For ten days after Mehlis announced his findings, the presidential palace in Damascus was silent. Rumors spread throughout the Syrian capital that President Assad had suffered a nervous breakdown, as Syria now faced even greater diplomatic isolation and the specter of UN sanctions should the regime fail to comply with the investigation. Many in Damascus talked of a possible palace coup, in which Bashar would be replaced by his brother Maher or his brother-in-law, chief of military intelligence Assef Shawkat—both names in the tracked changes of Mehlis’s first report. Others predicted that Assad would try and build up popular support by implementing the reforms promised at the Baath Party conference, most notably a new political parties law.
At 7 AM on November 10, a mobile-phone text message—sent in Arabic and English to all subscribers of Syriatel, the mobile network owned by Assad’s cousin and business tycoon Rami Makhlouf—broke the silence. It asked Syrians to attend a rally that day near Damascus University demonstrating “love of country and the rejection of external pressures.” By midday, thousands gathered out in front of the main hall of Damascus University. Pumping their fists into the air, the crowd chanted, “In spirit, in blood, we will sacrifice for you, oh Bashar”—the same mantra that Syrian soldiers had chanted at that airbase in the Bekaa the day Syrian forces pulled out of Lebanon.1
When President Assad took the podium inside the university’s main hall, he seemed ill at ease. Obviously under pressure, Assad started in a way that his father never did: he made it personal.
Before I start this speech, I would like to say that I was asked several times last week why I look pale, and whether it was because of the pressures. I said no. In fact I was a little ill. I am saying this so that I do not get asked the same question again. Political circumstances make us more united, and when we get united we become stronger and livelier. This speech was scheduled for next week, but because of the fast pace of developments, I decided to make it today.
With that, Assad slipped back into standard “regime speak,” urging his people to remain strong in the face of “cultural and psychological warfare.” Instead of addressing the points raised in the UN investigation, Assad framed the crisis as a US or Israeli conspiracy against Syria. “We must be steadfast in facing this foreign attack,” Assad said. “We don’t want to name names, but you know who I am talking about.” The audience erupted in laughter.
Concerning Syria’s domestic scene, Assad added that the regime would extend citizenship to hundreds of thousands of Kurds in Syria whose citizenship had been stripped away in the 1960s—a key point discussed at the Baath Party conference the previous June. In a clear warning to the Syrian opposition, Assad said, “If someone in Syria raises his voice in tandem with foreigners, he is being controlled by foreigners.”
In the final lines of the speech, Assad hinted at his plan for rolling back the pressures bearing down on his regime. “This region has two options: chaos or resistance,” Assad said. “In the end, we are going to win, one way or another, even if it lasts a long time. Syria is protected by God.”2
As I watched Assad receive a standing ovation, I thought about the speech and what it all meant. Directly and indirectly, Assad had told Syrians that the Hariri investigation in Lebanon was “politicized” and part of a plot against Syria by foreign powers. He was also clearly warning the opposition not to work with “foreigners”—that is, Americans or Westerners trying to help the Syrian opposition. But what was with “Syria is protected by God”? The Assad regime never made references to God, in keeping with the Baath Party’s distinctly secular language. And what did he mean by “resistance”? Resistance to the pressures bearing down on Syria? Or resistance to Israel? When I asked the Syria Today staff what they thought it all meant, they just shrugged their shoulders.
We didn’t have to wait long for an answer. In the days following the speech, Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki arrived in Damascus for talks with Assad. After a long set of meetings with the Syrian president, Mottaki also consulted with “resistance” groups based in Syria and Lebanon, including Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command (PFLP-GC) chief Ahmed Jabril, and a representative of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. A week later on November 21, Hezbollah launched an attempted kidnapping in Ghajar, a border village disputed between Lebanon and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. The raid marked the largest attack on Israel since the withdrawal of its forces from Lebanon in May 2000.
On January 19, the hard-line Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, made his first state visit to Damascus. The two leaders announced a bilateral alliance to confront “foreign pressures,” and President Assad publicly declared Syria’s support for Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear technology. High-level delegations accompanying Ahmadinejad signed a number of protocols pushing economic, educational, and cultural cooperation between the two countries to unprecedented levels, followed up by scores of visits by Iranian officials. By June, Damascus and Tehran concluded their first mutual defense pact. “Syria’s security is considered as part of the security and national interests of Iran,” Iranian defense minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar said after the June 2006 signing ceremony in Tehran. “We find ourselves bound to defend it.”
While Syria’s deepening relationship with Iran made international headlines, the regime began to reorient its rhetoric and propaganda toward Islam. At first, the symbolism was largely political. On the streets of Damascus, posters with images of Assad, Ahmadinejad, and Nasrallah, all surrounded by roses, began appearing on shop facades and car rear windows. Larger banners with Syria is protected by god were strewn throughout the Syrian capital. Syrian flags, with the slogan written into the middle white band alongside two stars—reminiscent of Saddam Hussein’s addition of “Allahu akbar” (God is great) to the Iraqi flag after his forces were driven out of Kuwait in 1991—hung from buildings. State-owned radio and TV repeated the slogan so many times that it quickly turned into a mantra.
By January 2006, however, there were real signs that the regime was reorienting itself away from its secular past and toward Islam. In September 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. States throughout the Arab world demanded that the Danish government apologize for the incident. Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s refusal to do so, because his government “does not control the media,” as it would violate “freedom of speech,” fell well short of most Syrians’ expectations.
On the morning of February 4, banner-wielding protesters began gathering near Rouda Square in Damascus for what would be the biggest diplomatic incident since the storming of the American ambassador’s residence in 2000 in response to US-coalition air strikes on Iraq.
Around 3 PM, demonstrators marched toward the Danish embassy located in the adjacent neighborhood of Abou Roumaneh, where Leila and I were sitting in that neighborhood’s local Kentucky Fried Chicken—Syria’s first Western fast-food restaurant. As I tucked into my three-piece-chicken combo meal, I noticed a swelling crowd through the restaurant’s front windows. When the demonstrations first started, uniformed security services patrolled the streets and traffic policemen directed cars across the district’s main thoroughfare. Soon, however, the waves of protesters could not be controlled. Leila and I rushed out of the door to see what was going on. The crowd was angry but not unruly. Uniformed security agents were gathered at the far end of the boulevard, where a perpendicular street led to the three-story villa housing the Danish, Swedish, and Chilean embassies.
