A sturdy metal chain, the kind used to tow cars, was tossed around the beheaded statue as dozens grabbed the ends of it, tug-of-war style, to bring down Hafez. After several hours, the statue suddenly, rapidly toppled from its base to a mighty roar—the crowd whistling, clapping, and shouting Allahu Akbar! as it smashed into pieces. Passersby on the highway honked their car horns as hundreds of men rushed toward the splinters. Everybody, it seemed, wanted a piece.
Suleiman and his cousin sped home to upload footage. Once again, he had no response from any of the outlets he e-mailed, but then he found the Shaam News Network’s Facebook page. SNN had posted his footage, which was also picked up by Orient TV and broadcast later that night, where Suleiman and his cousin watched it along with his parents. He had spoken in the video, and his parents recognized his voice. His mother scolded him, fearful of the repercussions. His father didn’t say a word, but the smile on his face assured Suleiman that he was quietly supportive. “When we saw it on TV, my cousin and I started dancing!” Suleiman said. “We were so happy! It was such a big deal!”
MOHAMMAD
The square eye-level slot in the heavy prison cell door jerked open, metal grating on metal, allowing a shaft of piercing neon light from the corridor into the dim cell. Without a word, the three dozen or so men cramped inside rose to their feet and faced the wall. They knew the drill. This was Military Intelligence, Branch 235, in Damascus, also known as Palestine Branch, a place where nightmares were lived.
Mohammad, a thirty-two-year-old father of two, heard his number called out: 6/15—prisoner 6, cell 15. They never used names. It was sometime after the last of the five daily prayers between sunset and midnight, on March 23, 2011, a week into the Syrian uprising. In the darkness, time was amorphous, but the faint call to prayer from a mosque somewhere in the vicinity anchored the men spiritually and temporally. Mohammad shuffled forward, blinking as his dark brown eyes adjusted to the light. He was going to be interrogated, transferred, or released. He knew the drill.
He’d spent four short stints, or “sleeps,” as prisoners call them—a total of less than two years—in various prisons for his suspected Islamist sympathies. The authorities weren’t wrong about him, but he was never convicted. Mohammad admired Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, but he was wily and hid his tracks well. He didn’t even wear a beard. It was common for suspected Islamists and other political prisoners to disappear in detention, sometimes for years, sometimes forever. Mohammad had gotten off lightly.
His first detention in 2006 occurred because of something he said. A mechanical engineer by trade, he let what he termed his “other self” appear in front of colleagues. He defended the cause of anti-American foreign fighters in Iraq. It cost him three months in the Political Security branch of his hometown, Latakia City, even though at the time his view paralleled that of the Syrian government. Syria’s grand mufti, the highest Sunni cleric in the land, Sheikh Ahmad Kaftaru, had issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, saying it was obligatory for Muslims to resist the occupying forces in Iraq. Mohammad was arrested anyway. The next year, he spent 111 days in a pitch-black solitary cell in another branch of the security apparatus, Latakia’s Military Security. He landed there, in a space just big enough to stretch his legs and stand, because of Western Union transfers of $20,000 to $25,000 each—a fortune in a country where monthly wages were a few hundred dollars. The funds belonged to two childhood friends he considered relatives, smugglers who transported people from as far away as Somalia and Indonesia across the Syrian–Turkish border and sometimes onward to Greece, Germany, and other European states. Mohammad’s cut was $40 per wire transfer. His interrogators insisted he was funding an Islamist sleeper cell.
For the first twenty-five days, he was subjected to procedures common in Syrian jails. Doused with water and electrocuted. Hung from the ceiling by his wrists, his toes barely touching the floor as guards beat his sides (they called this shabeh). Whipped on the soles of his feet with thick cables until he couldn’t walk (the falaqa torture method). Then they ignored him. He said that was worse. Alone in the dark, he hallucinated, becoming convinced that his baby daughter was in there with him. He’d bang on the door and ask for a beating, “just to feel something.” To Mohammad, being tortured outside the solitary cell “was more merciful than being in it.”
