Abu Yassin pulls open the heavy iron gate of the school and steps back. "Peace be upon you," he says in Arabic, grinning and extending a hand, his arm stained to the elbow with aluminium powder. "Welcome, welcome." He turns and waves for me to follow. We walk along a short pathway toward the front door, past an assortment of ordnance laid out on the concrete, bombs that fell from the sky but failed to explode: an ovoid 88-millimetre mortar shell; a big, 200kg one with twisted tail-fins; a neat row of pale-grey Russian cluster bomblets, their nose-fuses removed. "Later! I will open them later!" he says, eyebrows waggling with anticipation.
The four-storey school is shaped like a C around a set of basketball courts, paved with stone tiles and pocked at the far end with small, dark craters. A set of white plastic lawn chairs and a table have been arranged in the central courtyard near the door leading into the school. A young boy walks over. "Let's see, coffee or tea?" Yassin says, distracted, contemplating the plastic furniture. Another assistant, an older man in a filthy smock, comes out and stands beside us holding a silver cylinder the size of a soda bottle. It's wrapped in clear plastic tape and sprouts a red fuse, which the man proceeds to light. The fuse sputters as he steps forward and pitches the cylinder underhand across the courtyard, where it bounces and rolls to a halt some 30 metres away.
"Explosion!" he yells as Yassin looks on. With a deafening clap, the bomb bursts in a cloud of flame and smoke, buffeting our faces with a pressure wave. Yassin scurries forward and crouches on his haunches to examine the crater it leaves. Slowly he walks back, shaking his head. "Very bad, very bad," he mutters -- but then, remembering his guest, his expression brightens to a smile. "Please, sit down."
The conflict in Aleppo, like the [link url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_civil_war"]wider civil war in Syria[/link], has been mired in stalemate for more than a year. The rebels moved into the country's largest city in the late summer of 2012, seizing nearly two-thirds of it within a couple of weeks. Since then, though, regime and rebels have stayed locked in grinding urban warfare. The business of Aleppo's inhabitants has become violence -- and Abu Yassin has bent his unusual ingenuity to that task. A former network engineer, he has become one of Aleppo's premier bomb makers, part of a burgeoning homemade-weapons industry that has sustained the Syrian revolution. Yassin's factory inside the abandoned school churns out tens of kilogrammes of explosives every day, and he is constantly seeking innovative ways of killing people.
After we settle into the plastic chairs, the boy returns bearing a tray of Turkish coffee. From half a kilometre away, we can hear gunfire and shelling at the front line -- the thump of outgoing artillery, the crunch of incoming.
Periodically, the older assistant returns and lobs another bomb into the courtyard, its blast interrupting our conversation as bits of concrete plink against the plastic table. Yassin then wanders over to inspect the crater, squatting down like a tracker on his quarry's trail. The bomb maker added nitrocellulose to his mix today, in a bid to give his explosives more power; now he is checking the craters for residual ammonium nitrate, which would indicate an inefficient reaction.
Soon three more guests arrive, led in by Yassin's younger brother Abu Ali. (Abu means "father of" in Arabic, and many rebels take their son's name as a nom de guerre.) Ali, who runs the business half of the operation, owned a small shopping mall in Aleppo before the war; he is jowly and unshaven, clad in a tattered, calf-length leather trench coat and a cream turtleneck sweater streaked with grease. He has brought with him a rebel commander, a stout man wearing a pistol in a shoulder holster, along with two of the commander's men. They have just come from a nearby front line. "I need 50 of every kind of bomb," the commander tells Yassin, who nods toward his assistants.
As the soldiers ferry arm-loads of homemade grenades to their waiting car, Yassin and the commander walk into what was once the principal's office. Now hanging on the wall above the desk is the rebel tricolour -- green, white and black, with three red stars -- and below it a black flag with a Muslim profession of faith written out in stark white Arabic script, the kind of flag displayed by Islamist groups linked to al Qaeda. The centre of the room is dominated by a long wooden table upon which lie samples of Yassin's homemade wares: mortar shells, detonators, antitank mines, bottles of foul-smelling ammonium and napalm, shotgun-launched grenades and hand-thrown bombs of various shapes and sizes. In the corner stands a robot stippled in green camouflage, with four wheels and a single arm ending in a claw. The commander tells Yassin about an upcoming operation to capture a mosque held by the regime.
