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

by Reese Erlich

  The Obama administration once again began to revamp a failed policy. The White House was confronted with the waning power of its chosen military ally and the growing strength of ultra-right-wing Islamist groups—ISIS, al-Nusra, and the Islamic Front. One faction in the administration wanted to support the extremist Islamic Front by simply redefining it as “moderate.” The United States opened up talks with the Islamic Front and pointedly did not declare it a terrorist organization, as it had with al-Nusra. The front leader has made numerous speeches calling for an Islamic state governed by Shariah and attacking Alawites (see chapter 5).

  John Hudson wrote for the online magazine Foreign Policy that “US interest in the group [Islamic Front] reflects the bedraggled state of the Supreme Military Council and the desire to keep military pressure on President Bashar al-Assad.” A senior congressional aide told him, “The SMC is being reduced to an exile group and the jihadists are taking over.”59

  The Obama administration considered another option. It could temporarily ally with Assad to defeat the extremist rebels and then return to the antiregime fight at a later time. Such a policy had been implicitly implemented when the administration and the Syrian regime agreed to dismantle the chemical weapons. It was in US interests to keep Assad in power at least until the process was completed. And in early February 2014, the opposition groups negotiating with the regime in Geneva quietly dropped their demand for Assad's resignation prior to forming a transitional government representing both sides.60

  The Obama administration weighed yet another option. It could double down on its support for the SMC and provide pro-US rebels with advanced antiaircraft weaponry. Several media reported that the United States had agreed to spend millions of dollars to pay SMC salaries and had given Saudi Arabia permission to provide rebels with shoulder-fired missiles, which could seriously escalate the war.61

  An important group was left out of these US machinations: the people of Syria, who want peace and a secular society. I had a chance to meet again in late 2013 with activists I had met two years earlier. Leen, who we met in chapters 1 and 5, still lives in Damascus. She spends much of her time dodging Syrian intelligence and local thugs. Two years ago she was a leading civil-society activist, fighting for a secular, parliamentary system in Syria. “Now the military checkpoints divide up the city, and repression is everywhere,” she told me during a clandestine meeting in Damascus. “The civil-society movement doesn't exist here anymore.”62

  Ahmad Bakdouness, another activist I met in 2011, helped smuggle food and medicine to civilians under government attack in Homs. Then he was arrested and brutally tortured. Leen hoped that by making his name public, international pressure could force his release. Mahmoud, whom we met in chapter 5, once an avant-garde playwright and journalist, now fights with the Free Syrian Army in southern Syria. “We've all changed,” Leen told me.

  Civil-society activists continue to work in some of the rebel-controlled areas. They help provide food, medicine, and social services for the civilian population. And they maintain political ties with international groups that support neither Assad nor extremist rebels. At the end of 2013, one brave activist started a hunger strike in an effort to break the regime sieges imposed on rebel-controlled cities. The Syrian army refused to allow food, medicine, and other essentials into rebel areas.

  Qusai Zakarya, a leader in the civilian local council of Moadamiya, went on a hunger strike. The twenty-eight-year-old Palestinian, born in Damascus, had survived the chemical-weapons attack in the Al Ghouta area. He witnessed the even more devastating impact of conventional bombing, artillery fire, and the starvation siege of his town near Damascus. When Zakarya finished his protest, peace activists and prominent individuals took up the hunger strike in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East in order to help lift the siege on civilians.

  The struggle for a peaceful, secular Syria has been diminished, but not crushed. And the civil-society activists had some potential allies in the pro-Assad camp, as we'll see in the next chapter.

  The sound of artillery fire seemed to come from all directions. Machine-gun fire crackled until late at night. The Syrian army pounded towns held by the rebels on the outskirts of Damascus. The artillery rounds were so common that locals didn't even flinch when they exploded and the sound rumbled across the city. I definitely flinched.

