation is therefore a subject that must be better understood.
Firstly, I’m grateful to the Brookings Doha Center for having hosted me as a roving Visiting Fellow since December 2013. A special thanks in this case must go to Salman Shaikh, for having taken me on and provided me with the intellectual space and scholarly independence that has allowed me to gain so much insight on Syria in recent years. The centre’s broader research and administrative staff have also been a great support.
My position in the Brookings Doha Center also opened the door to my assuming a senior role within what has come to be a highly regarded Track II Syria process, funded by five Western governments. Within this endeavour, I’m particularly grateful for having had the chance to manage nearly two years of face-to-face engagement with the leaderships of over 100 of Syria’s most powerful armed opposition groups around Syria’s borders. The insight gleaned from this work and the experience of having got to know nearly all of the most pivotal actors involved in Syria’s conflict has been invaluable in constructing the core content of this book. With this Track II process now under the tutelage of The Shaikh Group, this experience looks set to continue, and again, I’m thankful to Salman Shaikh for entrusting me with this.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
More broadly, I must also thank the hugely impressive network of Middle East, security, intelligence and terrorism scholars at The Brookings Institution, with whom I’ve shared many interesting engagements on Syria. These include William McCants, Shadi Hamid, Bruce Riedel, Kenneth Pollack, Tamara Wittes, Daniel Byman, Michael O’Hanlon and J.M. Berger. I’d also like to express my thanks to senior Brookings Institution staff like Martin Indyk and Bruce Jones for having supported my work and role within such an impressive organisation as Brookings.
This book has also inevitably been influenced by the excellent work and research done by other Middle East and Syria specialists, including Robert Ford, Noah Bonsey, Aron Lund, Emile Hokayem, Maxwell Martin, Thomas Pierret, Aaron Stein, Sam Heller, Hassan Hassan, Andrew Tabler, Faysal Itani, Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, Michael Weiss, Aaron Zelin, Charlie Winter, Thomas Hegghammer, Peter Neumann, Shiraz Maher, Raffaello Pantucci and Clint Watts. There are many more that could also be named, including countless eminently qualified journalists whose fearless and professional work over recent years continues to inform the general public of the Syrian situation. I’m also grateful to the many senior government officials involved in working on Syria who I have got to know personally—from those in the West, including from the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium; to those across the Middle East.
I also want to thank the academic peer reviewers responsible for taking the time to read through the manuscript and to have offered their valuable comments. Moreover, I am incredibly grateful to Hurst Publishers and Michael Dwyer for entrusting me with such a considerable piece of work. Despite the book focusing on such a dynamic and constantly changing subject, Hurst’s staff and editor Mary Starkey were unfailingly quick, efficient and flexible in turning the manuscript into something publishable. I thank them all.
And finally, I must acknowledge how thankful I am to my whole extended family for their continued support, and especially to my extraordinary wife Jessica, for her love and patience throughout my endless periods of research and travel.
x
PREFACE
In the future, historians will look back on 2011 as having been a truly remarkable year for the Middle East and North Africa. In what is still heralded as the Arab Spring, ordinary citizens of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen took to the streets and confronted their corrupt and dictatorial leaders, sparking profound social and political change. Long-held institutional norms of keeping political dissent, and often frustration, within the confines of one’s own home were shattered.
Although the Assad regime had clearly demonstrated in previous years its lack of interest in—or outright refusal to—reform in order to bring Syria into a new era, many still thought the country would escape the Arab Spring unscathed. However, when small protests began erupting in early 2011, Syrian security forces were unforgiving. Many ordinary Syrians who had taken to the streets in support of political freedom and self-representation, or in protest against the detention and torture of children in the southern city of Deraa, were threatened, arrested, and attacked with teargas and live ammunition. A total refusal by both local and national government to allow for open dissent directly encouraged the escalation of protest and the birth of a revolution. In its early stages the Syrian revolution mobilised around issues of liberty, freedom, anti-corruption and democratic governance. The protests themselves were peaceful, with husbands, wives, children and grandparents all contributing towards a mass movement for positive change. However, a concerted security campaign aimed at suppressing this expanding revolution not only consolidated opposition to the Assad regime, but encouraged the mobilisation of local self-protection militias, which by the summer of 2011 had given rise to the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and a fledgling anti-government insurgency.
Well over four years later, Syria has become home to the largest, most complex and arguably the most powerful collection of Sunni jihadist movements in modern history. By September 2015, at least 30,000 foreign fighters, including as many as 6,000 from Europe,1 had travelled into Syria to fight jihad—on a scale totally unprecedented for many decades. But it has not only been men who have travelled to join the Syrian Jihad. Several thousand women and children have also left for Syria, primarily to join what they perceive to be a fledgling ‘Islamic state’.
Syria’s unique status in Islamic prophecies relating to its central role as the source of battles that will precede the end of the world has been a major attraction for jihadist recruits from over 100 countries. The presence of wellestablished jihadist facilitation networks in Syria prior to the revolution, as well as the country’s proximity to other jihadist hotspots in Iraq and Lebanon, have also contributed towards its newfound status as the centre of international jihad.
Several terrorist attacks and plots have since been both planned and inspired by Syria-based jihadists, whose hostility to the Western world was brought out into the open by US-led airstrikes in the country that began in late 2014. Those bombing raids had two principal targets: the so-called Islamic State (IS) and members of al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra (the Support Front)—two jihadist movements which, despite once being organisationally linked, effectively declared war on each other in 2014. While IS had established a self-proclaimed caliphate stretching across parts of Syria and Iraq in mid-2014 and had called for and received pledges of allegiance from small jihadist groups and individuals around the world, the latter appeared to be evolving from being a pragmatic and widely popular Syrian jihadist movement into an organisation with a more overt desire to one day impose its Islamic rule in other parts of Syria, with or without the support of other factions.
This book is exclusively focused on one component of the Syria-based insurgency: the role played by Sunni jihadists and their Syrian Salafist allies. There are of course also Shia jihadists playing an equally significant role in the conflict, on the side of the regime and Bashar al-Assad. The interplay and interdependence of both these components will be scrutinised, as will the role of international state and sub-state actors on both sides of the conflict. However, the overarching focus of this book is to provide a detailed account of how the Syrian Jihad emerged, grew and has evolved throughout several years of brutal conflict. It will therefore follow a chronological format, beginning with early chapters detailing the initially peaceful stages of the revolu-
tion in early 2011; the socio-economic and socio-political underlying factors behind both the revolution and its susceptibility to jihadism; and an investigation of the Assad regime’s dangerous flirtation with jihadist militancy that both directly and indirectly facilitated its emergence in the early days of the revolution.
This book is also driven and motivated by over four years of personal experience and engagement with hundreds of Syrian insurgents, from ordinary foot-soldiers to many of the most powerful group’s leaders and senior political command structures, from secular nationalists to devout Salafists. Most of these men picked up weapons as a last resort to protect their communities, but they now find themselves embroiled in a vicious and seemingly intractable civil conflict. Many of these revolutionaries—from young men in their twenties to those in their fifties, all of whose lives have been thrown into turmoil since 2011—have become friends and acquaintances. It is hard not to take their stories personally, from a young IT graduate who lost seventeen members of his family in the horrific sarin gas attack outside Damascus in August 2013 to an older sheikh who spent three separate extended periods in prison living in inhumane conditions and being tortured merely for being an outspoken member of the political Islamist opposition. This is to name only two. None of these men particularly wanted to be carrying guns in their homeland, but the struggle for justice and freedom has become a very personal one.
