We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled Read online

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  Part I of this book explores Hafez al-Assad’s authoritarian rule of Syria from 1970 to 2000. The history of Syria, of course, stretches millennia before that. Seat of some of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, the eastern Mediterranean, also called the Levant, came under Ottoman rule in the early sixteenth century. With the Ottoman Empire’s defeat in World War I, the League of Nations carved these Arab areas into separate nation-states under British or French colonial control. France acquired a Mandate in Syria and divided the territory along sectarian lines. Two separate states of Damascus and Aleppo contained Sunni Arab majorities and smaller Christian, Jewish, Shiite, and Ismaili religious communities, as well as distinct Turkmen, Armenian, Circassian, and Kurdish ethnic communities. The coastal Latakia region was designated a state for Alawites, adherents of a branch of Shiite Islam who historically had been persecuted. The southeastern corner of Syria became a state for the heterodox ethnoreligious Druze religious minority. Following years of anticolonial activity enlisting all communities to varying degrees, France conceded to integrate the different regions into a single republic. In 1946, Syria became a sovereign state.

  Syria preserved its preindependence parliamentary system dominated by a conservative, traditional elite. Already weak and unrepresentative, this system was further discredited by Syria’s defeat in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. In the decades that followed, industrialization, mechanization of agriculture, expanding access to education, and other socioeconomic developments swelled a new middle class and politicized the peasantry. Youth from rural and religious minority backgrounds, finding traditional economic and political structures unable to accommodate their growing aspirations, increasingly joined radical political parties. The Baath Party, a revolutionary movement committed to Arab unity and socialism, attracted particular support. It also gained a foothold within the army, where many young men from marginalized communities had long sought an avenue of mobility.

  Against this backdrop of class conflict and ideological ferment, military interventions in politics overthrew seven governments between 1949 and 1963. In that year, army officers affiliated with the Baath Party seized control of the state. The new regime nationalized industries and businesses, redistributed land, and extended welfare services such as education, health care, irrigation, and subsidies. While these reforms mobilized a mass base of support, they provoked opposition from wealthier sectors and rival political movements. Apart from those challenges, the Baath were racked by their own internal divisions, which only worsened after defeat in the 1967 War resulted in Israel’s occupation of Syria’s Golan Heights.

  One of the Baath leaders jostling for power was General Hafez al-Assad, minister of defense and commander of the air force. In November 1970, he sidelined competitors and took power via a bloodless coup.

  President Assad replaced decades of political instability with a single party security state. A foreboding military-police establishment, including multiple security services and internal intelligence agencies, monitored, vetted, and punished both citizens and other state personnel. Assad staffed security forces with personal loyalists and disproportionately reserved leadership posts for trusted members of his own Alawite community. The Baath Party, operating through thousands of cells and branch offices throughout the country, similarly acted as an instrument of local surveillance and control. It also co-opted millions with the professional and economic privileges of membership.

  Beyond formal institutions, Assad used alliances across society to remind citizens of the benefits of remaining in the regime’s good graces—and the costs of opposing it. While promoting an image of stalwart protection of religious minorities, he reached out to win the allegiance of powerful actors within the Sunni Muslim majority, including clergy. He appeased the traditionally Sunni business class by allowing them to continue and gradually expand private enterprise and trade. At the same time, he sustained a populist welfare state, including dramatically inflated employment in an enormous public sector. Such patronage politics sustained support from key constituencies such as peasants and workers. Yet it also saddled the state with an unsustainable burden of waste, debt, and corruption. Ultimately the economy failed to deliver the growth required by a burgeoning population.

  Where real backing for the regime was not forthcoming, coerced obedience filled the gaps. Farcical elections produced 99 percent mandates to renew the president’s tenure, while ubiquitous statues and pictures brought his gaze into public spaces. Schools and state-controlled media taught people what they could and could not say, while compulsory military service gave young men a further dosage of disciplining. Networks of covert informants policed society and encouraged it to police itself. Sensing that nowhere was safe, parents reared children on the saying “Whisper, the walls have ears.” A pervading threat of punishment was not simply imagined. An Emergency Law instituted in 1963 gave security forces sweeping powers to censor expression, restrict citizens’ assembly, seize properties, and arrest, interrogate, and detain anyone at will. Political prisoners were not only denied due process, but also subjected to overcrowding, filth, hunger, disease, and multiple forms of torture.

  These interlocking structures and practices were sufficient to preempt most organized opposition. The exception that proved the rule came in the late 1970s, when Assad’s controversial military intervention in the Lebanese civil war ignited Syrians’ already-accumulating grievances with inflation, corruption, and security force abuses. Many civic and professional associations agitated for human rights. The Muslim Brotherhood, a branch of the Islamist political movement founded in Egypt in the 1920s and a powerful opponent of Baath rule in Syria, began a violent campaign against regime targets. Authorities responded by indiscriminately killing, imprisoning, or disappearing tens of thousands of citizens. When Muslim Brotherhood militants led an insurrection in the city of Hama in 1982, Assad launched a brutal assault that flattened whole neighborhoods and left tens of thousands of civilians dead. This trauma, which Syrians referred to euphemistically as “the events,” warned generations of how the state would respond to challengers.

