By Steve Coll
A woman named only as Mumina sits before a darkened window, her face silhouetted to hide her identity. Off camera, she is questioned by Tulsi Gabbard, then a 35-year-old Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii with grand ambitions. Gabbard prompts her to tell her harrowing story. “They wore masks. They kept shooting…until they ran out of bullets,” Mumina says, recounting a night near Damascus when Islamist rebels fighting the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, gunned down her father as she watched. Gabbard comforted Mumina: “You are incredibly brave and strong.”