Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East (24 page)

I hated hearing this because I knew it wasn’t true. Yet he seemed so firm in his conviction. I didn’t try to argue with the young shopkeeper; but I reminded him what the American government had done for Muslim victims after the tsunami and the assistance the United States provided to Iranians after the earthquake in Bam. I told him about Bosnia and about how important our own Muslim population is in America. Like the other young people with whom I’d shared these examples in Lebanon and Syria, he had a difficult time responding. He stuttered a bit. “Well, maybe in those events the United States did something, but…” He trailed off.

Before we parted ways, I decided to buy a kaffiyeh from him. It was the typical Syrian head wrap, designed with red and white checkers. He placed it on my head and rested two black woven rings on top so as to hold it in place. After carefully adjusting it, he pulled back to admire his handiwork. He then shook my hand and said, “Now you look like you are from Syria.”

As was my usual tactic, I found some random guy on the street willing to drive me farther west. He had been lingering around Palmyra, perhaps looking for work. He made it easy to find him because he actually approached me with the offer of a cheap excursion to one of the rock tombs that I had been too lazy to walk to earlier that day. In the blistering summer heat, I always looked for an excuse to cut my walking time and he had a big pickup truck that made it all seem like an adventure. His name was Raja and he was tall, with a full beard and dark skin. He wore long pants and a collared shirt every day we were together, but his head was always adorned with a scarf. Raja was originally from Deir-e Zur, but had passed through Palmyra for business, or rather hopes of business. Like so many other young adults, he was simply looking for a way to make a living in Syria. He had tried handicrafts, rugs, and even tea; now he was hoping to make some money by leveraging his pickup truck as a taxi service.

We were heading in the same direction, so he offered me a good deal. I told him I wanted to visit several nomadic communities that were off the beaten track and then continue on to Deir-e Zur. Other than that, he knew very little of my plans. As I ventured farther into the eastern Syrian province of Deir-e Zur, where the influence of insurgent Iraq had supposedly meshed in a dangerous manner with an already fundamentalist political environment, I was looking for anything that might evoke a friendly response. He kept telling me, “Don’t worry, my friend. I will take you to do and see all that you want and when we get to Deir-e Zur, you will meet my family and see my friends. You will see the real Syria.” So we headed out together. I had now made it halfway across Syria. I was a third of the way to Iraq and more than a little anxious about the rest of my trip.

I
rode in the back
of Raja’s white pickup truck with my head wrap blowing in the wind. It was so refreshing and I cherished every minute that the wind relieved me from the living sauna of Syria in July. I still had every intention of continuing northeast to Turkey and then down into Iraq, but at this point, there was no need to explain that to Raja. While I was planning to enter Iraq through the north, I figured it might also be interesting to cross the Abu Kamal border and try to get to the ancient southern city of Babylon.

Not aware where he was ultimately taking me, Raja took me deep into the Palmyra Desert so that I could meet some Bedouins. Having spent three months living with the Maasai in southwestern Kenya, I had my own impression of what the nomadic lifestyle was like. I expected a simple lifestyle: no running water, no electricity, no technology. I expected apathy about politics and a visible rift between the Bedouin nomads and the rest of Syrian society.

I was right about one thing: The Bedouins did live in the middle of nowhere.

Raja and I drove to a point where roads ceased to exist. Consequently, we didn’t seem to be going anywhere. All I saw in every direction was desert. Every once and a while, I would see a small shrub as I sat up from the back of the pickup truck, but the sight was certainly not worth the sand blowing in my face. It was never clear to me how Raja navigated. It should have been lonely, as there was literally nothing anywhere in sight. But it wasn’t. I felt peaceful and without a worry in the world. For the first time in Syria, I didn’t feel as though I was in a police state. For once, I could focus more on being overheated than of being followed. There was no Big Brother watching me, no images of Syria’s dictators past and present; it was just me, Raja, and a bunch of sand. This must be why the Bedouins prefer the desert lifestyle.

