A Disappearance in Damascus

by Deborah Campbell

  When they neared the border, the driver stopped the bus and pulled back his chair, revealing a secret compartment. The two children crawled inside. From the small, dark space they could hear the bus come to a halt, the murmur of voices as Iraqi officers came aboard and checked passports. Crushed together, barely able to breathe, they didn’t make a sound.

  On the long journey to Baghdad, traffic stopped and started. Sometimes the two of them crawled out and stood on the road together, staring at the night. An old woman spoke to them kindly. Finally two passengers got off. “I suggest you take those seats now; before someone else does,” the driver said. Abdullah slept by the window and his sister in the aisle seat. She didn’t wake until Baghdad. “Your dad’s here,” the driver said. As the two of them stepped out, they saw their father, who threw his arms around them.

  When the UNHCR called and told them to return to Damascus, the children still had no passports, and their father arranged to have them smuggled once again. Moving through Iraqi checkpoints they were hidden in the luggage compartment under the floor, and then, at the border, behind the driver’s seat. “I remember crying because I couldn’t breathe, and my brother was crying thinking they were going to find us.” The only thing that made it bearable was knowing their father was there with them on the bus.

  In the coming months she would write her college application essay on how growing up as a refugee of war had taught her the value of adaptation.

  —

  Ahlam had returned to therapy, but the back surgery had laid her up again, and with both of her children busy with school and work she was often alone with her two cats, Misha and Angel.

  In 2015 matters came to a crisis. On the ninth anniversary of their son Anas’s death, Ahlam’s husband held a memorial to which Ahlam and her dearest Chicago friends, Beth Ann, Ann and Zainab—an Iraqi pediatrician—were invited. Ahlam had argued, irrationally, that her husband should not speak about their son, not say his name. When he did, she fled the gathering and disappeared. She remembered little of what happened next. Everything went dark.

  When she didn’t answer her phone the next day, Beth Ann and Zainab came to find her. They rang the buzzer again and again, but she didn’t hear it. “It was Angel who woke me,” she told me—her blue-and-brown-eyed white Persian. Hearing the buzzer, Angel jumped up on the bed and kneaded her with her paws until she got up. She had been asleep for nineteen hours. Her friends phoned her therapist at the Kovler Center, who came over right away. I flew down when she called me.

  The wind was blowing strongly off the lake, spreading dandelion fluff and lifting sand from the hardpack. “Maybe this had to happen,” Ahlam said. “I had been carrying the burden for too long.” She was feeling buoyed by her brother Salaam’s arrival in Chicago the week before, his application for resettlement finally accepted. Ann had agreed to cover the rent on a three-bedroom apartment for the whole family for the coming year.

  She was back at work for a different aid organization. Most of the refugees she helped these days were Syrians, among the millions who had fled that ravaged country. When I asked her how Syrians spoke about the war, she said they didn’t. “It’s a wound.” She was more excited about a second job she had taken, driving for Uber on the early morning shift. “No four walls,” she said. “No one asking me for help with their problems.” She had always loved driving. Her passengers were usually heading to the airport. They were quiet, checking their phones, utterly incurious about the woman at the wheel.

  As Ahlam and I walked, we talked about Beth Ann and Ann, Zainab and Marianne. We had just been to Ann’s venerable art deco home on the outskirts of Chicago.

  “You remember what Khaled said about me?” Ahlam asked.

  I had told her I had interviewed Khaled Oweis, her friend at Reuters, who had fled Syria and was now working for a think tank in Berlin. “Yes. He said you had all the qualities associated with the great Iraqis, except you weren’t wealthy.”

  “Except I am wealthy,” she said. “I have so many good friends.”

  She took off her sandals when we passed from grass to beach. She was recalling her childhood. She had been telling her therapist about the day her father had taken her out into the open fields on her grandfather’s land. “Run,” her father told her. “Run! No one can stop you.”

