The War Diaries

Shops in Naqsh-e Jahan Square in Esfahan, August 1999. ©1999 Derek Henry Flood

New York- In the summer of 1999 I embarked on an ambitious backpacking trip attempting to travel from London to Lahore entirely overland/water. The second to last leg of this rambling adventure was securing a visa for the Islamic Republic of Iran, the preferred exonym of the country’s post-1979 clerical revolutionary rulers. I anxiously applied for a transit visa (a tourist visa would’ve been much harder to come by at the time) at the Iranian embassy in Ankara and was gruffly informed the process could take as long as several weeks-which seemed like an eternity at that age.

In the interim I travelled extensively around southeastern Turkey/Kurdistan, skirting along the Syrian, Iraqi, Iranian, Azeri, and Armenian borderlands. I was just scratching the surface of both Eurasia’s utterly complex, divisive histories and my interest in photography. For I wanted not to be a photojournalist showing the world bursting at the seems, but a photographer using gorgeous imagery composed of diverse human and physical geography that emphasized man’s commonalities.

If I had envisioned myself as a war correspondent then I would have gotten myself into Kosovo that summer, rather than giving the Balkan conflict a very wide berth in circumambulating through the Italian peninsula when traveling from Budapest to Athens. To me at the time, wars were transitory events and historical epochs seemed eternal.

After 15 days of traveling through vast swaths of Turkey completely devoid of the hordes of ANZAC backpackers frolicking in Istanbul and its party-all-the-time West on the notorious Fez Bus circuit, I was finally granted an Iranian visa. But with my fall university semester quickly on the horizon back out in San Diego and having already traveled to Doğubeyazıt on the Turkey-Iran border, I had to fly to Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport in order to save time and have enough days to travel through nearly all of Pakistan afterward and return to California in time to sign up for that fall’s classes.

Arriving in Tehran, I then embarked on a massive road tour via the country’s bus network that would eventually have me riding in a Balochi smuggler’s Toyota Hi-lux truck to the Mirjaveh/Taftan border and crossing a mind-blowing civilizational boundary separating the Iranian plateau from South Asia on foot. There are richer elements to this story but I am leaving them in my long form, as yet unpublished book project. I stumbled on these photos while working on another project and felt like throwing up a few images to remind myself of this hopeful time period if nothing else.

The sun sets behind the hills of Shiraz, in southern Iran’s Fars Province. I would do anything to retreat back to this era where everything still seemed possible. A Dialogue Among Civilizations had a much nicer ring to it than a Global War on Terror. ©1999 Derek Henry Flood

A man peers into the void of the now destroyed Arg-e-Bam (Citadel of Bam) after having observed the total solar eclipse when the diameter of the Moon completely obscured that of the Sun in broad daylight on August 11, 1999. The Citadel was later leveled in the Boxing Day earthquake of December 26, 2003. ©1999 Derek Henry Flood

Another shot of the magnificent mud brick Citadel following the eclipse. Notice the sky is still slightly dark. ©1999 Derek Henry Flood

The Safavid-era Imam mosque in Esfahan’s Naghsh-i Jahan Square. Brilliant azure skies. ©1999 Derek Henry Flood

What pictorial on Iran would be complete without an image of the storied Persepolis? A chador-cloaked woman saunters through to ruined columns of the ancient Achaemenid capital in Fars Province. The über decadent party held here by Shah Reza Pahlavi in October 1971 to celebrate Cyrus the Great’s founding of the Persian monarchy 2500 years previously is thought by some to have been one of the initial sparks of the Shah’s undoing. The SAVAK-supervised four-day event rankled a then relatively obscure ayatollah exiled in Najaf, Iraq named Ruhollah Khomeini who was infuriated by the whole affair. ©1999 Derek Henry Flood

I arrived in Iran just 10 years after Khomeini’s mass funeral and his clichéd glowering visage was everywhere. Whereas in California such public space would be adorned with images aimed a crass consumer society, in Iran, a white beard who barely smiled extolled the virtues of sacrifice and martyrdom within the bounds of his own sculpted millenarian Shia context. ©1999 Derek Henry Flood