Yassin nods and strokes his beard. Already he is calculating exactly which explosives and mines will be most useful, how much they will cost, and how he will balance this commander's demands with the needs of the dozens of other rebel groups that come to him each week, desperate for weapons. After two years of increasingly vicious combat, the civil war has become a battle of annihilation, one increasingly tainted by sectarian extremism and human-rights abuses on both sides. Nearly 100,000 people have died, and the rebels all know that they too will likely join the dead if the government of Bashar al-Assad prevails. Once, they led ordinary lives, many of them in the ranks of the middle or professional classes, but those days are gone. They fight for their lives and for their country, but Abu Yassin is also fighting for his own redemption -- for a victory that might justify, in retrospect, the dark purpose to which he has turned his prodigious powers of invention.
After the commander leaves, Yassin sits down at the desk. He is wearing a grey tracksuit, and his dark, matted curls are covered by a faded orange-and-black-check cotton keffiyeh that he wears over his head like a bandana, winding the tails across his brow. This, together with his fur-lined vest, lends him a rustic air, but he speaks in the lengthy, didactic manner of a professor. When asked a question, he often looks upward in calculation, drums his fingers against his beard, and then mutters a rhetorical "OK" before he launches into an answer. His high cheekbones are sun-darkened and gaunt, and as he speaks his eyes bulge and narrow with the intensity of a mad prophet.
Yassin talks about the day when it first seemed possible Assad could fall. He had been working in Lebanon, building and maintaining the corporate IT network of a firm in Beirut. He was splitting his time between a Beirut apartment and a home in the nearby Syrian capital of Damascus, where his wife and two children lived. Though the average Syrian had suffered under decades of economic stagnation and isolation, Yassin's yearly salary was roughly $25,000 (£17,000), which meant he lived well. When the Arab Spring arrived and unrest in Egypt and Libya spread to Syria, and the army was ordered into the streets, Yassin couldn't believe what he was watching. Glued to Al Jazeera in his Beirut apartment, he was amazed at the mayhem in the Syrian streets, the open defiance of Assad.
Even then he regarded this unrest as an interested spectator, not a participant. But toward the end of 2011 the uprising became an armed rebellion. Resistance hardened among the Sunni Muslims (roughly 75 percent of Syria's population), who had grown tired of rule by Alawites, a sect that represents just one-eighth of Syrians but happens to include the two men, Hafez al-Assad and now his son, who have ruled the nation since 1970. Yassin is from a Sunni family in Aleppo, and his brother and parents still lived in the city; as the killing there escalated, he was drawn into the fight. He resigned from his job, returned to Damascus and kissed his wife and children goodbye -- that was the last time he saw them. Then he drove 320 kilometres north, into the civil war.
By the time he arrived, he found that Ali had already joined fighters in the south of the city, in the working-class neighbourhood of Salaheddine. Yassin initially volunteered as an ambulance driver, which let him witness firsthand the human sacrifice the rebels were making. His first ambulance was hit by a mortar shell just seconds after he got out of it. His second went up in flames after its fuel tank was shot while he was driving.
Meanwhile, he observed that his brother's group of fighters suffered primarily for lack of weapons. The Salaheddine group had 85 pump-action shotguns that had been smuggled in from abroad, as well as three dozen Kalashnikov assault rifles they had captured from the regime. Against them, Assad had a well equipped, professional army. One day Yassin was in the headquarters of the katiba -- the local battalion, which does its best to supply bands of fighters -- and watched as a commander arrived and asked for ammunition. The commander was allotted just 50 bullets for his entire team; he would be sending his men to die. Yassin's mind was working. He had no military experience. As a young man, he had studied to be a lawyer. Then he had worked as a sales representative for a commercial expo and trade-fair company. After that he had gone back to school to study network engineering.
Now 39, he would reinvent himself again. He and Ali left frontline combat to build a new operation, which they dubbed the Military Engineering Katiba. As startup capital, they used the savings they'd accumulated before the war. They couldn't manufacture rifle rounds, but they could make explosives and grenades to help their fighters conserve ammunition. Using the contacts they had built with other rebel units, they were granted use of the school, long since abandoned. They swept the courtyard clean of glass and got to work.