He was released without charge or trial, angry about “sleeping” for nothing. The next time he was imprisoned—and he was certain there would be a next time—he wanted it to be for something he’d actually done. So, over the next two years, he set about turning a suspicion into a reality. He introduced sixteen university-educated Sunni men to Al-Qaeda material. He was not yet a member of the group. It was more like a fan club than an Islamist cell. One of the sixteen was detained, unspooling the clique and landing Mohammad in Palestine Branch on November 28, 2009.
The branch didn’t look like much from the outside, a seven-story building with underground levels off the southern interchange in Damascus. Inside, it was a hole so black it served as a CIA rendition site for those America wanted tortured by a state it branded a sponsor of terrorism. Palestine Branch was near Damascus University’s Mechanical and Electrical Engineering Department, Mohammad’s alma mater, but he considered the prison his “greatest school.”
His cellmates belonged to a spectrum of Islamist groups, including Al-Qaeda. He befriended them all but was closest to a man several years his senior who used the nom de guerre Abu Othman. Abu Othman was a Shari’iy, or Islamic legal scholar, from the northern city of Aleppo. They looked like a mismatched pair. Mohammad with his dark hair and eyes, impossibly sharp cheekbones framing a boyish face, spry limbs that didn’t boast strength but possessed it. Abu Othman was stocky but not muscular, with a bulbous nose, small honey-colored eyes, and a chest-length red-tinged beard. He was incarcerated in May 2007 for membership in the governing council of an Al-Qaeda–linked group called Fatah al-Islam, active in Lebanon—a group that, by Abu Othman’s own admission, was heavily infiltrated by the Syrian mukhabarat. Abu Othman spent two years cycling through mukhabarat prisons in Aleppo before he was moved to Palestine Branch in 2009. He said he weighed just forty-eight kilograms when he walked into Mohammad’s cell, such was the pressure he was under during interrogations. Mohammad studied his cellmates. In prison, he said, “you soon learn who wants to work and who has been broken.” The men who wanted to work, like Mohammad and Abu Othman, memorized each other’s contact details.
Mohammad’s first “sleep” in Palestine Branch lasted fourteen months. His family had no idea where he was, or whether he was alive. He was released without charge or trial on January 18, 2011, just in time to watch the Middle East’s modern pharaohs teeter and tumble. He was transfixed by the Arab revolutions but doubted Assad would go the way of other leaders without a fight. Mohammad’s time outside Palestine Branch was brief. On March 13, 2011, he was snatched off the street outside his home in Latakia City, bundled into an unmarked car, and returned to the branch. He remembered making a pronouncement to the room as soon as the cell door slammed behind him: “Something’s changed, shabab! There’s going to be change, a revolution!” Some of the men cried out in happiness, a few hugged him. Others viewed him with suspicion, wondering whether he was a regime plant.
Just ten days after that, a guard was at the cell door calling his number: 6/15. Mohammad was blindfolded and shoved up stairs to ground level. His eyes uncovered, he stood in front of a uniformed officer seated behind a desk. Mohammad was being released. He didn’t understand why he’d been detained, given that he wasn’t questioned once in those ten days, but he dared not ask. The officer pushed a sheet of paper toward him. It was a typed pledge that he would not engage in antigovernment actions. It was the first time he’d been presented with such a condition. In the past, he’d been made to sign a statement outlining confessions extracted under torture. He knew not to challenge them. Doing so meant further interrogations and beatings about why the fictions he’d been forced to admit were
fictional. “If we catch you again, don’t blame us. Expect to die,” Mohammad remembered the officer telling him. “Keep that in mind. Expect to die. If you break this pledge, we will kill you.”
Mohammad did not doubt the officer’s intentions, but he sensed weakness behind his threats. They are trying to scare me because they are scared, he thought. He signed the document with no intention of honoring it. He was fingerprinted and handed his personal belongings: an ID card, mobile phone, and 200 Syrian pounds (about $4). It was standard practice in Syrian detention centers to remove a prisoner’s shoelaces from his footwear, but Mohammad didn’t wait to fetch a pair from a pile he was told to rummage through. He stepped into the chill of a Damascene night on March 23, 2011, in unlaced sneakers. He didn’t know it then, but that was his last “sleep” in a Syrian jail. That phase of his life was over, and a new one was about to begin.
