Spring was beginning to return to Damascus on the February morning in 2011 that Bashar al-Assad played tennis with his friend and army general Manaf Tlass. The patchy grass lawns in nearby Tishreen Park had been seeded, and overgrown hedges had been given an overdue trim. The clay tennis court was nestled in a wooded grove within the Tishreen Palace compound, where the Assad family often hosted foreign guests.
A massive Syrian flag whipped in the wind some 300 feet above the court. Installed the previous July, the flag marked the tenth anniversary of Bashar’s ascension to power as president. A large celebration had been held in the park at its unveiling; the prime minister spoke on the occasion and schoolchildren sang patriotic songs while waving heart-shaped cardboard cutouts of Bashar’s face.1
As Bashar and Manaf began their match that day in February, Manaf sensed that his tennis partner was distracted and downbeat. The tall (over six feet), slender, and athletic Bashar, who had turned forty-five a few months earlier, normally relished physical activity as a reprieve from his often dull presidential duties. He was a fierce competitor and served hard as he fixed his blue eyes on opponents across the net. But today he seemed unfocused; something was not right, Manaf thought.
Manaf hit the ball with his racket, thwack!
Suddenly the flag looming overhead cracked violently in the wind, almost like a loud thunder snap. Rattled by the sound, Bashar dropped his racket.2
“Calm down, there’s nothing to fear,” Manaf said with a smile, trying to put his friend at ease. Bashar laughed nervously and, in a moment, they returned to the game.
Bashar had much to fear that winter. In mid-January, a popular uprising toppled the head of a corrupt, entrenched regime in the North African state of Tunisia that for years had been backed by the West and the Arabian Peninsula’s oil-rich dynasties. The Tunisian army broke from the ruler and sided with the people. More significant were the protests that engulfed the US-supported leader of Egypt, the long-ruling former army general who was grooming his son to inherit the presidency. Libya, sandwiched between Egypt and Tunisia, was also on the brink of revolt against the maniacal ex–army officer who held power. Saudi Arabia’s monarchs, who had a long history of sponsoring strongmen across the region, looked on with trepidation as demonstrations gripped their poor southern neighbor Yemen and threatened fellow royals on the island of Bahrain, just across from their oil fields.
Arab regimes seemed stunned in disbelief as elation and a sense of liberation spread through the streets. It appeared nothing could stand in the face of the people’s will. Comparisons were made to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the revolutions that swept through the Communist-bloc countries of Eastern Europe afterward. The thinking was that, as in Eastern Europe, the Arab world’s sclerotic regimes and merciless police states would collapse one by one like dominoes. The newfound and much-yearned-for hurriyeh, or freedom, would spread like the brilliant wildflowers that had just begun sprouting throughout the countryside near Damascus as winter drew to a close that year. It would be an Arab Spring.
Many were already betting that the Assad family, which had ruled for forty years, was next.
The family’s ruthless guardians, however, saw matters differently. “It is impossible for Syria to witness anything of the sort… everything is under control… Syria is immune from the turmoil,” was the unanimous conclusion in the written reports Bashar received from his multiple intelligence and security services.3
These assurances should have been enough to comfort Bashar and put his mind at ease. After all, these agencies and the myriad branches attached to them constituted the backbone of Syria’s police state. Collectively known as the mukhabarat, they operated above any law and were responsible for watching the army, the government, every Syrian citizen—and each other. No detail of daily life eluded their scrutiny and control. It was as if America’s CIA, FBI, and NSA worked nonstop to suppress any hint of criticism of the US president.
