There were hardly any young men left in the town of Masyaf and the surrounding villages hugging the mountains that descend toward the Mediterranean coast, the heartland of Bashar’s Alawite sect.
Most of the women wore black to mourn a husband, son, or other male relative killed fighting for Bashar. Before the war, a bread van that went around the villages in the morning used to play sweet and dreamy songs by the Lebanese diva Fairuz; now it announced the names of the dead men, or the martyrs as they were called, and blared sorrowful verses of the Quran while it made its deliveries.1
Beyond the regime’s propaganda and the Alawites’ facade of defiance and absolute loyalty, there was grief and anguish in almost every home and a feeling among many families that their loved ones were expendable fodder in the Assads’ war of survival.2
In the summer of 2014, many Alawites were enraged when senior officers and commanders flew out of an airbase near Raqqa, leaving behind hundreds of soldiers to face approaching Islamic State militants.3 They were captured, paraded in their underwear, and then executed. The lucky ones escaped in the desert and some made it home eventually, while others were lost forever.4
The scenario of officers flying out and leaving soldiers behind repeated itself when the Islamic State captured the ancient city of Palmyra in the spring of 2015.
It was as if the regime wanted the Islamic State to expand in order to scare the world, and so having a few thousand conscripts and militiamen killed in the process hardly mattered.
“Young men from poor families are dying for nothing!” said the son of a retired Alawite army officer about the legions of men from his sect who joined regime militias for money or because of scaremongering.5
The pitch from the regime businessmen turned militia leaders and warlords, like the Jaber brothers, was simple: We need to fight them in Aleppo, Damascus, and Homs—otherwise these savages will be at the doorsteps of our homes on the coast.6 These were the same takfiris (Sunni fanatics) that massacred Alawites in the 13th century and hunted us down in the 1970s and ’80s, continued the pitch.
It was not only the Islamic State menace coming from the desert in the east; by the spring of 2015 an Islamist coalition that included the Nusra Front was making significant advances in the provinces of Hama and Idlib in northwestern Syria on the edges of the Alawite homeland.
These battle-hardened fighters had more-sophisticated weapons and skills, and they were destroying the regime’s tanks and armored vehicles, and shooting down the occasional regime jet taking off from the Hama airbase.7 They were also vowing to march on Qurdaha, the Assads’ hometown.
So even if many average Alawites were fed up and angry with the Assads at that point, they had few other options than to keep fighting and sacrificing for the regime. Their fate was intertwined with that of Bashar, for better or worse.8
Murals and monuments for the “martyrs” were erected in nearly every town and village square. Rows of photographs of dead soldiers and militiamen in defiant postures and often brandishing their weapons were assembled like pagan offerings around large posters of Bashar and Hafez.
The Assads wove themselves into their sect’s occult religious beliefs. Inside the white-domed shrine of an Alawite miracle maker, tucked in an apple orchard in the mountains above the coastal city of Jableh, were large framed portraits of Bashar and Hafez next to the holy man’s tomb.9 Another frame had a collage of dozens of passport-size photos, all of them men killed fighting for the regime since 2011.
Still, there was a limit in the reservoir of Alawite men to fight for Bashar. Many families lost several sons and were sending the remaining ones abroad, especially to neighboring Lebanon. The parents’ thinking was that if they themselves died in Syria then at least one son would survive to preserve the family line.
Other minorities, like the Christians and Druze, went to greater extremes to protect their children from being drafted by Bashar. Even though many saw Bashar as the lesser of two evils, they still felt that what was going on was largely a fight between Bashar’s Alawite sect and the Sunni majority.
By the spring of 2015, more than 30,000 Druze men in southern Syria were wanted for military service. These men were either smuggled through the mountains to neighboring Lebanon, also home to a sizable Druze community, or hid in their homes under the protection of armed town elders ready to block any attempts by the regime to round up conscripts.10
Since the regime was in a state of war and needed all the men it could muster, the duration of the compulsory military service, which previously had been eighteen months, became indefinite in almost all cases. Bashar also called up reservists; all men up to the age of forty-two now could be drafted even if they had completed their military service. Those not complying were caught on the streets and at checkpoints.11
Syrians were not the only ones trying to escape the Assad family’s burner. In the southern Lebanon town of Bint Jbeil, controlled by the Hezbollah militia and christened its “resistance capital,” one father compelled his teenage son to move to Dearborn in the US state of Michigan, home to a sizable Lebanese Shiite community with dual citizenship, after the boy—who was not even eighteen—wanted to go to Syria to fight on the side of the Assad regime.12 The son wished to prevent the desecration of Zeinab’s shrine, the justification put forward by the pro-Bashar camp.
