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2 Syria
goes from periphery to core By
Derek Henry Flood
For most of the past
decade, Syria, a country at the political heart of
the Arab world, was mostly an afterthought for
journalists. Stories about Syria focused on
subjects like the short-lived, 2000-2001 movement
towards democracy known as the "Damascus Spring"
and the influx of Iraqi refugees following the
2003 fall of Saddam Hussein (and later on, the
flow of jihadi fighters heading in the opposite
direction to fight American troops).
The
real Syria - an opaquely governed, heavily
fortified security state - did not present itself
the way its Lebanese and Iraqi neighbors did, with
their unvarnished war wounds open for all to see.
My early jaunts into Syria had virtually
nothing to do with
investigating domestic
politics. That's not to say that the Syria's
ethno-religious mosaic wasn't immensely
fascinating in its own right, but with hot wars
erupting on its eastern and western flanks, and
for journalists focusing primarily on kinetic
conflicts, a deep examination of Syria's potential
for renewed conflict remained comparatively
absent.
There were stories we wanted to
tell, but to outside journalists they seemed
impossible to verify on Syrian soil. Did President
Bashar al-Assad's regime torture "rendered"
terrorism suspects after 9/11, in cooperation with
the West as in the well-known case of
Syrian-Canadian Maher Arar? Was Syria behind the
brazen 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime
minister Rafik Hariri in an explosion on Beirut's
Corniche? Was the Assad government in the nascent
stages of an allegedly North Korean-assisted
nuclear program when a mysterious facility was
bombed by the Israel Air Force in 2007 as the
International Atomic Energy Agency asserted? It
was all talk and suspicion, with little to be
unearthed by journalists in a country that was
impossible to penetrate.
The Syrian wing
of the Muslim Brotherhood had been locked in a
low-intensity confrontation with Hafez al-Assad
that had quietly persisted since 1976. By the
early 1980s, the Assad dynasty had largely
succeeded in suppressing any form of domestic
opposition, religiously inspired or otherwise.
In central Syria, Hafez al-Assad had
literally attempted to bury his war with his
landed Sunni domestic challengers culminating in
the notorious Hama massacre of February 1982. As
many as 30,000 Syrians may have been killed in
that campaign of collective punishment, which
destroyed the city of Hama and sent many surviving
Brotherhood leaders into exile.
While
Bashar's father believed the threat of the Sunni
majority to Alawite power had been largely
extinguished that awful February, evidenced by no
such further serious contests to his rule all the
way until his death in June 2000, the successor
regime helmed by his unimaginative son would face
a renewed rebellion underpinned by the ghosts of
Hama's sectarian dimensions that refused to go
away even as the decades wore on.
Scorched-earth tactics combined with zero
effort at communal reconciliation over 30 years
ago only put Syria's Alawite-Sunni conflict in a
state of suspended animation rather than erasing
it altogether, though Hafez al-Assad likely went
to his grave thinking he had. Bashar has tried the
"Hama solution" writ large but has failed
spectacularly at quelling a diffuse, multi-pronged
insurgency which has vowed not to quit until he is
out of power.
2002 It was that
seemingly quiet and stable post-Hama Syria that I
came to know. It served as a passageway to the
places where the real action could be found, to
put it bluntly. In 2002, I traveled to Damascus on
a tourist visa, in hope of meeting with members of
the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) led by
Massoud Barzani.
A nominal Western ally,
the KDP controlled the border on the Iraqi side of
the Tigris River that separates northeastern Syria
and northwestern Iraq. Like other journalists at
the time, I had hoped to gain access through Syria
to the Kurdish-controlled regions of northern
Iraq, to report on the pending American-led
invasion as it was gathering steam.
In August 2002, the wares
of a poster seller in Damascus’s Old City
illustrate Syria’s inherent societal
contradictions. Then in power for just over two
years, Bashar al-Assad sought to cement his own
personality cult while attempting to strike a
balance between the secular and religious currents
in the Syrian polity. His portraits sit among
scenes of Mecca, a Koranic verse, and a poster of
the American pop star Britney Spears. Credit:
Derek Henry Flood
The Kurds had been
successful at achieving de facto independence from
Baghdad when the Operation Provide Comfort and
Operation Northern Watch no-fly zones kept
Ba'athist ground forces south of the 36th parallel
aided in the establishment of a semi-autonomous
northern enclave. It was this armed
humanitarianism dating from 1991 that prompted
Syrian rebels in 2012 in Syria's Idlib governorate
to insist to this reporter that they deserved the
same external aerial protection bestowed upon
Iraqi Kurds two decades previously so as to harden
a secure buffer zone stemming southward from the
Turkish border.
