A Disappearance in Damascus (28 page)

IMMEDIATELY AFTER HE WAS
separated from Ahlam at the immigration prison, having slipped her some money just in case, Salaam was deported from Syria with a stamp on his passport forbidding him from returning for five years. This meant he could no longer work as a driver crossing back and forth through the border. He went back to their village on the banks of the Tigris, and found an office job. But it was not that easy to recover. At night he was plagued by dreams in which he relived the torture he had suffered in Douma. He became fearful of falling asleep and was soon smoking four packs a day. Meanwhile word had spread through the village that Ahlam's arrest, like her kidnapping before it, was due to her work with the Americans. These rumours clung to him.

One morning, at six a.m., when Salaam normally left for work, a man was shot in the head on the main road in front of his house. From behind, the man looked exactly like him. Salaam fled at once to Thailand, one of the few countries still giving visas to Iraqis.

Despite that frightening news, Ahlam was homesick for Iraq. The early euphoria, the joy of survival, had faded. After two years, her husband had been accepted for resettlement and come to Chicago, but they had agreed to live apart, sharing custody of the children. Ahlam longed to see her mother, whom she'd heard might not have much longer to live. And life in the United States was hard: all people seemed to do was work. In spite of the violence and a chorus of friends and family members telling her it was madness, she returned to Baghdad in the summer of 2012 for a one-month visit.

The day before her departure we spoke on the phone. We had long talked of making this journey together, seeing the village where she had grown up, but one hundred and fifty journalists had been killed in Iraq since 2003, and nearly a hundred kidnapped.
³⁷
Not to mention the toll on “media workers,” the fixers and drivers and interpreters who die anonymously.

It was too dangerous for either of us. She knew I didn't want her to go.

“How do you feel?” I asked her.

Her voice sounded strained. “Bad.”

“How come?”

“Ghosts of the past. Ghosts of the future.” I could hear her light a cigarette, the gentle
whish
.

“Remember this,” I said. “I'll kill you if you get killed. I'll track you down and kill you again.”

The year before, in 2011, protest movements had swept the Arab world. The so-called Arab Spring. These were driven as much by widespread youth unemployment and rising food prices as by a grassroots desire for democracy. And all, with
the shaky exception of Tunisia where the protests started, failed.

In Syria, several issues converged to set off the protests. A drought, the worst in nine hundred years, had caused a million farmers and their families to abandon their land for work in the cities.
³⁸
At the same time traditional subsidies and social services that had long bound the countryside to the authoritarian state were being “modernized” under President Bashar al-Assad. The London-trained eye doctor, married to an investment banker, was eager to join the World Trade Organization. Having applied in 2001, Syria gained observer status in mid-2010. In the intervening years, farmer and worker unions had been de-funded, rent controls abolished, public services eroded in favour of faith-based charities. Education and health spending and agricultural and fuel subsidies were cut. Trade tariffs were lowered, and state land sold off cheaply. As foreign capital rolled in, real-estate speculation took off. For drought-ravaged rural areas, most of which were Sunni, help had been slashed when it was needed most.

What must it have been like for those displaced farm folk—conservative, humble, God-fearing—to come to Damascus and witness the nightly Mardi Gras in the city's wealthier quarters? Men and women flirting, checking their laptops, going to nightclubs and restaurants, shopping for designer jeans. Amid this spectacle of urban decadence, there weren't even low-wage jobs or cheap housing. The deluge of middle-class Iraqi refugees had already taken that.

“The most dangerous juncture for an authoritarian regime,” writes Raymond Hinnebusch, director of the Centre for Syrian Studies at the University of St. Andrews,
“is when it seeks to ‘reform,' particularly when the path of reform combines neo-liberalism and crony capitalism.” As Hinnebusch observed, Syria's president forsook the poor for the rich. “The gap was partly filled by the security services which, however, were underpaid, corrupt and lax.”
³⁹
Men like Abu Yusuf.

When the first protest broke out in a city filled with desperate migrant farmers, it came as a shock to the authorities, who must have thought everyone was out enjoying the new prosperity. It began with the arrest of fifteen schoolchildren for spraying anti-government graffiti on the walls of their school, echoing sentiments they heard from Egypt and Tunisia on satellite news. When their parents tried to have them released, they were taunted and sent away. Those who protested were arrested or fired on, spurring more protests that spread across the country. With no patronage left to cement the society, nothing to offset the rising inequality, the government reached for the only tool it had not abandoned: the army. Once again, the regime employed the scorched earth policy that had defeated—temporarily as it turned out—the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood thirty years earlier.

But now was different. Now Syria had outside enemies who saw opportunity in the prospect of civil war. Now Libya was in chaos following regime change; arms and Islamic fighters were in abundant supply. Now Saudi Arabia and Qatar, threatened by the rise of Iran since the removal of its archenemy Saddam Hussein, were vying for supremacy in the Sunni world. Now Turkey had visions of recovering its lost hegemony. Now, after Libya, Russia was not going to support American adventurism. Now Iran was looking at any war
on an ally as one directed at itself. Now al-Qaeda in Iraq was looking for a place to regroup and build an “Islamic state” that would spread across the region—and the world.

