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

by Jared Cohen

  I wanted to ask Mazen more questions, but I really needed to find the car. We had lost track of time and I was now almost two hours late for my driver. The only thing I was banking on was that since I hadn’t paid him anything yet, he would take the risk and wait for me. There was so much going through my mind. All of my things were in the car, so I was worried about losing my computer, camera, and belongings. Part of me also felt guilty that the driver would think I had scammed him. More than anything, I felt so helpless and lost. Those moments in the ruins when I didn’t know where I was and the uncertainty of how I would get back to my driver had made me afraid. This was still a country I didn’t understand.

  I wondered if it might help to draw a picture of the area where my driver had parked. After all, this had worked when I was searching for the synagogue in Iran. This idea largely arose from the fact that I was having a really difficult time explaining what I meant by cul-de-sac. I drew a picture of the cul-de-sac where we had parked and a small triangular ruin that I remembered seeing near the pavement. This was now the third time in my travels throughout the Middle East that I played Pictionary.

  I must be pretty good, because Mazen seemed to know exactly what I was describing. We got back on his motorcycle and he drove very fast down hills and through the ruins. I thought we could easily crash—and at moments thought we certainly would—but Mazen seemed to know what he was doing. His head wrap kept getting in my face as we were driving, and it was probably better that I couldn’t see anything.

  After fifteen minutes of barreling through the dead city at break-neck speed, I could see my driver’s car in the distance. I screamed his name three times, and finally, and luckily, I heard a beep from his horn as if to acknowledge that he heard me. I was relieved. I offered Mazen money for his help, but he wouldn’t accept. I kept trying to say that it was a token of gratitude, but he wouldn’t take money.

  He looked at me, shook my hand, and said, “Shukran, habibi.”

  I didn’t understand why he should be the one to say thanks when he was the one who had helped me—and I told him as much. He explained that life in Syria is difficult and there are virtually no opportunities for young people to talk about their dreams and their hopes. Mazen was thanking me for having shown an interest, for having cared enough to ask. He was saying thanks for listening.

  These words were very powerful and reminded me simple and even brief human interactions can transform opinions.

  I wondered what Hama was going to be like. Mazen’s story was chilling, and having seen his eyes tear up as he told his story gave my visit more gravity. But I had one more stop before heading to Hama. I came to the small Sunni town of Al-Marrad on the way to Hama to say farewell to my driver. From Al-Marrad I would have to find my own way and a new driver. The town had very little going on besides a small marketplace. This wasn’t the traditional souq that I had seen; instead, it was a very primitive marketplace with blankets instead of shops. Al-Marrad’s main street was a poorly maintained dirt road, and judging from the stores I saw on my walk, this was a very impoverished and traditional community. Even the mosques were small and unimpressive, especially compared to the grand mosque that I had seen in Aleppo or the shrines that I had visited in Homs. They almost looked like miniature models of a real mosque.

  I’d been to Afghanistan and seen women in the burkha, but I have never seen people so covered in my entire life. The women in this town wore a full black chador and revealed nothing, not even the hands, which were covered with black gloves. Even their eyes were concealed by the black cloth that completely covered their faces.

  Had it not been for my conversations in Iran about hejab, I never would have understood where this came from. I supposed that in Al-Marrad this was what women—or the men who forced them to wear this attire—viewed as modest. No matter how much I had been told about the concept of covering, I had trouble accepting such an extreme approach. It just looked uncomfortable and demeaning. I tried to talk to three different women but was ignored each time. The third time, I was spotted by three young guys playing backgammon at the Al-Marrad version of a convenience store. They were laughing and one gestured me over.

  They looked a lot more comfortable than the women, as they sat in their pants, short-sleeve shirts that I could see through the thin fabric of their robes, and sunglasses. And unlike the women, they were willing to talk to me. I told them about Mazen and this seemed to really open them up. They explained to me that living in a small but religious town like Al-Marrad, they could be more vocal because the intelligence units spent their time in the cities and they tended to stay away from the most religious pockets of Syria. Syrian intelligence weren’t worried about a small town with dirt roads and minimal infrastructure as posing much of a threat to the establishment.

  They were young and each wore a long white robe over his clothes and a red-and-white checkered kaffiyeh attached to his head with two black rings. They explained to me that in Syria, politics is taboo.

  “What we care about is Syria, we are Syrian,” one of the boys said to me.

  “And what do you want for Syria?” I asked.

  He explained that they don’t want what they see next door in Lebanon. He described Lebanon as a place with too much democracy and too many political parties. But reform was something that this group of boys wanted. They were not opposed to democracy, but they didn’t want too much of it. Instead, they asserted that reform is something that must come slowly.

  I asked them how they felt as Sunnis in a country ruled by Shi’a and Allawite. I was making assumptions that Syria and Lebanon were similar and they called me out on this. Syria has a far deeper nationalist identity than Lebanon and one of the boys explained that “Shi’a, Sunni, Allawite, Christians, we are all Syrian brothers. We are Syrian first and Sunni second.” Like many of the Iranians I spent time with, Syrians believed in country first, clan second.

