The Morning They Came for Us (2 page)

It does not take long to get to Syria from Lebanon, which gives an idea of how brutally the land was torn up and fashioned into artificial countries after the First World War, once the Ottoman Empire had collapsed. The modern Syrian state was established as a French mandate, after many false promises, lies and deceptions of the Arabs by the French and British. It left the Syrians (particularly the Alawites, who had felt most oppressed by French rule) with a wilful desire for self-determination. Syria finally gained independence in April 1946, as a parliamentary republic. What followed next was a series of coups, until the Arab Republic of Syria was established in 1963 in a Ba'athist coup d'état planned and led by several men, including Hafez Assad, father of the current president, Bashar.

Looking at that timeline of betrayal and violence, the groundwork had already been laid for the tragedy that would evolve decades after those maps had been redrawn by colonial interlocutors. It seemed forcefully inevitable.

The first thing I saw once I crossed the border into the Syrian hinterland was an enormous colour portrait of Bashar al-Assad, his already vivid eyes tinted blue to make their colour even more intense. The second thing I noticed was a Dunkin' Donuts, which seemed odd, even in a sophisticated country like Syria. It was an awkward juxtaposition, so blatant a symbol of Western commercialism – not a small café serving coffee but a sugar-infested paradise – on a highway leading to Damascus.

As it turned out, the Dunkin' Donuts was not what I suspected. Although it looked like the solidly American version, down to the branded signs and decoration, it only sold toasted cheese sandwiches. I bought one, and was
watched all the while as three mustachioed men smoking cigarettes – obviously Mukhabarat, secret police – stood around the bar, while one of them toasted it. My driver was waiting, twitchy and nervous, and hustled me out once the sandwich had been served.

The atmosphere in Damascus was equally paranoid, something like the old days in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. There was an unspoken quality, a silence despite the blaring horns of those caught in traffic. People whispered when out in public. When a waiter arrived at a table, the people at that table stopped talking. The Mukhabarat could easily have been the same men who had followed me in Iraq a decade before – those same cheap leather jackets, the same badly trimmed, downward-turned moustaches. Many of the Ba'athists I knew from Saddam's portfolio had, in fact, run to another country of Ba'athists after he was killed – to Syria.

I had come to Syria because I wanted to see a country before it tumbled down the rabbit-hole of war. During that first trip, in May 2012, Syria was just on the brink. You could be exacting about definitions and call it an armed conflict between two factions (later three, then four, then more), but I had seen war start like this before, and it was descending on Syria with stunning velocity. The world stood by watching.

I had a visa, therefore I was there legally, but anyway, I felt uneasy: I was watched, observed and followed. I checked into a hotel, the Dama Rose, where the United Nations monitors were also staying: morose men who were no longer allowed to operate because they had been attacked too often. They sat drinking coffee after coffee and making jokes about the
bar downstairs, which was usually frequented by lithe young Russian girls whom they called ‘Natashas'. In a few weeks' time, even the Natashas would flee, even though Putin being Assad's ally had made it easy for them to get visas to enter the country.

One Thursday – the day that is the start of the Muslim weekend – I returned to the hotel after a day of talking to people who were uncertain whether or not their country would exist in a year or two. They were Christians, but liberal. They did not support the government's crushing of peaceful rebellions, but nor did they support an armed resistance. At that point, I was trying to describe the various supporters and detractors of Assad. There were rebels who were fighting him; there were activists who were launching a digital war, using Facebook, YouTube and Twitter as ammunition; and then there were those who had protested in places like Homs in the beginning but had dropped out altogether when some of their fellow activists took up arms.

In a café in Paris, on a bitterly cold day earlier that year, I had met with Fadwa Suleiman, a graceful Alawite actress who, in the very beginning of the revolution, led the protests and became something of a celebrity (before that she had starred in Syrian soaps). Because she was an Alawite, the same ethnic group as Assad, and a protester calling for freedom from the regime, she was instantly branded as the face of the revolution. But she said things had changed. She was saddened to see that ‘the revolution is not going in the right direction, that it is becoming armed, that the opposition which wanted to resist peacefully is playing the game of the regime, and that the country is heading for sectarian war.' ‘I didn't want
to leave Syria,' she added, ‘but I didn't have the choice. I was being threatened and I was becoming a threat for the activists who were helping me.'