A group of boys jubilantly pose in the courtyard of Khomeini’s elaborate mausoleum set within the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery complex. These random kids are all adults now and could have ended up anywhere from foot soldiers in the IRGC to members of the dissident Green Movement or anywhere in between.  ©1999 Derek Henry Flood

New York-One of the myriad topics was what constitutes or defines intervention in Syria.  A high-ranking NATO official explained to me at 2 2012 security conference that the Alliance was emphatically not going to get involved militarily in Syria even if the so-called “red lines” set forth by individual member states were crossed time and again. When NATO became deeply involved in the Libyan war, it was under the auspices of protecting civilians as stipulated by UN Security Council Resolution 1973 which outlined the multi-national mission that culminated in Operation Unified Protector.

Members of the Free Syrian Army take aim at a Syrian Army post across the valley in northwestern Idlib Governorate. @2012 Derek Henry Flood

I mentioned at that February conference that I had inadvertently run across a pair of intelligence operatives on atop a cliff on the outskirts of Nalut in western Libya’s Jebel Nafusa/Western Mountains region in August 2011. I presumed the men to be either Central Intelligence Agency officers or former ones who were now for-hire intelligence contractors. They were providing real-time battlefield intelligence while decisive air strikes were being carried out in the then (until 6pm that day to be specific) Qaddafist-controlled towns of Ghazayah and Takut on the stiflingly hot plains down below. With a satellite phone and military grade macro binoculars they were apparently relaying coordinates for air strikes and feedback about the accuracy of previous bombardments.

Libya’s NTC rebels rest in the shade after capturing the Qaddafist-held town of Takut with NATO and CIA assistance on July 28, 2011. ©2011 Derek Henry Flood

When I confronted the NATO official about this, which to me appeared to be in direct violation of UNSC 1973 as an outside power was clearly taking sides with one of the conflict’s belligerents thereby nullifying the idea of any form of non-partisan negotiated solution with the Qaddafi regime, NATO’s man swiftly countered that member states within the Alliance had undertaken unilateral intelligence missions which were not part of NATO’s mandate nor had its official bureaucratic blessing. Oh, ok, well I guess that wraps my question up neatly, right?

BUT…how were the Libyans on the ground, both NTC rebels and Qaddafists, supposed to interpret these elite distinctions made in Brussels, Washington, Doha, London, Paris and Benghazi? For the Libyans, the CIA and NATO were one in the same, entirely conflated entities. Not to mention perfect fodder for those on the anti-imperialist left and conspiracy theorists in general who cynically assume the overthrow of Mu’ammar Qaddafi was planned long ago at a Bilderberg Group meeting or some such thing.

Destroying Takut in order to save it. NTC rebels rest in a smashed police checkpost at the entrance to the western Libyan town after wresting it from Qaddafist forces in concert with precision airstrikes, ©2011 Derek Henry Flood

So as the viewer’s comment pointed out NATO itself is nowhere in the vicinity of launching a large-scale military intervention in Syria but individual member states are indeed carrying out an intelligence war as unilateral, sovereign state actors outside the bounds of the trans-Atlantic security structure. NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen had been adamant that Syria will not become another Libya stating an armed humanitarian intervention was ”not the right path.”

The conundrum escalated with the recent cross-border shelling by Syria when ordinance not only landed on Turkish soil but killed Turkish nationals which appears at least on the surface to have caused Rasmussen to change tack. An attack on one member state is theoretically an attack on the broader Alliance which the other members must then be obligated to defend if such action is deemed necessary. Now Secretary General Rasmussen has stated “We have all necessary plans in place to protect and defend Turkey if necessary.”

I also want to quickly elaborate on the unraveling of the October 20, 1998 Adana Agreement which was essentially a peace treaty between Turkey and Syria to halt PKK attacks that were being mounted from safe havens on Syrian territory at the time in a vicious proxy dispute over water rights. Hafez al-Assad, near the end of his thirty year reign, sought to improve relations with Turkey and expelled Abdullah “Apo” Ocalan, the PKK’s cult-like leader. (Ocalan was captured in Kenya on the run in 1999 and extradited to Turkey where he remains holed up in an island prison today in the Sea of Marmara) Turkish-Syrian relations than greatly improved as Turkey tilted away politically from the European Union and began renewing ties, particularly economic ones, in the lands that constituted its former Ottoman realm (as well as warming relation with the clerical regime in Iran as part of its “zero problems with neighbors” policy).