Like Bashar’s militia leaders, Hezbollah recruiters touted the idea that Shiite men had to take the fight to the takfiris (all Syrian rebels were labeled Sunni fanatics) and not wait for them to come to their villages and homes in Lebanon.
Farther north from Bint Jbeil in a village above the coastal city of Tyre, Bassam Saleh mourned his twenty-seven-year-old son Raed, a Hezbollah fighter presumed dead in the Aleppo countryside in February 2015 though his body was never found.
“My son and many other resistance fighters had noble intentions, but they were exploited for a specific agenda,” he said. “Today Hezbollah is defending Iran’s agenda, it’s very clear—it serves Iran and benefits from Iran.”13 By then Hezbollah was sending teenagers in its youth movement, the Mahdi Scouts, to fight for Bashar. One of them who had worked in Raed’s car repair shop was also killed in 2015 in the Damascus suburbs.14
As for Iraqi Shiites, the majority among the militiamen sent by Iran to Syria, by 2015 many were opting to stay on their home turf to fight an increasingly barbaric and vicious Islamic State or flee the region altogether.
In March 2015, Bashar invited half a dozen Russian print and television reporters to the palace for an interview.
“Russian presence in different parts of the world including the Eastern Mediterranean and Syrian port of Tartous,” pontificated Bashar, “is extremely important to create a balance that the world lost after the breakup of the Soviet Union more than twenty years ago. We most certainly welcome any expansion of the Russian presence in the Eastern Mediterranean, specifically on Syrian shores.”15
Two months before Bashar spoke, one of the most senior advisers to Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, had held extensive talks with Putin and Russian officials.16
Later, in the summer, Putin conducted more talks with Khamenei’s adviser as well as Qasem Soleimani, the head of the elite Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who was leading Iran’s campaign in Syria.17
In tandem, Bashar announced in a speech at the palace in Damascus that he did not have enough men to defend and hold all areas in Syria and as such had to prioritize which ones were more strategic and vital than others.18
Two months later, on September 30, 2015, Putin gathered members of his government at his countryside house outside Moscow to announce that he had received an official request from Bashar to intervene militarily in Syria to fight terrorism.19
Russia’s strikes over the following week, which included a spectacular display of cruise missiles fired from warships in the Caspian Sea, did not target the Nusra Front nor the Islamic State but instead the rebel groups that were being backed by the United States and its allies.20
Around the same time, Russia began establishing a permanent airbase next to the Bassel al-Assad International Airport in the Assads’ home province of Latakia,21 and Russian jets tag-teamed with Bashar’s Russian-supplied jets to bomb hospitals, schools, and all the infrastructure that sustained civilians in opposition-held areas across Syria.
“It was absolutely terrifying. Sometimes you had five or six jets bombing us at the same time,” said Ali Othman, an army defector, who was fighting with a US-backed rebel faction and living with his family in the mountains north of Latakia city along the Turkish border.22 His baby girl, Nahla, had been born in a Médecins Sans Frontières–supported maternity hospital the day before it was bombed by the Russians.23 The family fled to Turkey. Putin’s direct entry into the war also coincided with a spike in the use of banned weapons like cluster bombs.24
Syria became a field for Putin to showcase and test Russia’s arms systems and latest-model fighter jets while boosting his standing and prestige, and challenging America in the Middle East.
“You know, in Syria we give the name Abu Ali to the tough and brave man,” Bashar’s minister of information told Russia Today.25 Vladimir Putin was now “Abu Ali Putin” for diehard Bashar loyalists. He was elevated to the pantheon of their greats: Bashar, Bassel, Hafez, and Maher al-Assad; Hassan Nasrallah and Ali Khamenei.
It was not only Bashar and his supporters who were enamored of Putin; the monarchs and autocrats of the Middle East, including traditional US allies and some of those who until recently had been calling for Bashar’s ouster, trekked to Moscow one by one in the summer and fall of 2015 to meet the new sheriff in town. From the start they had never liked the idea of the Arab masses rising up to demand freedom, and Putin was someone who truly understood them.
