Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East (23 page)

While Hama didn’t resemble a city ridden with trauma, talking to people revealed the existence of certain scars. People in Hama did not want to talk politics. They pretended to know nothing and have no opinions.

In the main park in Hama the setting was calm with women eating ice cream, kids playing soccer, and the shadow of the water wheels casting an almost metaphorical darkness over the whole scene. It was actually hard to imagine that this was the same place that just a few decades prior had been leveled by Hafez al-Assad and turned into a graveyard.

There were some kids around my age playing soccer, so I walked over and asked if I could play too. They immediately wanted to know where I was from and I told them America.

They laughed a bit, indicating what they thought of my likely soccer skills or maybe at the simple fact that I was American. But I’m a pretty nice American and a very good soccer player and I showed off my moves in the park. There were about ten of us and we played for over an hour. They asked me to lunch and I gladly accepted. We sat around a table at a traditional Syrian kebab restaurant with family-style portions. It was the typical fast-food kebab joint with a large leg of meat spinning around on a metal bar. There was something unappetizing about watching my food move around on display and then seeing the butcher slice off parts of it to give to my new friends. As we chowed on our lunch, a crowd of children gathered outside with their faces pressed against the restaurant window. Every time I made eye contact with them, they would run away laughing, leaving only their face prints on the glass, only to return again within seconds.

I asked them what they did for fun and one of the boys, who had a shaved head, said, “I think you will be surprised to hear this.” He pointed to a group of completely covered girls, some of whom even had their entire faces covered, and said, “Do you see that over there? Some of those girls, if you are out at the nightclubs, you won’t even recognize them. They will dress completely differently and won’t even wear head scarves.”

“Sometimes we go out to the clubs and the girls wait outside the door with their hejab, and then as soon as they get inside, they remove it,” another one of the boys explained to me. I later saw this in a Damascus nightclub, where there was a pile of hejabs in one of the corners of the venue.

I moved to touchier topics and asked about their thoughts on the regime.

One of the boys, who I distinguished from the others because of his unibrow, told me that, differently than Lebanon, they don’t care about politics in Syria. He explained that in Lebanon if you ask a young person even two years old, they will identify with a political affiliation. Always eager to distinguish between Lebanon and Syria, one of the other boys noted that they don’t want to leave their country like the Lebanese. They want to live, work, and die in Syria and even if things don’t change, they are still going to stay and work. Whatever question I asked, they always found a way to remind me that they were Syrian. One of them explained that even though they are all Sunnis, some of them believe that Syria should be an Islamic Republic, while others don’t. But he also reminded me that these differences don’t matter because they are all Syrian.

I asked them how careful they needed to be when talking about politics. One of the boys began answering me while his mouth was half-filled with a lamb kebab and said that before, they never used to speak about politics, just girls and sports, because it was safe. Now, they talk about girls and sports because it is more interesting conversation than politics. Again, drawing the parallel with Lebanon, the same kebab-eating boy highlighted the fact that Lebanon is rampant with political parties. He reminded me that in Syria there is only one
real
party, which is the Ba’ath Party, and if one doesn’t like the party, then that is only to be talked about in the home.

I wanted to know if they thought Bashar al-Assad was changing things for the better. One of the boys who had been silent now spoke up and told me that things are changing. He explained that while the president is doing his best to change Syria, he still cannot do it very well because of all the mistakes of the past fifteen to twenty years. He continued by explaining that the principals in the Ba’ath party made mistakes that cannot be changed in just two years. The idea that Bashar is doing his best, that reform is moving, but slowly, was very popular among Syrians. They almost seemed to think that reform has been a success, which it clearly has not. It was not that these kids had drunk the Kool-Aid; instead, they were seduced by façades of reform. When I asked them what reforms they have seen, the boys started listing cheaper cars, less expensive mobile phones, greater access to satellite television, and more Internet cafés. These short-term fruits embodied reform for a group of young Syrians with way too much time on their hands.

I asked them about larger reforms, but all I got was a little more detail. Instead of cheaper cars, this time they explained that before Bashar, the tariffs on cars were 255 percent, but now they are only 40 percent. Bashar al-Assad was seducing these youths into thinking that the cheaper cars were synonymous with legitimate reform.

Young Syrians are patient with reform and even content with it in some cases because Bashar al-Assad has shrewdly appealed to what youth care about in the short run. They are enamored of cheap cars, accessible mobile phones, unlimited satellite television, and the spread of the Internet, and they associate all of this with greater freedom and opportunity. Meanwhile, private banking, education, and social reforms remain stagnant. These are the reforms Syria needs for the future, but when I spoke to most Syrian youth, they hadn’t really made the distinction between short-term gains and long-term needs.

