A Syria Telecom engineer's account told his story during the war; what was behind internet shut downs? And what happened during students’ exams?
Doug Madory is a veteran network analyst and the Director of Internet Analysis at Kentik. Once profiled by The Washington Post as “the man who can see the internet,” his work focuses on the intersection of geopolitics and digital infrastructure, documenting how states control information flow.
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 back. He then saw Mahmoud’s laptop backpack in the overhead rack and asked, “whose bag is this?” Mahmoud said it was his as the fighter took it down and began rummaging through it. In the bag, he found Mahmoud’s passport and began flipping through it. His eyes lit up when he found a stamped Chinese visa on one of the pages.
Mahmoud had traveled to China two months prior. As was the case for developing countries around the world, the telecommunications infrastructure of Syria was built primarily using low-cost Chinese equipment. As a heavy user of Chinese gear, Syria Telecom had the opportunity to occasionally send engineers to China for advanced training and Mahmoud was the latest to make the trip.
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