A Disappearance in Damascus (10 page)

As we finished our coffees, her phone buzzed with a text message. She pulled it out and looked. A friend in Baghdad, a British journalist.
You are a tank
, she'd written.
You are a Humvee
. Ahlam read it and laughed. She looked as if she had already forgotten the meeting.

We got up to leave. It had been a waste of time but not a waste. Perhaps because we had switched roles. Perhaps because I was now invested in the success of her efforts. This time I was the translator and fixer, even if the mission had been a bust.

We went out to the street so I could find a taxi. We would go our separate ways. I had a dinner meeting with a Swedish diplomat who knew a lot about human smuggling. Then I would leave to spend a few days in the ancient city of Aleppo, the largest in Syria, a trip I had been planning for some time. Ahlam was heading back to her apartment. She would not, she told me as we parted, waste any more time. She would go straight to Abu Yusuf and tell him about the school before suspicions arose.

She looked happy. “If he says yes, okay. If he says no, I continue!”

AT THE BARON HOTEL
in Aleppo, a five-hour journey from Damascus by crowded bus, I sat on a cracked leather armchair next to the dusty bar, drinking a lukewarm vodka tonic. The cars honking on the streets, overlaying the call to prayer, sounded like a mutinous brass band, but the Baron was quiet, almost dead. With its atmosphere of faded grandeur and indifferent service, it was a forgotten way station on the road to conquest. A group of loud Germans sat on the stone terrace outside, drinking beer. A British tourist wandered in expectantly, as if into a museum, and left looking underwhelmed. Not much had changed here since the hotel opened a century ago, hosting Germans and British as they vied for control of the Middle East.

The Baron, Syria's oldest hotel, had witnessed many of the crucial events since then. In its heyday it had hosted the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk; the Shah of Persia; Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt. Agatha
Christie, more famous than all of them, was said to have written parts of
Murder on the Orient Express
while staying here with her archaeologist husband.

I had come to Aleppo to escape my work in Damascus for a few days, but found myself thinking of the war anyway—where it had started, how it could possibly end. Framed in a dusty corner of the hotel was T.E. Lawrence's unpaid bar bill from 1914. Lawrence had stayed here on breaks from an excavation for the British Museum. It's hard to separate the young man he was—handsome, intellectually curious, probably gay—from the legend of Lawrence of Arabia that made him the most celebrated hero of the First World War. But it was as a young archaeologist learning Arabic in Syria that he first came to sympathize with the Arab struggle against foreign domination; at that time, the fading Ottoman Empire.

I had spent the day at the Aleppo souk, wandering through vaulted archways lit by elaborate hanging lanterns, the air heady with the scent of spices piled in bright little pyramids. Sheep, freshly killed and sharp with the smell of blood, hung from chains in open cases; others were tethered in the stony crooks of dark alleyways, unaware they were next in line. Veiled women gathered around a fabric stall, expertly thumbing bolt after identical black bolt, measuring out to the inch exactly what they needed to cover themselves head to foot.

Lawrence had visited this bazaar to seek out artifacts. Though short of money, he loved beautiful old things, and couldn't resist haggling with men like the antiquities vendor who coaxed me into his cave-like shop. I sat on carpets, drinking strong coffee as the man tried to sell me Assyrian figurines that he said dated back three thousand years. It was possible
they had been looted from collections in Iraq and just as likely that they were made last week in a workshop owned by his brother-in-law. But there was no mistaking the authenticity of the old Iraqi currency he showed me with the face of Saddam Hussein, and those bearing the regal visage of Lawrence's close friend Faisal, briefly King of Syria and then—when that didn't take—of the newly minted country of Iraq.

You can see almost everything that has happened in the Middle East today in light of Lawrence and the First World War. The Ottoman Turks, by the time he came here, had ruled Arab lands for four hundred years. Their secret was simple: they mainly let their subjects run their own lives. In 1916, one of those subjects, Sharif Hussein of Mecca, launched a rebellion against them. He owed the Turks his job as director of the Islamic holy sites in what is now Saudi Arabia, but disagreed with the progressive Young Turks whose ideas, such as the emancipation of women, were not ones an old-fashioned tribal leader like Hussein could abide.
²²
The British, at war with Germany, needed help defeating the German-allied Turks, so they agreed to give Hussein gold and guns and, if all went well, an independent Arab kingdom of his own.

