No, the old militia commander says at the end of a long conversation. Hardly anyone would head into the desert like they used to – didn’t do so for years. “Anyone who did, disappeared.” Time and again, some of the Bedouin shepherds and gatherers who used to follow the sparse vegetation would fail to return. “The Badia,” as the Syrian desert between the coastal hills in the west and the Euphrates valley in the east is called, “was a place of doom,” says the man, his face lit by the wavering light of a lamp fed by a generator.
It is a story similar to that told by people on all sides of this great desert when asked in January 2025 to reflect on the region’s recent history. In Deir ez-Zur in the east. In a village near Salamiyah in the west. In the town of Shbiki in the deep south. Stories of nighttime raids on their tent camps. Narratives of armed men wearing masks shooting at them from motorcycles. Tales of their cars being set on fire and their sheep stolen.
Officially, the same villains were always to blame: the terrorists from Islamic State (IS), the organization that has spread fear and terror since 2013, conquering significant swaths of northeastern Syria along with, in 2014, the large Iraqi city of Mosul. It ruled its self-proclaimed caliphate for several years. In 2019, though, the last remaining IS stronghold – the Euphrates town of Baghouz, located right on the Syrian-Iraqi border – was overtaken in early spring by Kurdish militias with U.S. assistance.
The caliphate was history.
But then, Islamic State made a comeback in the Syrian desert, as a ghostly group of killers that could strike anywhere, but which no longer controlled towns and villages as it once did. IS made a return to maps of war-torn Syria as early as 2020. Those maps showed the clear boundaries of regions controlled by other powers competing for ascendancy. In the west, the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. In the northwestern area of Idlib, the Islamist militia Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), who’s offensive in late 2024 finally vanquished the dictatorship. To the northeast, the Turkish protectorate. Further to the east, the Kurdish area protected by a small contingent of U.S. troops, clearly delineated by the Euphrates. Way down south, the semi-circle surrounding the U.S. base at al-Tanf on the border with Jordan.
Islamic State, by contrast, has been located periodically at various sites in the desert, sometimes as one spot, sometimes as five or six spots, and sometimes merely as a hazy crosshatch pattern. A vague source of terror, like a mirage. Western terror experts and U.S. military leaders have been saying for years that IS is active once again, as has the Syrian regime. IS even maintains training camps in the Badia Desert, it is said. The terrorists are thought to have spent years holding out in caves, in inaccessible mountain ranges or isolated valleys deep in the desert. Estimates vary regarding the group’s strength. Some say there are thousands of them, others say there are hundreds. Either way, it is enough that Washington has repeatedly warned of an IS resurgence.
When Bashar al-Assad’s rule collapsed unceremoniously on December 8, 2024, his soldiers went home and the dictator himself fled secretly to Moscow, leaving his last remaining lackeys to fend for themselves. It was a momentous occasion that triggered concern among terror experts: If Islamic States’s adversary implodes, according to the logic, then the terror group could use the ensuing chaos to loot the weapons caches left behind and go on the attack.
“We thought there would be fighting, especially against IS. But there was nobody there.”
An HTS militia fighter telling the story of his unit’s advance through the desert in early December
“The current environment in Syria,” wrote the U.S.-based think tank The Soufan Group immediately following the collapse of the Assad regime, “is tailor-made for the Islamic State to exploit in an effort to help facilitate its comeback and resurgence, not just in the country but across the region.” Then-U.S. Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said it was the government’s “top priority” to prevent IS from receiving “new oxygen” from the uncertain situation. Outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden said: “We’re clear-eyed about the fact that IS will try and take advantage of any vacuum to reestablish its credibility and create a safe haven. We will not let that happen.” On December 8, the same day the regime disintegrated, U.S. Central Command issued a statement that the Air Force had launched “dozes of precision strikes” on IS targets in central Syria.
And then. Crickets.
Even as the Kurdish militia Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) took advantage of the chaos to occupy additional territory, as did Israel troops in the south, things remained quiet in the desert. There was no news at all from the region: no fighting, no air strikes, no injuries, no refugees and no kidnappings.