These guys did mention some changes that could have passed for steps toward reform. In prior years, for example, one could not be in politics without being a member of the Ba’ath Party. Though this has changed, Bashar al-Assad has not quite allowed for multipartyism. Instead, he has permitted small political parties to take part in a symbolic competition.

The youth also seemed to believe that the regime was less focused now on Ba’athist indoctrination. One of them explained to me that in school he used to have to learn about Ba’ath ideology, for instance the pronouncements of Hafez al-Assad, but now the curriculum has changed and they no longer have to learn about the laws of the party or the ideology. The same boy also told me that in earlier years, Syrian students used to have to learn about the military, about fighting, how to bear arms, how to load and reload, how to unjam a weapon. But, again, they no longer have to do this.

I asked them to identify the greatest problems they face in Syria. Without hesitation, one of the boys pointed to the educational system. The others nodded in affirmation and different voices explained that there are virtually no educational opportunities in their country. While they love their country and don’t want to leave, they feel compelled to travel to Lebanon or Dubai so that they can get the education they need to come back to Syria and make something of themselves. They don’t believe the world will accept a Syrian degree. They are probably right.

One of them explained that they desire a more open society, but the others pushed back and said that they fear too much freedom because they see what is taking place in Iraq. This was not surprising, given the spread of the Sunni insurgency to the Syrian border.

These kids didn’t seem to believe in demonstrating or protesting to achieve change. When I asked them why, they again went back to the same car example, explaining that they never protested for cheaper cars. Instead, they believe that their patience was rewarded.

I moved to my last subject and asked them what they thought of America. As had been the case everywhere else, they emphatically asserted that they love America and its culture. They want American products and they even like going to Lebanon just becaue there is more American influence there. They have Coca-Cola and Pepsi, they have McDonald’s, and their clubs play American music. But they viewed the United States government as something different. They saw my government as far too close to Israel and seemed to think it was out to destroy Islam. They were emphatic about this, but like most young kids in the Middle East, their justification was not rooted in facts, but instead bumper sticker slogans that had been inculcated upon them by extremists.

SYRIA, 2005

M
y journey to Aleppo, Homs, and Hama barely scratched the surface of Syria, but I needed to get back to Beirut. I had a multiple-entry visa that would require me to register with the Syrian government if I stayed much longer, so my plan was to come back after a few weeks and make my journey to eastern Syria, where the Salafist militants allegedly had crossed over from Iraq. I was low on cash and I wanted to give myself the option of turning away at the last minute, so I opted to go by car.

I passed some time gallivanting around Beirut as usual and then prepared myself for a long journey. My plan was to travel from Beirut back to Hama, across Syria, drive up the Iraqi border into Turkey, and eventually make my way into Iraq. With 90-percent certainty that I would chicken out of the Iraq stage, I threw my laptop and small suitcase all into a shared taxi at Charles Helou Station in Beirut and began my journey at six
A.M
. The journey out of Lebanon was a two-hour trip that I had already made five or six times. It still amazed me that it only cost ten dollars to go from Lebanon to Syria by taxi (a two-hour drive), but it cost fifteen dollars to drive from one side of Beirut to the other (a twenty-minute drive). It made traveling to Syria a rather frequent occurrence for me. The only catch was that for such a cheap cost, I was expected to share the taxi with as many people as could fit. Sometimes this was one or two other people, while other times it was four in the backseat. A year later, when war would break out again between Israel and Hezbollah, I heard from friends that it cost almost six hundred dollars to take the same trip out of Lebanon.

It was just after dawn and barely light out. In the distance, I could catch a glimpse of the Mediterranean. We were going north, away from the sea and onto the road to Mesopotamia—modern-day Iraq. I was anxious but tired; I would have slept through the entire ride if my rest had not been repeatedly interrupted by the woman smoking cigarettes next to me.

Just a few days before I left, some of the Hezbollah guys that I knew tried to convince me not to go to Iraq. They told me that I was crazy for wanting to go to Iraq and one of them even suggested, “If you come back from Iraq without a head, don’t say we didn’t warn you. These people are crazy.” While such warnings had already come from family, friends, and colleagues, Hezbollah’s really caught my attention. When Hezbollah thinks that something is unsafe, well, it’s probably not that safe. But I figured that when I got to the border with Iraq, I didn’t have to cross. Deep down, I think I believed I would actually turn away at the last minute. I would certainly have time to make up my mind: in order to get to Mesopotamia, I had to travel across Syria, up the Syrian-Iraq border, through Turkey, and down into northern Iraq. There was much to experience beforehand.

