A former Syrian army cargo pilot has revealed how he flew secret missions for the regime of Bashar al-Assad to carry cash and weapons into the country in the face of international sanctions.
Nazim spoke to The Sunday Telegraph from a border town in Jordan, where he fled with his family last September
By Nigel Wilson, Amman
8:00AM GMT 24 Mar 2013
The pilot, who asked to be identified only as Nazim, revealed that he or fellow pilots flew a cargo plane two or three times a month to collect bank notes from Russia - including large quantities of euros and dollars needed to prop up the regime.
He also recounted at least 20 missions to Tehran, two of which he flew himself, to collect Iranian arms and explosives for use by the regime in its effort to crush the rebellion that began two years ago.
His account - the first time anyone involved with such operations has spoken out - came as the conflict within Syria reached a new peak, with each side claiming that the other had used chemical weapons in an attack last week at Khan al-Assal, a town near Aleppo.
Meanwhile President Assad vowed to avenge the death of a senior pro-government cleric who was killed in a suicide bombing on a mosque in Damascus, along with at least 49 others, saying he would “purge” Syria of the militants responsible for the attack. Mr Assad said the attack on Sheik Mohammad Said Ramadan al-Buti, a strong supporter of the regime, was part of a terrorist conspiracy against his government.
The pilot’s account appears to confirm Western intelligence officials’ belief that the Assad government is being propped up by Russia and supplied with weapons by Iran.
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Nazim, 50, spoke to The Sunday Telegraph from a border town in Jordan, where he fled with his family last September. He decided to quit Syria, where he had once been a supporter of the regime, after he and fellow pilots were arrested and imprisoned for 60 days over a plane crash that the regime regarded as suspicious.
He and his family have been given rent-free accommodation by a sympathetic Jordanian - in a block where 26 other Syrian refugee families also live.
A proud and apparently meticulous man, he said he had made many flights abroad during his career in the Syrian army, first as a helicopter pilot and then for 18 years flying Russian-built Ilyushin Il-76 freighter aircraft, designed to carry payloads up to 40 tons.
“I’ve been to Moscow, North Africa, India, even England,” he said, sitting in an austere room in his current home.
“I’ve carried many kinds of cargo, humanitarian aid, medical aid, sometimes weapons. But now it’s not good because these weapons are being used against civilians.”
It was last April when Nazim made his own first round trip to Russia to collect cash, flying on a route that took him over Iraq, Iran and Azerbaijan to Moscow’s Vnokova airport. “The cargo was bank notes, 30 tons,” he said. Some of the currency was brought from the Russian city of Perm, where the country’s state currency is printed.
“When we landed at Damascus, secure cars from the Syrian bank were waiting for us at the airport to take the money straight to the bank.”
Such special flights were flown up to three times a month, he said, and the cargo was always the same - a combination of Syrian pounds, euros and US dollars. By August last year there had been at least 15 similar flights, he said.
Earlier last year, in January and February, Nazim made two return flights trips to Tehran, each time accompanied by Iran’s ambassador to Syria. Upon arrival in the Iranian capital, Nazim said, the plane was guided to a hanger and its crew sent away so that cargo could be loaded in secret.
Although he did not see what was put on board, he recalled being advised to avoid areas of turbulence during the flight back to Damascus as the 40-ton cargo would not be able to withstand a bumpy journey - a discreet way of warning that explosives were on board, he said.
“There were explosive materials. We don’t need anything else from Iran. If you looked you wouldn’t find any missiles. It was parts, explosives, copper sheets that could be used to make weapons in Syria.” After four or five hours he and the crew re-embarked to fly the plane back to Damascus. “There were around 20 such flights to Tehran from April 2011 to July 2012,” he said, adding that they received special permission from the Iraqi foreign ministry to overfly Iraq, “probably without American knowledge”.
It was not possible to verify details of Nazim’s account, but his full name is known to The Sunday Telegraph and he showed his Syrian Air identity card.
The planes he flew were owned and operated by the Syrian Air Force, he said, but when flying abroad they would be presented as civilian aircraft, part of the national carrier, Syrian Air. The pilots, flight engineers, navigators were all military staff, but were issued with Syrian Air identity cards which they always used when on international flights.
A Sunni Muslim, Nazim also described how he and other officers were arrested and imprisoned in a tiny cell, measuring four feet by seven and a half feet, after a cargo plane crash landed, killing the pilot - a member of the Alawite sect to which the Assad family belong.
“They took me from work and they put me in prison for 60 days. We were 12 people,” he said. “There were some pilots, some civilians and some artillery. All of them were officers.” He was interrogated about the plane crash almost daily until in mid-September - with no explanation offered - he was abruptly released.
“I decided to leave Syria when I got out of prison, because when I got home I found my house was burned down,” he said.
“I asked my neighbours what had happened. They told me three vehicles came to your house. They broke the door, went upstairs and took your uniform, your black bag and a souvenir from a trip abroad.
“Then they threw a white powder, phosphorous, on the ground and they burned the house. It burned swiftly, my neighbours saw the fire coming from the windows. I was in the army, working for the government, and yet they burned my house.
Fearful that he might be arrested again after a few days, he decided that the only safe course of action was to flee. “It might be OK now, but in a few months, they might round up every officer that isn’t Alawite and kill him. I was scared for my life, and my family and I knew I had to leave.”
Having reunited with his wife and daughters, who had relocated with neighbour’s help to a safer spot within Syria, he embarked on the dangerous four-day trip to the border, through territory controlled by the rebel Free Syrian Army.
In Dael, a town just north of Deraa in the south-west of the country, a government sniper shot at their vehicle. A bullet tore through his son’s arm before striking his nine-year-old daughter, who had been sitting on his lap. After receiving rudimentary medical treatment at a makeshift hospital nearby, he told doctors he would take his daughter with him even if she died, and the family set out on foot for the final eight-hour stretch to the Jordanian border.
They arrived in the Kingdom without any further hiccups but the journey left the family exhausted and his daughter required urgent surgery. “She was in hospital for 15 days,” he said. “She had her spleen removed and now she’s OK.” He showed the scars on her stomach, including two small circles where the bullet ripped through her skin.
Gazing out of the large window of the upper-floor flat where he now lives with his family, he can see into his home country and is still wistful about the life they have left behind, even though everything has now changed.
He paints a picture of a tolerant, pluralist society held back by favouritism among the political elite. “Most of my friends are Christians, many Alawite, Druze and some are Muslim like me,” he said.
“The problems started in Syria 40 years ago with Hafez Assad, who only took care of his family and not the population. The revolution has come now but there was always a fire behind the ash. You couldn’t see it, but it was there.”
The internet had changed everything for the people of Syria, he said. “This is a different generation. The Syrian people are an educated people. We just want some freedoms.
Not freedom like in the West, just some small freedoms.” He is still hurt by the way the army has behaved throughout the long rebellion. “The army belongs to me,” he said. “It’s my army, but it’s turned against the people.”
And he wishes he were not trapped in Jordan, unable to return home and unable to return to the flying he loved. “Every day I look to the sky,” he said. “I see aircraft and I think I want to do something for my people, my country. Not just my country, but for the world.”
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