Around a week after the overthrow of Assad, two HTS fighters, who were now standing guard in front of the complex in Damascus that once belonged to the military intelligence service, casually recounted the story of their advance in early December. They were part of the eastern flank that advanced on Homs and Damascus through the desert. “We thought there would be fighting, especially against IS,” they said. “But there was nobody there. Just thousands of soldiers walking home in civilian garb.” Nobody attacked them.
So what happened to Islamic State?
It is a bit unnerving to set out across a desert in search of a phantom terrorist group that the U.S. military insists is there. The attacks in recent years along with the murders of shepherds and clan leaders are all indisputable. How, then, can a run-in with the IS be avoided if the group’s fighters are still present? Our plan is to feel our way through the desert, establishing before each stretch of road if anyone had been there before us. First the large roads, then the smaller ones. And, prior to departure, to find a reserve jerrycan with a lid that closes tightly, a search that fails at several filling stations in Damascus. Ultimately, a plastic bag under the lid does the trick. The old Peugeot Khodro produced under license in Iran isn’t the perfect vehicle for the desert, but at least it’s not conspicuous.
Acquaintances from Deir ez-Zur, the once-prosperous, though now largely destroyed, oil town on the Euphrates River, which runs along the eastern edge of the desert, say over the phone that the road stretching hundreds of kilometers through the Badia is safe. We should, though, they warn, stay on the road. Unmarked minefields could be anywhere.
First, it was IS that mined the frontlines during its 2014 advances, having imported industrial quantities of explosive material and produced the mines itself. After IS was stopped, Assad’s army and numerous militias also laid mines to secure their bases. But even far away from those former bases, some shepherd trails and valleys have also been mined.
The most popular, and thus safest, route from Damascus into the desert leads north to Homs before veering east through the steppe – at which point traffic is reduced to a trickle. Small Chinese-built trucks share the road with Korean SUVs and a handful of buses as the road stretches endlessly through the desert – a semi-desert, really, with a steppe sprinkled with thorny thistles in place of barren sand dunes. Small mesas occasionally rise on the horizon. Hardly a single intact village will appear before the Iraqi border. The few cities in the region, along with the villages and even individual roadhouses, have been bombed, shot to bits and transformed into charred ruins.
Every few kilometers, there are abandoned military checkpoints and outposts that are still relatively intact. Based on what has been left behind, it looks almost as though the Badia was a gigantic military restriction zone for foreign militias. Over the course of several decades, Iran’s leadership built up strong, loyal militias among the Shiite populations of countries in the region – before then sending them to Syria starting in 2012 to prevent Assad’s regime from being toppled. First, it was the Hezbollah from Lebanon, followed by Iraqis, Pakistanis and Afghans. The Russian army joined them in 2016. By 2018, the most intense fighting in Syria was largely over. So why did the Shiite militias remain in the desert?
Along the road to the east are tanks abandoned mere weeks ago, along with a single artillery piece that was left behind. Trucks, minibuses and military jeeps destroyed many years ago lie in the sand, turned dark brown by the rust. Strips of paint from IS slogans faded by the sun peel off the ruined walls. The spray-painted way-markers are a bit fresher: “Turn right for Nujaba.” They are relicts of a Shiite militia from Iraq. Tattered portraits of Bashar al-Assad and what look to be Afghan martyrs flutter in the wind. But there are almost no people to be seen anywhere, not even shepherds in the distance.
As the sun goes down, three HTS men wave us over at the first checkpoint in over 100 kilometers. “Please! There’s no reception here. Could you call our commander once you have reached Deir ez-Zur? And tell him that there is nobody here in the desert, it is freezing cold, and ask him to relieve us soon?” Temperatures approach zero degrees Celsius on winter nights in the Badia.
