In the Lion's Den

by Andrew Tabler

  Things soon turned sour. Protesters began throwing office paraphernalia from the Danish embassy into the crowd. Suddenly, black smoke began billowing, as the protesters set the Chilean embassy on the first floor ablaze. I immediately looked at the security forces gathered in front of the church. They were still standing around, still only smoking cigarettes. More flames shot out of the embassy, and the crowd erupted in approval. I tried to push my way toward Leila, who was in front of the church beside the security services. I spotted something square and flat resembling a pizza box sailing through the air—it looked as if it might hit me. As I ducked, the object hit a number of protesters. They tore the package apart, only to find a plastic raincoat with a company logo on the breast. People tried to rip it apart, found it too tough, stepped on it, and just let it lie on the ground.

  The mob rage didn’t seem too convincing. In fact, people seemed to be just enjoying the spectacle. It was hard to move through the dense crowd, but a simple pat on the back and a murmured “afwan” (sorry) allowed me to pass. Few, at least so it seemed, gave me a second look. When they did, they gave a little smile when I started taking photos. They want me to see this, I thought.

  After about ten more minutes of struggling and frantic phone calls, I finally reached Leila and some friends in front of the church.

  “What’s with them?” I asked.

  “Come on, Andrew, mukhabarat is controlling everything,” one of her friends said with a patronizing look on her face.

  I hadn’t dared talk to anyone in the crowd, but now with Leila at my side, we could play Local Reporter, Foreign Journalist without much trouble. Leila began asking people questions, and I started taking photos.

  “Inti ajnabiya?” (Are you a foreigner?), a group of male protesters asked Leila. Her physical features are very Syrian, including olive-brown skin; brown, curly hair; and brown eyes to match. Leila was wearing jeans and a jacket but was hardly the only one in the crowd in Western-style clothing. Why are they asking her if she is foreign? I thought.

  “Ana arabiya” (I am an Arab), Leila replied. In Syrian speak, this means “I am first an Arab, then a Syrian, then a Muslim.” They then glanced at me and looked down before starting what seemed a rehearsed tirade.

  “America is behind this [cartoon],” said one of the group, a forty-year-old man named Mohammed. “We are here to express our anger.” He then looked at me a bit sheepishly. I snapped a photo.

  “But Denmark is in Europe. The European Union helps Syrian reform. What do you think of that?” Leila said.

  “The government has its policy,” Mohammed said. “The people are here to defend the Prophet and express their anger.”

  Pretty lame, I thought, but interesting. Mohammed was making a distinction between the state and religion. In the past, acting publicly on behalf of religious sentiments could have got you thrown in jail. In 1982, it also could have got you killed or “disappeared” during the state’s battle with the Muslim Brotherhood.

  Moving on, we stopped three other middle-aged men—including one wearing a green Islamic headband—to ask what brought them out into the street.

  “Down with the Baath Party!” the men exclaimed. Leila raised her eyebrows; here in the land of the Assad family’s Baath Party, I knew that she hadn’t heard that shouted before in public. They didn’t seem nervous at all, and they let me take their photos. When Leila asked them their names, they just continued shouting, “Down with the Baath Party!” and walked off.

  Islamic protesters openly calling for destruction of the Baath Party? I thought. Contemplation of the deeper meaning of what I had just heard was interrupted when fire trucks turned up—much too late to save the Danish embassy. They rolled through the crowd so lazily that they eventually coasted to a stop. No firemen were in sight. Protesters just used the trucks as observation decks for the spectacle. A red station wagon arrived—one of the well-known “protocol” cars that direct traffic for President Assad in the Syrian capital. It blew its siren once, half-heartedly. The crowd quickly parted, then broke up. The fire trucks moved in, their hoses shooting water at the flames. Street gutters flowed with water like small streams. Everyone who remained stood calmly and watched the firemen do their duty.

