And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

by Engel, Richard

  But between President Bush’s misguided military action and President Obama’s inconsistent and confused action, the United States managed to destroy the status quo in just fifteen years, plunging the region into chaos and exposing the rot that had long been festering within. The combined and contradictory actions of the Bush and Obama administrations pushed over the row of rotten houses in the Middle East, unleashing the bitterness stewing inside, and it will be difficult to erect them again. I suspect people will eventually get fed up with the chaos, as they did in Egypt amid the turmoil that followed the Arab Spring. After a year in office, Mohammed Morsi, a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood and the first democratically elected head of state in Egypt’s history, was deposed by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in a military coup. At this writing, Morsi is in jail, sentenced to death. Egypt always leads the way in the Middle East, so what happened there is instructive.

  I started my career at the peak of the Arab big men in the late 1990s. I watched the region change with the death of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. I followed its descent into chaos in Iraq. I saw the rise of a cynical new type of war in Lebanon where only violence mattered. I watched the zigzag policies of the Obama administration, the hopes and anguish of the Arab Spring and the madness that followed. I can only guess what will happen next. I suspect that over the next several years, we’ll see strongmen back in power in all or most Middle East countries. Out of the chaos, new dictators will offer themselves as an alternative to the horrors of ISIS, the Sunni-Shia bloodshed, Turkish-Kurdish enmity, and Arab-Persian proxy wars. Once in power, the new dictators—the ones to establish a new status quo—will likely be worse than the old strongmen because they’ll be able to use new technologies to identify and hunt down their enemies by their digital fingerprints. They will have the ability to point to the ugliness of recent history as a justification for taking their citizens’ rights. “Give me your freedoms unless you want to return to the way things were,” they might say.

  But these would-be strongmen face a difficult path ahead. Many dictators will try to assert themselves. Not all will survive. The chaos that has been unleashed by the breaking of the old status quo won’t easily be contained. ISIS supporters will fight to the death to retain the foothold they’ve taken for themselves. A lot of killing remains to be done before leaders of stature emerge—and before the fires of chaos are tamped down once again.

  EPILOGUE

  TWENTY YEARS HAVE PASSED SINCE I headed to Cairo to cover what I sensed would be the story of my generation, just as reporters before me had gone to Vietnam and Moscow to cover the big stories of their times. It turned out the train of history would pass through the Middle East’s station, but who would have guessed that the United States would fight two of the longest ground wars in its history and plunge the Muslim world into a frenzy of violence and revolution. My ambition was to ride the train of history, and the train came rumbling right at me.

  I arrived in Egypt before suicide bombings and beheadings and mass executions became almost daily occurrences in the region. It seems corny to say now, but Cairo had a kinder and more generous spirit back then. People didn’t like being poor, but since everyone was poor, they felt more or less in the same boat.

  As I moved beyond Egypt, Syrians, Yemenis, Jordanians, Palestinians, and others welcomed me into their homes too, and I went from place to place without concern for my physical safety. I was a vagabond, free to wander and absorb my surroundings. When I began to study Arabic on my own and with tutors, Cairenes were delighted that I would take the time to learn their language. I would go to cafés, and people would bring out papers and pens to help me with my grammar.

  Living in Egypt and exploring the Middle East was magical. I rode on horseback around the seventeen pyramids on the Saqqara plateau south of Cairo, including Egypt’s first, the step pyramid of Pharaoh Djoser, completed forty-seven hundred years ago. I luxuriated in the lush garden on Elephantine Island in the Nile off Aswan, Egypt’s southern gateway four thousand years ago. I wandered through the temple complex at Karnak, a forest of columns seemingly built by giants for giants but actually the work of a succession of thirty pharaohs beginning five thousand years ago.