Turkey nearly mounted an invasion of Syria in the late 1990s under the pretext of attacking the PKK. Turkey has also had a long time military presence in Iraqi Kurdistan and parliament in Ankara recently renewed Turkey’s standing hot pursuit mandate whereby Turkish ground forces can enter Iraq when giving chase to PKK fighters. So Turkish troops moving into Syria en masse is not so unthinkable in the present scenario.

The PKK has been stepping up attacks across southern Turkey in recent months and many Turks believe Bashar is playing his father’s old PKK card from the 1990s in an act of calculating strategic desperation. After all, what else does the already isolated Syria regime really have to lose at this point?  Even if the Assad government can somehow survive, relations with an AKP government in Turkey will not be put back together again. It is from this calculus that the Assad regime is basing its tragic strategic decisions and going with what is known as “the Hama solution” (code for scorched earth tactics in crushing any serious threat to their Ba’athist Alawi dynasty)

Barcelona- Partly out of boredom and partly out of the itch to simply create something new out of old, I threw together this photo montage over the weekend. In this era of digital photography where one shoots thousands of frames rather than analog hundreds, I was reflecting on how almost all of the images I make will never see the light of day in this regard. I put this video together in a largely random fashion with images that have been just sitting in my laptop for years. I put the photos in the order they came to me as I grabbed them one by one from various folders containing my view of many of the biggest news events of the last 10 years.

Interspersed with them are much more sublime moments of everyday life around the world. An elephant in Thailand, an aged priest in Ethiopia, a glitzy office tower in Manhattan. This has been my reality and is our collective reality. Globalization and social networking simultaneously accelerate worldwide travel and technological integration while hyper compartmentalizing our lives. We speak more so to only those who we want to and listen to those with whom we already agree.

Dr. Abdullah Abdullah preparing to depart for Ghazni province with the Afghan airforce to campaign in remote ethnic Hazara villages. Abdullah was the leading opposition candidate challenging President Hamid Karzai in the August 2009 elections. On the right stands a Shi’ite Seyyid accompanying him to Shia population centers for campaign credibility. ©2009 Derek Henry Flood

No one knows just where any of this is going. Billionaire fraudsters suddenly imprisoned, social revolutions springing up from seemingly nowhere (though not quite), calcified dictatorships counted on for decades in the interests of “stability” suddenly crumbling to pieces, it seems as if the entire world order is in question.

No grand conspiracy here, just plain, old awful war. On August 15, 2006, a Lebanese ambulance lay destroyed by what appeared to be an Israeli missile strike (quite possibly a drone strike or SPIKE anti-tank missile) outside of Sidon in southern Lebanon, an irrefutable violation of the Geneva Conventions on war crimes. Pro-Likud right-wing bloggers would dare say scenes like these were part of elaborate false flag operations by Hezbollah or photoshop masterpieces by left-wing or pro-Hezbollah journalists meant to demonize the Israel Defense Forces. This ambulance was not part of the so-called “ambulance controversy” nor am I aware that this particular wreckage appeared anywhere in the international media at the time.  ©2006 Derek Henry Flood

Working on an article for Jane's Islamic Affairs Analyst deep in the bowels of the underground. Russian Tokarev pistol and Chinese two-way radio, Idlib Governorate, Syria. ©2012 Derek Henry Flood

New York- I have a piece out in today’s edition of Asia Times Online from my meeting in Istanbul with Khaled Khoja, one of the more vocal member’s of the Turkey-based Syrian National Council, on the past, present, and future of the ever so troubled Syrian Arab Republic.  As the Syria crisis somehow continues to escalate even further, the roles of the SNC along with the Free Syrian Army will grow in importance despite the claims by some skeptics that these groups are neither genuine in their agendas nor indigenous in their roots. The SNC and the FSA couldn’t be any more different and have been pushed together into a marriage of Levantine realpolitik. What is happening in Syria is the death throes of 20th century pan-Arab ideology and the Hizb-ul-Ba’ath (the Ba’ath Party). The legacies of men like Gamel Abdel Nasser and Michel Aflaq are fading away in the revolutions sweeping the top-down Arab nationalist mukhabarat states give rise to long suppressed Islamism and an as yet uncertain accommodation of that outlook with democratization.