As we continued on through the desert, I thought back to a trip to Africa. In March of 2003, I had driven through the desert of Mali on my way to Timbuktu. In the smoldering heat and without any water, my car sank in the desert. Nearly passed out from heat exhaustion and scared about how I would get out of the situation, I was rescued by Tuareg nomads. They took me into their tents and sent the children out in the middle of the night to dig the sand away from the car so that I could leave in the morning. But this felt different. Getting stuck in an African desert was no picnic, but being lost less than two hours away from Iraq’s war-torn Sunni Triangle was nothing I wanted to experience.

But the car didn’t sink, we didn’t have to be rescued, and the driver found the Bedouins that I had been looking forward to meeting. The nomadic Bedouins may be a small portion of the population and exercise little influence over politics, but they cover a vast region of Syria and are one of the most important symbols of Syrian culture. Traditionally associated with nomadic migrations that took place between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries from the Arabian Peninsula, many Bedouins settled in the Levant, bringing their traditional pastoral ways with them to the vast deserts of Sinai and Palmyra.

There are roughly one hundred thousand Bedouins living in Syria, but the vast majority of them have settled into the town and city lifestyles; the predominantly Sunni Bedouins are one of the great symbols of the Middle East, yet only a small percentage continue to live as nomads. These days, it is more common to see Bedouins driving pickup trucks and running small businesses than herding sheep. Most of the Bedouins who choose to maintain a nomadic existence can be found scattered throughout the Palmyra Desert, where we were.

When we arrived, the Bedouin encampment was almost as I had pictured it. There were three white cloth tents that stood alongside one another: Each was held up by ropes that were staked down in various directions, and the tent itself was held down by a collection of sandbags. It was windy in the desert, so much so that those wearing veils seemed to use them more for protecting their faces from the sand than for religious purposes. Not far from the tents, the Bedouins had erected fences to shelter their livestock. I saw water storage containers and there was a separate tent for the kitchen.

I wondered how anyone could possibly enjoy a life out here in the desert. It was so secluded from everything. The youth who live in these nomadic communities seemed to have no form of recreation and no way of getting an education. The setting would have looked simple and stereotypically nomadic, if it hadn’t been for one small thing. The Bedouin nomads might have chosen to live in the middle of nowhere, but they were connected to events not only in Syria, but around the world. No, it wasn’t through telepathy; it was through satellite television.

I saw a gigantic satellite dish in the sand that was almost as large as the Bedouin tent it seemed to have wires leading into. When I was living with the Maasai, people had televisions and cell phones, but they didn’t function, they were decorative. These dishes had wires and cables.

The head of the household next to the dish was a man named Ihab. He wore a black cloak and had a thick beard and big bushy eyebrows. He was very amiable and introduced me to his six children, the oldest of whom was seventeen. I sat with them on a gorgeous Bedouin carpet, the pattern mixing bright blue and yellow colors, with a darker red and brown. Within moments, one of the young boys in the household brought a large metal serving tray with five or six smaller plates. Each plate offered a different dip or snack. As I examined the plates I saw a creamy white sauce, which turned out to have a bitter taste. In one of the other dishes, mixed spices and oil created a rough orange dip; and in another plate was a mixture of greens, olives, and white chunks that resembled tofu, but that were in fact a bitter cheese. Just as I was wondering why they had brought dips and no food, another young boy peeked around the corner and emerged out of hiding with a bowl of pita bread, making the formula complete.

As we ate we talked politics and about Bedouin culture, but to be honest, I was completely distracted by my curiosity for the television. Just after Ihab had explained to me how during the elections, the government provides transport for the nomads to come to the local towns and vote, I asked him, “Can I see your TV?”

He laughed and with an obvious air of pride led me through the separation in the tent to show me his television. The TV was fully functioning and I saw another wire leading from the television out to a round generator that rested, like the satellite dish, in the sand.

