Black Flags

by Joby Warrick

  “The country’s problems were being exacerbated by a general impression that Damascus elites were literally making out like bandits,” said Hof, recalling his thinking at the time. “The president had spoken about reform and so forth, and people thought, inshallah, maybe he’ll do something.

  “If he had handled reform and protests smartly, he could have had himself crowned emperor of Syria,” Hof said.

  Instead, with brutal displays of force—nearly all of it captured on cell-phone cameras—the Syrian leader managed to unite much of the country against him. He still controlled considerable assets. Of twenty-one million Syrians, Assad could reliably depend on members of his minority Alawite sect, which controlled the country’s elite army divisions and the security services. The remaining 87 percent of the population would have to be bought off or subdued. But how long could that last?

  Not long. That was the consensus view of White House officials who watched Syria implode in the spring and summer of 2011. By April, Assad was deploying army troops against unarmed civilians. By May, tanks barricaded the main squares of Hama, and snipers picked off individual protesters from rooftops. The demonstrations cooled for a while, then roared back to life in the early summer, seemingly unstoppable.

  “The early intelligence was that Syria’s ‘spring’ was not likely to go anywhere—it would be killed in the crib, and in a vicious way,” said a senior U.S. official who monitored the daily cable traffic from Damascus. “Then the conventional wisdom shifted quickly. It went from ‘Nobody could get rid of Assad’ to ‘There’s no way to stop these people.’ ”

  —

  Robert Ford could not sit still. In twenty years of assignments in the Middle East, he had never failed to find a path to the turbulent center of whatever crisis happened to be unfolding in his host country. It was about to happen again in Syria, this time in a way that would capture the attention of millions of people and put the United States clearly on the side of the demonstrators—or so it seemed to the Syrians themselves.

  Ford would admit to no particular bias, but in fact he owed a debt to ordinary citizens of Syria for kindnesses shown to him nearly three decades earlier. In 1983, Ford, then a skinny twenty-five-year-old student of Arabic with a mop of curly brown hair, made his first trip to Syria during a break in classes at the American University in Cairo. He and a schoolmate traveled by bus from Amman to Damascus and arrived in the Syrian capital very late, after most of the shops were closed. The city was packed with Iranian visitors on holiday, and the two Americans were turned away by one hotel after another. Just as they were resigning themselves to a night on the street in a strange city, a friendly hotel clerk called them over.

  “You’ll never find a hotel this late at night,” the man said to the two dirty, road-weary foreigners. “Sleep at my house tonight, and I’ll bring you back here early tomorrow.”

  Minutes later, the two youths were in the modest apartment where the man lived with his family. Though it was past midnight, the Syrian prepared a small supper, and the three stayed up talking for hours. When it was time to sleep, the host apologized for not inviting the Americans to stay longer. “If you stay more than tonight, I will have the secret police knocking at my door tomorrow,” he explained.

  Other Syrians Ford encountered were equally warm. Just days before, an American warship had shelled a Syrian troop position in the hills above Beirut. Yet, when Ford found himself on a bus filled with Syrian soldiers, he was treated with a graciousness that still stuck with him decades later. “Welcome!” the troops said after discovering two Americans on the crowded bus. Some gave up their seats for the foreigners, and others peppered them with questions about dating rituals and whether all American women were like the ones on the hit TV show Baywatch. In a more serious moment, one of the officers in the group pulled Ford aside to make a request.

  “When you get back to America,” the officer said, “tell them we are not barbar”—barbarians.

  Some twenty-eight years later, the government’s barbar were loose in cities throughout Syria, snuffing out ordinary lives. The working-class Syrians whom Ford had admired when he was a young man were organizing into neighborhood defense committees, the precursors of rebel militias. For now, nearly all the killing was being committed by one side, and it was hard to be dispassionate, even for a neutral diplomat whose job was to appeal to both sides for restraint. Whatever his personal feelings, Ford could not stray beyond the script approved by Washington, which, in the midsummer of 2011, was sharply divided over what to say. President Obama had not yet called on Assad to resign, as he had done more promptly in the cases of Mubarak and Qaddafi. Among some of the president’s aides arose new worries that the Syrian regime could suddenly collapse on itself before the U.S. administration could take a stand. The timing was critical: During Egypt’s uprising, Arab leaders lambasted Obama for symbolically abandoning Mubarak, a longtime U.S. ally, while he remained the country’s legitimate head of state. On the opposite side were Egyptian protesters who accused the White House of acting cowardly, waiting until Mubarak was all but finished before publicly breaking with him.

  There were, however, ways to show support for peaceful protest without uttering a word. Since the early weeks of the uprising, Ford’s senior staff had held low-key meetings with opposition leaders and posted carefully worded encouragement on the U.S. Embassy’s Facebook page. But Ford’s big gesture—the one that would infuriate the Assad regime and symbolically ally Washington with the protesters—grew out of a bid to prevent a massacre in Hama, a city in northwestern Syria where anti-Assad rallies were regularly drawing huge crowds. After weeks of clashes and scores of deaths, Assad fired the provincial governor on July 3, 2011, and deployed tanks and troops in rings around the city’s suburbs. An uneasy calm prevailed for three days, with large numbers of protesters occupying Hama’s center while Assad’s heavily armed security forces waited on the outskirts.