Then there were what I called ‘the Believers', Assad's followers, some of them as devoted to him as St Paul had been to Jesus, but others who were simply concerned that, as a minority of a minority – Alawites are an offshoot of the Shia branch of Islam – they would disappear if the radical Sunnis came to power.

There was a sub-faction of the Believers who only wanted to save their own skin: they did not want to get hauled away to jail by Assad. They privately did not approve of the regime's torture cells and bombing raids on Aleppo, but they found the news hard to believe, and, above all, they did not want the radical Islamists in power.

Then there was another category: those who believed in nothing other than staying alive, putting a meal on the table, stepping across a street without getting sprayed with shrapnel, or travelling in a car without getting stuck in traffic next to a car bomber.

Sometimes the categories shifted. The longer I stayed, the wider became the range of activists I would come across. I knew some who became Believers after ISIS – the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, sometimes called ISIL, sometimes called Daesh in Arabic – came to power, simply because they did not want to live under that kind of Islam: one where women doctors were beheaded, where children were taught to hate anyone who was not like them, where only the most literal, most radical form of Islam was accepted. There were also rebels who shifted sides, moving from being supporters of
the Free Syrian Army to part of Jabhat al-Nusra (the al-Qaeda faction in Syria), and then making the leap to ISIS.

Equally, many Believers were also losing faith. The Foreign Ministry spokesman that spring and summer was Jihad Makdissi, a Christian with a Muslim name and a degree from the Sorbonne in Paris. In his office at the Ministry, Jihad explained how his country was a ‘melting pot' of ethnicity: Greek Orthodox, Christians, Sunni Kurds, Shias, Alawites and Jews. He was rational, intelligent and thoughtful, and it was obvious why he was put in that position – to give a gentler face to the regime.

But Jihad did not stay much longer. One year after my first visit to Syria, I would open the paper and see that Makdissi had defected with his wife and children to the Gulf, making him for ever
persona non grata
 – at least under the Assad regime. Some time after that, I met him for lunch in a businessmen's café in Geneva, a few days before the failed Geneva II talks. Makdissi, who was leaning towards a political career, but was not entirely clear about what his platform would be, told me about his final days in Syria: ‘I realized that things I had accepted before, I would no longer be able to accept.'

Suleiman, the actress, also fled from Homs to Damascus, thence to Jordan, and finally to France. She said it was in Homs that she saw Sunnis who had initially carried weapons only to defend themselves begin to use these arms to attack regime forces. ‘It was then that I understood,' she said, acknowledging that what she had thought would be a peaceful uprising was turning into war. She blamed, above all, not the Syrians themselves, but the ‘other countries' (Saudi, Qatar, Kuwait) that were ‘arming the Syrian streets. . . Those people
are willing to do anything to take power in the same way that Bashar al-Assad is ready to do anything to stay in power.'

Fadwa wasn't that happy in Paris, she said; she missed her friends, her family and her old life. The life of someone in exile is always hard, more so when your country is in the midst of war and you are outside it, watching through a frosted-glass window. The actress had cut off her long hair when she started marching in Homs, as a symbolic gesture of protest, and in the Paris café that afternoon, with her short hair and big sweater, she looked scrawny, abandoned and cold. But she wasn't going back, she said, running her fingers through the hair she had willingly and somehow symbolically cut off, until Syria was a country she once again could recognize.

The pool party at my hotel that Thursday in early summer 2012 seemed to betoken the last days of a spoilt empire that was about to implode. Smoke was rising in the background from shelling in the southern suburbs, and a gaunt Russian Natasha was dancing clumsily near the pool, oblivious to the explosions. Syrian women with complicated hairstyles involving hairpieces and extensions, blow-dryings and coloured gels, paraded in full makeup, bikinis and high heels. The men wore Vilebrequin-style swimming trunks and drank Lebanese beer with a lime down the neck of a bottle and a salt-rimmed glass. A remix version of Adele's ‘Someone Like You' thumped from a stage.

