Places and Names

by Elliot Ackerman

  “I look like the Mahdi.”

  IN DARA’A, A SPARK AND FUEL

  ARABIA

  For a revolution to start, it needs a spark, and to spread, it needs fuel. In Syria both have origins in Dara’a, a remote, 3,500-year-old city in the south with fewer than a hundred thousand inhabitants. Dara’a sprouts out of the desert along the Yarmouk River, a tributary branching from the River Jordan that runs to its west. It is an unremarkable place, dusty and poor. Ramshackle tenements stack one upon the other, crowding the streets, their roofs littered with jerry-rigged antennae. Feral dogs roam alleyways that are dank with waste. When the revolution sparks here, Dara’a is saturated with internal refugees from Syria’s drought-ridden north, and just as Abu Hassar said, it all starts with the boys writing their messages in the street.

  * * *

  The spark: it’s February 22, 2011. Darkness has settled over the city. Six teenagers scribble graffiti on a school wall. “No teaching, no school, until the end of Bashar’s rule.” The Arab Spring began in the winter, just weeks before, when the twenty-six-year-old Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi immolated himself in protest after his cart and scales were confiscated by a corrupt government official, and so tonight the boys’ actions in Dara’a are laden with Bouazizi’s. Another of their messages is less lyrical; it simply reads, “Leave, Bashar.” Before they can finish, the boys are arrested. But who catches these nascent revolutionaries? The mukhabarat? Or perhaps the shabiha, those steroid-pumping paramilitaries whose name means “ghosts” and whose loyalty to the government is only surpassed by their loyalty to the Assad family itself?

  It’s neither of these.

  A school guard catches the boys. And this leads to the roundup of fifteen others. They are just teens, but weeks later they haven’t been released. Their families petition the local government but to no result. “Forget them,” one official says. “If you really want your children, you should make more children. If you don’t know how to make more children, we’ll show you how to do it.” Facing such insults, what’s left to do? On March 20, a contagion of anger spreads into the streets of Dara’a, arriving on the doorstep of the al-Omari mosque, built by the grandsons of the Prophet himself, its ancient minaret not cylindrical but famously square. Two years later, after the revolution has metastasized into a war, the regime will destroy this minaret, but now, in its shadow, the police confront hundreds of protestors.

  Demonstrations are not without precedent in autocratic Syria: the Kurds in 2005, the Druze in 2000, and as far back as 1982, when Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez, massacred up to forty thousand citizens and members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama. Will this be different? The police kill four protestors. Still, this is nothing new, and when protestors burn the local police station, killing seven officers, this too does not signal the inevitable revolution. So what is the spark? It begins in Dara’a but catches in Damascus, just a few days later, when the people fill both the streets and their throats with these words: “Dara’a is Syria.”

  To become a flame, a spark needs fuel, and a century’s worth of resentment can also be traced to Dara’a.

  * * *

  The fuel: on the morning of November 20, 1917, two men in flowing dishdashas dismount a pair of camels several miles outside of Dara’a. One is an Arab rebel, a bedouin wanderer of little renown, and the other is a British Army officer, Major T. E. Lawrence—or Lawrence of Arabia, as he will famously become known. He has ridden to Dara’a to conduct a reconnaissance of the city’s strategic railway junction. For the past year he has played a key role advising the Arab tribes that have revolted against their Ottoman Turkish rulers. The tribes envision a pan-Arabic state, and their leader, Emir Faisal, has successfully united both Sunni and Shiite Muslims to this end. The enemy of my enemy is my friend—so it is and always will be—and with the First World War entering its third year, the Arabs have secured a promise from the British government: help us defeat our common Turkish adversary and if we are victorious you will be rewarded with an independent Arab state.