NATO’s Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen ruled out the possibility of any formal military intervention by the alliance even if such action was legitimated by the UN Security Council (highly unlikely and so a safe statement for Rasmussen to make in that regard) or the General Assembly (whose resolutions are not legally binding in the manner of the SC). Funny too because as I was just as a NATO/CIOR conference in Germany last week, the young NATO spokesman present pedaled the notion that the responsibility-and raison d’être for NATO’s inaction to date-was because the UN was not unanimous on the Syria issue. Ehhhh, it’s all politics in the end I suppose. Thousands more Syrians will perish by fire in the meantime. Turkey does not want to become involved kinetically in Syria because its primary concern lay with fighting a resurgent PKK. The issues are interconnected obviously as Bashar can use the PKK as a lever to harass the Turks as Ankara slips further and further from the Damascene political orbit. This in turn may egg the Turks into supporting the FSA in what could become a proxy conflict in the northern Levant.

Reading the Times account about the death of Anthony Shadid was terrifying because I could so vividly imagine it. I had an intense dream last night that I was somehow stuck in Idlib and was trying with increasing frustration how to get out back to Turkey. To suffer so far from any medical care in such a rugged region is something which has crossed my mind. When I met with the FSA a few weeks ago now, they told me of one of their men being shot in the abdomen (through a steal door no less-thanks Russian arms deals!) and how he had to be carried, miraculously it sounded, over the mountains back to Turkey and ferried to a hospital in Antakya before it was too late. I never formally met Shadid but have a memory of working across from him in Benghazi last year at the hotel that had the wifi room the night before he and his Times crew were grabbed by Qaddafists. Journalism is a hellish business that I never intended to be in. Life just happens when you’re making other plans I guess.

View of Cologne's hulking gothic cathedral in the light of a bone chilling winter's day. ©2012 Derek Henry Flood

Istanbul, Köln, & New York- It’s been a while since I’ve been able to do an update after about three weeks of nonstop travel and work. I’m just going to post a mishmash of backlogged things of no particular importance. After leaving Antakya I spent a couple of incredibly cold, expensive days in Istanbul’s Sultanahmet tourist district. Long gone are the days of Istanbul being a cheap tourist destination. But in its core, the town hadn’t changed a lick. The dudes who work in the tourist hustle still tell the European and Australian tourists that their names are incongruously things like “Steve” or “Johnny” whilst explaining that they’ve never been outside Turkey in their lives. In that sense it reminded me of my first trip to the city in the summer of 1998. Turkey seemed to have changed a bit in the era of the AK Parti and the Gulen movement and I felt like maybe the Efes didn’t flow as freely (and definitely not as cheaply) as it once did.  But no matter what ideological trends are sweeping across the Anatolian plains, Turkey is still a relative bastion of accommodation between Islam and global modernity.

The legendary Orient Hostel in Sultanahmet. Some of my earliest adventures began from this place including my perilous 2002 trip to the Pankisi Gorge on the Georgian-Chechen border. ©2012 Derek Henry Flood

I made the observation that Turk Hava Yollari (Turkish Airlines) is sort of a de facto foreign policy arm for Ankara yet again. A decade ago the Turkish national carrier was part of the pan-Turkism policy that reconnected Turkey with its distant Sovietized cousins in Central Asia. When I was at Ataturk Hava Limani (Istanbul’s main airport) the first thing I noticed when I walked in was that the first destination on the departures board was the formerly besieged Libyan city of Misurata. Not Tripoli or Benghazi but a direct flight to Misurata. This intimates Ankara’s soft power desires and influence in the shattered Libyan state across the Mediterranean.

