Inside Syria: The Backstory of Their Civil War and What the World Can Expect

by Reese Erlich

  I met one such chameleon group. This FSA brigade of 150 men is called Ahrar Syria (Free People of Syria). It is only one of many dozens of groups loosely affiliated with the FSA. When I interviewed them at two in the morning, eight men crowded into a sparsely furnished living room, tapping on laptops and answering e-mails on smartphones. Ahrar Syria even has its own Facebook page.

  As brigade leader, Abdul Salman nervously pulled on newly minted facial hair; he told me they grew beards in order to look more religious. Members of Ahrar and other armed opposition groups are angry at the United States for not giving them enough backing. “We haven't gotten any arms from the United States,” Salman complained. “If we had arms, Assad would have fallen by now.” He also favored establishing a no-fly zone over parts of Syria as the United States and NATO did in Libya.3

  At the same time, Ahrar and other opposition groups strongly oppose US policy in the region. They want the return of Syria's Golan, seized by Israel in the 1967 war. They support Palestinian rights and oppose US aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Syria's uprising will impact the entire Middle East. But the United States faces a major contradiction. Many Syrians in the opposition want Washington to offer stronger support for their cause, yet their plans for Syria's future diverge significantly from US strategic goals.4

  The Washington debate about Syria is strangely detached from the reality on the ground. Doves favor tough economic sanctions and arming “moderate” insurgents. Hawks advocate sending even more arms to guerrillas accompanied by US military bombing. Syrian opposition leaders I met said those differences are only tactical. Both hawks and doves want to replace Bashar al-Assad with a pro-US strongman. “The Americans haven't supported the revolution strongly enough because they are still looking for someone who can ensure their interests in the future,” Omar Mushaweh told me.5 He was a leader of Syria's Muslim Brotherhood living in Istanbul.

  While US officials helped create opposition coalitions, ordinary people didn't accept US goals, he said. Mushaweh pointed to Iraq and Afghanistan as examples of US military intervention that produced political disasters. He doesn't want Syria to follow that path. That could be one reason the United States cooled on the Muslim Brotherhood and sought to back other armed groups that it trained in Jordan.

  The Obama administration and major US media portray Syria as a quagmire of religious groups fighting centuries-old battles. The reality is quite different. For many years, Syrians lived peacefully with one another. Syria was a secular dictatorship where dissidents faced torture and jail for criticizing Assad, but people largely ignored religious differences. Once the fighting began, however, leaders on both sides used religion to rally their troops. Rebels relied on the Sunni Muslim majority. Assad appealed to minority groups such as Alawites, Christians, and Shia Muslims.

  When the US government and media start to bewail the quagmire of centuries-old disputes, it means the United States hasn't figured out how to win the war or its plans have gone askew. And so it is with Syria.

  Oddly enough, we can learn a lot about US and Syrian politics by looking at the country's seat belt laws. Wearing a seat belt is mandatory in Syria. But a taxi driver, when approaching a traffic policeman, drapes the seat belt over his chest without buckling. It looks like it's on, but he has no need to actually benefit from the belt's safety. This practice continues even now, when military checkpoints are common in Damascus.

  Seat belts are so seldom worn that people actually look strangely at you when you put them on. One day I found out why. I was given a ride back to my hotel in the personal car of a very high-ranking government official. This guy had a car and driver at his disposal anytime. I got in the front passenger seat and reflexively strapped up. The driver looked strangely at me but said nothing. Even if he had said something, it would have been in Arabic. I interpreted his look to mean, “What? You don't trust my driving?”

  We made the uneventful drive back to my hotel. Then, I went to my room on the eighth floor and passed a mirror. The dirty seat belt had made a perfect black sash across my chest and shoulder. Having never been used, the belt had simply been collecting dust and dirt for the past four years.

  The civil war stalemate in Syria is a lot like my seat belt experience. Syria's government pretends to provide security for its people, but the seat belt is dirty, dusty, and seldom used. Extremist rebels offer security through the piety of Islam, but in reality pursue dictatorial power. Meanwhile, the United States pretends to uphold the rules but can't figure out why the seat belts don't work.

