Guest House for Young Widows

by Azadeh Moaveni

  While Karim looked for a job, Nour continued to soothe him with words of patience, but recently her reserves had been waning. When Karim had asked to marry her, he had mentioned the existence of an ex-wife, a Tunisian woman with whom he had had a daughter a few years before moving to France; he had made it sound tidy and long resolved. And perhaps it had been while he lived abroad, but now that he was back in Tunisia, the ex-wife was showing up in their lives. Nour took this gracefully, welcoming the little girl when she came to visit Karim, braiding her hair and taking her for ice cream along the seaside corniche. The ex-wife rang Karim almost every day, demanding to know when he would start giving them money. But Karim had nothing more than the occasional shift driving a taxi. When he explained this to his ex-wife, she shrieked that she couldn’t spin money out of air, either, and threatened to report him to the police as an extremist if he didn’t sort things out.

  His mobile phone vibrated at all hours with calls from an unidentified number. His body stiffened when he saw the caller; sometimes he ignored it, and sometimes he answered in a clipped voice. The conversations made the lines around his eyes deepen. Eventually he told Nour it was the police calling, asking to see him, asking him about men he knew from France. Karim told Nour that back in France, the police had also been monitoring him.

  Nour’s mother finally asked her why the police were bothering him. “His religion. It’s his religion that causes him trouble,” she said.

  ASMA

  January 2011, Raqqa, Syria

  For much of that January, and even into early February, Asma imagined, as she stepped off the bus that took her back and forth between her university and central Raqqa, that the distant rumblings of revolt would never reach them. The Arab Spring had quickly spread from Tunisia to Egypt and Yemen, with smaller protests in Jordan and Oman, but the Assad family had ruled Syria her entire life, all nineteen years of it, and they seemed as rooted in the country’s firmament as the pine trees that lined the coastal mountains. Enormous statues of Hafez al-Assad loomed over so many urban squares, Hafez with his preternaturally long forehead, arm outstretched and beckoning, as if to say, “Welcome to Syria, my personal home!”

  The Assad family were Alawites, a minority religious sect in the area of the Levant that came to be known as Syria, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. France administered Syria after the Ottoman dissolution, and during this time, it encouraged Alawite participation in its military with the conventional imperial aim: dividing the local citizenry by exacerbating natural fault lines. It was the first time in centuries that the Muslims of the Levant had been ruled by European Christians, and Sunni Muslim dismay and resistance was fierce. The new colonial borders drawn by the French blocked Sunni traders and merchants from access to their traditional Ottoman trade markets and seaports. For the Alawites, who were primarily peasants living in rural areas, the new arrangements offered a quick, unexpected path to power. Hafez al-Assad, the father of Bashar, took power following a coup in 1970. Rural Alawites slowly urbanized, while traditionally wealthy, conservative Sunnis in cities like Aleppo and Homs saw their influence and fortunes wane.

  By the early 1980s, the Muslim Brotherhood emerged as what one historian called the “natural spokesman” of the Sunni community, whose social interests, particularly among landed, trading, and manufacturing classes, suffered under Assad’s secular, nationalist-socialist project. The Brotherhood released a declaration in 1980 that was scarcely concerned with Islam or ideology at all, but advocated a different economic program that would aid a broader swath of constituencies and promote political and civil liberties. It was, as ever, a demand for better governance: more equitable economic policies, less patronage, a less stifling political environment. Though the Muslim Brotherhood exists in the Western imagination as an extremist movement driven by ideology, its historical roots in the Syria of the 1970s and 1980s grew out of political advocacy for an underrepresented group.