The mere mention of the mukhabarat horrified most Syrians. The common saying was that one could “disappear behind the sun” for doing anything that might upset the mukhabarat, a romantic euphemism for rotting in a prison cell with nobody knowing your whereabouts. The mukhabarat believed that the terror it had worked so hard for decades to instill in every Syrian’s heart remained potent.4 Even so, all the usual suspects were summoned one by one for a “cup of coffee” with senior mukhabarat officers who reminded them about the catastrophic consequences of rebellion.5
Meanwhile, the regime guardians bolstered their young leader with affirmation: Syrians adore you. Why should they protest? Your reformist and visionary leadership is miles ahead of the Arab world’s restless youth. You have already implemented the Arab Spring’s lofty ideals and slogans like “Bread, Freedom, and Social Justice.” You are on the cusp of transforming Syria and the entire region. At forty-five, you have absolutely nothing in common with the Middle East’s geriatric leaders who made peace with “our enemy” Israel and have been propped up for decades by America, Europe, and the petrodollars of Gulf Arab states.
The gist of the mukhabarat reports served as Bashar’s talking points at the end of January 2011, when he was interviewed by American reporters from the Wall Street Journal.6 The message was echoed by Bashar’s articulate and stylish wife, Asma, a few weeks later when she hosted Harvard’s Arab Alumni Association in Damascus. “Our identity must become that of a learning region… opening ourselves to new perspectives… adopting new skills,” Asma told the accomplished Arabs.7
In those early months of 2011, when Arab masses were intoxicated with thawra, or revolution, and many Syrians secretly yearned to liberate themselves from the fear, humiliation, and deception they had been living under for almost half a century, the regime’s greatest hope was that the narrative it worked years to construct, about Bashar and his leadership, his wife, and his vision, would shield it from the fever sweeping the region.
The narrative was something like this: Bashar was a genuinely nice guy. Educated, polite, modest, and even nerdy, he abandoned his career as an ophthalmologist and became his father’s heir because he wanted to reform Syria and lead it into the twenty-first century. He was battling the system’s corrupt and deep-rooted old guard. He was making great strides, but it was no easy task and he should be allowed more time. Complicating his mission were external factors like war and instability in neighboring Iraq and Lebanon, as well as conspiracies hatched by Syria’s enemies, chiefly the United States and Israel. Syria’s alliance with Iran and what the regime called “resistance movements,” like the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, should make every Arab proud. Better ties with Turkey and rapprochement with the West and rich Gulf monarchies toward the end of the first decade of his rule were an extension of the maverick politics of his late father, Hafez al-Assad, “the builder of modern Syria.”
The young leader’s wife, Asma, was a bonus—two for the price of one. The pretty and intelligent British-born daughter of a Syrian surgeon had also abandoned a comfortable life in the West and a career in investment banking because she loved Bashar and shared his vision for a new Syria. While many focused on her designer outfits and stiletto heels, Asma worked hard on nurturing early-childhood learning, supporting rural women, and preserving cultural heritage.8 The story was that Bashar and the first lady were on a quest to create an enlightened, empowered, and prosperous Syrian citizenry.
As proof of how modern and progressive the presidential couple were, their marriage transcended religious divides, he Alawite (a minority religion) and she Sunni (like the majority of Syrians)—not that this mattered in the secular Syria painted by the regime, of course. Showing that the couple also had the common touch was central to the narrative. They were pictured playing with their children at a Damascus park, biking and hiking in the countryside, and dining with the people at a traditional eatery. The president and his wife surrounded themselves with young friends, advisers and assistants who acted like them and shared their ethos and perspective.
Manaf Tlass and his wife, Thala Khair, were pivotal members of this cast of characters. Manaf, three years older than Bashar, was more than just a general in the Republican Guard, a kind of praetorian army unit charged with the president’s security. The two men were close intimates, practically family. Manaf’s father, Mustafa, the former defense minister, was the lifelong companion of Bashar’s father, Hafez. They met as cadets in their twenties at the military academy and rose up together when their Baath Party seized power in 1963. Mustafa helped his friend neutralize all his party rivals and secure his power in a coup d’état in 1970 under the guise of reform. Mustafa served Hafez with unwavering loyalty until the elder Assad’s death in 2000, and he was the chief kingmaker during the transfer of power to Bashar. The Assad and Tlass children had grown up together over the years. For a long time, Bashar addressed Manaf’s parents khaleh and ammou—“aunt” and “uncle” in Arabic.9
Manaf was in the president’s innermost circle and had direct access to him, even though he had not attained his father’s status and had to contend with those—particularly Bashar’s maternal cousins, the Makhloufs—who were intent on pushing the Tlasses out of this power orbit. Manaf, however, had something none of the other courtiers possessed: he and his wife, Thala, were strikingly charming and good-looking. With his boyish appearance, casual style, broad shoulders, shaggy salt-and-pepper hair, and frequent stubble, Manaf looked more like a movie star than an army general in a despotic Middle Eastern state.
