The Morning They Came for Us (6 page)

The legends – and the old people – say Takla was exhausted and finding her way blocked by the sharp, rocky sides of a mountain, she fell on her knees in desperate prayer. The mountains parted. ‘Ma'loula' means ‘entrance' in Aramaic.

‘Here in these mountains are all different people, different religions. But we decided adamantly that Ma'loula would not be destroyed,' Diab said.

At the ancient shrine of St Takla, Christian nuns – true believers in the Assad government – lived isolated, quiet lives, devoted to God and country. They slept in small, spotlessly clean chambers and passed their time working, praying and tending to the needs of the sick. They also ran an orphanage.

The convent was silent except for constant, shrill birdsong and the sound of nuns scurrying up and down marble stairs
with large glass jars of the golden-coloured fruit, which they made and sold. They would dry the apricots in boxes in the courtyard, and the scent of the hot fruit was as heavy as the incense in the chapel.

The convent is one of forty holy sites in Ma'loula, which before the war was a place where Muslims and Christians prayed to cure infertility or other ailments, and drank water from the crack in the rock that St Takla is said to have parted with her prayers.

But religion is not an issue, said Mother Sayaf, a Greek Catholic who has lived in this convent for thirty years. She spoke to me in a quiet, completely darkened room – shuttered from the fierce light – and one of the younger nuns brought glasses of iced water on a lacquered tray. She said the air was so fresh that Ma'loula was a place where doctors sent sick people to recuperate.

‘We had an Iraqi Muslim man who was badly wounded, who came here to be healed,' she said, meaning they would treat someone regardless of religion. At the same time, she made no secret of her devotion to Assad. Two years later, when the jihadists entered Ma'loula, her devotion to the regime would be tested.

I returned several times to Ma'loula to visit the monastery and the nuns. When I last went, in November 2012, as people fled embattled Homs, Damascus and Aleppo to seek refuge with relatives overseas or in the few still peaceful parts of Syria, people were returning to Ma'loula as a sort of safe haven.

‘It's my country,' said Antonella, a Syrian-American who left Los Angeles and Miami three years ago to return to her birthplace and start a café. She sat down inside her café – no electricity – and showed me maps. She reminded me Ma'loula was a UNESCO-protected heritage site, which she felt would somehow exclude them from being blown to bits.

Antonella had a chance to leave when the war started and fighting was close to Ma'loula, but refused. ‘I want to be here,' she said. Her business, however, was suffering; money was a problem and she had an elderly mother she needed to support.

Ma'loula did look different in the past, she said. ‘There were fifty tour buses a day here when I first came back,' she said. Her café, which was empty the day I sat with her, was once full. She wasn't sure how she was going to get through the next winter.

The previous year, when there was fighting in Yabroud, a strategically located town near the Lebanese border and just across the mountain, Antonella finally realized her country was at war and people were dying. ‘That depressed me,' she says. ‘The truth is, even if Ma'loula is quiet now, no one knows where this is going.'

But she still stoically supported Assad. ‘The rebels have destroyed our country,' she said. There was no other alternative.

Her brother Adnan, who had also come back from America, sat down and began to talk about the economy. Because of sanctions and the fact that transit has been halted across borders – trucks couldn't move because of fighting in
certain areas – food costs were skyrocketing. Foreign tourists had stopped coming. People bought only what was necessary. Small businesses, like Antonella's, were dying.

‘This is the beginning of World War III,' predicted Adnan. ‘It is starting in Syria, but it will engulf the region. This is a proxy war.'

I wandered back up the hill to say goodbye to Diab, the imam. I wanted to ask him one more question. Can a town renowned for its tolerance resist the centrifugal pressures of a vicious, sectarian civil war?

‘Everyone is a Christian and everyone is Muslim,' he answered diplomatically, not really answering the question. He refused to break down the percentage of Muslims. ‘It does not matter,' he insisted. ‘The situation here will not deteriorate. It's the opposite. People support each other.'

‘If we become Salafist,' he said, referring to the fundamentalist strain of Islam that has taken on a new prominence in the Arab Spring, ‘we lose all of this ethnic mix, and that is tragic. Everyone has to be like them. There is no room for anyone else.'

