“They couldn’t stop the bombings. But they felt sure they could use technology to give people in Syria a better chance of survival”
Danny Gold writes for Wired:
On the morning of April 11, Abu al-Nour was lounging at home in a small town in Syria’s Idlib Province. It was a pleasant day, and his seven children — ages 2 to 23 — were playing outside or studying inside. The house was small, but al-Nour was proud of it. He had built it himself and enjoyed having family and friends over to spend time in the big yard. His wife was cooking lunch in the kitchen.
farmer, as were many of the town’s residents, but since the Syrian civil war started in 2011, fuel and fertilizer prices had shot up well beyond his means. Al-Nour had been getting by with the odd construction job or harvest work here and there. The area had fallen to rebel forces in 2012, and though his village was too tiny for the rebels to bother with much, he’d noticed fighters from the Free Idlib Army and Jaysh al-Izza groups passing through on occasion.
Being in rebel-held territory meant government air strikes. The bombings began in 2012 and got worse in 2014. Many villagers fled out of fear. Others fell deeper into poverty, their businesses ruined by the relentless conflict. When the first air strike hit al-Nour’s neighborhood, he says, it killed eight people from one family. Al-Nour tried to help with rescue efforts, but instead was overcome with grief, unable to move. Afterward, he couldn’t stop imagining what could happen to his family. Finally, five long years into this reality, he heard about a service called Sentry from a friend. If he signed up, it would send him a Facebook or Telegram message to let him know a government warplane was heading his way.
Around noon on that day in April, al-Nour’s phone lit up with an urgent warning: A Syrian jet had just taken off from Hama air base 50 miles away. It was flying toward his village.
He panicked.
He shouted to his family and grabbed the younger children. The group dashed out to a makeshift bomb shelter that al-Nour called his “cave.” Many residents of the heavily bombed areas in Idlib had dug similar shelters — really, just holes in the ground—and fitted them with something like storm-cellar doors.
Al-Nour managed to get all his children into the cave, but not his wife. He kept calling her name as he heard the awful sound of an approaching jet overhead. His wife reached the door to the shelter just as a bomb hit. Al-Nour remembers the door blowing off the cave, everything shaking, and an almost unbearable pressure in his ears. “It smelled of dust and fire,” he says. “The dust was everywhere.”
Shrapnel had pierced his wife’s back. Some of his children were in shock; others were crying. Through the smoke, he could tell that his house was destroyed. Still, everyone was alive. For that he was grateful. “We saw the death with our own eyes,” al-Nour says over the phone through an interpreter. “Without the Sentry warning, my family and I would probably be dead.” (Al-Nour is a pseudonym; he fears using his real name.)
In the seven years since the start of Syria’s civil war, it’s estimated that at least 500,000 Syrians have been killed. That number includes tens of thousands of civilians killed in air strikes carried out by Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s regime and its allies. (Meanwhile, US and coalition forces are estimated to have killed as many as 6,200 Syrian civilians in their air campaign against ISIS.) Assad’s forces have been accused by the international community of war crimes for indiscriminate bombings. Six million Syrians have fled the country, creating a refugee crisis in the region and the world. International efforts to find a peaceful resolution continue to fail. The Assad regime has slowly regained territory; about two-thirds of the people in Syria currently live in areas under government control. The rest are in places held by an array of rebel groups as well as Kurdish and Turkish forces. Millions of people still live in unending fear of the sound of fighter jets overhead.
The conflict has left many Syrians feeling defeated. Huge swaths of the country have been laid to waste, and the humanitarian crisis isn’t expected to get better with coming government offenses. And yet even if these larger forces are implacable, a small effort can sometimes make a meaningful difference—like helping a family of nine escape with their lives.
The warning that came over al-Nour’s phone was created by three men — two Americans, one a hacker turned government technologist, the other an entrepreneur, and a Syrian coder. The three knew they couldn’t stop the bombings. But they felt sure they could use technology to give people like al-Nour a better chance of survival. They’re now building what you might call a Shazam for air strikes, using sound to predict when and where the bombs will rain down next. And thus opening a crucial window of time between life and death.
The Creators
in rural McHenry County, Illinois, John Jaeger didn’t have much to do until his stepdad built him a homebrew 486 computer. It was the late ’80s — still the early days of PCs—and he mostly played videogames. Eventually he found his way onto a BBS with connections to the demoscene, an early underground subculture obsessed with electronic music and computer graphics. By the time he was 15, Jaeger was in deep with hackers, software crackers, and phone phreakers.
“We would exploit weaknesses in computer networks in order to gain administrative privileges and learn how the networks worked,” Jaeger says. He messed around but adds that he didn’t do anything more “destructive” than hack into Harvard’s system to give himself a Harvard.edu email address.
Jaeger took a job at modem manufacturer US Robotics right out of high school, followed by a gig at General Electric Medical Systems. The promise of “good drugs and startup parties” lured him to Silicon Valley in the late ’90s. The adventure, he says, was “forgettable.” He took computer security and network management jobs before working his way up to IT director. “I basically made all the wrong decisions,” he says. “Instead of becoming a multi-billionaire, I went and worked for three companies that don’t exist anymore.”
Jaeger moved to Chicago and got a job in the financial industry. He designed and developed a trading platform and did risk management analysis. He was enjoying the work, but then the financial crisis hit. “I saw 20- and 30-year veterans of Wall Street soiling their trousers, genuinely scared,” he says. “It was really humbling.” That experience, he says, turned him off finance. But it was another three years before he finally left the industry.