Thala was beautiful, pedigreed, and interested in culture and education. She helped start one of the first model private primary schools, and the couple supported Syrian artists and collected their works. They led a busy and colorful social life, mingling with a young, hip crowd. Manaf was a movie buff, with encyclopedic knowledge of cinema and its techniques. In another life he could have been a film director.
One of the couple’s favorite haunts was Marmar, a bar tucked in the alleyways of the charming historic center, which screened artsy foreign movies during the week and featured live performers and funky DJs on the weekend. The luncheons and parties Manaf and his wife hosted at their spectacular mountaintop retreat near Damascus were the talk of the town. Their friendship with Bashar and Asma meant Manaf and Thala were eagerly sought out by members of the Damascene upper crust and all those who wanted to get ahead or simply get things done in a country where navigating the layers of bureaucracy and the mukhabarat’s vagaries was no small feat.
In a way, Manaf and Thala’s lifestyle and outlook accentuated and sustained the carefully constructed narrative of Bashar and his more open and youthful rule. Bashar knew this and endorsed it.
Bashar genuinely believed he was a reformer, but of course within the parameters and timetable set by him and his police state, and he wanted to believe the mukhabarat’s assurances about the power of the narrative, but experience had taught him to question their methods and motives. Bashar could not ignore the region’s dramatic events and early signs in Syria itself. Everything pointed to trouble ahead for the regime.
Manaf saw his friend’s confidence waver. On some days Bashar seemed untouched by the threat and confident of the regime’s staying power, while on others he seemed to grow agitated and apprehensive. The insecurities Bashar worked all his life to suppress seemed to be resurging, Manaf observed. This was, after all, a man who on many occasions boasted to Manaf about his detachment, rationality, and coldness in tackling all matters, whether private or public.10 To the world, Bashar appeared like a man who wore a steel armor shielding him from all human impulses. Manaf was one of the few who could see through this armor. They grew up together and remained close; Manaf witnessed Bashar’s transformation from a painfully shy and tormented child and adolescent to the strong but reformist leader he craved to be.
The alarm sounded for Bashar and the region’s autocrats after the eruption of massive protests in Egypt in late January 2011.11 The world was transfixed by the sight of millions of Egyptians taking to the streets and occupying Cairo’s central Tahrir Square. In the age of satellite TV channels and online social media, the slogans, defiance, and public outpouring of years of pent-up anger and frustration spread like wildfire, terrifying every Arab leader. What people might have spoken about behind closed doors was now in the open. The genie was out of the bottle. The floodgates had burst. If it could happen in Masr, or Egypt, then it could happen anywhere.
Many Syrians—aching to overcome decades of lies and terror—started dreaming of their own Tahrir Square in Damascus, a convergence point for millions. Citizens believing in an alternative to rule by one clan and party that controlled what they thought and spoke and how they viewed the world. People fed up with a state where rights, opportunities, and even human dignity depended on proximity to power and one’s place in the system. Men and women who simply wanted to liberate themselves from the regime’s shackles and find their own identities and voices.
Bit by bit, Syrians began testing how far they could go in fulfilling this dream.
