As the hopes of Tahrir receded, the visions of unity it inspired gave way to a terrifying undertow. People who had trusted each other for decades now saw barriers rising between them. The world was suddenly full of threats to all that was sacred: to the state, to your clan, to God. These were battles in which there could be no compromise. You had to take sides, and if your friend was beyond the barrier, so be it. The barriers varied from place to place. But beneath this surface variation, a common pattern was recognizable. In each country, the loosening of state authority seemed to unspool a related set of assumptions, as if all these strands were part of some larger Ottoman fabric that could no longer be rewoven.
How did it happen? How does an unspoken word between neighbors turn into the stuff of civil wars? I once asked that question of a Syrian schoolteacher. She was a woman of fifty, with a long face and wire-frame glasses that gave her a severe look. With her was her son, a genial, handsome man of thirty who ran an NGO providing medical and school aid to Syrians in the war zone. We were drinking tea in a streetside hotel café in southern Turkey, where they were living in exile. “You must understand, we were not like this,” she said, looking urgently at me. “Most of my friends were Alawi. My colleagues at work were Alawi. Our neighbors, Alawi. We did not even think about this. We are Sunni, yes, but sometimes we did not even know if this or that person is Alawi. It was not important.”
I had heard the same passionate speech from other Syrians, and I think she meant it. But I was startled by the way the teacher’s tone changed when I asked her about a young Alawi woman who had been very close to her family before they left Syria. She paused before answering. She said, a little uncomfortable, that the young woman was “a nice girl.” Then she added, “But the Alawis don’t have a religion. They are a traitor sect. They collaborated with the crusaders, and during the French occupation they sided with the French.” Her son, sitting next to her, agreed, saying the Syrian people had been deceived. “As for us, we will teach our children the real nature of these people,” he said. “They will not be like us, unaware of the real nature of the Alawis.”
It was jarring, this blithe shift from one voice to another, from an assertion of unity to an angry slur. It was tempting to smell hypocrisy, to accuse them of having hidden their sectarian feelings all along. But I think that would be unfair. They were not lying about their old relationships with people of other faiths. They were responding to something new: power had shifted, the old order was shaking, and they could no longer reconcile past and present. Their words were an effort to reach across that gulf, to seize the reassurance that came with an older identity. Something similar had happened a decade earlier in Iraq, when the American invasion exposed the tacit Sunni assumption of superiority. “You must understand, these people were shopkeepers,” I was told by one Sunni politician in Baghdad, when I asked him about the new Shiite political parties that were suddenly running the country. You could hear the undertone: People should know their place. In Syria the assumptions were very different, and in some ways more poisonous, since the Sunnis and Alawis both felt certain kinds of entitlement. But the 2011 uprising provoked the same kind of emotional disarray.
This unraveling took place everywhere in Syria, not just in the bombed-out neighborhoods that became the civil war’s signposts: Homs, Aleppo, the suburbs of Damascus. My own window was a midsize city called Jableh on the Mediterranean coast. It was in some ways a model place to see the way the 2011 uprising ramified into the lives of ordinary Syrians. Unlike the big cities, where the news outlets focused their coverage, Jableh was out of the limelight in the regime heartland of the northwest, and it remained peaceful for the whole first month of the protests. Its people had more time to observe, and sometimes resist, the sectarian narrative that was overtaking Syria. It has a fairy-tale remoteness, with a faded port that dates back to Phoenician times, cliffside cafés gazing out at the Mediterranean, a Roman amphitheater, and a population that reflected fairly well Syria’s mix of religious sects. The center of town is mostly Sunni, surrounded by hills full of Alawi and Christian villages.
One of the first people I met there was a young woman named Aliaa Ali. She was the daughter of a retired Alawi military officer, and she was twenty-five years old when the uprising began, a devoted supporter of the Assad regime. She had a broad, pretty face, with knitted brows that conveyed a mixture of petulance and determination. She was extremely intelligent and fully aware, thanks to a year spent in England, of the West’s harsh view of her president. Unlike many loyalists, she was willing to acknowledge the brutalities of her own side, and at times she seemed embarrassed by the Syrian police state. “There is a lot that needs to change here, I know that,” she told me when we first met. “But the fact is that it turned sectarian much sooner than people think.” When I asked her how it happened, she began telling me about the loss of her closest friendship, with a Sunni woman named Noura Kanafani. I later got to know Noura, and their accounts of the friendship matched. One of the first moments each of them told me about was something that had taken place in 2010, a year before the uprisings began.
It was a spring morning, and the two women were lying next to each other on Aliaa’s bed, as they often did. Noura had come over with strange and upsetting news. She’d received a marriage proposal, and her mother, an anxious, round-faced doctor with conservative ideas, wanted her to accept. She was already twenty-four, too old to still be without a husband. An earlier engagement to a conservative older man, her former college professor, had fallen through. But the new suitor was even more conservative, Noura told her friend. He said he wanted her to stop going to movies and wearing short dresses. He said he would not tolerate her having Alawi friends. His words still echoed in her mind: “How can you be friends with those people when you know what they did to us?”
The question had shocked Noura. She did not know what “those people” had done. The word Hama evoked only vague stories about something dark and unspeakable that happened in that city during the 1980s, before she was born. Her family stayed clear of politics. They were a large and well respected clan of doctors and teachers, solid middle-class folk with urban roots and not much interest in religion. They knew what everyone knew: that Sunni Muslims were the majority of Syria’s population, perhaps 70 percent, and that some pious Sunnis considered Alawis to be heretics and resented being ruled by them. There was some social snobbery, too: old Sunni families saw President Assad’s family—and the Alawis generally—as crude arrivistes from the mountains. But discussing any of this was a taboo in Syria. You heard about it only indirectly, like the day when Noura’s mother had said dismissively that “people from the coast”—this was code for Alawis—sent their children to Russia to study, while “other people” (meaning Sunnis) sent them to London. Aliaa had been upset by that and said it wasn’t true. She herself was studying English and planning to go to Britain. It hadn’t come up again. But now the conservative suitor’s comments had pushed the subject into the open. Lying on the bed together that morning, Noura giggled as Aliaa recounted the bizarre myths people spread about Alawis in Syria: that they had tails, that they practiced secret orgies. It was all so stupid.
Noura and Aliaa had become friends in high school and had been inseparable ever since. They seemed to complete each other, like a matched pair of good and evil angels on opposite panels of a Renaissance church ceiling. Aliaa was dark-haired and almost fierce looking, and Noura pale and blonde, with a heart-shaped face and a soft look in her eyes. Aliaa’s house was two blocks away and Noura felt completely at home there, taking off her head scarf and leaving her hair uncovered no matter who was home. They still walked to the university arm in arm, and Noura had told Aliaa she would name her first child after her. She envied Aliaa’s confidence and depended on her to make decisions; Aliaa, the strong-willed one, the eldest of her family, relished Noura’s awe and affection. There had never really been a question, but after discussing the proposal for an hour or so, the two of them still lying on Aliaa’s bed, Noura abruptly said, “I can’t live with a man who thinks Alawis are forbidden.” Marriage would have to wait.
Nine months later, in mid-January 2011, that conversation echoed in Noura’s mind. It was right after the revolution in Tunis, and suddenly all the neighbors were asking her the same question. Are you going to do that? Are you going to make protests here? Her first thought was about the word “you.” What did it mean? You the political opposition? You the Sunnis? You the enemy? Noura wasn’t sure how to answer. She was excited about the images she saw on al Jazeera, especially after Tahrir Square. Her aunts and cousins were jumping up and down when Mubarak fell, they couldn’t get enough. But the neighbors—the Kanafanis lived in a mostly Alawi district—seemed anxious, frightened, even. One of them quoted Qaddafi’s madman speech about hunting the protesters down “house by house.” He told one of Noura’s aunts, “Bashar will do the same to you.” Another one, after hearing the aunt say she supported the revolutions, told her half jokingly that he’d like to shoot her. It was troubling; these were people who had the keys to their apartment, who had helped raise Noura and her cousins since they were babies.
