Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East (22 page)

I continued to push deeper and deeper into these vast ruins. But when I stopped to place my camera on a rock to use the self-timer to take a photo of myself in front of a small pyramidal structure, I suddenly realized I couldn’t remember where my driver was. I had walked in so many directions and turned around so many times that I had become hopelessly disoriented. I had already been gone for at least an hour and even when I stood atop an elevated surface, I still could not see my driver anywhere.

At first I didn’t become too concerned because I assumed I would find my way back, but hours went by and I could not. I finally came across a paved road and was able to flag a man down on his moped. He was young, probably nineteen years old, and he wore a red-and-white checkered Kaffiyeh scarf. He was definitely Sunni. He could sense that I was concerned and in my broken Arabic I asked for his help. He gestured me onto the moped and we were off to find my driver.

He took me on a hazardously fast motorcycle ride throughout the six square kilometers of ruins as we drove over dirt paths, paved roads, and even small rocks in some cases. But after about an hour, we still had not found the driver.

This young man seemed like he would have helped me all day, but he decided that before going on, we should take a break to get some tea. We drove out of the ruins into the neighboring village until we reached a tea shop, which I would later learn was owned by his brother. I figured we had bonded on his moped, so I thought I might as well ask him a bit about politics. Up until this point, I had had a difficult time getting a lot of the Sunnis to open up to me in Syria. They was so different from Lebanese Sunni, who were eager to rant and rave about their politics. But my unnamed driver was with me in the middle of nowhere in some random tea shop. Perhaps he would be more candid with me.

We chitchatted a bit. I would ask him questions like “What do you think of Bashar al-Assad?” and he would give me benign answers that revealed very little. I didn’t want to risk offending the only person who could help me find my way to my driver, but I decided to be frank with him. Because he looked so young, I felt a certain level of comfort with him. I was actually surprised to hear that he was in fact twenty-five years old.

I mentioned to him that it seemed Syrians didn’t care much for talking politics. He explained that this is the Syrian way. He didn’t elaborate, so I pushed him a bit. He sipped his tea a couple of times. Then he told me why Syrians live in fear.

H
is name was Mazen,
and his family had originally been from the Sunni city of Hama. Mazen was the youngest looking twenty-five-year-old I had ever seen. Hints of a beard offered some veneer of age over his baby face. His eyes were piercing and large, but with his skinny neck, the kaffiyeh scarf he wore on his head made his face look minuscule. My ears perked up when I heard him say “Hama,” because it was my next destination after the dead cities.

Mazen explained that he was three years old when the Sunnis began living in fear. He told me that Hama has an eerie silence to it and made sure I understood why.

One of Syria’s largest cities, Hama has had a dark and a tumultuous relationship with the al-Assad regime. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Syria entered into the Lebanese civil war, first on the side of the Maronites and later on the side of the Muslims. Dissenters in Syria blamed the Syrian government for squandering its resources and military on a war in neighboring Lebanon. Creating greater pressure on the regime, it was also at this time that Syria was rumored to be providing funds to the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan (PKK) rebels in southern Turkey. These two external endeavors led to a rise in the outlawed but popular Muslim Brotherhood. Founded by Hassan al-Banna in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood is a predominantly Sunni extremist organization that began in Egypt and soon spread all throughout the Middle East. With Syria weakened by its entanglements abroad and growing domestic opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood claimed new members each day.

Sporadic terrorist activities by the Muslim Brotherhood against government sites in Syria soon escalated into more destructive attacks on Syrian infrastructure. At the beginning of the summer of 1980, the Syrian government announced that anyone found to be holding membership in the Muslim Brotherhood would be punished by death. On June 26, 1980, in response, the Muslim Brotherhood staged an assassination attempt on Syrian president Hafez al-Assad. While al-Assad survived the attack, his bodyguard was killed and he became extremely paranoid in the months that followed.