The experiences, stories and comments of these men, all now insurgent fighters, are interwoven throughout this book. Many now reflect on the peaceful pre-revolution days and wonder: was all worth it? Why did the ‘West’ come to the aid of Libyans when they rose up against Gaddafi, but ignored the plight of Syrians when they were beaten, tortured, shot, blown up and gassed? This is a legitimate question worthy of more investigation.
Four years of concerted research and work on the Syrian conflict and its complex insurgency has also brought brought me into contact with jihadist militants, from al-Qaeda, IS and other independent and international groups. This access has been of immense value in acquiring greater familiarity with terrorist organisations that are otherwise off limits and closed to Western nationals. Maintaining contact and a sporadic dialogue with such individuals is a delicate task, but the insight gleaned proved time and again that it was worth the time invested. Nonetheless, the publication of an extensive policyfocused assessment of IS for the Brookings Doha Center in December 2014 incurred an aggressive reaction from Islamic State and its support communities online, thus placing this author on several official and unofficial IS ‘lists’.
This experience served as a reminder of the intensity of jihadist self-awareness and self-protection amid international scrutiny and attack.
Knowing Syria as I do, with its extraordinary history, architectural and natural beauty and its superlatively welcoming people, the rise of jihadist militancy across the country is deeply concerning. That such groups, who hold such inherently violent and exclusionary ideologies, have become an integrated and fundamental component of the revolution and the anti-government insurgency is proof only of the failures of the international community to back a moderate Syrian nationalistic opposition that only wanted better things for their homeland.
Despite their broad ideological differences, most Syrians still involved in the revolution in 2015 want what they wanted in 2011, but the sheer power and intimidating dominance of jihadists has forced them to befriend their enemies. This book will tell the story of how this unfortunate state of affairs came to be. Where did the jihadists come from in the first place? How did they establish themselves, and what was their role in the revolution? What role did external actors play in facilitating the rise of jihadists and how might US-led and Russian intervention impact their status in Syria?
These questions and many more form the basis of The Syrian Jihad. Ultimately, we must also reflect on how a virtuous and well-meaning populist revolution, yearning only for the virtues of freedom, became transformed into an intractable civil war in which jihadists have found such a comfortable home.
Charles R. Lister, Doha, October 2015
INTRODUCTION
Syria currently represents the centre of the world for jihadist militancy. Even the high-profile conflict in Iraq is a rung lower given the psychological pull of conflict zones for men seeking to attach an Islamist ideological fervour to a specific political–military cause. While September 2015 estimates suggested at least 30,000 non-Syrians have joined the jihad in Syria at some point since 2011, it seems likely that this number is probably higher. After all, intelligence officials from the UK alone revised that country’s citizen flow into Syria from 600–700 in March 2015 to an extraordinarily higher estimate of 1,600 the following month, with an additional five citizens leaving for Syria every week.1
Such flows have significantly raised the profile and long-term sustainability of the jihad in Syria, but the domestic dynamics within Syria have played an equally significant role, if not one that is far more important.
Understandably, much has been written about the phenomenon that is the ‘Islamic State.’ Its slick media production, its brutal levels of violence, apocalyptic rhetoric, its effective fusion of fanatical Islamic extremism with ideals of Baathist Arab power, as well as its image as an international movement building a proto-state that spans across 100-year-old colonial borders, has seized the world’s imagination. But although initially an Iraq-based organisation, IS benefited hugely from the conflict in Syria, and today the effective capital of its ‘Islamic State’ lies in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa. Moreover, much of the group’s most valuable resources lie in Syria, where the immense complexity of the conflict offers it a sustainable long-term presence and territorial control.
The Syrian Jihad is about much more than IS, however. Countless other powerful jihadist groups have made Syria their base, many of which are led by and include within their ranks veteran jihadist figures with extensive experience in the upper echelons of al-Qaeda and other major jihadist organisations.
One of these groups is al-Qaeda’s Jabhat al-Nusra, which has arguably established an even more sustainable presence in Syria than IS. Through an intricately stage-managed game of pragmatism and Machiavellian power politics, Jabhat al-Nusra has carved out a stake in Syria that over time has become both tacitly accepted and militarily powerful. Its sustained focus on recruiting heavily from within Syria’s pro-opposition population has ensured it has, by and large, avoided the kind of isolation from popular opposition dynamics experienced by IS.
However, IS’s dramatic advances in Iraq and its proclamation of a caliphate, not to mention its status as the primary focus of international airstrikes, has presented an existential challenge to Jabhat al-Nusra and its jihadist legitimacy. This has encouraged a shift within Jabhat al-Nusra’s pragmatic posture, to the extent that it has begun to show signs of demonstrating the kind of belligerent and self-assertive behavior that got IS into trouble in 2013 and early 2014.
Syria’s Jihad is therefore a complex story, involving a huge cast of jihadist actors operating within one of the most intense and multifarious civil wars in recent history. In establishing a base in Syria and by playing a role in its revolution, Sunni jihadists had a crucial part in internationalising the conflict.
One consistent theme throughout the Syrian civil war has been the sheer multitude of insurgent and jihadist protagonists involved. By early 2015 at least 150,000 insurgents within as many as 1,500 operationally distinct armed groups were involved in differing levels of fighting across Syria, some within broader umbrellas and fronts and others existing entirely independently. Although the emergence of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in the summer of 2011 appeared at the time to herald the formation of an organised and moderate armed Syrian opposition, it quickly fell victim to the fact that its leadership was based outside Syria, in refugee camps in southern Turkey. Not only was its command-and-control potential thus hampered from the start, but its financial support was divided according to the respective interests of regional countries such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar as well as governments in Europe and the United States.
In fact, the consistent failure of external states with interests in supporting the revolution to unify their provision of assistance explains not only the proliferation of insurgent factions, but also the opposition’s incapacity to present a genuine threat to the Assad regime. The fact that groups found themselves having to compete with each other for funding and support, and in so doing were often moulding their image and ideological frames of refer-
ence towards those potential backers, meant that very few of them retained a consistent strength and long-term viability. Such inconsistencies ensured that external initiatives aimed at establishing a unified structure for the insurgency would almost certainly fail. Thus, separate attempts to establish and operationalise provincial military councils, the Supreme Military Council and a ministry of defence within the exiled interim government all fell far short of attaining anything like success on the ground inside Syria.
Moreover, although not immediately visible at the time, the FSA was only one of many armed insurgent movements to emerge in mid-2011. From June that year a number of more Islamist-minded factions were coming together and setting up bases outside Damascus, in Homs and in Syria’s north. These were groups such as Kataib Ahrar al-Sham—which would go on to become the largest and arguably most powerful Syrian insurgent group—Suqor alSham and Liwa al-Islam, as well as the al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra.
By mid-2011 a broad range of insurgent actors, which reflected the varied social backgrounds of Syrian society, had emerged. This did not augur well for a well-organised and unitary armed opposition. Moreover, as time passed, actors on the more Islamist end of the insurgent spectrum began demonstrating superior levels of internal organisation and insurgent coordination, and were thus enjoying sustained and reliable sources of support from outside sources. Qatar in particular played a key role in buttressing such groups in the conflict’s first twelve months, while Turkey and Jordan had an influence on their borders with Syria which ensured that certain groups acquired more reliable channels of support than others.
