A Disappearance in Damascus

by Deborah Campbell

  She told me she had found an ally, however, and this eased my mind. A Syrian woman named Mona who was, like her, a fixer for journalists. Some time after Ahlam’s visit with Syrian intelligence, a young Iraqi filmmaker Ahlam knew had introduced the two of them, and they had hit it off. Mona too had covered the refugee crisis and she told Ahlam she wanted to “give back.” I was relieved to hear about this development; I hadn’t met Mona but somehow I could immediately picture her: middle-aged, plain, perhaps with grown children and a hard-working altruistic air. Her involvement took a weight off my mind. I couldn’t do much to help, and I wouldn’t be here forever. Ahlam needed an insider. A Syrian professional who knew the lay of the land was a gift.

  With Abu Yusuf watching her, Ahlam wanted proof that what she was doing was nothing he should worry about. To that end she asked me to go with her to the UNICEF office to request a formal letter acknowledging the field research she had done with Marianne. Marianne was out of town, but the stamp of officialdom would legitimize Ahlam, make it obvious that she was an expert on the issue of refugee girls, the classes a natural extension of the work she had done. “If you come with me,” she said, “it will be harder for them to say no.”

  I was pleased to be asked. Here was someone who was actually doing something, not just writing about it. Ahlam’s usefulness was a counterpoint to my uselessness, set it in stark relief, and she was offering me a way to be of use. I could be part of what she did, do something practical and tangible rather than merely observe, and use my status as a Westerner to good effect.

  —

  We met at the UNICEF headquarters in Damascus one sun-blasted afternoon. I arrived by taxi; Ahlam was already there, watching for me on the street outside. We waited together to be ushered into the director’s office. He was Egyptian, with a long sallow face. I could tell right away that he was sorry to see us. Rather than speaking to her in Arabic, as I expected, he directed himself to me in French, as if she wasn’t there.

  This time I was the translator, explaining what she needed. Just a letter stating that she had worked on the report. He sighed, leaning back in his chair, and spoke in ponderous French of the “process” of the “formalization,” and the need for a study in order to formalize the process, and then committee meetings, and budgets and more studies….It was clear he was only giving her an audience because I was there: a Western journalist who, having brought out my notebook as a prop, was ostentatiously taking notes.

  Afterwards Ahlam and I sat in the park opposite the office. It was hot and dusty but pleasant, sunlight filtering through leafy jacaranda trees. Ahlam bought two coffees from a small stand and we sat on a bench smoking. I was angry but she was not. She said, “I knew it probably wouldn’t work.”

  Ahlam didn’t blame the sallow-faced director. She reminded me that she was not employed by UNICEF—foreign NGOs like UNICEF could not hire Iraqis, who themselves were foreigners in Syria, “guests” without legal permission to work. Marianne was on contract and Marianne had hired her. But she had no contractual structure, no rights. And in such a situation there is nobody to come to your aid. It wasn’t the director’s fault. He must have felt he was being made the fool, asked for something he could not grant even if he wished.

  As we finished our coffees, her phone buzzed with a text message. She pulled it out and looked. A friend in Baghdad, a British journalist. You are a tank, she’d written. You are a Humvee. Ahlam read it and laughed. She looked as if she had already forgotten the meeting.

  We got up to leave. It had been a waste of time but not a waste. Perhaps because we had switched roles. Perhaps because I was now invested in the success of her efforts. This time I was the translator and fixer, even if the mission had been a bust.

  We went out to the street so I could find a taxi. We would go our separate ways. I had a dinner meeting with a Swedish diplomat who knew a lot about human smuggling. Then I would leave to spend a few days in the ancient city of Aleppo, the largest in Syria, a trip I had been planning for some time. Ahlam was heading back to her apartment. She would not, she told me as we parted, waste any more time. She would go straight to Abu Yusuf and tell him about the school before suspicions arose.

  She looked happy. “If he says yes, okay. If he says no, I continue!”