Then, in mid-March, just after the uprisings started in Syria, something happened that frightened them all. Noura was sitting on her aunt Maha’s balcony with her mother and some of the cousins, breathing the spring air and the sounds and smells of a Thursday night: kebab and tobacco smoke and laughter. On the road below them, a line of cars began gathering, dozens of them, the men inside laughing and honking and waving flags from their open windows. It looked almost like a protest rally. But it didn’t take long for the reality to dawn. Some of the cars were SUVs, with blacked-out windows and pictures of Bashar and Hafez al Assad on them. They had come down from the mountain, the Alawi heartland. These were the Assad regime’s foot soldiers, and they had come to assert themselves, to show their teeth. They started chanting the slogans you always heard at regime rallies: “Long live the president!” and “God, Syria, and Bashar!” The Kanafani family watched them for a few minutes, a sense of unease settling over them. They’d seen this hundreds of times before. But with the protests rising all over the Middle East, it felt different. Al Jazeera had given them confidence. One of Noura’s cousins, an impulsive twenty-four-year-old named Tareq, stood up with no warning and bellowed down to the street, “Hey! It’s not ‘Long live the president.’ You should say ‘God, Syria, and Freedom.’” The rebel slogan.
Instantly, the young men in the cars went silent. The horns stopped. One of Noura’s other aunts, Amma, clutched Tareq’s arm and told him firmly to sit down. For a long moment, the family found itself in a virtual spotlight, as dozens of hostile young Alawi men glared up at them. No one on the terrace said anything. Finally the cars began moving on. Amma spoke, her voice tight with fear: “You don’t know these people. They are brutal. What we are doing might cost us our lives and the honor of our daughters.”
This happened before the first protest chant was heard in Jableh. But already, another sound was in the air, a dark counterpoint to the Pied Piper song of revolution and Arab unity that al Jazeera had been playing for three months. A week before that evening encounter on the balcony in Jableh, Saudi Arabia had sent its tanks across the eight-lane causeway into the puppet kingdom of Bahrain, putting an end to the uprising there. Pearl Square, the Tahrir of Bahrain, was destroyed and repaved. Nobody needed subtitles: the region’s great Sunni power was announcing that it would not tolerate a protest led by Shiites. You could almost hear the clink of shields being realigned around the region, from Yemen to Morocco. For years, the daily horrors of Iraq’s sectarian civil war had been a perfect cautionary tale for dictators; all they had to do was point in the direction of Baghdad and the democracy talk would fade to silence. It worked, until 2011. And now, Iran and Saudi Arabia, the two poles of Shiite and Sunni Islam, were rounding on each other once again, like two great bulldogs. The Syrian protesters would have to sing awfully loud to drown out those barks.
* * *
It was around this time, in late March 2011, that a high-ranking Syrian general named Manaf Tlass was ushered into the presidential palace in Damascus for a one-on-one meeting with President Bashar al Assad. The two men embraced in the Syrian manner, arms clutching elbows and three quick kisses on the cheeks, before sitting down. They made an odd pairing. The president was tall and angular in his crisply pressed suit, with a birdlike watchfulness and an elongated neck and head that made him look as if he’d been painted by El Greco. Tlass was shorter and rounder, with shaggy hair and teen-idol good looks. His half-open shirt seemed to confirm the playboy reputation he’d had for years. They shared a dynastic bond: Tlass’s father had been a right-hand man to Bashar’s father, Hafez al Assad. But they were not close. Tlass had been best friends with Bashar’s older brother, Basel, the heir apparent. Basel had died in a car crash in 1994, and Tlass’s influence had waned since then.
The Syrian uprising was a week old at the time of their meeting. It had started down south in the city of Daraa, where teenagers had spray-painted a message to Assad on a wall: IT’S YOUR TURN, DOCTOR—an unmistakable reference to the fate of Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Qaddafi. Arab cartoonists had been making the same point for weeks, with images of a nervous Bashar in line for dismissal. The Syrian regime did not think it was funny. The regional security director, a cousin of Bashar’s named Atef Najib, ordered the teenagers arrested and tortured. Their parents, according to the legend, were told, Forget your children. Go home and make more children, and if you don’t know how to make them, we will show you. That was the spark. The protests started in Daraa and spread quickly to Damascus, Banias, Hasakeh, Deir al Zour. The Syrian police state had responded as all police states do when they are threatened: with bullets. The demonstrations had only grown larger. Syria seemed to be following the lead of Tunisia and Egypt and all the others. But everyone knew that Bashar al Assad presided over a much more brutal regime and would not go down easily.
After only a few minutes of conversation, Bashar put his question very bluntly: “What would you do?” Tlass was ready for it and had prepared his answer. He told the president it was not too late to calm things down, but it would take strong measures. Go to Daraa yourself. Fire Atef Najib and, more than that, put him in jail. This will send a message. Force is not the way to win this. Tlass volunteered to play a role by meeting with local councils in several cities and identifying concrete grievances that could be addressed: policing, corruption, water and electricity shortages. This would get people off the streets. After talking for fifteen minutes, Tlass paused. Bashar seemed interested. He encouraged Tlass to start right away. But the president was notorious for making every guest think his advice had been taken. As Tlass shook the president’s hand and said goodbye, retracing his steps out of the palace, others were on their way in, with far more influence and very different advice. Before the year 2011 was out, Assad’s army would be using tanks and fighter jets to pound whole neighborhoods into rubble. His Alawi militias, the shabiha, would be massacring Sunni civilians in their homes and leaving scrawled sectarian slogans on the doors. The few Alawis who dared to support the opposition in public would be isolated and shamed, and tortured if they persisted. Assad would release Sunni jihadis from his prisons en masse, in hopes of turning the opposition into the terrorist front he had labeled it from the start. He would do everything he could to transform a democratic uprising into something far more vicious, something the outside world would recoil from rather than embrace.
* * *
Aliaa told me she first confronted her friend while they were taking one of their drives along the coast in mid-March 2011. Noura was at the wheel. “What do you mean you’re against the regime? Don’t you think it’s more complicated than that?” Aliaa said. “Of course there’s a lot that is wrong here. But come on, you spend most of your time thinking about shoes and clothes. Since when did you decide to become a political activist?” Noura kept her eyes on the road and held her ground. They had discussed the revolutions in Tunis and Egypt plenty of times, but this was the first time Noura had taken a stand against Bashar.
“Okay, I know I’m not so educated about politics,” Noura said, “but I don’t want Bashar to be my president. It’s as simple as that. I want my son to have a chance to be president. Can you dream that one day your son would be president?” Aliaa said nothing. Noura felt a twinge of guilt and wondered if she had gone too far. Not that Aliaa would mind, but her neighbors would surely be enraged by this kind of talk; it was a red line, and they were arriving at her house now, the window open. Aliaa opened the door, then leaned over to kiss her friend on the cheek. “See you tomorrow,” she said, as if nothing had changed.
Noura had missed the first demonstration in Jableh, and that had made her all the more willing to speak up. It was on March 25, and that morning the message lit up on thousands of cell phones as people gathered for Friday prayers: Gather outside the Abu Bakr mosque. People started showing up around one o’clock, dozens at first, then hundreds, and finally thousands. The revolution had reached Jableh at last. “God, Syria, and Freedom,” they chanted, and then marched past the old Roman amphitheater to a government building downtown. There was a small contingent of police officers watching, and probably plenty of others in plainclothes, but they just stood by and stared. Most of the Kanafani clan was there, including Noura’s aunt Maha, the family firebrand, and her children. Noura was not. Her mother, Zahra, was anxious about what might happen and didn’t want to risk her job as a gynecologist at the al Fayad Center. When Noura heard about the march afterward from her cousins, all of them glowing and exuberant, she was jealous. She made up her mind to join the next time. She started making protest signs at home, in Arabic and English. A week later, she joined her cousins and even spoke at the microphone onstage, ignoring her mother’s cautions. Revolutions come only once in your life, she told herself.