It was within this context of insurgent proliferation, moderate failures to unify and escalating violence and brutality that jihadists found and established such solid foundations. Not only did Syria present an attractive proposition for prospective jihadists as a result of its prophesied place in Islamic tradition, but also its close proximity to Europe through Turkey undoubtedly facilitated the arrival of foreign fighters from a very early stage. Among the various early starters within the jihadist camp were several groups founded and led by Chechens. At first, these were not Chechens coming directly from Russia’s North Caucasus, but rather individuals already residing within Turkey’s wellestablished Chechen diaspora communities.
Jihadist groups also directly benefited from the failures of more moderate insurgents, which encouraged the perception that the jihadists were more extensively and reliably funded, more professional, better armed and equipped, and were therefore simply more successful in battle. As such, many Syrian
men involved in fighting for the revolution chose to join groups with a more extreme outlook than they were perhaps initially inclined to, but did so in order to be part of a ‘winning team’ and the better to fit in with what was an increasingly Islamist landscape, especially in northern Syria.
While revolutionary and of significant value to the outside world, the explosion in the use of social media to publish and promote battle updates, insurgent bulletins and other news arguably also discouraged broad opposition unity in Syria. Any group intending to be taken seriously in Syria maintained social media accounts on multiple different platforms, which by itself induced a dynamic of self-promotion that was often contrary to the presentation of a single unified opposition. Jihadists in particular proved especially adept at managing their use of social media and the production of qualitatively superior video and imagery output, which further demonstrated the reputation of professionalism that they were gaining on the battlefield.
Ultimately, however, while the Sunni jihadist component of Syria’s insurgency fed off and benefited from others’ indadequacies and failures, it also established and maintained its own unique internal dynamic. As the number of jihadist groups grew through 2013 and 2014, the two key nodes of alQaeda and IS (or its predecessor, the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS)) emerged as defining influences around which other factions either aligned themselves or asserted continued independence. As 2015 began, both had effectively established their own unique modi operandi, and although they were pursuing the same objective, al-Qaeda (or Jabhat al-Nusra) had adopted an incremental approach towards establishing Islamic rule. These diverging strategies precipitated a significant debate within the broader jihadist community, which by extension split the world’s jihadists into two camps.
However, while IS had manoeuvred itself into being an avowed enemy of the entire Syrian insurgency by late 2013 and early 2014, Jabhat al-Nusra had quite ingeniously redefined itself as a jihadist organisation enjoying a broad base of acceptance within Syria’s opposition-supporting community. By pragmatically managing its relations with the broader insurgency, Jabhat al-Nusra was limiting the extent of its al-Qaeda-like objectives. However, at least within its senior leadership, the intent to one day establish Islamic emirates across Syria remained. Such objectives began to materialise more overtly in late 2014 until the rumblings of resistance induced a ‘re-moderation’ in April 2015. Whether that would endure remained to be seen, but it is unlikely that the group’s senior leadership and foreign fighter contingents will simply relinquish such goals, even amid rumours of an internal debate regarding its official relationship with al-Qaeda.2
All these developments relating to the jihadist insurgency, the broader Syrian opposition, external supporting states, the Syrian regime and its internal and external backers will form the spine of this book’s narrative. The Syrian conflict and the jihadist insurgency evolved through a number of different phases. From the point at which the revolution began in early 2011 until mid-2012, the dominant theme was of a fledgling insurgency emerging amid an escalating regime crackdown on protest and opposition to its authority. The interplay between these two opposing dynamics ensured that the Syrian revolution turned into a bloody and complex civil conflict in which jihadist groups could establish a concrete foothold and integrate themselves within a broader cause widely seen as having legitimacy: fighting to protect Sunni civilians facing indiscriminate and brutal repression. Jabhat al-Nusra was the first such group to become active in Syria, announcing its emergence publicly in January 2012, six months after it had begun to form in the summer of 2011.
With nationwide conflict in Syria an established reality by mid-2012, the next phase was characterised by important insurgent victories that lasted until roughly mid-2013. While southern Syria was beginning to emerge as a key stronghold of moderate FSA factions with close links to neighbouring Jordan and also Saudi Arabia, the north was evolving into an environment more favourable to groups with an Islamic frame of reference, including jihadists. Through the winter of 2012–13 Islamists in northern Syria led a number of important strategic victories against the regime, thereby facilitating Jabhat al-Nusra’s integration into the wider insurgency. That the US designation of the group as a terrorist organisation in December 2012 sparked nationwide protests in support of Jabhat al-Nusra illustrated how quickly the group had begun to win a degree of broad acceptance among Sunnis. Meanwhile, other jihadist groups were forming in northern Syria, several led by Chechens and others by experienced militants from North Africa and the Middle East.
Following a period of dramatic insurgent victories, the tide began flowing in the Assad regime’s favour in mid-2013. After a concerted Hezbollah-led offensive succeeded in recapturing the town of al-Qusayr close to the Lebanese border in June 2013, the Syrian army—increasingly backed by Iran and foreign Shia militias—acquired a major morale boost, which led to a six-month period of opposition losses in Syria’s strategically vital western border with Lebanon and around the country’s largest city, Aleppo and the capital, Damascus. More than anything, this phase represented one of regime recovery rather than victory, and the long-term outcome was more of a strategic stalemate, in which neither the opposition, nor the jihadists, nor the regime and
its supporting militias were in a position decisively to ‘win’ the conflict. This may have been a motivating factor behind the regime’s otherwise hard to explain sarin gas attack on Damascus’s East Ghouta suburbs in August 2013, which killed over 1,400 people.
Such horrific atrocities notwithstanding, the arrival of ISIS in Syria in April–May 2013 opened a rift within the jihadist component of the insurgency in Syria, whereby Jabhat al-Nusra ended up breaking away from ISIS— its mother organisation. Throughout the final months of 2013, ISIS operated as an increasingly self-assertive actor willing to attack and aggressively undermine other groups standing in its way. As inter-factional tensions rose across northern Syria, the regime became the only beneficiary.
This dynamic continued into early 2014, when Syrian opposition patience with ISIS’s aggression ran out and a major offensive was launched against the group across northern and eastern Syria in January 2014. While the regime attempted to exploit the opening up of another front in the conflict, the major strategic shifts through mid-2014 were between ISIS and the remainder of the armed opposition, including Jabhat al-Nusra. ISIS sustained serious losses between January and March and withdrew altogether from three governorates, refocusing its forces around its power base in the northern city of Raqqa and in the eastern governorate of Deir ez Zour. Despite this, and perhaps in reaction to it, ISIS launched its own dramatic offensive in mid-2014 in Iraq, capturing the city of Mosul and marching south towards Baghdad, before proclaiming the establishment of a caliphate spanning parts of Iraq and Syria.
