Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa

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Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa Page 13

by Michael J. Totten


  Ghajar’s residents had been living under Israeli jurisdiction since 1967, and—unlike the Druze of the Golan—most of them took Israeli citizenship in 1981. So when Leena and I arrived in 2005, the northern half of Ghajar was populated with Syrians in Lebanon with Israeli ID cards.

  The complexity still makes my head hurt, but that’s the Levant for you.

  Leena intended to take me there, but in hindsight I believe she mistakenly took me to a different village right next to Ghajar called Arab al-Luweiza.

  Ghajar had been under Israeli control for decades, but the place Leena showed me was utterly destitute, in worse shape by far than anything else in the area, whether Jewish, Druze, Christian or Shia. Some houses were crumbling boxes made out of cinder blocks. Others were shanties with tin roofs and walls. Barren ground was strewn with rubble and rocks.

  A handful of barefoot children dressed in dirty clothes and playing in filthy streets ran up to us when we stepped out of the car. Somehow they managed to smile.

  “What is wrong with this place?” I said to Leena. The conditions were worse than in the Hezbollah areas. “Who lives here? Are these people Shias?”

  Leena wasn’t sure, so she asked one of the boys.

  “Alawi!” he said.

  The Alawi—Alawite—sect makes up about 10 percent of Syria’s population and a tiny percentage of Lebanon’s. Most Alawites live along the Mediterranean coast in Syria and Northern Lebanon, but a few live as far south as the Golan Heights area. They are descendants of the followers of Muhammad ibn Nusayr, who took them out of mainstream Twelver Shia Islam in the 10th century. Their religion has as much in common with Christianity and Gnosticism as it does with Islam, and both Sunnis and Shias have long considered them infidels.

  The strangest thing about the Alawites is that they have made themselves rulers of Syria. It’s as unlikely as the Druze lording over Lebanon, the Kurds seizing control of Iraq or Coptic Christians mounting a successful coup in Egypt, but it happened. Since the Assad clan is Alawite, most of the elites in the Baath Party, the bureaucracy and the military are Alawites too.

  Imam Musa Sadr, founder of the Shia movement Amal in Lebanon, struck a deal with Hafez al-Assad in 1974 and issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, implausibly declaring Alawites part of the Shia community.

  Yet the Alawites are not Shias. They’re Alawites. The two communities need religious cover for their political alliance, however, and Sadr’s fatwa gives it to them. The relationship between Hezbollah and Damascus’ Alawite regime is strictly one of convenience. The two feel little or no warmth for each other.

  While Hezbollah and Amal are politically aligned with the Alawite government, the Sunnis are not, and Sunnis make up about 70 percent of Syria’s population. The fundamentalists among them have long detested Assad’s Baath Party regime, not only because it is secular and oppressive but also because its leaders are “heretics.”

  So the Assad family ended up supporting terrorist groups in Syria’s war against Israel for some of the same reasons the Khomeinists do in Iran. As minorities in the region, neither can be rulers of or hegemons over Sunnis without street cred.

  In 1982, the same year Israel invaded Lebanon and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps founded the prototype of Hezbollah, Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood took up arms against Hafez al-Assad’s government in the Syrian city of Hama. Assad dispatched the Alawite-dominated military and destroyed most of the old city with air strikes, tanks and artillery. Rifaat al-Assad, the former president’s younger brother, boasted that the regime killed 38,000 people in a single day.

  In his book From Beirut to Jerusalem, Thomas Friedman dubbed the senior Assad’s rules of engagement “Hama Rules.” They are the Syrian stick. The carrot is Assad’s steadfast “resistance” against Israel. No Arab government in the world is as stridently anti-Israel, in both action and rhetoric, as his. There is no better way for a detested minority regime to curry favor with Sunnis in Syria and the larger Arab world than by adopting the anti-Zionist cause as its own.