  The Parthenon in Athens is often held up as the epitome of man-made beauty, but for me nothing compared to Petra in Jordan, where a hidden canyon cuts through rock that seems red from afar but is swirled with blue, yellow, and pink and leads to perfectly proportioned and harmonious tombs. Dating to 312 BC and mysteriously abandoned and just as mysteriously rediscovered, Petra was once a city of thirty thousand but its location was unknown to Europeans until 1812. I loved walking through the shaded alleys in the Old City of Jerusalem and visiting the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where the site of Christ’s crucifixion is up a steep flight of stairs and where his tomb has long been covered with scaffolding because no one can agree on who should carry out badly needed renovations.

  I always smiled as I walked alone through the souk Al-Hamidiya inside the old walled city of Damascus. It was famous for its furniture (notably mother-of-pearl inlaid chests), brass pitchers and candlesticks, antique globes and doors—and vanilla ice cream with crushed pistachio nuts on top. The old city of Sana’a in Yemen was a serendipitous bazaar offering curved-blade daggers (jambiya), spices (frankincense), dates, qat (a mild stimulant everyone chewed), and all manner of objects from tiny artisanal workshops.

  Sana’a is a symbol of what has happened to the region over the last two decades. I used to go there often, sitting in cafés and chatting with Yemenis in a relaxed and friendly way. On one trip I stayed in Sana’a for weeks, going out every day reporting without a plan or a safety network. I bumbled into stories and learned by accident. Today I might be able to go once or twice a year and not feel nearly as safe wandering the streets. To be seen in the same place for too long could make me a marked man—for kidnapping or an AK-47 round. Given the choice, I’d prefer the latter. Kidnapping these days could mean being beheaded, drowned, or burned alive. When the Furies were released in the Middle East, an evil emerged beyond my worst imaginings.

  The joy of the Middle East has been replaced by fear, pervasive in Iraq and Syria and darkening the lives of people throughout the region. This is why refugees have been flowing out of the Middle East by the millions for Europe. If President Bush’s seeds of democracy or the Arab Spring had bloomed, these families wouldn’t be risking everything to leave. Many in the region have simply lost all hope, which is understandable. If you lived in Libya after the fall of Gadhafi, you’d be terrified. You can’t work, you can’t sell your goods, your children can’t go to school, you can’t even drive around without fear of being kidnapped by bandits or terrorists. It’s not a place where people can be happy and even marginally prosperous. It’s pure chaos. It’s worse in Iraq and Syria.

  When the strongmen I suspect are coming try to claw their way to power, they will confront a generation of young people shaped by this chaos—uneducated, inured to violence by ISIS videos and the atrocities they have seen firsthand, and dehumanized by squalid refugee camps in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon and from living in train stations and in fields on the long march to Europe. In one notorious ISIS video, a Chechen militant hands his pistol to his son, and the boy shoots several prisoners kneeling in front of them. Can kids like these regain their appreciation of human life? They will be in their twenties and thirties when people my age are in their fifties and sixties. They will not be like convicted murderers in the United States, who are released from prison as old men, usually too broken and tired to commit another crime. These young Muslim men will be in the prime of their killing years.

  When I came to the Middle East, journalists had a kind of immunity that allowed us to travel freely and meet with militants who hated Israel and the United States. In 2000, when I was working for Agence France-Presse, I didn’t feel fearful when I went to Gaza to meet with Hamas leaders or to the West Bank to speak to Palestinian gunmen. These men didn’t much like me. We
didn’t have anything in common. But they felt that they had to treat me with common decency and a modicum of respect because I was a journalist and I was writing about them. They wanted to spin me so that I would give the world their version of events. They were never completely happy, of course, because my pieces didn’t make them look as perfect as they looked to themselves. But they needed to talk to me and other reporters because we were the only way they could get their story out.

  Now jump ahead to 2006. Zarqawi was on his killing spree in Iraq, and suddenly the Internet had become ubiquitous, and uploading videos on YouTube and other platforms was literally child’s play. So Zarqawi and his henchmen said to themselves, “Why should we let reporters interview us and filter what we say? We can go straight to the Internet and say exactly what we want, for as long as we want to say it, and we can post videos that Western journalists would never show.”

