Inside Syria: The Backstory of Their Civil War and What the World Can Expect (16 page)

Those crony capitalists, along with the honest ones, continued to provide crucial support for Assad. Nabil Toumeh, CEO of the large conglomerate Toumeh Orient Group, supported Assad because he believed the opposition is controlled by extremists. “In Syria we are multicultured and multireligious,” he told me.
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He argued that extremists in the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups will impose an Islamic state on the country. “They will end the secular orientation in Syria and the whole Middle East…. The street must cool down in order to achieve the reforms. Otherwise they will never be implemented.” Nabil Sukkar, a former World Bank economist who later headed an economic consulting firm in Damascus, said that big business remained a crucial pillar of support for the government. Business people are pragmatic, according to Sukkar. “They expect the unrest to end sooner or later,” he said. “The regime is well-entrenched.”
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The government's neoliberal policies benefitted a few progovernment big-business men but did irreparable damage to the economy. The policies increased poverty in the mainly Sunni, rural areas, according to progovernment analyst Barakat. “Textile and other factories were no longer subsidized by the government,” he told me. “They allowed Turkish commodities to enter without taxes. The national industry was completely damaged.”
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Unemployment grew as factories shut down and farmers couldn't compete with cheap imports. “The Syrian regime made a big mistake,” Barakat said. “We had an army of unemployed young people.”

Syria's severe draught from 2006 to 2011 made bad economic policy even worse. The country averaged less than eight centimeters of rain each year, not enough to sustain farming. As much as 85 percent of Syria's livestock died from thirst, and in some areas, crop failures hit 75 percent. Hundreds of thousands of farmers fled from the countryside to the big cities where they had difficulty finding work.
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Some of the hardest-hit regions, such as Al Hasakah, later became hotbeds of rebellion.

The civil war exacerbated the already-bad economic conditions. International sanctions against Syria, the loss of most exports, and the destruction of war sent the economy into a tailspin. Syria produced 425,000 barrels per day of crude oil in 2011, but that dropped to zero by the end of 2013 as rebels seized control of the oil fields.
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The Syrian gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 3.2 percent in 2010 but dropped to –21.8 percent in 2012 and –22.5 percent in 2013.
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The economic crisis also hit the small-business people, many of whom had supported Assad.

Rana Issa owned a successful marketing and advertising business in Damascus focused, in part, on the construction industry. But the industry had little to advertise. Construction had ground to a halt, along with tourism and a host of other businesses. Issa laid off 25 percent of her staff. “Businessmen are afraid of economic recession, and they stopped their media buying,” she told me in her Damascus office. “It has a bad effect on the media agency. If the businessman doesn't buy advertising,
we don't have money, and we can't pay for anything. It's like a chain.”
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She said that businesspeople generally supported Assad. “Big-business men trust the government,” she said. Businesses of all sizes “just want to survive and work. We want the economy to recover.” She blamed the rebels for Syria's economic problems, not the Assad government. “The opposition, what do they want? What are their ideas about government?” Issa is of Palestinian origin. She said the Syrian government had afforded more rights to Palestinian refugees and their children than either Israel or other Arab countries. “As a Palestinian living in Syria, I cannot imagine that the president will go because of the opposition. We didn't have restrictions; we live like Syrians. I love Syria. I love the president. I love everything he does. He gave us a lot of promises and achieved a lot of targets. The opposition, they didn't give him time to work on this.”

I asked what she would do if the opposition took power. “I will leave,” she said with finality. She didn't wait for Assad's downfall, however. Faced with mounting economic difficulties, by the end of 2013, Issa had moved to Erbil in the Kurdish region of Iraq.

But Issa's pro-Assad views weren't shared by all her peers. Some small-business people had switched sides. I have visited Damascus's main
souk
, or marketplace, many times since my first trip in 2002. Thousands of customers and merchants haggled over everything from food to rugs. But since the uprising began, business has been much slower. On the day of my visit, light flooded in from the windows above as I interviewed shopkeepers at random.