Most modern explosives get their power from compounds that have complex nitrogen bonds. Ammonium nitrate, one of the world's most prevalent fertilisers, fits the bill. It can be obtained in large quantities and, due to its low cost, is used widely as an explosive in mining and quarrying. It's a favourite of terrorists and guerrillas. "Any peasant can obtain it," Yassin tells me at the school. We walk into one of the classrooms, which has been entirely emptied of furniture. Instead, 50kg sacks of Turkish fertiliser sit stacked against the far wall, surrounded by empty artillery shells and lengths of aluminium piping -- future bomb-casings. An older man and two young boys -- they can't be more than 12 -- are at work without gloves or masks. With a shovel, they mix an enormous pile of grey powder; a fine particulate suspension hangs in the air, illuminated by rays of light through the glassless windows. Several additives are mixed with ammonium nitrate to boost the power of the explosion. The most common is diesel fuel, but Yassin claims to have a nine-part secret recipe that works far better; the one key ingredient he'll reveal is powdered aluminium, hence the silver dust on his hands and arms. He casts an expert eye over the pile.
It hasn't been completely blended yet, and I can still pick out many of the constituent parts by their colour and texture: whitish fertiliser, chunky grains of TNT, black ground charcoal, silver aluminium dust.
In the jargon of explosives engineering, ammonium nitrate is "insensitive", which means it's difficult to detonate. Think about a campfire: you need to burn paper and then kindling before the flames are hot enough to consume thick wood. Bombs are much the same. You need a "primary" explosive, some highly sensitive substance that reacts in contact with a burning fuse or an electrical spark. Yassin and his brother used Google to find instructions for making common primary explosives such as mercury fulminate and lead azide. Then, taking over the school's chemistry lab, they tested the recipes. One day when Ali and some others were making mercury fulminate, the stuff exploded on them. Four men lost eyes and fingers, and Ali's face and arms were peppered with glass shards. Since then, Yassin has tried to source commercial blasting caps from Turkey whenever he can.
When Yassin and Ali started the katiba, their first product was a basic hand-grenade that the rebels could use in close-quarter urban combat. They packed the explosives, along with steel tailings that would turn into deadly shrapnel, into plastic tubing, then inserted a detonator and booster charge. Once they'd mastered elementary bomb-making, they turned to more complex devices. There were large bombs, for example, made from empty fire extinguishers or propane tanks, which could be buried and then triggered by wire.
There were antitank mines with charges that cut through vehicle armour -- a lethal technology that had been devastating to American forces in Iraq.
But as winter went on and bodies filled the streets, Yassin dreamed of bolder inventions. In January, Yassin got hold of a machine shop in the old city. In the school hallway, there is an olive-green 75mm mortar, newly arrived from his shop. "This is the work of months of development," Yassin says, patting the mortar. "It takes eight days to polish the inside of the tube." Indeed, the interior of the barrel is perfectly smooth, and the tube connects to its stand with a pair of greased threads; the mortar shells have been painted and finely milled.
Yassin is selling it for around £350 -- cheap, considering that a professional one on Aleppo's black market would cost thousands of dollars. Yassin isn't trying to make much of a profit. Once he masters a device, he keeps trying to find less expensive ways to manufacture it. With the homemade grenades, he has been able to cut costs by using steel tailings he gets for free from a generator factory. That has brought the unit cost of each grenade down to the equivalent of £2, which is exactly what he sells them for.
I ask him what he plans to make next. He rummages around in the principal's desk before pulling out a small brass device and handing it to me. "Take a look at this," he says. I turn it over in my hand. It looks like a plumbing fitting. "It's a pressure-sensitive detonator," he says. "Be careful, it's live."
I hand it back to him, asking what it's for. He points to a stack of metal objects in the corner, shaped like old-fashioned fire-alarm bells. They are what are known in military parlance as victim-operated improvised explosive devices -- land mines to you and me.
Among the Syrian rebels, Yassin is far from alone in applying his ingenuity to homemade weapons. More than in any of the other Arab nations riven by war in recent years, Syria's rebels have taken a DIY approach to arming themselves. This has been born out of a combination of necessity and uncommon opportunity, as rebels have been able to hold territory where workshops can be set up.