  Journalists became worthless, at least as megaphones. But we became valuable as commodities to be stolen, bought, and sold, traded for prisoners, or ransomed for millions. As a correspondent for a major American network, I began to feel like a Ferrari in the worst neighborhood in the world. The policy of the United States (and the United Kingdom) is not to pay ransoms for kidnapped nationals, although security agencies develop intelligence on their whereabouts and Special Forces have sometimes carried out rescue raids, most of which were deadly failures. European governments do pay ransoms, however, making journalists from the Continent prime targets for ISIS and other extremist groups.

  The next ten years in the Middle East promise to be extremely violent, but I suspect the fighting will be mainly local and sectarian, nothing like the US invasion of Iraq—and probably of little interest to Americans. In 2015, when I went back to the States or to an international conference, I found that people didn’t much care anymore. They saw the Middle East awash in blood, beyond redemption, and didn’t want to read about it or see it on the evening news. They just wanted to keep away from it.

  But American eyes returned to the Middle East because of the Iran nuclear deal. The agreement, which restricts Iran’s nuclear capacity for fifteen years, was signed on July 14, 2015, by Iran and six world powers—the United States, China, Russia, Britain, France, and Germany. It was unanimously endorsed by the UN Security Council on July 20.

  It is at the time of this writing too early to predict how it will work out. In principle, the deal makes sense. The United States, as a superpower, should use diplomacy to protect itself from hostile powers and to strike strategic alliances. Any attempts to bring more peace in the world should be encouraged. But I would add a note of caution. Keeping track of nuclear materials and centrifuges may prove to be the easy part. The deal, which reintroduces Shia Iran to the world economy, alters the global power dynamic between Sunnis and Shiites, and our history in Iraq and Syria has proven that the United States doesn’t seem to know how to strike that balance. In the end, it isn’t Washington’s responsibility to make amends between Sunnis and Shiites. From the US perspective, the deal limits Tehran’s ability to make nuclear weapons and that’s good for Americans. But the Middle East has proven to be a dangerous hole US administrations continue to slip into. If the Iran deal unravels or leads to an arms race, the United States could find itself slipping back in again. The Saudis could embark on a nuclear program of their own or buy nuclear weapons from another state, most likely Pakistan. A major ISIS attack could upset the balance of power or create a humanitarian crisis. A large-scale strike by ISIS or an al-Qaeda attack could renew calls for the United States to launch another war in the Muslim world. The Middle East is a magnet, and America could easily be pulled back in.

  On July 20, 2015, the day of the Security Council vote, the US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, said, “This nuclear deal doesn’t change our profound concern about human rights violations committed by the Iranian government or about the instability Iran fuels beyond its nuclear program.” Which was exactly why governments of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt were unnerved by the deal. They worried that the infusion of billions of dollars and the freedom to buy and sell sophisticated conventional weapons—surface-to-air missiles from Russia, advanced ballistic missiles from China—would make Iran the muscleman of the region, stirring dreams of Persian glory and hegemony.

  * * *

  DESPITE MY KIDNAPPING, AND BOMBS blasting out my hotel windows in Baghdad, and getting caught in cross fires in Aleppo and other places, I don’t have many professional regrets. I don’t sit around saying, “Jeez, I’ve been a dentist for twenty years and I really wanted to be a ballet dancer.” I’ve had more excitement than I thought possible when I was a thirteen-year-old in Marrakech with dreams of becoming a foreign correspondent who wore white linen suits and smoked cigarettes in a bone holder.

  When I was at Stanford, I lived in a house with a lot of football players. They were always injured, limping around in braces or casts. If you play football, you know you’re always in danger of knee and neck injuries. It’s the price of playing the game. By the same token, dealing with trauma is part of being a foreign correspondent. I know what to expect, and I know I’m going to deal with post-traumatic stress symptoms in the months and years after an ugly incident. After my kidnapping, I wanted to go to Syria as soon as possible to prove to myself I was all right. And when I got back in, I said, “Ha! I’m still standing. I’m not barking at the moon. I’m okay.”