  Her children were becoming Americans, but she, I thought, would always be an exile. She stood facing the water and opened her arms wide. She closed her eyes, remembering, and I could picture her on that open field, her father watching over her, the land warm beneath her feet. Around us thousands of birds on their annual migration raced along the shore.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This is a non-fiction book. No person or event has been invented. Some events appear out of sequence where strict chronology would be confusing; some people whose presence has no bearing on the story have been omitted. I have changed the names of many people in the book out of concern for their safety or the safety of their families. Given the number of articles and a documentary about Ahlam, and with her permission, I have used her real first name, though I have omitted her family name for their sake.

  To Ahlam I owe the largest debt of gratitude. She is one of those influential fixers and local experts, seldom visible despite their importance, who have done so much to show the world to itself. Thanks also to Abdullah, Roqayah and Salaam.

  I am grateful to the hundreds of Iraqis and Syrians who spoke to me, most of whom do not appear here, but whose testimonies greatly informed my observations. Thanks in particular to Rana, who lives in a suburb of Damascus to which she fled after her home was destroyed. To Kuki, who made it to New York. And Hamid, who succeeded in getting three of his grown children to the United States and now lives with his wife in Beirut. For their help in the field and beyond, thanks to Marianne Gimon, Alessandro D’Ansembourg, Gabriela Bulisova, Farah Nosh, Yasha Opera, Kate Brooks, and Michel Elefteriades, whose Empire of Nowheristan the world awaits. For patiently confirming and expanding upon details where I could not be present, thanks to Jason Pape, Adam Shilling, Stephen Glain, David Luhnow, Khaled Yacoub Oweis and Deborah Amos.

  Thanks to Harper’s magazine for the assignment that led to this book; to my agents Martha Webb and Anne McDermid; to my extraordinary editor Louise Dennys at Knopf Canada, and to Kate Icely and Angelika Glover; to the BC Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, and Access Copyright Foundation; to Alisa Smith, Ann Jones, Christy Fletcher and especially, always, Ronald Wright.

  NOTES

  1. A Pew Research Center study conducted in late 2007 of 111 journalists from twenty-nine news organizations (all but one US-based) who had worked or were working in Iraq found that a majority said most of the country was too dangerous to visit. More than seven out of ten said that travelling with chase cars and armed security details had become normal. Fifty-seven percent had had at least one of their Iraqi staffers kidnapped or killed over the previous year. “Welcome to the new world of journalism, boys and girls,” one bureau chief stated. “This is where we lost our innocence. Security teams, body armor and armored cars will forever now be pushed in between journalism and stories.” (See “Journalists in Iraq—A Survey of Reporters on the Front Lines.”)

  2. Ken Adelman, “Cakewalk in Iraq,” A27. Adelman was one of the neoconservative hawks behind the Iraq War. A member of the Pentagon’s influential Defense Policy Board, chaired by Richard Perle, he was close to Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. The latter four were key members of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a Washington-based think tank established in 1997. In They Knew They Were Right Jacob Heilbrunn writes: PNAC “was essentially a front organization to champion the democratic crusade, and specifically, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein” (217). Ten signatories to PNAC’s statement of principles went on to serve in the administration of George W. Bush; nine members of the Defense Policy Board had ties to defense contractors.

  On September 20, 2001, nine days after the attacks on the World Tr
ade Center and the Pentagon, a letter from PNAC signed by forty neoconservatives advised Bush that he had no choice but to remove Saddam Hussein from power “even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack.” On September 19–20, the Defense Policy Board, which included Henry Kissinger, met in Rumsfeld’s conference room at the Pentagon with Ahmed Chalabi, a wealthy Shia Muslim Iraqi exile and convicted embezzler who had met Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz in the 1980s while completing his PhD at the University of Chicago (ibid., 250). They had been introduced by leading neoconservative mentor Professor Albert Wohlstetter (ibid., 258), a Cold War theorist who was one of the models for the title character in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.

  Chalabi, tapped by Cheney and Rumsfeld to lead Iraq after Saddam Hussein, became a key source of the false allegations about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction that manufactured public support for the invasion. He later served as deputy prime minister of Iraq and was appointed by the Shia-led government to chair the highly destructive de-Baathification commission. As Jonathan Steele notes in the obituary for Ahmed Chalabi in the Guardian, “He used the position to purge hundreds of Sunni politicians who wanted to run for parliament in March 2010, thereby paving the way for the sectarian polarisation that provoked the emergence of the extremist Sunni group Islamic State.”

