When the sun shall be folded up; and when the stars shall fall; and when the mountains shall be made to pass away … and when the seas shall boil; and when the souls shall be joined again to their bodies … and when the books shall be laid open; and when the heavens shall be removed; and when hell shall burn fiercely; and when paradise shall be brought near: every soul shall know what it hath wrought.
Holy Qu’ran
The rain was getting heavier as we arrived in Metula, the northernmost town in Israel, which by now was shrouded in thick mist, so that I could barely see more than a hundred yards. Shani parked the car on the main street and suggested we stop for breakfast in a little café.
‘I know a guy here who you should speak to,’ she said, as we dashed through the pouring torrent, and jumped over the puddles that were filling the gutter overflow.
‘It’s always like this in January. I bet it reminds you of home,’ she said, smiling, as a friendly restaurateur opened the door and welcomed us to sit by the fire.
Professor ‘E’ was already waiting for us, huddled in the corner of the bar. We hung our drenched coats by the fireplace and Shani greeted her old friend.
‘Shalom.’ He shook my hand with a vice-like grip. ‘Sit down.’ I did as I was told. I was sodden, cold and feeling slightly downtrodden at the prospect of having to abandon the expedition without reaching Lebanon.
‘The border is closed,’ said the professor, a balding man with a scruffy moustache. He looked every inch the academic, but his eyes betrayed a knowing look and a life of intrigue.
‘It’s impossible to go to Lebanon from here. There are Druze families who have been torn apart for almost seventy years and haven’t been able to see their relatives. We can only peer over the barbed wire into the no-man’s-land.’ He nodded out of the window, which was streaming with the heavy rain. On the other side of the road, beyond the wire fence, I could make out a blurry forest that disappeared in the fog.
‘That’s the enemy. On the far side of that wasteland is Hezbollah territory. You simply can’t go there. There are minefields and unexploded bombs from half a century of war and they still fire rockets at us.’
I pulled out my phone and showed the professor a map.
‘What about Syria? Is there a way to cross over the Golan Heights?’
He stared me in the eye and laughed.
‘You’re a bold young man.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘You want to go to Syria?’
‘Well, I want to go to Lebanon, but if I can’t cross here, then the closest way is over the Golan Heights to Damascus.’
‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘but the Golan has been the front line since 1967 and is also closed.’
I told him I knew that, but I’d also heard rumours that some people had been able to cross in recent years, taking advantage of the chaos in Syria.
‘Who told you that?’ He suddenly looked serious.
I shrugged, pretending to know more than I did.
‘Are you military?’ he asked.
‘I used to be,’ I said. ‘British Army. Parachute Regiment.’ I knew that in some circumstances, a bit of a nod to my armed forces background could sometimes come in handy.
He leaned closer.
‘Let me tell you something,’ he whispered. ‘ISIS are just across that border. If they catch you, they will kill you in the most awful way.’
I looked at the map. I’d often wondered how ISIS had managed to keep a stronghold buffered up against Israel for so long, when most of their enclaves had already been destroyed by Assad’s army and the Russians. I could understand how they’d still held the land in the east, where they had free access to roam across the desert to Iraq, and could easily hide in the vast wastelands. But to be able to hold out here, while surrounded by Israel and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militias that dominated southern Syria, simply didn’t make sense. I told Professor E as much.
He glanced over his shoulder and then back at me.
‘It’s important you know this. And it’s off the record by the way, but I’m not just a professor at the university. I also work for a certain government agency, if you know what I mean?’
‘Mossad?’ I asked.
‘Shhhh,’ Shani whispered. Clearly, she already knew.
‘Yes. And the reason I’m telling you that is because I know what is happening over there. We are supporting them.’
‘Them?’ I asked.
‘Daesh,’ he whispered. ‘We, the Israelis, are giving them medical support, vehicles, transport and anything else they need. If they get injured, we even bring them over to our hospitals and treat them.’
‘Why?’ I asked, shocked.
He smiled. ‘Because we’d rather have those savages on our borders than Hezbollah or Assad’s lot. They give us a convenient buffer, so that Iran can’t get so close. You might think it’s unsavoury, but it suits us, for now at least.’
I shook my head in disbelief. I thought all the rumours were conspiracy theories, but apparently not. I’d heard it straight from the horse’s mouth. Of course, he could have been lying, but why would he?
‘So, what you’ve heard about people crossing,’ he continued, ‘it’s true. But trust me, they aren’t the best fellow passengers.’
He chuckled and took a sip of his coffee.
