Vogue
Abdalaziz Alhamza was only 20 years old when life as he knew it came to a crashing halt. He was a college student in his Northern Syrian hometown of Raqqa, studying biochemistry with the intention of becoming a pharmacist, hanging out with friends, playing soccer, smoking cigarettes. Alhamza, who goes by Aziz, had never been particularly political, but when demonstrations against the autocratic regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad began bubbling up in the wake of the Arab Spring, he joined the fray. Noticing that local news outlets were ignoring the very newsworthy protests, he began to film demonstrations with his phone, posting the videos online, where they were picked up by a handful of Arabic television channels.
Alhamza imagined the revolution would be over in six months. Opposition forces liberated Raqqa in 2013, but six years after it began, war in Syria is still very much raging. In early 2014, ISIS troops moved into Raqqa, took the city, and dubbed it a capital of the Islamic State. Alhamza was arrested three times by the Assad regime, tortured, and held for as long as 45 days. When ISIS seized power, they came for him, too, and he was forced to flee to Turkey. Later he went to Germany, where he now lives.
At 25, Alhamza has gone from regular college kid to heroic citizen journalist, one of a network of correspondents who operate an activist news service called Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently. Its goal, as expressed on its website, is to “expose the atrocities committed by the regime of Bashar Al-Assad and terrorist extremist group ‘the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’ ISIS toward the civilian populations if [sic] the city.” Those RBSS members who remain inside Raqqa under tyrannical ISIS rule risk their lives to smuggle out dispatches; those, like Alhamza, who have been forced into exile and live abroad in fear of ISIS death threats, publish those dispatches on the Internet. RBSS footage, which is frequently used by major international news outlets, offers a rare window into what life is really like in Syria, a narrative that cuts against the Islamic State’s robust propaganda machine.
Alhamza, who speaks excellent English, is something of a spokesperson for the group. He and several of his RBSS colleagues are now the subject of a documentary called City of Ghosts, by Cartel Land director Matthew Heineman. The film is about the work the group does—there are many scenes of activists hunched over their laptops, discussing the logistics of encrypting and uploading video files—but it’s also about the effects of the work on the people doing it. In addition to Alhamza, the film focuses on Mohamad, a former high school math teacher, who travels with his wife to Germany, where they move from safe house to safe house, longing to make a home of their own, even against an advancing tide of anti-immigrant nationalism; and Hamoud, a hermetic videographer, whose father was recently assassinated by ISIS. We watch as a very stoic Hamoud watches a highly stylized, horrifically graphic ISIS propaganda video of his father’s execution. Later, he dabs at his mouth with a cloth that comes away bloody. When he gets angry, Hamoud tells us, he has a tooth that bleeds. Grief, we can presume, works in strange ways; the stress of war and the effects of terror will find some form of expression.
“It’s a very human story,” says Heineman, seated beside Alhamza at a conference table in an out-of-the-way office building in New York City. “I started out making this story about the information war between ISIS and RBSS, this war of ideas, this war of propaganda. But the film becomes much more than that: It became an immigrant story, a story of finding oneself in a new land, of rising nationalism in Europe, of the cumulative effects of trauma, as we see so vividly in the end of the film.”
He’s referring to one of his documentary’s last scenes: Alhamza has just been alerted by the German police to something he already knows, that ISIS has a call out for his head. We watch as he waives the right to police protection, solemnly removes his name from his mailbox, enters his apartment, sits down, and lights a cigarette. Then he buries his face in his hands and trembles. Heineman keeps his camera trained on his subject’s quaking body for an unusually long shot. Like the ISIS video of Hamoud’s father’s murder, like Hamoud’s eerie bleeding tooth, it’s incredibly disturbing to witness. It’s also a powerful reminder that we cannot—dare not—turn a blind eye to what’s happening to the people of Syria.
Months later when I meet him in New York, Alhamza looks like any other 20-something hipster: He’s thickly bearded and wearing shorts, a black Jack and Jones T-shirt, a flat-brim hat, sticker still affixed to the underside. He’s got a lethargic way of speaking, and eyes that dart around as he talks. When he notices a high-pitched droning noise with no clear source, he becomes visibly agitated, stands up, checks the electrical sockets in the wall behind me and lays his ear flat against the drywall.
“What’s this noise?” he asks Heineman. “What is it?”
“I think it’s the air,” the director speculates, pointing at some vents. Alhamza casts his eyes around the room, and reluctantly returns to his seat. I’m reminded of something he mentioned earlier about growing up in Syria under Assad: “I used to hear that the walls have ears; everyone is like a spy.”
A couple days after we spoke, U.S.-backed Syrian forces took control of the last road into Raqqa. Earlier today, Alhamza published an op-ed in the New York Times. “Reclaiming the city will not be enough,” he writes. “We must continue to fight against the ideology of ISIS. Our group works diligently to point out the hypocrisy and the lies of ISIS’s media campaign—an act of resistance that the terror group does not like.” He ends with a promise: “We continue our mission in the hope that one day our words and images will defeat their weapons.”