It started in January 2011, with small gatherings in Damascus to express solidarity with protesters in Egypt and Tunisia. They were quickly put down, and the few who dared come out were beaten, insulted, and detained by regime forces and shabiha, or thugs.12 A protest against one of the monopolies of Bashar’s cousins followed on February 3, but it was crushed before it could even begin.13
On February 5, an anonymous call for a “Day of Rage” to protest against the regime, corruption, and Syria’s perpetual state of emergency spread on Facebook but ultimately failed to bring people out into the streets.14 Rumor had it that the mukhabarat itself issued the invitation to test how receptive Syrians actually were to such a call to action.15 This seemed plausible to a citizenry nurtured on fearing the regime and force-fed its disinformation, conspiracy theories, and propaganda.
Then on February 17, 2011, an incredible scene played out in Al-Hariqa, Damascus’s old commercial center. After sons of a textile merchant were insulted and beaten by policemen,16 shopkeepers shuttered their stores and together with day laborers, many from impoverished rural areas, took to the streets chanting “Thieves, Thieves!” and “The Syrian people won’t be humiliated.”17 The mukhabarat reports submitted to Bashar were wrong; Syrians were stirring.
Days after the Hariqa incident, a painter in his mid-thirties called Khaled al-Khani was among a few dozen people, mostly artists, actors, and creative types, who tried to protest outside the Libyan embassy in Damascus. They wanted to express solidarity with Libyans after Libya’s dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, ordered loyalists to hunt down protesters, whom he called “germs,” “rats,” “teenagers on hallucinogenic pills,” and “Islamist extremists.”18 Much of eastern Libya had fallen to rebels, and protests were spreading to the capital, Tripoli, prompting Gaddafi’s crackdown. Militiamen brandishing machetes and machine guns began attacking protesters.19
In a rambling, defiant, and at times hysterical televised speech from his Tripoli compound, Gaddafi laid out in no uncertain terms what Arab leaders must do if they wished to overcome what he called a conspiracy by traitors and foreign enemies. Notwithstanding his cartoonish persona, Gaddafi’s words were a precise roadmap for any dictator determined to stay in power at any cost: spread lies to sow confusion and manipulate the narrative, kill to illustrate the cost of defiance, and stoke paranoia to drive a wedge between people and make them fight each other. Keep the conflict going even if it means destroying the country: either the leader stays or the country burns.
“I have my rifle and I will fight to the last drop of my blood and with me the Libyan people,” shouted Gaddafi, wearing traditional tribal robes and repeatedly raising a clenched fist and banging on the lectern in front of him.20
The following day, February 23, 2011, Khaled and a group of almost fifty friends and acquaintances, all of them captivated by the promise of the Arab Spring, converged at sundown on the Libyan embassy on Jala’a Street in the Abu Rummaneh neighborhood. Jala’a was a busy two-way street with embassies, banks, boutiques, and cafés on both sides and, as Bashar’s diehard loyalists would say, proof of the leader’s reformist and modernist vision. As the street ascended, Mount Qasioun came into focus. Over the years, slums had invaded the mountain’s base like a marauding army. Thousands of lights twinkled on its slopes that evening.
As Khaled and the others congregated near the embassy, they were approached by a security officer.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“We want to protest, like yesterday,” Khaled and others answered.
“Not allowed,” he said.
“Why? It was okay yesterday,” they persisted.
Indeed, the day before, the mukhabarat had allowed a small group including an actor whose mother was Libyan to hold a brief candlelight vigil outside the Libyan embassy, but they kept the gathering tightly hemmed in while plainclothes mukhabarat agents whipped out their phones to document all those present before ordering the protesters to disperse.21
“Yesterday the leadership gave its permission, today there’s no permission, you must leave,” declared the officer to Khaled and his friends.
“Well, call the leadership and see if they’ll let us protest today, too,” they pleaded.
As the back and forth continued, they spotted a group of armed men charging down from Rawda Square, where Jala’a ended as it rose toward Qasioun. This was, after all, the perimeter of Bashar’s residence and office, and it was swarming with security personnel. Khaled and his group began running away, scattering in different directions. They were not giving up, though. They regrouped on a side street to plan their next move when they were approached by the same security officer with whom they had had the earlier discussion.