I stood on my balcony and watched the smoke from the bombing in the suburbs, but I also looked at the bacchanalian scene below – at the denial of the beginnings of the drum roll of war. One by one by one, these people's lives were
falling apart, and before they knew it each and every one of them would be betrayed. But the bubble had not yet burst.

For several weeks running, I watched the fevered hedonism of the Thursday afternoon pool parties at the Dama Rose Hotel. That first week it was like every other start of a weekend. By lunchtime, women were rushing to hairdressers; the roads leading out of the city – those that were still open – were clogged with luxury cars. People who could do so were still heading outside the city to the villages, taking their kids to amusement parks, or en route to country villas for parties, weekend picnics or dinners.

Restaurants such as Narenj, which takes up nearly half a block in the Old City and served traditional Arabic food to the elite, were still packed. I went to a wedding there one afternoon, and was served plate after heaving plate of lamb, chicken, rice, dates, oranges and honey-drenched sweets. I was painfully aware that less than an hour away by car, assuming there were no roadblocks, people in Homs were starving to death, a massacre was going on in Houla, and refugees were crossing the borders of Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan searching for a way to feed their families.

The most surreal aspect of the Dama Rose parties was that they were taking place in the hotel, which was home to those 300 frozen, frustrated UN soldiers from fifty different countries, who had been brought in to be ‘monitors'. On a top floor their boss, the Norwegian General Robert Mood, the chief monitor, was installed with his own team.

On 14 June 2012, their operations would be suspended because it became too dangerous for them. Eventually, most of them were pulled out, and a skeleton staff of UN workers
remained behind – frustrated to the end with the encumbering politics.

Not for the first time, the UN was in an uncomfortable position. The UN is always an easy target for journalists and regional analysts. We like to mock their ‘bloated inefficiency' (a favourite hackneyed term), and the often too obvious career aspirations of certain officials, which seem to come before their obligation to relieve human suffering. There is the cronyism, the preferential treatment of relatives and friends of senior officials, and vast corruption. But there are also a few committed officials, and more to the point, local field workers, who are determined to help people, to commit their lives, despite being hampered by the international institution's bureaucratic wrangles.

This time, the monitors, who wanted to be in Homs and Zabadani doing their job, were tethered to a hotel. They were on the fringe of a war they were unable to navigate or stop.

For the more honest senior officials, who spoke to me privately, there were deep anxieties that Syria was becoming another failure in the long list of catastrophes that included genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda and Sri Lanka, human trafficking in Kosovo, mass rape in the Congo (under the eyes of peacekeepers), and finally, cholera brought to Haiti in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake.
¹

Veteran diplomats like Kofi Annan, Lakhdar Brahimi and Staffan de Mistura were brought in to negotiate with Assad and the rebels. Annan and Brahimi both quit, at an utter loss over what to do, and in the winter of 2015, de Mistura was still pushing on with a plan for ‘freezing' local ceasefires in Aleppo, which, not surprisingly, never got off the ground.
²
De Mistura, a veteran humanitarian, was determined to keep going, to relieve the unbearable suffering. It took a lot of persistence, after four years of war, to continue to try to forge some kind of path to peace.

The second week in June 2012, people were more sombre at the pool party. There was drinking, the house music blared, the UN staff still complained about the noise, but the Russian dancer was gone. And by the third week, people left early, rushing to their 4x4s with distinctly worried looks on their faces. No one wanted to be out after dark.

On the afternoon of 28 June, I could see that in the distance, towards the al-Marjeh neighbourhood, across from the Justice Courts, there was a larger than usual curl of smoke. Two car bombs had exploded earlier that day in the centre of Damascus. The day before had been the bloodiest day on record since the then sixteen-month uprising had begun. This Thursday, the partygoers were almost non-existent, and the ones who remained were decidedly less cheerful. There was music, but it was not blaring. There was no dancing. Most people were glued to their phones, texting family or friends for news or information.