This dramatic series of events, and ISIS’s renaming of itself simply as Islamic State sent shock waves around the world, but particularly across Syria. A new inter-jihadist competitive dynamic had emerged to challenge the jihadist credibility of al-Qaeda, and in particular of Jabhat al-Nusra. However, the most strategically consequential shift sparked by IS’s successes was the initiation of US-led international military intervention—in the form of cruise missile and air strikes—against jihadist targets in Iraq (from August 2014) and Syria (from September 2014). This introduced a new and dangerous element of anti-Westernism into the conflict in Syria—especially within jihadist factions, but also across much of the wider opposition, which accused the West of willingly allowing over three years of civilian deaths at the Assad regime’s hands, only later to intervene against the jihadists. The real danger was in the effect that the strikes had in definitively creating a new international enemy in the eyes of IS and Jabhat al-Nusra—both of which had previously been focused solely on the local conflicts in Syria and Iraq.
As 2015 began, therefore, the conflict in Syria had become a complex web of local, national, regional and international dynamics, involving many different actors. A very large number of battlefronts were active within Syria’s borders, and jihadist militants continued to expand their influence. While the international community seemed more committed to countering IS in Iraq, it was becoming apparent that any anti-jihadist strategy in Syria remained limited more to counter-terrorism rather than a grand strategy aimed at eradicating these groups.
In March 2015 the broad scope of the insurgent ‘opposition’, including Jabhat al-Nusra, appeared to experience a significant boost, and by the end of the month a valuable Syria–Jordan border crossing had been captured and the city of Idlib had fallen into insurgent hands—only the second governorate capital to do so, after Raqqa. Insurgents inside Syria spoke at the time of increased levels of support being sent into Syria’s south and north by regional states increasingly self-confident after militarily intervening against Houthi advances in Yemen. Opposition forces consequently continued to win significant back-to-back victories in Idlib governorate through the summer, raising a question mark over the Assad regime’s potential to survive.
However, despite the rise in confidence and continued gains by the insurgency through the first months of 2015, the fact remained that both Jabhat al-Nusra and IS remained comfortably in place as major power-players in Syria. IS had spent several months preparing the ground for infiltrating areas around Damascus, further into Syria’s interior governorates of Homs and Hama, as well as into the south, and looked far from being an organisation weakened by international attack. Meanwhile, Jabhat al-Nusra remained an integral part of the northern insurgency, and was still notably strong in southern Syria. Multiple other jihadist factions remained active and influential across Syria, and thus it was hard to see anything but a continued and significant jihadist militant presence in Syria in the months and years to come.
At the end of the day, the story of Syria’s conflict and its evolution is extremely complex, but the trajectory of jihadist militancy within its ever-changing dynamics has steadily increased in scale and potential. A great many jihadist groups have emerged and established themselves on a local and sometimes national level in Syria, but generally, the pro-al-Qaeda, pro-IS and independent poles illustrate the entire jihadist landscape currently in existence. However, a crucial fourth pole is the expressly Syrian Salafist factions that largely retain similar conservative values as jihadists, but focus their existence solely within a Syrian operational perspective. Groups such as Harakat Ahrar al-Sham al-
Islamiyya (Ahrar al-Sham) and Jaish al-Islam, for example, have become invaluable links between jihadists and the broader insurgent opposition and, as long as these Salafists remain supportive and accepting of groups such as Jabhat alNusra, jihadists will reap the benefits of perceived legitimacy.
Simply put, and contrary to what many moderate FSA factions have said officially and on the record, a vast majority of Syria’s insurgent opposition has fought alongside and coordinated closely with Jabhat al-Nusra since mid-tolate 2012. While such cooperation takes place despite vast ideological differences, it has continued because an effective military opposition to the Assad regime has been a more important priority. There is, however, a better potential alternative to such cooperation with jihadists: a closer and more beneficial relationship with the international community.
Despite this, the Western world has failed to sufficiently reach out to, engage with and support a broad enough section of the opposition inside Syria to persuade others to cease their support for jihadists. This remarkable lack of commitment to reinforce a Syrian insurgent opposition has directly provided the space for jihadists to emerge as the dominant players in Syria that they are today. Unless this level of commitment changes, Syria will continue to represent the centre of the world for jihadist militancy for many years to come, and the consequences for such policy shortsightedness will not only fall upon Syria and Syrians, but will affect the world at large.
BREAKING DOWN THE BARRIERS
PROTEST
It took only twenty-eight days for the Tunisian people to overthrow their president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, from his twenty-three-year seat of near absolute power. That ‘revolution’—and indeed what has become known as the Arab Spring—was sparked by a single tragic act of desperation and personal protest by twenty-six-year-old street vendor Tarek al-Tayeb Mohammed Bouazizi, who self-immolated outside the office of the governor of Sidi Bouzid on 17 December 2010. Forced through personal circumstances to become the main breadwinner for his family at the age of ten, Bouazizi, who was locally known as ‘Basboosa’, had been unjustly tormented by local officials for years. That he was again harassed early that fateful morning in December 2010 catalysed his transformation into an icon overnight. His story, and his subsequent death on 4 January 2011, struck a nerve for many throughout the region.
Thirty-eight days later protesters in Egypt overthrew President Hosni Mubarak, whose authoritarian rule in that country had lasted nearly three decades. At this point, the long-held but unspoken regional norm of avoiding demonstrations of public political opposition was well and truly destroyed. By late February protests had erupted in at least fourteen other countries across the Middle East and North Africa, including in Libya, where an armed revolution would end up co-opting the support of NATO and end in Muammar Gaddafi’s death on 20 October 2011; and in Yemen, where sus-
tained political protest eventually forced President Ali Abdullah Saleh to resign on 27 February 2012.
The common understanding of the Syrian revolution holds that it began on 15 March 2011, but this doesn’t entirely tell the whole picture. In fact, the first notable incident of public protest against the government of President Bashar al-Assad took place in the north-eastern city of al-Hasakah on 26 January 2011, when a local man, Hasan Ali Akleh, poured a can of petrol over himself and set his body on fire. Although this act took place amid the tumult surrounding the proliferation in and escalation of various anti-government movements around the region, Akleh’s apparent act of desperate protest did not precipitate immediate demonstrations across Syria.
While pre-existing Syrian opposition groups did call, via Facebook and Twitter, for a ‘Day of Rage’ across the country on Friday 4 February, nothing of note took place, with one relatively minor exception: On the morning of 5 February several hundred protesters took part in a demonstration in alHasakah, but with minimal fanfare or consequence.
Nonetheless, the significance of regional events was having its effect. A violent assault on a shopkeeper in Damascus’a famous Souq al-Hamadiyya by police on 17 February triggered an impromptu protest, where locals repeatedly exclaimed: ‘Syria’s people will not be humiliated!’ Perhaps this represented the landmark moment, the modest turning-point in Syria’s political consciousness, whereby an individual act of government thuggery catalysed a psychological rethink. Approximately 5,000 people ended up taking part in the unplanned protest in al-Hamadiyya, which, considering the centrality of its location, made the incident a telling one.
The key catalyst came in a series of developments in the southern city of Deraa, beginning on 6 March, when fifteen schoolboys, aged between ten and fifteen, were arrested and detained by members of the Idaraat al-Amn alSiyasee (Political Security Directorate) for having painted the words al-Shaab yureed eskaat al-nizaam (‘The people want to topple the regime’) on a wall. The phrase had become well known as the slogan of the Arab Spring revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and although the children were clearly far too young to harbour genuinely threatening political motivations, they were nonetheless beaten and allegedly tortured in various ways, including by having their fingernails pulled out.1 Meanwhile, as reports of their detention spread throughout the country, acts of sporadic and planned protest spread, although still on a comparatively small scale.