It was during those early days that Aliaa and Noura’s shared conception of the world began to split apart, like speakers of the same language who are suddenly marooned on different islands. Aliaa heard the same protest chants as her friend, but she found them menacing. One by one, her relatives and friends brought her stories about the protesters that hinted at bloody intentions and sectarian agendas. Ahmed, a fellow Alawi she’d gone to school with, had been beaten up at the very first protest by a crowd of angry Sunni men. His arm had been broken, and it could have been worse if some Sunni friends in the protest crowd had not run up and protected him and, later, driven him to the hospital. That night, back at home, the same friends came to his house to check on him. “They said something that was very shocking to me,” Ahmed told me, two years later. “They told me, ‘From now on we must be with you whenever you go to a Sunni neighborhood.’ We didn’t have this kind of language in Jableh before.” Aliaa and her relatives were also troubled that the protests always came from mosques, and all the marchers—or almost all—were Sunni. Why? Within two weeks, hints of sectarian language crept into the protest slogans. One of them was “We don’t want Iran, we don’t want Hezbollah, we want someone who fears God.” This was loaded language in Syria: a dog whistle to Sunnis to rally against their Shiite enemies, Alawis included.
In early April, Aliaa was driving on a road near the coast, twenty miles from home, when she heard loud explosions and gunfire that lasted several minutes. The drivers panicked; no one knew where it was coming from. Only after getting home to Jableh did she learn that nine Syrian soldiers had been ambushed and killed nearby. Three of them, it turned out, were from Jableh. The opposition media quickly put out a story that was picked up in European and American news channels: the dead men were would-be defectors who had been killed by their Syrian army superiors. The story fit neatly into a narrative of regime breakdown and defection that was being reinforced constantly on al Jazeera, a mouthpiece for the rebellion. But no evidence for the story ever emerged. And amateur video taken at the scene suggested that the killers were rebel gunmen. For Aliaa and her friends, it fit a different pattern: the protesters and their allies were spreading lies, refusing to recognize the violence on their own side. And that pattern blurred easily, in their minds, into a comforting corollary: surely the regime’s mass arrests, its prison house torture, its wholesale massacres, all the unbearable gore being uploaded to YouTube—surely it was exaggerated, surely some of it was fake.
Aliaa repeated these stories to Noura, but she refused to believe them. The protests were peaceful, Noura said, and there had been no sectarian language. It was the government that was spreading these rumors. And the government, she said, her voice rising uncharacteristically into anger, was killing innocent people all over Syria. Aliaa asked what made her so sure. Everyone knew al Jazeera was biased, and why would President Assad do such a thing? It was “not logical” for a government to kill its own people, she insisted. Noura felt it was logical. Her aunt Maha had been telling her about the events of Hama, in 1982, when the regime brought in its tanks and crushed the Islamist insurgency there, killing some twenty thousand people; Maha said the real number was much higher and told her, “We paid the price last time, we won’t pay it again.” Maha had always been the most confrontational of her aunts, and she looked the part, with her mannish face and bold stare. Now Noura listened to her with a sense of awe and even a bit of self-reproach, as if she had spent her life hiding from a truth that was within her reach.
But with Aliaa, she sensed that she could not broach all this. It would be too much. So she backed down, returning to her old meek self. “Maybe we just heard different things,” she said. And they left it there.
Jableh held out for a long time against the onrush of violence elsewhere in Syria. For an entire month after the first protest in late March, the police allowed the rallies to proceed. A group of leading citizens formed a committee to resist the sectarian rumors that kept spreading (they usually involved men driving around in jeeps and shooting up neighborhoods). The regime seemed to be testing the waters, making efforts to tamp down the protests without violence.
Twice, ranking regime officers invited members of the extended Kanafani clan for discussions. They appear to have been counting on the support of the Kanafanis, perhaps because the family had so many Alawi friends. The first time, the contact was made through a family friend, a prominent Alawi engineer. He offered to host the meeting in his home in Jableh, where the Kanafanis would be far more comfortable. Meeting regime officials was always a frightening affair in Syria, especially in government buildings, where the basement torture room is never far away. This time Aunt Maha’s husband and two of her sons arrived at the home of their friend, and waiting for them in the living room was a man in an expensive suit. They recognized him right away: it was Alaa Ibrahim, a very wealthy businessman with close ties to the regime. He shook their hands and made polite small talk. Then he asked about the protest movement, its demands, and why they had chosen to join it. Maha’s older son, Mihyar, said he had no objections to Bashar remaining president, but he wanted to see reforms. They chatted for fifteen or twenty minutes. And then Mihyar’s younger brother Tareq—the same one who just a week or so earlier had stood up and shouted at the regime supporters in cars—dropped a bomb. “Mr. Ibrahim,” he said, “you are so thoughtful and decent—why can’t we have you as president, for instance? Why does it have to be Bashar?”
Instantly, Ibrahim’s body stiffened. The tone of the meeting changed. He warned them that targeting the president was a red line. Syria was not Egypt or Libya or Tunis, he said, and if they failed to understand that they would be sorry. The men got up. After handshakes and tight, dutiful smiles, they left the house.
The second meeting, a few days later, was less pleasant. This time the family received a call from Political Security, the Assad regime’s nerve center in Jableh. The voice on the phone demanded that the men of the family come to the headquarters. This was a frequent ritual in Assad’s police state, but terrifying nonetheless: plenty of people were arrested and jailed for months on the slimmest of pretexts. When they arrived, Maha’s husband and sons were brought to the sparsely furnished office of an official named Samer Sweidan. They sat down. “What do you want?” Sweidan said. “You have a house, you have a job, with a salary of forty thousand Syrian pounds a month [about $850]. Isn’t that enough for you?” Mihyar answered first. “It’s not about hunger and poverty,” he said. “We want dignity, we want law and civic institutions. We want to feel we are real partners.” The discussion went on for a while. And then Tareq, once again, broke the rules. He’d been watching al Jazeera, and he felt the revolution was bound to prevail. He wanted to be a hero. “I don’t want Bashar as president,” he said. “Why shouldn’t we vote? Why shouldn’t we get to decide who is president?”
There was a pause, and Sweidan looked at him coldly. “Think carefully,” he said. “I can throw you in prison right now.” Tareq refused to be intimidated. “Fine, throw me in prison,” he said. “At least I’ll have my books, I can study there. But if I’m free, I’ll go to the street and let my voice be heard like anyone else.” Tareq’s father and brother held their breath. But the officer let them all go home. The regime wasn’t ready to play hardball in Jableh. Not yet.
By mid-April 2011, the protesters were still in the streets of Jableh. The brutal treatment of the protesters in Syria’s bigger cities—broadcast every day on al Jazeera—fueled their anger, and their demands grew bolder. They now chanted, “The people want the fall of the regime,” the slogan that had brought down Mubarak, and more ominously, “In the ground, we will put Bashar in the ground.” On April 24, hours after a last meeting between the regional governor and a group of protesters, the regime finally lost its patience with Jableh.
Noura’s mother, Zahra, was driving back home that afternoon from Latakia, a bigger city an hour up the coast, when she saw something lurch into her rearview mirror: a military jeep driving very fast, with men in camouflage clutching machine guns. She pulled over, terrified, and waited as a whole convoy of soldiers passed. Other civilian cars were stopped on the shoulder next to her. Some of the drivers had got out of their cars and were staring at the convoy in wonder. No one knew what was going on. Zahra got back on the road, and arriving in Jableh half an hour later, she found soldiers blocking the main entrance to the town. That was when a friend called to tell her that seventeen people had been shot dead during a protest. It was like a war, the friend said, there were soldiers everywhere.
Until that day, Zahra had refused, alone among her sisters, to join the protests. She disliked politics, she said. Like everyone else, she had seen TV footage of the dead protesters in Daraa and had found herself asking: Who gave them the right to end people’s lives, as if they were killing birds? But the thought dropped, as it often had in the old days. She worried that street protests were the wrong way. Besides, she loved her job at the hospital and didn’t want to risk losing it.
When Zahra finally got home that afternoon, her hands were shaking. She went to the kitchen and washed the apples she’d bought in Latakia, then put them in a bowl on the table. One of the neighbors’ children, a sweet-faced thirteen-year-old named Hassan Eid, wandered in, took an apple, and began eating it. She looked at him. Hassan was Alawi. She’d known him all her life, considered him almost part of the family. But now, she told herself, this boy’s father or uncle or brother might be shooting demonstrators, at this very minute. He might be killing her own sisters. Five minutes later, Hassan’s parents sent a cousin over to bring him home. Zahra wondered if he would ever come back. The phone rang, and when she answered it an acquaintance spoke, his voice breathless and full of emotion: Dr. Zahra, you’re needed, someone is bleeding here, in the Old City, please come help us. He hung up, and in the silence that followed, she wondered what to do. The Old City was almost impossible to reach, with all the checkpoints. Treating wounded protesters would surely be seen as a crime. But she was a doctor. She hesitated a moment longer, and then decided: she would go. She picked up her bag and turned toward the door. Then the phone rang again, and the same voice spoke, calmer this time. It is okay, never mind, the man died.