Long after darkness has fallen, Deir ez-Zur appears on the horizon, once the largest city in eastern Syria. Today, only very few streets are illuminated and populated in the evening. The rest is a landscape of decaying, abandoned ruins looming in the moonlight. A few tens of thousands of people live here, estimates the new vice governor Abu Elias, who invites us into his makeshift accommodations. “Around 20 percent of the residents either stayed or have returned,” he says. Most of the population first fled regime air strikes and then the IS reign of terror. “When they were driven off in 2017, almost nobody was allowed to return,” says Abu Elias, who also spent many years living in exile. “First, it was prohibited, and later there was no electricity, no running water, no supplies.” Nothing has been rebuilt, as is the case everywhere in the country.
“Daesh,” as he derogatorily refers to IS in Arabic, was responsible for everything after 2017: “Every attack on civilians in the Badia, every murder, it was all officially Daesh, always. But often, such incidents were the result of conflicts between gangs of smugglers, turf wars for illegal oil extraction and, especially, conflicts over truffles!”
Desert truffles.
For many in the poverty-stricken region, the “kamah,” a less-flavorful relative of the classic truffle, has become a vital source of income. One kilo goes for between $10 and $70, the rough equivalent of a monthly civil servant salary. The potato-brown fungi grow just below the desert surface in the broad valleys from late January to April. Truffle gatherers, says Abu Elias, suffered most from the raids and saw the attackers. “Ask them!”
“It was always possible to blame IS.”
Bashar Hassan, a local journalist from Deir ez-Zur
For Assad’s rule, IS was a thoroughly useful enemy. Sheerly by virtue of its existence, the fight against the Syrian opposition could be framed as a war on terror – as a war against murderous jihadists who were threatening the entire world with their attacks in Paris, Brussels and Istanbul. In the early years of the war, Assad’s air force didn’t attack IS and the Syrian army would sometimes withdraw from towns at night so that IS could take them without a fight. The regime and IS cooperated for years when it came to the exploitation of oil and gas fields in the Badia. As a result, several magnates and regime minions ended up on U.S. and EU sanctions lists starting in 2015.
For the Kurdish autonomous government in the northeast of Syria, meanwhile, whose militia, the Syrian Democratic Forces, drove away IS with American help, the ongoing fight against the terrorists is their strongest argument for preventing the withdrawal of over 900 U.S. soldiers from their region.
The battle goes on against IS, but it is a useful enemy.
The search for files in the abandoned offices used by the intelligence services and the troops also produces contradictions. At the offices of the Syrian criminal police in Deir ez-Zur – at the bottom of the agency pecking order – there are piles of investigations into IS members. But in a nearby building used by both Russian officers and Syrian secret service agents, HTS guards present IS emblems found there. “They were lying in the offices,” says their leader. When Kurdish militia fighters entered the regime facilities in early December, one of them – likely in the same building – filmed a carton of brand new IS pennants, some of them still strung together on the same thread.
It was a similar scene to the one at military secret service headquarters in Damascus. There, too, we found numerous investigation files on suspected IS terrorists – along with, a few rooms further along, boxes of IS brochures, unpainted IS license plates, unused receipt blocks, maintenance records for IS vehicles and hundreds of unused laminated IS ID cards, most of the material printed with “Wilayat al Raqqa,” the province of Raqqa, the unofficial capital of IS. But Assad’s troops had never returned to the city after it was liberated from IS in 2017 by the Kurds. And why would the regime need such freshly printed IS supplies anyway?
“Just in case, for disguise,” says the local journalist Bashar Hassan in Deir ez-Zur, who occasionally writes for the Facebook page DeirEzzor24. “When it came to business interests, it was normal for the secret services and military units to fight against each other. And it was always possible to blame IS.” Earlier, real IS terrorists used to be active in the desert, he insists. “I set up a database of names, some foreigners among them.” The last of them, a man from Yemen, dropped off the radar in 2022, he says.
