Keeping Syria connected during war: Surviving ISIS and Intelligence

Summary

The author is a computer scientist, one of several prominent technical analysts who covered internet outages during the 2011 Arab Spring and its aftermath. In his work for Renesys and later Dyn Research, he connected with “Mahmoud,” a senior Syria Telecom engineer who, at great personal risk, became a trusted source and shared internal details that informed the analysis. “Mahmoud” is a pseudonym; he has lived safely outside Syria for several years. This is Mahmoud’s story. It was the middle of the summer of 2013 and Mahmoud was making a trek across northern Syria. The 33 year old lived in Aleppo where he worked for Syria Telecom as a network engineer. But on this day, the last day of Ramadan, he was packed into a crowded bus heading southwest to Idlib to celebrate Eid al-Fitr with family and friends. Thirty minutes into a trip that normally takes only an hour and a half, traffic slowed down for a roadblock up ahead. The Syrian civil war had been raging for over two years at this point and it was not uncommon for security checkpoints to spontaneously appear as the government hunted down members of the rebel forces. But this was not a government roadblock. The fluttering black flags made clear to the passengers on the bus who were operating this checkpoint. Following the direction of the armed men, the bus pulled off to the side of the road for inspection. The black flags’ white script was now legible: دولة الاسلام في العراق والشام (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant). The travelers on the bus stiffened and put themselves in ‘careful mode,’ as Mahmoud would later call it. At that point, ISIS was only a minor player in the multi-sided war in Syria and had not yet demonstrated the brutality it later became known for. Two armed ISIS fighters boarded the bus and began inspecting passengers paying particular attention to military-aged men. One approached Mahmoud and asked for his identification card. Once produced, the fighter scanned the card for a moment and handed it ...