Zahra’s attitude changed after that. The city itself changed; there were checkpoints now, and the demonstrations took place only at night, in the narrower streets of the Old City. One night Zahra got another call. A different voice this time but the same message: Dr. Zahra, please, you must come, no one wants to help the injured. She left the house and got in her car, her medical bag hidden under the seat, terrified that she’d be stopped at any moment by men with guns. The streets were silent and empty, except for military vehicles. At the first checkpoint, a soldier asked where she was going. She told him in a pleading voice that her old mother was unwell because of the noise and the smoke, she had to help her. The man let her pass. She reached the mosque where the protesters had told her to meet them, and as soon as she walked in, she saw three people lying on the carpet. Two of them were dead, their faces already gray, blood drying on their bodies. The third was bleeding, moaning, and in great pain; a bullet had entered his stomach and gone out through his back. Zahra had never treated someone with bullet wounds before, but she cleaned up the wounds and made stitches. In another room were three other wounded people. One of them was a sixty-year-old man who hadn’t even been in the protests. After treating the others, she took him to a private hospital, then drove home. It was after 2:00 a.m. The next day she skipped work. She felt sure someone would find out. But the calls for help kept coming, and she kept going, always with an alibi, always at night. She started having the same nightmare. In the dream, she was alone on the street at night, and suddenly she heard the screech of brakes as a police car stopped short and men came running out, pointing guns at her head. When she woke up, she was still alone, looking out the window at the empty street. Her life had become an echo of the dream. Zahra was a widow; her husband had died of cancer two years before the revolution.
After she got the courage to go back to work, Zahra was chatting one day with a colleague, a man she’d known for years. He was Alawi, but he’d always made clear to her, in private, that he disliked Bashar. He had told Zahra a year or two earlier that his dream was to have his son vote in a free election in Syria. Zahra would never have broached that kind of subject before—it wasn’t her way—but now she felt it was time. She reminded him of what he’d said about Bashar before the revolution. He looked at Zahra and glanced around, as if to make sure no one had heard. “Look, Zahra, I cannot talk about this now,” he said. He walked away, and from then on, he avoided her.
The Kanafani family mostly stopped going to any protests after the crackdown. But it didn’t matter; there was a black mark against their name now, and people treated them differently. One of Zahra’s oldest friends, an Alawi woman named Maysaa whom she’d gone to medical school with, stopped calling her. A mutual friend called her and explained: “Maysaa asked me to say that she is sorry, but she is afraid to talk to you.” Zahra cried afterward. But a month later, something hardened in her, maybe because of all the arrests, the killings taking place every day. Another old Alawi friend, a fellow gynecologist named Rafida who worked at a hospital in Saudi Arabia, called Zahra from Riyadh. When Zahra told her she wasn’t sure she could stay in Syria, her friend started sobbing. “Zahra, is it possible I’ll come back to Jableh and find you’re not there, that we can’t go for walks and picnics by the sea?” Rafida said. “Zahra, for me Jableh means you.” Zahra felt obliged to master her emotions this time. She sternly told her friend that it was time for her to face up to the reality of the Syrian regime’s cruelty.
Noura and Aliaa spent less time together, even though they were no longer attending classes at the university because of the crisis. In early summer, they went for a drive, and within minutes Noura declared, “Aliaa, the soldiers are killing protesters in Homs. It’s like a massacre.” Aliaa replied in her usual way: “Why would they do that? Maybe you should check on it.” Noura shot back, “It’s because the people want freedom, that’s why.” They were passing through an Alawi neighborhood, and a soldier flagged them down and offered Aliaa a friendly warning. “Be careful,” he said, gesturing at Noura, because her family was known. The same thing had happened in reverse when they were in Sunni areas. They drove on, and after a minute, Noura said, “If Sunnis ever attacked you, I’d protect you. And I know you’d do the same for me.” They said nothing for a moment, and then looked at each other. Both women burst out laughing. The idea still seemed strange, incomprehensible.
The hundreds of people killed in the regime’s crackdown turned to thousands. Aliaa and her family had long since stopped trusting anything they heard on the satellite channels or on the BBC. They listened instead to Syrian news, or Lebanese channels allied with the regime. There the headlines were different: Sunni sheikhs were calling for religious war, and Saudi Arabia was promoting them. Aliaa saw the signs herself and resented the Western media for failing to pick up on it. A bizarre superstition spread, echoed on Internet religious forums and ridiculed outside of them: if you banged on metal after midnight during the holy month of Ramadan, Alawis would disappear. One night in July, a loud clanging sound awakened the family. Aliaa’s father got out of bed and staggered to the balcony; in a building just opposite, a man was beating on a metal lid. “Shut up!” her father shouted. “We’re not going to disappear.” Later, they found an X mark outside the door of one of their neighbors, the brother of a high regime official. Was he targeted for assassination?
Aliaa’s younger brother Abdulhameed, an amateur boxer, had his own shock not long afterward. He was in Egypt at the time, doing a maritime training course and living with five Syrian friends in a rented house in Alexandria. One night, a young man with an Iraqi accent knocked on the door and asked hesitantly if Syrians were living there. Abdulhameed said yes, and the Iraqi walked off. Late that night, a group of men tried to break down the door, shouting curses about Alawis and Bashar. Abdulhameed and his friends drove them off. But a few days later, a Facebook posting appeared, listing the address of the house. “These men are Syrians funded by Iran and Hezbollah to spread Shiism in Egypt and they must be killed,” it said. Abdulhameed and two of his friends gave up their studies and went home.
In August, Zahra finally made the decision to leave the country, at least for a while. She’d been called in to talk to Political Security twice, in frightening interrogations. She’d denied treating injured protesters, but she felt the regime was closing in on her. She bought a ticket to Cairo, and Noura came with her to the airport. They waited hours on a line, and then, just as she was about to clear customs, two Mukhabaraat (Intelligence) agents walked up. We need to ask you some questions, they said. And they took her away.
Noura took a taxi home, wondering how long it would be until she saw her mother again. As the car arrived at the front door, she saw the Alawi couple who lived on the first floor of her building, the ones whose son was one of Bashar’s private guards. She had never thought about it much before, but now, all the anxiety and fear of the past few months welled up inside her. The regime, she said to herself, is made of people like this, our neighbors, living right next to us, thinking Bashar is God and supporting everything he does. She was out of the car now. She looked directly at the couple and then, very deliberately, spat on the ground. It was the bravest thing she had ever done. The couple said nothing. She walked past them into the house.
That night, several of her mother’s friends called to reassure her, telling her to stay calm, that the regime wouldn’t hurt her mother. Noura called a couple of Alawi friends to see if there was anything they could do. They seemed frightened to be talking to her at all. I’m sorry, if I ask questions about your mother this will be a black mark for me, you understand, I’m sorry, one of them said. Sometimes Alawis seemed more frightened of the regime than anyone else. Maybe because they knew it better. Over the next few days, even members of Noura’s own family seemed to withdraw, as if her mother’s black mark had infected her, too. It was the loneliest time in her life. After a week, her mother called for the first time. She said she was all right. She used a code that she and Noura had agreed on beforehand, referring to her as Farah. “Tell Farah to go stay at her cousin’s,” her mother said. It felt silly. No one would fool the Mukhabaraat this way. But she went. Her aunts Maha and Wissam had been arrested too, during a trip to Aleppo. The whole family was under suspicion. She spent the next two weeks living at her cousin’s place, rarely going outside. Finally, in mid-September, she got a call from her mother saying she was being released. She was thrilled and went home to wait for her there.
