A Disappearance in Damascus (4 page)

Four cars surrounded her, each with four armed men inside. Who were they? It would take her some time to figure out the answer to that.

“You're coming with us,” said one of the men. The youngest of them, a boy with a machine gun, looked hardly more than fourteen. “He wasn't even old enough to grow a proper moustache,” Ahlam recalled. When he lunged at her, she grabbed him by the collar and shoved him hard against one of the cars. The man standing next to him fired a shot between her feet. “I've been tracking you for a year and a half,” he snarled.

“Why didn't you just call me?” she told him. “I would have come to see you.”

The man didn't like her attitude one bit. “He shot a bullet beside my right ear. He would have liked to put the bullet in my head, but they only had orders to torture me, not to kill me. He told me he'd already tried to kill me several times but he couldn't catch me.”

He told her she drove too fast. “I used to drive a hundred and sixty kilometres an hour on the highway.”

“You were trying to escape them?” I asked.

“No. I just like to drive fast.” She sighed. “I had a Volvo. My dream in life is to have another Volvo.”

The next thing she knew, she was bundled into the passenger seat of one of the cars, a blindfold across her eyes.

“I want to smoke,” she said, her back stiff as a pole.

“What?” said the boy. He was sitting behind her in the back seat with his machine gun.

“Give her a cigarette,” said the driver.

The boy had taken her purse. Now he dug through it until he found a pack of cigarettes. “These are American,” he said suspiciously, as if this were proof of her treachery.

“No, they are Korean,” Ahlam told him. Pine cigarettes, her favourite brand, are made in South Korea. “You have to learn how to read.”

She didn't have time to finish her cigarette. Pulling off the road, the men grabbed her by her feet and shoulders and tossed her into the back of a truck. They changed trucks several more times along the route, tossing her from one to the next. “They were playing soccer with me, like I was the ball.” She was handcuffed, the cuffs so tight on her wrists that her hands swelled, and she shouted until they loosened the bands. She was taken somewhere in the desert. The walls of the building were mud and the floors of sand, the wind so hot it burned her skin. She later heard that her boss at the GIC, an American major named Adam Shilling, had sent a hundred soldiers to look for her.

Her captors began to interrogate her. They tied her to a chair and asked about contractors, military bases, interpreters. “I didn't have any answers to their questions.”

One of her captors beat her several times a day—“he seemed to be enjoying himself”—but she had the feeling there was some confusion. As if she wasn't the kind of captive they had been told to expect. They had envisioned some high-value American spy, some sort of Mata Hari, and seemed utterly baffled by a mother from a respected family who had become important enough to have information they wanted. They claimed to have reports that she travelled around in a Humvee, that she was having an affair with an American colonel, that she had dyed her black hair blonde.

“Take off my head cover,” she told them. She'd always covered her hair, it was how she was raised, and since the war began it was a matter of life or death. “See for yourself.”

They seemed frightened by the suggestion. Killing her would be a lesser sin in their eyes than seeing her hair. That's when she knew who they were: al-Qaeda.

For three days she was beaten, pistol-whipped, and not allowed to sleep, but then her captors began arguing among themselves. She could hear them through the walls of her room. The man who beat her argued that she ought to be killed. Another voice, one she had not heard before, agreed. “If I were in your place,” he said, “I would just kill her. If she's innocent she'll go to heaven. If not she'll go to hell.”

Another voice, younger, objecting. Would God not want them to discover the truth?

The younger one asked her tough questions but he never laid a hand on her. He interrogated her extensively about her central crime, working for the Americans, and she tried to convey nuance. She worked with the Americans, yes, but in fact her work was for the orphans and widows who came to her for help, and for the families of prisoners detained by American forces. She knew nothing of military bases, mercenaries, manoeuvres.

They shouted at her that this was exactly the sort of thing someone in her position
would
say. If she was lying, she would pay with her life. “I said my only request was that they don't throw my body in the river. So my mother wouldn't wonder if I was alive or dead like many of the families of the disappeared.”

The young interrogator investigated everything she told him. When she told him she had helped rebuild a school, he
sent a scout to check on her story. Then he took her phone and called through the numbers it contained one by one. And in the end, in the strange and circular way life sometimes works, it was the testimony of the orphans and widows she had been trying to save that saved her life.

