I Smoked Hash and Watched Cute Animal Videos with Syrian Rebels

The one shitty photo I managed to take on my phone to prove I was there. 

"This guy has smoked too much hashish," said the leader of a Syrian rebel militia group, gesturing at me with an amused look on his face. As I lay slumped next to a pile of frontline-bound military supplies at his family home in the southern Turkish city of Antakya, there wasn’t much I could say in my defence. I generally avoid cannabis, as it has a tendency to make me duller than, well, a stoner. Therefore, I am a lightweight and, in this case, had ended up getting exceptionally high – like, unable to finish a sentence without forgetting what I was talking about high. My companions, however, clearly liked to smoke a lot.

The militia captain, whose real name I’ll avoid using for obvious reasons, was due to head back across the Syrian border the following day, where his unit was involved in vicious fighting with al-Assad's troops in Idlib Province. In preparation, he and his aide-de-camp had been busy all night, organising the piles of body armour, rucksacks and other camouflaged paraphernalia stored in his brother-in-law's bedroom. "Ibrahim" – again, not real name – is a Syrian translator and activist who I'd been working with.

Ibrahim, some of his friends and I had been a little less productive; talking, listening to music and furiously – but cautiously – smoking hash like 15-year-olds while someone’s parents were in (windows wide open, cheap incense burning, hiding the stash under a mattress every time someone knocked on the door, etc, etc).

Preparations completed, and loose-fitting combat fatigues traded for a shirt and some glitzy mirrored shades, the captain joined us in Ibrahim's bedroom. To my host's obvious surprise, the captain then asked if he could skin up out of Ibrahim's hash, telling us, "it reminds me of being a young man again". Supplied with everything he needed, it quickly became clear that the captain very much enjoyed a smoke as a young man, because he packed the joint out end to end.

Until that point we'd been listening to traditional Syrian and Arabic music and watching battle footage, propaganda videos and the odd documentary – a pretty standard night of relaxation with Syrian opposition activists. But as the captain sparked up, someone switched from muwashshah to a ridiculously grandiose performance of "O Fortuna" – something I would have found tricky to deal with even if I wasn't already feeling like a kitten mistakenly put in a washing machine along with the laundry.

Unflustered by the battle-soundtrack vocals swelling out of the laptop speakers behind him, the captain grabbed a USB-powered massager, rubbed it on the back of his neck and began passionately railing against the brutality of the regime.  Many years before, he had held a senior position in the Syrian army. Then, after being demobbed, he started teaching psychology and philosophy in his hometown. When the uprising began, a number of his students and former students were killed, mostly by government snipers, so he took up arms again. "What kind of government kills its own people?" he asked. "We had to defend ourselves."

The blend of militant revolutionary sentiment and illegal drugs caught me a little off guard. Ibrahim was fiercely atheist and dangerously into symphonic metal (or whatever 43-year-old men with neck-beards call bands like Moonspell and Haggard), so the idea of him enjoying a smoke every now and then wasn't particularly shocking. But the leader of a rebel militia getting baked before crossing the border to fight in a real war with real weapons was a bit jarring. As Ibrahim picked up where the captain had left off, I began to realise that there was a certain element of self-medicated brain-numbing going on. "Sometimes you can't stop thinking about home and your family and the crazy things going on," he said. "So we smoke something, then maybe we'll think a bit less."

It has to be said that – at least in my experience – aspiring Spicolis like the captain aren't especially common among the majority of Syrian rebels, especially within the more zealously religious groups. Even the comparatively moderate Farouq Brigades, for example, are more into wholesale marijuana destruction than consumption.

After the operatic wailing got a little much, the soundtrack switched to a reggae compilation – the one genre able to transcend any cultural border to plunge a room of people smoking weed into the depths of a global cliche. One thing I never realised about reggae before, however, is that it's instantly capable of lending conversations about arms embargoes and long-term strategic plans a faintly surreal edge. “After we liberate our home towns and villages, we’ll take the fight to Damascus,” said the captain, passing me the joint as he nodded along to Natty Dread.

By this point, Ibrahim was queuing up some cute animal compilations on YouTube and it was beginning to become too much to process. Conversation forgotten, we vacantly stared at videos of kittens and baby pandas being idiots while my brain struggled to deal with the bewildering concept that one of the men next to me was planning to go kill some Syrian government forces the next day.

Suddenly, the captain got up, kindly presented me with two pens in a multi-coloured gift bag and left to catch up with some of his comrades at a nearby hotel – home to a lot of the senior Free Syrian Army guys when they’re in town. I said my goodbyes, stumbled off in the wrong direction and got lost on the way back to my grubby guesthouse.

Syrian rebels are getting some pretty terrible press at the moment, what with the video that emerged last month of the presumably insane Abu Sakkar feasting on a human heart (or, as someone who knows more about human insides than I do assures me, a lung) and hardline Islamists shooting a 15-year-old in the face for joking that he wouldn't give the Prophet Muhammad a free coffee.

But they're a disparate lot; for every cannibalistic lunatic and misguided Jihadist, there's a whole bunch of guys who – when they aren't fighting for freedom from a regime hellbent on slaughtering its own people – are perfectly happy to smoke a joint and crash out in front of videos of baby animals doing cute stuff. And, as the human aspect of the Syrian civil war begins to get lost in death statistics and reports of chemical weapons, that's an important thing to remember when you're trying not to lose grip on your own humanity.

More stories from Syria:

Syrian Rebels Are Getting Serious Help from a House in Suburban Ontario

We Spoke to Nick Griffin About His Summer Holiday in Syria

A Syrian Proxy War Is Being Fought in Tripoli

Watch - Ground Zero: Syria - Snipers of Aleppo