On 7 March thirteen prominent political activists serving prison terms in the infamous Adra prison in the north-east suburbs of Damascus released a joint letter declaring themselves ‘prisoners of conscience’ and announcing the start of a hunger strike. This strike, they said, was predicated on their demand for a complete cessation of ‘political arrests’ and for the government to remove ‘injustices’ and to restore ‘rights that have been taken from civil and political life’.2 Included in the list of thirteen signatories was Anwar al-Bunni, a human rights lawyer who had been sentenced to five years in prison for signing— along with nearly 300 other academics and political activists—the May 2006 Beirut–Damascus Declaration, which called on the Syrian government to respect Lebanon’s independence and territorial integrity. Another hunger striker was eighty-year-old Haithem al-Maleh, a former judge and pro-democracy activist imprisoned in 2009 for ‘affecting the morale of the nation’ during a television interview on London-based opposition channel Barada TV.
The following day the government announced a presidential amnesty to political prisoners over the age of seventy—in honour of the fortieth anniversary of Hafez al-Assad’s endorsement as president of Syria on 12 March 1971—thereby freeing Haithem al-Maleh. Later that day twelve Syrian human rights groups demanded that the government ‘amend all laws that prevent human rights organisations from working openly and freely, and civil society from playing its role effectively’. The demands also focused on the rights of Syrian Kurds, who it said faced ‘all forms of discrimination’ and should immediately be ‘entitled to enjoy their culture and use of their language in accordance with their civil, cultural, social, and economic rights’.3
On 10 March several dozen imprisoned Kurdish activists from the Partiya Yekîtî (Kurdish Democratic Unity Party) and Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat (PYD, or Democratic Union Party) joined the hunger strike launched by prisoners in Adra, and two days later Kurdish protesters held demonstrations in the north-eastern cities of Qamishli and al-Hasakah.
As in other areas of the region, Kurds had long suffered from disproportionate levels of discrimination in Syria. Kurdish cultural gatherings, including for the annual New Year festival of Nowrūz, were effectively banned, and political gatherings were frequently met with violent repression. Such struggles had been an established reality for decades. In 1962, in a remarkable act of stateorganised ethnic discrimination, a Syrian census stripped 20 per cent of the Kurdish population—approximately 100,000–120,000 people—of their Syrian citizenship, leaving them officially stateless and classified as ajaanib (foreigners). At the time, the government claimed that these Kurds were in fact
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"Five o'clock from Victoria, sir."
"That's right. You will come with me, Knighton. Tell my man, Archer, and pack your own things. See to everything here. I want to go round to Curzon Street."
The telephone rang sharply, and the secretary lifted the receiver.
"Yes; who is it?"
Then to Van Aldin.
"Mr. Goby, sir."
"Goby? I can't see him now No—wait, we have plenty of time. Tell them to send him up."
Van Aldin was a strong man. Already he had recovered that iron calm of his. Few people would have noticed anything amiss in his greeting to Mr. Goby.
"I am pressed for time, Goby. Got anything important to tell me?"
Mr. Goby coughed.
"The movements of Mr. Kettering, sir. You wished them reported to you."
"Yes—well?"
"Mr. Kettering, sir, left London for the Riviera yesterday morning."
"What?"
Something in his voice must have startled Mr Goby That worthy gentleman departed from his usual practice of never looking at the person to whom he was talking, and stole a fleeting glance at the millionaire.
"What train did he go on?" demanded Van Aldin.
"The Blue Train, sir."
Mr. Goby coughed again and spoke to the clock on the mantelpiece.
"Mademoiselle Mirelle, the dancer from the Parthenon, went by the same train."
14. Ada Mason's Story
"I cannot repeat to you often enough, Monsieur, our horror, our consternation, and the deep sympathy we feel for you."
Thus M. Carrège, the Juge d'Instruction, addressed Van Aldin. M. Caux, the Commissary, made sympathetic noises in his throat. Van Aldin brushed away horror, consternation, and sympathy with an abrupt gesture. The scene was the Examining Magistrate's room at Nice. Besides M. Carrège, the Commissary, and Van Aldin, there was a further person in the room. It was that person who now spoke.
"M. Van Aldin," he said, "desires action—swift action."
"Ah!" cried the Commissary, "I have not yet presented you. M. Van Aldin, this is M. Hercule Poirot; you have doubtless heard of him. Although he has retired from his profession for some years now, his name is still a household word as one of the greatest living detectives."
"Pleased to meet you, M. Poirot," said Van Aldin, falling back mechanically on a formula that he had discarded some years ago. "You have retired from your profession?"
"That is so, Monsieur. Now I enjoy the world."
The little man made a grandiloquent gesture.
"M. Poirot happened to be travelling on the Blue Train," explained the Commissary, "and he has been so kind as to assist us out of his vast experience."
The millionaire looked at Poirot keenly. Then he said unexpectedly:
"I am a very rich man, M. Poirot. It is usually said that a rich man labours under the belief that he can buy everything and every one. That is not true. I am a big man in my way, and one big man can ask a favour from another big man."
Poirot nodded a quick appreciation.
"That is very well said, M. Van Aldin. I place myself entirely at your service."
"Thank you," said Van Aldin "I can only say call upon me at any time, and you will not find me ungrateful. And now, gentlemen, to business."
"I propose," said M. Carrège, "to interrogate the maid, Ada Mason. You have her here, I understand?"
"Yes," said Van Aldin. "We picked her up in Paris in passing through. She was very upset to hear of her mistress's death, but she tells her story coherently enough."
"We will have her in, then," said M. Carrège.
He rang the bell on his desk, and in a few minutes Ada Mason entered the room.
She was very neatly dressed in black, and the tip of her nose was red. She had exchanged her grey travelling gloves for a pair of black suède ones. She cast a look round the Examining Magistrate's office in some trepidation, and seemed relieved at the presence of her mistress's father The Examining Magistrate prided himself on his geniality of manner, and did his best to put her at her ease. He was helped in this by Poirot, who acted as interpreter, and whose friendly manner was reassuring to the Englishwoman.
"Your name is Ada Mason; is that right?"
"Ada Beatrice I was christened, sir," said Mason primly.
"Just so. And we can understand, Mason, that this has all been very distressing."
"Oh, indeed it has, sir. I have been with many ladies and always given satisfaction, I hope, and I never dreamt of anything of this kind happening in any situation where I was."
"No, no," said M. Carrège.
"Naturally I have read of such things, of course, in the Sunday papers. And then I always have understood that those foreign trains
—" She suddenly checked her flow, remembering that the gentlemen who were speaking to her were of the same nationality as the trains.
"Now let us talk this affair over," said M. Carrège. "There was, I understand, no question of your staying in Paris when you started from London?"
"Oh no, sir. We were to go straight through to Nice."
"Have you ever been abroad with your mistress before?"
"No, sir. I had only been with her two months, you see."
"Did she seem quite as usual when starting on this journey?"
"She was worried like and a bit upset, and she was rather irritable and difficult to please."
M. Carrège nodded.
"Now then, Mason, what was the first you heard of your stopping in Paris?"