So the feeling I had about her, that she was fearless, was right. She was fearless though she had plenty of reasons to be afraid. Because after she finished telling me this story she told me something else.

“I've figured out I'm being watched here in Damascus,” she said. “Maybe by those same people who kidnapped me in Iraq.”

She was wrong about it being the Iraqis, but she was indeed being watched.

AHLAM
'
S DAMASCUS APARTMENT REMINDED
me of places I had lived in as a student. It was on the second floor of a rundown low-rise at the dead end of an alleyway. Next to the entrance was a modest kitchen with two burners where she could cook, if she were the sort of person who cooked, with a tiny bathroom off it. The four of them—she, her husband, their eight-year-old daughter, Roqayah, and ten-year-old son, Abdullah—shared the bedroom, sleeping on mats next to a locker room–style metal cabinet stuffed with most of their belongings. The large boxy living room had bare white walls and a balcony so small it was pointless. The living room had been furnished with castoffs, including a burgundy velvet sofa with carved mahogany arms that must have been someone's pride before the springs broke through the stuffing. A few stacks of books teetered on a shelf by the only window. Everything else was piled randomly into a doorless closet. On this, my second visit, Ahlam watched me
take it all in. “I'm a bad housewife,” she said. She sounded unapologetic. She sounded amused.

I am drawn to books. Whenever I go to someone's home and see books, I automatically start to flip through them, ignoring everything else, ignoring even the propriety of looking through someone's belongings, the inner workings of their mind perhaps, their ideals or passions or pretensions. The books they read or wish you to think they read can tell you as much or more than can be gleaned in conversation.

Most of her books were instructional guides—French lessons for Arabic speakers, books on mathematics. A few were more literary, like the copy of
Les Misérables
translated into Arabic, and
Three Cups of Tea
, a book about building schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan (later discovered to be mainly fiction). She said she was collecting them for a lending library.

Fictitious or not, that book's ideas appealed to her. As I leafed through it, she told me that she and a French-American researcher named Marianne, a consultant on contract to UNICEF (and she in turn was on contract to Marianne), had spent the past three months doing fieldwork on Iraqi adolescent girls in Syria. What they learned was alarming: countless stories of sexual trafficking and forced marriage; abduction, slavery, rape. There was also isolation—the girls were often shut up in crowded apartments where they spent all day doing chores instead of going to school as they would have in Iraq. The two of them had come up with the idea of starting a school for these girls. Ahlam was about to start hosting the classes from her apartment.

I picked up an English copy of L.P. Hartley's classic novel
The Go-Between
. Ahlam said it had been given to her by a
New Yorker
journalist she had worked for and counted as a friend. Perhaps the title was a reference to Ahlam's role. And perhaps, I later thought, when I read the book in its entirety and observed how the protagonist failed in his mission and disaster followed, it was a cautionary tale. For now I merely opened the book to that famous first line: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

I had been weighing whether I could trust Ahlam. As I've said, some fixers can be double agents, not necessarily through any choice of their own but because otherwise they can be prevented from working at all. At which point you might find yourself followed, watched or evicted from the country. Not kidnapped or murdered—that usually only happens when the structures of society break down (which had already happened in Iraq), or when it can be made to look like an accident. When states attack journalists it is typically when they think they can get away with it, which is why they usually focus on their own citizens or on journalists from countries with weaker governments that can't or won't do anything to protect them. The major risk is to your sources—the people who talk to you and help you and face the consequences long after your story has run and you are gone. Especially to your primary source, your fixer.

When I made calls in the evenings to arrange meetings I never said who I was or what I wanted to discuss; the person on the other end always seemed to understand. Everyone knew you had to present your ID in order to get a SIM card for your phone, and a copy of that ID was submitted to the Syrian intelligence. To be caught doing something, even a
whiff of something, meant deportation at best. For refugees that could be a death sentence.

Ahlam, however, wasn't reporting to the Ministry of Information. She was working on her own. That afternoon I described the article I was in the midst of writing, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the human consequences of the war. It seemed to me that Little Baghdad was a good place to find the human story. And surrounded by the comfortable familiarity of books, I thought she could help. She had her own story of survival and was working, like I was, unofficially. I believed we could work together.

