A Disappearance in Damascus

by Deborah Campbell

  But there was someone who could keep a roof over her head, and that was Ann, the generous philanthropist who had discovered Ahlam through the article in the Tribune. After two years in Edgewater, Ahlam and the children moved to a leafy suburb where Ann had found them a better two-bedroom and paid the difference on the rent. Both of the kids had experienced bullying, and this way they could go to a school that did not need a police car permanently stationed outside.

  When I visited again in the summer of 2011, the entire city sang with cicadas—a lovely sound. I was staying with Ahlam in her new apartment in Evanston, and had come expecting to stay up all night talking, catching up, but she was dropping into bed exactly at eleven p.m., awaking at seven on the dot. The person I knew, the quixotic, insomniac, bold and funny person, had been replaced by a robot.

  When she talked she seemed faroff, as if she were speaking from behind bulletproof glass. She told me there had been flashbacks. We were driving, I remember, through her new neighbourhood, green with parks and tree-lined streets, past shops selling gluten-free cupcakes and organic produce, dog-grooming, edible fruit arrangements, custom picture frames. There was more than one bookstore and a library, but the little girl who had read every book she could get her hands on now lacked the capacity for sustained concentration. There was too much chaos in her head.

  “What triggers the flashbacks?” I asked.

  “Sirens,” she said. “Or a baby crying.” She drove as if in a trance. She kept cigarettes on the backseat and reached for them, shaking one out. “I can’t stand that sound.” She told me about the day in 2004 when there had been a bombing near her office in Baghdad. It was during the festival of Ashura, when observant Shia mourn the loss of the battle in Karbala fourteen centuries ago that started the Sunni–Shia rift. Thousands of families poured in through the massive wooden doors of the shrine in the suburb of Kadhimiya, touching the brass knocker as they entered to worship. At least seventy-five people died there that day—another sixty during a simultaneous attack on pilgrims in Karbala. It was the worst day of violence since the fall of Saddam Hussein and was blamed on al-Qaeda, which wanted civil war. Hearing the explosions from her office, she ran the several blocks to the shrine. All she could hear amid the shouts and sirens, all she could recall hearing, was an infant’s cries. She followed the cries until she found the baby and pulled him from his dead mother’s arms. The woman’s body had shielded her son from the blast and saved his life.

  I awoke one morning to drink tea with Ahlam before she left for work. She stood up to light a cigarette and looked out the kitchen window at the new day. Her face was blank. I got up from the table and put my arms around her. “Where are you?” I asked. “Tell me where you are.”

  Between us was an overwhelming sadness. The full force of what she felt and what she could not feel was with us in the room. For the first time I understood that she was still captive to the traumas she had lived through. Her symptoms, common to sufferers of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, had been blunted by the drugs her doctors prescribed. This one to make you sleep the first half of the night, that one for the second half, this one to stop the flashbacks, another for the depression, another to combat the side effects of the others.

  She spoke of her son who had died, whose mother hadn’t managed to save him. “He will never see Chicago. He will never swim in the lake or walk in the snow.”

  He was eleven and a half. He would always be eleven and a half.

  “Why did I live?” she asked me. “I feel I’m not alive.”

  She had been, when I knew her in Damascus, more alive than anyone I’ve ever known.

  —

  Perhaps I had idealized her. Easy to do that with people who have risked their lives for you. I began tracking down journalists and American military officials who had known her. I wanted them to give me perspective, but listened as if anticipating a blow. I feared they would tell me she wasn’t the person I remembered, that it was self-deception. But all they could do, in the words of the first journalist she ever worked for, Stephen Glain, was “add to the heap of superlatives that Ahlam routinely inspires.”