  Hama was not like the historical graveyard that Mazen had described. In fact, it looked quite the opposite, lively and with a carnival feel to it. There were tons of street venders in Hama, selling everything from kebab and popcorn to sweets of varying kinds. The streets were overcrowded with other venders as well, but the scene looked less like a market and more like a tag sale. People drove like lunatics and just watching everyone cross the street made me nervous, especially when there were kids. At one point it took me at least fifteen minutes to cross a roundabout, never really certain of the traffic pattern to safely walk. The city’s action was located along its river, which is adorned with wooden bridges and twenty-foot water wheels. The water wheels are magnificent, towering over the city as if they were skyscrapers. Like a little kid, I marveled at their size. On both sides of the river, kids could be found doing the same.

  While Hama didn’t resemble a city ridden with trauma, talking to people revealed the existence of certain scars. People in Hama did not want to talk politics. They pretended to know nothing and have no opinions.

  In the main park in Hama the setting was calm with women eating ice cream, kids playing soccer, and the shadow of the water wheels casting an almost metaphorical darkness over the whole scene. It was actually hard to imagine that this was the same place that just a few decades prior had been leveled by Hafez al-Assad and turned into a graveyard.

  There were some kids around my age playing soccer, so I walked over and asked if I could play too. They immediately wanted to know where I was from and I told them America.

  They laughed a bit, indicating what they thought of my likely soccer skills or maybe at the simple fact that I was American. But I’m a pretty nice American and a very good soccer player and I showed off my moves in the park. There were about ten of us and we played for over an hour. They asked me to lunch and I gladly accepted. We sat around a table at a traditional Syrian kebab restaurant with family-style portions. It was the typical fast-food kebab joint with a large leg of meat spinning around on a metal bar. There was something unappetizing about watching my food move ar
ound on display and then seeing the butcher slice off parts of it to give to my new friends. As we chowed on our lunch, a crowd of children gathered outside with their faces pressed against the restaurant window. Every time I made eye contact with them, they would run away laughing, leaving only their face prints on the glass, only to return again within seconds.

  I asked them what they did for fun and one of the boys, who had a shaved head, said, “I think you will be surprised to hear this.” He pointed to a group of completely covered girls, some of whom even had their entire faces covered, and said, “Do you see that over there? Some of those girls, if you are out at the nightclubs, you won’t even recognize them. They will dress completely differently and won’t even wear head scarves.”

  “Sometimes we go out to the clubs and the girls wait outside the door with their hejab, and then as soon as they get inside, they remove it,” another one of the boys explained to me. I later saw this in a Damascus nightclub, where there was a pile of hejabs in one of the corners of the venue.

  I moved to touchier topics and asked about their thoughts on the regime.

  One of the boys, who I distinguished from the others because of his unibrow, told me that, differently than Lebanon, they don’t care about politics in Syria. He explained that in Lebanon if you ask a young person even two years old, they will identify with a political affiliation. Always eager to distinguish between Lebanon and Syria, one of the other boys noted that they don’t want to leave their country like the Lebanese. They want to live, work, and die in Syria and even if things don’t change, they are still going to stay and work. Whatever question I asked, they always found a way to remind me that they were Syrian. One of them explained that even though they are all Sunnis, some of them believe that Syria should be an Islamic Republic, while others don’t. But he also reminded me that these differences don’t matter because they are all Syrian.

  I asked them how careful they needed to be when talking about politics. One of the boys began answering me while his mouth was half-filled with a lamb kebab and said that before, they never used to speak about politics, just girls and sports, because it was safe. Now, they talk about girls and sports because it is more interesting conversation than politics. Again, drawing the parallel with Lebanon, the same kebab-eating boy highlighted the fact that Lebanon is rampant with political parties. He reminded me that in Syria there is only one real party, which is the Ba’ath Party, and if one doesn’t like the party, then that is only to be talked about in the home.

  I wanted to know if they thought Bashar al-Assad was changing things for the better. One of the boys who had been silent now spoke up and told me that things are changing. He explained that while the president is doing his best to change Syria, he still cannot do it very well because of all the mistakes of the past fifteen to twenty years. He continued by explaining that the principals in the Ba’ath party made mistakes that cannot be changed in just two years. The idea that Bashar is doing his best, that reform is moving, but slowly, was very popular among Syrians. They almost seemed to think that reform has been a success, which it clearly has not. It was not that these kids had drunk the Kool-Aid; instead, they were seduced by façades of reform. When I asked them what reforms they have seen, the boys started listing cheaper cars, less expensive mobile phones, greater access to satellite television, and more Internet cafés. These short-term fruits embodied reform for a group of young Syrians with way too much time on their hands.

  I asked them about larger reforms, but all I got was a little more detail. Instead of cheaper cars, this time they explained that before Bashar, the tariffs on cars were 255 percent, but now they are only 40 percent. Bashar al-Assad was seducing these youths into thinking that the cheaper cars were synonymous with legitimate reform.