With Gulf States and Turkey backing foreign fighters who saw Syria as a proxy battlefield—and the West blindly supporting the enemies of Assad whoever they might be—the worst fears of those quietly intellectual Syrians I knew in Damascus were fulfilled: the war had come to them.

Skyping with me from the darkness of her mother's house, Ahlam said, “I feel I'm back in prison.” She was only half joking; her mother refused to let her step outside. In the past they had kept the front door open all the time. Now all the houses along the river were fenced and barricaded, everyone indoors and accounted for after dark.

The day after she touched down at Baghdad airport, headlines announced that ten locations had been attacked in the city's worst day of violence since the withdrawal of American troops six months before. Over the course of her month-long visit, three car bombs went off in her district, followed by sweeping government arrests that seemed to target all Sunni men.

As the Iraqi government continued to make life hell for its Sunni population, the civil war in Syria was flowing back into Iraq. Opposition fighters from Syria were flocking into Baghdad, urging the Sunnis to join them in wiping out the Shia. “They even tried to recruit one of my nephews,” Ahlam said. Had he not had a loving family and other options, who knows? Meanwhile the US found itself in a bizarre contortion: supporting the same fighters in Syria that it wanted to see defeated in Iraq.

The Islamic State was born from the invasion of 2003.
⁴⁰
After the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq was killed by an American airstrike in 2006, the group reconfigured as the Islamic State of Iraq, a name they later changed to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS (Daesh to its enemies) and finally to Islamic State.

The leader of Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had spent four years in one of the American prisons in Iraq that Ahlam had talked to me about: Camp Bucca, where she said detainees could be held for a year on nothing but suspicion. When she was kidnapped for her work—which included locating missing prisoners—by members of al-Qaeda, al-Baghdadi was in that prison assembling the team that would turn al-Qaeda into IS: a combination of radical Islamic fighters and secular ex-Baathist military men from the days of Saddam Hussein. The Islamists had zeal but no plan; the ex-Baathists had plans but no zeal. Each galvanized the other.

“If there was no American prison in Iraq, there would be no IS now,” one of al-Baghdadi's fighters told the
Guardian
. “Bucca was a factory. It made us all. It built our ideology.”
⁴¹
It was there that military men with nothing more to lose decided to collude with radical Islamists who believed they had God on their side. Together they found wealthy sponsors in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and other Gulf States who welcomed the prospect of funding an army to fight the non-Sunni governments in Iraq and Syria. From victories in Syria they would go on to erase the border with Iraq that Britain—with the help of Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence—had drawn after the First World War.

At home on the banks of the Tigris, life was worse now than Ahlam remembered, not better. With electricity
sporadic, jobs scarce, and constant threats from Iraqi security forces, feuds had started among people she thought she knew. She was shocked by many things, especially to find that instead of going to school girls were now being married off at the age of nine or ten to thirty-year-old men. Their parents argued that marriage was a way to keep their daughters safe from rampant sex trafficking, including a new method: online entrapment through Twitter and Facebook.

“I feel like a stranger here,” she confessed over Skype. “If I say things need to change, people tell me that nothing can change. They tell me to go back to Chicago.”

Which she did. The past, her past, had become a foreign country. There was no going back.

ONE AFTERNOON IN CHICAGO
, Ahlam and I walked over to Lake Michigan. It was high spring, the perfect mix of sun and shore.

Over the past seven years our lives had gone in different directions. She wasn't my fixer anymore and I was taking a break from magazine writing. It was a thin time for journalism anyhow. What with the slow death by Internet and ownership consolidation, there was less and less money for in-depth reporting from foreign places, investigative work, and the long-form narrative writing I did. Tens of thousands of reporters across North America had lost their jobs since the crash of 2008. Pages were shrinking as quickly as pay rates. The only writers I knew who were still living from their words were making half what they had before the collapse. I had stopped being surprised by editors asking journalists to write for free, or by the lack of good coverage of urgent global affairs.

I was focused now on writing this book, on teaching, and on a life that had opened in the wake of everything falling apart. I had moved to an island in the Pacific Northwest,
having met someone new—this time a writer. As always I rarely discussed my personal life with Ahlam but now it was for different reasons: while my life had moved on, for her the past few years had not been easy. She had resigned from the Iraqi Mutual Aid Society, had had surgery on her back after a fall, and her children were growing up fast.

I'd spent time with them over the past week, delighted by how they had matured. Abdullah, tall and strapping, was studying math and computer science in college while working at the fashion retailer Forever 21—he kindly offered to let me use his employee discount. He was proud to be helping out his father, who was driving taxi, while Roqayah helped her mother (it was she who cooked for all of us).