T.E. Lawrence, assigned as a liaison to the Arab revolt, later said he suspected all along it was a ruse. In his memoir,
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, he wrote, “I risked the fraud, on my conviction that Arab help was necessary to our cheap and speedy victory in the East, and that better we win and break our word than lose.”
²³
Yet he was drawn in, trading his military uniform for the robes of an Arab prince, and befriending Sharif Hussein's son—the dashing Faisal—whom he helped to blow up Turkish railway lines.

When the war was won and the time came to make good on promises, it emerged that France and Britain had secretly agreed to divide the same territory between themselves: Syria (including Lebanon) falling to the French; Mesopotamia (what is now Iraq) to the British; with Palestine under international administration—though it would later be claimed by the British, to repent at leisure.

In
Paris 1919
, Margaret MacMillan's masterly account of the post-war division of spoils, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George is overheard musing aloud about the creation of the modern Middle East. “Mesopotamia…yes…oil…irrigation…we must have Mesopotamia; Palestine…yes…the Holy Land…Zionism…we must have Palestine; Syria…h'm…what is there in Syria? Let the French have that.”
²⁴

Just as cavalierly, I exchanged a few Syrian pounds for some Saddam Husseins and left behind the Faisals, though both were worthless now.

During the Arab revolt Lawrence met a young American journalist who brought back pictures of the blue-eyed blond in Arab dress, and made him the subject of a sensational multimedia show that seized the public imagination—the dashing young Englishman leading the proud natives to liberty. But by 1920 Lawrence saw the British occupation of Iraq turn ugly. The Sunni and Shia, supposedly so at odds, united in an armed uprising against the lack of representative government. In response, Britain razed entire villages with the new technology of aerial bombing; they debated using poison gas. Lawrence thought the British even worse than the Turks. “How long,” he wrote in the
London Times
, “will we permit millions of pounds, thousands of imperial
troops, and tens of thousands of Arabs to be sacrificed on behalf of a form of colonial administration which can benefit nobody but its administrators?”
²⁵

He had gone with Faisal to the Paris peace conference in 1919 to press for Arab independence, but neither the British nor the French wished to hear another word about it. Nor did they wish to hear the American president encouraging self-determination for national groups. (God was content with Ten Commandments, the French president quipped, but Woodrow Wilson had a list of fourteen.) The French insisted on having Syria as their share of the spoils, and the main lesson Britain seemed to have drawn from the war was that no future war could be won without oil.

Faisal claimed Syria anyway. In March of 1920, from the balcony of his room upstairs at the Baron Hotel, he proclaimed himself King of Syria. A few months later French forces drove him out.

The following year Lawrence and his friend Gertrude Bell—having met on that early dig outside Aleppo—persuaded Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill to place Faisal on the throne of a new country to be named Iraq.

Above my leather armchair in the bar of the Baron was a pastoral painting of an idyllic Arab village. I was reminded of the nine-year-old girl I had met through Ahlam whose farmhouse outside Baghdad had been fire-bombed. Her father had called her over to show me her burns. Clearly anxious to get back to the kitchen where she was tending to her paralyzed mother's chores, she relaxed only when her father pulled out a photo album. Leafing through it, she gazed dreamily at pictures of her family on their farm.
Happy times, smiling faces, herding the cows, harvesting their crops.

Her father thought the biggest mistake of the war was the American decision to lay the Iraqi army off work. Others had their own theories: allowing the looting; not sending enough troops; not enough planning or enough fluent Arabic speakers. As if, had any of these factors been different, things might have turned out well. Perhaps the biggest mistake of the war was none of these. Perhaps the biggest mistake was the same as in the First World War. The war itself.

The French went their own way in Syria. It turned out no better. Having carved Lebanon from Syria as a separate state for their Christian allies (without considering how the Muslims there might feel about that), they ceded oil-rich Mosul to Britain, gave 40 percent of Syria's coastline to Turkey, and shaved off Palestine and Transjordan from Greater Syria.
²⁶
In what remained of the weakened country, they recruited Syria's minorities into their occupation forces in order to divide and rule. Chief among these were the poor rural Alawites, long the victims of discrimination, for whom joining the military was the only way to move up in the world. After the French left in 1946, there were democratic elections. But the results did not please the United States, which had replaced Britain as the leading imperial power following the Second World War. In 1949, no longer championing self-determination, the US engineered its first Middle Eastern coup after the democratically elected president waffled on approving an American pipeline for Saudi oil. They put the head of the Syrian army in charge.
²⁷
He was murdered in less than six months, and successive military coups continued until a group of mainly Alawite army officers seized power
in 1963. Among them was an ambitious air force pilot named Hafez al-Assad, who became president in 1971.