She was sitting in her bedroom, after dark, when she heard the explosion, very loud and very close. She ran to the window and looked down: a car was engulfed in flames. She looked harder and realized it was her mother’s car. The flames were rising higher, and thick black smoke began to pour toward the house; she could smell it. A gunshot rang out, then another. She ran deeper into the house, screaming. This was it, she thought, they are coming for me, to arrest me, to kill me. She fumbled for her phone and called her mother. Zahra answered and Noura sobbed and shouted, telling her to come quickly. Zahra was at her brother’s house, not far away. She told Noura to calm down, it might be an accident. Wait for me.
The car burned. That was all. No one was coming to kill them. But even Zahra felt sure this was a message, though she wasn’t sure it was from the regime. Their neighborhood was mostly Alawi, and many people there must be very unhappy to have a prominent Sunni doctor who cared for wounded protesters living among them, she thought. She felt she couldn’t trust anyone anymore. Noura took days to recover. Even afterward, her nerves were so bad that Zahra began giving her a mild sedative every day.
Aliaa left in August for England, where she was doing a master’s degree in English teaching at Warwick University. She and Noura didn’t speak for almost two months. One night in October, Aliaa was half asleep when she heard a buzzing on her laptop: Noura was calling to video-chat. It was 4:00 a.m., but they spent an hour talking and laughing, as if nothing had changed. Politics came up briefly, but they dropped it and talked instead about their families, about England, about mutual friends. When they hung up, Aliaa burst into tears. She felt as if their friendship would survive despite everything. But Noura, in the predawn darkness of her bedroom, found herself thinking about something Aliaa had said: one of their mutual friends, a former classmate named Hossam who supported the revolution, had unfriended Aliaa on Facebook. Now Noura began to feel guilty somehow. So many people were in jail, so many had been killed, and here she was talking with Aliaa, who was with the regime.
In December, Noura attended one last demonstration. The Arab League had sent a delegation of observers to Syria and the protesters grew bolder, thinking they were safe as long as the visitors were in Jableh. Noura joined a daytime rally with a group of people bringing CDs documenting regime abuses to the Arab League team. But the police attacked, beating protesters with clubs and firing into the air; Noura ran headlong with a group of friends, terrified, with bullets cracking just overhead. Soon afterward, her mother got a call from Political Security, telling her to come in for another talk. This time, she got lucky. The office called back and said the meeting was delayed a week.
The family made its decision right away. Within days, Noura, her mother, and two aunts were crowded into a car, their suitcases crammed into the trunk. They had taken only essentials, knowing the trip would be hard. But they knew they might be gone a long time. In Latakia they got a ride northward into the border country. Then they walked for eight hours along a cold, muddy trail, with smugglers helping them carry the bags. They had to ford a river near the border, walking across one by one on a fallen tree. It rained much of the trip, and at times Maha thought of her old house and wanted to turn around and go back. But once they got to Turkey, her son Tareq was waiting for them. He had already rented an apartment in Antakya, the nearest city. All three families piled into it, their belongings heaped on the floor. They were exiles.
When Aliaa heard that Noura and her family had left Syria, she looked at her old friend’s Facebook page and discovered that Noura had unfriended her. But as she kept looking at Noura’s page almost every day, she saw a slow transformation. Noura’s public postings were passionately anti-Assad, and eventually they began to include more and more religious language, and some sectarian slurs against Alawis. Later that year, Noura married a Sunni man from Jableh whose Facebook page showed the black banner used by Al Qaeda. Noura’s younger brother Kamal, whom Aliaa had carried around and fed crackers when he was a boy, had his own Facebook page too, with an image of him clutching a Kalashnikov. In early 2013, just after giving birth to her first child, Noura posted a long passage praising Saddam Hussein, followed by the sentence: “How many ‘likes’ for the conqueror of the Shia and other heathens?”
All through 2012, the Syrian rebellion was simultaneously decaying and gaining ghoulish new life, like a reanimated carcass. The first wave of rebels, the urban young men and women who spoke of democracy, were fleeing to Beirut or London or Dubai. They were replaced by legions of young zealots who slipped across the border with holy war and martyrdom on their minds. To the outside world, the conflict became a gory mosaic of images and video clips shot on jiggling handheld cell phone cameras. The corpse of a thirteen-year-old boy, his genitals severed, his body covered with burns. A man being buried alive, while a Syrian commando orders him to say that Bashar is God. (The man refuses and is buried.) The bodies of women and children in a rebel village, lifeless, in heaps. A rebel fighter eating the viscera of a Syrian regime soldier. These images scattered like broken glass across the Internet, were mounted on posters, held aloft by chanting crowds, transformed into demands at the United Nations and the Arab League. A handful of these images, it turned out, were fake or, rather, old atrocities from Lebanon or Palestine, or even from car accidents, plane crashes, crime scenes. No one could say for sure where this fakery originated or how it spread, but its discovery came almost as a relief: both sides were eager for reasons to absolve their own crimes. “This is why we don’t believe anything they say about the regime or the shabiha,” Aliaa told me. “It’s all fake.” And so the war went on, a blizzard of horrors that anyone could ignore as if changing the channel on a TV remote.
The question no one could quite answer was how it had happened so quickly. Of course Bashar’s men had spread sectarian rumors. They had threatened their own people to stay in line, they had even released hard-core jihadis from the regime’s own prisons, all with the goal of opening up old wounds. But those wounds were real, and they were close to the surface. In less than a year, a regime crackdown had transformed into what looked like millennial religious hatred.
* * *
In November 1862, an American missionary named Henry Harris Jessup opened the door of his Beirut home and found himself confronting a stranger. The man before him was “short of stature, had a low forehead, projecting chin and Negroid lips, ruddy countenance, and altogether as repulsive a man as I have ever met in the East,” Jessup later wrote. The visitor was an Alawi, and he called himself Soleyman of Adana.
Jessup was accustomed to greeting strangers. He was one of a small group of Protestant missionaries living in greater Syria who were mostly seen as benevolent outsiders. They taught Arabs about the Bible and provided a refuge for people fleeing from ethnic and sectarian feuds. Jessup, at age thirty, was tall and starkly handsome, with piercing eyes, a high forehead, and a long beard that spread, in patriarchal splendor, around his stiff white collar. He had been in Lebanon for only six years, but he already spoke Arabic so well that he preached in the language. Soleyman pulled out a letter, which Jessup unfolded and read. It said that Soleyman was a man of considerable learning and a convert to Christianity from the “mystic Nusairi faith,” another word for the Alawi religion. The letter’s writer, a well-known scholar living in Damascus, had helped free Soleyman from military service on the grounds that he was now a Christian, one of the groups exempted by the Ottomans.
This was a rare discovery for Jessup. The Alawis and their religion were at that time an almost total mystery to outsiders, and they were the subject of wild and lurid rumors. Soleyman, it turned out, was not only an Alawi but one of the khass, the elite few in that community to be initiated into the religion’s secret tenets. Jessup invited him in and asked him to sit down. They began talking right away, and the conversation spread over many hours in the following days. Soleyman’s initiation had begun at the age of seventeen, when an Alawi sheikh handed him a glass of wine and placed a sandal on his head. “Say thou, ‘by the mystery of thy beneficence, O my uncle and lord, thou crown of my head, I am thy pupil, and let thy sandal lie upon my head,’” the man intoned. After a series of other rituals spread over nine months, a sheikh asked him to recite a vow of secrecy: “Wilt thou suffer the cutting off of thy head and hands and feet, and not disclose this august mystery?” Soleyman swore. He was inducted into the thousand-year-old mystical beliefs of the Alawis, including reincarnation and the deification of Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad. The Alawis venerated Christ and Muhammad, but also Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle. They used strange passwords to recognize each other, and had a practice of impersonating members of other faiths, though they privately reviled Muslims and Christians as wretched heretics, destined to be reborn as apes and pigs. At Jessup’s urging, Soleyman wrote up everything he knew about the Alawi faith in book form over the space of a few weeks. Jessup got it printed, and it was the first—and for a long time the only—authentic source for outsiders about the religion.
