Inside Syria: The Backstory of Their Civil War and What the World Can Expect (17 page)

But the larger question of Christian democratic rights was side-lined so long as the civil war raged. One day in late 2013, Armenian
Orthodox families gathered at a church in the old city of Damascus for the funeral of four children who died when a rebel mortar hit their school. Rebels on the outskirts of the capital regularly fire rockets and mortars into Damascus, sometimes aimed at military targets, sometimes not. A relative of one of the victims, Amira Hana, cried as she described the explosion. “We went running to the school to find out what took place,” she told me. “All the buses were completely destroyed. Blood was all over the ground.”
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Bishop Nalbandian, who presided at the funeral, criticized the rebels who intentionally targeted civilian areas. “I can't understand what kind of vision, what kind of ideology they have,” he said. “I do know that they don't pursue freedom or democracy as they said. They are actually criminals.” He said indiscriminate attacks on civilians are a war crime. “What they are doing isn't against the government. It's against humanity. I'm speechless.”
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For its part, the government indiscriminately shelled rebel-held neighborhoods, killing far more civilians than the rebels. At the end of 2013, a special UN human-rights commission accused the regime of systematic war crimes against civilians. The commission included Carla del Ponte, who had earlier declared that rebels had used sarin to attack regime soldiers and civilians. For the first time, a UN human-rights group held Assad personally responsible. “Evidence indicates responsibility at the highest level of government, including the head of state,” according to Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights.
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The civil war had taken its toll on the Christian community. Some left for neighboring Lebanon. Maryam, her husband, and two children fled the fighting in Syria and arrived in Lebanon with only one suitcase each. They left the war-torn city of Qusayr prior to its recapture by progovernment forces. “Bullets were flying everywhere,” Maryam told me, asking that only her first name be used. “There were rockets. My children couldn't go to school.”
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The family suffered months of hardships in Qusayr, in part because they were Christians, according to Maryam. “The mosques announced they wanted to round up all the Christian men. The families became
scared.” One night masked men came to their apartment intent on taking all the Christian men in the building. The masked antagonists weren't the infamous thugs of Assad. Nor were they fighters from other countries intent on waging jihad. They were local, anti-Assad rebels intent on purging Qusayr of pro-Assad Christians. The city had become a major battleground, with religion as a defining factor.

The family finally had to leave. “We either had to run for our lives or join the fight,” said Maryam, who is Roman Catholic. The family fled to Zahle, a predominantly Christian city in the eastern mountains of Lebanon. Maryam is among the thousands of Syrian Christians who have fled the fighting but received little international attention. The Most Reverend Archbishop Issam Darwish, a Melkite Catholic whose archdiocese includes Zahle, said Syrians have lived in peace for generations. He preferred to blame the anti-Christian violence on extremist groups such as al-Nusra and other jihadists. “They believe Syria is a Muslim country, and the Christians must leave,” he said. “But most Syrians are not like that.”
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But some Muslim extremists are. Even in the early months of the uprising, some local Sunnis were chanting the slogan, “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the
tabout
[coffin].”

“We heard that slogan,” said Joseph, Maryam's husband. “The rebels said, ‘We never said that.' But if you look, it's true. Where are the Christians? They are here in Lebanon.”
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Well, not exactly. According to UN statistics, some Christians have left but in far fewer numbers than their Sunni Muslim counterparts. Less than 1 percent of Lebanon's 900,000 Syrian refugees are Christians, according to Dana Sleiman, spokesperson for the Beirut office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
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Overall, over 2.5 million Syrians fled their country as of early 2014.
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Most Syrian Christians have hunkered down inside Syria, hoping for an Assad victory. Such views outrage other Christians. Basem Shabb, a Lebanese Protestant member of parliament for the Future Movement, said that supporting dictators has caused tremendous problems for
Christians in the region. The Future Movement, the party headed by Saad Hariri, has strongly opposed Assad and his Lebanese ally, Hezbollah. Shabb noted that Christians in Iraq largely sided with Saddam Hussein. “Now the Christians in Syria may be repeating the same mistake,” he told me. “For the Catholics and Maronites in Aleppo [Syria] to openly support the regime is suicide.”
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Elie El-Hindy, chair of the Political Science Department at Notre Dame University outside Beirut, agreed that Christians have been unwise to side with secular dictators against the Muslim majority. “The more they take sides or engage in alliances, the more they will be threatened,” he said. “One party is going to win; another will lose.”
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Rather than lament the attacks on Christians around the region, he urged Christians to take a broader view about the rise of Muslim political parties and governments. “We should believe that democracy and human rights will adjust the situation in the long term,” he said. He noted that Egypt's president Mohammad Morsi was overthrown, and non-Islamic movements have been attacking Turkey's president Recep Erdogan. Christians and their allies might lose elections initially, he said. “We should work on winning the next one.”

Of course, that assumes that the winner in Syria allows free and fair elections. Catholic charity official Reverend Faddul said if the war goes on too much longer, Christian refugees “won't have a home to return to.” He noted that Christians have confronted major crises many times before, including the fratricidal Lebanese Civil War of 1975–1990. Christians play a major political, social, and economic role, he said. “So many domains of life, like banks and tourism, are well maintained by Christians. We shouldn't squeeze ourselves in a corner and hide under the complex of persecution or inferiority.”
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El-Hindy agreed, expressing optimism about the continued Christian contributions to the region. “Christians are a factor for enlightenment and moderation,” he said. “This is the way to fight the threat of extremism.”
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Through the middle of 2014, Assad maintained the support of his repressive apparatus, a key factor to staying in power. He could also
rely on Christian and Alawite supporters in the military and intelligence services. We first met a member of the Mukhabarat (Military Intelligence Directorate) in
chapter 5
. It was quite a shock for me to meet one of the feared secret police face-to-face. The only other time I had seen the Mukhabarat was from the other end of leather jackets and aviator glasses as they offered intimidating stares at airports or while rousting civilians. But here was a real human being, not a stereotype. And his perspective was fascinating.