“The leadership said you could gather in the garden, provided you do not disturb people,” announced the officer. This was a small garden square at the corner of Jala’a and another street, two blocks away from the Libyan embassy.
“The Libyan people have said it: ‘Freedom is our quest, dignity is our demand,’” Khaled and a few dozen others chanted as they huddled in the small park on a winter night holding up candles and sheets of paper on which they hurriedly scrawled slogans.
“With our soul, with our blood, we sacrifice ourselves for you, O Syria!” they cried, purposefully omitting the president’s name from the familiar chant.22
They recited lines from a poem by Tunisia’s Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi that became an anthem of the Arab uprisings that winter: “If, one day, the people wills to live, then fate must obey, darkness must dissipate and must the chain give way.”23
As the protest grew louder and more animated it spilled out on Jala’a Street.
“I was standing there with Qasioun in front of me, chanting for the first time in my life, ‘Hurriyeh, hurriyeh, hurriyeh’ [‘Freedom, freedom, freedom’],” recalls Khaled as his eyes well up. Khaled and his friends tried to move farther up Jala’a toward the Libyan embassy, but they were met by dozens of security force members in black fatigues wielding batons and shields. They looked like riot police. “They knew we were there to challenge them and the regime and that our chants were in reality directed at Bashar,” and not Gaddafi, said Khaled.
One of the black-clad men stepped forward. “If you do not turn back, I’ll set my shawaya dogs loose on you,” he said, referring to tribal folk from eastern Syria.24 Over the years, the term became a derogatory way to describe gruff persons of darker skin tone.
Within seconds the blows were coming from everywhere. Khaled and the others were struck with batons, shields, and fists. Those who fell to the ground were kicked and trampled on.
Khaled managed to get up and run away, but others were not so lucky.
“People passed us by and saw us being pummeled,” he recalled. “Nobody stopped to help.”
This was to be expected in Damascus. Besides deep fear from the regime, there was economic self-interest. The capital’s dominant bourgeois and merchant classes had benefited the most from rising living standards during the first decade of Bashar’s rule, and many did not want to see these gains endangered by protests and instability. On the face of it, Khaled, too, had little reason to protest. He was making a name for himself as an artist. He had exhibitions in Syria and abroad, and his work was acquired by the city’s rich and powerful. The president himself owned one of his paintings.
But Khaled had a deep well of anger from which to draw.
In 1982, when he was seven years old, Khaled’s home, his neighborhood, and much of his native city of Hama were leveled to the ground by Bashar’s father, Hafez. Manaf Tlass’s father, Mustafa, the defense minister at the time, signed off on the massacre that occurred, sending regime opponents to the gallows. Khaled’s father, Hikmat al-Khani, a well-respected ophthalmologist, was tortured to death by Hafez’s forces simply because he had treated the wounded during the regime’s assault on Hama.25 Dr. Khani was among the nearly 10,000 who perished, according to the lowest estimate of the death toll.26 Three of Khaled’s cousins were among the thousands who remained missing.
Hafez justified the massacre at Hama as retribution against “terrorists,” members of a militant Islamist insurgent group. His message to all Syrians, especially non-Islamists who had peacefully challenged his regime during the same period, was unequivocal: This is what will happen to you if you ever think of rebelling again. It worked. Syrians were terrorized into submission for three decades.
Khaled had grown up internalizing the rage and trauma from witnessing the massacre, unleashing it only in his art—paintings filled with deformed, faceless figures and masses subsumed to an ancient and mythical godlike leader. “We should have rebelled the moment Hafez died and power passed to Bashar but we were too afraid,” he said. “The Arab Spring was our best chance to try again.”
But not everyone was ready to take the plunge.