  Hafez al-Assad, by that time, had cultivated a vivid personality cult that overlaid his oppressive rule: he was “father,” the “leader forever,” the “gallant knight,” even the country’s “premier pharmacist.” In that era, just as today, the divides in Syria could be mapped as Alawi versus Sunni—but not without blurring many lines, because there were also contentions that fractured along economic and social interests, and geographic and commercial ones. Before the 1970s, there was no perception of a grand sectarian conflict in Syria, because no one considered the Alawites to be Muslims; Sunnis and Shias alike considered them heretics, outside the fold of the faith. But Assad wished to endow his narrow, minority rule with religious legitimacy and to incorporate Islam into his national mythology. He sought to recast the Alawites not as an impious and singular religious tribe of its own, but as Shia-esque Muslims. He offered protection and patronage to Shia clerics who were willing to anoint them as such; the prominent Lebanese Shia cleric Musa al-Sadr offered the gelatinous term “partners in distress,” hinting that Alawites and Shi‘ites shared contemporary political concerns, if not theological roots.

  In February 1982, the Sunnis of Hama, through the Muslim Brotherhood, rebelled against the rule of Hafez al-Assad. The city of Hama had around 200,000 inhabitants. Assad dispatched 12,000 troops and sealed off the city, tanks rolling through the streets and helicopter gunships roaming the skies. In the course of three weeks, government forces killed between 5,000 and 20,000 citizens.

  Nearly every family lost at least one member. There were so many bodies lying in the streets that the city began attracting packs of wild dogs, who would gnaw at corpses and attack people searching for their relatives’ bodies. Asma wasn’t born yet, but her parents were living in the capital city of Damascus. By that time, Assad had catered successfully enough to the interests of the capital’s middle class, including its Sunnis, that their concerns no longer overlapped so neatly with those of Sunnis in other towns and cities.

  Hama. To this day, to anyone from the Middle East, the name of the town is one of those coffin words, like “Srebrenica,” synonymous with atrocity on the widest scale. “It is difficult to explain the sudden disappearance of a large city, especially one located on the main highway between Damascus and Aleppo,” wrote a historian shortly after the massacre.

  Assad and his Ba’ath Party, once they had mopped up the uprising, warned Syrians against the “beastly” Muslim Brotherhood that had “sold itself to the devil.” In a speech following the uprising, Assad designated those who had rebelled against the government as extremists.

  They are butchering children, women, and old people in the name of Islam. They are wiping out entire families in the name of Islam. They extend their hand to the foreigner and his agents and to the pro-U.S. puppet regimes on our borders. They extend their hands to them to receive funds and arms to double-cross their homeland and to kill fellow citizens….They carried out every act banned by God….They are apostates. We are the ones who defend Islam, religion, and the homeland.

  The chokehold of repression remained a constant in Syria during the decades that followed, as power passed from Hafez to his son Bashar. But now it was February 2011, just a few weeks after the revolt in Tunisia, and Arabs across the region were transfixed, emboldened to think that their dictators too might be held to account. In Dara’a, a southern town near the border with Jordan, a group of youths scrawled graffiti on the walls of a local school. “It’s your turn, Doctor,” they wrote playfully, addressing Bashar al-Assad, an ophthalmologist by training, riffing the rhyme in Arabic, “Ejak el door, ya Doctor.”

  But when they were arrested by police, their mocking graffiti turned into something like prophecy. By late March, word got out that the youth were tortured in prison. That Friday, after the noon prayer, demonstrators protested angrily in the streets of Dara’a, demanding their release. The police shot indiscriminately into the crowd, killing several people. Within a month, the protests spread to dozens of towns and cities a
cross Syria, flaring regularly after Friday prayers and growing into the most sustained, serious challenge to the Assad family’s rule since the rebellion of Hama in 1982.

  Bashar responded like his father. Though the protesters’ initial demands were for reforms, he shrugged off their grievances and refused to offer any concessions, moving to crush the challenge with violent force. Like his father, he used his first televised address to call the protesters “extremists” and warned that without him, Syria would fall to jihadists. Many Syrians, including prominent and middle-class Sunnis in Damascus itself, feared this prospect.

