The New Middle East (58 page)

A man pushed into the room beside me and lifted from the floor a blue and white-chequered tablecloth. Each square had a little posy of flowers printed on it. What he wanted me to see though was the clump of skin and flesh stuck to the top. As I instinctively stepped back he thrust it forward into my face and a small piece of someone’s brain fell from within it and landed on the floor.

I went outside to catch my breath, and as I squinted in the shimmering light, shapes that had before blurred and merged into the barren landscape came into focus. The white horse lying dead in the shade of the stables, the two dusty-coloured sheep shot by the chicken coop. The carcasses left to rot where they fell.

To understand what had happened in the Syrian village of Qubair it was necessary to walk to the house next door and submit your senses to the stench of burnt flesh. You had to make yourself understand that the piece of meat you had just stepped over once belonged inside a person who had lived, worked or played in the fields outside. You had to acknowledge that men had walked into this village with the intention of killing every living thing in it. People who could look into the face of a child, perhaps one just like their own, listen to his or her cries for mercy and then butcher it.

‘I can’t tell you who I am, I fear for my safety,’ said a young man with a red and white scarf wrapped tightly around his face to reveal only his black eyes:

The army surrounded the area and then the militia from the neighbouring villages came in and killed the people and then burnt them so no traces of the bodies would remain. They have killed everyone in the village, only three people are left. They did it because they wanted to take the land. They were protected by the army. They killed everyone, they destroyed everything. They even killed the children, they slaughtered them with knives.

The revolt was well into its second year, and these tales of atrocities no longer surprised anyone, because by now the Assad regime had dropped the charade.

At the beginning of 2011 so little was known about the reality of Syria in the wider world that Bashar al-Assad and his family were the subject of perhaps the most ill-timed puff piece in the history of magazine publishing. As the country began its slow slide towards civil war the March edition of
Vogue
magazine printed a fawning profile of Assad’s ‘glamorous, young and very chic wife’ Asma. She was, purred its headline, ‘A Rose in the Desert’, the first lady of ‘the safest country in the Middle East’. Her husband was a man who ‘takes photographs and talks lovingly about his first computer’. He had been ‘elected’ in 2000 after his father’s death with what the magazine described as ‘a startling 97 per cent of the vote’ because ‘in Syria, power is hereditary’.
¹
The piece didn’t mention that the national assembly had to change article 83 of the country’s constitution before he could be ‘elected’ by referendum because at the time Bashar was six years younger than the minimum age of forty required to ascend to the presidency.

In person Bashar al-Assad was an unlikely dictator. We had met a few months earlier at his Presidential Palace in Damascus, his slightly limp handshake and quiet lisping voice much more suited to the mild-mannered ophthalmologist he had once trained to be, than to the tyrant he had become. But for a long time he had managed to persuade the world that he was different from the other dictators, with speeches that kept promising reform. Even Hillary Clinton thought it worthwhile to say in the same month the
Vogue
article appeared that: ‘There’s a different leader in Syria now.’ She added that: ‘Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he is a reformer.’ A few days later she distanced herself from her own remarks, saying she had ‘referenced the opinions of others’.
²

Assad was not like his father’s generation of dictators. He is not a brutish self-made man who fought off challenges to take control of a state using violence and guile. He does not strike fear or awe into those who meet him. Even now, though he holds what is left of his father’s throne, he is still a prince, not a king. He did not look, did not talk, he does not even shake hands like a dictator. But he has proved to all those who had high hopes for the reformer that he knows how to act like a dictator.

After
Vogue
’s remarkable profile, which it has now deleted from the Internet, that ‘tall, long-necked, blue-eyed’ man began to perpetrate sickening violence against his own people. His secret police sent back children’s bodies smashed and beaten, with their genitals cut off.
³
His military massacred whole communities. Anyone caught using their computer to tell the outside world what was going on disappeared into a torture chamber. The Syrian state had been abusing and murdering its people for years, but eventually even the fashion world could not ignore something that was now being done on an industrial scale.

The conflict between the Syrian people will not end with the death of Assad or the removal of his regime. Nor if the guns are put away and a new government is formed. It can only end when the atrocities of the war are lost from living memory, because they will not be forgiven. Syria’s struggle within must wait for its end because of the way it started. People make rules of war to slow the inevitable descent of their societies into savage violence. Assad’s regime broke the rules on day one.

In March 2011 fifteen schoolchildren were arrested and tortured for writing on a wall the words that were echoing across the Arab world: ‘The people want the overthrow of the regime’. The boys were all from the southern city of Dera’a, and on 18 March the people of that city gathered after Friday prayers to express their revulsion for this act of cruelty. The security forces opened fire and killed four people. They did the same thing at the victims’ funerals the following day and another person died. The city rose up. The army’s Fourth Armoured Division, commanded by the president’s brother Maher, attempted to crush the revolt with tanks and troops. They failed in that but they did provoke a furious reaction to their brutality across the country in Homs, Hama and the suburbs of Damascus. In the capital small demonstrations against the regime had started on the 15th. Those countrywide uprisings against the regime never stopped.

‘The government compensated for a lack of smartness with an excess of force,’ a Syrian government official told me privately. ‘Without that mistake in Dera’a it would have stayed quiet for six months and by that time people would have seen what was happening in Egypt and would have thought five times before doing anything.’ He was right about the former, wrong about the latter. The Syrian people were as sick of their lives under dictatorship as everyone else in the region. They knew it was not going to be easy.