‘It’s time to leave,’ said Shani. ‘There’s only one option for you. You need to go back south to Jordan and cross that way. You might get across the border into Syria and from there go via Damascus into Lebanon. If you stick to the main roads and get yourself a Syrian government guide, then you stand a chance of making it, but I can’t see any other option.’
Later that afternoon, Shani and I travelled to the east, following the border zones higher into the Golan Heights, where yellow signs indicated minefields and old tanks rusted at the side of the road – a symbol of decades of conflict. There were abandoned Syrian army bases, now overgrown with weeds, and trenches dug into the hillsides.
Despite the clouds and heavy rain, I could hear the dull thuds of mortars landing in the distance and the rattle of machine-gun fire; a reminder that up here, war was never far away. IDF soldiers patrolled the razor-wire entanglements, the only sign of humanity in the fog of war.
Peering from the relative safety of a concrete bunker, I saw movement beyond no-man’s-land, through the grey mist a few hundred feet away. I couldn’t tell who it was.
‘It might be a local shepherd, or it might be an ISIS fighter,’ whispered Shani. ‘Who knows.’
I was suddenly filled with a feeling of panic. I knew that what lay beyond was an unknown entity. Syria had been chaos for years, and the prospect of running the gauntlet through the most dangerous country in the world was reckless, bordering on insanity. I knew it was madness, but I also knew that I’d come this far. I could literally smell the cedars of the Maronite highlands, and in the far distance make out the misty mountains of the anti-Lebanon range. I knew that, beyond their snow-capped peaks, lay my goal, Byblos – that most ancient of cities, and my final destination.
I’d survived the war in Iraq, the empty vastness of the Empty Quarter Desert, death threats in Yemen and the pirate-infested seas of the Gulf of Aden. I’d realised my dream of following in Lawrence’s footsteps and celebrating Christmas in the Holy Land. There was one final hurdle, and I knew I couldn’t give up now.
The highway to As-Suwayda was empty, shimmering in the haze of the late morning sun. No one was out on the roads and the only cars I could see were those burnt-out, black shells riddled with bullet holes, now abandoned in ditches at the side of the road. I wrapped the keffiyeh tightly around my face and walked north to the edge of the Syrian city. I felt as if I’d almost come full circle now. Al-Malikiyah, where I’d begun this journey, was only four hundred miles away to the north-east. And where I was right now, it looked to all intents and purposes exactly the same.
I was twenty-five miles inside Syria. Twenty-five miles from the safety of the Jordanian border, from where I’d come the day before. I’d taken the detour Shani had recommended, all the way back through Israel, over the River Jordan to Amman, and then struck north via the refugee camp at Zaatari, where I’d seen first-hand the victims of this seven-year conflict. Virtually all the children I’d met in the camp had no memory of their country other than war and extreme violence. For them, the only reality was the confines of this muddy campsite.
I’d met women whose children had been killed, men whose houses were burned down and children who’d lost their parents. It was tragedy in its worst form. And yet, in spite of it all, I’d discovered a surreal sense of hope among those refugees. Almost all the people I’d met wanted to go home, as soon as the war was over, and everyone I met begged and pleaded with me to go and visit their country. I’d had my doubts, of course, on whether it was the right thing to do; whether it was ethical to go to a war zone for the sake of writing a book about a journey.
But whatever doubts I had were banished by the words of those children who’d only ever heard of Damascus, Homs and Aleppo, and had never been to their own homes – and their smiles as they begged me to go and see their country for myself. So, armed with an official Syrian visa, I’d somehow been granted access to travel from the southern border all the way to Palmyra, Homs and Damascus.
I’d arranged to meet Nada, a Syrian woman, who’d agreed to escort me for my journey. I was surprised that the Syrian government – the Assad regime – had granted me a visa, let alone given me unrestricted access to visit as much of the government-controlled areas as I pleased. There was no military escort, no spy following me around and no bugged hotel rooms (as far as I was aware). I’d been told simply that I could report on whatever I wanted without caveat, because they were very confident that they were winning the war and had nothing to hide. Despite this astonishing freedom, I was probably still expecting something other than the diminutive lady in her late fifties who turned up to greet me.
Nada was wearing a hijab and smoking a cigarette when she arrived in a large 4x4 at the edge of town.
‘You must be the English traveller?’ she said, in very good English with an interesting accent.
‘It’s Finnish,’ she said. ‘I married a man from Finland and I spend half my time in Helsinki, but come back to Syria to work. I quite like the variety and frankly it’s important to make sure people outside know what’s really happening in my country.’ She laughed.