Soleyman also talked about the misery of life among the Alawis. They were mountain people, intensely distrustful of outsiders. They had retreated centuries earlier to the hills to escape from the Muslims of the Syrian plain, who reviled them as heretics, and occasionally carried out murderous raids. The theologian Ibn Taymiyya had proclaimed in the early 1300s that the Alawis were “more infidel than Jews and Christians, even more infidel than many polytheists,” and urged good Muslims to slaughter and rob them. Those words were invoked regularly. The Alawis retaliated with their own intense hatred. But even within their own community, the Alawis were so tribal and feud-prone that murder and robbery were constants of life. At times, the community stood close to extinction. One English clergyman who lived among them for several years in the mid-nineteenth century described a world of extraordinary violence and constant starvation, where “the state of society is a perfect hell upon earth.” Alawis accused of banditry, when caught by Muslims, were given special treatment: impaled on spikes and left on crossroads as a warning.
Soleyman’s story evoked great sympathy from his bearded American friend. Soleyman had come to doubt the truth of the Alawi faith after standing outside the house of a dying man and observing that no planet descended to the dead man’s body, and no star rose from the house door. Other Alawi beliefs also seemed baseless. Disgusted, Soleyman converted to Islam. But after only a month of reading through the Koran, he found three hundred lies “and seventy great lies” in it. He decided to become a Greek Orthodox Christian. After a brief honeymoon, he found he could not bear the worship of holy icons or the idea of eating God in the form of a wafer. Next he became a Jew and taught himself to read Hebrew well enough to get through the Talmud. There, too, he found too much nonsense. He then discovered a Protestant tract attacking the pope and decided he had found the true path at last. It was then that the Turkish authorities threw him in jail and drafted him into the army. He escaped only after being marched six hundred miles to Damascus. There, a Christian scholar who had worked as an American consul discovered him and wrote the letter that brought him to Beirut.
Jessup was delighted that this bizarre, troll-faced polymath had finally found the true Christ. He got him a room to rent in Beirut. Soleyman was thrillingly exotic company for the Pennsylvania clergyman and his friends: he could recite whole chapters of the Koran from memory, along with much of the Hebrew Bible. He had an almost endless supply of mystical Alawi teachings. But Soleyman’s wanderings were not over. He began roaming the region, preaching Protestantism with apocalyptic fervor, and one day he arrived on Jessup’s doorstep again, this time reeking of liquor. When Jessup told him he could not allow him to enter the house if he drank again, Soleyman asked for a pen and paper. He wrote: “I, Soleyman of Adana, do hereby pledge myself never to drink a drop of liquor again, and if I do, my blood is forfeited, and I hereby authorize Rev. H. Jessup to cut off my head, and drink my blood.” Jessup frowned at the “rather strong language” but was pleased with the pledge. It did not last long, however. Soleyman returned to his drinking habits and freely denounced all the religions he had abandoned. He married the daughter of a Greek priest and eventually moved back to Adana.
It was there that the Alawi sheikhs caught up to him. They had bided their time, believing that to kill Soleyman after the book was published would be taken for proof that all he had written was true. Years had now passed since its publication. Soleyman had fallen out of touch with his American friend, who was living hundreds of miles away in Beirut. Even then, the old sheikhs were cold and slow with their revenge. They invited Soleyman to a village feast, pretending to treat him as an honored guest, a son of the faith who had gained renown. He was on horseback, being led by young Alawi men who sang and fired their rifles in his honor. As his horse wove among the manure piles that ringed the village, the men suddenly grabbed his legs and flung him into a ditch they had prepared beforehand. They heaped dung onto him, ignoring his screams, until he was buried alive. Years later, when Jessup was passing through Adana in 1888, a local teacher told him that Alawi sheikhs had cut Soleyman’s tongue out after killing him and preserved it in a jar. They would bring it out on special occasions, the teacher said, cursing him and consigning him to hell for his betrayal.
The Alawis, meanwhile, continued to live in wretched poverty in their mountain hideaways, at the margins of Syria’s feudal economy. Many were forced to sell their daughters into indentured servitude as maids for wealthy Damascus families, where they were said to be treated as sexual slaves. The mutual hatred between mountain and city persisted even after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the arrival of the French at the end of the first World War. For a brief period, the French administered the Alawi mountain hinterland as a state of its own, and the Alawis were finally free from fear of their Muslim neighbors in the plains below. By the mid-1930s, the French were under pressure to recognize Syrian demands for a unified, independent state. The Alawis could see what was coming. In 1936, six Alawi notables sent a petition begging the French not to merge their northern enclave with the rest of Syria. “The spirit of hatred and fanaticism embedded in the hearts of the Arab Muslims against everything that is non-Muslim has been perpetually nurtured by the Islamic religion,” they wrote. “There is no hope that this situation will ever change. Therefore, the abolition of the mandate will expose the minorities in Syria to the dangers of death and annihilation, irrespective of the fact that such abolition will annihilate the freedom of thought and belief.”
One of the petition’s signers was Sulayman al Assad, the grandfather of Bashar al Assad. When the French abandoned them, the Alawis rushed to embrace the Syrian nationalist cause. History was rewritten, and Alawi divines began declaring themselves Muslims. The young Alawi officer Hafez al Assad embraced Arabism like a new religion; he pledged himself to the destruction of Israel, he did everything he could to disguise his heretical roots, especially after he rose to the presidency in 1971. Syria’s other minority groups—Christians, Druze, Ismailis, and the rest—did the same thing, rushing for the cover of Arabism and the Baath Party, its local political vehicle. But Assad needed more than just political cover. The stain of Alawi difference had to be explicitly cleansed. The word went out: the new strongman wanted fatwas. Several obliging Shiite clerics, eager for Syrian patronage, opened their arms and declared Alawis to be orthodox members of the Shiite fold.
Assad was grateful, but far too clever to mistake these bouquets for a wedding. He quietly positioned his Alawi kinsmen at the core of the expanding police state, like knives under a table. He knew he could count on them, and their fear, when the crisis came.
* * *
I remembered the 1936 petition signed by Sulayman al Assad when I first entered Aliaa Ali’s family living room and saw a black-and-white portrait on the wall: her grandfather, in a stiff collar and tie. “He studied in France in the 1930s,” Aliaa said brightly. Then she quickly added, as if someone had signaled a minor gaffe, “And later he fought the French in the struggle for independence—I think.” You have to be careful not to stumble on your history if you are Alawi.
It was April 2013. After two years of fighting, the Syrian war had spun outward and was drawing in almost every country in the region and many beyond it. Hezbollah had soldiers and trainers on the ground, as did Iran. There were thousands of rebels fighting in the name of jihad from more than a dozen countries, bankrolled by intelligence services and militias and zealots of every kind. On the other side, Shiite volunteers from Iraq, Lebanon, and even Yemen were lining up to fight for Bashar. The jihad was irresistible to bored, frustrated young men who had been fed a diet of religion all through their schooling. I met a Saudi in Riyadh later that year who had gone to Syria eight times. He was a hospital administrator, a respectable forty-three-year-old who felt no shame in admitting that he relished a chance to kill a few Shiites. Sometimes he went just for a long weekend. Most of these people could not have cared less about Syria itself; they were there for the Apocalypse, the great battle between true Islam and its enemies that would shatter heresy forever and pave the way for God’s kingdom. Or so they thought.
But there was always another way of looking at it, one everyone was at least half aware of: that this great battle between Sunni and Shiite was really just a cynical power struggle between the region’s two biggest oil producers, Saudi Arabia and Iran, who fed their people sectarian slogans the way you might feed amphetamines to a tired boxer. One thing was certain: the Iranian and Saudi designs on Syria, like shifting gears, turned larger wheels in more distant capitals. Russia bankrolled Assad with an eye on its own Muslims in the Caucasus. China vetoed any efforts to authorize force in the United Nations. Qatar funded jihadis and American efforts to undermine them. Even Barack Obama became a proxy warrior, with deep reluctance. After resisting for a year, he signed a secret order for the CIA to arm and train “vetted” Syrian rebels just before I arrived in Damascus in April 2013. This was the first time I met Aliaa and her family, and heard her story of the revolution’s unfolding in Jableh.
For me, it was an uneasy return to a country I barely recognized. I had been to Syria many times in the years before the revolution. I loved it the way you love an old abandoned junkyard, full of undervalued rusty relics that no one else has discovered. It was dim and depressing, with its collapsing old markets and decaying French mandate architecture, its medieval tunnels and dark silent bars, its dead cities full of crumbling stones and empty, lichen-clad cisterns. I made friends with film directors and Kurdish activists and Palestinian refugees, and we whispered furtively about the regime in bars, eyeing the Mukhabaraat men in leather jackets who pretended not to be watching.
