Everyone has their own version of the joke about the disguise used by Lebanon’s ISIS-supporting jihadist warlord, Ahmad al-Assir, arrested after two years on the run at Beirut airport Saturday. The Guardian called it a “70s makeover,” which was the PG-13 version of the more specific one making the Twitter rounds calling it a 70s porn star getup. Photo memes had him as, among other things, Christian Bale in American Hustle and Nicolas Cage in Face/Off. In Arabic, the more common point of reference was Duraid Lahham, a Syrian TV comedian famous for his role (also in the 70s) as the clownish “Ghawar al-Toushe” character.
Such is the ignominious end of the road for Assir, the Sunni Muslim cleric-cum-militant who in under four years went from total obscurity to the country’s Most Wanted Terrorist, with an interlude as charismatic populist and fêted guest on prime time talk shows. After shaving the footlong beard that he claimed took twenty years to grow, and donning the now-immortalized combover, mustache and specs, he was apprehended trying to board a plane to Nigeria, via Cairo, with a fake Palestinian passport.
How, exactly, airport security knew the man traveling as “Khaled Ali al-Abbasi” was in fact Assir has been a closely-held secret, though unconfirmed reports have it he was sold out by one of the factions at the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp, one of the most impoverished and densely-populated places on earth, home variously to everyone from ISIS and Al-Qaeda to Hamas and mercenaries loyal to Syria, Iran, the Gulf states, and no doubt even Israel itself.
The camp, in the center of Assir’s hometown, the south Lebanese city of Sidon, is where he’s believed to have hidden since fleeing an all-out, utterly hopeless showdown with the Lebanese army in June 2013 that left 18 soldiers and dozens of his gunmen dead. He may even have half-expected his escape plan to fail — when his Twitter account acknowledged his detention Saturday “at the hands of the Crusader-Safavid security agencies,” it also published a “will” he left “in case of his arrest or martyrdom,” in which he urged “the mujahideen around the world and especially in Iraq and the Levant” to come to the aid of “the Sunni people in Lebanon […] because I don’t know what will happen to me.” What will happen to him will be revealed when he faces trial on September 15, in a military court, where a judge has already requested the death penalty for him and more than 50 others accused of involvement in the battle.
If the end to Assir’s story was a surprise, it was entirely in keeping with the oddity that characterized his rise from day one. He first made headlines in early 2012 when, unlike other Sunni clerics content to keep their sermons to the local mosque, he organized a demonstration smack in the middle of glitzy downtown Beirut, where his unflinching condemnation of the Syrian dictatorship and its powerful Lebanese ally, Hezbollah, won him the attention—and quiet admiration—of a cross-section of society, including more than a few Christians. Within weeks he was the honored guest of Marcel Ghanem, Lebanon’s Anderson Cooper or Jeremy Paxman, who addressed him as “Your Eminence the Sheikh.” Assir stole the show, drawing laughs all round when he joked he would run for president (a post reserved exclusively for Christians).
In those days, he preached absolute nonviolence, telling this author, “Our movement will always be peaceful […] I don’t foresee my movement using weapons of any sort under any circumstances.” When he raised the stakes by blocking the main highway to the mostly Shia Muslim south of the country, vowing not to leave until Hezbollah surrendered its entire arsenal, he declared he and his followers would face down any and all violent opponents with “bare chests” (a ruse from which the feminine contingent were presumably to be excluded).
This apparent pacifism, coupled with his restless attention-seeking, made him perhaps the world’s first Salafist celebrity; photographed riding a horse one day; throwing snowballs the next; playing foosball another day; then getting a haircut (see the “Sheikh Assir Doing Stuff” Tumblr for much more).
