Places and Names

by Elliot Ackerman

  Peasants to nobles, all are taken indiscriminately by death.

  Standing in the Prado as a boy, I could not comprehend Bruegel’s vision. I remember the confusion I felt, and I recognize the same incomprehension expressed on the dead faces of the children in Ghouta.

  * * *

  Video of the victims creates an international outcry: the British, the Canadians, the Germans, and dozens of other countries condemn the attacks. French president François Hollande proclaims, “France is ready to punish those who took the heinous decision to gas innocents.” German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle says, “Germany will be among those that consider it right for there to be consequences.” After two summers of fighting, it seems the West will intervene against the Assad regime. Ghouta has created an opportunity for action. An international flotilla of warships is dispatched to the Mediterranean and Red Seas, positioned to strike. The beleaguered Free Syrian Army, long the West’s best hope for establishing a democratic and secular new Syria, redoubles its calls for support: We need weapons, we need money, we need the military might of the great democracies. This is the moment. The rebel’s champions must take up their cause.

  Soon there are questions: Why would Assad launch the sarin? Surely he knows a chemical attack will elicit a response from the West; there are other, less objectionable ways for him to kill a few hundred of his citizens, and President Obama has long been clear about his red line. The American public remembers its last war fought on the pretense of weapons of mass destruction. Domestic support for a military response is tenuous. Could the rebels, desperate and fatigued from two years of fighting, have engineered this attack to force an intervention? And who are the rebels? Reports circulate that their ranks have become riddled with foreign jihadists: Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham, Liwa Ahrar Souriya. We know so little about these groups. If we arm the revolutionaries, will we arm the jihadists as well?

  The warships are poised. A hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles have been assigned targets inside Syria, their trajectories set. Then days pass. A debate.

  On the pages of major newspapers, these questions are asked. The legislative chambers of the Western powers are scheduled to convene. Intelligence agencies spill out fragmented reports: no one has an answer, no one knows. So few have traveled there. After Ghouta, the voices demanding action are at their strongest yet: The Islamists hold little sway. We can work with the moderate rebels. The revolution isn’t over. The revolution can be won.

  But support crumbles abroad. British prime minister David Cameron holds a vote in Parliament, a motion to intervene in Syria: it is struck down. French president François Hollande’s ministerial cabinet presents him with successive polls showing nearly 70 percent of his people are against an intervention: he won’t commit without broader international support. President Obama’s allies fall away. Ten days after the attack in Ghouta, he stands alone in the Rose Garden, flocked by the White House press corps. Though he has the authority to act, he announces he will take the matter of intervention to a Congress known for indecision: “While I believe I have the authority to carry out this military action without specific congressional authorization, I know that the country will be stronger if we take this course, and our actions will be even more effective.”

  The same weekend as President Obama’s remarks, editorials for or against intervention run in the press alongside maps of Syria with the positions of moderate rebels and Islamists drawn out in straight lines, which are as neat and understandable as the borders created by Sykes-Picot, the treaty which drew the modern Middle East after the First World War. Monday is Labor Day; on Tuesday the Senate convenes. Along an oak dais, thick like a barricade, perch members of the Foreign Relations Committee. The arguments begin.

  Present in the chamber are two iconic veterans of America’s war in Vietnam: Secretary of State John Kerry and Senator John McCain. Kerry sits beneath the senators, at a conference table. He knows this chamber well, having served here for twenty-eight years. He first came not as a senator but as a witness, to testify. He was twenty-seven years old then. He wore the shirt from his military fatigues, his thick pompadour combed to the side, his many commendations for valor pinned to his chest, speaking out against US policy in Vietnam. “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” he had said.

  Kerry finishes his opening remarks, making the case for an intervention against the Assad regime. A shrill cry erupts behind him, a protestor from the liberal activist group Code Pink: “The American people do not want this! We don’t want another war!” A gavel drops and drops again as pleas for order roll across the floor. Then Kerry interjects: “The first time I spoke before this committee . . . I had feelings very similar to that protestor, and that is why it is so important we’re all here, having this debate, talking about these things before the country.” The senators cycle through their questions. They challenge Kerry on whether the United States will eventually commit ground troops, on whether a limited strike against Assad might further entrench him, on whether America’s interests even extend to Syria.

  Then it is McCain’s turn: “Over the weekend the Wall Street Journal ran an important op-ed. . . . I hope you saw it.” He begins to read, summarizing its arguments, which fall in a quick succession across the chamber: the resistance in Syria is not dominated by Islamist die-hards, the Free Syrian Army continues to lead the fight against the regime, they’ve demonstrated a willingness to submit to civilian authority. McCain has famously seen the worst of war, held captive in a North Vietnamese prison camp for five and a half years, his legs broken, his wounds infected. When it comes to matters of peace and war, both he and Kerry speak with credibility.

  McCain finishes reading. He looks to Kerry. “John, do you agree?” Kerry nods, and adds, “The fundamentals of Syria are secular and I believe will stay that way.” McCain leans over his microphone, cutting off Kerry. “I think it’s very important to point out again, as you just said: it’s a secular state. They would reject radical Islamists.”