  As “infidels,” Syria’s Alawites don’t feel they have the legitimacy to force Sunnis to make peace with Israel. That’s a risky business even for Sunni leaders, as the assassination of Egypt’s Anwar Sadat showed after he signed a treaty with Israel’s Menachem Begin.

  Because most of Syria’s Alawites live along the Mediterranean coast and away from the Sunni heartland, they could, at least theoretically, be separated from Syria into their own Alawite nation. The Middle East would probably be a safer place if they had their own state. Unlike the Druze, they once aspired to one. They did have their own semiautonomous government under the French Mandate from 1930 to 1937 and again from 1939 to 1944.

  “The Alawites refuse to be annexed to Muslim Syria,” Suleiman al-Assad, grandfather of President Bashar al-Assad, wrote in a petition to France during the second period in 1943. “In Syria, the official religion of the state is Islam, and according to Islam, the Alawites are considered infidels … The spirit of hatred and fanaticism imbedded in the hearts of the Arab Muslims against everything that is non-Muslim has been perpetually nurtured by the Islamic religion. There is no hope that the situation will ever change. Therefore, the abolition of the mandate will expose the minorities in Syria to the dangers of death and annihilation.”

  The Alawites’ semiautonomous government was dissolved back into French Mandate Syria in 1944, and their Latakia region has been an integral part of the country ever since. Had they declared and received independence, they might even have been natural allies of Israel for the same reasons the Middle East’s Christians and Kurds are. After all, when the Alawites of Ghajar were given a choice to live under a Lebanese or Israeli government, they chose Israel’s. And they made that choice when Lebanon was considered the Switzerland of the Middle East, years before it descended into chaos and horror and war. Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights freed them from tyrannical Syrian rule, and it freed them from the Sunni demand to resist the Zionists.

  After Hadar and I said goodbye to Faiz and Taiseer and thanked them for talking with us, I dropped her off at her house before returning to Tel Aviv. We took the long way round, though, so she could show me a couple of things.

  “There’s a destroyed Alawite village ahead,” she said before directing me to turn off the highway. The road to the ruins clearly had not been maintained since the ’60s. It is, like the village, in a state of advanced deterioration.

  “It must have been lovely here once,” Hadar said. “They had this amazing view in a moderate climate and with all these trees above northern Israel. It’s a shame, really. We would have gotten along fine with them had they stayed.”

  She was most likely right about that. The Israelis get along fine with the Golani Druze. And they get along even better with the Alawites living in Ghajar.

  “I should have asked our Druze friends why they stayed when the Alawites fled,” she said.

  “That’s a good question,” I said. Why did the Druze stay when the Alawites fled? “I don’t know why, but I can guess.”

  “Why?” she said.

  “Perhaps,” I said, “because they knew already that the Druze in Israel were treated well by the Israeli people and government. They knew they weren’t in any danger, but the Alawites had no idea what to expect. There was no precedent for Israelis and Alawites getting along. They would have been fine had they stayed, but they didn’t know that. So they left. But that’s just a guess.”

  “I found something Faiz said very disturbing,” she said.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “When he told you he wasn’t sure what his Israeli neighbors really think,” she said. “We’ve been telling them exactly what we think now for decades. We want them to join us and take citizenship. It’s not a trick. That’s exactly what we want and hope for, and we’ve never told them anything else.”

  Faiz, like all the other Druze on the Golan, surely hears this message from the Israelis, but it seems he isn’t prepared
to accept it at face value. Perhaps he suffers from cognitive egocentrism, what Professor Richard Landes describes as the tendency to project one’s own mentality on others.

  “My guess is that he was projecting,” I said. “He doesn’t necessarily tell you what he really believes, for political reasons beyond his control, so maybe he thinks Israelis do the same thing. It’s completely normal behavior from his point of view. In his experience, everyone does it.”

  “We’ve perfectly integrated Israeli Druze into our society,” she said, “and he knows that, so why doesn’t he think we could do the same with the Druze of the Golan?”

