He pulled up a photo on his mobile phone, showing him back in his military service days. Dozens of other Syrian men had shown me similar photos, in which they usually looked far older, even when the shots had been taken years before. The service was so notoriously tough and brutal that it turned fresh-faced teenagers into gaunt shaven-headed young men with haunted eyes. They were forced to complete gruelling physical training every day on pitiful rations, sleeping in unheated barracks even in the freezing winter months and running for miles in boots that were often several sizes too small. The Sunnis suffered the worst; on top of the physical discomforts, they were humiliated by the Alawite officers. Praying was strictly forbidden, and anyone caught doing it would be beaten.
But in his photo Ahmed looked like a male model. He had a fashionable haircut, a designer suit and sunglasses, and he was leaning proprietorially against a gleaming Mercedes. This was the fortune of those who occupied the elite military positions – privilege, freedom, and carte blanche to behave how they liked.
‘If I had wanted to be an asshole, I could have been,’ said Ahmed. ‘You could steal, or rape, or blackmail, and nothing would happen to you.’
By early 2011, he had been seconded to the personal protection team of the head of Damascus’s political intelligence unit. In the days before the 15 March Day of Rage, preparations for the security service’s response reached warp speed. There had already been one small demonstration in Damascus a month earlier; now, the regime knew that it had to prepare for more. ‘We have twelve different intelligence forces in Syria and every single one knew what was being planned,’ said Ahmed. ‘I felt uneasy about it – I didn’t believe that these protests could bring anything good.’
The Day of Rage protest started in the Souk al-Hamidiyah, the famous covered market in the old city. Ahmed was one of the dozens of officers assigned to it, far outnumbering the handful of protesters. Every officer wore plain clothes, mingling seamlessly with the demonstrators before moving in for the kill. As the protest moved into the old city along the ancient streets around the Umayyad Mosque, the security forces moved in from all directions. Ahmed and his colleagues arrested everybody – it didn’t matter if they were taking part in the protests or not.
A few days later, his ambivalence about the slowly swelling protest movement turned to fear. President Bashar al-Assad gave a speech in which he promised that the security forces would not open fire. But the head of the political intelligence unit told his men something different.
‘He told us that at the next protests, we were to fire on the protesters,’ he said. ‘Some of us spoke up – we said that the president had said that wouldn’t happen. But he replied: “Shut up. This is what I’m telling you. And this is what you do.” And then I realised that Bashar was saying one thing, but the security forces were doing something else.’
On 2 April, Ahmed attended his final protest in Damascus. Everyone in his unit had been issued with cattle prods that discharged 330 volts of electricity – enough to kill a person. The protest, near the political intelligence headquarters, was the largest yet in the capital. News of the spiralling violence in Deraa was spreading, and people who had spent years subdued by their fear of the regime were now galvanised by anger. It was not just the students and the young people who turned out to protest – this time there were older people too. ‘I saw one old man next to me and I told him “Just run, just go”,’ said Ahmed. ‘I knew what was going to happen.’
Within half an hour the security forces had turned on the protesters. Ahmed had deliberately spilled water over his cattle prod and broken it but others were fully invested in the mission they had been sent out on. Division Four – the elite and feared security force headed up by Bashar al-Assad’s psychopathic brother, Maher – came out into the demonstration. Ahmed watched as they started laying into the protesters with crude maces – sticks of wood topped off with sharp metal. ‘They were like animals,’ he said. ‘The old man I’d told to run had ignored me. I saw him getting beaten with one of those sticks.’
On 4 April 2011 – two days after that protest – he was released from military service and returned to Aleppo, charged with new hate for the regime and fear of the future, of what the things he had witnessed might turn into. Two weeks later, the regime stopped releasing men from their military service. For those still serving against their will, being forced ever more often to fire on the people they sympathised with, the ways out were closing down.
By the time I met him in 2014, Ahmed had fled Aleppo with the other activists and was living in Kilis in the Turkish borderlands. With his fluent English and rapidly improving Turkish, he was soon earning enough money to pay the rent on a newly built apartment and look after his wife and baby son in comfort. He was also developing a growing admiration for Erdoğan.