One clothing store owner, who asked me not to use his name, said the souk is “like a graveyard. Our whole business relies on the foreigners from the gulf, the tourists.” He said tourism is not just down, “it's zero.”
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The clothing store owner lamented that he hadn't seen a foreign customer in months. And he can't export his clothing to Iraq or Jordan, previously major customers. His costs to import cloth have increased a lot because the value of Syrian currency had declined. “I can't compete. It's cheaper in their own countries.”

The merchant was a longtime supporter of Assad. Now he blamed his president for the country's woes. He said the police began the crisis when they arrested and beat the teenagers for writing antigovernment graffiti on a wall in the southern city of Daraa. The government “should have tried the people responsible for the acts and tried the corrupt people,” he said. “If the police who beat the children were put in jail, that would have stopped the demonstrations. We just want an end to corruption. Young people are fighting for their rights.”

He leaned forward and, in a barely audible voice, said he supported the banned Muslim Brotherhood. He argued that the brotherhood is a moderate group, likening it to the Islamist party that ruled Turkey. “The Muslim Brotherhood wants an end to corruption,” he said. The hatred of government corruption cuts across class and religious lines in Syria, even impacting Syria's Christians, who generally support Assad.

In late 2013, a twenty-year-old Christian student was kidnapped in broad daylight in front of his university in Damascus. His father received a call demanding a huge ransom in US dollars, said the student's uncle, Hagop, a university professor and regime supporter who asked that only his first name be used. “They think the Christians are all rich.”
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Dozens of Christians have been kidnapped for ransom in Damascus, according to Hagop and other Christian leaders. Christians are perceived to be more prosperous than the majority Sunni Muslims. They had felt relatively secure in the largely secular regimes of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad. The student's family was finally able to negotiate a deal, and the young man was released, according to Hagop. The family never discovered the identity of the kidnappers. Hagop said they could have been antigovernment rebels or common criminals. Rebels regularly kidnap civilians in areas under their control, according to human-rights organizations.
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“But most frighteningly, we suspect some kidnappings are carried out by the Popular Committees,” Hagop said. The committees are a progovernment militia that was incorporated into the National Defense Force in late 2012. Militia members received a salary, uniforms, and
arms from the government. “How could a rebel group infiltrate secure areas of Damascus, kidnap someone in front of the university, and then take him through all the checkpoints to an area they control?” asked Hagop. “No, it has to be someone on the inside.”

Life became increasingly perilous for Syrian Christians. Some 10 percent of Syria's 22.5 million people are Christian, both Orthodox and Catholic. When the French occupied Syria and Lebanon after World War I, they implemented a divide-and-conquer strategy that favored some Christian sects. Many Syrian Christians achieved higher incomes and educational levels than their Muslim counterparts, differences that persist today. Christians also participated in the anticolonial struggle and helped found the nationalist Baath Party in the 1940s. Under the rule of Hafez al-Assad, some Christians rose to positions of power in business, government, and the military. Each Christian faith has its own story.

Armenian Christians fled to Syria after the Ottoman Turkish genocide of 1915.
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For them, the current civil war is a double tragedy. About one-third of the prewar Armenian population of 120,000 had left Syria as refugees, according to Bishop Armash Nalbandian of the Armenian Orthodox Church.
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Christians also faced attack because of their politics, according to Father Simon Faddul, director of the Catholic charity Caritas in Lebanon. He explained that some of the Christian refugees in Lebanon are Syrian government employees. Others may be related to Syrian soldiers or members of the intelligence services. They face persecution because of their progovernment views. “They live in continuous fear,” said Father Faddul. “Christians have paid in blood.”
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While opinions vary within the diverse Christian communities, most have sided with Assad against the rebels. “The guarantee of security of minorities is to have good functional government, a strong government,” Bishop Nalbandian told me. “This security we experienced and saw with the government of President Bashar al-Assad.”
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When the Syrian uprising began in 2011, many Christians sympathized with the calls for democracy but worried about Islamic extremists who saw Christians as infidels. Bishop Nalbandian said that in the
first few months Christians hoped the government would make significant reforms through meaningful dialogue with the opposition. “Unfortunately, the government lost this moment, or couldn't or didn't use this moment,” he explained. “The government did some reforms according to the constitution, but actually it's not enough.” For example, the government lifted its formal state of emergency first implemented in 1963, but then continued repressive policies. The government held parliamentary elections in 2012, but the new body has little power.