  Damascus had changed profoundly since my last reporting visit in 2011—and definitely not for the better. Back then, Damascus was home to frequent rallies and marches calling for freedom. Damascus of late 2013 was a city at war. Concrete barriers blocked formerly busy thoroughfares, and military checkpoints pockmarked the city. “We learned to ignore the sounds of war,” said Dr. Bassam Barakat, a medical doctor and progovernment political consultant. He didn't mind the inconvenience of the checkpoints, he said, because they helped maintain security.1

  Some Syrians agreed with Barakat and continued to support the Assad regime. After three years of civil war, the Syrian military and intelligence services remained loyal to the ruling regime, unlike their counterparts in Tunisia and Egypt. Sharmine Narwani, a senior associate at Saint Anthony's College, Oxford University, and regime supporter, argued that Assad had majority support. Key sectors included people in the major cities of Damascus and Aleppo; minorities such as Alawites, Druze, Christians, and Shiites; three million mostly Sunni Baath Party members; and the business elite. She argued that Assad had the support of “millions and millions of Syrians whose voices have been entirely ignored.”2

  Narwani and other Assad supporters argued that the government provided security and stability. Syrians saw the sectarian warfare in Iraq and Lebanon, and they quite understandably feared chaos. Assad cleverly played on the fears of minority groups that they would suffer under majority Sunni rule. David Lesch, a professor of Middle East studies at Trinity University in San Antonio, noted that the Assad family used sophisticated methods to silence critics. “Employing coercion, a pervasive spy apparatus, carefully constructed tribal and family alliances, bribery and the tactics of divide and rule, maintaining control over the remaining half of the population is not as difficult for a minority-ruled regime as would, on the surface, seem.”3

  Assad had some popular support, but he relied on the military to keep himself in power. And the military took on extraordinary powers. Take, for example, the drive from Beirut to Damascus, which I've made many times. It used to take about two and a half hours. At the end of 2013, it took me twice as long due to intensified border security and seven checkpoints along the highway. The traffic delays felt interminable.

  Since 2012, when rebels bombed the Damascus military headquarters, the capital has been crisscrossed with checkpoints. Soldiers mostly waved cars through, occasionally stopping to inspect a back seat and trunk for smuggled weapons. But the resulting traffic jams caused havoc for emergency vehicles. I saw one maneuvering on a sidewalk and another driving the wrong way on a major street in order to get through. Most checkpoints had two lanes: civilian and military. The military lanes allowed soldiers, intelligence officials, and anyone with a special ID to pass quickly. The civilian lines, which included taxis, took far longer. Journalists usually traveled by taxi.

  The national economy, which was never in great shape, had tanked. Inflation and unemployment were serious problems. In 2011, the US dollar bought fifty Syrian pounds. During my trip two years later, it bought 142. That was actually an improvement over earlier exchange rates, when the pound sank as low as 330 to the dollar. The few Syrians with access to foreign currency lived well, but most faced hardships from inflation-reduced salaries and shortages of goods. Western sanctions meant Syria could no longer export oil, a major source of hard currency. Domestic factories and infrastructure had been hit hard by the fighting.

  In 2013, gasoline shortages meant long lines at gas stations. Taxi drivers had a hard time making a living because of high gas prices and longer times to reach destinations. Rebels blew up electrical stations and power lines, causi
ng regular outages. One night during my stay, most of Damascus was blacked out for several hours. The city, once vibrant with night life, all but shut down after dark.

  So why do people still support the government? Because they think the rebels are worse. The government played up extremist statements by right-wing rebel leaders; extremist groups that took over some cities killed Alawites and Christians. Rebels controlling the capital's outskirts regularly fired rockets and mortars into Damascus, seemingly aimed at civilian neighborhoods. Bishop Armash Nalbandian, a leader of the Armenian Orthodox Church in Damascus, told me, “When the crisis began in 2011, they [protestors] called for freedom.” But opposition demonstrators “didn't bring stability,” he said. “I want this government to be protected.”4