"It was at the place they call the Gare de Lyon, sir. My mistress was thinking of getting out and walking up and down the platform. She was just going out into the corridor when she gave a sudden exclamation, and came back into her compartment with a gentleman. She shut the door between her carriage and mine, so that I didn't see or hear anything, till she suddenly opened it again and told me that she had changed her plans. She gave me some money and told me to get out and go to the Ritz. They knew her well there, she said, and would give me a room. I was to wait there until I heard from her; she would wire me what she wanted me to do. I had just time to get my things together and jump out of the train before it started off. It was a rush."
"While Mrs. Kettering was telling you this, where was the gentleman?"
"He was standing in the other compartment, sir, looking out of the window."
"Can you describe him to us?"
"Well, you see, sir, I hardly saw him. He had his back to me most of the time. He was a tall gentleman and dark; that's all I can say. He was dressed very like any other gentleman in a dark blue overcoat and a grey hat."
"Was he one of the passengers on the train?"
"I don't think so, sir; I took it that he had come to the station to see Mrs. Kettering in passing through. Of course he might have been one of the passengers; I never thought of that."
Mason seemed a little flurried by the suggestion.
"Ah!" M. Carrège passed lightly to another subject. "Your mistress later requested the conductor not to rouse her early in the morning. Was that a likely thing for her to do, do you think?"
"Oh yes, sir. The mistress never ate any breakfast and she didn't sleep well at nights, so that she liked sleeping on in the morning."
Again M. Carrège passed to another subject.
"Amongst the luggage there was a scarlet morocco case, was there not?" he asked. "Your mistress's jewel-case?"
"Yes, sir."
"Did you take that case to the Ritz?"
"Me take the mistress's jewel-case to the Ritz! Oh no, indeed, sir." Mason's tones were horrified.
"You left it behind you in the carriage?"
"Yes, sir."
"Had your mistress many jewels with her, do you know?"
"A fair amount, sir; made me a bit uneasy sometimes, I can tell you, with those nasty tales you hear of being robbed in foreign countries. They were insured, I know, but all the same it seemed a frightful risk. Why, the rubies alone, the mistress told me, were worth several hundred thousand pounds."
"The rubies! What rubies?" barked Van Aldin suddenly.
Mason turned to him.
"I think it was you who gave them to her, sir, not very long ago."
"My God!" cried Van Aldin. "You don't say she had those rubies with her? I told her to leave them at the Bank."
Mason gave once more the discreet cough which was apparently part of her stock-in-trade as a lady's maid. This time it expressed a good deal. It expressed far more clearly than words could have done, that Mason's mistress had been a lady who took her own way.
"Ruth must have been mad," muttered Van Aldin. "What on earth could have possessed her?"
M. Carrège in turn gave vent to a cough, again a cough of significance. It riveted Van Aldin's attention on him.
"For the moment," said M. Carrège, addressing Mason, "I think that is all. If you will go into the next room, Mademoiselle, they will read over to you the questions and answers, and you will sign accordingly."
Mason went out escorted by the clerk, and Van Aldin said immediately to the Magistrate: "Well?"
M. Carrège opened a drawer in his desk, took out a letter, and handed it across to Van Aldin.
"This was found in Madame's handbag."
"Chère Amie" (the letter ran)—"I will obey you; I will be prudent, discreet—all those things that a lover most hates. Paris would perhaps have been unwise, but the Isles d'Or are far away from the world, and you may be assured that nothing will leak out. It is like you and your divine sympathy to be so interested in the work on famous jewels that I am writing. It will, indeed, be an extraordinary privilege to actually see and handle these historic rubies. I am devoting a special passage to 'Heart of Fire.' My wonderful one! Soon I will make up to you for all those sad years of separation and emptiness.—Your ever-adoring,
"Armand."
15. The Comte de la Roche
Van Aldin read the letter through in silence. His face turned a dull angry crimson. The men watching him saw the veins start out on his forehead, and his big hands clench themselves unconsciously. He handed back the letter without a word. M. Carrège was looking with close attention at his desk, M. Caux's eyes were fixed upon the ceiling, and M. Hercule Poirot was tenderly brushing a speck of dust from his coat sleeve. With the greatest tact they none of them looked at Van Aldin.
It was M. Carrège, mindful of his status and his duties, who tackled the unpleasant subject.
"Perhaps, Monsieur," he murmured, "you are aware by whom—er— this letter was written?"
"Yes, I know," said Van Aldin heavily "Ah?" said the Magistrate inquiringly.
"A scoundrel who calls himself the Comte de la Roche."
There was a pause; then M. Poirot leaned forward, straightened a ruler on the judge's desk, and addressed the millionaire directly.
"M. Van Aldin, we are all sensible, deeply sensible, of the pain it must give you to speak of these matters, but believe me, Monsieur, it is not the time for concealments. If justice is to be done, we must know everything. If you will reflect a little minute you will realize the truth of that clearly for yourself."
Van Aldin was silent for a moment or two, then almost reluctantly he nodded his head in agreement.
"You are quite right, M. Poirot," he said. "Painful as it is, I have no right to keep anything back."
The Commissary gave a sigh of relief, and the Examining Magistrate leaned back in his chair and adjusted a pince-nez on his long thin nose.
"Perhaps you will tell us in your own words, M. Van Aldin," he said, "all that you know of this gentleman."
"It began eleven or twelve years ago—in Paris. My daughter was a young girl then, full of foolish, romantic notions, like all young girls are. Unknown to me, she made the acquaintance of this Comte de la Roche. You have heard of him, perhaps?"
The Commissary and Poirot nodded in assent.
"He calls himself the Comte de la Roche," continued Van Aldin, "but I doubt if he has any right to the title."
"You would not have found his name in the Almanach de Gotha," agreed the Commissary.
"I discovered as much," said Van Aldin. "The man was a goodlooking, plausible scoundrel, with a fatal fascination for women. Ruth was infatuated with him, but I soon put a stop to the whole affair. The man was no better than a common swindler."
"You are quite right," said the Commissary. "The Comte de la Roche is well known to us. If it were possible, we should have laid him by the heels before now, but ma foi! it is not easy; the fellow is cunning,
his affairs are always conducted with ladies of high social position. If he obtains money from them under false pretences or as the fruit of blackmail, eh bien! naturally they will not prosecute. To look foolish in the eyes of the world, oh no, that would never do, and he has an extraordinary power over women."
"That is so," said the millionaire heavily. "Well, as I told you, I broke the affair up pretty sharply. I told Ruth exactly what he was, and she had, perforce, to believe me. About a year afterwards, she met her present husband and married him. As far as I knew, that was the end of the matter; but only a week ago, I discovered, to my amazement, that my daughter had resumed her acquaintance with the Comte de la Roche. She had been meeting him frequently in London and Paris. I remonstrated with her on her imprudence, for I may tell you gentlemen, that, on my insistence, she was preparing to bring a suit for divorce against her husband."
"That is interesting," murmured Poirot softly, his eyes on the ceiling.
Van Aldin looked at him sharply, and then went on.
"I pointed out to her the folly of continuing to see the Comte under the circumstances. I thought she agreed with me."
The Examining Magistrate coughed delicately.
"But according to this letter—" he began, and then stopped.
Van Aldin's jaw set itself squarely.