The Iraqi Kurdish enclave
was to become a beachhead in the proposed
Anglo-American invasion of central Iraq in order
to depose then president Saddam Hussein. Plans
were quickly frustrated when nearly half of
Turkey's parliament - supposedly wary of internal
blowback and in the face of civilian protests -
rejected a draft proposal to allow tens of
thousands of American troops to stage themselves
at military facilities on Turkish soil with
Incirlik Air Base.
Last December, Turkish
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told the state
broadcaster, Turkish Radio and Television
Corporation, that the George W Bush administration
had quietly scuttled another option that would
have seen Turkish regular troops enter Iraqi
Kurdistan en masse as a contingent of Operation
Iraqi Freedom.
Bush purportedly telephoned
Erdogan to say the concept was a deal breaker for
the White House's allies in Erbil and Sulaimaniyah
who rued Turkish militarism with nearly equal
vitriol as their Arab Iraqi enemies. Ankara feared
both the consequences of a furtherance of Kurdish
empowerment in Iraq in its war with Kurdistan
Workers Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan-PKK)-led
Kurdish irredentism inside its own borders but did
not want to game itself out of shaping the outcome
in its own interests in a post-Saddam Baghdad.
But even well before Turkey officially
refused to let the United States military use its
territory at the 11th hour on March 1, 2003, it
seemed the stuff of pie-in-the-sky neoconservative
thinking that was typically very out of touch with
ethnographic ground realities. It seemed that the
only viable option for the Pentagon and Langley
would be to deftly insert intelligence officers
and a limited number of special operations troops
who would pair up with the Peshmerga armies of the
KDP and Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan (PUK).
Short of a major ground
assault, Washington sought to recreate its "Afghan
model" in Iraqi Kurdistan. Modeled on its light
footprint military campaign in northern
Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 when it bought the
loyalties of the Tajik and Uzbek ethnic militia
commanders leading Jamiat-i-Islami and
Junbish-i-Milli in its efforts to route Taliban,
Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and al-Qaeda
men from their dug-in trenches, millions of
American taxpayer dollars were thrown at savvy KDP
and PUK leaders, thus buying their allegiance.
What complicated things for the Americans
was the intricate milieu that had developed in the
Kurdish enclave under the aegis of the
Western-enforced no-fly zone. Kurds from Turkey,
Iran, and Syria strengthened linkages with their
Iraqi Kurdish brethren, and a Salafi-jihadi group
called Ansar al-Islam had set up shop in mountains
along the Iranian border and would have to be
violently dislodged before US forces could move
southward into Arab Iraq.
The KDP, then
depending on Bashar al-Assad for diplomatic
succor, never did arrange for me to cross that
riverine northern border as promised. The Syrian
government sought to undermine that of rival
Saddam Hussein by letting a very limited number of
approved journalists quietly trek into Iraq, but
did not want its Kurdish guests to welcome too
many reporters on its territory at any given time
lest Syria itself become subject to too much
spillover scrutiny. At the time, it was busy
torturing terror suspects and constructing a
nuclear reactor, so it was best that journalists
crossing the territory it controlled were tightly
monitored
Arriving overland from Istanbul
I checked into the down-at-the-heels al-Rabie
hotel popular with Australian and Japanese
backpackers on a shady sidestreet. I repeatedly
phoned a number from the al-Rabie's front desk
that was given to me by a KDP contact in
Washington. A startled KDP man answering in hushed
tones insisted each time that he had not been
notified of my impending arrival in the Syrian
capital by his US-based colleagues in advance,
which therefore prevented him from revealing the
address of his office over the phone.
In
the Middle East, even what are essentially evolved
guerilla movements maintain their own arcane,
state-like bureaucratic procedures to thwart
penetration by rivals. The befuddled hotelier
couldn't understand why someone who appeared to be
a young budget tourist was whispering mysteriously
into the front-desk phone each morning rather than
inquiring about the best place to buy local
antiques or museum hours. In the interim, I
periodically popped into one of the Syrian
capital's then few Internet cafes to plead with
the Washington KDP office for help.
Entrepreneurial cafe operators tried to
explain to me why Bashar al-Assad had had Hotmail
blocked across Syria on some sort of paranoid
Ba'athist whim. These clever young men had quickly
found ways to circumvent Assad's clumsily imposed
firewall, however, and I would fire off requests
to Washington Kurds labeled "urgent", to no avail.
2006 In July 2006, with the
Israeli offensive in Lebanon raging, I once again
applied for a visa at Syria's Washington embassy
on a shady side street north of Dupont Circle.
(Syria's UN Mission in New York did not have the
authority to issue visas and they generally could
not be acquired on arrival at border crossings
unless one's home country lacked a Syrian embassy
altogether).
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
