Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East

by Jared Cohen

  Fathi described the second stage of Palestinian suffering as the period after completing high school or university. He explained that there are no jobs for the educated, and without the job prospects a young man cannot begin to imagine finding a wife and building a family. He reminded me that the Lebanese government has regulations that deprive Palestinians the opportunity of working as doctors or engineers. He explained that while this is beginning to change, the Palestinian workers still do not get the benefits of health insurance, pension, and vacations. They are not protected.

  As Fathi continued his explanation, he seemed to have forgotten about the other two stages of Palestinian suffering that he had mentioned to me. He had initially focused on what he perceived to be the priorities. Once I reminded him, he then went into the usual and expected tirade about the United States and Israel.

  I found it very interesting that this is not what he had emphasized in our conversation. In fact, I’d had to remind him to mention the United States and Israel. The fact is, Palestinian youth are two generations removed from the days when they lived in their homeland. Most Palestinian young people do not expect to return home; instead, they are more pragmatic, interested in improving their everyday lives. They blame America and Israel by default, but they do it largely to maintain their sense of identity.

  Fathi seemed to represent an example of someone in the older generation who had actually been impacted by the youth. Every day he surrounded himself with hundreds of young Palestinians and undoubtedly the transformation in that generation’s mind-set had affected him. Perhaps he had a different perspective on violence than the general.

  Just as I was on my way out of the camp, my slow stride was disrupted by a fight that broke out just in front of me. While I didn’t know why the two boys were fighting, I saw that one was armed with an AK-47, while the other had only clenched fists. Recognizing the potential for escalation, some of their peers quickly stepped in to break up the fight. The dire conditions lend themselves to heightened tensions, and because so many youth belong to rival groups, it is not surprising that schoolyard quarrels often end with gunshots.

  I continued strolling down the narrow alleyways that I had been chased through when I initially entered the camp. As I weaved through these alleys, I encountered a seemingly endless number of children who had gathered in large numbers to see me out. One of the girls proudly displayed a vine of grapes that she had acquired and asked me if I wanted one. One of the young boys gave me a high-five as he leaned against the cement wall. As I looked at their faces, I couldn’t help but wonder: Will the cycle of humiliation never end? Will these children become yet another generation of Palestinian youth who find in a rocket-propelled grenade the antidote for their fractured souls?

  CHAPTER 9

  BABIES IN THE BA’ATH PARTY

  SYRIA, 2005

  Neither Iran nor Lebanon was without its challenges for me. Still, in both places I witnessed vibrant youth cultures that gave me hope. In Iran, where the government tries vehemently to suppress its population, young people find ways to express themselves and enjoy their adolescence. In Lebanon, the opportunities were minimal, but young people there brought about the first self-made transition to democracy in the Middle East. Even in Palestinian refugee camps, I found militants who showed me that despite indoctrination and military training, they were simply interested in making a place for themselves in society that gave them greater meaning than being unemployed in the slums of the refugee camps.

  But Syria seemed different. Syria has long been one of the most nationalistic societies in the Middle East; indeed it is the birthplace of Arab nationalism. Only in Iran and Egypt is this nationalistic quality so deeply and historically entrenched. The concept of Greater Syria was one of the earliest expressions of this type of nationalism, which took off after the First World War. The concept called for Syria to exercise sovereignty over present-day Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and even parts of Turkey. Driven in large part by this nationalist spirit, Syria competed with its ally and rival Egypt throughout the early part of the cold war for influence and leadership in the region. During this period, the Syrian people reveled in this nationalist spirit and were not the closed society that they are today.

  In March of 1963, the shift toward totalitarian autocracy began. Just one month after a Ba’ath revolution in Iraq, revolutionaries in Syria proclaimed a new government under its Ba’ath ideology. The Ba’ath Party had been founded eighteen years earlier by Michel Aflaq and Zaki al-Arsuzi. Aflaq was a Christian from Damascus who had built a simple life for himself as a schoolteacher, and al-Arsuzi was a Sunni with the same background. Both had been radicalized by Arab nationalist sentiments during the Second World War and each had formed his own group. It was the merging of these two groups that led to the official establishment of the Ba’ath Party. The movement was largely secular and was intended to be a revival of Arab nationalism with a strong emphasis on socialist ideologies.

