Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East (21 page)

The Sunni population of Syria is notoriously more fundamentalist than the Shi’a and Allawi minority, whose political sentiments are based largely on strategic considerations.

Because of their small numbers, only 3 percent of the total population, Christians play only a minor role in national politics. In Aleppo, however, it is a different story. This northwestern Syrian city is more than 20 percent Christian, making it the second largest Christian population in the Middle East behind only Beirut.

Aleppo is Syria’s second most populous city, but the Christians were not hard to find. There were communities located near the churches and when I walked through the old marketplace, I simply looked for crosses on the wall. The Christians share similar perspectives on politics and the government with the Shi’a and Allawites. Given the historic animosity that has existed between Christians and Shi’a Muslims in Lebanon, I was surprised to find such agreement right next door in Syria. Christian, Shi’a, and Allawi Syrians all have the concerns often found among minority groups, and none of them want to see their country transformed into a Sunni Islamic Republic, which many believe would be the likely result if the current regime were to fall. For each of these minorities, the current regime is likely to be the best deal they are going to get.

Unlike their counterparts in Lebanon, the Christian youth in Syria are a complacent minority. Other than the Allawite, who have benefited the most from the al-Assad regime, the Syrian Christians are arguably the group that offers the most support to the president. Such pragmatic support is not illogical, as Christians in Syria practice freely, enjoy what limited Syrian opportunities exist, and believe they have the protection of the president. When speaking of political reform, many young Christians, Shi’a, and Allawite in Syria argue that al-Assad has become less autocratic; as examples, they point to al-Assad choosing not to ban the Syrian Socialist Party and decreeing that the prime minister does not have to be a member of the Ba’ath Party. They are comfortable with this degree of choice, although most assert that they would still vote for Bashar. In the words of one Shi’ite student from the western city of Latakkia, “If there is an election between someone who we don’t know and Bashar, for sure we will select Bashar because he is good for the Shi’a. We will vote him because we know that as a minority he will protect us.”

Many Syrian Christians also believe that establishing Lebanese-style democracy in Syria would create a chaotic path to catastrophe for their community. Fearing the loss of minority rights to majority rule, Syrian Christians looked unfavorably upon the political standing of Lebanese Christians. I spoke to numerous Christian youth from Syria who had traveled to Lebanon and some who had even studied there. Over coffee with a young Christian in Aleppo, I was told, “Even though there are more Christians in the smaller country of Lebanon, we still feel like we are not safe and we experience great discomfort.”

There is a popular belief held by Syrian Christians that if elections were free and yielded majority rule, the outcome would be a fundamentalist Sunni government that would oppress the Christian community throughout Syria. They fear what they describe as an “Iranian scenario.” Although they dread a Sunni rather than Shi’a majority, their imagined loss of comfort is the same. This type of association of Iran with backwardness was something I had first noticed in Lebanon. The youth of both these countries have the same fears and anxieties toward the regime as we do in America.

While these are the sentiments of most minorities in Syria, it is by no means universal to all of them. There are some who detest Bashar, there are some who want the Lebanese-style system, and there are some who support the Syrian Socialist Party. Oftentimes this depends on circumstance: whom they live near, the political sentiments of their parents, and the demographics of their town or city.

But most youth have been socialized into a society where they became accustomed to accepting the outcome without asking questions. For instance, while their neighboring Christians, Shi’a, Sunni, and Druze in Lebanon were fighting each other as well as enduring massive discrimination, Syrians watched carefully and came to value their own sense of relative security. Their conception of democracy was constructed around the situation in Lebanon and they came to accept what they perceived to be a safer status quo.

M
y Lebanese friends
told me on several occasions that I needed to be careful in Syria. They told me that I would be followed around, monitored, and watched by Syrian intelligence. From what they described to me, I thought it would be just like my experience in Iran. But the vigilance was more discreet: I wasn’t watched all the time, I never noticed myself being followed around, and it seemed—at least on the surface—as if I operated freely in Syria.

I had traveled to Homs with Maya and Haifa without any problems and took that as an indication that Syrian intelligence was unaware of my presence in the country. With this air of confidence, I traveled eight hours north to the northwestern province of Aleppo. The city is built around the ruins of the Aleppo citadel, the once proud fortress that protected the old city. The sheer size of Aleppo is most visible atop this citadel, and when it is time to pray the echoing sound of the call for prayer reverberates almost in succession from what must be at least several dozen mosques. The streets of Aleppo were intriguing, lined with shops of all varieties, and differently than other cities I had been to, there was something calm and orderly about this northwestern city. The roofs of shops and homes were covered with satellite dishes; every street corner seemed to be decorated with advertisements, posters of partially naked women whose faces had been replaced by the faces of American celebrities.

Later, as I stood near the famous citadel in Aleppo, two Syrian guys approached me and invited me to an underground gay rave. I didn’t attend the party, but I asked them about Syria’s gay community and how they organized raves. The boys explained to me that they walk through crowded markets and send out Bluetooth messages on their phone advertising gay parties, which they hold in abandoned buildings, people’s homes, and even public parks. They dance all night and sometimes get several hundred people to attend.

By the end of my first day in Aleppo, I had met with a group of three young guys in a café, talked to a group of young Christians about what it is like to be the minority in Syria, and had the chance to speak with Sunni, Shi’a, and Allawi youth in various parts of the city. That night, I went to bed surprised at how easy it had been to talk to people and how fortunate it was that I wasn’t being followed.