As I rounded the corner of Abou Roumaneh Street, pushing my way through security forces dressed in olive green, I began to hear something that sounded like popcorn popping. About thirty yards down the street, protesters were stoning the Danish embassy. I stopped in my tracks and took a photo.
As I got closer to the embassy, I heard calls of “Allahu akbar” punctuated by sounds of shattering glass. Around a thousand protesters were pushing hard toward the embassies, packed into an area the size of half a football field. Flags of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad fluttered in the air. Banners with enigmatic slogans in English, such as we are ready printed in blood-red ink, dotted the crowd. I was a bit surprised, since Syrian protest banners are usually handmade, full of horrible English spelling and grammar mistakes. What happened next helped me understand just what that slogan meant, a little about where it was coming from, and who was behind it.
The front gate of a church adjacent to the embassy complex was open, with no signs of forced entry. Half a dozen Syrian men, between the ages of fifteen and fifty, were trying to scale the wall of the embassy from the church garden. As the crowd cheered the climbers, I began to notice that more than fifteen uniformed state security agents were assembled in front of the church—smoking cigarettes. Not a single officer lifted a finger to stop the rioters or looked at all nervous.
A number of protesters had already climbed onto apartment-block balconies across from the embassy—a perfect pitcher’s mound for the rock barrage that was still under way. A banner reading IT’S NOT FREEDOM THAT YOU MEAN, BUT INCITEMENT WHAT [sic] YOU MEAN was draped over one terrace railing. Where the stones came from was anyone’s guess, but their brown, earthen color indicated that they did not come from the immediate surrounding area, which was completely paved or covered in asphalt.
One of the climbers, a Syrian man in his early thirties with long black hair and a shortly cropped beard, finally made it onto the terrace of the embassy complex’s second floor, which was home to the Swedish embassy. He immediately began tugging at the Danish coat of arms, a colorful metal plate under the flagpole a floor above. Breaking it loose, he lifted it above his head and slammed it to the earth. Momentarily silenced by the spectacle, the crowd then roared approval, as chants of “Allahu akbar” echoed again. Unable to reach the Danish embassy on the third floor, the bearded man hoisted the green banner of Islam—on which was written LA ALLAH ILLA ALLAH, WA MUHAMMAD AR-RUSUL ALLAH (There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is the prophet of God)—up the Swedish embassy’s flagpole. The crowd roared again.
Protesters were excited but not full of the kind of hate that might justify their stoning a building. While my light-brown hair, blue eyes, and northern European features (a Danish friend once told me that I look a bit Scandinavian) would have seemed to scream “hit me,” I noticed not so much as a dirty look. I was sporting a short-cropped beard, which could have been taken as a sign of Muslim piety. Every time Leila called me on my mobile phone, I made sure I spoke in Arabic. When a few English words slipped out of my mouth, a number of protesters looked my way, but not too hard.
Things soon turned sour. Protesters began throwing office paraphernalia from the Danish embassy into the crowd. Suddenly, black smoke began billowing, as the protesters set the Chilean embassy on the first floor ablaze. I immediately looked at the security forces gathered in front of the church. They were still standing around, still only smoking cigarettes. More flames shot out of the embassy, and the crowd erupted in approval. I tried to push my way toward Leila, who was in front of the church beside the security services. I spotted something square and flat resembling a pizza box sailing through the air—it looked as if it might hit me. As I ducked, the object hit a number of protesters. They tore the package apart, only to find a plastic raincoat with a company logo on the breast. People tried to rip it apart, found it too tough, stepped on it, and just let it lie on the ground.
The mob rage didn’t seem too convincing. In fact, people seemed to be just enjoying the spectacle. It was hard to move through the dense crowd, but a simple pat on the back and a murmured “afwan” (sorry) allowed me to pass. Few, at least so it seemed, gave me a second look. When they did, they gave a little smile when I started taking photos. They want me to see this, I thought.
After about ten more minutes of struggling and frantic phone calls, I finally reached Leila and some friends in front of the church.
“What’s with them?” I asked.
“Come on, Andrew, mukhabarat is controlling everything,” one of her friends said with a patronizing look on her face.
I hadn’t dared talk to anyone in the crowd, but now with Leila at my side, we could play Local Reporter, Foreign Journalist without much trouble. Leila began asking people questions, and I started taking photos.
“Inti ajnabiya?” (Are you a foreigner?), a group of male protesters asked Leila. Her physical features are very Syrian, including olive-brown skin; brown, curly hair; and brown eyes to match. Leila was wearing jeans and a jacket but was hardly the only one in the crowd in Western-style clothing. Why are they asking her if she is foreign? I thought.
“Ana arabiya” (I am an Arab), Leila replied. In Syrian speak, this means “I am first an Arab, then a Syrian, then a Muslim.” They then glanced at me and looked down before starting what seemed a rehearsed tirade.
“America is behind this [cartoon],” said one of the group, a forty-year-old man named Mohammed. “We are here to express our anger.” He then looked at me a bit sheepishly. I snapped a photo.
“But Denmark is in Europe. The European Union helps Syrian reform. What do you think of that?” Leila said.
“The government has its policy,” Mohammed said. “The people are here to defend the Prophet and express their anger.”
Pretty lame, I thought, but interesting. Mohammed was making a distinction between the state and religion. In the past, acting publicly on behalf of religious sentiments could have got you thrown in jail. In 1982, it also could have got you killed or “disappeared” during the state’s battle with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Moving on, we stopped three other middle-aged men—including one wearing a green Islamic headband—to ask what brought them out into the street.
“Down with the Baath Party!” the men exclaimed. Leila raised her eyebrows; here in the land of the Assad family’s Baath Party, I knew that she hadn’t heard that shouted before in public. They didn’t seem nervous at all, and they let me take their photos. When Leila asked them their names, they just continued shouting, “Down with the Baath Party!” and walked off.