The older generation, remembering Hama and its aftermath, was more fearful of the consequences of rebellion than Syria’s youth. Although there were plenty of exceptions, members of minority groups like the Alawites, Christians, and Druze generally tended to see the current regime as their protector from the extremist tendencies they believed could emerge among the Sunni Muslim majority, which had long viewed the Assads and their Alawite sect as usurpers. After Hama, the regime enshrined the idea that Islamists were the agents of the nation’s “imperialist, Zionist, and reactionary” enemies. A Christian from the Hama countryside—born fifteen years after the massacre and fourteen years old at the Arab Spring’s start—grew up being told by his parents that the Hama massacre was necessary because it broke the Sunnis and supposedly made it safe for Christian women to venture into the city without being harassed for not wearing the veil.27
The biggest hurdle for those dreaming of change was transcending the socioeconomic, religious, and ethnic divisions that were exploited by the regime to protect itself while it pretended to be the defender of a secular and unified Syria.
There were of course those who truly loved Bashar and believed that Syria was on the right track at the start of his second decade in power, but the vast majority felt they had no choice but to accept the regime’s gradual and piecemeal reforms because the alternative in their minds was the war and chaos that engulfed their neighbor to the east, Iraq, after the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
For those like Khaled and many other Syrians who believed that change was long overdue and who could make the argument that the Arab Spring was a perfect opportunity, there was an even more basic issue to wrestle with that spring: How does a revolt even begin in a place like Syria, where the regime has for decades defined the national identity and imposed it on people? How do you rally Syrians around an alternative cause, message, and leader in a country where all expressions of opposition and dissent have been mercilessly crushed and where fear, lies, and mistrust have sustained the Assads’ rule?
Channeling the yearning for freedom among many disaffected and aggrieved segments of Syrian society into a movement with a vision for change and a set of well-articulated demands was what preoccupied human rights lawyer Mazen Darwish day and night in those early weeks of 2011 as he watched the euphoria of revolution spread around him. Overthrowing Bashar was certainly not one of these demands, at least in the beginning.
In late February, Mazen and a friend and colleague, Razan Zeitouneh, reached out to a Kurdish political leader and arranged to meet for lunch in central Damascus.28 They sat in a restaurant overlooking a giant bronze statue of Hafez al-Assad in a business suit, raising his hand over passersby like a deity offering a blessing.
“Lower your voice—he might hear us,” whispered Mazen in jest.
As plates of hummus and tabbouleh were served, Mazen and Razan laid out their plan to the Kurdish leader Abdul-Hakim Bachar.
“Why don’t we join you in the Nowruz celebrations and use it as an occasion to call for change and reform?” Mazen suggested.
Nowruz, the Kurdish new year and the official start of spring, would fall on March 21. As they had done in the past, Syria’s Kurds were probably going to defy a regime ban on their celebrations and huge crowds would gather to light bonfires, picnic, sing, and dance. But beyond the merriment and festivities, every year the occasion has real political significance for the region’s Kurds who are scattered across Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. It’s a chance for them to come together and assert their identity and affirm their long-standing quest for independence—or, at the very least, more autonomy and rights in the states they reside. Syria’s Kurds, subjected to decades of Arabization policies and frequently denied citizenship, were considered the most repressed in the region.
Mazen and Razan argued that the grievances of the Kurdish minority aligned with those of all Syrians. Since the ruling Baath Party took power in 1963 and established a state of emergency upheld ever since by the Assads, all Syrian people, regardless of religious sect or ethnicity, were subject to the mukhabarat’s power to detain, hold incommunicado, torture, and kill anyone deemed a threat to the regime. Perhaps the Kurds would want to join their advocacy for lifting severe restrictions on freedom of expression, for the release of thousands of prisoners of conscience, and for the legalization of political parties outside the Baath and its partners.
The Kurdish leader smiled as Mazen and Razan eloquently made the case for unified action, but he had an answer at the ready: “We bore the brunt in 2004 and now you want us to be on the forefront again. Find something other than Kurds to ignite your protests.”