  3. Reported in the New York Times, CNN, the Guardian, and elsewhere. See, for example, Pamela Hess, “Rumsfeld: Looting Is Transition to Freedom,” April 11, 2003.

  4. Interview with Dr. Matanius Habib, 2007. He refuted the theory that terrorism has no roots in injustice. “The urgent task in front of the international community is to help the Iraqi refugees survive and raise their living standards. That will keep them from crime, terrorism and hate. If not, we will see instability and international terrorism that will affect not only the region but the developed countries.”

  5. The Office of Special Plans (OSP) was a shadow intelligence unit conceived by Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld to make the case for invading Iraq. Headed by Douglas Feith and reporting to Dick Cheney, the OSP manipulated raw intelligence in an attempt to show that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam Hussein had links to al-Qaeda, overriding more credible reports from the CIA and State Department. It relied on information provided by Ahmed Chalabi. (See Julian Borger, “The Spies Who Pushed for War,” and Seymour Hersh, “Selective Intelligence.”)

  The OSP was also involved in post-invasion planning. Paul Bremer’s orders to “de-Baathify” Iraqi society and disband the Iraqi army were made over objections from more experienced military and intelligence officials who warned of dangerous consequences. Bremer stated that on May 9, 2003, Douglas Feith showed him a draft order for the “De-Baathification of Iraqi Society.” Later that day he received his “marching orders” in a memo from Rumsfeld. (Paul Bremer, My Year in Iraq, 39, quoted in James P. Pfiffner, “US Blunders in Iraq,” 78.) That same day Rumsfeld approved a draft plan to disband Iraq’s security forces and recreate the Iraqi army from scratch. The plan was drafted by Walt Slocombe, a tax attorney who had previously held Rumsfeld’s job in the Clinton administration. Slocombe admits to drafting the policy but says, “it was made not only by Bremer but also by Wolfowitz and Feith and other people in the department, including, I assume, Rumsfeld.” (See “Where Did ISIS Come From?”)

  6. Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and head of the Office of Special Plans, worked on the de-Baathification plan with Ahmed Chalabi and presented it to President Bush on March 10, 2003, ten days before the invasion of Iraq. While Paul Bremer said that the order would affect only about 20,000 people, the total was between 85,000 and 100,000. According to former CIA director George Tenet, who resigned in mid-2004 for “personal reasons,” these included “forty thousand schoolteachers, who had joined the Baath Party simply to keep their jobs.” For an overview of the de-Baathification debacle, see Pfiffner, “US Blunders in Iraq,” 76–85.

  7. CPA, Order No. 2, Dissolution of Entities. While 500,000 is the number commonly cited, the full effect of the order was closer to 700,000. According to Thomas Ricks, this order formally terminated 385,000 people in the armed forces, 285,000 in the Interior Ministry, which included police and domestic security, and 50,000 in presidential security units (Fiasco, 162).

  8. See Ned Parker, “Saudis’ Role in Iraq Insurgency Outlined.” According to US military figures, the largest number of foreign fighters targeting US military and Iraqi civilians, some 45 percent, came from Saudi Arabia, as did the largest number of suicide bombers. Nearly half of the 135 foreigners in US detention facilities in Iraq were Saudi.

  9. See Juan Cole, “Brief History of Islamic State of Iraq.”

  10. Teru Kuwayama notes that fixers would have more “glamorous” job titles if they were North American or European. (“How to Shoot (and Not Get Shot) in a War Zone.”)

  11. A Collection of Essays, 312–313. Orwell goes on to state that “all writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery.” (Ibid., 316)

  12. David Kilcullen and Nate Rosenblatt offer a useful overview of the way mass rural migration to Syria’s cities “driven by economic necessity and persistent drought” created a vast urban underclass that formed the basis of domestic Syrian resistance to the regime. Such urban villagers do not have the means to wait out the war abroad. They accommodate foreign-funded Islamic militant groups because the Islamists have the money and training to provide economic necessities, services and law enforcement. As the authors note, armed groups have otherwise devoted as much time to fighting one another as they do the Syrian government. “Neighborhood gangs run rampant. Lawlessness is rife. Warlordism is on the rise.” These factors help explain why extremists, including al-Qaeda–linked groups and offshoots such as Islamic State, are thriving: they are well-funded, well-armed and the “least corrupt organizations among opposition groups.” (“The Rise of Syria’s Urban Poor,” 33–41.)