I think I’d been half-expecting some exotic young girl, who would try to honey-trap me and enlist me as an Assad spy. Instead, I found myself with this eccentric woman, who I couldn’t work out at all.
‘Get in the car,’ she said, with the air of a bossy school mistress. ‘We have work to do!’
‘Work?’
‘Yes. You have work to do and so do I. I need to get us through Syria in one piece, and you need to go home alive, so you can tell everyone what you see here. That’s your job.’
I guess she was right.
We drove through the suburbs of As-Suwayda, past the turnoff for Daraa. The town of Daraa was still in rebel hands, and parts of it were held by ISIS factions.
‘Over there, the war is still raging,’ said Nada. ‘But it’ll be over soon. The army has taken most of it back.’
In fact, in the last few weeks, Assad’s Syrian Arab Army had regained control of more than half of the country, leaving only a few small enclaves of rebel militias, which were supported by NATO. I knew for a fact there were US and British Special Forces operating on the ground, not too far from where I was now, indirectly fighting against the very army that I was meant to be under the protection of. Nada was employed by a Syrian tour agency and had been vetted by the government to ensure her allegiance, but she wasn’t some blind follower of Assad either. She was well aware of the regime’s failings, and of their brutality at times. But she was very clear on who she preferred running the country.
‘Given the choice, what is better?’ she said. ‘A leader who is harsh but can keep the country together, or a bunch of Islamist nut-job fuckers with big beards, who love cutting heads off?’ I couldn’t quite believe the language used by the little lady.
‘Those bastards are stupid medieval assholes who are only interested in guns and power. They call themselves freedom fighters, rebels, ISIS or whatever. They’re all the same. They’re just immature pricks, who enjoy fighting. People think that ISIS are the worst, but there’s al-Nusra, Jamaat al-Islam and the two thousand other groups of barbarians we have to worry about, too.’
The highway cut through the desert like a rusty knife, its edges scarred with rubble and debris. We drove past the village of Thalia, where the Druze inhabitants had formed a mobilisation squad to fight ISIS and al-Nusra, and old women had defended their homes with antique rifles and ancient shotguns. This was where the civil war had begun, and it was here that it was coming to an end. Quite what had changed, apart from the deaths of more than three hundred thousand people, I wasn’t sure.
It took two hours to reach the south-eastern suburbs of Damascus, where the road split into roundabouts and flyovers. For the most part, it was empty. Nobody travelled south out of the city, and the shattered eastern suburbs around Ghouta and Douma were still in rebel hands.
‘Insurgent hands. Or better still, terrorist hands,’ Nada reprimanded me. ‘They are holed up like rats. They’re imprisoning civilians as hostages, so that the government won’t bomb them. They kill children and try and blame it on the government, and fake gas attacks so that the army looks bad. But wait and see, they’ll be done for soon and we’ll have our country back.’
I noticed how all the bridges were draped with Syrian flags and the walls were covered with posters of the president, sometimes alone, other times accompanied by grinning images of his allies, the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran and, of course, President Putin. There were also the faded outlines of the ISIS emblem, now scrawled over and crossed out. Here, there was no doubt who was winning the war – and it wasn’t the people we’d backed.
‘You’re a historian, aren’t you?’ Nada said, as we were waved through yet another checkpoint. The Syrian army had the roads fully under control, and every few hundred metres was a machine-gun post manned by a grizzly-looking fighter. Some were in regular uniforms wearing berets, and yet more were clearly militiamen in any combination of khaki and camouflage.
‘I’ve studied a bit,’ I told her.
‘Well, I’ve done my research,’ she said, ‘and so have the government. They know you’re a British officer, and they know everything else about you. Assad knows everything.’ She winked conspiratorially. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to scare me or wind me up.
‘Let’s go to Palmyra,’ she said.
I was suddenly filled with both a sense of excitement and terror. Palmyra was two hundred and fifty kilometres away … in the wrong direction. It was almost halfway to Al-Malikiyah, where I’d begun four months earlier, and what’s worse, it was almost right on the front line against ISIS.
‘It’s safe enough,’ said Nada. I couldn’t quite reconcile the blasé look of nonchalance of this little lady and the fact that she was suggesting we drive halfway across the Syrian desert to go and see the ruins of this once important town.
The explorer in me won over.
‘Let’s do it,’ I said, and she smiled.