  Ford watched the standoff from afar before making his move. He dispatched to Hama one of his aides, a twenty-six-year-old woman who passed easily between the capital and the outlying cities, for a personal assessment of the demonstrators and their intentions. She came back with photos and an impressive report: tens of thousands of people were gathering in the city’s main plaza daily, and—contrary to Syrian media accounts of looting, vandalism, and kidnapping—the crowds were as well behaved as anyone could hope. Ford relayed the reports back to Washington.

  “They’re releasing doves in the air and selling flowers,” Ford said. “It’s entirely peaceful.”

  But from the suburbs came ominous signs of preparations for battle. Intelligence reports suggested that Assad had decided to send his tanks into the city with the intention of smashing the opposition movement and turning Hama into an example for the rest of the country. Until now, Assad had simply ignored U.S. and European entreaties to exercise restraint. But as he watched the preparations, Ford wondered: would the Syrian leader risk an attack if he knew that a sitting U.S. ambassador was in the city to witness the outcome? Traveling uninvited to the uprising’s bloody epicenter would be seen as a provocation, so Ford resolved to keep the visit as stripped down as possible. There would be no events or speeches, just the silent witness of an American diplomat whose mere presence would attract attention far beyond the city’s borders.

  “I would just be there to watch,” Ford would later explain. “I’d have to be there myself, because otherwise it wasn’t going to have any credibility.”

  On the morning of July 7, without a word to the Syrian authorities or his own bosses, Ford climbed into an SUV with three of his staff and headed north in a tiny convoy that included Ford’s friend the French ambassador, Éric Chevallier. They crossed the ridge of stark brown hills above the capital and pushed onward through the lush farmland and ancient cities of the country’s northwestern heartland, heading toward Hama and what was certain to be a confrontation, though when it would occur or how it would unfold was anyone’s guess. It was f
ar from clear whether they would even make it to their destination. All along the 130-mile highway—and particularly on the approach to Hama—were security checkpoints, and at each one, police would want to know why two foreign diplomats were passing through their territory without prior clearance from Damascus. Even if Assad’s men allowed them to pass, there were no guarantees that Hama’s demonstrators would welcome a pair of uninvited emissaries from Western governments that many Syrians viewed with suspicion and even hostility.

  Yet the startled guards simply waved the travelers through. Hours after setting out, Ford’s tan SUV pulled safely into central Hama and past large crowds milling around the city’s Assi Square. The city’s center had a jubilant feel, as though liberation had already occurred. Someone had hung a huge purple banner from the town’s clock tower with the words “Long Live Free Syria—Down with Bashar al-Assad!” The troops, tanks, and even police remained behind their cordons in the suburbs; in central Hama, there was not a baton or uniform in sight.

  As planned, the two ambassadors checked in to a Hama hotel that would serve as a base during their visit. They visited a hospital to talk to workers caring for protesters injured in earlier clashes with police. Then they held a series of discreet meetings with opposition leaders, away from the glare of TV cameras. Ford, in his meetings, took pains not to overpromise, he recalled later. The important thing, he stressed, was to avoid violence.

  “If you become violent, we will not support you,” Ford said. Western intervention in Libya notwithstanding, no U.S. troops would be coming to the rescue if the Syrian opposition got itself into a war, he explained. “After the Iraq war, the last thing we’re going to do is send the military to Syria. It will never, ever happen.”

  The next day, a Friday, was the week’s big protest day. As Ford and Chevallier set out in their SUVs, they found the central plaza packed with people—one hundred thousand or even more, according to later estimates. The crowd was exuberant but orderly, until someone happened to recognize the diplomatic license plates on the tan vehicle working its way along the edges of the demonstration. The night before, Syrian television had broadcast a less-than-flattering report about an American delegation arriving in the country’s fourth-largest city.

  “The ambassador of America, in Hama!” one of the protesters shouted.

  Within seconds, the car was mobbed by cheering Syrians who pressed against the car until it could barely move. Onlookers threw rose petals and garlands until the driver had to stop and clear the windshield in order to proceed. A chant began from somewhere in the throng and quickly grew into a roar.

  “The people want to topple the regime!”

  Someone in the crowd captured the moment on a cell-phone video. Grown men leapt for joy, and others waved tree branches or tried to touch the car. Ford, wearing sunglasses, sat behind the driver, eyes straight ahead. He had intended only to bear witness, but now his visit itself had become an event. He directed his driver to leave the city as quickly as possible, but within hours the video shot by cell phone had flashed around the world—including in the Syrian capital, where an enraged Assad railed against Ford’s interference in an internal matter.

  “The presence of the U.S. ambassador in Hama without previous permission is obvious proof of the implication of the United States in the ongoing events, and of their attempts to increase tensions,” the regime said in a statement issued through the Foreign Ministry.