As was usually the case, I had to wake up from my nap when we arrived at the Lebanese-Syrian border. At the border, I saw the usual scene of trucks lined up for miles, probably waiting for days, before crossing. When Syria had been pressured into withdrawing its troops from Lebanon in March 2005, it did so with great reluctance and at great cost to Syria’s economy and prestige. The Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon coincided with American government pressure for Syria to do a better job securing its borders. While the United States wanted the Assad regime to secure its border with Iraq, the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria used the opportunity to shut down its borders with Lebanon to economic traffic. While some traffic was let through, commercial trucks were left sitting at the border, sometimes for weeks on end. Border crossings have become like gigantic parking lots, with literally miles and miles of trucks not moving an inch. With Lebanon’s economy already in shambles, the commercial lockdown of the border has come at great cost to the Lebanese, yet another source of widespread Lebanese hatred for Syria.

Fortunately only commercial vehicles were being held up. It was actually rather easy for me to get to the Lebanese-Syrian border. In fact, this was my third time going to Syria in the past two months and I had never run into any trouble at the border, but this time was different. My passport resembles a small book. It is thick and well-worn and often raises the eyebrows of officers, guards, and stuffy bureaucrats. I was even once asked upon arrival in Stockholm if Burundi was a real country. The immigration officer at the Syrian entry point was focused on one page of my passport and asked me, with a cocky and stern look, why I had gone to Israel.

I was puzzled. I had been to Israel in 1990, but this passport was issued in 2001. There were no Israeli stamps in my passport, the presence of which would immediately result in my being denied entry to Syria. I had deliberately avoided taking a trip to Israel before I traveled to Lebanon and Syria, precisely to avoid this predicament.
“Maruuhit Israel,”
I told him (I hadn’t gone to Israel).

He didn’t seem to believe me. I shrugged and put my hands to my sides; I had no clue what he was talking about. He pointed to a stamp in my passport and I leaned over to look. He was pointing to my multiple-entry visa for Ethiopia. He had mistaken the five-sided star on the Ethiopian stamp for a Star of David.

“This is for Ethiopia, not for Israel.” I said. He still looked confused, so I drew a picture of a Star of David alongside the five-sided Ethiopian star to demonstrate the difference. He was finally convinced and he allowed me to proceed.

Syria, like most Middle Eastern nations, does not recognize the State of Israel. They do not take kindly to even the smallest reminder—like a stamp in a passport—that Israel does in fact exist. Such willful ignorance is not limited to border crossings. I was once at the Virgin Megastore in Beirut, browsing DVD box sets of
The West Wing
. They had the first and third seasons of the popular show, but the second season was conspicuously absent. The saleswoman told me that the store was forbidden from selling the second season: The word
Israel
had been uttered too many times in those episodes.

Such restrictions are government posturing and Middle Eastern youth know it. Even the most vehemently anti-Zionist youth I met would express frustration at living next to a country in which they had never been allowed to set foot. As one Hezbollah student told me, “I don’t want to go to Israel to fight or destroy it. I just want to see what it is like. I grew up only twenty kilometers from the border, and still I have no idea what it is like there.” In fact, when you ask a lot of young Lebanese what language they would like to learn besides English, many of them suggest Hebrew. This is even more so the case among the Shi’a from the south, the area bordering Israel.

T
he charade at the border
had been a colossal waste of time and I actually got the impression that the other people in the taxi were irritated with me for holding up their journey. Too tired to address the awkwardness with my traveling companions, I just went back to sleep.

I had probably dozed off for about an hour when I woke up to the sound of singing. It was my taxi driver; in his voice, each word that he sang grew louder and was dragged out longer. It sort of sounded like “Hava Nagila.” Then I heard the words:

Hafez!

Basil!!

Bashar al-Assad!!!

It got louder and more celebratory:

Hafez!…

Basil!!…

Bashar al-Assad!!!…

Now the taxi driver wasn’t the only one singing. The older lady who had been smoking in the back also joined in. They were clapping and smiling. I didn’t know what else to do, so I joined in. My Syrian traveling companions were literally singing the praises of the brutal al-Assad dictators, and it was chilling to see their pictures on every street corner, their decals on every taxi windshield, and billboards glorifying their mythical achievements and disgusting brutality.

The taxi dropped me off in Homs again, the same predominantly Sunni city that had been my first introduction to Syria several months earlier. This time I didn’t stay long. I hailed another taxi and asked to be taken to Palmyra, or Tadmor, as it is known in both Arabic and its original language of Aramaic. Three hours from Homs and 250 kilometers northeast of Damascus, the ancient city of Palmyra stands in the center of Syria. The site being adjacent to perhaps the largest oasis in the Middle East, it is not hard to imagine why the ancient Romans chose it to construct the eastern flank of their empire.