  Straddling the railway tracks north of the city, Lawrence and his Arab companion set out on foot. For the past year they have fought an irregular and mobile war. Mounted on camels, the insurgent Arabs have raided garrisons and demolished railways and bridges, ravaging supply trains and turning the Turkish rear area into a frontline. If nearly a year of these attacks has taken a toll on the Turks, the year has also taken a toll on the rebels. Lawrence confides in a letter, “I’m not going to last out this game much longer: nerves going and temper wearing thin. . . . This killing and killing of Turks is horrible.” But in addition to the killing, Lawrence is burdened by something else, a secret he carries: the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

  A year and a half before Lawrence wanders the train tracks on his reconnaissance of Dara’a, Briton Sir Mark Sykes and French diplomat François Georges-Picot negotiate that in the event of an Allied victory, Arabia will not be for the Arabs, as Lawrence has promised, but will be partitioned into British and French colonial mandates. These secret boundaries draw the lines of present-day Iraq, Syria, and Jordan, carving modern-day discontent into the Middle East with ruler-straight borders that disastrously sever the irregular borders of tribe, religion, and ethnicity. For Lawrence this agreement makes his assurances to Emir Faisal and the united tribes of the Arab Revolt a lie. Lawrence walks the rail line toward Dara’a alongside his Arab companion, burdened by a year’s slaughter and the coming betrayal.

  The plan had been to scout the tracks leading to Dara’a, but Lawrence brazenly decides to wander into the center of town so he might get a better look at its rail complex. He will hide in plain sight, for who would expect a British Army officer dressed in Arab garb to stroll through the garrisoned streets of Dara’a? The morning’s reconnaissance proceeds without incident, but just outside of Dara’a Lawrence strolls past a Turkish army encampment. Who are these two wanderers? And who is this fair-skinned one with blue eyes claiming Circassian descent to explain his whiteness? Lawrence is detained, but his Arab companion is set free.

  What happens next is widely disputed among historians, some believing Lawrence’s retelling of events and others questioning the accuracy of his account. What seems certain is that the next twenty-four hours forever alter Lawrence, as if the cynicism and brutality he’s been surrounded by—the savagery of irregular war, the betrayal embedded in the Sykes-Picot agreement, the dismissiveness of an often-unsupportive British high command—finally erode the optimism fueling his revolt. According to Lawrence, after his capture a Turkish sergeant delivers him to the district governor in Dara’a, a fearsome pederast named Hajim Muhittin. In Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence’s classic recounting of the Arab Revolt, he describes the sexual abuse and torture that follows in five explicit and agonizing pages, with passages detailing how the guards “knelt on my ankles, bearing down on the back of my knees, while two more twisted my wrists till they cracked.” A blow to the groin “doubled me half-over, screaming, or rather, trying impotently to scream, only shuddering through my open mouth.”

  After his rape in Dara’a at the hands of Hajim Muhittin, Lawrence is left for dead, allowing him to escape into the desert, where he rendezvouses with his companions. Years on, in 1924, when corresponding with his confidante Charlotte Shaw, the wife of author George Bernard Shaw, Lawrence writes of Dara’a, “About that night. I shouldn’t tell you, because decent men don’t talk about such things.”

  Though the Arab Revolt continues for almost another year, that night forever marks Lawrence. Ten months later, just weeks before the end of the war, when a column of four thousand Turks and Germans are retreating from Dara’a past the neighboring town of Tafas, Lawrence orders the Arabs under his command to show “no quarter,” and he personally supervises the execution of 250 surrendering soldiers. “Then we turned our Hotchkiss [machine gun] on the prisoners and made an end of them, they saying nothing,” Lawrence details in his official report.
But the events in Dara’a alone are not what seem to take the decency out of the Arab Revolt. Three days after Lawrence’s rape, on November 23, 1917, the newly established Bolshevik government in Russia reveals the full text of the Sykes-Picot agreement in the newspapers Izvestia and Pravda. The exigencies of war will keep Emir Faisal and the Arab tribes fighting on the side of the Allies, but the resentment of their deception and the disastrous carving up of the Middle East to follow become the earliest fuel for the revolution’s spark nearly a hundred years later.