  As we walked away from the protest, we ran into Tarek, Leila’s friend. He was smiling, joking with several men in black leather jackets and expensive, well-polished shoes. After watching them for a few minutes, I realized that Tarek was talking to intelligence officers. Men around them with black handheld radios were barking orders; all held wooden batons.

  “So what did you think?” Tarek asked me.

  “I think it was quite a show,” I said. “People are angry, but the security services don’t seem to be doing much.”

  “Yep,” Tarek said with a grin on his face. “People are under a lot of pressure. We have the Hariri problem, and the government just raised petrol prices by 20 percent. They [the regime] are just letting off the pressure.” Tarek moved his hand as if turning a valve.

  On the surface, Syria seems a secular society. Minority rights, religious or ethnic, are guaranteed by the state, which is dominated by the Alawites—an offshoot of Shiite Islam from which the Assad family hails. The Baath Party is a secular, pan-Arab party. The other political parties aligned with the Baath in the National Progressive Front are secular as well.

  In the half decade leading up to the Danish protests, increased signs of Islamic sentiment in Syria had appeared. At first it showed up in terms of Islamic dress, then mosque attendance grew, as did Islamic study centers. In the midst of this trend was a female religious leader, Munira al-Qubaisi, who runs an organization Syrians call “Qubaisiaat” in her name. The influence of the group had spread rapidly under Bashar al-Assad’s rule.

  As we walked away from the demonstration toward Tarek’s office for coffee and chitchat, he pointed toward a new musali (prayer room) constructed beside an ancient domed shrine, which housed the body of a notable who had once donated the land to build an Islamic school; the school was razed long ago, but the tomb remains.

  “I renovated this,” Tarek said. I knew he was a practicing Muslim; Leila had told me so. But on the surface, Tarek looked like a wealthy, Westernized Syrian who had spent time in the United States—which he also happened to be. I took off my shoes and stepped inside. Tarek took me through the carpeted room to the shrine, opened the door, and showed me the sarcophagus. “By building it next to this tomb, I get around the permits,” Tarek said. After a few words with the prayer room’s sheikh, I returned to the front door and recovered my shoes from a locker. Tarek remained to pray, saying he would join us later in his office.

  For a secular state that arrested people for praying in public in the 1980s, tolerance of this Islamic trend raised eyebrows. What was pushing a nonreligious state, dominated by Alawites, to openly accept growing Sunni Islamic movements? The short answer: external pressures and the complex internal tensions they created.

  Standards of living were eroding in Syria. The reasons behind this slide were pretty clear: a general lack of investment, due largely to an extremely corrupt legal and regulatory environment, was not creating enough jobs. Exacerbating this trend was the fact that, when political tensions bubbled over in the 1980s, Syria endured one of the highest birthrates in the world. That massive demographic wave was now hitting the Syrian market with full force.

  At the same time, the secular state and the ruling Baath Party continued to hold up socialism as an economic ideal. The public sector’s ability to create enough jobs to absorb labor-market entrants was rapidly declining, however, due to decreasing oil production. Public-sector salaries were also much lower than those in the private sector. Pure and simple, the state was running out of ways to buy off its population and keep them complacent.

  Enter the external pressures. Since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, relations between Syria and the United States had deteriorated rapidly. Because of Syrian support for the Iraqi insurgency as well as for radi
cal Palestinian groups based in Damascus, Washington had tightened sanctions on Syria in 2004. Washington was also talking about spreading democracy in the Middle East—something Syrians do not necessarily oppose. However, television images of US forces waging a bloody war on insurgents in Iraq also turned Syrian popular opinion against the United States and its “democracy agenda.” After all, the majority of Iraqi insurgents were Sunni Muslims—a minority in Iraq, but a majority in Syria.

  Syria’s rapid withdrawal from Lebanon following the assassination of Rafik Hariri as well as the subsequent investigation into his death put the Syrian regime under tremendous international pressure. Trade, both formal and informal, between Syria and Lebanon had been drastically interrupted, impacting the livelihood of an unknown number of Syrians and Lebanese.