  The Assad regime claimed to uphold secularism in the face of Muslim extremism. But the regime has tried to drive a wedge between Sunni Muslims and Syria's minorities. Soldiers at checkpoints are automatically suspicious of Sunnis but not worried about Alawites and Christians. The various communities no longer trust one another. Alaa Ebrahim, a Damascus TV reporter, told me that before the civil war Sunnis and Alawites were friends and pretty much ignored their religious backgrounds. Now it's different. “As an Alawite government employee, if you're invited to dinner by a Sunni, you would be afraid of an ambush,” Ebrahim told me. “You would refuse. Trust has broken down.”5

  For many years Syria survived as a secular dictatorship. How did the society come apart so quickly? I found out during a visit to Tartus, a coastal city in western Syria not far from Lebanon, where many Alawites live.

  I stood in front of a large statue of Hafez al-Assad, Syria's former ruler and father of the current president. Traffic zoomed around the statue as dusk fell and people headed home from work. At the beginning of the uprising, something quite extraordinary happened here in Tartus. In March 2011, President Bashar al-Assad ordered the dismantling of his father's ubiquitous statues in order to take away flashpoints for demonstrators. But the people of Tartus objected and even set up a human barricade to prevent the statues’ removal. Feras Dieb, a forty-two-year-old businessman, drove to Tartus from his hometown in order to participate in the protest. “The president asked the people to take down all the statutes around Syria,” he said. “Here in Tartus everyone didn't want it. We stayed around the statute so no one could take it down. I stayed with the group for twenty-four hours.”6

  Alawites have a long history of going their own way. They split off from Shia Islam in the eighth century. Alawites lived mostly in what is modern-day Turkey, Lebanon, and Syria. During colonial times, the French favored Christians and suppressed Alawites, although they were encouraged to join the military. Before 1970, Alawites faced a lot of discrimination and lived in poor, rural areas. Today Alawites make up about 10 to 12 percent of Syria's population.

  Life changed dramatically for Alawites after Hafez al-Assad came to power in a coup in 1970. Starting with his supporters in the Baathist military, the elder Assad created a power base among his fellow Alawites. Dieb said Assad helped Alawites and all Syrians. “When Mr. Hafez was president he did many good things for people, especially for the poor,” said Dieb. “After 1972 there were no wars and no problems in Syria. We have almost free education and free medical. The total cost of a medical education is about two hundred dollars, maximum. In each village, he built a high school. So you don't have to go to another village for education.”

  I drove about thirty kilometers to a small town where Dieb's mother and father live. The rural community is surrounded by farms and bisected by a noisy, two-lane road. The Dieb family was retired and lived modestly. Feras's mother, seventy-five-year-old Shafika, said previous rulers in Syria didn't respect religious freedom. French colonialists, who occupied Syria between the world wars, favored the Christians. “When I was a child,” said Shafika Dieb, “my mother told me that the French tried to make life difficult, especially for Muslim families. They gave Christian families a beautiful area for their farms and homes. They supported the Christian families, especially in the nearby town of Safita. After the liberation from France, all the religious groups lived together. For example, my husband's family lived next door to a Christian family. They never had fights. Christian and Alawite families lived in peace together.”7

  From 1970 onward, during the Assad family rule, many urban Syrians intermarried among different religious and ethnic groups. During all my previous journeys to Syria, I rarely heard references to someone's religious background in casual conversation. The Dieb family firmly believed that Western powers were once again seeking to divide and rule in Syria. They said the opposition wanted to impose an intolerant Sunni Muslim regime and that Assad was protecting religious minorities. Mahmood Dieb, Shafika's husband, was seventy-nine years old. “If something happens to Dr. Bashar, everyone here will fight. If he is overthrown, it will go back to the days of the French with people fighting each other.”8