MOHAMMAD WAS BORN on 9/11, September 11, 1979, in Jisr al-Shughour, a city in Syria’s northern Idlib Province, near the Turkish border. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, it was part of Syria’s first, failed Islamist insurrection against Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad. The seeds of that uprising were planted in socioeconomic policies of the 1960s as much as in the role of religion in the state. At the time, the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood was the spearhead of the political Islamist movement. It had been a democratic political player in Syria since 1946, its ideology based on the notion that Islam was the solution—from the pulpit to the parliament. For Assad’s Baath Party, religion had no place in affairs of the state. The Baath’s guiding trinity, expressed in its slogan, was unity (of the Arab nation), freedom (from foreign powers and tyranny), and socialism (the instrument for upward mobility regardless of religious, geographic, or economic identity).
Syria’s Baath Party, like most of the secular movements sweeping to power in the 1950s and ’60s across a Middle East emerging from the trauma of colonialism, had a romantic leftist manifesto that found great appeal. It promised social justice and offered its adherents a larger pan-Arab identity. It told them they weren’t just Christians or Alawites or Druze, Shiites, or Sunnis in a majority-Muslim region—they were part of a new Arabism that transcended the confines of a religion or a nation-state. The Baath preached an idealistic egalitarianism, but, like other secular parties governing the region, it birthed a dictatorship.
Like Islamism, Baathism was at once geographically expansive and culturally narrow. Islamism assumed Arabs were Muslims. Baathism viewed Middle Easterners as Arabs. There were, of course, other religions and ethnicities in the region. The Baath and the Brotherhood represented different visions of what Syria should be, and their supporters came from opposite strata of society. The Baath was the party of the downtrodden, stacked with minorities and the rural poor of all sects, including Sunni. The Brotherhood was solidly Sunni, mercantile, middle class, and old bourgeoisie.
When the Baath Party came to power in 1963, it nationalized banks and many large businesses, seized and redistributed land at the expense of the traditional Sunni elite, including the tribes. The Muslim Brotherhood’s championship of private property and limited state authority played well to this disaffected constituency. The Baath, quick to recognize and crush a political competitor, banned the Brotherhood in 1964. Its actions spurred isolated riots in Hama that year by some factions of the Brotherhood, in Damascus in 1965, and more widespread instability in 1967.
When Hafez al-Assad seized control of the ruling party through an intra-Baath coup in 1970 known as the Corrective Movement, he achieved several things. First, he ended a tumultuous period of short-lived coups that had consumed the country since independence from France in 1946. He continued to focus on the neglected hinterlands, bringing such infrastructure as schools and electricity to the rural poor, but he also reached out to the Islamist opposition and, more broadly, to the Muslim clerical establishment of Ulama, in part to temper the spasms of violence but mainly to secure religious legitimacy for his Alawite community.
The Alawites follow a syncretic religion, a very distant offshoot of Shiite Islam. Most Sunni and Shiite Muslims consider them heretics, not “People of the Book,” thus they have been historically persecuted by Muslim leaders of both sects. (People of the Book are followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.) For generations, the Alawites—about 10 percent of Syria’s majority Sunni population—were the servant class.
Assad encouraged his Alawite coreligionists to adopt mainstream Muslim rituals that were not part of their esoteric faith, such as fasting during the holy month of Ramadan. He built mosques in Alawite villages. He played to both sides of the Sunni–Shiite divide, manipulating them with a manufactured religious affinity to achieve political goals. His rapprochement with the Sunni clerics and political Islamists ended in 1973 with the introduction of a revised constitution that, among other things, removed the requirement for the head of state to be a Muslim and enshrined one-party rule, decreeing that the Baath led “the state and society.” Widespread protests followed, prompting Assad to rescind the article about the president’s faith.
The Muslim Brotherhood, although factionalized by deep ideological and personal rifts into Hama, Damascus, and Aleppo branches, was nonetheless the main repository of anti-Baathists. Its altercations with Syria’s new rulers continued intermittently, especially the Hama faction, fueled by regime corruption, nepotism, and classism through the overt rise of rural Alawites at the expense of the traditional urban Sunni elite.