Now that Syria was gone. Half the country was behind rebel lines, in a zone where Western hostages were bought and sold and beheaded. Most of my Syrian friends had fled and were living in Europe or Beirut or Dubai. Some of them were dead, or kidnapped God knows where.
I began my journey in Damascus and found one old friend on a Thursday night in Abu Rummaneh, a tony district. It was in a basement bar, a dark throbbing den of young Syrians dancing and drinking and making out. I pushed through the thicket of bodies until I reached the bar and found Khaled, who gave me a sweaty bear hug and bought me a beer. He is a novelist and a bohemian, a big man with a rowdy laugh and a massive head of steel-gray curls. He’d been a dissident ever since I’d known him, and a passionate protester in 2011. Two years had aged him visibly. We talked about mutual friends, all of them now gone. “I can’t give up on the revolution,” Khaled said. “I won’t leave Damascus.” He put his arm around a young woman and introduced her as Rita. “Khaled is the only optimist left in Syria,” Rita said. When Khaled moved off to greet someone else, I asked Rita—we had to shout over the churn of Arab pop music—about the state of the peaceful opposition. “I am ashamed to say it, but the opposition has lost its meaning,” she said. “Now it is only killing, nothing but killing. The jihadis are speaking of a caliphate, and the Christians are really frightened.” There was a pause. “I waited all my life for this revolution, but now I think maybe it shouldn’t have happened. At least not this way.”
If the opposition had lost its meaning, so had the regime. The old masks were gone. The country that had defined itself as “the beating heart of Arabism” had been officially ejected from the Arab League, its leader scorned as a criminal.
On a quiet side street in one of Damascus’s richest neighborhoods, a prominent lawyer with ties to the Assad family invited me to join him and his friends in an opulent book-lined study. There were soft leather couches and European chocolates on the coffee table. A sixteen-frame video screen showed every approach to the house. One of the guests was Father Gabriel Daoud, a handsome priest who sprawled on an armchair in his black cassock. The subject of Syria’s minorities came up, and Father Daoud’s face registered his irritation. “Minorities—it’s a false name,” he said. “It should be the quality of the people, not the quantity. It gives you the idea that minorities are small and weak. But we are the original people of this country.” As for the protesters and their demands for freedom, Father Daoud smirked. “They don’t want hurriya, they want houriaat.” Hurriya is the Arabic word for “freedom,” and houriaat is the plural of “houris,” the dark-eyed virgins that suicide bombers are promised in the afterlife. Father Daoud chuckled at his little witticism, and then grew more serious. “They are barbarians, real barbarians,” he said of the opposition. “They may have Syrian nationality, but not the mentality. We are proud of our secularism. We cannot live with these barbarians.” When I raised the subject of Arab nationalism, Father Daoud winced. “We are Phoenician, not Arabic,” he said. “We don’t want to be Arabic.”
Some other regime supporters took this idea further. One young Alawi filmmaker, the son of a high-ranking officer, hinted that it was time for the Alawis to stop pretending they were Muslims. “When the Alawi sect began, a thousand years ago, it was a rebellion against the status quo,” he said, when I met him in a Damascus café. “The dictatorship at that time was Islam, so the rebellion against it naturally took a religious form. Islam is a lie, it is just a way to gain power and control crowds. This is what we should be rebelling against.” When I asked him what—in the absence of Arabism of Islam—might inspire young Syrians or bring them together, he hesitated. “The Baath Party doesn’t exist anymore,” he said. “They are dinosaurs. Arab nationalism could be reconstructed, perhaps, on an economic basis…” His voice trailed off, and he grimaced. “I remember saying, when the first protests started in Tunis and Cairo in 2011, that if this happens here in Syria, it will never end. The moments of extermination are still too present in people’s minds.” I assumed he was referring to Hama, where so many Sunnis were killed by the regime’s Alawi-led forces. But after a moment’s thought I realized I was probably wrong: he had spoken earlier of the Alawis as rebels and victims. Everyone in this struggle was bent on portraying his own people as David and the other side as Goliath.
In some ways, life in Damascus was startlingly normal. There was fresh fruit in the market stalls, and crowds of shoppers in the Old City; sweet apple-flavored tobacco smoke drifted from the cafés. But checkpoints were everywhere, and I could not walk ten yards without a plainclothes member of the new National Defense Forces demanding my ID. Behind the comforting bustle of street sounds, the dull thump of artillery could be heard, like intermittent thunder. No one ever remarked on it, and in the spring sunlight it was hard to imagine that people were fighting and dying only a few miles away.
Only after taking the highway north out of Damascus did I see the war. On either side of us were houses pancaked to rubble or burned beyond recognition, posters bearing the faces of Assad and his clan shot to pieces. As we drove past the suburb of Harasta, where some of the worst fighting had raged, a huge column of black smoke rose from a cluster of houses a few hundred yards away. My driver glanced anxiously back and forth. The speedometer pushed past ninety miles per hour, and I wondered how our worn-out Hyundai would hold up. “This is a very dangerous area,” he said. “We must go fast.” Beyond the suburbs, the highway skirts the war-shattered city of Homs and turns west, toward the mountainous Alawi heartland along the Mediterranean. This was the route Bashar and his loyalists would take if, in the fantasy embraced by their enemies, they ever abandoned the capital and tried to forge a rump state in the land of their ancestors. The landscape along the highway grows greener the farther north you go, and the signs of war slowly fade. Magnificent snowcapped mountains rise to the west, and later, the glittering blue plane of the sea comes into view. The hills are speckled with olive and fruit trees, and the smell of eucalyptus mingles with the sea breeze.
It was there that I first met Aliaa Ali and found myself gazing at the photograph of her grandfather. The Ali family home in Jableh had the cozy look of a beach house, with shells on the walls and blue paint peeling in spots from the moist sea air. A picture of Hassan Nasrallah hung on the wall, and one of Bashar al Assad. On the shelves were some novels in English, including Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The bookends were oblong lumps of metal, which turned out to be bits of Israeli artillery shells, a memento from her father’s years as a sergeant with the Syrian military in Lebanon. As we ate a lunch of fried fish and chicken, her father delivered a little lecture about the evils of Saudi influence; the seeds of terrorism had been sown in the ’70s, he said, and they were flowering now. This was a constant during my time in regime-controlled Syria, as if everyone had received a little index card reminder of what to tell the American journalist: We are facing Saudi-funded terrorism, just like you.
Not everyone abided by the regime’s sectarian script. After lunch, standing on the terrace in the warm spring air, I asked Aliaa what she thought of Alawis who joined the opposition, like the novelist Samar Yazbek, another native of Jableh. She grew wary at the mention of Yazbek’s name. “I met her once,” Aliaa said. “She told me I had a bright future in front of me. But I don’t want a future like hers. I think Alawis who join the opposition don’t realize that they are being used as tools. Or they think they can turn this jihadi war into a democratic revolution. But they will never succeed.”
Samar Yazbek was also in Syria during the early months of the revolution. In her diaries of the revolt’s first four months—later published in English under the title A Woman in the Crossfire—she describes the furious campaign conducted against her after she publicly backed the insurrection. Her family was forced to disavow her, and leaflets were passed out in Jableh denouncing her. At one point, she describes a terrifying encounter with the security apparatus. After being driven from her house in Damascus to an intelligence center, she finds herself with a scowling officer who spits on her, knocks her to the floor, and threatens to kill her. Guards then lead her blindfolded downstairs to one of the regime’s basement torture rooms, where she is forced to look at bloodied, half-dead protesters hanging from the ceiling. The officer tells her that she is being duped by “Salafi Islamists” and that she must come back to the fold or die. “We’re honorable people,” he tells her. “We don’t harm our own blood. We’re not like you traitors. You’re a black mark upon all the Alawis.” When I spoke to Yazbek, who is now living in Paris, she told me she believed that the Alawi community had been the Assad clan’s first victim, that they had been used as “human shields” to keep the regime in power. “They believe the regime’s rhetoric, that they would be massacred if Assad falls,” she said. “They are very afraid, and very confused.”