Ahlam knew the refugees because she was one of them. She was sought out by media and human rights groups who needed accurate, reliable information about the refugees in Syria. I didn't ask her for references—that's not how it works—but if I wanted them I could have talked to the BBC, Reuters, the
Wall Street Journal
, Al Jazeera, or French or Australian TV—or to Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, Refugees International, the UN, all of whom she helped with their reports.

While we were talking, a friend of hers, an Iraqi professor in his fifties, stopped by to visit. Ahlam invited me to stay for dinner with them that evening. The professor was a famous historian, the author of dozens of books, and had (or
had
had) his own television show in Baghdad on current and historical affairs. He had been friends with Ahlam's family for thirty years. Meeting him confirmed my decision to trust her.

Wearing a brown suit that had rumpled in the heat, his red tie slung over his shoulder like a dog's tongue, he mentioned that a book he had written—about sex in the time of the Prophet—had infuriated the religious establishment. “They call me the Salman Rushdie of Iraq,” he said, looking
delighted. After the invasion, caught up in the burst of optimism that followed Saddam Hussein's fall, he started one of the first pro-democracy newspapers,
Baghdad Dawn
. Now, after three attempts on his life in Baghdad, he was on the run in Syria.

He said he couldn't understand why the intellectuals—doctors and professors and research scientists—were being systematically murdered, when they were above the Sunni–Shia nonsense. “No one knows who's behind it. The Sunnis blame Iran. The Shia blame Saudi Arabia and the US. They use idiots, teenagers to do the killings. If you ask me, the ideology of the Wahhabis is behind this”—the fundamentalist Saudi form of Islam. But whoever they were, as often happens where dissidents are viewed as a threat, they wanted to destroy the country's brain trust, eliminating those who could prevent the country from slipping into a dark age.

Though the professor was considered an expert on current affairs, he confessed that he no longer understood what was going on. “I say something in the morning and find I'm wrong at night.” He preferred to talk about the past. He talked about Alexander of Macedon (“you call him Alexander the Great”) who had invaded what is now Iraq in the fourth century BC. Alexander thought he could solve the problems he encountered there by forcing the locals to marry Greeks. “His teacher Aristotle laughed at him. He said, in fifty years you will not succeed in changing these people: you will change the Greeks!”

Ahlam had gone out and brought back takeout. Kebab, roast chicken, roast tomatoes, rice and bread, steaming from Styrofoam. At the smell of food, her children, Abdullah and Roqayah, emerged shyly from the bedroom where they
had been watching TV. Sitting cross-legged around a tablecloth that Ahlam had set down on the living room floor, we feasted.

Her husband didn't join us. He had been an engineer before the war and was now unemployed; the family lived on whatever Ahlam earned as a fixer. Like a lot of people, her husband was rediscovering the religion that had been set aside in the days when they lived in big houses, had busy careers and drove nice cars. Now he was where he always was these days: at the mosque. He went five times a day.

“God gets bored with him,” Ahlam said, as she emerged from the kitchen with a pot of tea.

The professor laughed. “Ahlam is the model Iraqi woman,” he said, turning to me. “I want to write a book about her one day. She's a fighter. Have you seen her get mad?”

I had. Earlier in the day a man had come to her door: it turned out that she was a source of advice and assistance not only for journalists but for other refugees. The man wanted to know which kind of people she helped: was it the Sunni or the Shia? At those words she flew into a rage, shouting at the man to get out and not come back until he stopped talking that way. It was a false divide, manipulated by those for whom it had advantages, was how she explained it to me. She had known Shia who had saved the lives of Sunnis, “and vice versa.”

The professor was Shia, Ahlam was Sunni, and both of them hated such distinctions.

After dinner I took a cab back to my new apartment. I felt the thrum of excitement that came when I knew I'd hit the mark. I had found a hub, a connector, one of those people who knows people, knows what's going on.

The streets of Damascus reflected my mood. I have known more beautiful cities, such as Shiraz or Isfahan. And more chaotic: Cairo, Mexico City, Gaza City, Tehran. More ambitious: Dubai, Doha. More hedonistic: Havana, Beirut, Dubai again. More religiously significant, whether Jerusalem or, with its Zoroastrian fire temple and open-air burial towers, Yazd. But Damascus, vying with Baghdad as the oldest continually inhabited city on Earth, was hard to beat. And I always love places that have remained somehow cut off from the wider world and still have something to show me that isn't available everywhere.

