How the War Against ISIS Was Won, Before It Was Lost
If you ask an Istanbullu where to find plant food or pesticide, you will be directed to a shopping arcade in an underpass beside the Galata Bridge, in the neighborhood of Karaköy, where these items are sold in rows of identical shops. Fishing equipment is sold a few blocks over, where nets and harpoons hang from awnings and mannequins in wetsuits clutter the sidewalks. A little farther along are the shops that sell construction supplies, crowded together along the narrow streets of the Perşembe Pazarı, one after another, hard to tell apart. Neighborhoods like these are vestiges of another age in the timeworn city, before the internet and the phone book, when buying a certain thing meant going to a certain place—engagement rings in Nişantaşı, wood products in Tahtakale. Modern Istanbul has its chain stores and shopping malls but also plenty of areas where the old style remains, if for no other reason than the classic Turkish mind-set that says, Because things have always been this way. Down the hill from central Istanbul’s Taksim Square is Çukurcuma, home to the antique sellers. Farther west, in Galata, are shops stacked with musical instruments. On the nearby hilltop in Şişhane, store windows are filled with light fixtures, glittering above the sea. Eminönü has the spice bazaar, and Sultanahmet is home to the carpet traders. Aksaray, a working-class neighborhood in the heart of the conservative Fatih district, is home to the human traffickers.
The neighborhood was founded in the 15th century by migrants from a region in central Turkey of the same name. They were brought to Istanbul by its conqueror, Mehmet II, to help populate the city with ethnic Turks after his victory over the Greeks. The transitory feel of the place has continued into the present day. Aksaray is home to the city’s main bus depot, a seething compound that sees long-haul arrivals from places as far as the Balkans and Iran. Traces remain of the immigrant communities that have sprouted in the neighborhood over the years, from the riotous Georgian restaurant hidden in a corner of the bus depot to the Iraqi café and Iranian restaurant on the streets around it. In the fall of 2012, Munzer al-Awad, a Syrian journalist with whom I’d eventually partner to cover the Islamic State and the criminal networks across Turkey that supported it, stepped out from a taxi and into the disorienting crush of Aksaray for the first time. He was surprised to find new Syrian restaurants along its streets. Syrian refugees like him crowded by the hundreds into its parks and squares as agents of the human traffickers canvassed among them, working to fill their smuggling boats.
He had arrived at the Istanbul airport two hours earlier, still caught in the mental fog that trailed him after his confinement and torture in one of the Assad regime’s prisons. The only thing he could communicate to the taxi driver was that he was Syrian, and so the man drove him to Aksaray. Unsure what to do with himself, Munzer found a cheap hotel, sat at the bar, and ordered a drink.
Refugees like Munzer had been receiving this sort of welcome to Aksaray for decades. Before Syrians, it was Iraqis fleeing the carnage of the U.S. war. In the 1980s, it was Iranians, fleeing the newly established Islamic Republic. All of them were directed to smugglers who worked from hotels and offices and seemed to be part of Aksaray, as enduring as the medieval fountains along the busy streets. The particular smugglers changed with whatever national or ethnic group was passing through at a given time, taking over from the traffickers who’d come before them, always with the Turkish Mafia providing protection from police. The traffickers sent their charges onward to Europe and beyond: by plane; via the land borders with Greece and Bulgaria, both a three-hour drive away; and on dangerous voyages in overcrowded migrant ships.
By the time Munzer and I began working together, in the fall of 2014, the Syrian-refugee crisis had become the worst in modern history. People were fleeing ISIS as well as the daily bombardment by the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and more, Syria’s secret police, arrested him at his home, and he was thrown into the unlit basement of a prison. For years he would tell me only outlines of what had happened to him—that he’d been tortured repeatedly, that he’d tripped over dead bodies in the pitch black of his crowded cell. I knew that he’d been released only by what he considered a freak chance and that the rest of the dozens of people he was imprisoned with were almost certainly dead. In a database run by a monitoring group in an effort to keep track of the tens of thousands of men and women who’d disappeared into the regime’s prisons, Munzer himself was listed as deceased.