“I want to express our tremendous gratitude to the Russian leadership and people for the help they are providing Syria,” gushed Bashar as he met with Putin at the Kremlin in October 2015 during his only known trip outside Syria since the December 2010 Paris trip, a few months before the start of protests.26
Bashar grinned nervously.27 His tics, which were usually under control when he delivered his scripted speeches and gave his Western media interviews in Damascus, were slightly noticeable once more. He could barely contain himself as he walked a little behind a swaggering Putin into one of the Kremlin’s chambers for a working dinner with the Russian leader and his ministers.28
As Russia decimated opposition enclaves in Syria, Obama and his secretary of state, Kerry, issued protests and condemnations, but otherwise America did little to stop the Russians, Bashar, and the Iranians.
“September 2015 was a huge turning point—we knew we were sold out to the Russians by the Americans,” said a defected Syrian army officer working with the US at the time.29 “It was one of two things: either the Americans gave the Russians the green light to strike whomever they wanted, or the Americans were too afraid to get into any confrontation with the Russians.”
Putin went out of his way to suggest that he and Obama were in synch on Syria despite outward differences. He launched his bombing campaign as he met with Obama at the United Nations in New York,30 his generals coordinated with their American counterparts to make sure that Russian jets did not bump into American ones over Syrian skies, and his foreign minister Lavrov huddled with Kerry to work on convening talks between Bashar’s regime and the opposition in Geneva;31 Russians spoke of the Kerry–Lavrov “bromance.”32
As Syrians were slaughtered in ever greater numbers after the Russian intervention or began to flee the country in droves, Kerry spoke of a negotiated political settlement with the regime.
Around that time, Obama notched what would be touted as one of his presidency’s main achievements: a nuclear deal with Bashar’s patron Iran.33
By then Obama had, for all intents and purposes, washed his hands of the moderate Syrian rebels whom he called “farmers, dentists, and folks” who did not stand a chance against the ruthlessness of Bashar and the barbarity of the Islamist extremists.34
Obama, however, still wanted these same Syrians to stop fighting Bashar and turn their guns on the Islamic State instead. To that end, Obama authorized the Pentagon to fly rebels to the US airbase in Qatar for weeks of training and vetting which included an inspection of their beard length and a quiz on the nature of their Islamic faith.35 “Those that join our program are forbidden from fighting the regime,” a US general told one Syrian rebel commander who was being interviewed to join the Pentagon-led effort.36
Obama seemed to have made a simple cost–benefit analysis: Syria was of little strategic import to the US compared with oil-rich Iraq, and there was more to gain by collaborating with Iran and Russia on fighting the Islamic State and reaching an accord on Iran’s nuclear program than by confronting them in Syria over their protégé, Bashar.
Moreover, fear that the mayhem of Iraq and Syria was spilling over to the West trumped all other concerns, especially after twenty-two people were killed in Paris in January 2015 in an attack on an editorial meeting at the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and a hostage-taking rampage at a kosher food market.
The French-born assailants said that they did it for Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and for the Islamic State. One of them had previously been jailed after he was arrested trying to catch a flight to Damascus in 2005.37 He wanted to join the foreign jihadists whom Bashar’s mukhabarat were assisting at the time to cross over to Iraq to fight the “infidel” Americans and their allies.
In Paris, Manaf Tlass saw the Russian intervention, nine months after the Charlie Hebdo attack, as the best chance to save Syria, which he likened to a maiden being raped by world powers. More important, he saw it as his ticket to return to Syria as the savior, given the sense of betrayal he felt toward the West; the way he saw it, they pushed him to break with Bashar and then hardly gave him a chance to lead.
“Russia is a great power. It has history in Syria. It helped build the Syrian army before it was taken over by the Assad family. I hope you can help us bring back this army,” Manaf told Russia’s deputy foreign minister Mikhail Bogdanov during a meeting at the Russian embassy in Paris days after Putin entered the war in Syria in the fall of 2015.38
“Our priorities are the military institution, the Syrian state, and keeping Syria unified,” the bespectacled and Arabic-speaking Bogdanov assured Manaf.39 “We want to bring back honorable patriots like you to the army. We are not attached to Bashar al-Assad.”
Manaf told Bogdanov that he was secretly in touch with army officers still inside Syria, including members of Bashar’s Alawite sect, and that they were all enthusiastic about Russia’s involvement. They believed that Russia would push back Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah, who had practically swallowed the Syrian state as the price for saving Bashar, explained Manaf.