It was here in Aleppo, a decade after that, that the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood rose up against his rule. With Syria poised on the brink of civil war, Assad brought his army out against the Brotherhood, massacring as many as twenty thousand, including civilians, in the city of Hama in 1982. For nearly three decades the rebels were driven underground.

The Aleppo I saw as I walked through the city is finished now—bombed and shelled and shot to pieces. Syrian forces barrel-bombed civilian neighbourhoods; rebel forces burned down the ancient souk. The Middle East fashioned a century ago has become what the Ottoman Empire was before it: fragile, quaking, rife with rebellions. Like the First World War, the Iraq War upset the balance of power in the region, a horrifying illustration of the impotence of power to contain what it sets in motion.

The Baron Hotel, as always an eyewitness to history, found itself on the frontier between opposition and government areas in the embattled city. By 2014, its roof pierced by shrapnel, the rooms stood empty except for a few displaced families. A hundred years after Lawrence visited, the Baron quietly closed its doors.
²⁸

FOR AHLAM, THE WAR
began on April 8, 2003, the day she watched the first Abrams tank rumble past her house along the main road into Baghdad. Until then all traffic had been in the opposite direction, cars and buses carrying people out of the city to the north of Iraq to wait out the invasion. When the bombs began to fall, the villagers panicked. Men rushed to organize cars, filling them with women and children. She refused to join them, or to let her husband take the children from her side. The two of them had argued before he left. He pleaded with her to change her mind. “No one has the right to kick us out of our house,” she told him. “It's our country. If I die, I will die in my home.” A handful of men—her cousins—stayed behind to safeguard their property, but for the next several weeks she was the only woman left in the village.

Now, as the huge tank rolled past, beige as a sand dune, she felt a profound sense of loss. From a loudspeaker, a prerecorded voice blared orders in Arabic:
Stay away from the
main roads! No one is going to harm you! Avoid gathering in large groups! Don't shoot at us and we won't shoot at you! Any suspicious activity will be viewed as threat!
More convincing than any news headline, it was proof that Baghdad had fallen. “We had lost our country.”

US ground forces were pouring into the Iraqi capital. Until that day the war hadn't seemed real. In the first three days of the invasion a dust storm had swept in from the desert. She taped plastic over the doors and windows against the dust. All she could hear through the thick copper haze were sporadic explosions several times a day. She hoarded food as she had learned from other wars. In her garden she dug a bomb shelter, scattering dirt over the tin roof. From overhead came the roar of F-18s and B-52s. She taught her children to plug their ears and shout “Ahhhhhh” to save their eardrums.

Anas was nine, Abdullah seven, and Roqayah, her “angel,” just five. The countryside north of Baghdad was being heavily bombed because the Iraqi military hid armaments there, but her children thought the war was a game. They waved at the fighter planes, shouting greetings. “Look, Mum!” they said, pointing in the air, jumping up and down. They slept soundly through even the loudest explosions.

Once, six planes loomed over the dusty date palms, flying in formation. From the B-52 came a powerful screech as it released a payload of cluster bombs over their fields. “It was enough for us adults to hear the bombs drop on our fields,” Ahlam said. “The sound, like opening the gates of a thousand-year-old castle, scared even the biggest man. But my children didn't give me a chance to be scared.”

As the tank rolled on towards Baghdad, a half-hour away, Ahlam turned her attention back to her household. She
had been standing in her garden after lunch that day when she saw young Iraqi soldiers hiding in the brush. “Please, Auntie,” one of them called to her. “Can you help us?” As they emerged from the tall grasses around the orchards, she saw there were about fifty of them. They were eighteen, nineteen years old—just children, she thought. They were tearing off their army uniforms and needed civilian clothing, since the Americans would otherwise kill them on sight. They had been drafted only recently, with little or no training, and their commanders had slipped away to avoid the US military, knowing their old weaponry wouldn't stand a chance. Her heart went out to them.

Bringing them inside, Ahlam handed out what clothing her husband had left behind when he had fled north. She arranged to billet them among her cousins' houses along the river. Her own house had many bedrooms, so ten of them stayed with her. “If the Americans come to my door,” she promised them, “I will say you are my relatives.” One of them sat on the floor next to her television set in the living room, crying and asking for his mother.