  I had another seat belt experience in Damascus when an official car and driver picked me up. This time the seat belt was scrupulously clean. I was about to meet President Bashar al-Assad.

  Strange as it may sound, I first met Assad as part of a delegation of visiting Americans from South Dakota in 2006. Former US Senator Jim Abourezk had organized people from his home state to tour Syria. His wife is Syrian, and the Abourezks periodically visited relatives in the western part of the country. Because of his long history as a progressive politician and leader in the Arab-American movement, Abourezk had won Assad's respect. In fact, every time Abourezk came to Syria to visit his in-laws, the president invited him over for a chat.

  We filed into a huge meeting hall and sat on the ubiquitous overstuffed chairs popular throughout the Middle East. Assad is tall and thin with an angular face. He sports the mandatory mustache and short haircut of the model Arab leader. He was charming, personable, and fluent in English. He won over many in the group as being a reasonable leader seeking normal relations with the United States.

  After the meeting, I approached him to ask if I could get a one-on-one interview for public radio. He immediately agreed and said Bouthaina Shaban, a presidential advisor and spokesperson, would make the arrangements.

  Shaban is one of the few women in high government positions and always objected to the rampant corruption in Syria. At the time, she appeared to be a moderate in the country's ruling elite. Once the uprising began, however, she remained a public spokesperson, staunchly defending Assad's repression.

  Bashar's father, Hafez al-Assad, seized power in a military coup d’état in 1970 and ruled with an iron fist. Bashar was not supposed to follow in his father's footsteps. That role was set aside for Basil al-Assad, Hafez's eldest son. Bashar had become an ophthalmologist and was doing advanced studies in London when his brother died in a car crash. Bashar was called home in 1994 and groomed for the presidency.

  Bashar's familiarity with the West, high level of education, and natural charm convinced many that he would be a reformer. Western leaders also praised Assad's neoliberal economic policies. He sold off state-run enterprises and encouraged private sector, capitalist development. But none of these changes resulted in significant reform, let alone an end to Syria's highly centralized, authoritarian system.

  A few days after my initial meeting with Assad, that government car with the clean seatbelt showed up at my hotel. I was driven up a long, winding road to the presidential palace. Assad normally works out of his downtown office and uses the palace only for formal events. I must have been considered a formal event. I walked through enormous red-carpeted rooms to a set of eight-foot-high double doors. The doors parted, and there stood the president.

  I unpacked my radio recorder and short, shotgun microphone. It's shaped like a very short, single-barreled shotgun barrel with a foam covering, a standard mic for radio and TV. For some reason, Assad was intimidated by it. He fidgeted uncomfortably and kept looking nervously at the mic. Perhaps it looked too much like a real shotgun.

  I had asked opposition activists all over Damascus what questions I should ask their president. So I came not just with the usual list of questions about US-Syrian relations but also with many questions about domestic issues. When would Syria have free elections for a parliament? When would opposition parties be allowed? Why hadn't 300,000 Syrian Kurds been allowed citizenship? When would Syria end the state of emergency in
effect since 1963?

  Assad bobbed and weaved around these and other questions. He claimed calls for democratic change were really efforts by the United States to weaken his government. He claimed to be creating a dialogue with Syrian intellectuals to discuss domestic reform.

  “It takes about a year of dialogue to define the frame” for negotiations, he told me.6 That was in 2006. Five years later, no meaningful dialogue had taken place, let alone reform.

  In March 2011, the Arab Spring came to Syria, and people raised many of the issues I had asked about in the interview. It's not because I had a crystal ball; large numbers of Syrians had been raising those issues for decades. In a panic, Assad implemented some reforms. He lifted the state of emergency, gave citizenship to most of the disenfranchised Kurds, and opened a dialogue with moderate opposition leaders. Had he made such reforms in 2006, Assad would have been hailed as a farsighted leader.