In 2004, four years into Bashar’s rule, at least thirty-six people were killed and 160 wounded, mostly Kurds, when the regime violently quelled protests across northern Syria following deadly shootings by security forces at a soccer match. More than 2,000 Kurds were arrested.29 Tensions persisted and several deadly incidents with Kurdish victims followed, including the last Nowruz celebration in 2010, when at least one person was shot dead by security forces.30 The feeling among many Kurds was that the rest of Syria merely watched from the sidelines as they died.
But the rebuff by the Kurdish leader was not going to deter Mazen and his friends who have been advocating for human rights and freedom of expression in Syria for the past decade at great personal risk and against all odds. As for many, Mazen’s commitment to the cause was deeply personal; his father had been forced into hiding after opposing Hafez al-Assad’s coup in 1970, and his mother had been jailed for criticizing the regime. Mazen and other youthful activists believed this was their golden chance to achieve what had long eluded their parents, mentors and an entire generation of Assad regime opponents. Now, it seemed like the tide was beginning to turn all around them, and Syria would get swept up in the current soon enough. To Mazen, “it was not a matter of if but when in Syria.”
The mukhabarat, bracing for the same inevitability, began arresting some university students suspected of starting protests and summoning known political opponents and activists like Mazen for lengthy interrogations about their intentions.31
“We were looking for any pretext to take to the streets, even something like celebrating the national day of the Republic of the Congo,” said Mazen jokingly.
The first opening toward liberation for Mazen and his friends came on March 8, 2011, when, on the forty-eighth anniversary of the Baath’s takeover of power in Syria, Bashar issued a decree pardoning certain categories of prisoners. It excluded most political prisoners, some languishing in cells and dungeons for decades. Immediately word spread that thirteen political prisoners in Adra prison near Damascus had gone on a hunger strike to be included in the pardons.32
Mazen and his associates decided to release a statement expressing solidarity with these prisoners and announced their own protest on March 16 in front of the Ministry of the Interior to demand the release of all prisoners of conscience. They signed it with their real names and posted it on Facebook. “We wanted to move our activity from the clandestine and secretive to the open,” explained Mazen. “This is us and these are our real names and we are calling for a protest on a specific day and time regarding a Syrian matter—we the Syrian people.”33
On March 16, nearly 300 people showed up in Marjeh Square—once the site of public executions when Syria was ruled by the French and, before them, the Ottomans. The streets were lined with cheap hotels, office buildings, and shops selling everything from cell phones to baklava. Usually visitors from the provinces idled in the square while children chased pigeons. But they were absent that day as the crowd formed and security forces ringed the interior ministry building just off the square.
The moment protesters began to wave posters of the prisoners and banners calling for their release, hundreds of security force members and pro-Bashar irregulars in civilian clothes poured out from surrounding buildings.34 (They had been lying in wait in the stairwells all morning, Mazen later found out.) The regime enforcers charged toward the protesters, shouting with one voice: “With our soul, with our blood, we sacrifice ourselves for you, O Bashar!”35
Mazen and the other protesters tried to hold their ground and close ranks, chanting: “He who strikes his own people is a traitor!”
Within seconds, protesters were clubbed with batons, knocked to the ground, trampled on, and dragged on the pavement. Mazen watched in disbelief as Tayeb Tizini, a well-respected and elderly philosopher who was among the protesters, was hoisted up by two thugs and thrown against a lamppost again and again. Mazen and nearly two dozen other protesters were arrested and bundled into vans.
Two days later, Friday, March 18, Manaf Tlass strolled through Marjeh Square while on a morning walk, a near-daily routine. All seemed normal. There was more security than usual but otherwise nothing out of the ordinary.36 Manaf lingered in the square for a few moments, then looked at his watch: it was well past ten o’clock. He decided to head back home to shower and change.