  The fuming from the capital was all but eclipsed by the jubilation in Hama, a city that was, at least for that brief moment, Syria’s first and only free province. A local organizing committee appointed a pair of civilian guards on motorcycles to serve as an official escort, parting the crowds so Ford’s SUV could safely navigate its way back to the Damascus highway. But in the center of town, the celebrating continued late into the evening without a pause, and the tanks in the suburbs stayed behind their lines. On this day, at least, Assad would hold his fire.

  —

  Three days later, Ford and his marines stood watch on the embassy’s top floor, waiting to see if the heaving rooftop door would hold. The feared backlash had come, and one of the targets, it now seemed clear, was Ford himself.

  The Alawite toughs—the same kind that traveled by bus to beat up protesters in cities around the country—continued in their quest to find things to smash. They ripped down the American flag from its rooftop mast, set fire to it, and raised a Syrian flag in its place. From the French Embassy came alarming reports of shots being fired. The assailants there used a battering ram to break into a garage, then proceeded to demolish the ambassador’s car. Three embassy workers were hurt in skirmishes before French guards let loose with a warning volley that scattered the mob.

  In Washington, the State Department’s Near East Division worked the phone lines, looking for anyone in the Syrian government who might possess an off-switch. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, furious, called a news conference to denounce the embassy assault and the Syrian leader presumed to be behind it. This time it was Clinton who veered off the White House script, with harsh words that stopped just short of demanding Assad’s ouster.

  “President Assad is not indispensable, and we have absolutely nothing invested in him remaining in power,” Clinton said, sounding out each syllable with an icy resolve. “From our perspective, he has lost legitimacy.” It was the first time any U.S. official had publicly challenged the Syrian leader’s right to rule.

  For whatever reason, the attacks in Damascus’s diplomatic quarter abruptly subsided. The police officers who had stood idle as rioters scaled the U.S. Embassy fence now busied themselves doing their jobs, shooing the assailants out of the embassy compound, though making no arrests. From the improvised defensive post on the embassy’s top floor, the sounds of conflict gradually softened until the compound was again quiet.

  When it was safe, embassy workers ventured outside to survey the damage. Detritus from the morning’s mayhem lay scattered everywhere: shattered glass, graffiti, rocks, and rotten fruit. The attackers had nearly destroyed the main entranceway, and had even managed to rip down the metal letters from the U.S. Embassy sign on the front gate. But the more serious scarring was harder to see. The government of Syria had allowed a mob to besiege the American diplomatic mission. And then, whether through inaction or by design, it had let the intruders rampage through the embassy grounds—a violation, in essence, of sovereign U.S. territory.

  But what to do about it? After the usual protests were lodged, the White House still had a significant card to play. President Obama had not yet uttered what his staff would call the “magic” words: “Assad must go.” Now the debate flared again over whether and when the United States would declare to the world that Assad’s expiration date had passed. The pressure for a vigorous U.S. response came from all quarters: from Congress, from Syrian exiles, from editorial writers, from staunch allies such as France. Nearly everyone saw the Assad government as a weak regime—far weaker, surely, than that of Egypt’s Mubarak, who had been dislodged from power in a month. Each day’s news brought fresh reports of trouble for Assad, from the defections of senior Syrian army officers to the rapid shrinking of the country’s foreign-currency reserves. There was a strong White House belief, as the Syria adviser Frederic Hof would later say, that Assad’s “days were numbered, and it was a very low number.”

  But what if Assad refused to leave? What, if anything, was the United States prepared to do? Hof was among a minority of senior advisers who worried that Assad’s exit would not be as quick as conventional wisdom suggested. If the Syrian president found a way to hang on, it would be the Americans who would be seen as weak.

  “The president doesn’t ‘do’ advice or opinions; if he says Assad should step aside, it’s our job to make sure the guy steps aside,” Hof would later explain.

  Obama did call for Assad’s resignation soon afterward, on August 18, 2011—five weeks after the embassy assault, and five months after Assad’s first attacks
on civilians—in a statement released in coordination with the leaders of France, Germany, and Britain.

  “We have consistently said that President Assad must lead a democratic transition or get out of the way,” Obama said. “He has not led. For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.”

  Administration officials later acknowledged that the president’s statement may have raised expectations for U.S. actions that were not explicitly promised. As Middle East governments teetered in early 2011, the White House found itself repeatedly thrust into the unaccustomed role of “arbiter for legitimacy for various leaders,” said Benjamin Rhodes, a former White House speechwriter who became Obama’s deputy national security adviser. In the case of Syria, Obama was personally appalled by Assad’s use of snipers and tanks to kill protesters. Rhodes described the president as “very disgusted by the behavior of the Syrian regime over a long period of time.” Obama felt compelled to put the United States on record as opposing Assad’s behavior, Rhodes explained, though it was clear to the White House that “we frankly do not have the available options, short of overwhelming intervention, to forcibly remove Assad from power.”

  At the time, little else seemed needed. “Everyone thought nature was going to take care of it,” said a senior administration official involved in the policy debates. “Assad would be gone, and very soon.”

  But Syria’s president had no intention of leaving, and he still had cards of his own to play. Though perhaps powerless to stop the uprising, Assad, in the summer of 2011, already had a plan in place to change radically what the fighting was about.