Though regional countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar have supplied arms to the rebels -- and the US decided in June to begin its own limited programme -- weapons have been scarce enough that the rebels continue to manufacture their own. The whole region around Aleppo, which had been the centre of Syria's heavy industry, quickly became particularly fertile ground; as the rebels captured machine shops, steel mills, and power plants, they began adapting them for war.
Some of the rebels' creations verge on the outlandish. I ask about one odd-looking, 4.5-metre-long wooden trebuchet, which its proud creator is using to hurl 2kg fragmentation bombs. He tells me he got the idea from the video game Age of Empires.
Another Aleppo inventor gained fame with an armoured car called Sham II. Two crew-members sit inside the car, an old diesel chassis with steel panels welded to the outside, and look at TV screens. As one drives, the other uses a PlayStation controller to aim and fire a roof-mounted machine-gun.
The demands of fighting Assad's army have resulted in some limited coalescence among the rebel katibas. In many areas, they have banded together into larger units called liwwas, Arabic for brigades. These units handle logistics for their subordinate katibas, sourcing weapons and materials from Turkey and Jordan, and setting up factories. The liwwas also barter and trade weapons and expertise among themselves.
In Aleppo, I meet Abu Mahmoud Affa, a former house-painter who now commands a liwwa called Shield of the Nation. He is wearing camo fatigues and chain-smoking in his office, another abandoned school. With his big frame, belly and bushy white beard, he looks like a cross between Che Guevara and Santa Claus. His bulk is accentuated by his pixie-faced 12-year-old son, Mahmoud, who totes an M-16 some two-thirds his height.
Affa agrees to drive me to one of the factories his men have set up, on the condition that I wear a blindfold. With a scarf wrapped around my face, I feel the car twist and turn as we speed through Aleppo's narrow streets. Soon the hubbub of traffic and pedestrians dies off, replaced by the sound of machine-gun fire. At last the car stops and I am pulled out, and told to walk, Affa's big hands guiding me. "Who is this motherfucker?" Someone thinks I'm a prisoner. "He's a journalist," Affa says. The blindfold is lifted. I'm in a narrow one-room shop with a low ceiling and roller blinds on the front. Several fighters sit on mats with their weapons, smoking and regarding me with curiosity. Affa leads me toward the back of the shop, where the rebels have bashed a hole in the concrete. We duck through it, and I find myself in a second shop, dominated by a massive central lathe and a collection of machine tools.
Affa introduces me to Abu Abed, a slender, balding man who presides over the shop. Before the rebellion, he worked at a munitions plant near Al-Safira, south of the city, where the government made everything from bullets to helicopter-launched rockets. When he defected to the rebels, he brought his knowledge of weapons manufacturing with him. Shield of the Nation has a network of small factories like this one, each focused on different components. "We work one item at a time and make a few hundred of them before moving on to the next," Abed says.
This factory doubles as a head office of sorts, where the others send their pieces for assembly. It's also where Abed and his colleagues try new designs. Most of the equipment is from an auto-transmission workshop. Despite the fact that they're working with explosives, everyone is smoking. No one here bothers with eye or ear protection. "Now we're making a piece for the mortar," Abed says. The mortar is the liwwa's pride; they reverse-engineered a captured 82mm Russian model.
Aside from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and grenades, their most popular item is a short-range rocket similar in design to the ones developed by Palestinian militants in Gaza. To make the rockets, they cut the U-joints off the ends of car driveshafts, later reusing them to join the mortar tube to its baseplate. After determining the mortar's range -- usually 2km -- the rebels use Google Maps to pick a suitable spot that sits the same distance from their target. They take the rocket there, use a compass to aim it, and then fire.
After blindfolding me again, Affa walks me out to the car. By the time I get back to my neighbourhood in Aleppo it's dark, and I lie on a mat on the floor of my borrowed apartment, listening to a city at war with itself. The regime is shelling the town, and the rebels are firing back, but I can sense myself on one side of a more visceral divide -- those who fire blindly into the dark and those who wait fearfully within it.
Abu Yassin has made a promotional video for his Military Engineering Katiba. It begins with a montage of clips of his work -- bombs exploding, beakers smoking, circuits and IEDs being assembled -- accompanied by a dramatic orchestral track that sounds like it was ripped from a videogame. Then Yassin appears, sitting in a darkened room in front of a window, such that only his silhouette is visible. He looks like a super-villain. A Syrian rebel flag hangs above his shadow. "In the name of God the most gracious and most merciful," he begins, and then goes on to list the weapons that his shop produces.