  As the investigation into Hariri’s death focused its attention on Damascus, the Syrian regime hunkered down, preparing for a siege—including possible UN sanctions. So instead of sharing some of the wealth generated by record-high oil revenues over the last year, the state increased salaries by only 5 percent that January—far short of the 20-percent increases in 2004 and 2002 respectively. Gasoline subsidies had also recently been slashed, which caused a 20-percent increase in prices at the pump. Inflation ran at an estimated 15 percent. Syrians were feeling the economic pinch of reform and external pressure at the same time.

  When we met Tarek in his office after his prayer, he looked relaxed and at ease. We had a glass of tea, talked over a bit of business, and went on our merry way.

  However, the fun was not over. We soon learned that the demonstrators had moved on to the Norwegian embassy and burned it down as well, since two of that country’s newspapers had reprinted the Jyllands-Posten cartoons. A couple of phone calls confirmed what we feared—the riot was now moving to the French embassy, as the French newspaper France Soir had also run the caricatures.

  It was dark when we arrived in Afif, the Damascus neighborhood that is home to the French embassy. Security forces had finally assembled themselves in force. Leila continued to shout “sahafa” (journalism) as we approached the uniformed security agents. They let us through without batting an eye. When some plain-clothed security agents tried to stop us, she just repeated “sahafa,” and they moved away.

  At the French embassy, the situation was far from tense. Police and soldiers mixed freely before the embassy’s stone walls, joking and smoking cigarettes. Two fire trucks were out front, this time complete with firemen in full uniform. They were adjusting the water cannons and firing up the trucks’ compressors. Out in front of the fire engines, about twenty yards down the street, a wall of uniformed security agents donned what looked like old green football helmets and grasped clear Plexiglas riot shields.

  I took photos for a few minutes before the police told me to step back. Water shot out of the lead cannon for about thirty seconds, filling the air with a heavy mist. When the firemen turned the cannon briefly to the left, I was caught in the jet stream. I hid behind a tree to dry off and braced myself for another soaking. It never came, however. The “Muslims on a rampage” gave up without much of a fight. Leila and I walked back to the main street and headed to the nearby Damascus Journalists’ Club for oriental salads and good stiff drinks.

  But the wheels inside my head were already spinning. Why would Syria’s security apparatus—which, as one civil rights activist once told a journalist friend, “sends ten agents for every protester at a human rights march”—stand back and do little to stop the burning of a number of European embassies? The answer seemed simple: the Bush administration’s Middle East “democracy agenda” had run into unexpected problems, and the Syrian regime knew it. The Muslim Brotherhood scored well in Egypt’s autumn 2005 elections (and probably would have done better without widespread government vote rigging), Shiite parties had dominated Iraq’s December 2005 poll, Hamas had upset Fatah in January’s Palestinian legislative elections, and Hezbollah remained part of the Lebanese government.

  Direct regime involvement in the incidents at the embassies was hard to determine. The state did issue a permit for a peaceful demonstration. According to student activists in Islamic centers in Damascus—which are not owned by the state—they received instructions from the centers’ sheikhs to organize protests against the cartoons as well as Denmark in general on February 3. The call to protest, like the call to support President Assad’s November speech at Damascus University, was publicized by text message.

  The following afternoon, as much more violent protests raged outside Denmark’s embassy in Beirut, the Syrian state news agency released a statement confirming that one armed Islamist had been killed in a security raid outside Damascus that lasted ninety minutes.

  At cocktail receptions the next week, Western diplomats in Damascus were asking everyone the same question: What is the strength of political Islam in Syria? Their reason for asking was apparent: policy makers in Washington and Europe were wondering if the very pressures they were currently orchestrating would push Syria into the hands of political Islam—from which support for Islamic terrorist groups was highly suspected—or into sectarian political chaos, like that in nearby Iraq.