  In this sense, Ba’athism was a deviation from and even a contradiction of the Islamist leanings of more extremist movements, most notably those of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and the Shi’a Islamist movements in southern Iraq. The Ba’ath movement centered itself around the concepts of pan-Arabism, and socialism, but also emphasized expulsion of foreigners from the Arab world.

  When Syria unexpectedly suffered a crushing defeat in the Six Day War in 1967, the true reach of the autocratic leadership was put to the test. In November 1970, with the government weakened and the leadership vulnerable, Minister of Defense Hafez al-Assad undertook a bloodless coup in Syria that became known as the Corrective Revolution. After Hafez al-Assad seized power, it was not long before the system in Syria degenerated into a police state and eventually a totalitarian dictatorship.

  Hafez al-Assad reigned from 1970 until his death in 2000. His rule was brutal and his totalitarian grip was firm. A simple man from an impoverished background, Hafez al-Assad rose to power through military opportunism. While president of Syria, he transformed the country into a cult of personality centered around himself. Opposition was forbidden, dissent was outlawed, and insubordination was punishable by death. There was no freedom of speech, assembly, or opportunity. While failing to achieve a degree of autocracy that was on quite the same level as in neighboring Iraq, Hafez al-Assad’s regime ran a close second to Saddam Hussein’s. Al-Assad viewed himself as the sole ruler and symbol not only of Syrian power, but also of the Arab world. He assumed the leadership role in the Arab world against Israel and exploited the Arab-Israeli conflict to project his commitment to Arab nationalism.

  Domestically, Hafez al-Assad used fear tactics to keep his country united and the vision of Greater Syria alive. As a member of the Allawite sect of Islam, he ruled from a demographic that constitutes no more than 13 percent of the Syrian population. The Allawites are most similar to the Shi’ite sect of Islam, with whom they broke official ties in the ninth century. Forming a separate sect of Islam and basing themselves in Allepo, Allawites emerged as a parallel but not rival sect to the Shi’a. Al-Assad was constantly preoccupied with opposition from the Sunni, who comprise 74 percent of Syria’s population. As a result, he tightened his grip on control, doing everything in his power to suppress the population, silence potential voices, and socialize the next generation of Sunni youth into a culture of fear.

  As part of this culture of fear, Syrian youth have been taught to believe that democracy is dangerous and precipitates conflict. During the Lebanese civil war, the regime linked the violence in Lebanon with the concept of democracy. It is this linkage that has created yet another difference in the thinking between Syrian and Lebanese youth. While the Lebanese youth associated democracy with American and Israeli foreign policy, young Syrians associated it with Lebanon and violence.

  Whether they were part of the minority or part of the Sunni majority, Syrian parents instilled in their children the notion that if they looked throughout the Middle East, they would see that Syria was an anomaly
. In the 1980s, Lebanon and Israel were at war, Iran and Iraq were at war, and the Syrian regime exploited these neighboring conflicts to remind the people that it held the key to their security. To some extent the parents became the agents of the regime, training their children to believe that it was best to keep their distance from politics.

  In the early 1990s, the ailing Hafez al-Assad, who had a history of heart problems, announced his son Basil al-Assad to be his rightful successor. Preparation had been undertaken for Basil’s ascension to power and the country had been decorated in posters proclaiming his capacity to rule. The planned succession was interrupted, however, when Basil al-Assad died unexpectedly in a car accident. Challenged with grieving over his son and maintaining an al-Assad dynasty, Hafez turned to his youngest son, Bashar, who at the time was working as an ophthalmologist in London.