He was stocky but solidly built, with a military-style buzz cut. He dressed in slacks and an open-necked shirt and drove an inexpensive car. In 2011 he and his wife, both Alawites, lived in a middle-income apartment complex built by the government. If people in the Mukhabarat were making big bucks from corruption, he was not among them. He told me that protesters may have had legitimate demands at the very beginning, but very quickly criminal elements and foreign powers hijacked the movement. During the first week of the uprising, he said, he was personally shot at by protestors carrying everything from AK-47s to hunting pistols. Such a claim couldn't be independently verified.

I asked if the Assad government had made any mistakes, thinking perhaps he would concede that the harsh measures only encouraged more anger at the government. “Yes, the government made mistakes,” he told me gravely. “It should have cracked down harder from the very beginning. Officials initially took away our pistols so we wouldn't shoot demonstrators,” he claimed. “We only got them back a few days ago.”
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I asked that if that was true, why were so many civilians killed during demonstrations? He parroted the government position that over eight hundred members of the security forces had been killed and almost no protestors. At the time, the United Nations estimated that over three thousand civilians had been killed. The security forces saw themselves as victims of people in the pay of foreign powers. They claimed the United States, Great Britain, and Saudi Arabia smuggled arms into the country and paid people to come to demonstrations. Given the participation of millions of Syrians, the conspiracy must be vast indeed!

His arguments reminded me of how the US government twists the facts in describing the war on terrorism. Only the worst of the worst were locked up in Guantanamo. The drone attacks always kill evildoers, never civilians. The National Security Administration is protecting us from terrorism by having access to every phone call and e-mail sent in the United States. In Syria, it was the same Alice-in-Wonderland reasoning. The victims became criminals and the perpetrators became victims.

He took me on a tour of his town. People lined up at a government bakery where they paid half-price for bread. It was an everyday occurrence, but when I shot photos, he became worried. Although he was a member of the feared security forces, he was afraid to be seen with me. I got out to shoot photos, but he made sure I didn't speak so no one could figure out I was American. I look Middle Eastern enough to pass for Syrian if I don't open my mouth. We ran into a friend of his from the secret service. He didn't introduce me. He was worried that his friend would turn him in for some kind of unauthorized activity. Remember, I was traveling in Syria with a journalist visa and all the appropriate documents. But even a member of the Mukhabarat was scared of the Mukhabarat.

Even with the system of state-inspired fear, the secret police and regular army proved incapable of suppressing the uprising. Very early on, armed groups of regime supporters, known as
shabiha
, attacked demonstrators and tried to intimidate the opposition. The first shabiha, which means “ghosts,” were smugglers in the western seaport of Latakia in the 1970s. During the Lebanese Civil War, the shabiha formed alliances with Syrian authorities who profited from smuggling consumer goods, drugs, and arms.
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When the uprising began, the Mafia-like shabiha joined together with security forces to attack peaceful demonstrations. The opposition began to refer to similar groups around the country as shabiha, and the name stuck. The gangs managed to combine mindless loyalty to Assad with criminality. “We started by facing the protesters, but when the opposition became armed, we attacked them in their villages,”
shabiha member Abu Jaafar told
Global Post
. “In addition to our salaries we take whatever we can get during the attacks: TVs, video players, electronics.”
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In early 2012 the regime organized the disparate militias into a national group called the Popular Committees. A year later, the Popular Committees were incorporated into the National Defense Forces.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards provided arms and training to the NDF, following the model of the
basiji
, armed thugs who became infamous for attacking the 2009 popular demonstrations in Iran (see
chapter 8
). By the end of 2013, the NDF had grown to an estimated 100,000 members.
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The government wanted the NDF to act as a civilian backup to the army. Following classic counterinsurgency tactics, it was supposed to take over and hold an area liberated from the rebels. But the NDF was unaccountable legally and militarily. TV reporter Alaa Ebrahim told me the “National Defense Forces don't have the ethics of the army, nor are they legally accountable.”
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From the very beginning of the uprising, the shabiha were responsible for some of the regime's worst atrocities. On May 25, 2012, the Syrian army launched ferocious artillery and tank fire on Houla, a small village outside Homs. The shabiha waited on the outskirts of town and fired at civilians attempting to escape. When the bombardment stopped, the shabiha entered the village and massacred 108 people, including 34 women and 49 children, many with their hands tied behind their backs.
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Nations around the world condemned the Houla massacre and withdrew their ambassadors in protest. The regime blamed the deaths on foreign terrorists.

On May 2, 2013, regular army soldiers and NDF militia entered the town of Bayda in the Tartus Governate in western Syria. They came under fire from armed rebels, and a dozen soldiers were killed. The government called for backup and launched artillery barrages at other nearby villages in and around Baniyas. They later entered the village and went door to door, stabbing and bludgeoning entire families. One video showed eight children dead on a bed.
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A UN report later estimated that between 300 and 450 deaths had occurred from
the massacre, most at the hands of government forces.
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Syrian government TV reported that the army had defeated a band of “terrorists” and blamed them for the atrocities.

Government supporters argue that accounts of regime massacres are exaggerated by the opposition. Others say any civilians still living in rebel-controlled areas are prorebel. Ebrahim, who regularly interviewed NDF militiamen, said some government supporters justify the killings because civilians provide a “nurturing environment” for the rebels. Ebrahim strongly disagreed with this view but said some government supporters are convinced “if the civilians don't leave rebel areas, they must support the rebels.”
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