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  Part II probes Bashar al-Assad’s first decade in power, from 2000 to 2010. Hafez al-Assad had groomed his eldest son, Basel, to be his successor. Basel’s death in a car accident in 1994 transferred that expectation to the president’s second son, Bashar, then an ophthalmology student in London. When Hafez died in 2000, Bashar fell six years shy of the Syrian constitution’s requirement that the president be at least forty years old. The Syrian parliament immediately amended that clause. Nominated by the Baath Party as the only candidate, Bashar was elected president in a national referendum by a reported 99.7 percent of voters.

  Many Syrians welcomed their new head of state, who presented himself as a youthful and modern reformer. In an unprecedented political opening that became known as the “Damascus Spring,” civil society spearheaded new forums for debate and petitions demanded greater freedoms and rule of law. Old walls of fear appeared to be crumbling until the government, not ready for change after all, launched a crackdown. Arrests and trials of activists, organizational closures, and malicious rhetoric throttled the movement, at least temporarily.

  Meanwhile, neoliberal economic reform opened the country to new consumer goods and commercial possibilities. Many in the urban middle and wealthy classes rejoiced in access to novel comforts. Unleashed without political accountability or oversight from an independent judiciary, however, privatization and trade liberalization allowed corruption to reach unprecedented heights. A new class of crony capitalists, at their fore Assad’s extended family, because conspicuously rich. As power and wealth became concentrated in a narrower elite, the regime increasingly abandoned its traditional working-class base. Inflation, unemployment, crumbling infrastructure, and cutbacks in state subsidies and services precipitated rising rates of poverty and inequality. Neglect of the countryside aggravated rural destitution, particularly after
drought—and the government’s mismanagement of it—swept areas of the northeast and south from 2006 to 2010.

  The sense of economic despair and choked aspirations were especially acute among the more than half of the population under the age of twenty-four. A good portion were university graduates who could not break through layers of favoritism and nepotism to find work. Simmering discontent broke into the streets in 2004, when antagonistic chants at a soccer match in the predominantly Kurdish city of Qamishli transformed into a Kurdish uprising. Mass demonstrations became riotous until the army’s deployment of tanks, helicopters, and thousands of troops killed dozens and brought the unrest to an end.

  After a decade in power, Bashar al-Assad remained personally popular. Yet many Syrians saw their lives worsen under his rule. Few who longed for greater civil liberties, rule of law, government accountability, and fair economic opportunity dared to voice demands publicly. For most people most of the time, to dream of freedom seemed foolish, and to fight for it, reckless.

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  Part III details the launch of the Syrian revolution. Its roots lay in the yearning for change that fueled mass demonstrations across the authoritarian Middle East. In December 2010, when a self-immolation sparked demonstrations in rural Tunisia and security forces responded with repression. Outraged citizens spread protest throughout the country, forcing the much-loathed President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali to flee in mid-January 2011. Egyptians then took to the streets and, defying police violence during eighteen days of far-reaching mobilization, pushed the long-ruling Hosni Mubarak to resign as well.

  As what became known as the Arab Spring extended to Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, and beyond, many observers believed that Syria—a “kingdom of silence”—would be immune from the regional tide. Nevertheless, many ordinary Syrians were elated by these previously unimaginable shows of people’s power, and some began to express political dissent in new ways. Against this backdrop, a spontaneous protest in the Hareeqa market of old Damascus showed surprising boldness, as did vigils outside the Egyptian and Libyan embassies in solidarity with revolts in those countries. Syrian expatriates issued online calls for nationwide protest on March 15. Damascus and other localities witnessed small demonstrations, but armed personnel quickly suppressed them.

  Meanwhile, in the city of Daraa on the Jordanian border, security forces arrested children after antiregime graffiti appeared on a school wall. When relatives beseeched local officials for their release, the notorious provincial police chief dismissed them with a vulgar insult that incensed the entire community. A march the next day swelled into a mass demonstration during which security forces killed two unarmed protestors. Subsequent funerals launched larger demonstrations, and subsequent demonstrations resulted in still more funerals. Protestors recorded events with mobile phones, producing videos that made their way online, to satellite news channels, and the knowledge of citizens elsewhere in Syria and the world.

  One week after the start of protest in Daraa, tens of thousands joined in demonstrations across the country. The regime’s response—offering some measures of appeasement while suppressing gatherings with force—sparked further indignation and resolve. A widespread expression captured what this historic moment meant for those who discovered themselves and their nation in its unfolding: Syrians broke the barrier of fear.

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  Part IV takes a closer look at the regime’s efforts to repress the protest movement and protestors’ efforts to sustain the movement, nonetheless. Twelve days and sixty-one deaths passed before Assad delivered his first televised address. Many Syrians insist that had he offered remorse for the bloodshed, as well as indications of meaningful change, they would have cheered his leadership. Instead, by denouncing unarmed protestors as terrorists and traitors to be crushed, he brought more people out into the streets. The uprising swelled, and initial calls for reform escalated into demands for the regime’s overthrow.