Damascus was even better than expected. I liked to lose myself in the walled Old City with its narrow stone passageways, passing churches fronted by rose bushes and Roman ruins glowing sepia in the setting sun. There was a sense of pride in the city's long history and signs of growing prosperity. Most striking was the way every sort of person melded in the bazaars and the shopping districts, whether secular or any variety of religion or ethnicity. In the cool of the evenings, the city's cosmopolitan residents sat outside on café terraces, men and women mixing freely, the scent of fruit-flavoured tobacco wafting from the water pipes they passed from hand to hand. Through an unpromising entryway—meeting one of my contacts, a logistician from Doctors Without Borders who himself was undercover—I had found myself in a fine old house built for a family of thirty that had been transformed into an elegant restaurant filled with whispering fountains and potted orange trees. Damascenes were warm but shy, intellectual but reticent. When they complained about the influx of Iraqis driving up prices and crime rates, it
was always with sympathy, accompanied by the blunt sentiment: “We don't want their war to come to us.”

Nearing my street the taxi was snared in the evening crowds. American pop music thumped from car windows. Laughter and wolf whistles. Smoke billowing from a hip sidewalk crêperie. The scent of exhaust and cardamom. From sundown until two or three in the morning, all summer long, thousands of young men and women turned downtown Damascus into a nightly Mardi Gras. It was a party that would end like a fast car hitting an embankment, but it still felt like it could go on forever.

I paid the driver and got out to walk the last few blocks, making my way through the crowds, passing espresso bars where the young intelligentsia hunched over laptops the way their elders had over backgammon boards. The brand-new pizza parlour was decked out in red checkered tablecloths and flickering candlelight. A beautiful girl in jeans and a bustier perched on the front of a parked car like a hood ornament, surrounded by a bevy of male admirers.

This was the chic modern shopping district of Sha'alan, where young women in tank tops clustered in front of bright windows displaying the latest fashions from London and Paris. The occasional fully covered woman, all in black with her male guardian, window-shopped too, gazing through the slit in her veil. The former, in their Western garb, might be Christian or Alawite; the latter was undoubtedly Sunni. In 2007 it still mattered little in the capital city, where there was only one religion and it was the same as everywhere else—getting and spending.

I felt safe in Sha'alan. Everyone did. Money has insulating properties. If the inflation caused by the influx of Iraqis
was forcing poor Syrians to take second jobs and speak with dismay of the skyrocketing price of tomatoes, it was making others rich. One could feel the tremors of discontent in the poor neighbourhoods that surrounded the city, but in affluent Sha'alan all I noticed was a slight uptick in religious sentiment on the part of the Sunnis—striking because religious identities were discouraged by the Alawite state under President Bashar al-Assad. It was considered poor taste even to ask about such things. Yet the man who had rented me the apartment, an educated Syrian gentleman with a son studying medicine in the United States, told me he had recently recommitted to his faith. He apologized for not shaking my female hand.

The war that shook the world four years later, in the spring of 2011, has been often described as sectarian, a revolt by the Sunni majority against the largely secular Alawite dictatorship—the Alawites being an oddball splinter sect of Shia Islam (combining elements of Christian, Gnostic, Neoplatonic and Zoroastrian thought) that is today more cultural than religious. Yet the Sunni business class and most of the minorities would end up siding with the state. That is because its true genesis was a class war: the city versus the countryside.

On the plane over—a packed Syrian Arab Airlines flight from Gatwick—I had sat next to a young Syrian on a break from his studies at the London School of Economics. Slim, clean-cut and urbane, he was emblematic of the new middle and upper classes that were thriving under Bashar al-Assad. Throughout the five-hour flight he regaled me with stories of the ways the economy of Syria was liberalizing, the country finally opening up to the outside world as the nation embraced market reforms. Hence the girls laden with shopping bags,
construction cranes hovering over luxury developments, the heady optimism in these streets. Hence the influx of foreign investment, the privatization of state lands and services, the cuts to subsidies that most benefitted the poor.