  Israel has done a good job integrating even non–Middle Eastern minorities. “We accepted Vietnamese boat people as refugees in the 1970s,” she said. “They’re Israeli citizens, and their children are Israeli citizens. They aren’t Jewish, but they fit in very well. They speak Hebrew and they serve in the army.”

  She was a little bit bothered by our entire conversation with Faiz and Taiseer. They told me more or less what I thought they would say, but she was uncomfortable with the differences between their point of view and that of her Israeli Druze friends.

  “I just wish they would meet us halfway,” she said.

  “They are,” I said, “compared with the Syrian Druze. If they lived under the authority of Assad and took their opinions from him, they wouldn’t say they’re more concerned with your welfare than the welfare of Egyptians. They wouldn’t say Israel has the right to occupy the Golan for security reasons as long as Israel doesn’t build settlements. They’d champion the ‘resistance’ and say you have no right to exist in this region at all.”

  “That’s true,” she said. “I once saw them in Majdal Shams carrying placards demanding Israel leave the Golan. Only a tiny number of people showed up at the rally, and they looked terribly bored. It doesn’t cost them anything to protest against Israel, but they don’t dare protest the Syrian government even though they live here.”

  She later sent me an email after she thought about our conversation some more.

  “It’s no good from their point of view,” she said, “our being nice neighbors and offering them full citizenship if we don’t come out once and for all and make it very clear that we have no intention of ever giving up the Golan. As long as Israel does this silly peace dance with the Assads of any generation once every few years, Faiz and the rest of the Druze will still be in that impossible position. I can see entirely where he’s coming from and how unfair it is to them—all we’re offering them is something they can’t take. They need us to operate on the ‘strong horse’ principle, but it’s against our nature.”

  Much of the world supports the Palestinian cause, partly because they’ve been stateless for decades but also because Palestinian leaders, both religious and secular, have waged relentless campaigns of terrorism. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, as they say. Few would take an interest in the Palestinians if they acted like Druze.

  Hardly anyone yearns to return the Druze of the Golan to Syria. Even they come across as only half interested. If they were passionate, though, and if they mass-murdered Israelis, their cause may well get traction on university campuses, in activist circles and perhaps even in the White House. Terrorism works, at least up to a point. If the Druze adhered more closely to the regional mainstream instead of to their own local mainstream, they might resort to terrorism themselves, but they don’t.

  The Alawites are a little bit different. Most who live in Ghajar enthusiastically took Israeli citizenship as soon as it was offered. They seem to think it makes them safer. Those who live in Syria enthusiastically embrace the Sunni cause of “resistance,” and they do it for the same reason. It’s safer that way.

  The war between Syria and Israel will last a long time, for the rest of Assad’s life, more likely than not.

  Chapter Six

  On the Hunt in Baghdad

  Baghdad, 2008

  If your men conduct any raids,” I said to Captain Todd Looney at Combat Outpost Ford on the outskirts of Sadr City, Baghdad, “I want to go.”

  “We might have something come up,” he said. “If so, I’ll get you out there.”

  Less than an hour later Haji Jawad, one of the most dangerous terrorist leaders in all of Iraq was spotted holding a meeting at a house in the area. An arrest warrant had already been issued by the government of Iraq, and Captain Looney’s company was the closest to his location. They would be the ones to go get him.

  “Do you still have room for me?” I said.

  “Get your gear,” Captain Looney said.

  Last time I was in Baghdad, in the summer of 2007, I was told that most suspects surrender the instant they realize their house is surrounded. Fighting would be suicidal, and most terror cell leaders do not seek martyrdom. But the guy we were after was far more vicious and crazy than average.

  “Is he the kind of guy who might shoot at us during a raid?” I said to Captain Clint Rusch in the Tactical Operations Center.

  “Oh yeah,” he said. “He’s definitely the kind of guy who will shoot at us. He’s a really bad dude. A few weeks ago he and his men lobbed huge bombs at a JSS in the area and almost destroyed it, then called up the commander and asked how was his morning. And he said if we didn’t stop chasing him, he’d start wearing a suicide vest wherever he goes.