  They called her honest, competent, tough. They said—this was Khaled Oweis, the Reuters bureau chief in Damascus—“she had all the qualities you associate with the great Iraqis, except she wasn’t wealthy.” They said she was charming, bold, outrageous. Brave. Generous. Warm. “Badass.” Empathetic. Smart about what needed doing and did it. Was reliable, likeable, funny. Sometimes sad. Nonsectarian at a time when the Shia ascendancy in Iraq made that a rare quality indeed.

  In Skype calls and phone calls and emails, I was given a picture of someone even more influential than I had known at the time—“Did you know she fixed for Jeremy Bowen at the BBC? And Lina Sinjab at the Beeb, Lina loved her.” Perhaps because she had been that missing link, our bridge across the divide towards a common humanity. That was her gift to us. She represented the spirit of the places we had come to know through her, whether Baghdad or Damascus, that were no longer what they had been, and in the deepest sense had disappeared.

  Chapter 28

  AFTERMATH

  IMMEDIATELY AFTER HE WAS separated from Ahlam at the immigration prison, having slipped her some money just in case, Salaam was deported from Syria with a stamp on his passport forbidding him from returning for five years. This meant he could no longer work as a driver crossing back and forth through the border. He went back to their village on the banks of the Tigris, and found an office job. But it was not that easy to recover. At night he was plagued by dreams in which he relived the torture he had suffered in Douma. He became fearful of falling asleep and was soon smoking four packs a day. Meanwhile word had spread through the village that Ahlam’s arrest, like her kidnapping before it, was due to her work with the Americans. These rumours clung to him.

  One morning, at six a.m., when Salaam normally left for work, a man was shot in the head on the main road in front of his house. From behind, the man looked exactly like him. Salaam fled at once to Thailand, one of the few countries still giving visas to Iraqis.

  Despite that frightening news, Ahlam was homesick for Iraq. The early euphoria, the joy of survival, had faded. After two years, her husband had been accepted for resettlement and come to Chicago, but they had agreed to live apart, sharing custody of the children. Ahlam longed to see her mother, whom she’d heard might not have much longer to live. And life in the United States was hard: all people seemed to do was work. In spite of the violence and a chorus of friends and family members telling her it was madness, she returned to Baghdad in the summer of 2012 for a one-month visit.

  The day before her departure we spoke on the phone. We had long talked of making this journey together, seeing the village where she had grown up, but one hundred and fifty journalists had been killed in Iraq since 2003, and nearly a hundred kidnapped.37 Not to mention the toll on “media workers,” the fixers and drivers and interpreters who die anonymously.

  It was too dangerous for either of us. She knew I didn’t want her to go.

  “How do you feel?” I asked her.

  Her voice sounded strained. “Bad.”

  “How come?”

  “Ghosts of the past. Ghosts of the future.” I could hear her light a cigarette, the gentle whish.

  “Remember this,” I said. “I’ll kill you if you get killed. I’ll track you down and kill you again.”

  —

  The year before, in 2011, protest movements had swept the Arab world. The so-called Arab Spring. These were driven as much by widespread youth unemployment and rising food prices as by a grassroots desire for democracy. And all, with the shaky exception of Tunisia where the protests started, failed.

  In Syria, several issues converged to set off the protests. A drought, the worst in nine hundred years, had caused a million farmers and their families to abandon their land for work in the cities.38 At the same time traditional subsidies and social services that had long bound the countryside to the autho
ritarian state were being “modernized” under President Bashar al-Assad. The London-trained eye doctor, married to an investment banker, was eager to join the World Trade Organization. Having applied in 2001, Syria gained observer status in mid-2010. In the intervening years, farmer and worker unions had been de-funded, rent controls abolished, public services eroded in favour of faith-based charities. Education and health spending and agricultural and fuel subsidies were cut. Trade tariffs were lowered, and state land sold off cheaply. As foreign capital rolled in, real-estate speculation took off. For drought-ravaged rural areas, most of which were Sunni, help had been slashed when it was needed most.