Yassin sees the video as a sort of marketing instrument, one that he can show to the rebel commanders who flock to him for weapons. He's proud of what he has achieved on his own, without help from wealthy Arab donors or foreign intelligence services. "Nobody can tell me what to do!" he exclaims one day as we sit in the principal's office. He is wearing the same grease-darkened scarf and gray tracksuit he had on when we first met. He rubs his eyes and calls for another cup of black coffee -- he seems never to sleep. "And they all need me."
Some of his inventions have failed. He tried to modify remote-controlled model aeroplanes to carry video cameras so he could use them as spy drones. But he couldn't build the gear light enough for the planes to fly above the range of small-arms fire.
Then there's that claw-armed robot, which Yassin and some engineering students spent two weeks assembling, based on a design from a Japanese website. "We were forced to make our own circuits," he explains, "and they had less capability than the ones the design called for." He dreamed of using the claw to retrieve weapons or even wounded men on the battlefield, but the robot never worked well enough to deploy.
Yassin seems to believe that anything can be accomplished with the right combination of gadgetry. "There's one kind of circuit that I'm looking for," he says, "that will allow the rockets to track aircraft by seeking their heat." It's a self-conception that harks back to an older, pre-corporate ideal of the heroic solo inventor, like those of the golden age of American innovation in the days of Thomas Edison, or the kind satirised in the 1980s by the breakfast-making contraption at the beginning of Back to the Future.
For all his technological enthusiasm, Yassin at times betrays how deeply his lethal new trade troubles him. "These things are for killing people," he tells me once, in sudden disgust. "Every time I make a bomb, I feel sorrow." He hopes that eventually, in the new Syria, the one that he will help to build, he will find justification for his bloodied hands. "I'm tired of talking about death," he tells me one day. He announces that he is planning a new project called Amar (Arabic for "Works") to revitalise the moribund and devastated city after the war. As part of this effort, he says, he has invented a new strain of bread yeast and a new kind of quick-drying cement. He wants to produce cleaning chemicals. He will make enough to supply the whole city. He will build as many factories as necessary. And the labour force? Why, the streets of Aleppo will be filled with unemployed men! "Working in such a factory will give them a purpose again and make them feel hope," he says, eyes flashing. As for when Amar can begin, he is vague. In the meantime, he is left to feed and tend a machine that sucks in explosive material and spits out mangled bodies.
Curious to see his products in action, I visit a band of rebels he supplies in Aleppo's old city. The buildings have high, thick stone walls and interior courtyards, which, coupled with the narrow streets and maze-like layout, make them ideal havens for urban guerrillas. In the courtyard of a stone house in the Kastel Harami district, I meet with Abu Mohammed, a rebel leader affiliated with Ahrar al-Suria, or the Freemen of Syria. Mohammed's house is a well-appointed dwelling with grape vines, bronze wind chimes and a small tortoise. The commander himself is squatting in the courtyard when we arrive, busily pouring a mixture of industrial adhesive and gasoline into a collection of empty Nutella jars.
He shows me some rockets and a crate of homemade mortar shells; a grocery bag brims with spherical metal grenades the size of oranges, also homemade, with fuses sticking out of their tops, like bombs in a cartoon. After filling the rest of the jars, Mohammed and his men gather their rifles and head into the street. We wind through the dense geometry of the old city; down a narrow alley, then into a courtyard, then through a hole bashed in the courtyard wall into a small cavity between the houses, then across a plank to another roof. We descend into a third courtyard, where a group of rebels waits for us. They have assault rifles, as well as a couple of grenade launchers and a light machine gun. The attack is about to begin.
Mohammed motions for me to follow him up a set of stairs at the far end of the courtyard. On a second-storey terrace, a rebel waits next to a 2.4-metre-high metal stand shaped like a Y with a loop of elastic dangling from it. It's a giant slingshot. The attendant rebel introduces himself as Abu Zakaria. He hefts a grenade from a shopping bag. "Angry Birds," he says in English, laughing.