  The regime’s military laid siege to Dara’a and began killing protesters who poured into the streets, sometimes more than a hundred a week. Large cities like Homs grew restive, and a tweet circulated: “Homs 2011 = Hama 1982, but slowly slowly.”

  The revolution was slow to come to Raqqa. Asma continued to board the bus each day for her marketing classes at al-Hasaka, leaning her head against the window, engrossed in her phone: texting her boyfriend, scrolling through her Facebook feed. Slowly, the uprising that had initially seemed so distant began to inch closer. Asma’s classes at the university were canceled, with no date given for when they might resume. Eventually there were marches through the center of the city, the citizens of Raqqa finally shouting what Syrians had already been calling for across the country: “The people want the fall of the regime!”

  But even as news of massacres and heavy fighting reached the city, as refugees from cities in the west began appearing, as the city’s young men started to sign up with the most popular anti-Assad groups in the area—mostly Jabhat al-Nusra—the fabric of life seemed mostly intact. Within two to three days, the Free Syrian Army and Jabhat al-Nusra worked together to liberate the city.

  Revolution

  The Arab uprising of 2011, optimistically called the Arab Spring, have disrupted the political alignment that has organized the Middle East for more than half a century: the implicit bargain between Arab client state dictators and the West, whereby authoritarians rely on the United States, France, and Britain for political backing, aid, and military protection, and pay it all back through investments in Western economies and tens of billions of dollars in arms purchases, buoying the defense industries of those nations.

  In Syria, in the course of little more than a year, what began as a peaceful protest grows into an armed rebellion against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

  Assad moves swiftly to portray the protesters as extremist Islamists and warns the country of their violent, sectarian intentions. To make this story come true, his security forces target peaceful activists, detaining thousands in prisons where they are tortured and raped. He releases scores of Islamists and hardened jihadists from prison, allowing them free rein to group and organize.

  Defectors from the Syrian military form the Free Syrian Army, while the released jihadists intermingle with more religious and militant strains of the emerging opposition. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who runs the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI), spies an opportunity and dispatches a senior operative to open a front in Syria. This new effort is called Jabhat al-Nusra, the Nusra Front, and attracts both freshly released local militants and Muslim fighters from abroad. Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, the successor of Osama bin Laden, issues a statement lauding the Syrian resistance and urging Muslims from around the region to travel to Syria’s “fields of jihad.”

  In February 2012, the Sunday Times journalist Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik die when Assad’s military forces shell a media center in Homs.

  In May, around one hundred people are killed in the Houla region of Syria, nearly half of them children. Shadowy death squads dispatched by the regime, called the shabiha, who wear civilian clothing and white sneakers, are believed responsible.

  Western governments call on Assad to step down, and impose sanctions. Key regional states—Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia—cut ties, and begin to fund and support Assad’s opponents. Russia and Iran, Syria’s closest allies in the region, stand staunchly behind him; Tehran sends advisers and starts backing militias working with the Syrian military.

  President Obama authorizes the CIA and other agencies to arm and finance the Syrian rebels. Much of this effort is coordinated by the Saudis, who view the opposition to Assad as a sectarian Sunni uprising, and an opportunity to mobilize Sunnis against both the Shia-dominated governments in Iraq and Iran, their great regional foe and a Shia power. President Obama warns that any use of chemical weapons is a “red line” that will bear enormous consequences and “change my calculus” on U.S. intervention.

  In 2012, the United Nations dispatches Kofi Annan to broker a cease-fire. He resigns after just five months, saying that the refusal to include Iran in negotiations defeats any possibility, already slim, of a political settlement.

  The Syrian civil war becomes a proxy war, involving several regional powers and also the United States.

  RAHMA AND GHOUFRAN

  June 2012, Sousse, Tunisia

  Rahma climbed the stairs to the rooftop, holding the bony, bedraggled alley cat by the neck scruff. The dead cat had been lying on the side of the road near the bakery where her mother worked an afternoon shift. Thirteen-year-old Rahma had grabbed it and stuffed it in her backpack.