  Chapter 7

  ANOTHER COUNTRY

  AT THE BARON HOTEL in Aleppo, a five-hour journey from Damascus by crowded bus, I sat on a cracked leather armchair next to the dusty bar, drinking a lukewarm vodka tonic. The cars honking on the streets, overlaying the call to prayer, sounded like a mutinous brass band, but the Baron was quiet, almost dead. With its atmosphere of faded grandeur and indifferent service, it was a forgotten way station on the road to conquest. A group of loud Germans sat on the stone terrace outside, drinking beer. A British tourist wandered in expectantly, as if into a museum, and left looking underwhelmed. Not much had changed here since the hotel opened a century ago, hosting Germans and British as they vied for control of the Middle East.

  The Baron, Syria’s oldest hotel, had witnessed many of the crucial events since then. In its heyday it had hosted the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk; the Shah of Persia; Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt. Agatha Christie, more famous than all of them, was said to have written parts of Murder on the Orient Express while staying here with her archaeologist husband.

  I had come to Aleppo to escape my work in Damascus for a few days, but found myself thinking of the war anyway—where it had started, how it could possibly end. Framed in a dusty corner of the hotel was T.E. Lawrence’s unpaid bar bill from 1914. Lawrence had stayed here on breaks from an excavation for the British Museum. It’s hard to separate the young man he was—handsome, intellectually curious, probably gay—from the legend of Lawrence of Arabia that made him the most celebrated hero of the First World War. But it was as a young archaeologist learning Arabic in Syria that he first came to sympathize with the Arab struggle against foreign domination; at that time, the fading Ottoman Empire.

  I had spent the day at the Aleppo souk, wandering through vaulted archways lit by elaborate hanging lanterns, the air heady with the scent of spices piled in bright little pyramids. Sheep, freshly killed and sharp with the smell of blood, hung from chains in open cases; others were tethered in the stony crooks of dark alleyways, unaware they were next in line. Veiled women gathered around a fabric stall, expertly thumbing bolt after identical black bolt, measuring out to the inch exactly what they needed to cover themselves head to foot.

  Lawrence had visited this bazaar to seek out artifacts. Though short of money, he loved beautiful old things, and couldn’t resist haggling with men like the antiquities vendor who coaxed me into his cave-like shop. I sat on carpets, drinking strong coffee as the man tried to sell me Assyrian figurines that he said dated back three thousand years. It was possible they had been looted from collections in Iraq and just as likely that they were made last week in a workshop owned by his brother-in-law. But there was no mistaking the authenticity of the old Iraqi currency he showed me with the face of Saddam Hussein, and those bearing the regal visage of Lawrence’s close friend Faisal, briefly King of Syria and then—when that didn’t take—of the newly minted country of Iraq.

  You can see almost everything that has happened in the Middle East today in light of Lawrence and the First World War. The Ottoman Turks, by the time he came here, had ruled Arab lands for four hundred years. Their secret was simple: they mainly let their subjects run their own lives. In 1916, one of those subjects, Sharif Hussein of Mecca, launched a rebellion against them. He owed the Turks his job as director of the Islamic holy sites in what is now Saudi Arabia, but disagreed with the progressive Young Turks whose ideas, such as the emancipation of women, were not ones an old-fashioned tribal leader like Hussein could abide.22 The British, at war with Germany, needed help defeating the German-allied Turks, so they agreed to give Hussein gold and guns and, if all went well, an independent Arab kingdom of his own.

  T.E. L
awrence, assigned as a liaison to the Arab revolt, later said he suspected all along it was a ruse. In his memoir, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, he wrote, “I risked the fraud, on my conviction that Arab help was necessary to our cheap and speedy victory in the East, and that better we win and break our word than lose.”23 Yet he was drawn in, trading his military uniform for the robes of an Arab prince, and befriending Sharif Hussein’s son—the dashing Faisal—whom he helped to blow up Turkish railway lines.

  When the war was won and the time came to make good on promises, it emerged that France and Britain had secretly agreed to divide the same territory between themselves: Syria (including Lebanon) falling to the French; Mesopotamia (what is now Iraq) to the British; with Palestine under international administration—though it would later be claimed by the British, to repent at leisure.