A lone civilian was among them, a quiet young man named Adem. He had been on a bus full of civilians fleeing Baghdad along the main road when it was struck by an American helicopter. Wandering from the wreckage, he saw that he was the only survivor. A bullet had torn through his hand so Ahlam brought him inside, cleaned the wound, and managed to stop the bleeding using the first-aid kit she kept for cuts and scrapes. “You need a doctor,” she told him. “They'll have to operate.” But roads and hospitals were closed.

For two days and nights, Adem and the teenagers remained in the village. She cooked meals for them but they
were too frightened to eat; they only wanted cigarettes, nervously smoking every last one she had. They wanted to go home but they could hear the helicopters whirring overhead. One of the boys collapsed in terror, sobbing helplessly.

On the third day, one of Ahlam's cousins swam the hundred-metre breadth of the muddy Tigris to borrow a rowboat from friends of theirs who lived on the other side. It was a calm night, no helicopters. After dark she left her children in the care of another cousin and led the boys down through the orchards to the riverbank. Under a sliver of moon, she helped ease them, five at a time, onto the boat.

It took three hours to row them all across. For two of the trips Ahlam took a turn at the oars. The current was rough and she worried that the boat would sink. For days afterward her arms ached, but it was worth it. From the far side, as the boat bobbed up against the riverbank, she watched the last of them run headlong across a field and disappear into the night.

All along the main road near her house were the bodies of those who had been killed while fleeing the city. A few had been soldiers but most were civilians; they appeared to have been shot from American helicopters with the kind of bullets that explode inside the bodies. The first looters had begun to appear, pulling the dead from their cars and driving off; they were armed so no one could stop them. Now the dead, lying in the hot sun, were attracting the dogs that roamed in packs along the riverbank. Ahlam and four of her male cousins held a meeting to discuss what to do. “It was a hard decision but the right one. It was that or let the dogs eat them.”

The five of them worked as a team. Two of the men dug the graves, two carried the bodies, and Ahlam took charge of
registration. She made a logbook, filling it with identifying characteristics: names (if the dead had identity cards), estimated height, weight, age, a description of their clothing or the vehicles where they had been found. Because of the cluster bombs that now lay concealed among the trees and tall grasses, they couldn't bury them in the fields, and instead dug holes along the roadside. On the makeshift graves they placed markers wrapped in plastic and held down by rocks. The logbook they stored in the village mosque. They knew they could be killed at any time but they reasoned that no one would attack the mosque so at least the records would survive.

A few weeks later the roads reopened and families began searching for the missing. For most of them, the main road was the last option, after they had exhausted all other routes going north. Ahlam led them—confused, relieved, anguished, full of despair—to the graves. They had searched with the hope that they would discover their family members alive, and even when faced with the description in the logbook they found room for doubt. Perhaps this was the grave of a different father and a different set of children, aged nine and eleven, discovered in a different red car near the bridge?

The family of Adem, the civilian wounded in the bus attack, came to speak to her. They wanted to know if he had told her anything about his brother-in-law, who had been seated next to him on the bus—Adem had told them he couldn't remember anything. But Ahlam wondered if he might be trying to protect them from the truth.

An old man came to find his son, a soldier of eighteen. He stood on the grave where they had buried the boy.

“Tell me, are you my son?” he shouted. “Speak! Even if you are not my son, I will care for you, I will bury you! Just tell me!”

While they were burying the dead, an American tank stopped. The soldiers asked what they were up to and since they had no translator Ahlam interpreted. Despite their weapons she wasn't afraid of them. “It's my land, not theirs.” They seemed surprised to hear her speak to them in English.

Ten days later another tank was stationed on the main road. This time, surrounded by a group of men from the village, it was Ahlam who approached the soldiers. She explained on behalf of the villagers that they were out of electricity, drinking water and medical supplies. Their orchards were dying because the irrigation system relied on electricity, and their land was covered in unexploded cluster bombs so they could not set foot there. “People are becoming angry,” she told them, “watching their fields die.”

She also asked them to collect the weapons left behind by the Iraqi Army when they fled. “There were weapons everywhere—in the schools, the streets, the military camps, even the hospitals. The shrine in Kadhimiya had three rooms full of weapons—rocket-propelled grenades, explosive devices, anti-tank mines—and there were long-range missiles just sitting there in our fields, ready to be used. We asked every American troop unit to remove the weapons before the looters did, but they didn't listen.”