As far has he knows, he says, a handful of remaining fighters have withdrawn to isolated hideouts, “five to 10 men in a group” – to Mount Bishri, to Arak and Resafa in the north and the west, to Maisilija in the south. He hasn’t been to those places though. “Most of them crossed the Euphrates into the Kurdish area, though.” Precisely to the place where the Kurds have made the fight against IS a key element of their political message and where thousands of IS fighters are still locked away in prison. It is, says Hassan, safer there for IS. “The Arabs view the Kurds as occupiers, making it easier for IS fighters to go underground. They even call the region the safety zone.” His uncle in the region, he says, pays protection money for his bakery to someone who claims to be from IS.
Two days later, Bashar Hassan contacts us again to say that he had asked around among his contacts in the south. Maisilija, which he had mentioned as a possible IS hideout, is completely vacant, he says, and is safe for a visit. But then, it starts pouring down rain and continues for several hours. Halfway to Maisilija, we decide to turn around – out of concern for possible mines and that, because of the mud, it might become difficult to stay on the road.
“Talk to the truffle hunters,” the vice governor advised us. But first, our search takes a circuitous route that leads us to someone who witnessed a robbery of the fungi collectors. In March 2024, the man relates, he and dozens of others had gone to a desert swale near Kobajjep, just west of Deir ez-Zur. “Shots were fired at truffle hunters almost every day. We knew that it was dangerous to collect them without authorization. But otherwise, it was hardly worth it.”
They spread out on their search, keeping their eyes open for the tiny rises that indicate a fungus growing beneath the sand, when shots were suddenly fired from the direction of the highway, he says. “I started running and saw our truck burning in the distance. A warplane flew low overhead, Russian or Syrian.” An older man was killed in the gunfire, he says. The man’s family spent months trying to learn more about his death. The witness says he has the phone number of the man’s son. When asked if he thinks IS might be behind the attack, he scoffs. “How could they be? In a region full of military bases? From the highway? And do they have planes?”
In a house that has been provisionally patched together in the center of Deir ez-Zur, we meet Ammar, in his mid-20s, the son of the truffle hunter who was shot dead. His father, Abdallah al-Mheimid, died on March 6, he says. “It was his birthday,” Ammar says, as he begins to describe a panopticon of greed, violence and deceit. “Every productive truffle area in the Badia de facto belonged to an officer, a militia. It was called a Taahud, a promise. Here, the 4th Division, an elite unit under the control of Assad’s brother Maher, and the military intelligence service divided the most productive valleys among themselves. Those who collected truffles under their protection in their area had to hand over about half of what they found and sell the rest to them at an artificially low price. But they wouldn’t be shot at.” The areas weren’t surrounded by fences, but by mine fields, he says.
On that morning in March, his father and the others were collecting on their own, without protection. “He didn’t want to take me along. He said it was too dangerous.” When the attackers arrived on motorcycles and in a white delivery van, says Ammar, his father was the only one who was mortally wounded.
Without being asked, the son says: “We never rose up against Assad. We were always loyal. We even moved on a number of occasions to avoid living in an opposition quarter.” Perhaps that is why they dared to do what families of murder victims rarely did: They demanded an investigation. They went to the police over and over again, and they even dared to approach the feared military intelligence service. “We were disruptive,” says Ammar al-Mheimid, “and were turned away. One police officer asked: ‘What do you want? Everyone here is murdered at some point.’”
“Those who collected truffles under their protection in their area had to hand over about half of what they found. But they wouldn’t be shot at.”
Ammar al-Mheimid, the son of a murdered truffle hunter
Instead of shedding light on the murder, the family’s efforts produced the opposite. Immediately after his death, the regime militia Liwa al-Quds posted on Telegram that al-Mheimid had been murdered by IS. Then, the post disappeared. The police report also only mentioned an “armed group.”
Even as the police and secret service eagerly sought to eliminate evidence of the purported IS murder on site, the March 6 attack was magnified in the PR meant for foreign consumption. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights in Britain reported that “at least 18 people” had been shot to death near Kobajjep, including four pro-Assad militia fighters, with another 50 gone missing. A news agency from the Kurdish region of Syria reported 40 deaths, “including women and children.” On the propaganda broadcaster Mayadeen-TV in Damascus, 47 deaths were reported.