Since the days of the French mandate in Syria, the military, largely scorned by the upper classes, was an Alawite’s main ticket to limited social mobility. Hafez al-Assad—a lieutenant who rose to command the Syrian Air Force by 1963—institutionalized the idea, lifting the sons of the servant class out of society’s fringes and funneling them into the military and intelligence services that would underpin his power. The changes did not pass unchallenged. There were sporadic assassinations of Syrian military officers and government officials as well as prominent civilians, both Alawite and Sunni. On June 16, 1979, a militant breakaway faction of the Brotherhood called the Fighting Vanguard entered the cafeteria of the Aleppo Artillery School, separated the Sunni cadets from the Alawites, and gunned down eighty-three unarmed Alawites. Hafez al-Assad vowed punishment. On June 26, 1980, he escaped an assassination attempt, kicking away one of two grenades lobbed at him. (A bodyguard fatally threw himself on the other.) The next day, a military unit controlled by Hafez’s brother Rifaat stormed Tadmor Prison, in the desert near Palmyra, and massacred hundreds of suspected religious dissidents in their cells. Two weeks after that, on July 7, 1980, Assad issued Law 49, imposing a blanket death penalty on any member of the banned Muslim Brotherhood.
An open, asymmetric conflict followed, a period that would later simply be referred to as the ahdass—the events. The Islamists, centered in the cities of Hama, Aleppo, and, to a lesser degree, Jisr al-Shughour, engaged in guerrilla attacks and assassinations. Decades later, Bashar al-Assad would emulate his father in using airpower and artillery against the grounded rebels. On March 9, 1980, helicopter gunships strafed Jisr al-Shughour. Mohammad’s family fled to a village on the outskirts of the city, but it was another city, Hama, that would bear the brunt of the anti-Islamist crackdown. In February 1982, somewhere between ten thousand and thirty thousand people—perhaps more, perhaps less, nobody knows; gunmen and civilians alike—were exterminated. It was mass killing in an information blackout, but survivors remembered where the bodies were dumped and paved over: in the plot under the five-star Afamia Cham Hotel, under the streets of what became a vegetable market in the Hamidiyeh neighborhood, in a garden near the Bakr al-Sadiq Mosque. Residents of Hama didn’t dare pray over the bodies, such was the regime’s unrelenting hatred for its foes, even in death. “If you only knew what is under the hotel,” a white-haired, mustachioed man told me when I sneaked into Hama in August 2011. “I know things that I cannot speak of in front of a woman.”
Hama’s ghosts walked unavenged among the
living, a vivid warning of the price of dissent in a nation where memories are long. The 1982 Hama massacre extinguished the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, but the hunting and hounding of suspected sympathizers continued for years. A generation of Sunni children, like Mohammad and Abu Othman, grew up witnessing or hearing about the humiliation of their elders at the hands of Hafez al-Assad’s regime.
For Mohammad, one particular childhood event shaped his adulthood. He was seven when it happened. Cars full of mukhabarat drove up to the isolated hilltop cluster of flat-roofed homes outside Jisr al-Shughour where he lived. Some of the mukhabarat men waited by the convoy as others raided the home of Abu Ammar, a neighbor whom Mohammad loved like an uncle. Abu Ammar, then thirty-seven, was in the fields threshing wheat. He was dragged into a dirt patch amid the five houses where the families used to park their vehicles.
Although most of Mohammad’s distant male relatives, who numbered in the tens of hundreds, were associated with the Brotherhood and the events of Jisr al-Shughour, Mohammad’s father could not have been more removed from them. He maintained good relations with the government men in the area. He knew most of the mukhabarat agents who loomed over Abu Ammar on that early summer evening of August 5, 1986. There were few other men in the handful of homes. Most were headed by women, their husbands and sons over the age of seventeen rounded up or killed in earlier government raids against suspected Brotherhood members and other Islamists, their sympathizers, associates, friends, family, and even casual acquaintances.
The security men ordered the residents to gather outside, even the children, including Abu Ammar’s two sons. They all stood there in silence as the mukhabarat took turns beating Abu Ammar. Mohammad watched, frozen in fear, as what seemed like hours passed and Abu Ammar’s face and clothes were bloodied. It was quiet, save for the neighbor’s cries and the curses of the security men. “Who could dare to do or say anything?” Mohammad’s father recalled.
No Turning Back Page 3