At that moment, the idea began germinating in Manaf’s head that the Americans and Russians would get together to reconstitute the army by combining those supposedly still-honorable and patriotic officers and soldiers on Bashar’s side (those without blood on their hands) with the moderate rebels and defectors.
This new army would fight the Islamic State and then turn its attention to extremists on all sides, both anti-and pro-Bashar. Iran and its militias would be told to leave Syria. As part of a political settlement, a new military council—headed by Manaf—would rule Syria on an interim basis and create the right conditions in which to draft a new constitution and hold elections.
If Russia and the United States hammer out a deal, then Bashar has no choice but to accept his eventual exit, Manaf told those he saw after his meeting at the Russian embassy.
Manaf dismissed as a sideshow the talks between the regime and the opposition that Kerry and Lavrov were so keen on convening in Geneva as soon as possible. The real plan was the military council, he confided to the interlocutors with whom he often met at the Au Vieux Colombier café, across from his apartment near Saint-Sulpice church.40
As Manaf plotted his return to Syria, hundreds of thousands of Syrians were plotting their exit at any cost after Putin’s dramatic moves.
Even Sally Masalmeh, the girl from the southern city of Daraa who was eighteen when she defied family and tradition to seize a role in the revolution against the Assad regime, was by the fall of 2015 ready to give up, at least for now. What’s to be done if the two superpowers, America and Russia, want Bashar to stay, Sally and others like her wondered.
After she and her parents and most of her siblings had fled to neighboring Jordan in 2013, Sally returned at the start of 2014 to what was known by then as the liberated zone of Daraa province, which included half of Daraa city, most of the countryside to the east and west, and part of the border area. The idea was that civilians like Sally could contribute to running the day-to-day affairs of this zone while the fighters, including two of her brothers, would free the rest of the province from the regime.
“You’re out of your mind. What do you think—you’re going to liberate Syria?” demanded her family and friends in Jordan when she told them she was returning to Daraa.41
She was the only woman in a bus of some thirty male fighters that dropped them at the Jordan–Syria border. By then the Jordanians were only allowing fighters back and forth as they continued to host a command center dominated by American, Emirati, and Saudi operatives that supported the Syrian rebels affiliated to what became known as the Southern Front. Sally managed to secure an exception through a rebel commander.
At the border they climbed up an earth berm, navigated their way through a trench, and climbed back up another mound to get to the Syrian side. In normal times, the journey from the border to Daraa city took fifteen minutes. Now it was a one-hour drive through fields and back roads, with the car’s headlights turned off to avoid detection by the regime’s planes.
Sally barely recognized her city, which was plunged in near-total darkness; many homes had been demolished or reduced to bare-bone structures by the regime’s relentless bombing. Even the beloved Omari mosque, which had become a rallying point for protesters in 2011, was gone, its minaret destroyed and much of the remaining edifice heavily damaged.42 Daraa was now a divided city, with the regime controlling the northern half and rebels the rest.
Sally’s neighborhood and family home with its rosebushes and lemon trees were part of the front line now and off-limits.
Sally stayed with her brother Shaker and his wife at an absent relative’s house in the liberated section. Her youngest brother, Fadi, was a fighter in one of the city’s main rebel groups headed by a defected army officer. Fadi was barely twenty but seemed much older than his age, Sally thought. She tried to convince him to quit fighting and contribute in other ways to the cause, which they still called the revolution. They argued and shouted at each other, but he was not going to change his mind.
Fadi had watched his best friend die from a sniper bullet at the end of 2012. In the liberated zone, makeshift screens were erected across most of the streets fronting the regime-controlled part in order to block the view of snipers there. It was a precarious existence.
Every few days, the regime’s Russian-made jets raided the rebel zone. Mechanisms were developed to warn people to take cover, although these proved futile as barrel bombs were dropped from helicopters directly onto residential buildings. There was no particular reason for using them except to kill civilians and remind people of the high cost of living outside Bashar’s control. The macabre scene repeated itself almost daily: bodies pulled from underneath the wreckage and the lucky survivors emerging dazed, bloodied, and completely covered in dust.43
Still, the liberated zone had its own local government council, a military council that brought together all rebel factions, and civil defense and relief and medical aid committees among other structures. During the time that Sally had spent in Jordan in 2013, she went to Turkey for training seminars on institution building and management sponsored by international donors. She now wanted to teach others in Daraa how to prepare budgets and financial reports, increasing accountability and transparency and streamlining operations to boost efficiency.