But witnesses of the attack and al-Mheimid’s family all say that only one person died. And that nobody had been abducted.
On its ever-changing Telegram channels, IS claimed responsibility neither for the attack near Kobajjep nor for the many other attacks for which it has been blamed. Which is unusual for a terrorist group which has in the past demonstrated a penchant for exaggerating its strikes. The same discrepancy was identified back in 2021 by two experts at the Washington-based Middle East Institute in an essay called “Islamic State Underreporting in Central Syria.” The regime, the essay noted, had reported up to 10 times as many IS attacks as IS itself.
On the southern edge of the Badia, not far from the Jordanian border, is the isolated military base of Al-Tanf. It is home to around 200 U.S. soldiers and a few hundred fighters from the lesser-known Syrian Free Army (SFA). The fighters have been trained and financed by the U.S. military since 2015, and their official mission is to fight IS within a 55-kilometer radius, the protection zone around the base.
But with the sudden implosion of Assad’s military in early December, well-equipped SFA units have, since December 7, ventured much further afield in the desert – almost all the way to Damascus in the west and toward Deir ez-Zur in the east, until its convoy hit a mine. In the north, they were able to advance unhindered to the legendary Roman ruins of Palmyra, where they occupied the airport. They didn’t see any armed IS personnel along the way, “just fleeing soldiers,” says a still somewhat bemused SFA officer named Abdulrazak al-Chudr. He recommended that we meet at the airport says he is prepared to later escort us to Al-Tanf.
Palmyra is just as destroyed and abandoned as all the cities in the Badia. IS took control of the city on two separate occasions and blew up parts of the Roman ruins, including two surviving temples and parts of the famous theater, the stage of which the terrorists used for executions. Once IS was finally chased away for good in 2017, the city became a bridgehead for Iran’s military presence in Syria. Hundreds of Shiite banners in green, pink and blue and bearing the writings of the Holy Imams lie on the floor of the abandoned headquarters of the Fatemiyoun Brigade, made up of mercenaries from Afghanistan. The men apparently stayed here until the very end. But why? There was no longer any fighting here.
“The surroundings were to remain empty of people.”
Abdulrazak al-Chudr, officer in the American-backed rebel group SFA
The situation grows even more mystifying following a chance encounter with a single solitary sapper, who tells us that he has found weapons depots everywhere in the city center. “Come along!” Two such depots are located within 200 meters of each other, rooms packed with 1.5-meter piles of anti-tank mines, wooden crates full of anti-personnel mines, blocks of explosive material wrapped in plastic and boxes full of fuses. A nearby garage contains four rocket halves, each five meters long, packed in giant boxes.
In one of the storerooms, we discover something from the IS repertoire that is shunned by normal troops: a small production site for vests used by suicide bombers. Steel balls cast in large sheets of synthetic resin, then broken into smaller pieces and packed into a ready-made vest. There are enough fragments for a dozen more vests sitting ready in a large bowl.
Abdulrazak al-Chudr, the SFA officer whose unit was the first to reach Palmyra in December, says that he was initially surprised. “The Afghans had enough ammunition here to defend themselves for another three months.” But their priority was likely a completely different one. “The main route between Tehran and Beirut, used to supply Hezbollah in Lebanon, ran through Palmyra. That is another reason why the surroundings were to remain empty of people.” That would explain the weapons depots and the traces everywhere in the Badia of Afghan militias and other armed groups under Tehran control. And why displaced Syrians weren’t allowed to return to the area. For the Iranian leadership, a well-armed Hezbollah was key to its deterrence strategy against Israel and crucial to its efforts to exert power across the entire Middle East.
As to where IS might still be hiding in the Badia, Chudr can only guess: They withdrew “in cells of five to 10 fighters,” he says, repeating the common conjecture. And he also mentions the same possible hideouts: Mount Bishri northwest of Deir ez-Zur, and the Rod al-Wahsh Valley, which locals translate as “taming of the beast.”