Nevertheless the soldiers told her they would speak to their commander.

The next day a tank pulled up in front of her house. A soldier stepped out and called out to one of her nephews who
was standing in the yard. He pointed at her house. “English,” he said.

The boy ran inside to get her. “Auntie,” he told her, “this man from the Americans wants to talk to you!”

She went outside.

“Is there anything you need?” the man asked. And before she could say a word: “How come, in the middle of this village, we find a woman speaking English?”

She laughed at him.

“What did you tell him?” I asked her.

“I said, ‘What do you see in front of you?' He told me that back home they learned that Iraqis were all wild, like animals.”

If Iraqis all seemed the same to Americans, to Iraqis the Americans all looked “like creatures from outer space,” since only their mouths and noses protruded from their protective gear. She could not distinguish their ranks at a glance, but she had the impression this man was in a position of power. That day he gave her a radio that worked with solar, battery or hand-crank—a gift that pleased her because she could once again follow the news.

The next morning she looked outside to see two tanks pulling up beside her house. One was filled with medical supplies and foodstuffs—cakes, sweets, orange juice, coffee, jam. The second had come to protect the first. They were part of an armoured tank battalion with the 3rd Infantry Division, which had led the invasion of Baghdad. They had been reassigned to stabilize a large area northwest of Baghdad, from the urban Shia area of Kadhimiya where Ahlam had spent her early childhood to the rambling Sunni countryside known as Al Taji. The northernmost part of their sector,
where Ahlam lived, was one of the most heavily bombed, so medics from the battalion came to treat some of those injured by coalition attacks. Among them was a little girl badly burned after air strikes hit her house, a father and son who both lost their legs to cluster bombs dropped on their farm, and an old man shot through his Achilles tendon.
²⁹

After that day the soldiers were fixtures at Ahlam's home. Even in their desert camouflage she could see how young they were, barely older than the soldiers she had rowed across the river to escape them. Over the coming weeks they brought toys and treats for the awestruck children, and English books for Ahlam to read. Black, white and Hispanic, they were curious, eager to learn, to have new experiences. They asked her questions about Iraqi culture. “Why is it that y'all fire guns in the air?” one of them wanted to know. She told him it was a traditional way to summon people to a meeting or a celebration such as a wedding, since not everyone in the world had mobile phones.

Their company commander, a genial ginger-haired captain named Jason Pape, in charge of about a hundred men, hit it off with Ahlam and with her husband who had by then returned home. “Ahlam and her family were the favourites of all the men,” he would later tell me. “We went there as often as we could.” The meals at her house were simple fare, nothing like the “over-the-top, ridiculous feasts” served to them elsewhere. That was part of the draw: “They weren't trying to impress us or ask for anything.” Perhaps because of the relaxed atmosphere, a pleasant change from urban areas where they had to be on guard, Pape's men began removing their cumbersome gear and took to swimming with the
local children. Some of them held competitions in the river. One of them swam all the way across the Tigris and back. A twenty-year-old Mexican named Mendoza watched one of Ahlam's sisters cooking and took to preparing Iraqi dishes himself in Ahlam's kitchen. He told her he had joined the military to get his American citizenship and maybe a scholarship for his education.

Since she didn't have any ammunition for the gun that, like most Iraqi families, she kept to protect their home, another of the soldiers gave her ten bullets. “Don't tell anybody or they'll put me in jail,” he told her. “If anybody asks, I'll tell them I shoot bullets, not give them away!”

A month later, in May, David Luhnow, a reporter for the
Wall Street Journal
, was put on to Ahlam's brother Samir through a correspondent who had used him as a fixer in the past. Samir did the usual—taking him around for a few days, then “outsourcing” him, as Luhnow put it, to his younger sister. Luhnow was furious at first, thinking he'd been shafted, but as he got to know Ahlam and her husband he quickly changed his mind. It turned out to be a lucky break. “I was happy,” he recalled.

Luhnow had arrived in Baghdad on the day that American president George W. Bush stood on an aircraft carrier off the coast of California under a banner stating “Mission Accomplished,” and boasted—rather prematurely as it turned out—that major combat operations in Iraq had ended. It was the reporter's first visit to the Middle East and he was supposed to be chronicling American reconstruction efforts. What he saw in Baghdad convinced him that not
much of the kind was happening. If anything, Baghdad was being
de
-constructed. He needed to figure out what the hell was going on.