Two of the women in the household were gathered around the TV, watching what I was almost positive was Al-Jazeera or something like it. I asked Ihab how many channels they got on the television, expecting him to say three or four. He shocked me when he said nine hundred. I was bursting with questions, but the first one to come out was how they pay monthly cable charges out here in the desert. He laughed at this question and explained that they just pay a hundred dollars at the beginning for the satellite dish and the cable box. After that, they don’t pay anything. Admittedly I was a bit jealous, a hundred dollars and unlimited cable. Not a bad deal.

Ihab did not have the only household with a satellite dish. I saw numerous dishes throughout the desert and I also heard stories about the Qashquai nomads in Iran with similar setups. While I didn’t actually see it myself, I’d also read articles and heard eyewitness accounts of some nomadic communities in Syria that had solar panels outside of their tents.

I still had questions for him. “What do you do when you move?”

“Do you see those mules over there?” I looked at where he was pointing and then turned my head back to listen. “We tie the satellite and the generator to the mule with rope.”

These nomads were connected. A great deal of the hatred toward America in the Middle East is often attributed to a difficulty in reaching people. What I realized from the nomads in Syria, however, is that there is not a problem of access. Satellite television was the most prevalent technology I saw in the Middle East. It existed in the Palestinian refugee camps, in private homes, in shared facilities, and apparently even in the nomadic deserts. The cost was minimal, the access was tremendous, and especially in the slums, cable was often spliced as many as five to eight times between families.

When nomads in the middle of the desert have upwards of nine hundred channels, lack of access cannot be said to be a problem for those outlets trying to reach Middle Eastern audiences. But those same nomads—like so many others in the Middle East—are glued to Al-Jazeera, Al-Manar, and Al-Arabia, three traditionally anti-Western networks. Changing their preferences is going to be more difficult than giving them access.

Ihab’s children, however, are a different story. The very idea of channel-surfing excited them and even if they didn’t speak the language, they would watch non-Arabic channels. For them it was about something new, increased access to diversified perspectives. The youth embrace variety far more than the adults, because they have a better understanding of a technology that gives them choices. They were born with choices.

A
fter watching television
with Ihab’s family, Raja and I visited a number of other Bedouin settlements. From there, we saw the other side of Bedouin culture, the nonnomads. These Sunni people were warm, hospitable, and interesting to talk to. What I didn’t realize at the time was that this would not be representative of the larger Sunni population I was about to meet. Where I would go next was a different story.

As we moved farther east, Syria became stranger and stranger. I began to see scowls rather than friendly grins, and people met me with hostility rather than amiability. The dialect of Arabic also began to change, and it just didn’t seem that I was welcome anywhere. My driver and I had an amiable relationship, but our interactions were about to get awkward and uncomfortable. He still didn’t know I was American and as far as I was concerned, there was no reason to tell him. What I didn’t realize was that as we moved closer toward the Syrian-Iraqi border, there would be checkpoints. After only thirty minutes of driving, we reached the first of these checkpoints, where I was asked to present my passport. My driver reached out his window to the back of the pickup and I handed him my passport. As soon as he realized I was American, our relationship began to sour.

I could tell that he was pissed that I hadn’t told him I was American. Rather than trying to ameliorate the situation, however, I simply asked him how long it would take to get to the Abu Kamal border with Iraq. He told me it would take two to three hours and then immediately asked with an air of suspicion why I wanted to know. I explained that I was planning to eventually go to Iraq through Turkey, but it might be interesting to enter through Syria. He looked appalled and the car actually slowed down as he turned his head to respond.

He began making the argument that things weren’t safe in Iraq and that it was not a place to travel, but I persisted. He stopped answering me and we didn’t speak again until we got a flat tire almost an hour and a half later. Ironically, it was right next to a sign with an arrow pointing toward Iraq. I asked him to take a picture with me in front of the sign and he refused. He didn’t want to be in it. As we replaced the tire, I asked the driver if he would mind taking me to Iraq.