  What must it have been like for those displaced farm folk—conservative, humble, God-fearing—to come to Damascus and witness the nightly Mardi Gras in the city’s wealthier quarters? Men and women flirting, checking their laptops, going to nightclubs and restaurants, shopping for designer jeans. Amid this spectacle of urban decadence, there weren’t even low-wage jobs or cheap housing. The deluge of middle-class Iraqi refugees had already taken that.

  “The most dangerous juncture for an authoritarian regime,” writes Raymond Hinnebusch, director of the Centre for Syrian Studies at the University of St. Andrews, “is when it seeks to ‘reform,’ particularly when the path of reform combines neo-liberalism and crony capitalism.” As Hinnebusch observed, Syria’s president forsook the poor for the rich. “The gap was partly filled by the security services which, however, were underpaid, corrupt and lax.”39 Men like Abu Yusuf.

  When the first protest broke out in a city filled with desperate migrant farmers, it came as a shock to the authorities, who must have thought everyone was out enjoying the new prosperity. It began with the arrest of fifteen schoolchildren for spraying anti-government graffiti on the walls of their school, echoing sentiments they heard from Egypt and Tunisia on satellite news. When their parents tried to have them released, they were taunted and sent away. Those who protested were arrested or fired on, spurring more protests that spread across the country. With no patronage left to cement the society, nothing to offset the rising inequality, the government reached for the only tool it had not abandoned: the army. Once again, the regime employed the scorched earth policy that had defeated—temporarily as it turned out—the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood thirty years earlier.

  But now was different. Now Syria had outside enemies who saw opportunity in the prospect of civil war. Now Libya was in chaos following regime change; arms and Islamic fighters were in abundant supply. Now Saudi Arabia and Qatar, threatened by the rise of Iran since the removal of its archenemy Saddam Hussein, were vying for supremacy in the Sunni world. Now Turkey had visions of recovering its lost hegemony. Now, after Libya, Russia was not going to support American adventurism. Now Iran was looking at any war on an ally as one directed at itself. Now al-Qaeda in Iraq was looking for a place to regroup and build an “Islamic state” that would spread across the region—and the world.

  With Gulf States and Turkey backing foreign fighters who saw Syria as a proxy battlefield—and the West blindly supporting the enemies of Assad whoever they might be—the worst fears of those quietly intellectual Syrians I knew in Damascus were fulfilled: the war had come to them.

  —

  Skyping with me from the darkness of her mother’s house, Ahlam said, “I feel I’m back in prison.” She was only half joking; her mother refused to let her step outside. In the past they had kept the front door open all the time. Now all the houses along the river were fenced and barricaded, everyone indoors and accounted for after dark.

  The day after she touched down at Baghdad airport, headlines announced that ten locations had been attacked in the city’s worst day of violence since the withdrawal of American troops six months before. Over the course of her month-long visit, three car bombs went off in her district, followed by sweeping government arrests that seemed to target all Sunni men.

  As the Iraqi government continued to make life hell for its Sunni population, the civil war in Syria was flowing back into Iraq. Opposition fighters from Syria were flocking into Baghdad, urging the Sunnis to join them in wiping out the Shia. “They even tried to recruit one of my nephews,” Ahlam said. Had he not had a loving family and other options, who knows? Meanwhile the US found itself in a bizarre contortion: supporting the same fighters in Syria that it wanted to see defeated in Iraq.

  The Islamic State was born from the invasion of 2003.40 After the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq was killed by an American airstrike in 2006, the group reconfigured as the Islamic State of Iraq, a name they later changed to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS (Daesh to its enemies) and finally to Islamic State.

  The leader of Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had spent four years in one of the American prisons in Iraq that Ahlam had talked to me about: Camp Bucca, where she said detainees could be held for a year on nothing but suspicion. When she was kidnapped for her work—which included locating missing prisoners—by members of al-Qaeda, al-Baghdadi was in that prison assembling the team that would turn al-Qaeda into IS: a combination of radical Islamic fighters and secular ex-Baathist military men from the days of Saddam Hussein. The Islamists had zeal but no plan; the ex-Baathists had plans but no zeal. Each galvanized the other.