  13. Sunni Arabs account for 60 to 65 percent of the rank-and-file of the Syrian army, a near precise correlation to their 65 percent of the total Syrian population. This is a strong indicator of the class-based nature of the conflict. One reason for the high Sunni Arab representation in pro-government forces is the perception of opposition Sunnis as rural, religious and poor, thus having little in common with urban, educated Sunnis. Another reason is their fear of the radical Sunni Islamists who dominate the opposition. If the civil war in Syria was truly sectarian, Syria’s Sunnis would abandon the army and the government would fall. See Chris Zambelis, “Syria’s Sunnis and the Regime’s Resilience.”

  14. It is a common misconception that all Alawites, who make up about 12 percent of the Syrian population, benefited from the Assad rule. This was not the case. Most Alawites are poor and suffered the same state repression as other groups. They have supported the state rather than the opposition out of fear of Sunni jihadists, who consider Alawites to be heretics and massacre them. Nevertheless Alawites have expressed anger at the stunning death toll of Alawites serving in the Syrian army. Pro-government fighters have suffered the largest proportion of casualties in Syria, according to the opposition Syrian Network for Human Rights. By 2015, as many as a third of the 250,000 Alawite men of military age were dead. See Lauren Williams, “Syria’s Alawites Not Deserting Assad Yet, Despite Crackdown,” and Ruth Sherlock, “In Syria’s War, Alawites Pay Heavy Price.”

  15. For an in-depth exploration of the outsiders who “hijacked” the Syrian revolution, see Hugh Roberts, “The Hijackers,” 5–10.

  16. Robert L. Bateman, “Iraq and the Problem of Border Security,” 41–47.

  17. See Shane Harris and Matthew M. Aid, “CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran.”

  18. See Roger Morris, “A Tyrant 40 Years in the Making.” Morris documents the first American regime change in Iraq in 1963, when the CIA under President John F. Kennedy orchestrated the overthrow of Iraqi prime minister Abdel Karim Kassem in collab
oration with Saddam Hussein. “Washington’s role in the coup went unreported at the time and has been little noted since. America’s anti-Kassem intrigue has been widely substantiated, however, in disclosures by the Senate Committee on Intelligence and in the work of journalists and historians like David Wise, an authority on the CIA.” Kassem, who had overthrown the Western-allied Iraqi monarchy in 1958, was regarded by Washington as a “dangerous leader who must be removed.” In the early 1960s, the CIA organized regime opponents, backing a small anti-Communist group, the Baath Party. “According to the former Baathist leader Hani Fkaiki, among party members colluding with the CIA in 1962 and 1963 was Saddam Hussein, then a 25-year-old who had fled to Cairo after taking part in a failed assassination of Kassem in 1958.” The coup began on February 8, 1963, culminating in Kassem’s execution. “Almost certainly a gain for our side,” Robert Komer, a National Security Council aide, wrote to Kennedy. In the purge that followed, the Baathists systematically murdered Iraqi elites suspected of communist sympathies using lists the CIA provided. The follow-up 1968 coup that brought Saddam Hussein closer to ultimate power was also backed by the CIA.

  19. Souad Al-Azzawi, “Decline of Iraqi Women Empowerment Through Education Under the American Occupation of Iraq 2003–2011.” Iraqi associate professor Souad Al-Azzawi notes that prior to the First Gulf War in 1991 women made up more than 30 percent of faculty members in Iraqi universities and research centres in Iraq and two-thirds of all teaching staff in primary and secondary schools. Since 2003, with kidnappings and assassinations of academics, teachers, health care specialists and other professionals, “it has become really hard for women to keep up their jobs and education status.”

  20. Phil Williams, “Criminals, Militias, and Insurgents: Organized Crime in Iraq.”

  21. Stephen Glain, “The Arab Street,” 172–173.