A Picture in Words From a Syrian Officer, Then Nothing

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Ours was an unusual, sometimes operatic, correspondence that unfolded over more than a year. Abu al-Majd, a Syrian police officer who was being deployed more and more often like a soldier, texted at all hours, sending news from the front lines and grumbling about boring, sunbaked patrols, his complaints sometimes punctuated by expressions of terror, pride or doubt.

For us, it was a critical window into the raging war in Syria that we were too often forced to follow from afar. For him, it seemed, as much as anything, about having a connection to people who lived outside the claustrophobia of war, yet cared about what he was going through.

On May 19 last year, Abu al-Majd sent a pair of snapshots. One showed him in fatigues, smoking a water pipe and starting to smile, as if a friend had just walked in; two cups of Turkish coffee, still foamy, stood on a table.

He was about to board a bus to Palmyra, the Syrian desert city that was in the process of falling to the Islamic State. Many government troops had fled, but Abu al-Majd and a few dozen others had been ordered to fight what he believed to be a doomed battle.

He had taken the photos specially. “These,” he texted, “might be the last pictures.”

We did not hear from him again. Six weeks later, his parents received a call from a man who identified himself as a soldier and warned, “Don’t be hopeful.” Then he hung up.

They went to a security office, where a bureaucrat handed them a piece of paper that said: “Missing.” That stark label, it turned out, masked a terrifying tale of a fighter’s desperate bid for survival, and his struggle between duty and fear.

We had met Abu al-Majd more than a year before, on a reporting trip to Palmyra in April 2014. We were among the last international journalists to visit the city and its imposing ancient ruins, some since blown up by the Islamic State. He was then 24, part of a comically large entourage assigned to guard us — and monitor us.

Palmyra, also known as Tadmur, had lost its main livelihood, tourism, and on its grid of concrete-block streets, men sat around with little to do. Islamic State militants were just a few miles east, while Syrian Army tanks occupied the medieval citadel above the ruins.