She barely slept three to four hours a night, so busy was she working on documentation of the regime’s brutality, speaking to the media, organizing activities for children traumatized by war, and helping distribute aid across the liberated zone.
Sally felt empowered to affect change, to make a difference, to challenge and take initiative—values not only discouraged throughout more than four decades of Assad family rule but also punishable by prison or worse.
What the police state nurtured in people was fear, paranoia, mistrust, and the acceptance of corruption and bribery as an inescapable fact of life. The idea was that the system was rotten and the only way to get ahead was to cheat and lie. It was hard to break free from this legacy in one, two, or even ten years. Maybe it was going to take an entire generation.
For sure there were many, especially young people like Sally, who truly believed they were in the midst of a revolution against the old system and all its ills, and who were passionate, sincere, and honest about everything they did. Yet it was also hard for people not to revert to what they had been taught all their lives.
The reality that Sally began to confront in 2014 was bleak. Many rebel commanders were now greedy warlords competing for local control as well as the weapons and funds they received from their foreign backers, whose whims only escalated with each passing day. A Southern Front commander was told by the United Arab Emirates that it would not support him unless he moved his wife and children to the UAE from Qatar, his previous benefactor.44
Rebel leaders sought to dominate the local government body, which was supposed to be an independent civilian structure. They demanded their percentage from the humanitarian and medical aid coming through the border.45 Nothing was for free. They had no qualms sacrificing the common good to settle their own scores. These divisions often created the perfect opportunities for Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front and other extremists to assert themselves.
One time, Sally was with her brother Shaker visiting an aid center outside Daraa city when they were stopped at a Nusra checkpoint. The gunmen, mostly Daraa natives, were all masked.46 “Why are you dressed indecently?” one of them said to Sally while looking away.
She wore a hijab, long sleeves, and jeans but not the black head-to-toe covering.
“I am free to dress any way I want,” she told him defiantly. “Go liberate us from Bashar al-Assad, stop the bombardment, and provide people with a decent life instead of picking on me.”
The gunman asked Shaker to get out of the car and took him aside. He lectured him on how he should be ashamed for allowing his sister to appear like that in public. Shaker promised she would cover up. It was a lie to defuse the situation.
November 2014 brought unbearable loss. Sally’s youngest brother, Fadi, was killed when he rushed in with other fighters from Daraa city to help fellow rebels in a nearby town who had come under attack by regime forces.
A bullet hit him in the back and he probably bled to death.47 It took a while for his comrades to retrieve his body from the battlefield. They brought him to Sally so she could say goodbye.
They lay him down on the floor. He looked serene and even smiling. She touched his face. It was cold.
“He’s still a baby, no!” she shouted, and then sobbed uncontrollably.
Sally went back to work a week a later, but nothing was ever the same.
There was some joy, though, in the spring of 2015. Malek al-Jawabra, a young man and neighbor who had a crush on her and whom she had sort of been dating for six months already, proposed to her. He was two years older than her and had been studying law before the war. He participated in the first protests in Daraa but never bore arms. He was now volunteering to teach English and math to children in the liberated zone.
The engagement ceremony was truncated, discreet. Malek’s parents were able to sneak over from the regime side, but Sally’s parents could not come from Jordan. Sally wore a red dress and Malek a suit. They exchanged rings, and sweets were served to the few guests in attendance.
Later in 2015, just before Putin’s direct military intervention in Syria, rebels came under tremendous pressure from civilians in Daraa city to launch an operation to drive the regime out from the rest of the city.48 People were sick of the status quo, of being culled bit by bit by the regime’s barrel bombs while rebel commanders were consumed by their internal struggles and quest to enrich themselves.
Rebels drew up the plans and got them approved by their backers at the operations center in Jordan. They even had a name for their campaign: Southern Storm. Many civilians left the city, moving to farms on the outskirts while the fighting was underway. They were willing to endure anything for the chance to rid their city from the killer regime once and for all.
Rebels had driven the regime out of the official border post with Jordan and the historic town of Bosra, and it seemed they could do the same in Daraa.
It took months for the battle to even begin and there were several false starts, too, as rebel commanders squabbled over which faction was going to control the city after its full liberation. There were also high tensions over the participation of Islamist groups. The rebels could exclude the Nusra Front, as the Americans were demanding, but not another Islamist group whose members were city natives.49 Some rebel commanders were also diverting ammunition and funds they were receiving from their backers away from the battle.