  The weakest member of the family and the least experienced in politics, Bashar al-Assad was groomed for the presidency beginning in 1994. After being rapidly promoted through the military hierarchy, Bashar ascended to the presidency upon his father’s death in 2000. Bashar attempted to adopt the style of his father, but had neither the capacity nor the experience to replicate his firm grip on society. Instead, Bashar’s hastened rise to power and inherent weakness offered a glimmer of hope in Syria. It created an opening for youth empowerment in Syria that saw a new era of expression and social indulgence that simply had not existed under Bashar’s father.

  While proceeding slowly, the youth in Syria are experiencing an awakening. For most of their lives they have lived in fear and have been socialized to go through the motions of life without ever questioning the status quo. They still live in some fear, but things are changing. Amid a highly nonsecular society that seems unfamiliar with democracy, the youth of Syria are beginning to embrace the progressive characteristics that are innate to youth around the world. While they are straggling behind youth in Lebanon and Iran, they are moving in the same direction. Under Bashar al-Assad, they have movement and avenues for expression that they didn’t have even five years ago.

  But still Syria was different. My introduction to the Syrian world largely came from two girls, and as we walked in the streets in the western city of Homs the stares came from all directions.

  My ability to be subtle and keep a lower profile was not in my hands. I was with two Syrian cousins that I had befriended at a beach party several weeks earlier in Jiye, a small city just south of Beirut. I knew the girls were relatively liberal because I had met them at one of the wildest and craziest parties I went to in Lebanon; in fact, it was the same beach party that I had attended my second night in Lebanon. The girls had been hanging out by the bar, relying on nearby men to buy them drinks.

  I was uncomfortable with the staring, but the cousins—Haifa and Maya—seemed to take some joy in being stared at. In Lebanon, women loved being stared at, too, but it was usually to show off their latest designer clothing. In Lebanon, women who wear the hejab are a minority and those who wear the full chador are an even smaller minority. For Haifa and Maya, dressing as Westerners ready for the nightclub was not about vanity. It was something of far greater substance. Like the girls in Iran, it was all about passive resistance.

  And they really stuck out in Homs, an oil town known for the Sunni conservatism of many of its residents. The average women in Homs are covered from head to toe in the full black nikhab and face covering, regardless of the excruciating heat.

  The journey from Beirut to Homs was not long. I got a cab in Beirut, and three hours and ten dollars later I had made the journey across the northern border of Lebanon. The border was its own traffic jam, lined for several kilometers with eight-wheeled trucks waiting for their chance to cross. After caving to international pressure and withdrawing from Lebanon, the Syrian regime had tightened its borders to economically punish Lebanon. As I crossed into Syria, I could see the face of the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, towering over the border post as if he was keeping an eye on neighboring Lebanon. From the moment I stepped into Syria, I could feel the aura of a police state. The smell of fear was in the air. It was in the faces of the people and the diligence of the border guards.

  Now I was in Homs, and Haifa and Maya were turning heads left and right. Given that Homs is a predominantly Sunni city, this wasn’t surprising. In Syria, the Sunni may be the majority of the country, but they are subjected to the less conservative minority Shi’a that control the country. Haifa and Maya wore something different. Haifa wore a tight pink T-shirt that was nearly sleeveless. The shirt was short and reached just down to the belt of her Western-style blue jeans. Maya wore something similar, except her shirt was maroon instead of pink. Both of them wore a tremendous amount of makeup, giving their cheeks a rosy red coloring and accentuating their eyes. I was with two beautiful girls in a townful of burkhas.

  These were strong girls. As we walked through the Old City and the Homs Souq, I watched them endure look after disapproving look. I watched elderly women yelling things at them in Arabic. Haifa and Maya represent a generation of Syrian girls who push the limit. They are glued to their satellite television, the Internet, and their mobile phone. Unlike their mothers, these girls have the access to know what they are missing out on. Society has changed and technology has opened their eyes in ways that their parents cannot begin to understand. They know what they have been deprived of. They watch Western movies, they hear stories, and some of it they witness firsthand in the underground nightlife. Knowing what is out there only sparks their curiosity. The girls insisted on showing me the few sites in the city—the mosque and the souq. It didn’t take the girls long to open up to me, in large part, I suspect, because as a nonmember of their community I was safe. Maya told me about problems she was having at home and when I pressed, she explained that her father beat her. It was impossible to know how to respond; all I could tell her was that whether the laws of Syrian protect her or not, such abuse is wrong and she deserves better. These domestic violence stories always made me cringe and it was far too frequently that I heard about them.

