Fade to Black. Rise and Fall of the Caliphate of ISIS. 2011_2019 Syria, Iraq and Libya

Rise and fall of the Caliphate of ISIS 2011_2019. Syria, Iraq and Libya

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Combatiente del Gobierno de Acuerdo Nacional (GAN o GNA, por sus siglas en inglés) herido al que un compañero sujeta la mano, en un hospital de campaña, durante la batalla de Sirte contra el ISIS. Los soldados, la mayoría de ellos jóvenes sin experiencia, procedían principalmente de la ciudad libia de Misurata (Libia, 2016).

Original title Fade to Black Publisher Leopoldo Blume ❘ Photography and Concept Ricardo García Vilanova ❘ Digital Image Processing David Vicente, Juan Manuel Castro Prieto. AuthSpirit Layout Francisco Díaz Gómez ❘ Translation Kevin Krell ❘ Edition/Production Cristina Rodríguez Fischer First edition 2019 © 2019 Naturart, S. A. Edited by BLUME. Carrer de les Alberes, 52, 2.º, Vallvidrera, 08017 Barcelona. Tel. 93 205 40 00 e-mail: info@blume.net © 2019 of the photographs Ricardo García Vilanova © 2019 of the texts, their authors I.S.B.N.: 978-84-17757-38-0 ❘ Legal deposit: B. 11 282-2019 ❘ Printed in Brizzolis, Pinto (Madrid) All rights reserved. Total or partial reproduction of this work by any means, whether mechanical or electronic, without the express written authorization of the author is prohibited.

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F A D E T O B L A C K

The Strength of the Testimony (Jon Lee Anderson)

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SYRIA 2011_2013

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The constant massacre of civilians (several hundreds of thousands of victims have been reported) brought about the entrance and settlement of ISIS in Syria and its expansion as a caliphate.

Syria, Iraq and Libya 2014_2019 Rise and Fall of the ISIS Caliphate

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ISIS sowed death and destruction, resulting in hundreds of thousands of victims

Short Story of the ISIS Caliphate

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Resilience under the Caliphate

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Fade to Black

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It’s Better to Die Standing Than to Live on Your Knees

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>>> The final bombing of the enclave of Al-Baghouz, on 19 March, where ISIS was left with just a few hundred square meters surrounded by the Euphrates River. This marked the final surrender of 500 people, including combatants and their families, and the end of the caliphate (Syria, 2019).

FADE TO BLACK

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The Strength of the Testimony Jon Lee Anderson

Ricardo García Vilanova is a man of few words, but his images say it all. In the best tradition of legendary war photographers like Don McCullin and James Nachtwey, Ricardo García Vilanova places us in the middle of war and reveals its intimacies. It’s not pretty.

What we see here in Fade to Black are contemporary wars, waged not on battlefields, outside of cities, as used to happen, but inside them, with the lives of the fighters, and what they do inextricably intertwined with those of the civilians around them. They suffer, they hurt, they die, and they survive together.

What Ricardo García Vilanova shows us, in other words, is the face of horror itself. They are reminiscent of the Dantesque illustrations of the Holy Inquisition by Goya, or those of Hell, by Brueghel. As in the scenes that were captured in those paintings, Ricardo wants us to feel the full impact of that horror. He does not want to soften anything; his purpose is to share exactly what he witnessed, wherever it took place, in the places he experienced it, again and again, from 2011 to 2019, in the midst of bloody battles in Syria, in Iraq and in Libya. At the core of it all, as the title of this book says, is the dark rise and fall of the Islamic State, the most sadistic and destructive terrorist group that the modern world has yet known.

Ricardo García Vilanova is an exceptional witness. No one has covered the history of the Islamic State as closely and as continuously as he has. Not only has he observed its terror up close – he was also a hostage of the jihadist organization; not once, but twice. Incredibly, he survived.

Ricardo’s first kidnapping took place in Aleppo in the summer of 2013. His captivity lasted only eleven days, thanks to the circumstances of the war at the time, and the loyalty and persistence of a close Syrian friend, the man he calls Doctor Yasser, whose testimony is also included in this book.