  After a few hours, the hearing concludes.

  A vote is taken.

  Senate Joint Resolution 21, Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against the Government of Syria to Respond to Use of Chemical Weapons, passes the Senate.

  * * *

  Long before that summer, I would read the headlines coming out of Syria, I would follow the debates around intervention, and I would wonder what might happen. Increasingly, I found myself seeking out friends of mine from the Marines, like Mike, so I could see what they thought about the prospect of another Middle Eastern war. I sought them out like a sad case asking after an old girlfriend, as if I just wanted to know what she was up to, as if I just wanted to suck out that last little bit of marrow from a dead romance. Then I met Matt.

  It was the spring before the Ghouta attack, three months before the Senate debate. I was pressed into the D.C. Metro on the ride into work as I commuted to a government job that had once seemed important. My cell phone rang between stations. On the other end was an old family friend, a journalist who’d spent decades reporting on conflicts all over the globe. She spoke quickly, insisting that I meet Matt, who was in town for a couple of nights from Kabul. “You two will become friends,” she predicted as my train disappeared into another tunnel and our call lost service.

  He sat at a bar in Georgetown, the same one where I’d sat with Mike some weeks before. We talked about Iraq—where he had worked at the American University in Sulaimani—and about Afghanistan—where he currently worked at the American University in Kabul. He had other projects as well, most recently an effort to be the first American to visit with Taliban leaders in the Korengal Valley, also known as the “Valley of Death,” which US forces had ceded control of two years before. But he was done with Afghanistan. He was looking to move on.

  “To what?” I asked.

  “To Syria,” he said.

  Matt had saved up s
ome money—quite a bit, he explained. “I don’t spend much, living in these places,” he said. “But I’ve been paid a lot.” While we were on the topic of money, he described how much he had seen wasted by humanitarian aid organizations in both countries performing needs assessments, the studies used to allocate resources. “I’m thinking about starting a company in southern Turkey, along the border, that will bid on needs assessments inside of Syria. The place is like a black hole. Nobody really knows what’s going on.” His idea was simple: by hiring locally, by keeping his workforce lean, he could underbid the bloated aid agencies that were only beginning to work inside Syria.

  We talked about Iraq and Afghanistan, swapping stories of places—towns, villages, other valleys of death—intoning the familiar names like spells. Then he asked what I thought of his idea.

  The television above the bar was switched to the news. I couldn’t help but check the headlines as we spoke. Glancing up at them once more, I told him that if he started his company, I wanted to come—not to work, just to be there. He agreed, not needing to ask why, or at least not asking me to explain.

  * * *

  In the days after the Senate vote, Matt and I email constantly. I book my ticket to Gaziantep, where his offices will be based. “It’s going to be busy,” Matt writes, as we brace for what looks like another US war. The debate then moves from the Senate to the House of Representatives. President Obama has less support here: the Republicans control this chamber. The stakes are high: not only does the future of Syria’s moderate opposition hang in the balance, but also the credibility of a presidency that seems unable to garner support for its foreign policy. The Democratic whips maneuver, corralling votes in the House for the president’s motion to authorize force against the Assad regime. But the votes aren’t there.

  The debate is stalling in the House. President Obama can’t back down on eliminating Assad’s chemical weapons, but he can’t proceed with the use of force without congressional support. He is stuck. The rebels are stuck: the Western intervention they’ve fought the last two years to achieve will melt away unless Congress acts.

  It’s the Monday after the Senate vote. Secretary Kerry is in London, holding a press conference at the Foreign Office. “Is there anything Assad’s government can do to avoid an American attack?” shouts a journalist from the press pool. Kerry clutches the side of the dais, hangs his head, as if exhausted by the question, the debate, his inability to convince. He looks up. “Sure, he could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week.” Then Kerry throws his hands in the air. “Turn it over, all of it, without delay. . . . But he isn’t about to do it and it can’t be done.”

  Phones start ringing. Russia, Syria’s staunch ally and America’s old adversary, enters the fray. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, acting on President Vladimir Putin’s orders, makes an offer: the Russians will broker the destruction of Assad’s chemical weapons as Kerry suggests, negotiating a settlement that will avert war. They will save both the Syrian regime and the Americans from their predicament. What’s more, they will defuse the crisis that Ghouta has created. Crisis and opportunity, different words for the same thing: the Russians will eliminate the opposition’s opportunity for an intervention by the West. Putin achieves all this in one swift diplomatic coup.

  The moment for intervention has passed. The United Nations will take away Assad’s chemical weapons so he might continue to use other weapons to kill his people. Then the next year, in 2014, after the Democrats lose the Senate, Senator McCain will become the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, a position of enormous leverage. He will come to press for American support of the Syrian rebels with renewed gusto, perhaps even greater than before, as if he wants to expurgate his loss during the Ghouta debate.