On 4 September 2013, a Jordanian suicide bomber exploded a truck at a Syrian Army checkpoint at the entrance to Ma'loula. Rebels then attacked the checkpoint – the explosion was assumed to have been a signal – killing eight soldiers and taking control of several sections of the historical town. The Syrian Army led a counter-attack two days later, regaining control of the town, but continuing to battle against jihadists in the surrounding area. But the
rebels, having received reinforcements, once again took the town, allegedly burning down some churches and harassing the town's Christian residents. According to some sources, nearly the entire population of this diverse town had fled, leaving only about fifty people inside its limits. The army eventually conquered the rebels and secured Ma'loula on 15 September, and many residents returned, but they still lived in fear of further attack.

In late November, opposition forces again attacked Ma'loula, this time kidnapping twelve nuns from the monastery in order to ransom the women in exchange for their own prisoners of war. On 14 April 2014, the Syrian Army, with the help of Hezbollah, once more took control of Ma'loula.

Recalling the events, sixty-two-year-old Adnan Nasrallah said: ‘I saw people wearing al-Nusra headbands who started shooting at crosses.' One of them ‘put a pistol to the head of my neighbour and forced him to convert to Islam by obliging him to repeat “there is no God but God”. Afterwards they joked, “He's one of ours now”.'

In late February 2015, Christians in Ma'loula prayed for their fellow Christians, hundreds of whom had been kidnapped and murdered by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

On the road back to Damascus that afternoon in 2012, long before the Salafists arrived, we saw the first signs of war getting closer to Ma'loula. As we approached Damascus, smoke rose, curling into the skyline. A car bomb. The sun bore down on the car, in contrast to the cool convent with its sense of hushed protection. The traffic was stalled for miles at
the roadblocks, so we left our car by the side of the road and walked to the bombsite.

It stank of burnt rubber. Skeletons of charred cars remained. No one had been hurt, which was fortunate. The explosion was caused by ‘sticky bombs' – handmade bombs taped to the bottom of a car, which had been parked just across from the Justice Courts at the height of the rush hour.

‘Real amateur hour,' one UN official said to me later. ‘The bombers didn't know what they were doing – it's just a scare tactic to make the people hate the opposition.'

For a while, it worked. People blamed the opposition and ‘foreign interventionists' for the explosions. Crowds of people gathered, angry that their city was quickly falling victim to the devastation that was spreading across the country.

‘Our only friend is Russia!' one well-dressed man shouted near the bombsite, his face contorted with rage. ‘These are foreigners that are exploding our country! Syria is for Syrians!'

It was a common belief that the bombs and the chaos that were spreading throughout the country were widely being caused by a ‘third element'. This was especially true in Damascus, which had long been an Assad stronghold. People refused to believe that the opposition could rule their country without turning it into a Salafist kingdom, an Islamic caliphate where women were not allowed out of the house and Christians were locked up and sold as slaves.

This was nearly a year before we even began to hear about ISIS, the Islamic State.

A crowd gathered around us. People were getting agitated from the heat, from the uncertain future, from the violence that had just ripped through their streets. My driver wanted to go.

After we had returned to the hotel, I watched the end of the pool party in the dying light of the day, and against the faint dusk I could still see the grey, acrid smoke plumes curling in the air, a warning sign of darker days to come.

‘Look at what happened in Tunisia, look at what happened in Libya, look at the results of Egypt,' said Ahmed, a wealthy seventeen-year-old in a pink Lacoste shirt, faded jeans and Nikes. He was agitated and passionate: he wanted to talk to someone who was not Syrian and he did not often have the chance. ‘Listen to me! Everyone thinks we are the bad guys, that Assad is a monster. But there is another side to the story.'

Ahmed was giving me a ride home from a dinner party in Damascus – his mother had asked him to take me. ‘He has some solid ideas on politics,' she said. ‘He expresses what all of us think.' So Ahmed got the car keys and drove me through the winding streets, back to my hotel.

Ahmed was from a wealthy family and went to a good school in Damascus, where he lived in a comfortable villa with his family. He was leaving shortly to do his military service in the Syrian Army, then to study at an American university.