  By 2011, it was too late. The uprising against Assad and his entire regime had begun, and there was no turning back. Syria's ruling elite became increasingly isolated, internationally and domestically. The Arab League—composed of twenty-two states from the Middle East and North Africa—voted unprecedented sanctions against Syria and later voted to recognize the Syrian opposition and eject Assad's government. The United Nations sent several observer missions and tried to broker a peace agreement. All the efforts failed.

  The regime has suffered a number of high-level defections, including the Syrian ambassador to Iraq, a Republican Guard brigadier general, and the prime minister. Every week saw desertions by lower-level military. Syria faced serious economic problems as well. But as ultra-right-wing rebels gained strength within the opposition, Assad rallied some Syrians to his side, arguing that a secular strongman is better than Islamic rule.

  A big question remained: Will the Syrian people blame the country's crisis on the Assad government or the rebels?

  I received a partial answer during a very unusual trip. Syrian authorities organized a media visit to an elementary school in the southern city of Daraa, where the uprising began. Government officials wanted to show that life had returned to normal. All was going according to plan when the children came out for morning recess.

  Then, spotting the TV cameras, the children suddenly began chanting, “Freedom, freedom,” one of the main antigovernment slogans. Then others chanted “Syria” and similar progovernment slogans. Government officials leading the delegation went pale. Here, in front of the whole world, stood the divided Syria.

  “The political chasm has reached the schools,” said my translator, who was assigned by the government to accompany me on this visit. “First graders are now politically motivated.”7

  The fact that students dared to chant antigovernment slogans during an official visit did not bode well for Assad and the future of the Syrian government.

  Uprisings aren't new in Syria. To fully understand the revolt that began in 2011, we need to look at the country's tumultuous history.

  If Americans know anything about twentieth-century Middle East history, it's likely gleaned from watching reruns of Lawrence of Arabia. The 1962 epic film featured an all-star cast riding camels across the desert while fighting the evil Ottoman Turks during World War I. I enjoyed watching the film as a teenager, particularly Peter O'Toole's heroic portrayal of T. E. Lawrence. Later, as a college student and anti–Vietnam War activist in the 1960s, I wondered if the film accurately portrayed history. It took me years to find out.

  Peter O'Toole has become the iconic image of Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence: tall, lanky, and blond. The real-life Lawrence stood only five feet five inches tall, so short that he didn't even look like a British Army officer. But the two men did share fine blond hair and very blue eyes.

  The life of T. E. Lawrence was inextricably intertwined with the modern history of Syria. He was born in 1888 and entered Oxford University in 1907. Lawrence began his early career in 1909 with a walking tour of Syria, then part of the Ottoman Empire. He made two more trips to Lebanon and Syria after graduation to work on archaeological digs overseen by the British Museum. Lawrence had learned to speak colloquial Arabic and wrote his PhD thesis about Crusader castles in Syria.

  Lawrence became a quasi–Indiana Jones by using his archaeological travels as a cover to spy for the British military, although history does not record his owning a bullwhip. Some historians dispute whether Lawrence spied for the British before the war. But without doubt, British intelligence was very interested in the area being studied by Lawrence because of the nearby bridges and a new railway line being built by the Germans.1 Lawrence's mentor, who got him the archaeological job, worked for British intelligence. And, without doubt, Lawrence in his early travels did carry a 9mm Mauser pistol.

  After the outbreak of World War I, Lawrence officially joined British Army intelligence and was posted to Cairo. He developed both a respect for and a romantic affinity for Arabs, a marked departure from the colonial arrogance of the times. His fellow colonialists suspected him of being too sympathetic to the natives.