Bullets snap overhead. Zakaria pats the wall we have our backs against. The regime soldiers are 15 metres that way, he tells me.
From the opposite side of the terrace, another group of rebels comes running, yelling for us to take cover. The previous night, they snuck up and planted a massive IED against the foundation of the house the regime soldiers were occupying. Now they are going to detonate it. We crouch and stick fingers in our ears just before an enormous blast
Now it is time to engage the slingshot. Mohammed places a grenade in the band and draws it back tight, squatting on his haunches, clenching it with all his might. Zakaria puts a cigarette lighter to the fuse. With a snap, Mohammed releases the grenade -- but the angle is too low. We hear the metallic clink of the bomb, that £2 staple of the Military Engineering Katiba, hitting the courtyard wall and bouncing back at us.
Everyone scrambles to escape. My only option is the bathroom, so I dive into it, sliding face-first on the cool tiling. Another rebel jumps in on top of me just before we feel the violent concussion of the grenade, which strikes me not as sound but as silence. For a full minute, the world is quiet. Then men's voices fade in, sounding like faraway radio chatter. Gradually I begin to hear again. Miraculously, no one is hurt.
Mohammed and Zakaria go right back to the slingshot and begin lobbing grenades toward the regime lines, this time successfully.
After exhausting their supply, Mohammed waves for everyone to pull back to the lower courtyard, where they gather in a circle and chant "God is great!" After that we retreat another hundred metres into an alley. The assault has ended as abruptly as it began. Instead of pressing the attack, the rebels break for an hour for lunch.
When they return to the front line, the rebels are greeted with fresh machine-gun fire: the regime soldiers have regrouped. Neither the first rebel IED nor a second one has succeeded in collapsing their house. A group of rebels runs down the alley with a young compatriot, his face pale and taut. He has been shot through the thigh, and as they heft him into a waiting van and try to improvise a tourniquet, a bright arterial jet spurts crimson on to the cobblestones.
Afterward, Zakaria rests against the stone wall, fingers probing the skin of his trembling brow. "We've been fighting in this same position for three months," he says. "But tomorrow we'll advance, God willing."
On my last night in Aleppo, I go for a final visit with Abu Yassin. Although it's late March, the weather is still cold, and that evening has brought rain. There is no power in most of the city, and as I approach the school, the waxy yellow of its generator-powered light stands out through the drizzle. One of Yassin's henchmen opens the gate; the bomb maker is sick, he tells me.
I find Yassin in the principal's office, slumped into a sofa. He makes a feeble attempt to get up. "Sorry," he says, then coughs wetly. He has been bedridden with fever for two days. I have a few questions about his manufacturing, but he turns the conversation to Amar, his yeast and cement factories, his grandiose plans for the new Syria. He wants to show me something, he says. It is a picture of him before the war, in a suit and tie, clean-shaven. The bearded and keffiyeh-wearing man in front of me is almost unrecognisable as the same man. We both laugh. "I hate this," he says, glancing around his room full of weapons. "Do you know what my dream is?" He waits for a moment, and I shrug. I have heard all about the glorious future he envisions. "My dream," he says, "is to go to a café with my friends. And then to walk home slowly and find my wife and children asleep."
An incoming mortar round whistles outside; then, down the street, a distant thump. "We hope that this bad dream is going to end," he says. He sweeps his hands around the principal's office. "This is a school! Where are the children? Where are they?"
He looks at me and forces a grin. "But I am hopeful for the future. Syria can be a great country again. Our labourers built half the Gulf countries. They can build our own."
Yassin insists on walking me to the front gate himself. There is a vacant lot across the road from the school; beyond that stands a line of four-storey apartment buildings, with one missing. A regime jet had dropped a bomb on it earlier today, burying three families.
Despite his illness, Yassin helped supervise the rescue operation. "It will be fine," Yassin says again, gazing out across the empty lot. "You just... have to think!" he says in his broken English, stabbing his fingers toward his temple, the man of reason asserting his control over destiny. "You can do anything if you think." A new chain of explosions flickers on the horizon like faraway lightning. Yassin's face relaxes. "Peace be upon you," he says, and turns to go.
Matthieu Aikins is a writer and photographer based in Kabul
This article was originally published in August 2013 and was taken from the September 2013 issue of WIRED magazine.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