About to turn seventeen, Roqayah was an honours student in Advanced Placement classes, studying madly for the SAT exams, helped by a coach Ann had hired. After school and on weekends she worked long hours at Jimmy John's, a sandwich chain.

She had gone from seeing herself as the “refugee girl,” to volunteering as a mentor for other young refugees. She was still thinking pre-med but was also interested in history, French and current affairs, and unwound from her late-night shifts at Jimmy John's by watching
Orange Is the New Black
on Netflix, which she admired for its take on gender and diversity.

She was finally ready to tell me what had happened to her and her brother after their uncle Salaam's arrest. I knew that their father, from Baghdad, had made arrangements to have them smuggled home, after Syrian agents returned to the apartment with guns drawn, asking after other members of Ahlam's family. Shortly after that, Abdullah and Roqayah were told to pack their bags. An old friend of their father's
drove them to an empty road on the outskirts of Damascus, where the three of them waited until a bus pulled up. The man left them in the care of the driver, who was going to help them get through the frontier.

When they neared the border, the driver stopped the bus and pulled back his chair, revealing a secret compartment. The two children crawled inside. From the small, dark space they could hear the bus come to a halt, the murmur of voices as Iraqi officers came aboard and checked passports. Crushed together, barely able to breathe, they didn't make a sound.

On the long journey to Baghdad, traffic stopped and started. Sometimes the two of them crawled out and stood on the road together, staring at the night. An old woman spoke to them kindly. Finally two passengers got off. “I suggest you take those seats now; before someone else does,” the driver said. Abdullah slept by the window and his sister in the aisle seat. She didn't wake until Baghdad. “Your dad's here,” the driver said. As the two of them stepped out, they saw their father, who threw his arms around them.

When the UNHCR called and told them to return to Damascus, the children still had no passports, and their father arranged to have them smuggled once again. Moving through Iraqi checkpoints they were hidden in the luggage compartment under the floor, and then, at the border, behind the driver's seat. “I remember crying because I couldn't breathe, and my brother was crying thinking they were going to find us.” The only thing that made it bearable was knowing their father was there with them on the bus.

In the coming months she would write her college application essay on how growing up as a refugee of war had taught her the value of adaptation.

Ahlam had returned to therapy, but the back surgery had laid her up again, and with both of her children busy with school and work she was often alone with her two cats, Misha and Angel.

In 2015 matters came to a crisis. On the ninth anniversary of their son Anas's death, Ahlam's husband held a memorial to which Ahlam and her dearest Chicago friends, Beth Ann, Ann and Zainab—an Iraqi pediatrician—were invited. Ahlam had argued, irrationally, that her husband should not speak about their son, not say his name. When he did, she fled the gathering and disappeared. She remembered little of what happened next. Everything went dark.

When she didn't answer her phone the next day, Beth Ann and Zainab came to find her. They rang the buzzer again and again, but she didn't hear it. “It was Angel who woke me,” she told me—her blue-and-brown-eyed white Persian. Hearing the buzzer, Angel jumped up on the bed and kneaded her with her paws until she got up. She had been asleep for nineteen hours. Her friends phoned her therapist at the Kovler Center, who came over right away. I flew down when she called me.

The wind was blowing strongly off the lake, spreading dandelion fluff and lifting sand from the hardpack. “Maybe this had to happen,” Ahlam said. “I had been carrying the burden for too long.” She was feeling buoyed by her brother Salaam's arrival in Chicago the week before, his application for resettlement finally accepted. Ann had agreed to cover the rent on a three-bedroom apartment for the whole family for the coming year.

She was back at work for a different aid organization. Most of the refugees she helped these days were Syrians, among the millions who had fled that ravaged country. When I asked her how Syrians spoke about the war, she said they didn't. “It's a wound.” She was more excited about a second job she had taken, driving for Uber on the early morning shift. “No four walls,” she said. “No one asking me for help with their problems.” She had always loved driving. Her passengers were usually heading to the airport. They were quiet, checking their phones, utterly incurious about the woman at the wheel.

As Ahlam and I walked, we talked about Beth Ann and Ann, Zainab and Marianne. We had just been to Ann's venerable art deco home on the outskirts of Chicago.

“You remember what Khaled said about me?” Ahlam asked.

I had told her I had interviewed Khaled Oweis, her friend at Reuters, who had fled Syria and was now working for a think tank in Berlin. “Yes. He said you had all the qualities associated with the great Iraqis, except you weren't wealthy.”

“Except I
am
wealthy,” she said. “I have so many good friends.”

She took off her sandals when we passed from grass to beach. She was recalling her childhood. She had been telling her therapist about the day her father had taken her out into the open fields on her grandfather's land. “Run,” her father told her. “Run! No one can stop you.”

Her children were becoming Americans, but she, I thought, would always be an exile. She stood facing the water and opened her arms wide. She closed her eyes, remembering, and I could picture her on that open field, her father watching over her, the land warm beneath her feet. Around us thousands of birds on their annual migration raced along the shore.