  Like their counterparts in Iran, Haifa and Maya deviate from the strict norms that the government and the older generations try to enforce in an act of expression. When Haifa and Maya walk among men and women who scowl at them for their perceived deviant behavior, it is a way for them to say without any words that the times are changing and they don’t accept the status quo.

  My new female friends were not anomalies. I visited almost every province in Syria and I always saw these same resilient girls. They stood out and they didn’t have to speak; their message was loud and clear. Haifa and Maya are representatives of a generation of Syrian girls who reject the old way of life. They are deeply religious and believe in their Sunni identity, but they see religion as something largely private. While they may not see or believe in a separation of religion and politics, they would like to separate religion from their social and recreational activity. Most females in Syria do not take this to the extreme that Haifa and Maya did, but the vast majority behave differently when they are out of their parents’ sight. The best chances for them to do this were in the Syrian nightclubs, where they could throw their hejabs in the corner as if it were a coatroom and dance the night away, forgetting at least temporarily about the society they come from.

  In addition to what they see in the media and through the Internet, Syrian youth have been tremendously impacted by what they see in neighboring Lebanon.

  Because Syria and Lebanon are comprised of the same ethnic and religious groups, however, it is easy to assume that the two are similar. In terms of population, Syria is nearly five times the size of Lebanon. In a country of nearly nineteen million people, Syria is more than 90 percent Muslim, of which 74 percent are Sunni. Yet Syria is actually run by the 16 percent of the population that is Allawi and Shi’a.

  The Sunni population of Syria is notoriously more fundamentalist than the Shi’a and Allawi minority, whose political sentiments are based largely on stra
tegic considerations.

  Because of their small numbers, only 3 percent of the total population, Christians play only a minor role in national politics. In Aleppo, however, it is a different story. This northwestern Syrian city is more than 20 percent Christian, making it the second largest Christian population in the Middle East behind only Beirut.

  Aleppo is Syria’s second most populous city, but the Christians were not hard to find. There were communities located near the churches and when I walked through the old marketplace, I simply looked for crosses on the wall. The Christians share similar perspectives on politics and the government with the Shi’a and Allawites. Given the historic animosity that has existed between Christians and Shi’a Muslims in Lebanon, I was surprised to find such agreement right next door in Syria. Christian, Shi’a, and Allawi Syrians all have the concerns often found among minority groups, and none of them want to see their country transformed into a Sunni Islamic Republic, which many believe would be the likely result if the current regime were to fall. For each of these minorities, the current regime is likely to be the best deal they are going to get.

  Unlike their counterparts in Lebanon, the Christian youth in Syria are a complacent minority. Other than the Allawite, who have benefited the most from the al-Assad regime, the Syrian Christians are arguably the group that offers the most support to the president. Such pragmatic support is not illogical, as Christians in Syria practice freely, enjoy what limited Syrian opportunities exist, and believe they have the protection of the president. When speaking of political reform, many young Christians, Shi’a, and Allawite in Syria argue that al-Assad has become less autocratic; as examples, they point to al-Assad choosing not to ban the Syrian Socialist Party and decreeing that the prime minister does not have to be a member of the Ba’ath Party. They are comfortable with this degree of choice, although most assert that they would still vote for Bashar. In the words of one Shi’ite student from the western city of Latakkia, “If there is an election between someone who we don’t know and Bashar, for sure we will select Bashar because he is good for the Shi’a. We will vote him because we know that as a minority he will protect us.”