‘I remember my father when we used to talk in the house,
in the house
he used to whisper,’ Zubaida told me.
⁴
‘He knew people were listening because even the air was controlled. This is what kept us safe boys and girls.’ Zubaida is an Alawite who lived in Damascus, where we were talking on a cool summer’s evening after the crisis had moved into its second year. She comes from the same sect as the Assad regime but is not among its supporters. That truth may not make any difference in the Syria that emerges from the conflict. Stating that fact may not protect people like her. Too much blood has been shed for words to matter any more, even though it was words in the mouths of babes that brought the conflict to life.

In the old Syria, in the old Middle East, no one really knew what the truth was in the society that existed before the civil war. How will they be able to judge it afterwards? Right from the start Assad said that the truth was that his regime was fighting an opposition riddled with al-Qaeda-linked violent jihadists. His regime then set about nurturing an environment that would bring that truth to life. And as it did it, so it also systematically created an equal to the opposite.

‘I’ve been following this from the beginning because I am Alawite,’ Zubaida told me:

When [the uprising] began the Alawites said: ‘Yes, I want to be part of this because I am part of society.’ And then the army did something very smart. They would go to an Alawite village and they would put a red X on the doors of the houses and the Alawites got a little scared. It took them five or six months to really make them scared, because in the beginning they were not nervous. They said: ‘This is a revolution for us also, like in Egypt,’ but they started sending them some very smart messages to say: ‘No, this is a Sunni revolution against all Alawites.’ They would go into a very poor village and they would say these Sunnis are coming to kill you and they gave them some weapons. They would pick a village and send back some of their children cut into little pieces and say those people [in the neighbouring village] killed your son. So you’ll find so many young men are ready to come and join [the government militia, the Shabiha]. I’m not saying they are not good people, it’s that they are more vulnerable in the villages because they are not in daily contact with the other sects. They don’t really understand other communities so it’s easier to play with their heads. Every two hundred years there is a slaughter [of Alawites], so they have inside them this fear and it’s easy to bring it out again.

Town by town, village by village Assad’s men picked away at the scab that barely covered the wounds of his minority sect. ‘The Assad regime is holding its own community hostage,’ Professor Bernard Haykel told me. He was born and grew up in neighbouring Lebanon, so he has seen first-hand how sectarianism corrodes societies. ‘Like the Jews they have this history of persecution, and they see history coming back to haunt them. The opposition, whether it’s the Free Syrian Army or the opposition in exile, has just not done enough to counteract that impression, so the Alawis are terrified.’

It was always hard to say what being Syrian actually meant. The civil war made it harder. Like many European creations that would eventually crumble into violent disorder, the country felt more like a concept, created from a few stray thoughts left over from some big colonial ideas. Modern Syria had the Alawites, a branch of Shia Islam, at the top of the social order. They are the largest religious minority in Syria and make up around 12 per cent of the 23 million people in the country. The vast majority of the population are Sunni Muslims who comprise around 75 per cent of the nation’s people. Around 10 per cent of the Sunnis are Kurds. The rest of the population’s patchwork is mainly Christians, with smaller numbers of other splinter Shia faiths like Ismailis and Druze. There are also half a million Palestinian refugees.

The reason the Syrian revolution took so long to play out was that the quarter of the country who are in the non-Sunni minorities were not sure if they would be any safer under a new government. They had looked across the border at Iraq and seen how minority groups suffered waves of bomb attacks or were driven out of their homes by ethnic cleansing. They wondered whether a post-revolution Syria would hold the same fate for them. Some, mainly the younger generation, joined the revolution but many others held back because they feared for their prospects under whatever rule emerged from the conflict.

‘A friend of mine who is a Franciscan monk went to a friend of his who is a very moderate sheik and he asked him whether he could guarantee his people would not take revenge on other sects,’ said Ahmed, a Syrian journalist I met in Damascus.
⁵
‘The sheik said: “Yes, I do guarantee that, but not in the first one hundred days.” No one can guarantee the streets in the first three or four months. People will be crazy and there will be deaths and there will be revenge.’

I asked him whether Syria’s social fabric could be saved. ‘No. It will need a decade or two to repair the damage. Rebuilding the infrastructure is easier than rebuilding the society, and the damage to the social fabric has already been done.’

The little Sunni Muslim village of Qubair was surrounded by equally tiny villages populated by Alawites. These villagers had stopped the United Nations ceasefire monitors from getting to the site of the massacre for twenty-four hours. They had surrounded their cars and blocked the roads. Shots had been fired. It was a long enough delay for the evidence to be dragged away or destroyed by the Syrian army and the local Shabiha.

There was no justice for the families killed on 6 June 2012. But that doesn’t mean there was no retribution. The last words somebody must have heard before a bullet went into their head or a knife slashed through their body were ‘This is for Qubair,’ because by this time the world had to acknowledge Assad’s truth. There were now violent Islamist fighters in Syria. These men had been encouraged and funded by two of Washington’s closest allies in the Arab world: Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

I was told by UN officials in Damascus that at times, as the US called for peace and reconciliation, these two states were deliberately sabotaging local ceasefires negotiated by the monitors. The Salafists were mainly getting their funding from Saudi Arabia. Qatar funded fighters linked to the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. But it was clear that the Qataris were not fussy who they dealt with if it produced the desired result. ‘I am very much against excluding anyone at this stage, or bracketing them as terrorists, or bracketing them as al-Qaeda,’ said the Qatari minister of foreign affairs, Khalid bin Mohammad al-Attiyah. ‘We should bring them all together, we should treat them all equally, and we should work on them to change their ideology, i.e. put more effort altogether to change their thinking. If we exclude anything from the Syrian elements today, we are only doing worse to Syria. Then we are opening the door again for intervention to chase the monster.’
⁶
Their differing objectives meant that Saudi Arabia and Qatar were, behind the scenes, at each other throats over Syria. The US tried, and failed, to get them to cooperate.