  In Paris 1919, Margaret MacMillan’s masterly account of the post-war division of spoils, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George is overheard musing aloud about the creation of the modern Middle East. “Mesopotamia…yes…oil…irrigation…we must have Mesopotamia; Palestine…yes…the Holy Land…Zionism…we must have Palestine; Syria…h’m…what is there in Syria? Let the French have that.”24

  Just as cavalierly, I exchanged a few Syrian pounds for some Saddam Husseins and left behind the Faisals, though both were worthless now.

  —

  During the Arab revolt Lawrence met a young American journalist who brought back pictures of the blue-eyed blond in Arab dress, and made him the subject of a sensational multimedia show that seized the public imagination—the dashing young Englishman leading the proud natives to liberty. But by 1920 Lawrence saw the British occupation of Iraq turn ugly. The Sunni and Shia, supposedly so at odds, united in an armed uprising against the lack of representative government. In response, Britain razed entire villages with the new technology of aerial bombing; they debated using poison gas. Lawrence thought the British even worse than the Turks. “How long,” he wrote in the London Times, “will we permit millions of pounds, thousands of imperial troops, and tens of thousands of Arabs to be sacrificed on behalf of a form of colonial administration which can benefit nobody but its administrators?”25

  He had gone with Faisal to the Paris peace conference in 1919 to press for Arab independence, but neither the British nor the French wished to hear another word about it. Nor did they wish to hear the American president encouraging self-determination for national groups. (God was content with Ten Commandments, the French president quipped, but Woodrow Wilson had a list of fourteen.) The French insisted on having Syria as their share of the spoils, and the main lesson Britain seemed to have drawn from the war was that no future war could be won without oil.

  Faisal claimed Syria anyway. In March of 1920, from the balcony of his room upstairs at the Baron Hotel, he proclaimed himself King of Syria. A few months later French forces drove him out.

  The following year Lawrence and his friend Gertrude Bell—having met on that early dig outside Aleppo—persuaded Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill to place Faisal on the throne of a new country to be named Iraq.

  —

  Above my leather armchair in the bar of the Baron was a pastoral painting of an idyllic Arab village. I was reminded of the nine-year-old girl I had met through Ahlam whose farmhouse outside Baghdad had been fire-bombed. Her father had called her over to show me her burns. Clearly anxious to get back to the kitchen where she was tending to her paralyzed mother’s chores, she relaxed only when her father pulled out a photo album. Leafing through it, she gazed dreamily at pictures of her family on their farm. Happy times, smiling faces, herding the cows, harvesting their crops.

  Her father thought the biggest mistake of the war was the American decision to lay the Iraqi army off work. Others had their own theories: allowing the looting; not sending enough troops; not enough planning or enough fluent Arabic speakers. As if, had any of these factors been different, things might have turned out well. Perhaps the biggest mistake of the war was none of these. Perhaps the biggest mistake was the same as in the First World War. The war itself.

  The French went their own way in Syria. It turned out no better. Having carved Lebanon from Syria as a separate state for their Christian allies (without considering how the Muslims there might feel about that), they ceded oil-rich Mosul to Britain, gave 40 percent of Syria’s coastline to Turkey, and shaved off Palestine and Transjordan from Greater Syria.26 In what remained of the weakened country, they recruited Syria’s minorities into their occupation forces in order to divide and rule. Chief among these were the poor rural Alawites, long the victims of discrimination, for whom joining the military was the only way to move up in the world. After the French left in 1946, there were democratic elections. But the results did not please the United States, which had replaced Britain as the leading imperial power following the Second World War. In 1949, no longer championing self-determination, the US engineered its first Middle Eastern coup after the democratically elected president waffled on approving an American pipeline for Saudi oil. They put the head of the Syrian army in charge.27 He was murdered in less than six months, and successive military coups continued until a group of mainly Alawite army officers seized power in 1963. Among them was an ambitious air force pilot named Hafez al-Assad, who became president in 1971.

  It was here in Aleppo, a decade after that, that the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood rose up against his rule. With Syria poised on the brink of civil war, Assad brought his army out against the Brotherhood, massacring as many as twenty thousand, including civilians, in the city of Hama in 1982. For nearly three decades the rebels were driven underground.