On the night of the 2016 coup attempt, he drove around the streets of his adopted town flying a Turkish flag out of the window. Soon after that, he was regularly posting pictures of the president on social media, alongside AK Party slogans and sycophantic dedications, so similar to those that Assad’s loyalists devote to him. At first I couldn’t figure out Ahmed’s path from army defector, to revolutionary, to refugee, to Erdoğan supporter. But soon I came to see that he is not unusual – he is the norm. Many of the Syrians who loathe Assad as a dictator see Erdoğan as their protector and sole champion in an otherwise uncaring world. WhatsApp groups set up for the Syrians applying for Turkish citizenship are full of adoration for the president, and many of Turkey’s pro-Erdoğan news services have launched Arabic-language versions to peddle their version of the truth to the refugees. And those Syrians who see the growing similarities between Erdoğan and Assad are wise enough to keep quiet.
‘Syrians are frightened and the only positive signals they get are from Turkey,’ one told me. ‘When Erdoğan says there is a conspiracy, it makes sense for them.’
7
THE KURDS
March 2016
Cizre, south-eastern Turkey
The pages of my notebook are smeared black with soot. The room I am standing in is a burnt-out husk. The family who used to live here are gathered in the doorway, stunned.
‘A shell came through the wall,’ says one of the young men, as deadpan as if he is reeling off the week’s shopping. ‘Then they shot our water tank up, so we stayed in the room built onto the roof. And then finally we went to another neighbourhood.’
It is the first time the family, a collection of matriarchs in white headscarves, their quiet, wet-eyed husbands and their sportswear-clad sons, have dared return to their devastated house. Their furniture, accumulated over decades, is destroyed. Light peeks in through gaping holes in the walls. Masonry and broken glass litter the floor, alongside dusty scraps of fabric and pages ripped from schoolbooks.
I had been on a road trip across south-eastern Turkey with two photographer friends when we got the news about Cizre. This region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, populated mostly by ethnic Kurds, boasts the kind of landscapes I remember from primary school Bibles: huge dusty outcrops and shepherds herding flocks of sheep through the mountains. We had visited Hasankeyf, an ancient cave town, and Mardin, a fortress city built high on a rock. We sipped wine brewed by local Assyrian monks as the sun set over the plain leading down to the Syrian border. And then one of us, I don’t remember who, looked at the news and saw that the town of Cizre, an hour’s drive to the east, had been reopened after almost three months under Turkish military curfew. We drove there at top speed, calling every government contact we could think of, and bargained our way through the army and police checkpoints with our press cards.
On the outskirts of Cizre, battered commercial neighbourhoods with every window smashed, we keep something of our holiday joie de vivre. But it vanishes as soon as we find the Yağarcık family staring goggle-eyed at the remains of their home.
The young men lead us to the roof where they had sheltered, up staircases treacherous with damage and debris. Up here,
we find scraps of the battle, bullet and shell casings glinting in the early spring sunshine. This family never chose to be on the front line. Armed teenagers loyal to the PKK built barricades and laced the streets with explosives in a bid to keep police out of the neighbourhood. At first, there was little reaction from the state. Emboldened, Cizre’s local government, run by a party with hazy links to the militants, declared autonomy and started a trend. The pattern was soon repeating itself across south-eastern Turkey.
The state’s response, when it came, was brutal. In December 2015 Turkish tanks and special forces surrounded Cizre and other towns and ordered the civilians out. Artillery and air strikes pummelled the militants and anyone else who remained. A son points to the army base on the hillside, less than a mile away, where the Turkish tanks were stationed. It has a clear line of sight to the Yağarcıks’ home, where they had been planning to hold weddings for three of their children this year.
The whole of this side of the street has suffered the same fate. Shells have punched holes through concrete, leaving buildings looking like Swiss cheese. The PKK militants have scrawled their slogans on the walls: Biji Apo! (‘Long live uncle!’, the nickname for Abdullah Öcalan, the militia’s leader and founder). Turkish soldiers later daubed their response: Piç (‘Bastard’), next to a crude rendering of the Turkish star and crescent.