Islamic protesters openly calling for destruction of the Baath Party? I thought. Contemplation of the deeper meaning of what I had just heard was interrupted when fire trucks turned up—much too late to save the Danish embassy. They rolled through the crowd so lazily that they eventually coasted to a stop. No firemen were in sight. Protesters just used the trucks as observation decks for the spectacle. A red station wagon arrived—one of the well-known “protocol” cars that direct traffic for President Assad in the Syrian capital. It blew its siren once, half-heartedly. The crowd quickly parted, then broke up. The fire trucks moved in, their hoses shooting water at the flames. Street gutters flowed with water like small streams. Everyone who remained stood calmly and watched the firemen do their duty.
As we walked away from the protest, we ran into Tarek, Leila’s friend. He was smiling, joking with several men in black leather jackets and expensive, well-polished shoes. After watching them for a few minutes, I realized that Tarek was talking to intelligence officers. Men around them with black handheld radios were barking orders; all held wooden batons.
“So what did you think?” Tarek asked me.
“I think it was quite a show,” I said. “People are angry, but the security services don’t seem to be doing much.”
“Yep,” Tarek said with a grin on his face. “People are under a lot of pressure. We have the Hariri problem, and the government just raised petrol prices by 20 percent. They [the regime] are just letting off the pressure.” Tarek moved his hand as if turning a valve.
On the surface, Syria seems a secular society. Minority rights, religious or ethnic, are guaranteed by the state, which is dominated by the Alawites—an offshoot of Shiite Islam from which the Assad family hails. The Baath Party is a secular, pan-Arab party. The other political parties aligned with the Baath in the National Progressive Front are secular as well.
In the half decade leading up to the Danish protests, increased signs of Islamic sentiment in Syria had appeared. At first it showed up in terms of Islamic dress, then mosque attendance grew, as did Islamic study centers. In the midst of this trend was a female religious leader, Munira al-Qubaisi, who runs an organization Syrians call “Qubaisiaat” in her name. The influence of the group had spread rapidly under Bashar al-Assad’s rule.
As we walked away from the demonstration toward Tarek’s office for coffee and chitchat, he pointed toward a new musali (prayer room) constructed beside an ancient domed shrine, which housed the body of a notable who had once donated the land to build an Islamic school; the school was razed long ago, but the tomb remains.
“I renovated this,” Tarek said. I knew he was a practicing Muslim; Leila had told me so. But on the surface, Tarek looked like a wealthy, Westernized Syrian who had spent time in the United States—which he also happened to be. I took off my shoes and stepped inside. Tarek took me through the carpeted room to the shrine, opened the door, and showed me the sarcophagus. “By building it next to this tomb, I get around the permits,” Tarek said. After a few words with the prayer room’s sheikh, I returned to the front door and recovered my shoes from a locker. Tarek remained to pray, saying he would join us later in his office.
For a secular state that arrested people for praying in public in the 1980s, tolerance of this Islamic trend raised eyebrows. What was pushing a nonreligious state, dominated by Alawites, to openly accept growing Sunni Islamic movements? The short answer: external pressures and the complex internal tensions they created.
Standards of living were eroding in Syria. The reasons behind this slide were pretty clear: a general lack of investment, due largely to an extremely corrupt legal and regulatory environment, was not creating enough jobs. Exacerbating this trend was the fact that, when political tensions bubbled over in the 1980s, Syria endured one of the highest birthrates in the world. That massive demographic wave was now hitting the Syrian market with full force.
At the same time, the secular state and the ruling Baath Party continued to hold up socialism as an economic ideal. The public sector’s ability to create enough jobs to absorb labor-market entrants was rapidly declining, however, due to decreasing oil production. Public-sector salaries were also much lower than those in the private sector. Pure and simple, the state was running out of ways to buy off its population and keep them complacent.
Enter the external pressures. Since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, relations between Syria and the United States had deteriorated rapidly. Because of Syrian support for the Iraqi insurgency as well as for radical Palestinian groups based in Damascus, Washington had tightened sanctions on Syria in 2004. Washington was also talking about spreading democracy in the Middle East—something Syrians do not necessarily oppose. However, television images of US forces waging a bloody war on insurgents in Iraq also turned Syrian popular opinion against the United States and its “democracy agenda.” After all, the majority of Iraqi insurgents were Sunni Muslims—a minority in Iraq, but a majority in Syria.
Syria’s rapid withdrawal from Lebanon following the assassination of Rafik Hariri as well as the subsequent investigation into his death put the Syrian regime under tremendous international pressure. Trade, both formal and informal, between Syria and Lebanon had been drastically interrupted, impacting the livelihood of an unknown number of Syrians and Lebanese.
As the investigation into Hariri’s death focused its attention on Damascus, the Syrian regime hunkered down, preparing for a siege—including possible UN sanctions. So instead of sharing some of the wealth generated by record-high oil revenues over the last year, the state increased salaries by only 5 percent that January—far short of the 20-percent increases in 2004 and 2002 respectively. Gasoline subsidies had also recently been slashed, which caused a 20-percent increase in prices at the pump. Inflation ran at an estimated 15 percent. Syrians were feeling the economic pinch of reform and external pressure at the same time.
When we met Tarek in his office after his prayer, he looked relaxed and at ease. We had a glass of tea, talked over a bit of business, and went on our merry way.
However, the fun was not over. We soon learned that the demonstrators had moved on to the Norwegian embassy and burned it down as well, since two of that country’s newspapers had reprinted the Jyllands-Posten cartoons. A couple of phone calls confirmed what we feared—the riot was now moving to the French embassy, as the French newspaper France Soir had also run the caricatures.
It was dark when we arrived in Afif, the Damascus neighborhood that is home to the French embassy. Security forces had finally assembled themselves in force. Leila continued to shout “sahafa” (journalism) as we approached the uniformed security agents. They let us through without batting an eye. When some plain-clothed security agents tried to stop us, she just repeated “sahafa,” and they moved away.
At the French embassy, the situation was far from tense. Police and soldiers mixed freely before the embassy’s stone walls, joking and smoking cigarettes. Two fire trucks were out front, this time complete with firemen in full uniform. They were adjusting the water cannons and firing up the trucks’ compressors. Out in front of the fire engines, about twenty yards down the street, a wall of uniformed security agents donned what looked like old green football helmets and grasped clear Plexiglas riot shields.