It took four hours to reach the oasis of Palmyra. It rose from the desert like a mirage. Overlooked by a flat-topped mountain topped by the crumbling citadel, the ruins of the ancient Semitic palaces lay spread across the plains. Roman arches and Greek temples littered the landscape in a glorious explosion of antiquity. I’d heard the worst, that Palmyra was no more, having been taken twice by ISIS. But as I got closer to the site, now more or less abandoned, I was relieved to see that much of it remained intact. Even the savagery of ISIS, it seems, couldn’t defeat the architects of history.
‘Fuck them,’ said Nada. ‘See, now we have it back.’
We passed a checkpoint into the archaeological site itself. I noticed the soldiers on guard; they were a mixture of Syrian soldiers, Afghan and Iranian mercenaries, and there, in the shade of a lean-to shelter, stood guard a handful of white men in Russian uniforms. The lads were all blond with piercing blue eyes. They wore light green camouflage smock jackets over blue and white T-shirts, almost the exact same uniform worn by their predecessors in Afghanistan thirty years before. Technically these were the enemy, but for today at least, they were my guardians. More importantly, they were the guardians of Palmyra, having recently liberated the town from ISIS rule.
‘Let’s get out and walk,’ Nada said, as we parked the car under the shade of a date palm.
And so, under the watchful eye of the Russians, we strolled around the ruins.
For me it was a mixture of emotions. The damage was clear to see. Gone was the Triumphal Arch, and the gateway to the Citadel. The Temple of Baalshamin lay in sad wreckage, along with the Great Colonnade, although I was glad to see that many of the columns remained, and that the Baths of Diocletian and the Senate were for the most part undamaged.
I looked up in wonder at the infamous Roman Theatre, which once held gladiatorial contests, and in equally grim circumstances more recently, the executions of hundreds of men by Islamic State terrorists. The Temple of Baal was utterly demolished, blown up by these modern-day philistines, and now only the central gateway remained, and it was here, standing on top of the rubble, that I met Tarik Al-Assad.
‘He’s the son of the old head of antiquities at Palmyra Museum,’ said Nada, introducing us. ‘He has quite a story to tell.’
The man shook my hand. I guessed him to be about my age, with closely cropped hair. A sad look in his eyes betrayed an unknown tragedy.
‘I work at the museum in Damascus,’ he said, leading me through the piles of two-thousand-year-old masonry. ‘And my father was in charge here. His name was Khaled, please don’t forget it.’
Tarik stared at me with a long silence. I nodded.
‘My father loved this place, he worked here for forty years. He was a historian and a hero, you know, it was because of him that Palmyra became a UNESCO world heritage site. When Daesh came here and took over, they arrested him, and me too. For weeks we had been taking the antiquities to a place in Damascus for safe keeping, because we knew that Daesh would steal them and sell them in Turkey. So when they came, my father told me to run and take my mother and brother away. So I escaped one night and hid from them.’
He paused. ‘But my father refused to leave, even though he could have. He said that his place was here in Palmyra, even if it meant he had to die. Daesh were stupid and thought there was gold hidden in the ruins and they beat my father and asked him where he had hidden it. When he told them that there was no gold, they started blowing things up. Then when they realised it was just old stones, they asked him where the antiquities were. He refused to tell them anything.’
Tarik stuttered his words and I noticed a tear running down his cheek.
‘One day, on the eighteenth of August 2015, they took him to the crossroads by the mosque, just over there.’ He pointed beyond the gate to the shattered remnants of the modern town, where a bullet-strewn minaret jutted miserably into a grey sky.
‘They forced him to kneel down on the pavement and …’
Tarik looked at the floor and wiped his eyes, before looking directly into mine.
‘They cut his head off with a sword.’ He winced and gazed off into the distance and fell into silence. Nada was looking intently at me, as she stood in the background. ‘He was eighty-three years old.’
Suddenly Tarik pulled out his phone from his pocket and opened up his file of photographs. He forced the phone into my hand. ‘Look at that.’
I peered at the screen with disbelief. The image was of a body, hanging upside down from a traffic light, with a decapitated head on the floor in a pool of blood underneath on the pavement. The bloated and battered head still wore a pair of broken spectacles.
‘It’s my father,’ said Tarik, with a forced smile. ‘I still have his glasses.’
Shocked, I didn’t know what to say, and Tarik, the man whose father had been murdered for no crime other than defending his country’s heritage, put his hand on my shoulder as if to comfort me.
‘Just remember his name, that’s all I ask. Khaled Al-Assad.’
The clouds darkened and it was time to leave.