For several months, there was an escalation of state arrests of prominent Sunnis and reprisal attacks from the Muslim Brotherhood that eventually led to an all-out Sunni insurrection in February 1982. Sunni extremists, led by the Muslim Brotherhood, declared the city of Hama de-Ba’athified and took over government buildings.

Hafez al-Assad was enraged that his totalitarian grip seemed to be slipping to extremists. He would not stand for it. His brutal response, though directed at the Muslim Brotherhood, would leave a scar on the entire Sunni population of Syria. Beginning on February 2, 1982, al-Assad ordered the shelling and destruction of the predominantly Sunni city of Hama. The city was leveled and those who couldn’t escape were murdered. In the end, the regime killed twenty thousand people, mostly Sunnis.

News of what had happened in Hama spread like wildfire. Sunnis all around the country became fearful that their own cities might be attacked next. The few Sunni political groups that existed went dormant. Hafez al-Assad took the opportunity to remind the Syrian people what would happen if his politics were questioned. Hama became his way of evoking fear, his empirical evidence that he would not tolerate dissent, in particular from Sunni extremists.

“I was only three years old when it happened, but I remember,” Mazen said. “And I remember the years that followed in even greater detail.”

I could hear the emotion in his voice; this was clearly hard for him to talk about. “From that moment on, we were told that politics are to be ignored and that we should not think about these things.”

I finally understood why Syrian Sunnis were apolitical to the point of total disengagement from the public sphere. Ultimately, this overwhelming majority of the population had been intimidated into accepting the same skewed interpretation of Syrian politics that kept their Shi’a, Allawi, and Christian countrymen so docile. Instead of confronting the fear and repression perpetrated by the al-Assad regime, Sunnis choose to look next on the other side of the fence and delude themselves into believing that the grass is most certainly not greener in Lebanon. Like most Syrians, the Sunnis have been conditioned to look at the economic and sectarian troubles in Lebanon and blame politics and democracy as the root causes of these problems. Sunnis living in Syria would often joke with me that “the problem with Lebanon is every ten people is a political party.”

I wanted to ask Mazen more questions, but I really needed to find the car. We had lost track of time and I was now almost two hours late for my driver. The only thing I was banking on was that since I hadn’t paid him anything yet, he would take the risk and wait for me. There was so much going through my mind. All of my things were in the car, so I was worried about losing my computer, camera, and belongings. Part of me also felt guilty that the driver would think I had scammed him. More than anything, I felt so helpless and lost. Those moments in the ruins when I didn’t know where I was and the uncertainty of how I would get back to my driver had made me afraid. This was still a country I didn’t understand.

I wondered if it might help to draw a picture of the area where my driver had parked. After all, this had worked when I was searching for the synagogue in Iran. This idea largely arose from the fact that I was having a really difficult time explaining what I meant by
cul-de-sac
. I drew a picture of the cul-de-sac where we had parked and a small triangular ruin that I remembered seeing near the pavement. This was now the third time in my travels throughout the Middle East that I played Pictionary.

I must be pretty good, because Mazen seemed to know exactly what I was describing. We got back on his motorcycle and he drove very fast down hills and through the ruins. I thought we could easily crash—and at moments thought we certainly would—but Mazen seemed to know what he was doing. His head wrap kept getting in my face as we were driving, and it was probably better that I couldn’t see anything.

After fifteen minutes of barreling through the dead city at break-neck speed, I could see my driver’s car in the distance. I screamed his name three times, and finally, and luckily, I heard a beep from his horn as if to acknowledge that he heard me. I was relieved. I offered Mazen money for his help, but he wouldn’t accept. I kept trying to say that it was a token of gratitude, but he wouldn’t take money.

He looked at me, shook my hand, and said,
“Shukran, habibi.”

I didn’t understand why he should be the one to say thanks when he was the one who had helped me—and I told him as much. He explained that life in Syria is difficult and there are virtually no opportunities for young people to talk about their dreams and their hopes. Mazen was thanking me for having shown an interest, for having cared enough to ask. He was saying thanks for listening.