I took photos for a few minutes before the police told me to step back. Water shot out of the lead cannon for about thirty seconds, filling the air with a heavy mist. When the firemen turned the cannon briefly to the left, I was caught in the jet stream. I hid behind a tree to dry off and braced myself for another soaking. It never came, however. The “Muslims on a rampage” gave up without much of a fight. Leila and I walked back to the main street and headed to the nearby Damascus Journalists’ Club for oriental salads and good stiff drinks.
But the wheels inside my head were already spinning. Why would Syria’s security apparatus—which, as one civil rights activist once told a journalist friend, “sends ten agents for every protester at a human rights march”—stand back and do little to stop the burning of a number of European embassies? The answer seemed simple: the Bush administration’s Middle East “democracy agenda” had run into unexpected problems, and the Syrian regime knew it. The Muslim Brotherhood scored well in Egypt’s autumn 2005 elections (and probably would have done better without widespread government vote rigging), Shiite parties had dominated Iraq’s December 2005 poll, Hamas had upset Fatah in January’s Palestinian legislative elections, and Hezbollah remained part of the Lebanese government.
Direct regime involvement in the incidents at the embassies was hard to determine. The state did issue a permit for a peaceful demonstration. According to student activists in Islamic centers in Damascus—which are not owned by the state—they received instructions from the centers’ sheikhs to organize protests against the cartoons as well as Denmark in general on February 3. The call to protest, like the call to support President Assad’s November speech at Damascus University, was publicized by text message.
The following afternoon, as much more violent protests raged outside Denmark’s embassy in Beirut, the Syrian state news agency released a statement confirming that one armed Islamist had been killed in a security raid outside Damascus that lasted ninety minutes.
At cocktail receptions the next week, Western diplomats in Damascus were asking everyone the same question: What is the strength of political Islam in Syria? Their reason for asking was apparent: policy makers in Washington and Europe were wondering if the very pressures they were currently orchestrating would push Syria into the hands of political Islam—from which support for Islamic terrorist groups was highly suspected—or into sectarian political chaos, like that in nearby Iraq.
Answers to this question varied. Everyone noted increased Islamic sentiments, but it was unclear how much this trend had entered the political sphere. Religious parties were banned and 1980’s Law 49 made membership of the Muslim Brotherhood punishable by death. Gauging Brotherhood strength was difficult. The organization’s leaders remained in exile, and members inside Syria had moved underground long ago. By and large, however, many Syrians, including Sunni Muslims (the religious base of the Brotherhood), shunned the organization due to its bloody history in Syria.
Evidence of armed Islamic groups in Syria had been growing since April 2004, when authorities foiled an attack on an abandoned UN building in Mezze, a modern district of Damascus. According to a January 2006 report by Ibrahim Hamidi in Al Hayat, three of the four assailants involved had gone to Iraq to fight US forces in the days before Saddam’s fall. Many observers (including me) and diplomats doubted the authenticity of the attacks, since they happened while Washington was making a decision on how to apply the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act (SAA). If Syria seemed on the edge of the abyss, perhaps Washington wouldn’t strictly implement the sanctions.
Then, in May 2005, the authorities announced that they had broken up a “terrorist cell” in the Damascus neighborhood of Daf al-Shawq. As Syrian TV showed footage of the cell’s arms depot, the state announced that the cell was part of a larger organization, the Munazama jund al-sham l’wahda wa jihad (the Soldiers of Damascus Organization for Unity and Jihad). Subsequent reports indicated that the group was well organized and was distributing propaganda throughout Syria. According to Hamidi’s analysis of the group’s pamphlets, the group sought to “establish an ‘Islamic Emirate’ or ‘caliphate’ in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq.”
The following December, security forces attacked a “takfiri cell”—a group that unilaterally declares other Muslims apostates. Members of such groups have been known to inflict their punishment by, among other things, strapping on explosive belts and walking into Western hotels in the region. While the attack got some play in the Syrian media, a Syrian journalist friend told me at the time that the attack was the first instance where the authorities used helicopters against civilians in Syria since the state’s bombardment of Hama in 1982. In his subsequent article, the journalist cited “informed sources” who said that when the security forces surrounded the cell’s hideout, its members refused to give up prior to the government’s air raid. They also accused the security forces of being “infidels.”
To get a handle on this Islamic trend, I visited the offices of Mohammed Habash, a supposedly independent parliamentarian and founder of the Damascus Islamic Studies Center. Unlike most religious figures in Syria, Habash openly spoke about Islam in Syrian political life. The interview was strange from the start. Interviews with prominent Syrians are usually well-managed affairs: office calls are diverted and strong tea or coffee is served to help get people in the mood for candid conversation. It is one of the best things about Syria under Bashar al-Assad: people talk quite openly behind closed doors. So when an unexpected guest showed up for my interview with Habash, it couldn’t be chalked up to mere coincidence.
As I walked into the center’s main salon, a man followed on my heels, shook my hand, and sat down at Habash’s side. The man was well dressed, sported a five-o’clock shadow, and wore a smile from ear to ear. Somewhat unnervingly, he did not say a word. Thirty minutes later, when I asked Habash about his thoughts on the relationship between authoritarianism in the Arab world and the spread of Islamic extremism, I was finally introduced to the mystery guest.
“I have no desire to justify terrorism, but I would like to explain it,” said Habash, who preaches a tolerant version of Islam that he dubs “renewal.” “I agree with you that radical movements began before the invasion of Iraq, but not the occupation of Palestine. Look at Musa here. I have only known him for about a month. He traveled to Iraq with two hundred and ninety others to wage jihad. He was the only one who survived.”
My eyes opened wide. Could Musa really be one of the jihadists that the government denied were crossing from Syria into Iraq in support of that country’s insurgency? Musa then spoke in broken English about “traveling to Iraq to attack occupation,” fighting “two hundred kilometers from Baghdad,” and about “some people in that city being very bad.” When I told him to speak in Arabic, he said the same thing. Musa was one of the Syrians who I had watched out of the US embassy window climb onto the buses outside the Iraqi embassy on the eve of the 2003 US invasion. I glanced back at Habash, who appeared ill at ease.