  * * *

  A month after Putin’s intervention, I am traveling the road between Kilis and Gaziantep with Matt as we return from our first trip to the border. I’d taken some notes that morning, and as I review them, the image of the Syrian man, the serrated scar bisecting his flayed stomach, projects across my mind. And his shirt: “The Music Will Live Forever.” I return to that day long before, when I stood in the Prado as a boy. As the army of skeletons ravages the land, none are spared in Bruegel’s vision, except for one. In the bottom right corner of the painting, a smiling Death plays music from his lute while in front of him, for his entertainment, an unwitting fool plays along.

  THE FOURTH WAR

  AKÇAKALE

  The night before leaving the villa in Gaziantep, Abed and I had agreed: when I met Abu Hassar, we’d lie and tell him that I had been a journalist.

  The week before, Abed had taken a day trip to Akçakale refugee camp to check on conditions for one of SREO’s reports. The night he returned, I was washing dishes in the kitchen when he said, “I met a guy I think you should meet.”

  “Okay,” I replied, “who is he?”

  “He fought in Iraq for al-Qaeda,” answered Abed, “but I think you two would really get along.” Intrigued by the prospect, I agreed to return to Akçakale with Abed. But would Abu Hassar want to meet with a former Marine? That’s when we decided it’d be best to tell him I had spent my time in Iraq as a journalist, and see how our conversation went.

  We drive out of Gaziantep early in the morning. It is November, just above freezing. On the outskirts of town, we pick up a twenty-piece box of baklava—Abu Hassar’s favorite, I’m told. Then we take the autobahn, a newly completed feat of Turkish engineering, past the city of Şanlıurfa, toward the refugee camp in Akçakale, which is less than a mile from the border where Syrian artillery rounds occasionally land.

  “It’s going to make talking about Iraq a bit awkward,” I say, looking at Abed as he drives.

  As we struggle to break 130 kilometers per hour, our black Peugeot shakes like a space shuttle on reentry. Abed glances at me from behind his thin, wire-rimmed spectacles and shifts his eyes quickly back to the road. “Tell him you covered the war,” he says, his Damascene accent mixing with an English one, the result of time spent in London and a job he’d once held in the British Consulate’s cultural section.

  I know Abed is right. Abu Hassar and I are both veterans of the Iraq War, albeit different sides of that war, and even in the abstract, I feel a connection to him, but the hope that he’ll feel the same toward me could prove to be naive, even a bit delusional. Abed has explained to me how from 2005 to 2008, Abu Hassar ran guns and fighters across the Syrian border into al-Anbar Province for al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, right under the nose of Assad’s secret police, the mukhabarat. Then, in 2008, the mukhabarat caught him and threw him in jail for three years. He’d only been released when, in the wake of the revolution begun by democratic activists like Abed, Assad emptied the prisons of jihadists in 2011. Assad had hoped the jihadists would fight against him; a regime under siege by radical Islamists is more likely to garner international support than a regime under siege by democratic activists.

  To Assad’s credit, it worked. Now many of Abu Hassar’s old jihadi friends are members of Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS, the most hard-line and controversial groups in Syria. And Abed, my friend the democratic activist, isn’t an activist anymore. He holds down his day job at SREO, and like me, he occasionally files a news story and calls himself a journalist. Who’s to say he isn’t? Most major papers have shuttered their international bureaus. They rely on freelancers who, for two hundred dollars and a byline, turn in a thousand-word dispatch—far cheaper than keeping someone on staff.

  After two hours, we exit the autobahn onto an old and broken road. Abed slows our Peugeot, dodging potholes, driving carefully in the morning rain. My mind churns over the questions I’ll ask Abu Hassar. To settle my thoughts, I look out the window. The road is straight and flat. In the distance are the wet hills of Syria’s Ar-Raqqah governorate. Between the hills and us, soggy fires burn the bare cotton stalks of an early winter harvest.
Bales are stacked in the fields among clods of wet earth. Flecks of cotton rise in the hot air and make little blazes here and there. They look like fireflies in the day.

  One of our windshield wipers has broken. It stutters across the glass. Fortunately, it is the one in front of me, and Abed can still see well enough to drive. He points ahead of us. I lean my head over the gearshift to get a look. Like a dirty lake seen from far off, Akçakale refugee camp sits low and gray in the distance. It takes shape as we approach, its tents hung like pavilions behind a thin barbed-wire fence. The pattern reminds me of an empty egg carton expanding for miles on end. Soon I make out dark figures wandering between the camp and the road’s shoulder, where they draw rainwater from a ditch.

  We pull over, near a cement blockhouse. I move the box of baklava off the back seat and hold it in my lap. Gaziantep is famous for its baklava, and this batch of twenty was expensive. It even came with its own wood-handled carrying case.

  Abu Hassar doesn’t own a cell phone, a precautionary habit from his jihadi days, so Abed calls Abu Hassar’s brother, Abu Ali, who runs a shop out of the blockhouse in front of us. But Abu Ali isn’t picking up, and Abed seems in no hurry to walk inside and start asking after either of the brothers.