His second kidnapping, in September of the same year, led to a captivity lasting seven long months. Part of the time, he was held in a dungeon in the city of Raqqa, capital of the self-proclaimed "caliphate" of the Islamic State. Ricardo was not alone but together with his friend and Spanish colleague, Javier Espinosa, and several other European, American and British hostages.

All suffered threats and daily abuse at the hands of the four jihadists who guarded them, the so-called "Beatles". All assumed that they were going to die there, because the Beatles told them repeatedly they would kill them. We know that this is exactly what happened to American hostages Jim Foley, Steve Sotloff, Peter Kassig, and British hostages David Haines and Alan Henning.

They were beheaded by the Beatle known as Jihadi John, with their deaths recorded on video and broadcast around the world.

Fortunately, Ricardo, Javier, and a handful of other European hostages were lucky enough to get out alive not long before the gruesome beheadings of their friends began. They were very lucky,

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but they will always carry with them the memory of their time on the caliphate’s death row. No doubt most people surviving such a nightmare would seek to avoid ever again putting themselves into similar situations of risk, perhaps even changing their professions.

Ricardo has done just the opposite. Since he was released in 2014, he has repeatedly returned to the battlefield, and in this book we see the dramatic results of those efforts. Fade to Black shows what happened in the battlegrounds where the Islamic State was finally confronted by its adversaries and, where, little by little, its caliphate crumbled.

When Ricardo told me he was returning to Syria for the first time since his capture, to document the great battle of Kobane, I tried to dissuade him. He told me: "Jon, I have to go. If I do not go, they win". And so it was. He went to Kobane, to Sinjar, to Sirte, to Raqqa, to Mosul, to Deir ez-Zor..., to all the places where the Islamic State was once strong and is no longer. He wanted to be an eyewitness to the defeat of this nefarious group, and he has been.

Ricardo tells us about the hypocrisy of Islamic State jihadists.

Although they were all ostensibly committed to giving up their lives for their cause, Ricardo was on hand to witness many of them surrendering, or else being caught while trying to flee. He also arranged to have a face-to-face encounter with two of the four Beatles, who were captured and became prisoners of the Kurds.

When they realized who he was, they refused to talk to him.

For Ricardo, it was an important moment to see with his own eyes that his former tormentors had been defeated, and were unable to face him, much less stand up for their own convictions.

If one day their captors hang these individuals, I would not be surprised if Ricardo attended their executions, and I would not judge him if he did, capable of witnessing so much pain and cruelty, and moving on. It is not for everyone. This book is not for everyone either. Ricardo lives with the paradox of wanting to show us his creative and professional work which, in turn, is something that many of us would prefer not to see.

"See this", Ricardo is telling us: "Look at these pages and maybe you will feel what I have felt. By looking, we may restore some humanity, some proof of life to these people whom we only see in their moments of mourning, pain, fright, or hate. See them", Ricardo is telling us."They are human beings just like us".

What Ricardo has done here brings back to memory something of my own life. Many years ago, in the 80s, I lived in El Salvador.

I was a young reporter and there was a civil war. I decided to invite my younger sister, who was 20 years old, to spend a week with me there. My intention was not to endanger her. I was ten years older than her and wanted to open her eyes to the world. At the time she lived a normal life for someone her age in the United States, a peaceful, uneventful life. She came to El Salvador, and initially, everything was fine. I introduced her to my friends and we went out for meals, and I took her everywhere I could think of that was relatively safe.

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Free Syrian Army (FSA) soldiers engaged in a fierce battle against Assad’s troops in Aleppo’s Old City (Syria, 2012).

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Refugees, who had fled desperately from the city of Mosul during the night, risking death if ISIS captured them, were rescued by Kurdish Peshmerga soldiers (those who face death) in Al-Qubeiba and later transferred to a refugee camp (Iraq, 2016).

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A wounded man being comforted by a friend, in a field hospital during the battle of Sirte against ISIS. The soldiers mainly came from Misrata, the majority of them very young and without any previous military experience (Libya, 2016).

ISBN 978-84-17757-38-0

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