“Why did this young man with an open mind and future plans decide to attack the US in Iraq?” Habash blurted out. “Mukhabarat didn’t order him to; he decided to go on his own. You can find hundreds like him. Why? Because the Bush administration does not understand our people.”
Other powerful Americans were apparently asking for Habash’s help in trying to do just that, however. At the end of the interview, Habash casually quizzed me about the National Prayer Breakfast, a forum held every February in Washington for political, social, and business leaders of the world to break bread together and talk about problems. I gave him my best account of what it was.
“Hillary Clinton invited me this year, but I apologized,” Habash said. “I tried to travel to New York last year, but US security didn’t let me in.”
To my surprise, Musa was leaving at the same time I was. After bidding Habash good-bye, Musa and I walked into the street. Still smiling, he gave me his mobile number, shook my hand, and went on his way.
My unsolicited introduction to Musa was so bizarre that I could not resist asking to meet him again. In an on-the-record, hour-long interview two days later, Musa gave me a blow-by-blow account of waging jihad against US troops during the invasion of Iraq and fleeing back to Syria. His story made little sense and seemed tailor-made to suit the regime’s red lines on this issue. Since he had gone to Iraq in the waning days of Saddam Hussein and returned only a few weeks later, he was technically not one of the famed “Arab fighters” that Damascus denied was crossing the Syrian frontier into Iraq. He certainly was an Islamist, however, and had just joined the new private sector and Islamic-leaning Sham TV as a newscaster. The very fact he was talking about his experience publicly to a foreigner was something new in Syria. And to make matters more bizarre, halfway through the interview, I had a sudden bout of déjà vu that I could not readily explain.
As diplomats and journalists combed the streets of Damascus chasing the “Islamic genie” that had appeared out of Syria’s secular Baathist bottle, the regime of Bashar al-Assad busily reached out to Islam in subtle and unprecedented ways. And it was hard to know what to make of any of it.
Two days in April 2006 epitomized the regime’s efforts to connect with Islam. In Syria, April 7 is Baath Day—the anniversary of the party’s first congress in 1947. Since the Baath Party seized power in 1963, April 7 has been a day of speeches, marches, and banner-filled streets hailing the party’s accomplishments. This time, celebrations were small, few marches were held, and Baath Party flags were hard to find. Party offices held small receptions, serving only cake and soft drinks.
Instead, the Syrian regime waited until April 10—the prophet Muhammad’s birthday—to celebrate. Colorful banners hailing the Prophet’s virtues lined the major thoroughfares of Damascus, people filled the streets, and President Assad prayed with the Baath Party leadership in Damascus’s Hasseby Mosque beside the new Grand Mufti of the Republic, Ahmad Badr al-Din Hassoun—all very strange for a secular state famously carved out of a virtual civil war with the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1980s. The regime’s first step to engage these rising Islamic sentiments had come on September 1, 2004, with the death of Hassoun’s predecessor, Ahmad Kuftaro. For forty years, Kuftaro served as the ceremonial head of Islam in Syria, staying out of the spotlight in keeping with Syria’s secular orientation. Instead of holding the customary Majlis al-Aala (consultative council) to elect a new mufti from among Syria’s Islamic clergy, the regime waited for eleven months before appointing Hassoun—by presidential decree.
Hassoun began breaking with tradition and pushing Islam back into public life. He met frequently with community leaders, preaching “interfaith dialogue” and the tolerance of Islam. Following the burning of the Danish embassy, Hassoun met and communicated regularly with representatives from the Vatican and Europe. He also prayed often and publicly with President Assad in the grand mosques of Damascus and Aleppo. All of Hassoun’s activities were covered in detail by SANA—the state’s primary propaganda machine.
Regime efforts to engage rising Islamic sentiments accelerated substantially after the “defection” of Syrian vice president Abdel Halim Khaddam to the opposition on December 30. In a speech to the Arab Parties General Conference in Damascus on March 4, President Assad said that the Arabs derive their strength from “Islam, which is strongly connected with Arabism.” He later said that Islam and Arabism were mutually interdependent and that any political party that ignores either is bound to fail—echoing the words of one of the Baath Party’s founders, Michel Aflaq, and even turning them on their head.
On March 13, Syria held its first competition for reading the Koran in the auditorium of Damascus University—a venue traditionally reserved for Baath Party occasions and presidential speeches. Two weeks later, a ban on mosques that opened between prayer times was lifted to allow for Islamic instruction. A week after that, Aleppo was named the Islamic cultural capital of 2006 amidst great fanfare and, more importantly, open presidential patronage. The city then underwent a major renaissance project, which was funded by donations from pious businessmen.
Then, on April 1, the Syrian military shocked the country when it announced that Islamic clergy would be allowed to enter barracks to talk to soldiers about religion for the first time in forty-three years. Defense minister General Hassan Tourkmani reportedly announced at a conference that the decision was in response to “the thirst for God in the barracks.” Brokering the agreement were none other than Habash and Hassoun.
On April 5, President Assad issued a decree establishing an Islamic college in Aleppo—the center of the Muslim Brotherhood’s uprising in Syria in the 1980s. Two days after Assad prayed with the Baath Party regional command on the prophet Muhammad’s birthday on April 10, Habash was invited to deliver a lecture on Islamic morals and values to a gathering of the state-dominated National Union of Syrian Students (NUSS).
As journalists and diplomats continued to file stories and cables about the regime’s slide toward Islam, many questions remained concerning the actual makeup of this Islamic wave. Strangely enough, the only people who seemed to have any answers—and would talk about them to foreigners—came via Mohammed Habash.
“Muslims in Syria are certainly becoming more religiously conservative,” Habash had told me during my interview. “Conservatives believe that there is only one way to God and paradise, and others are false … but this doesn’t mean that they have any desire to use violence against others.”
It was hard to know where the line between conservatives and radicals lay, however. Reports of security clashes with takfiri groups—militants who declare other Muslims to be apostates and therefore legitimate targets of terrorism—continued to make their way into the media. All reports originated from “security sources,” who approached local journalists with accounts of state raids on the Soldiers of Damascus Organization for Unity and Jihad. There was considerable speculation that the clashes could have been fabricated for external consumption so as to persuade the United States and Europe to ease pressure on the Syrian regime.