Through a friend who had worked on President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, he got an introduction to someone in the State Department. It was 2012, a year after the start of the Arab Spring, and the US government was recruiting people who could bring corporate experience and technical expertise to Syria. Jaeger wasn’t exactly familiar with the civil war that was building. “I had no idea what was going on,” he says. But he wanted to go overseas, so he relocated to Istanbul and basically became a consultant for the people trying to achieve a semblance of normalcy in areas of Syria that weren’t under Assad’s control.
“You had a whole lot of chiropractors and dentists suddenly respond to the needs of their local communities in a way they had never anticipated,” Jaeger says. “These guys need clean water. These guys need power. These folks need medicine.” Jaeger’s job was to help them figure out how to provide services and maintain some stable governance.
In October 2012, he started working with journalists and developing a program to support Syrian independent media. But two years in, the conflict started wearing on him. Jaeger had grown attached to many of his Syrian contacts and mourned when they were killed. Everyone he knew had lost family. It became clear that the biggest problem he could address was the bombing of civilians.
Options for mitigating the damage from air strikes, Jaeger knew, were few. And most were out of his reach. You could stop them. But even the international community had failed to do that. You could treat people after the air strikes hit. Various groups, like Syria Civil Defense, were doing that work. Or you could warn people ahead of time.
That last option seemed within his technical expertise. So he approached the State Department. But when he couldn’t rally any interest in the idea of an early-warning alert system, he left the agency in May 2015. He was convinced he was onto something. But he needed help.
Dave Levin is a Wharton MBA who had worked for the UN Global Compact under Kofi Annan, had been an entrepreneur in the Philippines, and had consulted for McKinsey. In 2014, Levin founded Refugee Open Ware, an organization that helps people start projects using tech to do good in troubled regions. He was working in Jordan on an effort to develop 3-D-printed prosthetics for victims of war when a Syrian activist connected him to Jaeger. Levin flew to Turkey and the two met to talk about Jaeger’s idea. Levin signed on right away. (Refugee Open Ware has since invested in the project, and Levin splits his time between the organizations.)
In November 2015, two months after he met Levin, Jaeger got another lead. An expat friend in Turkey told him there was someone he needed to meet, a Syrian coder who was looking for ways to warn civilians about air strikes. The man, who goes by the alias Murad for safety reasons, grew up in a prominent, largely apolitical family in Damascus.
At university, Murad met people from other parts of Syria, young men and women who hadn’t grown up as sheltered as he had. Their stories of poverty and repression, of relatives imprisoned or killed by the government, shook Murad. He started to understand the grim authoritarian reality of his country.
When the war started, Murad was in his mid-twenties and a recent graduate with a degree in management information systems. He started working with groups that were housing displaced people. Eventually he realized that this activity had made him a target of the regime, and he fled to Jordan. There, he volunteered as a teacher in a refugee camp. But six months later, troubled by stories he heard from Syrians who were fleeing their homes, he felt he had to return.
Once he got back to Syria, Murad began teaching activists how to keep the government from intercepting digital communications. But regime thugs threatened his family, and he had to flee again. This time he went to Turkey. He started organizing schools for the growing community of Syrian refugees there and helping Syria Civil Defense with data management. As the air war ramped up, he saw more and more Syrians arriving mutilated—and traumatized. “This was horrible,” he says. “People without arms or legs.”
Murad had an idea: Start connecting civil defense organizations in different towns so they could better communicate about impending attacks. He mentioned the idea to Jaeger’s friend. Jaeger and Murad soon met for coffee, and Jaeger offered him a job. It came with low pay, long hours, and no job security. Murad was all in.
With a team in place, the group was ready for the most arduous startup task: fund-raising. Jaeger went to VCs, who told him the idea was great — but would never generate billions. They pointed him toward social-impact investors, who told him the idea was great — but they didn’t invest in the “conflict space”. They suggested foundations — which said they didn’t invest in for-profit businesses and sent him to VCs.
Screw it, thought Jaeger. In late 2015, the co-founders put together what they could from their personal bank accounts and managed to get some funding from an angel investor Levin knew. It was time for their startup, which Jaeger had named Hala Systems, to try to make a business out of saving lives.
The Project
DURING WORLD WAR II, British farmers and pub owners in rural areas along the flight paths of German warplanes would phone ahead to big cities, warning them when the Luftwaffe was on the way. Seventy years later, Syrian civilians set up a similar ad hoc system. People who lived near military bases kept watch; when they saw a warplane take off, they used walkie-talkies to notify other people, who would contact others, spreading the word up the chain. Many of the participants were members of Syria Civil Defense, known as the White Helmets, who also served as rescue workers. But the process was spotty, unreliable. There was no systematic way for observations to come in and warnings to go out.
Jaeger thought that with the right technology it should be possible to design a better system. People were already watching for planes. If Hala could capture that information and connect it with reports of where those planes dropped their bombs, it would have the foundation of a prediction system. That data could be plugged into a formula that could calculate where the warplanes were most likely headed, taking into account the type of plane, trajectory, previous flight patterns, and other factors.
The Hala team started reaching out to the people who were monitoring the planes, including the White Helmets. At the same time, the team hacked together the first iteration of a system that would analyze data from the aircraft monitors, predict where the planes were headed, and broadcast alerts to people under threat of attack. Jaeger and Murad sketched it out, eventually filling up a notebook and using napkins to get the rest down. Jaeger says at first the system was just a bunch of if/then statements, a logic tree, and an Android app.
Basically, if someone saw, for example, a Russian-built MIG-23 Syrian warplane take off from Hama air base, then entered that information into the system—now called Sentry—it would issue a warning via social media with predictions about when an attack could be expected to hit a targeted area. It might estimate that the jet could be headed for the town of, say, Darkush with an ETA of 14 minutes, or Jisr al-Shughur in 13. When more people reported a specific plane as it flew over different locations, Sentry could then send more specific and accurate warnings directly to people in threatened areas.