  “If there was no American prison in Iraq, there would be no IS now,” one of al-Baghdadi’s fighters told the Guardian. “Bucca was a factory. It made us all. It built our ideology.”41 It was there that military men with nothing more to lose decided to collude with radical Islamists who believed they had God on their side. Together they found wealthy sponsors in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and other Gulf States who welcomed the prospect of funding an army to fight the non-Sunni governments in Iraq and Syria. From victories in Syria they would go on to erase the border with Iraq that Britain—with the help of Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence—had drawn after the First World War.

  At home on the banks of the Tigris, life was worse now than Ahlam remembered, not better. With electricity sporadic, jobs scarce, and constant threats from Iraqi security forces, feuds had started among people she thought she knew. She was shocked by many things, especially to find that instead of going to school girls were now being married off at the age of nine or ten to thirty-year-old men. Their parents argued that marriage was a way to keep their daughters safe from rampant sex trafficking, including a new method: online entrapment through Twitter and Facebook.

  “I feel like a stranger here,” she confessed over Skype. “If I say things need to change, people tell me that nothing can change. They tell me to go back to Chicago.”

  Which she did. The past, her past, had become a foreign country. There was no going back.

  Chapter 29

  EXILE

  ONE AFTERNOON IN CHICAGO, Ahlam and I walked over to Lake Michigan. It was high spring, the perfect mix of sun and shore.

  Over the past seven years our lives had gone in different directions. She wasn’t my fixer anymore and I was taking a break from magazine writing. It was a thin time for journalism anyhow. What with the slow death by Internet and ownership consolidation, there was less and less money for in-depth reporting from foreign places, investigative work, and the long-form narrative writing I did. Tens of thousands of reporters across North America had lost their jobs since the crash of 2008. Pages were shrinking as quickly as pay rates. The only writers I knew who were still living from their words were making half what they had before the collapse. I had stopped being surprised by editors asking journalists to write for free, or by the lack of good coverage of urgent global affairs.

  I was focused now on writing this book, on teaching, and on a life that had opened in the wake of everything falling apart. I had moved to an island in the Pacific Northwest, having met someone new—this time a writer. As always I rarely discussed my personal life with Ahlam but now it was for different reasons: while my life had moved on, for her the past few years had not been easy. She had resigned from the Iraqi Mutual Aid Society, had had surg
ery on her back after a fall, and her children were growing up fast.

  I’d spent time with them over the past week, delighted by how they had matured. Abdullah, tall and strapping, was studying math and computer science in college while working at the fashion retailer Forever 21—he kindly offered to let me use his employee discount. He was proud to be helping out his father, who was driving taxi, while Roqayah helped her mother (it was she who cooked for all of us).

  About to turn seventeen, Roqayah was an honours student in Advanced Placement classes, studying madly for the SAT exams, helped by a coach Ann had hired. After school and on weekends she worked long hours at Jimmy John’s, a sandwich chain.

  She had gone from seeing herself as the “refugee girl,” to volunteering as a mentor for other young refugees. She was still thinking pre-med but was also interested in history, French and current affairs, and unwound from her late-night shifts at Jimmy John’s by watching Orange Is the New Black on Netflix, which she admired for its take on gender and diversity.

  She was finally ready to tell me what had happened to her and her brother after their uncle Salaam’s arrest. I knew that their father, from Baghdad, had made arrangements to have them smuggled home, after Syrian agents returned to the apartment with guns drawn, asking after other members of Ahlam’s family. Shortly after that, Abdullah and Roqayah were told to pack their bags. An old friend of their father’s drove them to an empty road on the outskirts of Damascus, where the three of them waited until a bus pulled up. The man left them in the care of the driver, who was going to help them get through the frontier.