“The groups that traveled to the US and carried out the September 11 attacks were not conservatives; they were radicals,” Habash said. “In Syria, such people are less than 1 percent. Syria has a population of seventeen million, which means that we have one hundred seventy thousand radicals running around. Any injustice they see, they will use violence. You don’t have to ask why they are here—we are in the eye of the storm between the occupations of Iraq and Palestine. They believe the Syrian army should go to Iraq to attack Americans. They have a problem with this regime.”
To counter this trend, Habash advocated what he called “renewal Islam.” “Renewal believes that there is one way to God, but his names are many,” Habash said. “Spirituality is one, but religions are many. There should be no monopoly on salvation, paradise, religion, and the day of judgment.”
While this might have seemed all well and good to the regime, the strange thing is that Habash himself admitted that his interpretation had little following in society. “Only about 20 percent of Muslims in Syria are renewal,” Habash said. “The rest are conservative, and their numbers are growing.”
Although seemingly well fitted to the political situation, Habash had no time for the regime’s nemesis, the Muslim Brotherhood. “There is an upsurge of Islam in Syria, but that does not mean people support the Muslim Brotherhood,” Habash said. “They have no chance in Syria because there is a bloody memory from the 1980s. If they find a way back into Syria, they will have to change their name.”
Habash was also rather forthcoming about his ambitions to form a political party under the new parties law—whenever it would be issued of course. “This is my secret; why are you asking me?” Habash said. “I am looking to participate fully in political life. I am not looking for an Islamic party—this would not be beneficial for our country. We don’t need a theocracy, as we cannot achieve real development this way. At the same time, I am looking for some party with an Islamic affiliation. Like the [ruling] Justice and Development Party in Turkey.”
And what about Musa, the mystery guest at Habash’s office? When I listened to the interview tape later a couple of times, I still made no sense of his tale of waging jihad in Iraq (and will waste no time explaining it here). Much more interesting, however, were Musa’s surprisingly moderate views concerning a number of recent political issues—for a man that not long ago says he fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a US Army Humvee.
“These Muslims were being stupid when they burned the Danish embassy,” Musa said of the February 4 attacks on the Danish, Swedish, and Chilean embassies in Damascus. He had a relaxed smile and a twinkle in his eye that could give any diplomat or foreign correspondent some glimmer of hope that the Islamic tide sweeping Syria was nothing to worry so much about as to intervene in an Arab country’s internal affairs. “I was among the demonstrators. It was peaceful, but a few people got out of control. The Prophet for Muslims is not the same for Christians. Denmark doesn’t understand that.”
At that moment, I realized it wasn’t déjà vu after all. During my years of working in Egypt in the 1990s, I had often interviewed a prominent researcher and professor at the American University in Cairo named Saad Eddin Ibrahim, then a confidant of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and now one of his most outspoken opponents. Ibrahim used to run a foreign-funded program rehabilitating Islamic “terrorists” captured by the state in upper Egypt and around major Western tourist sites. After swearing off violence, former combatants were released from prison and given seed money and soft loans to open small businesses such as cigarette kiosks and sandwich counters. Foreign journalists in search of the story of Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt flocked to Ibrahim, who would boast about the program and arrange interviews with beneficiaries. A few days later, a story would appear in the Western press outlining how the Egyptian government and society recognized its “Islamist problem” and had matters under control.
After fifteen editions of Syria Today, and about a week after the riots, it finally happened: security agents showed up in our office. When Syrian security comes to investigate foreigners, they don’t have a face-to-face meeting with you. Instead, they talk with your Syrian friends about you, which in turn scares your friends to death. Although Leila didn’t say that she had been questioned, her behavior told me all I needed to know.
“Andrew, we have to watch what we are writing,” Leila told me as I walked into her office. She was nervously trying to light a cigarette. “We are responsible for everything anyone writes from here, be it for Syria Today or outside newspapers.”
From day one, we knew that our publication had to make it past the Syrian censors, so we were as careful as we could be concerning red lines. Both Hugh and I could get away with a lot more when we published in the international press.
“What do you mean ‘we are responsible’?” I said.
“I mean things are bad, and anything anyone from Syria Today publishes can be used against us,” Leila said, with a twinge of nervous anger in her voice. “They could close us down.”
The reason to be cautious would become apparent a little later that day, when Hugh, Othaina, and I headed down to the old justice palace to cover an opposition rally. It was March 9, 2006, the forty-third anniversary of the declaration of emergency law in Syria. For the second year in a row, members of the National Union of Syrian Students (NUSS) were busy beating up and chasing off opposition figures that were staging a sit-in in front of the old Ministry of Justice—a stone’s throw away from the radio station where martial law had been declared in 1963, the morning after the Baath Party seized power in a military coup. Multiparty politics in Syria had been suspended that day, all in the name of bringing to an end the raging political instability that had plagued the country since independence in 1946.
A man with gray hair broke from the crowd of demonstrators, arms waving overhead. Scores of student-union protestors were on him like a swarm of bees, shouting “traitor” while beating him with wooden sticks adorned with Syrian flags. As I took a photo of the melee, Hugh and Othaina sized up the situation, notebooks in hand.
“Come on, let’s go talk to that guy!” Hugh said.
Othaina and I looked at each other. Without saying a word, we understood that the worst thing that could happen to this brave man at that moment would be for two foreigners to ask him how he felt about being abused and beaten up. We probably knew the answer anyway.
“That’s the story!” Hugh shouted, eyes wide.
In an ideal sense, he was right. But in a country where nationalist sentiments were high due to US and UN pressure, it was often hard to know what to do. If the man wanted to talk to foreigners—and put his neck on the line—that was his choice. But if we approached him, it could be seen as the very treasonous activity of which he was being accused, possibly leading to dire circumstances that could prevent him from enjoying the permanent freedom he sought.
We did not have time to mull it over, however, since the students quickly converged on another target—me.
“We are here to support Syria and President Bashar against the traitors!” one protestor shouted, as the crowd closed in around us. “The West just wants our oil!” I could hear someone whispering the word “American” behind me. Suddenly, a sweaty young man with wild blue eyes, short-cropped hair, and a Syrian-flag bandanna appeared.