They built Palmyra as a center for tax collection, a stopping point for trade, and a protection fortress for the eastern front of the Roman Empire, and two thousand years later much of what once stood here remains. I spent two full days walking through the ancient columns, exploring the amphitheater, and wandering around the rock tombs. It was a massive desert, except instead of cacti growing out of the sand, there were gigantic columns of limestone whose blocks fitted tightly together in a perfectly symmetrical pattern to form archways. In every direction I could see a different feature of the city and it became fun to decipher the varying historical functions of what I saw. Even when the city seemed to end, as indicated by smaller columns and fewer ruins, I could still see the large rectangular rock tombs erected out of the sand. It never ended.

When I stood before those magnificent ruins in Palmyra, it became easy to see how Syrian young people, looking at their history, are overtaken with a sense of pride. There are thousands of ruins scattered throughout Syria. Even granted an entire lifetime for the purpose, one could not see them all. Considered by some to be the most spectacular ruins in the entire world, Palmyra is filled with intact columns, arches, coliseums, temples, churches, and a variety of other structures. To young people, the ancient ruins in the Middle East are more than just tourist attractions. In Syria and Iran, young people would always refer to my desire to see these sights as admirable; my young friends praised what they saw as my interest in understanding their cultural pride. In Iran, it was about seeing Persepolis; in Syria, Palmyra; in Iraq, the ancient citadels; and in Lebanon, Baalbak.

While I was in Palmyra, a young man approached me on a camel. He couldn’t have been older than seventeen, but he told me that he spoke nine languages. When I asked him where he had learned them, he explained, “from the tourists.” But the place was empty. He explained to me the frustration of being Syrian: knowing what treasures the country possesses and wanting to share them with the world, but having no visitors.

The city of Palmyra was filled with interesting shops. Some of the stores were designed for tourists, with Syrian artifacts at hiked-up prices. These were not the blanket shops of Al-Marrad. There was a whole row of stores, much like a main street in any busy and developed town. While some of the stores offered artifacts and clothing, there was also no shortage of tea shops, places to smoke flavored tobacco, and restaurants. As I walked into one of the shops, my eyes immediately zeroed in on a small but ornate Quran, protected by an intricately designed metal case. It stood with its majestic allure on a fancy silver stand. After bargaining on the price, I was told by the young shopkeeper, “Be very careful with this, it is very special. Make sure you take care of it and show it respect.” He then picked it up, kissed it, and said a prayer. I asked him if he would mind showing me some of his favorite passages. And so began an afternoon-long lesson on the Quran. We went through dozens of passages, as I listened to him explain what they meant and the various ways that they could be interpreted.

He was very knowledgeable and clearly well-read in the Quran. He didn’t boast about his religious commitments, nor did he emphasize how deeply pious he was. I have found in my experiences in the Middle East that those who feel the need to brag about their religious commitments are often those who are either new to their faith or not well-versed in its teachings. I met so many young people throughout Lebanon, Iran, Syria, and Iraq who claimed to be deeply pious, well-read in the Quran, and scholarly about Islam. When I would ask them to show me the location of a passage in the Quran, however, many of them didn’t know where to turn. Despite an oft-stated commitment to Islam, most youth in the Middle East have never read the Quran cover-to-cover. Instead, they rely on others to tell them what it says. Such reliance on oral education highlights the importance of the mosque and the cleric they choose to follow. Religious extremists employ this method to find new recruits. While this structure of religious education is not exclusive to the Middle East, this reliance on intermediaries to interpret all religious doctrine has provided an opening for dangerous extremists to hijack Islam. I was amazed at how many youth believed—often incorrectly—that the words of the extremist
marja
(clerical leader) they followed were verbatim from the Quran.

After a few hours going over passages in the Quran, he asked me why I was so curious to learn about Islam. It was as if he hadn’t expected me to care, let alone sit with him for hours going over the text of the Quran. I explained to him that for a student of the Middle East, understanding Islam is essential. He looked at me perplexed and then said with astonishment, “I didn’t think anyone in America would ever want to learn about Islam.” He shouldn’t have been surprised by this. I actually found it refreshing to see someone sitting with a Quran and pointing out passages, rather than regurgitating rhetoric that had been distorted by individual interpretation. It wasn’t quite critical thinking, but it was a step in that direction. I asked him where he got the impression that an American would never want to learn about Islam, and without hesitation he proclaimed that America hates Islam, and wants to destroy the religion.