  The effects of my abduction actually settled in later. I got occasional flashbacks, and now I take more seriously what happened to me—and appreciate more fully how lucky I was. A friend recently asked me where I went on a family vacation after my release. “Turks and Caicos,” I blurted out, but I knew that wasn’t right. “Oh, I’m sorry, that’s not it,” I said. “It was an island. Where in the hell was it? I’ll have to check.” It was actually Virgin Gorda. I’m blessed with a good memory, and if I couldn’t remember a week in Virgin Gorda, I must have been more shook up than I thought.

  As a foreign correspondent, which often means a war correspondent, you have to embrace the risks. I’m not addicted to them in the way some gamblers are addicted to losing because it hurts them and touches them deep in their souls. When I take risks now, I do so only when I have to and with every precaution. I used to prospect for news, dropping into places to see what was up. Well, I could go to parts of Libya today and find lots of good stories, but I probably wouldn’t be around to tell them.

  I did some soul-searching after my kidnapping. I felt I had seen history up close and lived life to the fullest—except in the most elemental way. I was forty years old, unmarried, and childless. That aspect of my life was a void.

  Mary and I had grown serious about each other over the previous year, and I asked her to move in with me. When she did, I made her that pasta meal I’d pictured cooking while in captivity. It was fantastic and she looked as beautiful as I pictured under my blindfold. We started talking about spending our lives together and starting a family. Now we have a wonderful son. I used to think having a child was more frightening than running through a minefield. I thought it would crush the romantic spirit I wanted for my life. I was wrong. Being a husband and a father is pretty romantic too.

  I look forward to doing more stories in China, Russia, and other places that have taken a backseat to the Middle East during most of my career. But the story of my generation may also be the story of the next generation.

  With its tangled history and politics, the Middle East has a way of sucking in great powers—and journalists. I bought my ticket on this train of history in 1996, and what a wild ride it’s been. I plan to stay on the train until I have to get off one way or another.

  (1) CAIRO | JULY 2013

  An iconic image of Cairo’s Tahrir Square. The relatively small, tented protest camp at the center of the square swelled with up to a million demonstrators shouting “the people want to topple the regime.”

  (2) CAIRO | AUGUST 2013

  Islamist supporters of the Mus
lim Brotherhood chose the location for their protest badly. Many of the locals who lived around the Rabaa al-Adiwya mosque supported the coup against the Brotherhood. Here several residents hang a photograph of the coup leader, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, on the gate of the mosque where the protest was based.

  (3) CAIRO | AUGUST 2013

  Egyptian security forces claimed they were shot at by Islamist protesters and returned fire, killing many in the side streets around the Rabaa al-Adiwya mosque at the edge of Cairo.

  (4) CAIRO | AUGUST 2013

  In reporting on wars and uprisings, like here during the crackdown on Islamist protesters in Cairo, we are often confronted with images too graphic to show on American broadcast television, like this man shot in the torso. We try to take images that evoke what happened without being offensive to our viewers, like pictures of feet or even bloody clothing.

  (5) CAIRO | AUGUST 2013

  The aftermath of the Rabaa crackdown. Bodies of Islamist protesters were gathered in mosques. Volunteers put blocks of ice on top of the bodies, which melted into the carpet under everyone’s bare feet.

  (6) CAIRO | AUGUST 2013

  After the Egyptian military overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood in a coup, Islamists set up a protest camp around the Rabaa al-Adiwya mosque on the edge of Cairo. They hoped it be would be like the Tahrir Square protests and that the world would back them. They were mistaken. Estimates of the death toll when Egyptian security forces broke up the protests range from 800 to several thousand.

  (7) GAZA | JULY 2014

  Israel flattened Gaza City’s al-Tufah neighborhood, claiming it was a Hamas stronghold. Palestinians called it collective punishment.