The operation finally got underway in the summer of 2015, but the rebels were decimated by the fierce regime response, which they had grossly underestimated. Iranian and Hezbollah commanders were in charge of the counteroffensive, which operated from the Army’s Ninth Division base in As Sanamayn, north of Daraa city.50
Making matters worse was a decision by one of the rebel commanders, a carpenter turned warlord, to open a new front west of the city on the border of Suwayda, the Druze-dominated province. He was able to capture a regime base and then he besieged an airbase, but the regime responded by mobilizing Druze militiamen, raising the specter of a war between the Druze and Sunni Muslims from Daraa.
The whole operation was halted in July after close to 800 people were killed on the rebel side.51 The regime pressed on with its barrel-bomb campaign more savagely than before. One of Sally’s closest colleagues, a twenty-nine-year-old activist and citizen journalist called Tareq Khodr, was cut to pieces by a barrel bomb in mid-August.52 More friends and colleagues were killed the same way in an attack the following day, August 16, 2015, on a food market in the city’s liberated zone.
Sally and Malek had planned their exit from Daraa the same day. They had decided to join the stream of refugees heading to Europe that summer, Germany specifically. Sally’s eldest brother, Mohammad, was there already with his family, and it looked like the Germans were going to take in all Syrian asylum seekers.
Tears of goodbye were mixed with those of mourning for their dead friends.
Jordan was hardly allowing anyone through from Syria, not even through the informal border crossings. So Sally and Malek and others fleeing Daraa that summer had to travel for more than 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) through the desert—much of it Islamic State territory—to reach the Turkish border in the north.
Their smugglers collaborated with and bribed both regime mukhabarat officers and Islamic State militants to allow people through.53 The regime and the Islamic State were not only sharing the profits from people trafficking in this desolate and barren expanse of territory along the Iraqi border; also, as Sally and Malek saw, dozens of fuel tankers were crossing from the Islamic State side to the regime side.
The Islamic State also seemed happy to do the mukhabarat’s dirty work.54 Sally and Malek were interned with hundreds of others at an Islamic State camp in Al-Mayadin in Deir Ezzour province, where they were interrogated for days to determine whether they were protest leaders, army defectors, or members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA)—all were the opponents that bothered Bashar the most.
It was like being in one of the regime’s mukhabarat branches, the exact same terror. In fact the Islamic State had created its own secret police modeled after that of the Baathist regimes of Iraq and Syria.55
Four men in Malek’s group were taken away and executed after they were charged with having been FSA members.56 It was Malek and Sally’s most harrowing experience in their two-week ordeal across Syria. Malek was so traumatized that he barely spoke during the journey from Deir Ezzour to Aleppo after they were let go by the Islamic State. From there they were smuggled into Turkey.
The day they arrived, everyone was talking about Aylan al-Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy whose body washed up on a beach in southwestern Turkey after the rubber boat he was in with his family capsized while they were trying to reach the Greek island of Kos. His mother and brother died, too. Only the father survived.57 Close to 4,000 people perished in the Mediterranean that year as they tried to escape to Europe from conflict zones in Africa and the Middle East.58 Many were Syrians.
Sally cried all night, thinking she had made a mistake and certain that death awaited her and Malek. They stayed with a friend in Istanbul for three weeks, debating what to do next. Then they decided to take a chance and made their way to Turkey’s western coast. Three times their raft was turned back by the Turkish coast guard as they tried to reach the Greek island of Lesbos from Assos in Turkey.59 They succeeded on the fourth try from the Turkish city of Izmir.
Because of the deluge of people arriving at its shores, Greece stopped enforcing the European Union regulation that mandated the processing of asylum seekers at their first port of entry. Sally and Malek traveled to Athens and then onward to Macedonia and Serbia.60
The problem was Hungary, which was not letting people through and wanted to turn them back to where they came from per the EU regulation. Europe was split that summer between countries like Hungary that wanted to build walls and fences to keep refugees and migrants out, and countries like Germany that wanted to have quotas for EU member states to take them in.61
Hungary’s ultranationalist prime minister Viktor Orban said that the mostly Muslim refugees were anathema to a European identity “rooted in Christianity.”62
Sally, Malek, and their companions, who included a friend’s brother and his family and two resourceful young men from Aleppo they had met along the way, maneuvered through the chaos and desperation at the Keleti train station in Budapest, where thousands of refugees had been converging.63 They managed to get to the Austrian border. It was raining when they reached Vienna, where they hugged each other and cried. From there they took a train to Munich. German police waited on the platform for the new arrivals.64
As for Mazen Darwish, the human rights lawyer and free speech advocate who had dreamed of toppling the regime with peaceful protests, he too fled Syria a few weeks later in the fall of 2015 as Putin doubled down on saving Bashar and strangling the Arab Spring.