  * * *

  For a revolution to succeed, the ideals that disrupt the status quo must then become the status quo. This is the point of failure in many uprisings. And it is the point of failure in the Arab Revolt. In 1919, just months after the end of the First World War, Emir Faisal joins Lawrence in Versailles at the Paris Peace Conference to advocate for a pan-Arab state, but in Versailles and in a handful of conferences hosted by colonial powers—San Remo and Cairo—the ideal of pan-Arabism slips away. Sykes-Picot becomes a reality when the British and French cleave the two largest Arab states, Syria and Iraq, out of the lands Faisal once hoped to unite. Acting in defiance, the Syrian Arabs unilaterally proclaim Faisal their king, but both the British and French immediately repudiate this bid for sovereignty. The French assert their mandate over Faisal’s independent Syria. Then Faisal marshals an army against them. But after a swift battlefield defeat on a plain of dust ten miles outside of Damascus, he flees to London, taking shelter among the British, who refused to aid him against this French aggression.

  Faisal’s reign over Syria lasts four months.

  The onetime revolutionary and unifier of Arabs is now an exile, betrayed and then defeated by his old allies. But within the year, the British face unrest in their new mandate of Iraq. In July 1920, the same month Faisal loses his crown in Syria, a revolt against the British begins in Mosul, spreading south along the Euphrates river valley. With their mandate in Iraq crumbling, the British need a strongman who can corral the dissident tribes. Lawrence advocates that his old friend Faisal is just such a leader. Though Faisal is virtually unknown in the new kingdom of Iraq, this hardly matters. Reliability of the man is what’s most important. Faisal has learned a lesson in realpolitik, the consequences of acting against British and French interests.

  Pragmatic as he’s become, Faisal still maintains a certain credibility among Arabs for his leadership in their revolt. With the help of the British, he campaigns among the Iraqis for their support, and within five months a plebiscite—sponsored by the British—unsurprisingly shows 96 percent of Iraqis support Faisal’s ascendance to the throne. Thus, in August 1921, thirteen months after losing an independent kingdom in Syria, Faisal is granted a client kingdom in neighboring Iraq. He forms a dynasty that will rule for nearly forty years, until in 1958 a military coup d’état led by Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim ousts Faisal’s successors. In the turmoil that follows, a young political operative attempts to assassinate Brigadier Qasim the very next year. That operative’s name is Saddam Hussein. Within the decade his Ba’ath Party will rise, and for the remainder of the century a string of strongmen nominally allied with the West will rule in Arabia. Yet the original Arabian strongman was also its original revolutionary: Emir Faisal.

  * * *

  On June 29, 2014, three weeks after the Islamic State begins an offensive that annexes vast swaths of Iraq, its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, climbs the minbar in the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in the heart of newly captured Mosul, the same city where Iraqis first revolted against their British occupiers nearly one hundred years before. From this perch al-Baghdadi gazes over the assembled congregants. He wears a black robe and a black turban, the color worn by the Prophet Muhammad during his conquest of Mecca. An electric fan swirls behind him, and beneath the thick tufts of his beard a cluster of microphones are bundled, our only reminders that this image is not from 1,400 years ago. With a grandeur reminiscent of Napoléon’s self-coronation, al-Baghdadi has declared himself Caliph Ibrahim Amir al-Mu’minin, “Leader of the Faithful,” and he has also declared the establishment of a caliphate straddling present-day Iraq and Syria, stretching toward the Mediterranean Sea and closely matching the borders of the pan-Arab state advocated by T. E. Lawrence and Emir Faisal during their revolt. His remarks are awash with theological references, but when he speaks of the political, his words are meant for Western ears:

  We have now trespassed the borders that were drawn by the malicious hands in the lands of Islam in order to limit our movement and to confine us inside them. And we are working, Allah permitting, to eliminate them. This blessed advance will not stop until we hit the last nail in the coffin of the Sykes-Picot conspiracy.

  * * *

  But none of this has happened yet. I am in the car with Abed, our one windshield wiper creaking across the glass, driving back to Gaziantep after our meeting with Abu Hassar. Rain pelts the highway and the New Year, 2014, is only a month off. For a bit longer, the old borders will remain intact.