The festivities began to wane at the end of 2012, when the killing of two Assir supporters in a shootout with pro-Hezbollah gunmen near the Ain al-Hilweh camp moved him to place armed guards at the perimeter of his mosque complex. In retrospect, that decision made an eventual confrontation with the army—which deployed its own gunmen at a new checkpoint just meters from the mosque—an inevitability. In the meantime, he raised temperatures further by announcing the formation in April 2013 of a militia to wage “jihad” in defense of the Syrian city of Qusayr, then under relentless attack from Hezbollah and the Syrian air force. Assir himself even traveled briefly to Qusayr, releasing photos and videos of him wading, rifle in hand, through trenches; sitting on a tank surrounded by rebels; and blasting a heavy machine gun off a roof.
The detonation came two months later, when a dispute between Assir’s men and the soldiers outside his mosque led to shoving, and then shooting, followed soon by rocket-propelled grenade fire. Assir issued a video calling on supporters to join the battle and on soldiers to leave the army—effectively declaring all-out war. Intense, deadly fighting raged for some 30 hours before the army, with quiet assistance from Hezbollah, successfully overran the mosque complex. Assir, who had vowed to stand his ground “until martyrdom,” was nowhere to be seen.
In the two years since that day, he has written occasionally to his more than 250,000 followers on Twitter, where, true to form, he’s gone ever further off the deep end. When Lebanon’s mainstream Sunni party, the Future Movement, agreed to a joint government with Hezbollah in February 2014, Assir derided them as “sahwat”—an accusation of treachery alluding to the Iraqi Sunni tribes who helped the US against Al-Qaeda in Iraq from 2006. The Future Movement, in fact, was “more dangerous” than both Hezbollah and “the Zionists,” he said, because “it wages war on us from within Sunni Islam.”
Shia, meanwhile, became “rafida,” a sectarian slur, while Christians became “Crusaders.” In this Assir’s syntax matched that of ISIS, of whom he became an enthusiastic supporter; “blessing” their “victories” in Mosul in July 2014, as he later would their “liberation” of Ramadi in May 2015. He attacked the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS as “the coalition of disbelief to strike the Muslims,” and lambasted Saudi Arabia for bombing ISIS but not Assad and Hezbollah. “Say what you want about the mujahideen of the Islamic State,” he wrote in one tweet that got over 6,000 retweets, “[but] by God their righteous blood reminds me of nothing so much as the blood of the Noble Companions [of the Prophet].”
This latter-day affiliation with ISIS naturally raises questions of a possible jihadist backlash in Lebanon following his arrest. ISIS itself has not commented thus far, though the Abdallah Azzam Brigades, an al-Qaeda spinoff that suicide-bombed the Iranian embassy in Beirut in 2013, released a statement calling for Assir’s release, adding the vague threat that “in Lebanon there are thousands of Sunni youths zealous in their religion […] and verily the day of their rage is coming.” A “#We_Are_All_Sheikh_Ahmad_Al_Assir” Twitter hashtag was created and tagged by pro-ISIS accounts. “What are we going to do to help him?” asked one. “Turn Beirut’s night into day,” suggested another.
Even if things don’t go that far, Assir’s captivity could seriously complicate ongoing negotiations between the Lebanese government and both ISIS and the al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, who together are holding 25 kidnapped Lebanese soldiers and policemen in the remote mountains along Syria’s western border with Lebanon. Executing Assir could cost the lives of the servicemen, four of whom have already been murdered by their captors in the last year. On the other hand, exchanging Assir for the soldiers, as some have earnestly suggested, would outrage the public. Balancing a fair trial of the country’s foremost jihadist with the need to stay on speaking terms with another group of jihadists sitting on the border is unlikely to be a straightforward exercise.
And, beyond that, Lebanon may never be fully free of the so-called “Assir phenomenon” so long as the conditions that fueled its rise remain in place. These include a perception—dating back to the 2005 assassination of Sunni Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri, for which five Shia Hezbollah members have been indicted, but shielded from arrest—that in Lebanon there is one law for Hezbollah and another for everyone else. “On this point,” the TV political commentator Nadim Qoteish (who is incidentally of Shia birth) said on his show Monday night, “Assir was right.”
“With or without Assir,” Qoteish continued, “this is the reality of the country today. And in Assir’s place, there will come a hundred more Assirs so long as this reality exists.”