Later that day, Manaf and his wife, Thala, drove out to their weekend house in the mountains west of Damascus close to the Lebanese border. It was a simple stone house nestled on the flank of a six-thousand-foot mountain between the resort towns of Bloudan and Serghaya. Cars could not reach the crest, so visitors had to park three-quarters of the way and hike up to the house.37 The Tlasses lived rather simply there: a family room, two bedrooms, and small kitchen powered by a private generator. Hand-woven Bedouin rugs covered the floor. The main attraction was the spectacular view from the outdoor terrace. Stretched out below were scenic valleys with farmhouses, streams, and apple orchards. One could see as far as the Lebanese city of Zahleh in the adjacent Beqaa Valley.
On this particular occasion, the Tlasses were hosting a lunch in honor of the Austrian manager of the Four Seasons hotel in Damascus, Martin Rhomberg, and his Mexican wife, Ana Luisa. It was intended as a farewell party for Rhomberg, who was being transferred elsewhere after three years in Damascus.38 The hotel had been a joint venture between the Four Seasons chain and the Syrian state, one that Bashar hoped would send a message that Damascus was now open for business under his dynamic and reform-minded leadership.
The guests started arriving at the Tlass weekend home, gathering on the terrace with their drinks. Given the warm, sunny weather, the Tlasses were planning a barbecue. Manaf, dressed in jeans and sporting a stylish army-green keffiyeh around his neck, held a glass of red wine in one hand and a Cuban cigar in the other as he chatted with his guests.
Talk before lunch drifted to the one question on everyone’s mind: How will the Arab Spring affect Syria?
“I was ready with the standard response and our talking points: I did not think we would be affected, because our young president was already carrying out reforms,” said Manaf.
His words proved to be false that same day.
Sixty miles south of Damascus in the city of Daraa, close to the Jordanian border, eighteen-year-old Sally Masalmeh was having breakfast at home with her parents and siblings. Since it was Friday, the beginning of the weekend, the whole family was gathered together to linger over plates of white cheese, olives, pickled eggplants, fried eggs, and hot bread—a typical Syrian breakfast.
As they moved to the living room to have tea after the meal, news from Al Jazeera, by then the Arab world’s most popular satellite news channel, streamed in on the TV. Millions across the Arab world followed the channel’s day-and-night live broadcasts of the cataclysmic events sweeping the region: Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and now potentially Syria.
“We are going to be next for sure,” said Sally with a mischievous smile.
She was a thin girl with dark, almond-shaped eyes and sharp eyebrows that stood out below her colorful headscarf.
“Be quiet, they will arrest us all if you keep saying that,” interjected her father. He was old enough to remember Hama.
Daraa was buzzing that day with talk of a possible protest planned after midday prayers by relatives of a group of teenage boys who had been arrested by security forces more than two weeks earlier for doing the unthinkable. Across school walls the boys had spray-painted: “Jayeek el dor, ya daktor”—“You are next, doctor,” referring to Bashar.39
“It’s going to be just like the other countries—twenty, thirty days maximum, and he’ll pack up his bags and leave,” Sally insisted. Bashar, she believed, would step down just like the presidents of Egypt and Tunisia.
“He’s no Mubarak or Ben Ali, he’ll kill all of you and he won’t leave—mark my words,” said her father as he got up to prepare to go to the mosque near the house, where he planned to pray. He wanted to avoid the central Omari mosque near where the protest might occur. Better to stay away from trouble.
After her father left, Sally helped her mother tidy up the house. Since the weather was nice, they were planning to go for a picnic when her father returned.
Suddenly, the sound of heavy gunfire filled Daraa.
As the sun started disappearing behind the mountains of Lebanon, some guests at the Tlass luncheon headed back to Damascus. It was getting chilly on the terrace. Manaf was tending to a few guests still lingering over dessert and coffee when his assistant pulled him aside with urgent news. There had been a protest in Daraa, he said, and it had turned violent and people had been killed.
Stunned, Manaf excused himself from the remaining guests and rushed to the base to try to piece together what had happened in Daraa. On Sunday morning he was still working to gather information when his cell phone rang. It was the president.40
“Hi, are you near a landline?” asked Bashar.
“Yes, I am at the base,” said Manaf.