It has always seemed to me that Turkish Airlines has been an instrument of soft power for Ankara. ©2012 Derek Henry Flood

Too distant to make out in this bad Blackberry snap, I noticed when boarding my flight to Köln that Afriqiyah Airways had painted the new-old Sanussi/Libyan independence flag on its jets above the rear passenger windows (and that it was back flying again after the end of the no-fly zone imposed by the UN on Libya last year). ©2012 Derek Henry Flood

I’m still swamped with work related to my Syrian adventure and corresponding interviews with Syrian opposition figures in Turkey. I want to list a couple of things if nothing else than for my own personal archives. My speech from the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique September terrorism conference titled “Western boots on Eastern ground: A Comparison of Western Interventions in the Muslim World in the post-9/11 decade” is now available in PDF form (en Français) on the FRS site. I was quoted twice last week on CNN.com in “No Libya play for the West in Syria” and “How Syria differs from Libya.” This time last week I was presenting my work at an annual security conference comparing the scenarios in Libya & Syria and NATO’s supply lines in Central Asia in Wesseling, Germany which I will post more about when the CIOR site is updated and I have more time.

Statue detail on the lower exterior above an entrance to the Cologne cathedral. ©2012 Derek Henry Flood

The Blue Mosque lit orange on a balmy winter's night in Istanbul. ©2012 Derek Henry Flood

Istanbul- Concluded a fascinating interview with one of the founding members of the Syrian National Council on my last night here. Absolutely fascinating. We delved a good bit into the history of the Ba’ath Party, a subject I never tire of. Had the taxi drop me off by the Mavi Masçid (Blue Mosque-really the Sultan Ahmet Mosque) and took a brisk walk around while looking for the only restaurant still open where I could get a lentil çorba (soup) and an Efes, Turkey’s one and only beer. Time to hit the hay, off to Cologne in the morning for a 3 1/2 day NATO conference.

Man vs War. I was so ill prepared for this trek. ©2012 Derek Henry Flood

Antakya- I have a new article out in today’s edition of Asia Times Online on my journey into rebel-held northern Syria. In over a decade of jihads, war zones and civil unrest, I think this was the most difficult thing I have ever accomplished in terms of logistics. My entire body is shot and at one point repelling down a muddy mountainside I slipped into a coil of concertina wire that my amazing fixer and smuggler had to rescue me from. Then while attempting to sprint through an Assadist free fire zone, I got trapped in mud so thick it might as well have been quicksand. On the way back I had to trek through pitch black forest that we lit with cell phones to try and find our way. For some reason we hiked back to Turkey a different way than we came in which was totally disorienting. We linked arms and forded a very fast moving icy river that was nearly waist deep lit by the moon while screaming “takbir” and the corresponding “allahu akbar” to steel our resolve.

At that point my mind went into a trance-like state bent on pure survival. Then when I got back to the comfort of my hotel room in Antakya and collapsed on my bed, I stared at the ceiling and thought that I did this for one day and the rebels of Free Syrian Army live this way everyday. Hard to contemplate. I’ll be going back to the West in a couple of days (where I will be speaking at the Interallied Confederation of Reserve Officers Winter Seminar outside Köln) and there is no way anyone can relate to what I’ve just experienced.

In other news, TWD was quoted in a Global Post article titled “African Union Looks East” about the inauguration of China’s gaudy new African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia which I reported on last year. Even that relatively innocent story ended up in a violent encounter when a paranoid Chinese government foreman ordered a hulking Ethiopian security guard to grab my camera and delete the contents of my flash card. They were unsuccessful due to my cunning.

This is Yassin. He is a local area commander for a Free Syrian Army group in the besieged hamlet of Ain al-Baida. Woefully underarmed compared to their opponents, Yassin and his men are determined to fight the Syrian regime's forces till victory or martyrdom. ©2012 Derek Henry Flood

Ain al-Baida- Made an incredibly arduous trek into Syria’s war-torn Idlib Governorate yesterday. Working on my first article on the hardscrabble conditions of the Free Syrian Army. I was missing driving in the relative comfort of a late model Toyota on Libya’s desert highways about a 1/3 of the way into this hardcore journey. In order to keep going I kept telling myself that worthwhile outcomes do not come easily in this life. Sometimes you have to literally scale mountains in order to get a story out. No dog-and-pony show here. I never get tired of entering crumbling mukhabarat states without a visa. Throwing this image up as a teaser. More soon.