  The United States, European Union, and Arab League imposed sanctions on the Syrian government and eventually called for Assad’s resignation. Under pressure, the Syrian government opened a national dialogue with handpicked reform-oriented figures, held parliamentary elections, and repealed the hated Emergency Law. At the same time, with a new Anti-Terrorism Law as cover, the regime arrested tens of thousands on pretexts ranging from participation in protests to being from a town known for protests to no pretext at all. It carried out wholesale torture of detainees, aimed in part at terrifying communities when emaciated neighbors or mutilated corpses returned home. Some bloody acts, such as the massacre of a peaceful vigil in Homs’s Clock Square or the brutal torture of a boy in Daraa, became symbols of the regime’s apparent readiness to carry out the threat that its loyalists were scribbling on walls at the time. Citizens could choose: either “Assad or we burn down the country.”

  Taking repression house to house, security forces conducted hair-raising raids of civilian homes. These could entail pounding down doors in the middle of the night, committing murder and rape, and looting or destroying at will. Some raids, like beatings and shootings of protestors on the streets, were carried out by thuggish civilian loyalists whom the population referred to as shabeeha (singular: shabeeh). When these measures failed, the regime sent tanks and troops into restive communities. Using snipers to enforce curfews, the army cut access to food and utilities, and carried out theft, arson, and summary executions. Independent human rights investigations judged regime actions to constitute crimes against humanity.

  Syrians opposed to Assad organized to keep the revolution going. Citizen journalists took up cameras and documented both demonstrations and regime abuses. Activists came together in informal groups dubbed tanseeqiyat, or coordination committees. Operating underground to evade arrest, hundreds of committees across the country planned protests, organized relief for besieged communities, provided medical care for the wounded, and attended to myriads of other challenges as they emerged. In bringing together citizens of different walks of life, these grassroots efforts embodied the revolution’s ambition to break from the hierarchy, atomization, and distrust fostered by the authoritarian state and replace it with a democratic society based on civic engagement, participation, and social solidarity.

  The core of the conflict in Syria was a struggle between those who opposed the Assad regime and those who wanted to preserve it or feared that alternatives would be even worse. But this political division overlapped with other economic and social cleavages. Urban and rural working-class folk formed the rebellion’s core base of support. Some among the more affluent, especially in the two largest cities, Damascus and Aleppo, were more ambivalent. While Syrians of all religions and ethnicities could be found on different sides of the conflict, polarization took an increasingly sectarian hue. The country’s Sunni Muslim majority tended to view the revolt as a struggle that would both bring freedom and rectify disadvantages they faced due to favoritism and abuses of power. Many members of minority communities feared that the rebellion threatened their very existence. Regime propaganda and media actively cultivated such fears, including the charge that the rebellion was fueled by conservative Arab Gulf states’ plotting to replace Syria’s secular, multicultural character with an Islamic state.

  Bloodshed compounded the sectarianizing effects of rhetoric. The fact that the security leadership and majority of civilian shabeeha were Alawite increased Sunni citizens’ sense that the sect as a whole was complicit in their oppression. This in turn intensified ordinary Alawites’ fears of vengeance. Many became convinced that their collective survival depended on Assad rule, regardless of their own criticism of its wrongdoing or lack of personal share in its spoils. With time, atrocities with sectarian overtones would be committed and suffered by all sides.

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  Part V examines the militarization of the rebellion. From March to September 2011, the protest movement buried some two thousand dead, yet remained overwhelmingly nonviolent. Eventually, citizens and army defectors took up a
rms. First, they focused defensively on protecting demonstrators and communities; then, under the banner of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), they carried out attacks on military targets. Lacking preexisting networks and infrastructure, however, the FSA was not an organized force so much as a banner championed by hundreds of autonomous battalions. A Supreme Military Council set up headquarters in Turkey but proved unable to wield command and control. Opposition political bodies formed in exile, first the Syrian National Council and later the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, fell similarly short in establishing leadership of the larger freedom struggle.

  Gradually, rebels pushed regime forces from territory across the country. The regime pounded those areas with artillery, missiles, airpower, and scorched-earth assaults. When rebels wrestled control of most of Homs, Syria’s third-largest city, the regime responded with indiscriminate bombardment that caused rampant destruction. Fighters and a few thousand civilians were eventually besieged in the old city, where many remained without food or medicine for two years before consenting to be evacuated.

  Other rebel formations emerged, many oriented toward an Islamist ideology. The al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front announced its birth in January 2012. It traced some of its roots to the mid-2000s, when Assad facilitated the flow of Islamist fighters into Iraq to fight American troops and then, recognizing their hostility to his own regime, imprisoned them upon their return through Syria. When the Syrian uprising was still predominantly peaceful, presidential amnesties released many of these fighters, cunningly infusing the rebellion with terrorists in order to legitimate the regime’s claim to be combating terrorism. In April 2013, other al-Qaeda affiliates announced their formation of an even more radical group: the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS). Both Nusra and ISIS enjoyed funding, discipline, and swarms of foreign fighters that expanded their presence on the ground relative to that of the FSA.