Meanwhile, over the past year, extremist rebel groups seized more territory. When the rebel group ISIS took over the northern city of Raqqa in 2014, for example, it closed the churches and forced most of the Christians to flee (see
chapter 6
).

The civil war has ripped apart relations between Christians and Sunni Muslims, even in Hagop's small hometown. As the crow flies, Hagop's town lies only twelve miles from central Damascus, but he must drive through half a dozen military checkpoints to get there. What used to be a thirty-minute commute now takes three hours. No one makes the drive at night because rebels sometimes hit the road with mortar fire and rockets.

“I drive into Damascus only a few times a week and otherwise stay home,” Hagop said. “We don't mind the checkpoints. I said thanks to the soldiers because they are protecting us.” Hagop's town is a mix of Christians, Sunnis, and Druze. Before the crisis, residents got along well. Friendships and business relations extended among all religious groups.

Officially, the Assad government is fighting to maintain this secularism. Officials claim that most Sunnis support the government, and the army fights only extremists, or
takfiris
. That epithet means “impure Muslims” and is used to describe all rebels. Hagop admitted, however, that the reality in his town has become far different. “The army blocked off the Sunni part of my town,” he said. “Now we hardly see the Sunnis at all. Everyone is suspicious. Is he a terrorist?” Friendly relations with neighbors have broken down. “I tell my children not to talk politics with anyone outside our immediate family. You never know who might be a kidnapper.” Soldiers are hostile to all Sunnis because they suspect
them of supporting the rebels, Hagop said. “Because I have an Armenian name,” he said, “I don't get hassled at the checkpoints. They are looking for Sunnis. One time a soldier asked if I was Kurdish because I was born in the north, in the Kurdish region. I said, ‘No, I'm Armenian Christian.' ‘OK—you're one of us,' the soldier said.”
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Being “one of us” doesn't mean Christians are accepted as equals. Even progovernment Muslims see Christians as guests in a Muslim country. “We protect Christians and Jews,” said Sheik Abdul Salaam al-Harash, a representative of the Muslim Scholarship Association. “That is our duty as good Muslims.”
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Hagop pointed out, however, that Syria was a Christian area for centuries before it became majority Muslim. Saint Paul traveled extensively in what is modern-day Syria, and Christianity spread rapidly during the era of the Roman Empire. “This was a Christian area before the Muslims came,” said Hagop. “But they still see us as guests. We don't need protection. We need full rights as citizens.”
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Christians can't hold the country's highest office. Syria's president must be a Muslim, according to the constitution, which was revised by Assad in 2012, carrying forward a provision in previous Syrian law. Christians wanted to see the constitution changed so that a person of any religion could be president, according to Bishop Nalbandian. That clause is “not democratic. But in this crisis we didn't raise our voice to change it.”
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That issue revealed the fragile relations between Christians and the majority Muslim community, one that is exacerbated by the militancy of the Islamists in the opposition. Hagop remembered that in 1973, Hafez al-Assad tried to change the old constitution to allow a president to be from any religion. Conservative Muslims protested, and dozens were killed in large demonstrations against the ruling Baath Party. “So I'm not sure if the provision that the president must be Muslim reflects Baath policy or popular will,” Hagop said with a shrug. “The people want a Muslim president.”
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Bishop Nalbandian said making democratic changes in Syria will take time. “Democracy is not an item to be bought in a store,” he said. “It is a process.”
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