  Answers to this question varied. Everyone noted increased Islamic sentiments, but it was unclear how much this trend had entered the political sphere. Religious parties were banned and 1980’s Law 49 made membership of the Muslim Brotherhood punishable by death. Gauging Brotherhood strength was difficult. The organization’s leaders remained in exile, and members inside Syria had moved underground long ago. By and large, however, many Syrians, including Sunni Muslims (the religious base of the Brotherhood), shunned the organization due to its bloody history in Syria.

  Evidence of armed Islamic groups in Syria had been growing since April 2004, when authorities foiled an attack on an abandoned UN building in Mezze, a modern district of Damascus. According to a January 2006 report by Ibrahim Hamidi in Al Hayat, three of the four assailants involved had gone to Iraq to fight US forces in the days before Saddam’s fall. Many observers (including me) and diplomats doubted the authenticity of the attacks, since they happened while Washington was making a decision on how to apply the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act (SAA). If Syria seemed on the edge of the abyss, perhaps Washington wouldn’t strictly implement the sanctions.

  Then, in May 2005, the authorities announced that they had broken up a “terrorist cell” in the Damascus neighborhood of Daf al-Shawq. As Syrian TV showed footage of the cell’s arms depot, the state announced that the cell was part of a larger organization, the Munazama jund al-sham l’wahda wa jihad (the Soldiers of Damascus Organization for Unity and Jihad). Subsequent reports indicated that the group was well organized and was distributing propaganda throughout Syria. According to Hamidi’s analysis of the group’s pamphlets, the group sought to “establish an ‘Islamic Emirate’ or ‘caliphate’ in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq.”

  The following December, security forces attacked a “takfiri cell”—a group that unilaterally declares other Muslims apostates. Members of such groups have been known to inflict their punishment by, among other things, strapping on explosive belts and walking into Western hotels in the region. While the attack got some play in the Syrian media, a Syrian journalist friend told me at the time that the attack was the first instance where the authorities used helicopters against civilians in Syria since the state’s bombardment of Hama in 1982. In his subsequent article, the journalist cited “informed sources” who said that when the security forces surrounded the cell’s hideout, its members refused to give up prior to the government’s air raid. They also accused the security forces of being “infidels.”

  To get a handle on this Islamic trend, I visited the offices of Mohammed Habash, a supposedly independent parliamentarian and founder of the Damascus Islamic Studies Center. Unlike most religious figures in Syria, Habash openly spoke about Islam in Syrian political life. The interview was strange from the start. Interviews wi
th prominent Syrians are usually well-managed affairs: office calls are diverted and strong tea or coffee is served to help get people in the mood for candid conversation. It is one of the best things about Syria under Bashar al-Assad: people talk quite openly behind closed doors. So when an unexpected guest showed up for my interview with Habash, it couldn’t be chalked up to mere coincidence.

  As I walked into the center’s main salon, a man followed on my heels, shook my hand, and sat down at Habash’s side. The man was well dressed, sported a five-o’clock shadow, and wore a smile from ear to ear. Somewhat unnervingly, he did not say a word. Thirty minutes later, when I asked Habash about his thoughts on the relationship between authoritarianism in the Arab world and the spread of Islamic extremism, I was finally introduced to the mystery guest.

  “I have no desire to justify terrorism, but I would like to explain it,” said Habash, who preaches a tolerant version of Islam that he dubs “renewal.” “I agree with you that radical movements began before the invasion of Iraq, but not the occupation of Palestine. Look at Musa here. I have only known him for about a month. He traveled to Iraq with two hundred and ninety others to wage jihad. He was the only one who survived.”

  My eyes opened wide. Could Musa really be one of the jihadists that the government denied were crossing from Syria into Iraq in support of that country’s insurgency? Musa then spoke in broken English about “traveling to Iraq to attack occupation,” fighting “two hundred kilometers from Baghdad,” and about “some people in that city being very bad.” When I told him to speak in Arabic, he said the same thing. Musa was one of the Syrians who I had watched out of the US embassy window climb onto the buses outside the Iraqi embassy on the eve of the 2003 US invasion. I glanced back at Habash, who appeared ill at ease.