After being held incommunicado and tortured almost to death for more than eight months in the mukhabarat’s prisons and dungeons, Mazen had to sign a charge sheet accusing him of “promoting terrorist acts.”65
One of the more absurd allegations against Mazen was that he had traveled to Washington in 2009 and met with John Kerry, when he was still senator, to conspire against Syria. Mazen was banned from leaving Syria, but he and four other activists did meet with Kerry in Damascus for about half an hour, a day after the US official’s dinner with Bashar in early 2009 and with the regime’s full knowledge.
Mazen was told he would have to await his trial at either Adra or Saydnaya prisons near Damascus; the latter was a certain death sentence, where a military tribunal routinely ordered summary executions for most of the protesters and political prisoners sent there.
“Congratulations!” erupted Mazen’s inmates and hugged him when they found out he was being sent to Adra.
Activists called Adra the “Four Seasons” of Bashar’s prisons; with cash and bribes to guards, prisoners could get decent food delivered from restaurants, Internet access, liquor, and whatever else their hearts desired as well as regular visits.66
From behind a barred window, Mazen saw his mother and his wife, Yara, who along with other women in Mazen’s group had been released four months after their arrest at the office in February 2012. Mazen had not seen his wife or mother for more than a year. They barely recognized him. He looked pale and had lost nearly half of his body weight.
There were tears and laughter but also grim news. Nearly two dozen of Mazen’s closest friends and colleagues had been either tortured to death by the regime or were missing in the maw of Bashar’s detention system. Yara worked tirelessly to get Mazen out, taking up his case with UN officials, ambassadors, and anyone with possible influence.
Six months into his stay at the Adra prison, Mazen was formally accused of “having too much popularity among other prisoners, who treat him with respect and deference and even call him ustaz” (meaning “teacher” or “learned one” in Arabic), so he was kept in near isolation.67
At the end of 2014 they transferred him to Hama prison, which had a reputation of being under the sway of Islamists. He feared that maybe they wanted to get him killed in prison and then blame it on extremists, as happened with his colleague Nizar Rastanawi in Saydnaya prison in 2008.
Mazen was assigned to what was called the terrorism wing, which had about 800 people.68 He was pleasantly surprised, though. Many of the Hama-area protest organizers and peaceful activists he had collaborated with at the start of the uprising were being held there, too. One of them was the man the prisoners nominated as their chief. There were only a handful of prisoners deemed extremist or militant—since Bashar had intentionally freed most of them at the start of the uprising in 2011.
Mazen was given a hero’s welcome: they carried him on their shoulders and started singing and clapping, a prison version of a Damascene traditional ceremonial sword dance called the “Arada.”
Then came the ordeal of being taken every few weeks to Damascus to make appearances in front of a judge at the counterterrorism court—but only to have his trial postponed each time.
Two days before each trial date, he was shackled and taken to Homs prison and from there to a special transit section at Adra and then to Damascus. It was the same sequence but in reverse for the return trip to Hama.
Bashar issued a blanket pardon in 2014 for certain categories of prisoners and technically Mazen was covered. He still had to go through the formality of a trial, though, so to prevent him from being released, the mukhabarat instructed the judges to keep postponing his trial indefinitely.
At the fifteenth postponement, in May 2015, Mazen cracked in court.
There was a fourteen-year-old boy who was also being held in Hama on terrorism charges and had come to court with Mazen that day to make an appearance in his own case. They were all standing up. Mazen put his hands on the boy’s shoulders and moved with him a bit closer to the judge’s bench.
“Look at this terrorist!” he shouted. “Do you not think that Bin Laden, Zarqawi, and Baghdadi would laugh at you if you told them he was a terrorist? What can I do if you are a regime that’s terrorized by a pen? Just as it’s clear that I am not a terrorist, it’s also clear that you are not a judge and do not have a say over anything.”69
There was total silence in the courtroom for a while. Then Mazen turned to the security officers behind him and said, “Tell your bosses to send my sentence to the judge and let’s get it over with!”