“So, an American!” he boomed, strutting like a rooster. The crowd roared. Someone started tugging on the belt of my raincoat, which admittedly would have been more appropriate on Washington’s Dupont Circle than the edge of Damascus’s Old City. I went silent, as did Hugh. Othaina shouted back, “We are journalists for a Syrian magazine!” and whipped out a few copies of Syria Today. The protestors, most with confused expressions, stared at the magazines’ covers.
Not to be cowed, the blue-eyed man raised his arms above his head. “America—fuck America!” he screamed, throwing his arms down. The crowd roared again.
Suddenly a young man appeared, wearing a white baseball cap on which was printed I LOVE SYRIA in English.
“It’s OK,” he said, smiling at me. “Please, this way.”
He made a single motion with his hand, like Moses parting the Red Sea, and the crowd quickly obeyed. We were escorted to the side, and the mob turned its attention toward its next victim.
We decided to visit the nearby office of Damascus Declaration spokesman Hassan Abdel-Azim. It was bustling with activity, packed full of Damascus Declaration members, whom I had interviewed over the last two months; they were all sipping cups of strong tea to calm their nerves. I hardly recognized Abdel-Azim, despite the fact that I had interviewed him recently.
“I can’t see you very well. They smashed my glasses,” Abdel-Azim said, shaking my hand. “They weren’t students who beat us; they were just parrots. They don’t even know what our declaration stands for.”
After the declaration’s announcement the previous October, members of the Syrian opposition slowly came onboard as the Assad regime weathered the heavy political storm of the Hariri investigation. External international pressure, combined with the regime’s lack of a political-reform plan, had old foes putting differences aside and overcoming deep-rooted suspicions.
“If you look at the names who signed the Damascus Declaration, all but one is a Sunni Muslim,” said Fateh Jammous, leader of the Communist Labor Party and an Alawite—the same sect from which the Syrian leadership hails—who signed in the days following the declaration’s announcement. “We don’t accuse them of being sectarian, but we objected at first to the declaration’s references to Islam…. The Syrian bureaucracy is corrupted and cannot be reformed. We don’t need slow reform—we need a rescue operation.”
It was the declaration’s appeal to moderate Islamists in an increasingly Islamized environment that seemed to be giving it staying power. “We have liberal Islamists, political Islamists, and fundamentalist Islamists in Syria,” said Samir Nashar, the spokesperson for the Syrian Free National Party and a member of Syria’s Committee for the Revival of Civil Society. “The difference between them is difficult to distinguish. We need to gather the first two together, as the fundamentalists cannot live with others. They see only in terms of black and white, believers and apostates.”
And with bloodshed in neighboring Iraq filling TV news reports every day, a more liberal-based opposition lacked major appeal. “We tried to organize a parallel liberal rally alongside the Damascus Declaration in November and December,” said the Assyrian Democratic Organization’s Bashir Ishaq Saadi, who finally signed the declaration in February 2006. “Liberal parties in Syria are now very weak. Some of the Kurdish parties were demanding ‘self-determination’ as well. We couldn’t support that.”
After lying low for a few months as the Hariri investigation blew over and the Assad regime vented its fury over former vice president Abdel Halim Khaddam’s dramatic “defection” to the opposition on December 30, the declaration’s leadership began to organize. On January 18, a twenty-member transitional committee was formed, including thirteen domestic and seven exiled opposition groups. On January 29 and 30, Samir Nashar and other members of the transitional committee attended a Syrian opposition conference in Washington, DC, sponsored by the Syrian National Council in the United States and the Syrian Democratic Assembly of Canada. Farid Ghadry, the head of the Bush-administration-supported Reform Party of Syria (RPS), was not invited. Receiving foreign funding emerged as a fault line in the opposition. The day following the conference, the Damascus Declaration issued its first follow-up statement, which rejected foreign pressure on Syria, declared Syria to be part of the Arab nation, and clarified that the declaration’s references to Islam were not limited to Sunni interpretation.
“More people signed after that,” Abdel-Azim said. “The demands came from declaration signatories. They said to be silent on Iraq and that Palestine was dangerous. We certainly don’t want the Iraqi or even the Lebanese scenarios in Syria. We need democratic change to strengthen nationalist forces to face external pressure.”
On February 18, the transitional committee began work on the formation of a fifty-member national council, with representatives from all of Syria’s fourteen governorates. Its members were scheduled to be announced on April 6.
Both the Syrian government and Washington responded to the Damascus Declaration selectively. The regime gave Abdel-Azim considerable leeway in carrying out the accord’s activities, despite the fact that the regime’s nemesis, the Muslim Brotherhood, was one of the declaration’s primary supporters. Drafts of a new parties law that made their way around Damascus indicated that the regime was not making much space for opposition parties. Syrian political commentator Sami Moubayed, who had seen drafts of the law, reported that while the parties law would be issued within the month, it would not accept parties whose “behavior is opposed to the Revolution of March 8 [the day the Baath took power].” Parties that were “chaotic, terrorist, fascist, theocratic, religious, ethnic, sectarian, tribal, etc.” would be denied license—leaving little room for many of Syria’s opposition parties, including the Muslim Brotherhood and the Kurds, to formally join political life. Not surprisingly, foreign funding was strictly forbidden as well.3
The regime then began going after outspoken declaration members to force the opposition to toe the nationalist line. Riad Seif, who was released from prison on January 18—the very day that the transitional committee on which he now sits was formed—bore the brunt of regime harassment.
“On February 14 [the first anniversary of Hariri’s assassination], there was a decision to contain all the Syrian opposition,” Seif said. “I am one of the primary names on the Damascus Declaration, so they arrested me again.”
He was released the next day. On March 12, during a rally supporting Kurdish rights, the same thing happened. “If they arrest and hold me, I will be a hero, and they don’t want that. They cannot get rid of me other ways, because that would be costly. So they try to scare me so that I am unable to think,” said Seif, whose son disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1996. “They warned me not to talk to foreigners or diplomats. They follow me everywhere. They tell my neighbors not to talk to me. I was less isolated in jail.”