  On all sides Sousse stretched out into the distance, a horizon of low-slung concrete-block houses, huddled together along narrow, rutted streets that became rivers of mud in the rain. Sousse was a city perched on the Mediterranean coast, about a two-hour drive south of the capital, Tunis. The old quarter had an antique medina where the tourists sometimes wandered. But apart from the luxury hotels splayed along the beach, enclaves where nearly naked Brits and Germans lay on deck chairs amid palm trees, much of the city was squat and strewn with rubbish, lined with fast-food joints with cheap metal doors and closed storefronts. Some of its streets were wide, some narrow, the buildings a mishmash of varying styles, as though the city had developed as a series of afterthoughts.

  Rahma lived with her mother, Olfa, three sisters, and one brother in a small two-room flat in a grimy, trash-strewn neighborhood. Their father, Olfa’s ex-husband, was a drunk who lived in a nearby town and didn’t have the money or inclination to help them. Olfa worked multiple jobs and was away for long hours, trying to earn enough to cover the electricity and rent. When she returned home, she was usually exhausted and prone to screaming at her children for minor infractions or squabbles. Olfa was keen for her daughters to grow up with proper morals and modesty, even though she wasn’t around to oversee their movements the way a less work-burdened mother might be. At school, other children looked down on them for their poverty and fatherlessness and for their secondhand clothes.

  That June day it was quiet up on the roof, except for the rumble of Rahma’s stomach. Some days there wasn’t very much food in the house, and today was one of those days. Rahma thought of her sister Ghoufran downstairs in the flat, watching their younger brother and sister on her own, and resolved to make quick work of the dead cat. The roof contained little but the makeshift corrugated-tin shack where Rahma did her dissections. She had a small table lined with various-sized knives. She started at the base of the neck, slitting a clean line down to the tail, and started edging the knife in sideways, separating the dirty pelt from the muscle underneath. Rahma specialized in this, skinning the neighborhood’s dead animals. Ghoufran, who at fourteen was just a year older, called the shed on the roof “the butcher shop,” but to Rahma, it wasn’t butchery. Something about the precision, the deconstruction of a cat or a bird into its smaller component parts, calmed Rahma. When she was on the roof working on an animal, nothing else existed.

  The night before, Rahma told her mother that she was suspended from school for two days for shouting back at the chemistry teacher. It had begun when two girls had mocked her during recess for not having a father. “Who knows if your mother even knew who he was,” one
of them said. At this, Rahma pounced on her. She was suspended for shouting at the teacher in the aftermath of the fight. Rahma was a strong-willed girl. On other occasions, she had gotten herself into trouble for sticking up for weaker girls who were bullied for their looks, their poverty, their families.

  Olfa was a thickset woman in her mid-forties with a freckled, flat nose and bright brown eyes that hinted at both temper and playfulness. Life hadn’t allotted her the freedom to develop hobbies or pastimes, and she spent most of her waking hours working in a tin-roofed bakery and then waiting tables in a restaurant. She constantly did sums in her head, making sure she would earn enough each week across her shifts. Many evenings, when she got back from the long evening shift at the restaurant, Olfa lay on the sofa rubbing cream onto her puffy ankles. She tried to convince Rahma to be sensible. “Why do you always have to be the voice of defense? Would that girl have done the same for you?” Olfa wondered, as she did countless times, why God had seen fit to give her such a challenging daughter. “There’s always going to be someone treated badly in front of you, Rahma,” she said. “You don’t have to always get involved.”

  That summer evening, Rahma held up the cat’s right paw and inspected it. There seemed to be a piece of metal, like a nail without its head, stuck in it. She prized it out and finished the cat off. The animal looked even skinnier without its fur, sinewy and pink-fleshed. Rahma tossed the knife to the side and walked back out onto the roof, wondering what dinner they could make for the younger children.