The weather has cleared up after the rainfall. On the way to Al-Tanf, a silver shimmer can frequently be seen on the horizon, as though we are approaching an expansive body of water. Once we get closer, however, the mirages vanish, leaving behind the grayish brown sand, scree and scrub.
The first shepherds with their sheep, goats, camels and black winter tents begin appearing around Al-Tanf in mid-January. The Badia after rainfall provides excellent grazing, says Mohammed Ideia, an old shepherd. “But for years, we didn’t dare come here. It was hell. At every army checkpoint, regime soldiers would confiscate flour and even firewood, saying it was banned. Or we had to pay. They would then come into our tents and take our IDs and would demand one sheep per document to get them back.”
Last June, he continues, they were attacked at night. “The assailants burned three cars, stole our trucks and hundreds of sheep, and kidnapped my cousin.” Who were the attackers? “I have no idea. It was dark. They were shooting.” IS disappeared from the western Badia back in 2017, he says, “but the place was full of soldiers and Iranians,” as he refers to the Shiite militias.
Just like the mirages on the horizon, the authors of evil fade to nothingness. Who was it who fired at them? The remnants of Islamic State? Some of the thousands of Afghans stationed in the desert? The Syrian henchmen belonging to the army and secret services? Was there actually much shooting? Or were many of the reported attacks mere exaggerations?
The journey to the northern edge of the Badia also passes numerous abandoned military posts. Near the village of Ithriya, a place still marked as an IS stronghold on some maps kept by terror experts, several modern natural gas facilities rise out of the steppe, their gates marked with signs warning of mines. This area was clearly under state control. In Ithriya itself, there are abandoned bases that once belonged to an Afghan militia and the Lebanese Hezbollah; a large portrait of the group’s late leader Hassan Nasrallah is still hanging above a refrigerated warehouse.
After nine days, dozens of interviews and 1,800 kilometers crisscrossing the Badia, we have accumulated so many new clues and traces that we have decided to take a second journey through the desert. This time even deeper into the areas reported to be IS safe havens. One of them is in the surroundings of the town of Sukhnah, 135 kilometers west of Deir ez-Zur. The town itself is deserted, like all the others. A dozen rebels have taken up residence in the former headquarters of Assad’s 4th Division. Once-looted wardrobe walls are still piled up in the courtyard. There aren’t any IS terrorists around here, says a veteran. But they might be in the inaccessible Mount Bishri massif, he says, as he begins reciting the familiar list of possible hideouts.
A lanky young man standing at the edge of the group says laconically: “No, there’s no one there.”
“Or maybe in the Rod al-Wahsh Valley,” the veteran continues. “No, not there either,” the lanky man says again.
How does he know? “I’m responsible for drone reconnaissance in our unit,” the 20-year-old rebel fighter Mohammed Yasir says, introducing himself. Because of the mines, he says, it is dangerous to leave the roads and walk into the desert. But he has, in recent days, flown his camera drone through inaccessible areas in the eastern Badia, he says. Including Mount Bishri, the Rod al-Wahsh Valley, Arak. “It’s all deserted.”
When the drone found indications that people had been in the area, “we would send a unit with a sapper to the site.” At Mount Bishri, for example – the purported IS stronghold named by everyone – they only found a few hip-high wind shelters built from rocks, a couple of boxes of munitions with Iranian labeling, tuna cans with a Syrian label and relatively fresh bread. “They won’t have been able to survive their long, whoever it was.” But, he adds, it’s unlikely that the IS uses Iranian munitions.
On the return journey, our second trip along the lonely road to Ithriya, the desert depressions – completely empty just last week – are covered in tents and grazing herds. “No more attacks. Since the disappearance of the regime, Daesh has also vanished,” says a shepherd. “Almost like a mirage,” he adds casually as he gazes out at his sheep.