  EXPATRIATES

  GAZIANTEP, DAMASCUS, FALLUJAH

  The villa’s garret is cold, warmed insufficiently by a space heater. Timbers of untreated birch have been nailed into a crosshatch of rafters. Coarse notches in the wood protrude at odd intervals. From them I hang my gym shorts, a towel, a laundry bag. Beneath the rafters I have a bed, piled with a swirl of fleece blankets; also a chair and a desk that face a window, small as a ship’s porthole. My view is of Gaziantep’s pitched rooftops and a picket of minarets. A week before Christmas they are dusted with snow. Early each morning the muezzins call the first prayer. I am looking forward to sleeping past five a.m., to a few weeks home for the holidays.

  Matt is flying home as well, back to Boston. The office will shut down for some days, but Abed will stay. The regime searches for him in Damascus.

  More than a year ago, he was called into the army, to fight the rebels. That night the police came to his parents’ flat, a walk-up on Mushtahed Street. They carried Abed’s draft notice, but Abed wasn’t there. Two weeks before, he’d had an argument with his father, a civil servant turned grocery shop owner, who believed Abed’s activism was endangering their family. Terrorized by memories of the Hama Massacre in 1982, the tens of thousands of corpses, their arms and legs woven into a bloody carpet along that city’s streets, Abed’s father told him, “You couldn’t walk except by stepping on bodies. You want to take this journey? You will take it by walking over the bodies of your brothers and sisters.” Exhausted by such arguments, Abed left home, renting a room in Damascus’s old city. And the night when the police shouldered into his parents’ doorway, jabbering that the father must sign a receipt for the draft notice of his son, Abed’s father refused.

  He hung up the phone with his mother, who had told him he must go, and in his dimly lit room Abed packed a bag: two sets of clothes, a USB memory stick, a spiral notebook he’d used as a journal since the revolution’s outset, and three books—Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Obama’s Dreams from My Father, Dickens’s Oliver Twist. He had twenty-four hours, maybe less, before his conscription notice would flag his detention at the Lebanese border, just a two-hour drive away. But there was one last thing to do. He logged onto Facebook. His sanitized page revealed almost nothing of him: a fake name, archived messages from eighteen months of protests, a profile picture—not his face but a river at sunset. He typed out a quick note to Laetitia, a twenty-four-year-old Swiss woman whom he had met in Damascus the summer before the revolution, during a language exchange where for weeks they had wandered through the old city—the Souq al-Hamidiyya, Nasr Street, the Umayyad mosque—while he spoke Arabic to her so that she might speak French to him.

  “I have a problem,” he wrote her. “I must leave the country. I want you to know that I love you very much.”

  He hadn’t seen her since it all began, since everything changed, and though they were always in contact, he wondered about those changes. Six months before
, he’d asked her to marry him. He didn’t have a ring, or enough credit on his phone to even call her in Geneva, so he’d asked in an email. She hadn’t answered yet. With a proposal like this, what type of life could they expect? Though he still held out hope.

  He logged off and then left his apartment, locking the door behind him.

  When Laetitia wrote back, Abed wasn’t there to read her response: “I will light a candle for you.” And he wasn’t there to see her when she broke down and cried.

  Abed paid the taxi driver extra to sit in the front seat. Behind him were three others, none of whom he knew. They drove through the darkness, toward the crossing in a wisp of a town called Jdaidit. The taxi’s headlights scoured the empty road. They lulled Abed into near hypnosis. Like an athlete before competition, he rehearsed what was to come at the border. His imagination played out a terrifying scene: detention, conscription, torture. Burned onto the memory stick in the small front pocket of his jeans was evidence of his activities, enough to serve as a passport to prison. He took the memory stick from his pocket and slyly tucked it into the passenger-side door. The driver took his eyes from the road. His heavy-lidded gaze rested on Abed and he drove without looking. His stare was fixed, empty, and cold, as if careening into the open desert was an incidental danger when compared to the one Abed had presented him.

  “Put that back in your pocket,” the driver said.

  His voice stabbed and Abed did as he was told, but now he was doubly paranoid: he feared not only the incriminating documents he had sentimentally brought with him but also the suspicion he had incited in the driver. His imagination again played out the scene: the driver waving down a border agent, the two of them speaking and glancing in Abed’s direction, the seizure of his passport, his person searched, the incriminating evidence—the memory stick, the journal—and his impotent explanations for both.