  The Aleppo I saw as I walked through the city is finished now—bombed and shelled and shot to pieces. Syrian forces barrel-bombed civilian neighbourhoods; rebel forces burned down the ancient souk. The Middle East fashioned a century ago has become what the Ottoman Empire was before it: fragile, quaking, rife with rebellions. Like the First World War, the Iraq War upset the balance of power in the region, a horrifying illustration of the impotence of power to contain what it sets in motion.

  The Baron Hotel, as always an eyewitness to history, found itself on the frontier between opposition and government areas in the embattled city. By 2014, its roof pierced by shrapnel, the rooms stood empty except for a few displaced families. A hundred years after Lawrence visited, the Baron quietly closed its doors.28

  Chapter 8

  AHLAM’S WAR

  FOR AHLAM, THE WAR began on April 8, 2003, the day she watched the first Abrams tank rumble past her house along the main road into Baghdad. Until then all traffic had been in the opposite direction, cars and buses carrying people out of the city to the north of Iraq to wait out the invasion. When the bombs began to fall, the villagers panicked. Men rushed to organize cars, filling them with women and children. She refused to join them, or to let her husband take the children from her side. The two of them had argued before he left. He pleaded with her to change her mind. “No one has the right to kick us out of our house,” she told him. “It’s our country. If I die, I will die in my home.” A handful of men—her cousins—stayed behind to safeguard their property, but for the next several weeks she was the only woman left in the village.

  Now, as the huge tank rolled past, beige as a sand dune, she felt a profound sense of loss. From a loudspeaker, a prerecorded voice blared orders in Arabic: Stay away from the main roads! No one is going to harm you! Avoid gathering in large groups! Don’t shoot at us and we won’t shoot at you! Any suspicious activity will be viewed as threat! More convincing than any news headline, it was proof that Baghdad had fallen. “We had lost our country.”

  US ground forces were pouring into the Iraqi capital. Until that day the war hadn’t seemed real. In the first three days of the invasion a dust storm had swept in from the desert. She taped plastic over the doors and windows against the dust. All she could hear through the thick copper haze were sporadic explosions several times a day. She hoarded food as she
had learned from other wars. In her garden she dug a bomb shelter, scattering dirt over the tin roof. From overhead came the roar of F-18s and B-52s. She taught her children to plug their ears and shout “Ahhhhhh” to save their eardrums.

  Anas was nine, Abdullah seven, and Roqayah, her “angel,” just five. The countryside north of Baghdad was being heavily bombed because the Iraqi military hid armaments there, but her children thought the war was a game. They waved at the fighter planes, shouting greetings. “Look, Mum!” they said, pointing in the air, jumping up and down. They slept soundly through even the loudest explosions.

  Once, six planes loomed over the dusty date palms, flying in formation. From the B-52 came a powerful screech as it released a payload of cluster bombs over their fields. “It was enough for us adults to hear the bombs drop on our fields,” Ahlam said. “The sound, like opening the gates of a thousand-year-old castle, scared even the biggest man. But my children didn’t give me a chance to be scared.”

  As the tank rolled on towards Baghdad, a half-hour away, Ahlam turned her attention back to her household. She had been standing in her garden after lunch that day when she saw young Iraqi soldiers hiding in the brush. “Please, Auntie,” one of them called to her. “Can you help us?” As they emerged from the tall grasses around the orchards, she saw there were about fifty of them. They were eighteen, nineteen years old—just children, she thought. They were tearing off their army uniforms and needed civilian clothing, since the Americans would otherwise kill them on sight. They had been drafted only recently, with little or no training, and their commanders had slipped away to avoid the US military, knowing their old weaponry wouldn’t stand a chance. Her heart went out to them.

  Bringing them inside, Ahlam handed out what clothing her husband had left behind when he had fled north. She arranged to billet them among her cousins’ houses along the river. Her own house had many bedrooms, so ten of them stayed with her. “If the Americans come to my door,” she promised them, “I will say you are my relatives.” One of them sat on the floor next to her television set in the living room, crying and asking for his mother.