  The tip-off came in over the phone late at night when the terrorist leader’s meeting was almost scheduled to be finished. By the time everyone had their gear and was ready to go, we had seventeen minutes or less to drive across a portion of Sadr City and break down the door before the meeting was over.

  We ran to the Humvees.

  “Go with Sergeant Gonzales,” Captain Looney said to me. “When we dismount, catch up to me and stay on me.” He looked angry all of a sudden, but mostly he was just being serious. Any of us might be killed in less than an hour.

  Our convoy of Humvees roared down Baghdad’s streets in the dark without headlights. I checked my watch. No time to waste. We had eleven minutes to catch the bastard before his meeting was scheduled to end. Hopefully he and his pals were on “Arab time” and would hang out and drink tea for a while before heading out.

  Almost every house we drove past was dark. Few streetlights worked. It was hard to believe I was in the middle of a city of millions. Iraq’s electrical grid is still in terrible shape. Baghdad is only marginally better lit than the countryside. It produces perhaps only one or two percent as much ambient light after dark as cities in normal countries. Baghdad at night from the air looks more like a constellation of Christmas lights than, say, the brightly lit circuit board of Los Angeles.

  The Humvee in front of mine suddenly stopped. Our driver slammed on his brakes.

  “Dismount!” Sergeant Gonzales said from the passenger seat in the front.

  Here we go.

  I got out of the Humvee. Even hopped up on adrenaline it’s impossible to throw those doors open quickly. They weigh hundreds of pounds because they’re up-armored with several inches of steel.

  Every soldier could see better than I could. They all had night-vision goggles. I had to rely on my eyes in a near-pitch black corner of a dark city. It takes thirty minutes for a man’s eyes to adjust to darkness, and we had left the brightly lit interior of the base less than ten minutes before.

  Sergeant Gonzales motioned for me to follow him alongside a wall toward an opening that led into the neighborhood. I stepped in a deep puddle of mud. At least I hoped it was mud. Sewage still runs in the streets in much of Baghdad, and we were in one of the most decrepit parts of the city. But I hardly cared what had just splashed up onto my pant legs. Any second now I might be shot at or worse.

  One at a time we poured through the hole in the wall. Every single house on the other side of that wall was cloaked in darkness. I had no idea which house we were about to storm into, but the soldiers knew and I followed them up to the gate.

  The gate was locked. One of the soldiers--I couldn’t tell
anyone apart in the dark--kicked the gate with everything he had. Twice. And it did not open.

  “Goddamn it!” Captain Todd Looney said.

  He pulled out an enormous hammer and swung it hard against the front of the gate.

  BANG.

  The gate merely shook.

  BANG.

  The metal gate shuddered, but it did not break.

  BANG.

  Everyone in the neighborhood must have heard us by then.

  If a meeting were still going on in that house, they knew we were coming. I kept as close to the wall as I could in case we fot shot at. No one inside the house would be able to hit me as long as I didn’t back up into the street.

  Taking the house would be much more dangerous now, but the soldiers brought flashbang grenades. Flashbangs stun and blind everyone in a room for up to ten seconds. All the soldiers had to do was toss one of those babies into a room ahead of them. Ten seconds is an eternity in room-to-room combat. American soldiers can do whatever they want in a room full of terrorists in less than two seconds.

  BANG.

  The hammer came down on the gate once again, but it still didn’t break. We would have to climb over the wall.

  “Keep busting it open while we’re climbing the wall!” Captain Looney said.

  BANG.

  The wall was about seven feet high and made of cement. Most of us couldn’t get over it without some kind of boost. I’m not used to throwing myself over walls taller than I am, and the soldiers were weighed down with 80 pounds of armor and gear. Someone crouched on all four and let everyone else use his back as a step ladder. That effectively knocked two feet off the height of the wall. It’s easy to climb five feet.

  “Keep going over!” the captain said. “Keep going over!”

  The gate was locked from the inside. Those on the other side desperately tried to unlock it, to no avail.

 

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