"I know. It's no good mincing matters. However unpleasant, we have got to face facts. It seems clear that Ruth had arranged to go to Paris and meet de la Roche there. After my warnings to her, however, she must have written to the Count suggesting a change of rendezvous."
"The Isles d'Or," said the Commissary thoughtfully, "are situated just opposite Hyères, a remote and idyllic spot."
Van Aldin nodded.
"My God! How could Ruth be such a fool?" he exclaimed bitterly. "All this talk about writing a book on jewels! Why, he must have been
after the rubies from the first."
"There are some very famous rubies," said Poirot, "originally part of the Crown jewels of Russia; they are unique in character, and their value is almost fabulous. There has been a rumour that they have lately passed into the possession of an American. Are we right in concluding, Monsieur, that you were the purchaser?"
"Yes," said Van Aldin. "They came into my possession in Paris about ten days ago."
"Pardon me, Monsieur, but you have been negotiating for their purchase for some time?"
"A little over two months. Why?"
"These things become known," said Poirot. "There is always a pretty formidable crowd on the track of jewels such as these."
A spasm distorted the other's face.
"I remember," he said brokenly, "a joke I made to Ruth when I gave them to her. I told her not to take them to the Riviera with her, as I could not afford to have her robbed and murdered for the sake of the jewels. My God! the things one says—never dreaming or knowing they will come true."
There was a sympathetic silence, and then Poirot spoke in a detached manner.
"Let us arrange our facts with order and precision. According to our present theory, this is how they run. The Comte de la Roche knows of your purchase of these jewels. By an easy stratagem he induces Madame Kettering to bring the stones with her. He, then, is the man Mason saw in the train at Paris."
The other three nodded in agreement.
"Madame is surprised to see him, but she deals with the situation promptly. Mason is got out of the way; a dinner basket is ordered. We know from the conductor that he made up the berth for the first compartment, but he did not go into the second compartment, and that a man could quite well have been concealed from him. So far
the Comte could have been hidden to a marvel. No one knows of his presence on the train except Madame; he has been careful that the maid did not see his face. All that she could say is that he was tall and dark. It is all most conveniently vague. They are alone—and the train rushes through the night. There would be no outcry, no struggle, for the man is, so she thinks, her lover."
He turned gently to Van Aldin.
"Death, Monsieur, must have been almost instantaneous. We will pass over that quickly. The Comte takes the jewel-case which lies ready to his hand. Shortly afterwards the train draws into Lyons."
M. Carrège nodded his approval.
"Precisely. The conductor without descends. It would be easy for our man to leave the train unseen; it would be easy to catch a train back to Paris or anywhere he pleases. And the crime would be put down as an ordinary train robbery. But for the letter found in Madame's bag, the Comte would not have been mentioned."
"It was an oversight on his part not to search that bag," declared the Commissary.
"Without doubt he thought she had destroyed that letter. It was— pardon me, Monsieur—it was an indiscretion of the first water to keep it."
"And yet," murmured Poirot, "it was an indiscretion the Comte might have foreseen."
"You mean?"
"I mean we are all agreed on one point, and that is that the Comte de la Roche knows one subject à fond: Women. How was it that, knowing women as he does, he did not foresee that Madame would have kept that letter?"
"Yes—yes," said the Examining Magistrate doubtfully, "there is something in what you say. But at such times, you understand, a man is not master of himself. He does not reason calmly Mon Dieu!" he added, with feeling, "if our criminals kept their heads and acted with intelligence, how should we capture them?"
Poirot smiled to himself.
"It seems to me a clear case," said the other, "but a difficult one to prove. The Comte is a slippery customer, and unless the maid can identify him—"
"Which is most unlikely," said Poirot.
"True, true." The Examining Magistrate rubbed his chin. "It is going to be difficult."
"If he did indeed commit the crime—" began Poirot. M. Caux interrupted.
"If—you say if?"
"Yes, Monsieur le Juge, I say if."
The other looked at him sharply. "You are right," he said at last, "we go too fast. It is possible that the Comte may have an alibi. Then we should look foolish."
"Ah, ça par exemple," replied Poirot, "that is of no importance whatever. Naturally, if he committed the crime he will have an alibi. A man with the Comte's experience does not neglect to take precautions. No, I said if for a very different reason."
"And what was that?"
Poirot wagged an emphatic forefinger. "The psychology." "Eh?" said the Commissary.
"The psychology is at fault. The Comte is a scoundrel—yes. The Comte is a swindler—yes. The Comte preys upon women—yes. He proposes to steal Madame's jewels—again yes. Is he the kind of man to commit murder? I say no! A man of the type of the Comte is always a coward; he takes no risks. He plays the safe, the mean, what the English call the low-down game; but murder, a hundred times no!" He shook his head in a dissatisfied manner.
The Examining Magistrate, however, did not seem disposed to agree with him.
"The day always comes when such gentry lose their heads and go too far," he observed sagely. "Doubtless that is the case here. Without wishing to disagree with you, M. Poirot—"
"It was only an opinion," Poirot hastened to explain. "The case is, of course, in your hands, and you will do what seems fit to you."
"I am satisfied in my own mind that the Comte de la Roche is the man we need to get hold of," said M. Carrège. "You agree with me, Monsieur le Commissaire?"
"Perfectly."
"And you, M. Van Aldin?"
"Yes," said the millionaire. "Yes; the man is a thorough-paced villain, no doubt about it."
"It will be difficult to lay hands on him, I am afraid," said the Magistrate, "but we will do our best. Telegraphed instructions shall go out at once."
"Permit me to assist you," said Poirot. "There need be no difficulty." "Eh?"
The others stared at him. The little man smiled beamingly back at them.
"It is my business to know things," he explained. "The Comte is a man of intelligence. He is at present at a villa he has leased, the Villa Marina at Antibes."
16. Poirot Discusses the Case
Everybody looked respectfully at Poirot. Undoubtedly the little man had scored heavily. The Commissary laughed—on a rather hollow note.
"You teach us all our business," he cried. "M. Poirot knows more than the police."
Poirot gazed complacently at the ceiling, adopting a mock-modest air.
"What will you; it is my little hobby," he murmured, "to know things. Naturally I have the time to indulge it. I am not overburdened with affairs."
"Ah!" said the Commissary shaking his head portentously. "As for me —"
He made an exaggerated gesture to represent the cares that lay on his shoulders.
Poirot turned suddenly to Van Aldin.
"You agree, Monsieur, with this view? You feel certain that the Comte de la Roche is the murderer?"
"Why, it would seem so—yes, certainly."
Something guarded in the answer made the Examining Magistrate look at the American curiously. Van Aldin seemed aware of his scrutiny and made an effort as though to shake off some preoccupation.
"What about my son-in-law?" he asked. "You have acquainted him with the news? He is in Nice, I understand."
"Certainly, Monsieur." The Commissary hesitated, and then murmured very discreetly: "You are doubtless aware, M. Van Aldin, that M. Kettering was also one of the passengers on the Blue Train that night?"
The millionaire nodded.
"Heard it just before I left London," he vouchsafed laconically.
"He tells us," continued the Commissary, "that he had no idea his wife was travelling on the train."
"I bet he hadn't," said Van Aldin grimly. "It would have been rather a nasty shock to him if he'd come across her on it."
The three men looked at him questioningly
"I'm not going to mince matters," said Van Aldin savagely. "No one knows what my poor girl has had to put up with. Derek Kettering wasn't alone. He had a lady with him."