The dinner that night had included Ahmed's mother, his grandmother, his aunts and his cousin – all of whom are highly educated, multilingual and the holders of several passports. It's a common thread with the elite in Damascus – to
be bi-national, to have a second passport, a way out. When I pointed out that this might be the reason that they supported Assad – because if it all went wrong, they had a place to flee – Ahmed's mother looked at me darkly. ‘We had years of French occupation, coups, years of Ba'athists,' she said. ‘Now we do not want the years of Islamists.'

After dinner, we sat on the balcony amongst flowering jasmine plants, smoking apple-flavoured shisha. Ahmed sat in a wicker chair. ‘I am one hundred per cent behind the government – not that I believe everything Assad is doing is right,' he said, ‘but because the time is not right for change and it should not be imposed by the West.'

‘Syria is geopolitically important,' he added. ‘People want to get their hands on it. And why should we take democracy lessons from Saudi Arabia, which arms the opposition?' Saudi Arabia, he reminded me, ‘did not let women drive'.

The party did not break up until after midnight, and we went out into the street. There was no curfew. People were still out on the streets, walking home from dinners or from visits with family. We passed a bank of floodlights on a street corner: a commercial was being filmed in the middle of a country that had just declared civil war.

‘Life goes on,' Ahmed said.

There was a crowd of people watching the shoot, and a few actors were waiting for their call. I saw an actress named Dima, whom I had met at the hotel the day before while she was dressing up in Gucci and Christian Louboutin heels for a magazine photo shoot. The shoes, she pointed out, were a brand that was a favourite of the President's wife, Asma al-Assad.

In an interview with Asma for US
Vogue
entitled ‘A Rose in the Desert', the journalist Joan Juliet Buck praised the beauty and philanthropy of Asma al-Assad, wife of the dictator. The piece had unwisely been published in the magazine's March 2011 ‘Power' issue, just as the Arab Spring was erupting in the Middle East. It caused a storm of criticism and was pulled off
Vogue
's website in May 2011, as it became clear how many people the government was willing to kill to remain in power.

Buck later said she had been pressured not to mention politics to the Assads. In other words, reading between the lines, she was not to counter the glowing references to Asma's beauty with the fact that her husband's father's regime had killed thousands of people in three weeks to wipe out Muslim extremists (in the Hama massacre in 1982). And that Asma's husband was now basically doing the same.

Like Asma, Dima wanted to be in
Vogue
. She was sitting in a chair near the window being made up when I first saw her: like Asma, she was stunning: alluring eyes and strong bone structure. Dima saw me and smiled, motioned for me to come in: she spoke good English and wanted news of the world.

‘Not of war,' she said. ‘Please don't talk of war. Talk of the world. What's happening out there? I want to go to New York, to California . . .' She wanted to hear about Kanye West and Kim Kardashian; about films showing in cinemas where there was no war; about music and magazines and dresses.

That night with Ahmed, Dima spotted me in the car, and called me over. ‘Do you want to come and watch?' she asked. ‘We just started filming.'

Behind her, looming slightly, were two burly men in leather jackets. One of them motioned for her to come back after she talked to me, and she obeyed, head bent. She looked solemn as they spoke. Then she approached our car again. She was no longer friendly.

‘Maybe you'd better go,' she said. ‘It's late. I'll call you tomorrow. We can drink coffee or something.'

‘Who are those men? Your bodyguards?'

She looked at them to make sure they were not listening, and then cupped her hands around my ear, as if telling a little girl a secret. She shook her head.

‘They are Shabiha,' she said. ‘Just go home.'

Damascus has two faces.

There are the opposition activists who are working day and night on their computers, and sometimes in the streets, to bring down Assad. These are the ones who meet me in secret, the ones who disappear from their offices one day, like Mazen Darwish, a lawyer who founded a group promoting free expression, or Razan Zeitouneh, another human rights activist. These are the ones who risk going to jail for up to forty-five days' detention (same as the old French mandate administrative detention law, being held without charges) and the ones who simply seem to have no fear. Even peaceful protesters have been thrown in jail simply for demonstrating, without their families being told of their whereabouts.