  Young Syrians are patient with reform and even content with it in some cases because Bashar al-Assad has shrewdly appealed to what youth care about in the short run. They are enamored of cheap cars, accessible mobile phones, unlimited satellite television, and the spread of the Internet, and they associate all of this with greater freedom and opportunity. Meanwhile, private banking, education, and social reforms remain stagnant. These are the reforms Syria needs for the future, but when I spoke to most Syrian youth, they hadn’t really made the distinction between short-term gains and long-term needs.

  These guys did mention some changes that could have passed for steps toward reform. In prior years, for example, one could not be in politics without being a member of the Ba’ath Party. Though this has changed, Bashar al-Assad has not quite allowed for multipartyism. Instead, he has permitted small political parties to take part in a symbolic competition.

  The youth also seemed to believe that the regime was less focused now on Ba’athist indoctrination. One of them explained to me that in school he used to have to learn about Ba’ath ideology, for instance the pronouncements of Hafez al-Assad, but now the curriculum has changed and they no longer have to learn about the laws of the party or the ideology. The same boy also told me that in earlier years, Syrian students used to have to learn about the military, about fighting, how to bear arms, how to load and reload, how to unjam a weapon. But, again, they no longer have to do this.

  I asked them to identify the greatest problems they face in Syria. Without hesitation, one of the boys pointed to the educational system. The others nodded in affirmation and different voices explained that there are virtually no educational opportunities in their country. While they love their country and don’t want to leave, they feel compelled to travel to Lebanon or Dubai so that they can get the education they need to come back to Syria and make something of themselves. They don’t believe the world will accept a Syrian degree. They are probably right.

  One of them explained that they desire a more open society, but the others pushed back and said that they fear too much freedom because they see what is taking place in Iraq. This was not surprising, given the spread of the Sunni insurgency to the Syrian border.

  These kids didn’t seem to believe in demonstrating or protesting to achieve change. When I asked them why, they again went back to the same car example, explaining that they never protested for cheaper cars. Instead, they believe that their patience was rewarded.

  I moved to my last subject and asked them what they thought of America. As had been the case everywhere else, they emphatically asserted that they love America and its culture. They want American products and they even like going to Lebanon just becaue there is more American influence there. They have Coca-Cola and Pepsi, they have McDonald’s, and their clubs play American music. But they viewed the United States government as something different. They saw my government as far too close to Israel and seemed to think it was out to destroy Islam. They were emphatic about this, but like most young kids in the Middle East, their justification was not rooted in facts, but instead bumper sticker slogans that had been inculcated upon them by extremists.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE ROAD TO MESOPOTAMIA

  SYRIA, 2005

  My journey to Aleppo, Homs, and Hama barely scratched the surface of Syria, but I needed to get back to Beirut. I had a multiple-entry visa that would require me to register with the Syrian government if I stayed much longer, so my plan was to come back after a few weeks and make my journey to eastern Syria, where the Salafist militants allegedly had crossed over from Iraq. I was low on cash and I wanted to give myself the option of turning away at the last minute, so I opted to go by car.

  I passed some time gallivanting around Beirut as usual and then prepared myself for a long journey. My plan was to travel from Beirut back to Hama, across Syria, drive up the Iraqi border into Turkey, and eventually make my way into Iraq. With 90-percent certainty that I would chicken out of the Iraq stage, I threw my laptop and small suitcase all into a shared taxi at Charles Helou Station in Beirut and began my journey at six A.M. The journey out of Lebanon was a two-hour trip that I had already made five or six times. It still amazed me that it only cost ten doll
ars to go from Lebanon to Syria by taxi (a two-hour drive), but it cost fifteen dollars to drive from one side of Beirut to the other (a twenty-minute drive). It made traveling to Syria a rather frequent occurrence for me. The only catch was that for such a cheap cost, I was expected to share the taxi with as many people as could fit. Sometimes this was one or two other people, while other times it was four in the backseat. A year later, when war would break out again between Israel and Hezbollah, I heard from friends that it cost almost six hundred dollars to take the same trip out of Lebanon.

  It was just after dawn and barely light out. In the distance, I could catch a glimpse of the Mediterranean. We were going north, away from the sea and onto the road to Mesopotamia—modern-day Iraq. I was anxious but tired; I would have slept through the entire ride if my rest had not been repeatedly interrupted by the woman smoking cigarettes next to me.

  Just a few days before I left, some of the Hezbollah guys that I knew tried to convince me not to go to Iraq. They told me that I was crazy for wanting to go to Iraq and one of them even suggested, “If you come back from Iraq without a head, don’t say we didn’t warn you. These people are crazy.” While such warnings had already come from family, friends, and colleagues, Hezbollah’s really caught my attention. When Hezbollah thinks that something is unsafe, well, it’s probably not that safe. But I figured that when I got to the border with Iraq, I didn’t have to cross. Deep down, I think I believed I would actually turn away at the last minute. I would certainly have time to make up my mind: in order to get to Mesopotamia, I had to travel across Syria, up the Syrian-Iraq border, through Turkey, and down into northern Iraq. There was much to experience beforehand.