In the Middle East, regimes fall but the files remain. They lie in the drawers of ministries while the men they concern grow old, change names, cross frontiers. On Thursday one of those files was pulled out and acted on: Syrian intelligence officers arrested Ali Kayali — far better known by his other name, Mihrac Ural — as the state news agency SANA put it, “while he was attempting to flee across the border.” Al Jazeera reported the announcement. SANA did not say at which border he was stopped, nor name the country he was trying to reach.
The name in the file
The accusation carried in that file is one of the oldest and bloodiest of the Syrian war: involvement in the mass killing of civilians in the coastal city of Baniyas in 2013, in the third year of the uprising against Bashar al-Assad. Thirteen years is a long time even by the accounting of that war. Whole childhoods have been lived under the shadow of what happened on that coast, and for most of those years the men accused of the killing walked with the confidence of the protected.
Turkey’s Anadolu Agency reported, again citing SANA, that the arrest was made in a special operation coordinated with Turkish intelligence. That detail explains itself. Ankara has kept its own ledger on Ural: TRT World notes that the former pro-Assad militia leader has also been accused of involvement in twin bombings in Turkey’s Hatay province. So the man now in a Syrian cell was wanted by two states at once — one of them the new Syria that rose out of the war he helped wage, the other the neighbour across whose border, reportedly, he hoped to disappear.
Two ledgers, one man
There is a pattern worth naming, and it can only be offered as a pattern, not as a principle: those who commit a state’s violence imagine the state is permanent, because they cannot imagine standing alone. But states end, patrons change their calculations, and one day the name that once opened doors at checkpoints becomes the name an intelligence officer is waiting to hear. Ural crossed many borders in his time. On Thursday, by the account of the country he was leaving, he ran out of them.