There is worse to come.
‘This is the good part of the town,’ a pair of young children tell us with awful gaiety as we gawp at the remains of an office building spilling out onto the ruined street. They point down the road to another neighbourhood, called Cudi, which they say took the brunt of the battle. As we turn off down the side street, down littered pavements past the ruined frontage of a hotel I once stayed in, a stunned old woman staggers towards us talking gibberish and pleading with the sky. Dark blue armoured police cars prowl up and down the street, sending the people on the pavements shrinking back towards the twisted shop shutters. I wonder why no one is talking. Then the cloying tang of decay hits the back of my throat.
A throng has gathered around a pile of rubble on Bostancı Street, men scratching furiously at an opening in the ground. Swarms of flies congregate around little hillocks in the dust. It used to be a house, this mound of grey rubble.
‘Journalists? Come down here!’ shouts one man, and the crowd parts to let us down into the basement. It is tar black, claustrophobic and sinister, and I can taste the hot aroma of death. Men are sifting through charred body parts and bones, silent as they dig and pass their finds between them. But the crowd around the entrance is appalled.
‘We pulled out a boy no older than my son!’ shouts one man, pointing to a wide-eyed kid of about seven.
‘Where is Europe? Where is America? Where is the world?’ screams another, an old man, crazed and spittle-flecked with rage. ‘We know why they keep silent – they are scared Erdoğan will send more refugees to Europe.’
Others start throwing us snippets of the rumours flying around Cizre – of glimpsed sightings of paramilitary gangs pouring petrol over houses and torching them, of the numbers who have died in basements like these. One woman tells us there are sixty corpses down here. Another says there are twenty-seven, and that there are two more basements full of bodies on this street alone.
I flash back to a month earlier, when I managed to contact a group of people sheltering in a Cizre cellar. There was terror in the voice of the woman I spoke to over a fuggy mobile phone line. She told me of the shells raining down on the place and the four decomposing bodies lying down there with them – people who had died of their injuries.
‘All the buildings around us have collapsed, there are massacres occurring. We have no medical supplies left and there is nothing we can do for the injured,’ she said. They had been in there for four days. I was never able to reach her again.
‘This is a war crime, a fucking war crime,’ says Yusuf, a fellow journalist, dazed as he shoots photos of the horror. This is worse for him, a Turk faced with the brutality of his own. We leave Cizre before the sunset curfew comes down and drive back up the road to Mardin. Our glasses of Assyrian red wine leave a bitter taste this evening.
Kurds and bears
‘In Yüksekova we had been warned of the danger of Kurds and bears,’ wrote Robin Fedder, The Times’s ‘Traveller in Kurdistan’, in November 1965. Fedder was journeying to Turkey’s south-easternmost reaches, the mountainous province of Hakkari sandwiched between the Iranian and Iraqi frontiers. His trip was possible only with the authorisation of the district governor, and with the help of two local guides and six ponies who transferred Fedder and his voluminous luggage across the harsh landscape. The region had just been opened up to foreign travellers for the first time since 1925. A new road had been built through Hakkari, and it seemed like a fresh chapter was opening in this long-tortured place – the perfect moment for an intrepid correspondent.
Yet the Turks’ old wariness of the Kurds, those tribal people with the fearsome warrior reputations, had not abated. The governor had insisted that one of the guides carry a gun. Had he himself ventured from his comfy office in urban Yüksekova up into the wilds of Hakkari he may have discovered, as Fedder did, that the guns the Kurdish men carried were ‘merely status symbols’. Neither were the bears as scary as the legends had it: though Fedder spotted several, they all seemed to run away from him as quickly as possible.