Back at the hotel, around ten-fifteen
P.M
., the man at the front desk told me over the phone that I had a visitor. My guest was about forty years old, he had a full beard, and his nose was nothing shy of gigantic. He was also extremely fat and seemed to waddle rather than walk. He introduced himself as Rashid and said he had been asked to “tend” to me for the evening. I should have been angry at this, but my confusion led me to be more curious than anything else. He wore a suit and a tie and looked very official, and I was tired and not thinking straight; so when he asked me to come with him, I followed. I still found the whole thing more peculiar than scary. He hadn’t told me anything about himself and was kind of weird and evasive when I would ask questions.

We got in his black Land Cruiser, with its fine interior and leather seats, and we drove for a while down some narrow streets. At one point, Rashid sideswiped a car, cracked its mirror, and kept going. We were in what appeared to be the older part of Aleppo. The cobblestone roads were too narrow for two-way traffic; every time we saw a car coming from the opposite direction, Rashid would put the car in reverse and back off the street until the car had passed. After about fifteen minutes of driving, we arrived at our destination. It was what appeared to be a rather elegant restaurant. The crowd looked highly sophisticated. The men all wore suits and the women were adorned in elaborate head coverings. The restaurant had an indoor/outdoor feel to it, with plants growing from the floor and a semiopened rooftop. Despite the elegance of the restaurant, the air was filled with overlapping clouds of smoke that emanated from the flavored tobacco pipes on each table. It was fairly late at night, but when we walked in, we were seated in our own private section of the restaurant. What was going on here? Who the hell was this guy?

He ordered a nargilah, or hookah as it is also known, and asked me if there was anything I wanted to drink. What if he was going to poison me? I’d seen the movies; I asked for water. Rashid then pulled three cell phones out of his pocket and put them all on the table, as many people in the Middle East do. But why did he have three?

“So what is your plan in Syria?” he asked me. “Who are you meeting with while you are here?”

I told him the same thing I told the Syrian Embassy in London: that I have always been interested in Syria’s ancient history. In what was my standard cover, I explained that I had been an archaeology major as an undergraduate.

He sat and nodded his head. His phone rang and he spoke for a bit. I didn’t understand any of it, but it sounded like official business of some sort. His questions then became both stranger and more direct. “Who have you spoken to since you have been here? What is your business in Syria? How much do you know about Syria?” It was all very ominous. I realized then that I had been followed earlier in the day. My behavior would have aroused suspicion: I had lingered around the schools in Aleppo, wandered the marketplaces, and chatted with people in the public venues, interviewing young Syrian students about reform and what they wanted for Syria. Though I was eventually taken back to my hotel, this late-night dinner with “Rashid” was Syrian intelligence’s way of sending me the message that I was not operating as freely as I wanted to believe.

S
yrians in the
northwestern province of Aleppo had been relatively open with me, but this was more a tribute to the city’s demographics than anything else: The relative diversity of Aleppo lent itself to progressiveness. As I traveled back down south to Sunni cities that I had skipped over when traveling from Homs to Aleppo, I found a very different scene. I visited a number of Sunni towns and cities in a journey that would lead me to the Sunni city of Hama.

I took several detours on the way to Hama, in part to see more of the country, but also because some of the world’s most spectacular historical sites were situated between Aleppo and Hama. Among these sites are the famous Apamea gates and more than seven hundred “dead cities” from various periods of ancient Syria. Most are comprised of portions of churches, schools, courthouses, and homes. Locals, mostly Bedouins, had moved into some of the ruins, using parts of them to store sheep and goats. The dead cities are a remarkable testament to the Byzantine Empire, and some date back as far as 4000
B.C
. The ruins ranged from magnificent arches and temples, to a couple pieces of limestone half-buried in the dirt. Some of the structures were easily recognizable, while others could have been a granary or part of a cemetery. There were no guidebooks to this place; it was miles and miles of seemingly endless village rubble. The structures were poorly preserved and I always proceeded gingerly, never really sure if a snake would come out of a hole or a brick would fall on my head. I went to as many of these lost cities as I could, but after a while, they all started to look the same and climbing over ancient homes, mosques, and churches grew tiresome and repetitive.

I had been to Jumayi, Serjilla, and Duvia, but everyone had kept talking to me about Al-Bara, which, in addition to being the largest of the dead cities, was also the most historically significant. My increasingly bored driver, who had already taken me to several of the cities, seemed tired of making these trips in the blistering heat, but when I offered him a bit more money, he seemed more than happy.

As we pulled into a cul-de-sac, I asked if I could leave my things in the car. This was really stupid of me, as these “things” included my computer, my books, and my notes. But I thought I would be right back.

“Barja baad saa,”
I told the driver. I would be back in one hour.

“OK, just one hour. Otherwise it is more money,” he reminded me. Everyone was always trying to squeeze me for an extra few hundred Syrian pounds here and there.

At first glance, the ruins of Al-Bara were not particularly striking. It looked more like a bunch of rocks buried in vines, trees, and shrubbery. There was no clear passageway to walk through the ruins as there had been in the other dead cities, of which Al-Bara is both the most extensively preserved and also the largest. Its six square kilometers all look mostly the same and unlike the other dead cities, one can really lose one’s bearings when inside. The city’s history is rich and eerie, dating back to the fourth century
A.D
. Al-Bara once stood as one of the most significant cities along the trade route from the northern city of Antioch to the southern gateways of Apamea. The city was of particular value because of its rich and arable land that enabled its Eastern Christian inhabitants to cultivate it into a major center for olive oil and fine wines.

Al-Bara initially endured the turbulence created by Islamic invasions, but eventually it succumbed to the Crusaders in the eleventh century. Al-Bara became a notorious base for Crusader attacks in western and central Syria. In one of their most infamous campaigns, the Crusaders launched a horrific cannibalistic attack on Ma’arat an-Nu’aman in 1098. Tales of their brutality and consumption of the victims led potential victims to fear them until they were driven out twenty-five years later.