The problem, according to Abdel-Azim, was a stark contradiction between the leadership’s words and the regime’s actions. “In his last two speeches, the president said the national opposition that doesn’t take foreign funding should be respected,” Abdel-Azim said. “But on the street, two days later, they call us traitors and beat us.”
Washington struggled to find ways to handle the Damascus Declaration as well, especially in light of the rising Syrian nationalist sentiments resulting from the US occupation of Iraq, Washington’s strong alliance with Israel, and the Hariri investigation.
“I told the Americans that they will get more credibility if they focus on corruption and the regime’s crimes in the 1980s,” Nashar said, following his return from the Washington conference. “On these issues the regime cannot defend itself…. The human rights associations have a lot of files [on corruption and human rights abuses]. If America concentrates on this, Syrians will emerge from fear. Look at what happened in Lebanon. Do you think that a million Lebanese could have protested on March 14, 2005, [demanding Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon] without international cover?”
Perhaps with Nashar’s nuanced advice in mind, on February 18, the same day that work on the declaration’s national council began, Washington announced that five million dollars from the State Department’s Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) would be earmarked “to accelerate the work of reformers,” including “build[ing] up Syrian civil society and supporting] organizations promoting democratic practices such as the rule of law; government accountability; access to independent sources of information; freedom of association and speech; and free, fair, and competitive elections.”
A week later, the Damascus Declaration’s leadership predictably, but kindly, turned Washington down. “The Damascus Declaration refuses foreign funding, including the $5 million from the US State Department for the Syrian opposition,” read the group’s statement a week later. In a follow-up report by Reuters, Abdel-Azim said that while “support by international powers for democratic change in Syria is welcome,” financing was out of the question. “It means subordination to the funding country,” Abdel-Azim said. “Our project is [for] nationalist, independent democratic change in Syria, not through occupation or economic pressure, as we see the United States doing.”
Making things more complicated, former vice president Abdel Halim Khaddam and the Muslim Brotherhood’s Bayanouni announced in Brussels on March 17 the formation of a National Salvation Front, a group of seventeen exiled opposition parties that called for “democracy” to replace the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Another opposition meeting, sponsored by the Aspen Institute (officially dubbed a “small and informal meeting with oppositionists from Syria” on the sidelines of a conference called Civil Society and Democracy in the Greater Middle East), was held in Doha, Qatar, on March 22. A few days later, as Khaddam reportedly met with the virulently anti-Assad Lebanese politician Walid Jumblatt, Bayanouni announced that his organization had in fact had contact with Khaddam since 2003—some two years before the former vice president left office.
“The Damascus Declaration has no value without the Muslim Brotherhood. I am a liberal, and I am responsible for my words,” said Nashar, who was arrested and then released three weeks after my interview. “I saw them in Washington. They have a democratic awareness—perhaps more than the Syrian intelligentsia.” While Abdel-Azim said that the new front had “nothing to do with the Damascus Declaration,” Riad al-Turk, a member of the Syrian Democratic People’s Party, one of the five parties included in Abdel-Azim’s National Democratic Rally, blamed him for dividing the opposition.
“The formation of the [National Salvation] Front is because of the backwardness, slowness, and hesitation of the Damascus Declaration’s leadership,” Turk said in an interview with the pan-Arab daily Al Hayat on March 20. “The basic conflict is now between external opposition representing America and the domestic opposition representing the regime. The hope is that there is a liberation front that will support a general political line calling for democratic change and preserving national independence while not falling into a severe crisis like in Iraq.”
To try and understand where the Damascus Declaration was heading, I visited the home of Michel Kilo for a long interview.4 Greeting me at the door in a brown corduroy suit and slippers, he escorted me into his office: a small desk in the corner of a guest bedroom. Despite the ongoing crackdown on dissidents, Kilo seemed eager to talk.
“The Syrian opposition didn’t leave the country—especially true democrats,” Kilo said. “In the past we had only one block: the regime. Now we have two blocks: the regime and its parties, and the opposition and its parties.”
When I asked Kilo why he was picking a time when the regime was under pressure to launch the declaration, his answers were surprisingly nationalistic.
“We are not calling for changing the regime or a revolution—we are calling on reform,” Kilo said. “It’s not right to ask for foreign assistance. We are not part of the American pressures. We are not toys in the West’s hands. We will make a democratic state in this country no matter the cost.”
I then asked Kilo if the regime had asked the opposition what they would like to see in a political parties law.
“For five and a half years, Abdel Halim Khaddam said that the parties law was coming after one month. Nothing happened,” Kilo said. “There is a draft law. It forbids ethnic and religious parties and all parties have to recognize Article 8 of the constitution and commit to the goals of the Baathist March 8 revolution. This is not a political parties law—it’s a law to prevent political parties.”
As much as Kilo was critical of the Assad regime, he was equally critical of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. Kilo insisted that the opposition could not work according to “an American understanding” but “our own understanding” and that Washington’s intentions were to “Americanize the region,” not democratize it. “We want to discuss Arab unity and that we will not accept doing nothing about the Palestinians.”
When I asked him if he would have thought differently had the US occupation of Iraq not broken out into sectarian warfare, Kilo nearly leapt out of his seat. “Of course! There is no democracy without a state.”
Last but not least, Kilo rejected accepting any money from the Bush administration for Damascus Declaration members. “No one will enter the Damascus Declaration if they take money from the US administration.” As Kilo shook my hand cordially in farewell, I wondered what his next move might be.
On May 12, Kilo helped engineer the Beirut-Damascus/Damascus-Beirut Declaration, another manifesto urging Syria and Lebanon to establish full diplomatic relations between the two countries and demarcate the long ill-defined Syrian-Lebanese frontier. Two days later, Syrian security forces arrested Kilo at his home.5 The Security Council reiterated these demands on May 17 in Resolution 1680, which called on Damascus to demarcate the Syrian-Lebanese frontier—a key element in ending the dispute between Syria, Lebanon, and Israel over the territorial status of the Shebaa Farms—on which Hezbollah legitimizes the retention of its weapons. Anwar al-Bunni, an opposition figure working with Kilo and head of a closed EU-supported civil-society center, was arrested the same day. The next day, Washington issued Executive Order 13399, freezing assets of “anyone involved in the Hariri murder” and subsequent bombings in Lebanon.