  One night I went strolling through the city of Tartus. The government rebuilt the Corniche, or coastal road, and Syrians jammed onto the streets, chatted with friends, and sat in cafés. The night in October 2011 was calm and the air balmy. You wouldn't know that Syria was at war. My guide was another Dieb family member, a daughter named Wafaa. She was a medical doctor who studied and worked abroad. She said this whole discussion of religious and ethnic background was new to Syria. For her, Syria's secularism was a key component of what she called Syrian democracy. “Syria is one of the most democratic countries in the world, certainly more than any Arab country,” she asserted. “We have democracy, which includes respect for my religion. I don't want to change. This is democracy for me.”9

  The United States had overthrown governments in Iraq and Afghanistan, she reasoned, and had then set its sights on Syria. “I think America wants to occupy many countries. Thank God we don't have very much petrol. If we had oil, the United States would occupy Syria like Iraq. The United States wants Syria to be like a slave. I don't want Syria to become like Afghanistan, either. I don't want to stay home; as a woman, I want to be able to work.”

  Dieb and other Alawite supporters of the government lived in a cocoon where government propaganda reinforced existing beliefs. They were never able to answer a simple question: If Assad enjoyed so much popular support and the rebels were all tools of foreign powers, why had the government lost control of so much of the country?

  Tartus has changed a lot. During my 2011 trip, I was able to drive from Damascus to Tartus in a few hours, hitting only a few cursory military checkpoints. All the nearby cities were calm and under government control. By the end of 2013 I couldn't drive there from Damascus because the roads were closed to civilian traffic. Residents had to fly into nearby Latakia. The only safe area of Tartus extended to about ten square kilometers around the city center.10 Going outside that zone became dangerous. That political and military instability hit not only Alawites, of course, but the country's business elite as well.

  Dating back to the late 1950s and early ’60s, Syria adopted a system of “Arab socialism.” The government provided people with low-cost healthcare through public clinics. Education was free. The military, through its control of the government, nationalized important industries such as telecommunications. Military and government officials divvyed up the lucrative profits. Corruption ran rampant. Workers had even less control over the economy than they did over the government. It was socialism in name; kleptocracy in practice.

  When Bashar al-Assad came to power in 2000, he faced a moribund economy and potential social unrest. Syria was the second-poorest country in the Middle East. Only Yemen had a lower per-capita income.11 Under Assad's leadership, the government privatized some state-run industries and lowered tariffs on imported goods, following an economic model promoted by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Baath Party cronies and Assad relatives bought the industries on the cheap or got licenses to open new ones, such as cell phone companies. The business elite benefited as the governm
ent allowed creation of private banks, insurance companies, and an airline. Government policies created economic growth and loyalty among business leaders. But the new liberalization policy also increased systematic and widespread corruption.

  Early demonstrations in 2011, for example, singled out Rami Makhlouf, Assad's cousin and owner of the country's largest cell phone company. Critics said he'd made tens of millions of dollars due to family connections. Nabil Samman, director of the Center for Research and Documentation in Damascus, estimated that three hundred families controlled the vast majority Syria's economy. “An end of the regime means their demise, not only in terms of political power,” said Samman. “People will ask, ‘Where did he get this money from?’”12 Bouthaina Shaban, a top adviser to the president, admitted to me that corruption remained a serious problem in Syria. “Rami Makhlouf isn't the only one who made money in the past period,” she said in an interview at the presidential palace. “There are many people, big capitalists, who made a lot of money.”13 Syria had replaced Arab socialism with crony capitalism.

  Those crony capitalists, along with the honest ones, continued to provide crucial support for Assad. Nabil Toumeh, CEO of the large conglomerate Toumeh Orient Group, supported Assad because he believed the opposition is controlled by extremists. “In Syria we are multicultured and multireligious,” he told me.14 He argued that extremists in the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups will impose an Islamic state on the country. “They will end the secular orientation in Syria and the whole Middle East…. The street must cool down in order to achieve the reforms. Otherwise they will never be implemented.” Nabil Sukkar, a former World Bank economist who later headed an economic consulting firm in Damascus, said that big business remained a crucial pillar of support for the government. Business people are pragmatic, according to Sukkar. “They expect the unrest to end sooner or later,” he said. “The regime is well-entrenched.”15