"Ah?"
"Mirelle—the dancer."
M. Carrège and the Commissary looked at each other and nodded as though confirming some previous conversation. M. Carrège leaned back in his chair, joined his hands, and fixed his eyes on the ceiling.
"Ah!" he murmured again. "One wondered." He coughed. "One has heard rumours."
"The lady," said M. Caux, "is very notorious."
"And also," murmured Poirot softly, "very expensive."
Van Aldin had gone very red in the face. He leant forward and hit the table a bang with his fist.
"See here," he cried, "my son-in-law is a damned scoundrel!"
He glared at them, looking from one face to another.
"Oh, I know," he went on. "Good looks and a charming, easy manner. It took me in once upon a time. I suppose he pretended to be broken-hearted when you broke the news to him—that is, if he didn't know it already."
"Oh, it came as a complete surprise to him. He was overwhelmed."
"Darned young hypocrite," said Van Aldin. "Simulated great grief, I suppose?"
"N—no," said the Commissary cautiously. "I would not quite say that —eh, M. Carrège?"
The Magistrate brought the tips of his fingers together, and half closed his eyes.
"Shock, bewilderment, horror—these things, yes," he declared judicially. "Great sorrow—no—I should not say that."
Hercule Poirot spoke once more.
"Permit me to ask, M. Van Aldin, does M. Kettering benefit by the death of his wife?"
"He benefits to the tune of a couple of millions," said Van Aldin.
"Dollars?"
"Pounds. I settled that sum on Ruth absolutely on her marriage. She made no will and leaves no children, so the money will go to her husband."
"Whom she was on the point of divorcing," murmured Poirot. "Ah, yes—précisément."
The Commissary turned and looked sharply at him.
"Do you mean—" he began.
"I mean nothing," said Poirot. "I arrange the facts, that is all."
Van Aldin stared at him with awakening interest.
The little man rose to his feet.
"I do not think I can be of any further service to you, M. le Juge," he said politely, bowing to M. Carrège. "You will keep me informed of the course of events? It will be a kindness."
"But certainly—most certainly."
Van Aldin rose also.
"You don't want me any more at present?"
"No, Monsieur; we have all the information we need for the moment."
"Then I will walk a little way with M. Poirot. That is, if he does not object?"
"Enchanted, Monsieur," said the little man, with a bow.
Van Aldin lighted a large cigar, having first offered one to Poirot, who declined it and lit one of his own tiny cigarettes. A man of great
strength of character, Van Aldin already appeared to be his everyday, normal self once more. After strolling along for a minute or two in silence, the millionaire spoke:
"I take it, M. Poirot, that you no longer exercise your profession?"
"That is so, Monsieur. I enjoy the world."
"Yet you are assisting the police in this affair?"
"Monsieur, if a doctor walks along the street and an accident happens, does he say, 'I have retired from my profession, I will continue my walk,' when there is some one bleeding to death at his feet? If I had been already in Nice, and the police had sent to me and asked me to assist them, I should have refused. But this affair, the good God thrust it upon me."
"You were on the spot," said Van Aldin thoughtfully. "You examined the compartment, did you not?"
Poirot nodded.
"Doubtless you found things that were, shall we say, suggestive to you?"
"Perhaps," said Poirot.
"I hope you see what I am leading up to?" said Van Aldin. "It seems to me that the case against this Comte de la Roche is perfectly clear, but I am not a fool. I have been watching you for this last hour or so, and I realize that for some reason of your own you don't agree with that theory?"
Poirot shrugged his shoulders.
"I may be wrong."
"So we come to the favour I want to ask you. Will you act in this matter for me?"
"For you personally?"
"That was my meaning."
Poirot was silent for a moment or two. Then he said:
"You realize what you are asking?"
"I guess so," said Van Aldin.
"Very well," said Poirot. "I accept. But in that case, I must have frank answers to my questions."
"Why, certainly. That is understood."
Poirot's manner changed. He became suddenly brusque and business-like.
"This question of a divorce," he said. "It was you who advised your daughter to bring the suit?"
"Yes."
"When?"
"About ten days ago. I had had a letter from her complaining of her husband's behaviour, and I put it to her very strongly that divorce was the only remedy."
"In what way did she complain of his behaviour?"
"He was being seen about with a very notorious lady—the one we have been speaking of—Mirelle."
"The dancer. Ah-ha! And Madame Kettering objected? Was she very devoted to her husband?"
"I would not say that," said Van Aldin, hesitating a little.
"It was not her heart that suffered, it was her pride—is that what you would say?"
"Yes, I suppose you might put it like that."
"I gather that the marriage had not been a happy one from the beginning?"
"Derek Kettering is rotten to the core," said Van Aldin. "He is incapable of making any woman happy."
"He is, as you say in England, a bad lot. That is right, is it not?"
Van Aldin nodded.
"Très bien! You advise Madame to seek a divorce, she agrees; you consult your solicitors. When does M. Kettering get news of what is in the wind?"
"I sent for him myself, and explained the course of action I proposed to take."
"And what did he say?" murmured Poirot softly.
Van Aldin's face darkened at the remembrance.
"He was infernally impudent."
"Excuse the question, Monsieur, but did he refer to the Comte de la Roche?"
"Not by name," growled the other unwillingly, "but he showed himself cognizant of the affair."
"What, if I may ask, was M. Kettering's financial position at the time?"
"How do you suppose I should know that?" asked Van Aldin, after a very brief hesitation.
"It seemed likely to me that you would inform yourself on that point."
"Well—you are quite right, I did. I discovered that Kettering was on the rocks."
"And now he has inherited two million pounds! La vie—it is a strange thing, is it not?"
Van Aldin looked at him sharply.
"What do you mean?"
"I moralize," said Poirot. "I reflect, I speak the philosophy. But to return to where we were. Surely M. Kettering did not propose to allow himself to be divorced without making a fight for it?"
Van Aldin did not answer for a minute or two, then he said:
"I don't exactly know what his intentions were."
"Did you hold any further communications with him?"
Again a slight pause, then Van Aldin said:
"No."
Poirot stopped dead, took off his hat, and held out his hand.
"I must wish you good-day, Monsieur. I can do nothing for you."
"What are you getting at?" demanded Van Aldin angrily.
"If you do not tell me the truth, I can do nothing."
"I don't know what you mean."
"I think you do. You may rest assured, M. Van Aldin, that I know how to be discreet."
"Very well, then," said the millionaire. "I'll admit that I was not speaking the truth just now. I did have further communication with my son-in-law."
"Yes?"
"To be exact, I sent my secretary, Major Knighton, to see him, with instructions to offer him the sum of one hundred thousand pounds in cash if the divorce went through undefended."
"A pretty sum of money," said Poirot appreciatively; "and the answer of Monsieur your son-in-law?"
"He sent back word that I could go to hell," replied the millionaire succinctly.
"Ah!" said Poirot.
He betrayed no emotion of any kind. At the moment he was engaged in methodically recording facts.
"Monsieur Kettering has told the police that he neither saw nor spoke to his wife on the journey from England. Are you inclined to believe that statement, Monsieur?"
"Yes, I am," said Van Aldin. "He would take particular pains to keep out of her way, I should say."
"Why?"
"Because he had got that woman with him."