Some Alawis inside Syria quietly make the same point, though it is far more dangerous for them to do so. Aliaa herself often seemed on the verge of conceding that much of what Yazbek said was true. She had read widely and absorbed the unforgiving Western view of Assad’s regime. Once, she referred to him in passing as a “dictator.” It was as if she wanted me to know that her mind was not captive to the sectarian label she’d grown up with. But these impulses were always followed by a gesture of anger at Europe and the United States: these were the governments that defined her people as an enemy. She might peer over the box of her loyalties, but she could not escape it. At times, Aliaa and her peers reminded me of Soleyman of Adana: struggling to escape the past, yet unable to speak too loudly lest their own people destroy them.
Most of the time, Syria’s minorities—not just Alawis but also Christians, Druze, Murshidis—do not make such distinctions. All they know is that they are being hunted down and killed by an enemy that looks just like the one that killed their ancestors. By 2013, the rising death toll among regime soldiers had made funerals an almost daily affair in northwestern Syria. I saw at least half a dozen new war monuments in mountain towns near Latakia, often with hundreds of soldiers’ names engraved on them. Paper flyers and colored posters cover the walls in Latakia and Tartous, all of them showing the names and faces of men (and some women) killed while fighting for Bashar.
Soon after I met her, Aliaa and her brother Abdulhameed took me to her family’s ancestral home, in the mountain village of Dreikeesh. The road from the coast climbs along hairpin turns into a magnificent landscape of lush terraced hills and orchards that called to mind the hill towns of Tuscany or Umbria. After a twenty-minute drive, we reached the house, where Aliaa’s uncle, Amer Ali, stood waiting for us, a sturdy-looking man of fifty with a hardened face and close-cropped graying hair. He led us upstairs to a large high-ceilinged room where sunlight splashed through two open walls. Dozens of people waited inside, some of them in uniform, sipping tea and coffee. Amer had gathered them to tell their stories of relatives or spouses lost to the war. I sat down and listened to them, one by one. They were working-class people: soldiers, construction workers, policemen, dressed in simple, worn-out clothes. All were Alawis, as far as I could tell. Some were probably shabiha, though none of them would have used that term. One of them, a middle-aged construction worker named Adib Sulayman, pulled out his cell phone and showed me the message he’d received after his son Yamin was kidnapped by rebels: “We have executed God’s will and killed your son. If you are still fighting with Bashar, we will come to your houses and cut you into pieces. Never fight against us.” None of the people I met in that room conveyed any arrogance of the kind I was used to seeing in Damascus. They all made clear that they felt their families, their homes, their whole way of life, were in terrible danger. I met a twenty-year-old man who had been shot twice in the head and had lost some of his memory and half his hearing. He told me he would go back to the front as soon as his wounds healed. His father stared at me and said, “I would be proud to have my son become a martyr. I am in my fifties, but I am ready to sacrifice my life too. They thought we would be weak in this crisis, but we are strong.”
After lunch, Aliaa’s uncle showed me around the house. On the wall was a Sword of Ali, an important symbol for Alawis, with verses in praise of Imam Ali engraved on the blade. There were old farming tools, a stick for catching snakes, hunting knives, and a century-old carbine—a kind of visual history of the Alawi people. There were ancient Phoenician amphorae, and a family tree in the kitchen, with names dating back centuries. Amer Ali led me to the roof, where we gazed out at the town where his family has lived for hundreds of years. The hills were lovely in the golden afternoon sunlight. You could see an ancient spring with a stone arch over it, and a mosque that had been built by one of his ancestors 240 years ago. Aliaa stood next to me on the terrace, looking out at the town with an expression of rapturous pride. I asked her how it made her feel to know that Western human rights groups had documented repeated atrocities by the Syrian regime—some, perhaps, by people like the ones we had just talked to. This was before the large-scale chemical weapons attacks on Syrian civilians that would bring the United States to the brink of military intervention in Syria in the autumn of 2013. It was before the Assad regime made “barrel bombs,” the makeshift explosives dropped indiscriminately onto civilian areas, a household word. But already the litany of horrors was long.
Aliaa glanced downward. “Yes, there have been atrocities,” she said. “You can never deny that there have been atrocities. But you have to ask yourself: What will happen if Bashar falls? That’s why I believe victory is the only option. If Bashar falls, Syria falls. And then we, here, will all be in the niqab, or we will be dead.” Before we climbed back down, Aliaa’s uncle showed me a rusted white tripod, set in the center of the roof, under a gazebo. “It is for telescopes, for looking at the stars,” he said, looking up at the cloudless evening sky. Then he glanced down the mountain, toward where the hills give way to the vast Syrian plain. “But we can use it to set up a sniper rifle and defend ourselves here.”
Two hours’ drive to the north, just beyond the lush green hill country of the Turkish border, Noura Kanafani and her family were living in an oddly parallel world of grief and encirclement. They showed me photographs of dead and disappeared friends and relatives, of bare skin marked by hideous bruises, welts, burns, the language of torture. I watched appalling videotapes of regime soldiers and paramilitaries shooting at funeral ceremonies in Sunni villages. Noura too felt that the world had abandoned her and her people: the Americans, the Europeans, the Arabs—all faithless. She had a job at an American-funded charity, and her mother, Zahra, was working at a nearby hospital. Aunt Maha was running a school for Syrian refugee children in a camp near the border. They were much better off than most Syrian refugees; with their jobs, they had enough money to rent decent apartments. But they were deeply unhappy in exile, and none of them believed they would ever see Jableh again. They had retreated into piety. Noura, who had always worn a simple hijab over her hair, told me she was thinking about donning the full niqab. When I first approached her, she refused to talk to me, because her husband, whose Facebook page was full of jihadi symbols and warlike slogans, did not approve of her talking to foreign men. Eventually, under the pressure of his in-laws, he relented. Noura and her relatives were all angry that the West was more focused on the crimes of rebel jihadi groups than those of Bashar al Assad. “It is not believable that a superpower can do nothing,” Noura told me. “People are shocked by the world’s silence.” Her aunt Maha went further, saying that she suspected the United States was in league with Bashar, and it was all part of a war against Islam itself.
As their friendship receded into the past, both Noura and Aliaa began revisiting it in the light of a new wartime awareness. Each of them highlighted stray comments and anecdotes that had seemed innocuous at the time but now took on a sinister new meaning. Sitting in a Turkish café one night, Noura said something that amazed me: “I think Aliaa and her family became Shiites.” When I asked what she meant, she said Aliaa had often told her about her parents’ pilgrimage to Najaf and Karbala, the Shiite shrine cities in Iraq. And that Aliaa had often recited quotes from the Koran about Ali. Noura said she now remembered hearing rumors that Aliaa’s family had once been poor, then suddenly became rich. This now made sense to her: the Iranians were said to pay people to become Shiites. As Noura thought about it, she began to feel that Aliaa had been subtly suggesting to Noura that she, too, should become a Shiite. “She wasn’t very clear about it, but now I think maybe she was going to become more clear if I actually became Shiite,” Noura said. None of this was true. Aliaa’s parents had visited Najaf and Karbala, like many Alawis, but I found no evidence that they had ever contemplated converting to Shiism. But facts were not the point. It was as if the war had gradually cast its shadow over Noura’s most intimate memories, reshaping them into a narrative that made Aliaa little more than a puppet in a sectarian morality play. Behind her friend stood the shadow of Iran, enemy of the Sunnis.
For her part, Aliaa also was combing through her memories of the friendship and had found all kinds of subtle but damning signs. She remembered Noura’s mother having said something positive about Osama bin Laden. She remembered that Noura had almost married the old professor from Rastan, the one who was a hard-line Salafi, a Wahhabi. She remembered Noura having said something about “regaining the Umma,” the Islamic nation. Once, Noura had said to her, “You don’t understand, because you don’t have a deep knowledge of religion.” Most damning of all were the links to Saudi Arabia: one of Noura’s aunts married a Saudi. And Noura’s teenage brother, Kamal, had met with a Saudi jeweler, who was teaching him about the jewelry business. “It was just strange at the time, but now I understand why,” Aliaa told me. Her friend had been a closet Wahhabi all along. This too was a fantasy, but it was a fantasy she needed, just as Noura needed hers. Their friendship belonged to a world that no longer made sense. They had redefined each other, little by little, as enemies.