It was only two years after the foundation of the Turkish republic, in 1925, that the Kurds revolted against the new order. They continue to do so today, the violence undulating according to popular sentiment and world events. The original Kurdish rebel was Sheikh Said, a tribal leader whose war was as much about winning superiority over the other Kurdish clans as about revolting against the Turkish state. Today, Abdullah Öcalan is the Kurdish cipher – a student of politics who graduated from the elite Ankara University into the stormy milieu of militant leftism. The PKK, the organisation he founded in 1978, blended Marxism-Leninism with Kurdish nationalism and quickly attracted scores of followers. At the same time, Öcalan took care to rub out his detractors and rivals, leaving the PKK as the jealous, sole vanguard of the Kurdish struggle. By the time he was arrested in Kenya in 1999, Öcalan was the PKK’s undisputed leader and Turkey’s public enemy number one. The PKK, which had quickly morphed from an intellectual movement into a violent one, was locked in a struggle with the state in south-eastern Turkey that had already left more than thirty thousand dead.
A fifth of Turkey’s eighty million population are ethnic Kurds, with their own mother tongue and culture. Their politics is often tribal and insular; whatever rivalries and rows they may have between themselves, the outsider’s criticism is met with furious resistance. I have discovered it myself on a number of occasions. Once I was branded a Turkish agent and a closet Islamic fundamentalist because I wrote articles documenting allegations of war crimes committed by a PKK-linked group in Syria. On another occasion, an erudite and friendly lawyer in Diyarbakır, Turkey’s biggest Kurdish city, exploded into sudden rage when I brought up the nepotistic tendencies of Masoud Barzani, then president of Iraq’s Kurdish region.
‘You need to read the history and then come back to me!’ the lawyer shouted. ‘In the past the Kurdish system was a federation of clans. That’s why people don’t understand the situation in the Kurdish region!’
Five minutes later he had cooled down and was apologising profusely.
‘We Kurds tend to have emotional reactions,’ he smiled.
Building Atatürk’s nation
When the Turkish republic was declared in 1923, scores of ethnic and religious minorities were captured within its huge new borders, more than 1,600 miles of frontier cutting across the Middle East, the Caucasus and Europe. As well as the Kurds, there were Armenians and other Christian minorities who had sat out the bloody purges of 1915. There were Alevis, followers of a schism of Shia Islam considered heretical by many hardcore Sunnis. There were others who spoke Arabic, Laz and Kurdish di
alects like Zaza as their mother tongues. Greek, Balkan, Roman and Asian blood goes into the mix of this nation that boasts native blue-eyed blondes as well as dark eyes and olive skin. Turkey was – and still is – a genetic and cultural kedgeree.
Atatürk and the builders of his new republic tried to paper over the fractures with a narrative of Turkishness that mixed truth with hearty doses of mythology and pseudo-science. The landscape of the new nation, ruined by years of war, needed urgent rebuilding – but so too did the minds of its citizens. In order to bring his people together and make them loyal to the new system, Atatürk needed a narrative of a Turkish history that could downplay the importance of the Ottoman Empire – not easy, since it had been the Anatolian paradigm for the past six centuries – and root the Turks firmly in the soil they now stood on. So, as the towns and cities were reconstructed in a blaze of high modernism, archaeologists, historians and linguists began hunting for Turkey’s new past.
In 1930, on Atatürk’s orders, a committee was founded to create the comprehensive history of the Turks. Most of its members were bureaucrats, not historians. They won their places on the committee because they were favourites of Atatürk, and had proved their dedication to the nationalist cause. Within months, the committee published its Outline of Turkish History, a tome which was in some parts a transcription of Atatürk’s own streams of thought, and in others a mish-mash of translated foreign-language histories of the Turks – although only the cherry-picked bits. Overall, it was carefully constructed to tell a story of the Turks as a nomadic people of Aryan blood who had originated in central Asia and then migrated westwards in search of better climates for the growing of crops. They brought their genetics, culture and language with them. Islam was something that came later, and the Ottoman Empire an unfortunate glitch in the otherwise glorious march of Turkish progress. According to the Outline, not only was Turkish culture the greatest in the world, it was also the fountain from which all other cultures sprang. The Outline became the main history textbook for all schoolchildren aged between fifteen and eighteen.
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