In mid-January, a video emerged on YouTube of an English-speaking man, wearing a black-and-white kaffiyeh and surrounded by four bearded Arab men, addressing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad directly. "Your days are numbered, you're going down in flames, you should just quit now while you can," he said. "You're going to die no matter what ... we will find you and kill you."
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The speaker was Eric Harroun, a white American from Phoenix, Arizona, who hails from a Christian family. He has become a self-described Sunni Muslim, fighting in Syria's brutal civil war -- even, he claimed, joining up with Jabhat al-Nusra, which the State Department has labeled an alias of al Qaeda in Iraq. He served nearly four years in the U.S. Army's 586th Engineering Company, but was never deployed overseas.
In mid-March, a video released by Assad's supporters celebrated the alleged death of "The American" fighting in Syria. But Harroun himself confirmed to us that the rumors were false: In a Skype chat on March 17, he appeared alive and well, and claimed he was staying near the upscale Taksim Square, in Istanbul, Turkey.
"Don't worry your little yahmickah [sic] off your head, Bashar will be dead before me," he wrote in a Skype chat on March 15. Two weeks earlier, we were the first journalists, to our knowledge, to make contact with Harroun. Weeks of following Harroun's digital trail on Facebook, MySpace, and chat forums culminated in contacting him through his Skype handle. We published an account of our initial conversations with him in a Fox News expose -- a fact that prompted Harroun to denounce us as Zionist conspirators. At times, he was explicitly anti-Semitic: In a March 17 video chat, he referred to one of us multiple times as "that fucking kike."
In our first conversation with Harroun, which began in Skype chat, he seemed paranoid about being tracked by U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies. When on March 2, we asked him whether he had joined up with Jabhat al-Nusra, he answered, "5 Amendment" -- referencing the stipulation in the Bill of Rights against self-incrimination. Providing "material support" to Jabhat al-Nusra would constitute a crime in the United States. He then sent a beer icon and asked, "What r u C.I.A or Mossad?"
His initial reluctance to give a solid answer regarding his connection to Jabhat al-Nusra encouraged us to probe further.
Pinning Harroun down is never easy. At times, he appears willing to provide very specific details about himself, while at others he becomes more reserved, preferring to not comment or flat-out denying his previous statements -- only to retract his retractions. He can become inexplicably hostile, hurling accusations of lying and anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist comments, or respond with flippant or jocular comments. He will also, in the middle of a line of questioning, simply write "bye" or "halas" (his rendering of the Arabic word for "enough"), and cease communication.
But there's no doubt that Harroun has been involved in the fight against Assad in Syria. In addition to confirmation by a rebel spokesman that he had linked up with a brigade affiliated with the Free Syrian Army (FSA), one video shows Harroun in a Jeep driving across a desert landscape, toward a crashed helicopter. "Yes, we smoked those motherfuckers, didn't we?" he says.
Harroun's first video appearance, in which he addresses Assad directly, may also contain a hint about his connection with radical Islamist groups. In the video, one of the fighters alongside him is wearing a shoulder patch that resembles the insignia used by jihadist groups, including Jabhat al-Nusra. The video's publication on YouTube coincided with the time Harroun said he began associating with Jahbat al-Nusra.
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