These words were very powerful and reminded me simple and even brief human interactions can transform opinions.

I
wondered what Hama
was going to be like. Mazen’s story was chilling, and having seen his eyes tear up as he told his story gave my visit more gravity. But I had one more stop before heading to Hama. I came to the small Sunni town of Al-Marrad on the way to Hama to say farewell to my driver. From Al-Marrad I would have to find my own way and a new driver. The town had very little going on besides a small marketplace. This wasn’t the traditional souq that I had seen; instead, it was a very primitive marketplace with blankets instead of shops. Al-Marrad’s main street was a poorly maintained dirt road, and judging from the stores I saw on my walk, this was a very impoverished and traditional community. Even the mosques were small and unimpressive, especially compared to the grand mosque that I had seen in Aleppo or the shrines that I had visited in Homs. They almost looked like miniature models of a real mosque.

I’d been to Afghanistan and seen women in the burkha, but I have never seen people so covered in my entire life. The women in this town wore a full black chador and revealed nothing, not even the hands, which were covered with black gloves. Even their eyes were concealed by the black cloth that completely covered their faces.

Had it not been for my conversations in Iran about hejab, I never would have understood where this came from. I supposed that in Al-Marrad this was what women—or the men who forced them to wear this attire—viewed as modest. No matter how much I had been told about the concept of covering, I had trouble accepting such an extreme approach. It just looked uncomfortable and demeaning. I tried to talk to three different women but was ignored each time. The third time, I was spotted by three young guys playing backgammon at the Al-Marrad version of a convenience store. They were laughing and one gestured me over.

They looked a lot more comfortable than the women, as they sat in their pants, short-sleeve shirts that I could see through the thin fabric of their robes, and sunglasses. And unlike the women, they were willing to talk to me. I told them about Mazen and this seemed to really open them up. They explained to me that living in a small but religious town like Al-Marrad, they could be more vocal because the intelligence units spent their time in the cities and they tended to stay away from the most religious pockets of Syria. Syrian intelligence weren’t worried about a small town with dirt roads and minimal infrastructure as posing much of a threat to the establishment.

They were young and each wore a long white robe over his clothes and a red-and-white checkered kaffiyeh attached to his head with two black rings. They explained to me that in Syria, politics is taboo.

“What we care about is Syria, we are Syrian,” one of the boys said to me.

“And what do you want for Syria?” I asked.

He explained that they don’t want what they see next door in Lebanon. He described Lebanon as a place with too much democracy and too many political parties. But reform was something that this group of boys wanted. They were not opposed to democracy, but they didn’t want too much of it. Instead, they asserted that reform is something that must come slowly.

I asked them how they felt as Sunnis in a country ruled by Shi’a and Allawite. I was making assumptions that Syria and Lebanon were similar and they called me out on this. Syria has a far deeper nationalist identity than Lebanon and one of the boys explained that “Shi’a, Sunni, Allawite, Christians, we are all Syrian brothers. We are Syrian first and Sunni second.” Like many of the Iranians I spent time with, Syrians believed in country first, clan second.

H
ama was not like
the historical graveyard that Mazen had described. In fact, it looked quite the opposite, lively and with a carnival feel to it. There were tons of street venders in Hama, selling everything from kebab and popcorn to sweets of varying kinds. The streets were overcrowded with other venders as well, but the scene looked less like a market and more like a tag sale. People drove like lunatics and just watching everyone cross the street made me nervous, especially when there were kids. At one point it took me at least fifteen minutes to cross a roundabout, never really certain of the traffic pattern to safely walk. The city’s action was located along its river, which is adorned with wooden bridges and twenty-foot water wheels. The water wheels are magnificent, towering over the city as if they were skyscrapers. Like a little kid, I marveled at their size. On both sides of the river, kids could be found doing the same.