RBSS will continue to fight. But for Alhamza, journalism is a necessity, not a calling. When I ask about his dreams for the future, for the day he can hopefully return to Raqqa and resume the life that was so suddenly interrupted, he’s clear on what he wants. “I’m not going to do anything,” he insists, sounding for the first time like a 25-year-old. “I’m going to stay home, relax, smoke cigarettes, and invite my friends to come to Raqqa.”
Below, more from my conversation with Alhamza and Heineman about City of Ghosts.
RBSS was founded to fill a void left by the international press, who wasn’t paying attention to what was happening in Raqqa and elsewhere in Syria. Matt, at one point did you start paying attention?
MATTHEW HEINEMAN: Like any person who reads the newspaper, I was aware of what was happening in Syria. I can’t say I necessarily fully appreciated what was happening or was emotionally connected. And then I was traveling around with my last film, Cartel Land, and trying to understand this phenomenon that was becoming front-page news, and I started reading voraciously about what was happening. I came across this story by David Remnick in the New Yorker, about Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, this group of friends who banded together to document the atrocities of ISIS in their hometown of Raqqa. I knew this was my way into the topic. I reached out to the guys, and about a week later, I was filming. So often these large issues—Syria, ISIS—get relegated to headlines or stats or photos. And one of my goals was to really put a human face on the topic, to allow audience members to go on this visceral journey. And hopefully in doing so, creating a tiny bit more empathy toward, first and foremost, this group, and then the situation in Raqqa, and more broadly in Syria.
We see a lot of footage of RBSS members living abroad in hiding. How did you weigh the risks and rewards of giving the group broader exposure?
MH: Right from the beginning, we had very frank conversations about the ramifications of taking part in this film. What happens when the film comes out? Because undoubtedly when that happens their risk profile will increase. Those are conversations we had at the beginning, throughout the filming process, about what where and how is safe to film, and conversations we continued to have in the editing room up until the very end. We were constantly communicating through encrypted means. Their safety was always paramount. But at the end of the day, they wanted to come out from behind the veneer of social media and show their faces, show that they are modern Muslim men from Raqqa, fighting against this extremist group who had hijacked their religion.
Did you personally have to think twice about it, Aziz?
ABDALAZIZ ALHAMZA: I used to be on camera on the TV, so my identity was known before we started the movie. But most of my colleagues were not on camera. We knew that doing a documentary would help us to have our message out, to educate people, to alert them. The documentary will reach thousands around the world. So we decided that, okay, we will risk our identities, our information. It was our choice. We knew a lot about the risk, but we knew that we were at risk already before we started filming for this movie.
One of the more disturbing parts of the film is seeing how sophisticated ISIS’s propaganda machine is, how high their production values are. How did you get your hands on all that ISIS footage?
MH: Some we found through websites that monitor jihadist footage around the world. Some we got from the group themselves [RBSS]. And some we got directly from ISIS, by subscribing to their various social media channels, through which they disseminate videos, photos, on an almost hour-to-hour basis.
At some point, someone compares the ISIS propaganda aesthetic to that of Grand Theft Auto. Do you think they’re actually intending to mimic that video game?
MH: One hundred percent. They use those videos for two reasons: to disseminate fear across the world, which they’ve done so successfully. I would venture to say that the vast majority of the 6-billion-plus people who live on this earth have heard of ISIS. They also use it as a recruiting tactic. These videos are disturbing on many levels, but they’re manipulative insofar as they dehumanize violence. They emphasize the paradise. People go, Oh, I want to go on an adventure, I want to be part of this experiment. And clearly that’s worked.
Raqqa has been in the news a lot lately. Aziz, what’s happening now with RBSS?
AA: Nothing has changed, really. Our colleagues inside are still operating. There are militias supported by the U.S. trying to take over Raqqa from ISIS. And airstrikes hitting the city daily. Hundreds and thousands of people have been killed by the airstrikes; [there have been] human-rights violations against civilians by both sides—ISIS and these militias supported by the U.S. People are suffering. No services, no electricity, no water. Hard to get food because of the airstrikes, so people are home all the time. Even when they attempt to get food, there are like 50 to 70 people that will be killed. That’s what happened to my uncle two days ago.
There’s a shot in the film from inside Raqqa of this satellite-dish graveyard, after ISIS banned them. Has that crackdown affected RBSS’s ability to get news out?
AA: We knew about all these orders before ISIS established them, so we were able to figure out ways to communicate. We figured out three ways. I can’t talk about them for security reasons. The first way is still working. But in case ISIS would find out about it, we would just move to the second and the third.
Recently the Supreme Court partially reinstated Trump’s “Muslim ban.” Aziz, if you weren’t already in the U.S. when this happened, would you have been able to be here for this interview?
AA: I have a complicated story with the travel ban. When the first ban came out, I was in Sundance. It was our last screening. If Sundance had been a week after, I would not be there. Right now, whenever I leave the U.S., I will not be able to come back. My visa will be canceled.
Matt, would you love to get your film in front of the Supreme Court before they hear the case pertaining to the “Muslim ban”?
MH: Do you know them? I generally try to make my films apolitical, to make them human. I would love the Supreme Court to watch this. I would love for Trump to watch the film. I would love for members of Congress to watch the film. I would love for people all across the country and the world who put people like Aziz in a certain box—the color of his skin, the country he comes from—to better understand him, to perhaps empathize more with the situation he’s in.