After four years of war, Ahmed thought he had finally been given a break when he landed a job at Syria’s national gas company. Then he was assigned his new supervisors: the militant group, Isis.
For $80 a month, the 25-year-old petroleum engineering graduate from Deir Ezzor spent a nightmarish year working at the Tuweinan gas plant — one of several that have in effect become joint ventures between President Bashar al-Assad’s government and the world’s most notorious jihadi group.
The plant is not far from a military base where Isis months earlier had killed dozens of soldiers and displayed their heads on spikes. “It was frightening, but I didn’t have a choice,” says Ahmed in a phone interview. Like all employees interviewed, he asked to change his name for his family’s safety. “For people like me, you basically have no other work opportunities in Syria.”
Isis and the Assad regime remain battleground enemies, but on Syria’s gasfields the need for electricity has forced them into a Faustian bargain.
Gas supplies 90 per cent of Syria’s power grid, on which Isis and the Assad regime depend. Isis controls at least eight power plants in Syria, including three hydroelectric facilities and the country’s largest gas plant. The regime has companies that know how to run them.
Syrian activists and western officials have long accused the regime of making secret oil deals with Isis, which controls nearly all of Syria’s petroleum-producing east. But an FT investigation shows co-operation is strongest over the gas that generates Syria’s electricity. Interviews with over a dozen Syrian energy employees have revealed agreements that are less about cash than about services — something they may find more valuable than money.
The business deals do not translate into a truce. The two sides continually attack one another’s employees and infrastructure. The regime points to these clashes as proof that such understandings do not exist. In a written statement, Syria’s Ministry of Oil and Natural Resources said: “There is no co-ordination with the terrorist groups regarding this matter.” But it acknowledged some of its employees work under Isis “for the sake of preserving the security and safety of these facilities”.
But others describe the fighting as part of a struggle for better terms, where neither seeks to destroy the other. “Think of it as tactical manoeuvres to improve leverage,” said the owner of one Syrian energy company, who met the FT but asked not to be named. “This is 1920s Chicago mafia-style negotiation. You kill and fight to influence the deal, but the deal doesn’t end.”
Deadly game
The pawns in this deadly game are employees of state-run energy companies and the private groups they contract.
Instead of worrying over valves and pipelines, Ahmed spent much of his time at Tuweinan parsing a high-stakes mind game with his militant overseers. They beat workers regularly, and even killed one in front of his colleagues.
“The worst part is knowing that once you’re there, you belong to no one,” he said. “To both the regime and to Isis, you become untrustworthy.”
Like Ahmed, most workers sent to Isis territory are from Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority, who drove the revolt that spawned Syria’s brutal civil war against the Assad family and elites from their minority Alawite sect that have dominated the state. Many members of Syria’s minorities have supported Mr Assad — especially since Isis overtook the rebellion and branded non-Sunnis infidels.
Marwan, another Sunni engineering graduate who worked for the Syrian Gas Company before fleeing the country this summer, says only minorities and Sunnis with good political connections can secure jobs in government-controlled areas. Less fortunate employees find little sympathy from the state company if they try to avoid a posting in an Isis-controlled plant.
“If you try and complain, they say, ‘Forget about it. Trust me, it’s better in the Isis areas, people are happier there’,” Marwan, a bespectacled 25-year-old, told the FT.
Workers say that in agreements between Isis and the regime, the Syrian state and private gas companies pay and feed their employees and supply equipment to the facilities. The two sides divide the electricity produced from the methane heavy “dry gas”, while Isis gets the fuel products made from the plants’ liquid gas.
For example, employees at Tuweinan say its gas is sent to the Isis-held Aleppo thermal power plant. When facilities are working — there are frequent outages due to the instability in the area — the Tuweinan deal nets the regime 50mw of electricity each day. Isis takes 70mw.
At most plants where the two sides co-operate, Isis gives its daily output of liquid petroleum or cooking gas, and condensate — used for generators — to its own members or sells it to locals. At Tuweinan, unstable conditions mean it currently produces about 300 barrels of condensate but no cooking gas.
Tuweinan is partly run by the Syrian company Hesco, whose owner, George Haswani, is under EU sanctions on suspicion of dealing with the regime and Isis. Several workers said Hesco sends Isis 15m Syrian lira (about $50,000) every month to protect its equipment, which is worth several million dollars.
Michel Haswani, the owners’ son and a manager at Hesco, denies this. He said that claims the company pays Isis or communicates with it in any way are “not true and imprecise”. But he says that Isis was “partly” running the plant.