  Lawrence sought to distinguish himself from the typical British colonial. At the same time, he realized the contradiction of being British in an Arab land, an issue that would plague him throughout his life. “Some feel deeply the influence of native people, and try to adjust themselves to its spirit,” Lawrence wrote. “To fit themselves modestly into the picture, they suppress all in them imitate the native, and so avoid friction in their daily life. However, they cannot avoid the consequences of imitation, a hollow, worthless thing. They are like the people but not of the people…”2

  But the Arab leaders of the revolt against the Turks had a decidedly different perspective on Lawrence. Most saw him as a minor British liaison officer who became famous only after the war. Abdullah ibn al-Hussein, one of the leaders of the Arab revolt, had to convince his followers of Lawrence's usefulness in military matters. He forbid Lawrence from making direct contact with tribes under his control.3 Lawrence's seemingly contradictory role became understandable in the context of his political goals. He favored independent Arab states, but only to be governed by friendly Arab monarchs who supported Britain and opposed France. Lawrence was an advocate of neocolonialism.

  The Ottoman Sultans ruled the area that is now Syria from 1517 to 1918. The provinces that are now Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine included numerous tribes, ethnicities, and religious groups. The Ottomans allowed some local autonomy to feudal Arab tribal leaders. Local noblemen ruled in rural areas so long as they paid taxes to Constantinople (Istanbul). They allowed Christians, Jews, and Muslims to control their own personal-status laws, such as marriage and divorce.

  Both conflict and cooperation had historically existed between Christians, Muslims, and Druze, a distinct ethnic group that split off from Shia Muslims nearly one thousand years ago. The Ottomans played one group off another to maintain their rule. To further complicate matters, European powers sought to extend their influence by supporting certain groups. The French backed the Christians, and the British supported the Druze.

  Like all colonialists, the sultans also used brute force. In those days the Ottoman Empire extended into southern Europe. The sultans brutally suppressed an 1875 rebellion in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Yugoslavia), the 1876 rebellion in Bulgaria, and an Armenian uprising from 1892 to 1893. The Ottoman Empire was impacted by the same nationalist and democratic movements as other countries around the world. Around the turn of the twentieth century, revolutions had erupted in Russia (1905), Iran (1906), China (1911), and Mexico (1910).

  With the outbreak of World War I, the Ottomans sided with Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire against Britain, France, and Russia. The British, and to some extent the French, hoped to use the war as a means to divvy up the Ottoman Empire, as well as seize control of German colonies. Not surprisingly, the British Empire and French colonial empire were happy to use Arab nationalism to help defeat their enemy. While paying lip service to Arab independe
nce, however, both powers planned to extend their colonial empires at the expense of the local populations.

  Lawrence of Arabia more or less accurately portrays how the British sought a wartime alliance with Sharif Hussein ibn Ali, governor of Mecca, and his sons. Alec Guinness portrayed Faisal bin Hussein, one of Hussein's sons, although the real Faisal was twenty-nine years old when the war began and Guinness was forty-eight when the film was shot. As the official who governed Islam's most holy city, Sharif Hussein represented a political alternative to the Ottoman Turkish Sultan Mehmed V, who was then the recognized leader of the Muslim world. Hussein, the patriarch of the Hashemite family, claimed to be a direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammad and thus offered a credible case for an alternative, pro-British leadership of the Muslim world.

  Hussein offered to support the British in return for a guarantee of a postwar independent Arab nation under his rule that would encompass virtually the entire Middle East. His vision of an independent state was decidedly conservative, opposing many of the reforms imposed by the Turks. He would not allow women to work. Hussein favored a strict version of Islamic Shariah law, including amputations of thieves’ limbs.4 Such views didn't stop Sir Henry MacMahon, the top British diplomat in the region, from responding favorably to Hussein's offer. Even then, Western empires feared the power of Islamic movements. Lawrence prophetically sought to divide the Muslim world by promoting pro-British Sharif Hussein against Sultan Mehmed V.

  Referring to the violence needed to overthrow the Ottoman Empire, Lawrence wrote, “If we can arrange that this political change shall be a violent one, we will have abolished the threat of Islam, by dividing it against itself…”5 MacMahon wanted to leave the impression that he supported Arab independence, but he intentionally clouded his support with opaque and ambiguous diplomatic language. The British government had no intention of actually granting independence.6 But Lawrence's Arab allies knew little of Britain's long-term plans. Hussein, his sons, and other nationalist leaders trusted that the British would carry out their promises. Auda Abu Tayi was one of them.