He was hauled along with two of his colleagues to Branch 285 of the mukhabarat’s General Intelligence Directorate in central Damascus. Bashar’s trusted mukhabarat chief, Ali Mamlouk, had an office in the same building.70
Mazen and the others were all stripped naked and tortured while they hung from the ceiling or were made to put their head, neck, and legs into a car tire. His torturers made them drink their own urine, and during the first few days they did not let them fall asleep.71 Every few minutes they came in and poured buckets of freezing water over them. This went on for forty-five days.
While he was at Branch 285, Mazen was awarded the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize.72 The previous year Salman Rushdie had shared his PEN Pinter prize with Mazen.73 The UN Human Rights Council Working Group on Arbitrary Detention had also issued a detailed report about the unlawful imprisonment of Mazen and two of his colleagues.74
Later in 2015, Bashar pardoned about two hundred prisoners, including Mazen—all peaceful protesters brutally tortured and branded as “terrorists.” Like his father in the 1990s, Bashar was being magnanimous for the holiday of Eid al-Fitr, state media told Syrians.75
After another stint at Hama prison and then another short stay at Branch 285, Mazen was freed on August 10, 2015, but he was barred from leaving the country and ordered to appear in court yet again.76
The day he was freed and while he was still in his prison clothes—shorts, a torn T-shirt, and flip-flops—the minister of justice asked to see him.
Mazen looked and felt like a shipwreck survivor, who just made it to shore.
Najm al-Ahmad was a lawyer like him and they knew one another, but obviously they had followed starkly different paths. A haggard-looking Mazen was taken to Al-Ahmad’s office, which was at the historic Palace of Justice near the old souks. The counterterrorism court was in the same building.
An elderly gentleman in an expensive suit was sitting on a leather chair in Al-Ahmad’s large, wood-paneled office at that moment. He was from the presidential palace.77
“Where have you been?” said Al-Ahmad, sounding genuinely surprised. “I signed your release more than a month ago.”
“I was running a quick errand at Branch 285,” said Mazen sarcastically.
The minister and the palace gentleman grew visibly tense. Someone came in with a tray of teacups.
“You know your arrest was a mistake—you’re one of our honorable patriots whom we’re all proud of. The whole thing was a mistake and it evolved in a bad way,” said Al-Ahmad in a somewhat sincere and even compassionate tone. “But now the homeland is above all else and we must work hand in hand because the knife is over all of our necks. Daesh [ISIS] wants to slaughter us all. You’re Alawite, they’re going to slaughter you first. Even before me. Even if you are opposition, we must all work together now.”
“Doctor Najm please, you see my condition,” beseeched Mazen, “let’s have this conversation another day.”
“Let me order you another tea,” persisted Al-Ahmad. “You know something? All these years you were in prison nobody asked about you—all your contacts with international organizations and human rights groups but none of them asked about you or even said a word about you.
“Only two people asked about you. Your brother, and he does not really count because he’s your next of kin. So technically only one person was asking about you the whole time—his excellency President Bashar al-Assad. Believe me, Mazen, no month passed without him calling me directly to inquire about you and your case and trial.”
On the wall behind the minister and above his chair and head was a framed portrait of Bashar in a suit, looking contemplative.
There was a long silence in the room.
“Your excellency,” replied Mazen and then paused, trying his best to tame the rage he felt at that moment, “so you mean to tell me that the president and the minister of justice were talking about my case every month, really? I thought all along that you were the ones detaining me and trying me for terrorism… but it turned out I was totally mistaken and I had been kidnapped by Daesh, and the Syrian state was worried about me and was doing everything to free me.”
The meeting ended, and shortly after his release Mazen started getting visits from one of Maher al-Assad’s aides as well as a businessman close to Mamlouk, the mukhabarat chief. It was the same message relayed by the minister: “We must unite against Daesh and we must work together to save the homeland. You have been talking about transitional justice and reconciliation since 2005. Now we have a reconciliation ministry. Come work with us.”78
Maher then sent word to Mazen that he wanted to meet him. Mazen managed to postpone it once but then the pressure became intense.
Mazen and his wife, Yara, decided to flee Syria. He had no passport because the regime refused to issue him one, plus he was banned from travel. They were able to raise $10,000 and used it to bribe a senior regime officer at one of the border posts with Lebanon.79 The German embassy in Beirut issued him a special travel document and a visa. They flew to Berlin.