The New Middle East (59 page)

The Israelis were contemptuous of the mismanagement of the mess on their doorstep by the US and its allies in the Gulf. ‘Nobody is running the opposition in Syria. That’s the problem,’ a senior Israeli defence official told me.

There is an Arabic phrase which translates as ‘You peel the onion and you keep finding more heads’. [In the opposition] you have many leaders, I could give you all the names, but if you ask me: ‘Who is
the
leader? Who are the elders that Qatar and Saudi Arabia are supplying with dangerous weapons?’, my answer is there is no one. Which means there is a vacuum, and that vacuum means al-Qaeda for the first time in history is in Syria. We think Bashar al-Assad is a terrible guy because he had unprecedented cooperation with Iran. He’s a murderer, but the Golan Heights was the quietest area in the Middle East. Now what is the address of the person the Qataris and Saudis are cooperating with? Who is this leader? Who is responsible for making sure tomorrow they don’t use these SA-14s [Russian shoulder-held missiles] to shoot down a British Airways plane?

That last bit was clearly said for my benefit, because Israel’s security concerns are focused solely at home.

That is why on 30 January 2013, for the first time since they attacked the Syrian nuclear plant in 2007, twelve Israeli air force jets struck in Syria again. Their target was a convoy carrying the more advanced SA-17 anti-aircraft missile launchers. The Israeli press quoted anonymous, which were probably military sources, to assert that the attack happened to stop ‘game-changing’ arms being sent to Hezbollah, which in return had sent in fighters to help the regime. I was told by a senior figure in the UN that by late 2012 the bodies of Hezbollah men were regularly being brought back across the border for a quiet burial in Lebanon. By then though there was already some division within Hezbollah about its involvement in the war. So its leadership framed the group’s military action to its men as protecting Shia communities and shrines in Syria from the Sunni Salafists rather than fighting for Assad, even though they were fighting alongside his forces.

In the months that followed the January strike Israel regularly had to respond to incoming fire from across the Golan Heights. Tensions steadily increased on the once quiet border. Israel knew nothing would have pleased the Assad regime, and Hezbollah, more than dragging it into the conflict so Syria could then try to rally wider Arab support around it. Tensions in Lebanon were growing as Hezbollah’s increasingly public involvement in the war and the influx of Syrian refugees disturbed the country’s religious equilibrium. Then in the summer of 2013 Israel again carried out air strikes in Syria on arms shipments that were destined for Hezbollah, adding to fears that the conflict was spreading. But while Israel did not want to play into Assad’s hands the airstrikes were making it clear that the generals in Tel Aviv did not have to ask for international blessing to intervene to serve their interests over the strife in Syria. The United Nations did.

‘Any proxy war is destructive, but particularly this one,’ a United Nations official at its headquarters in New York told me. ‘But even though there is a proxy war it isn’t coordinated. All the parties are supporting their own proxy war. The Turks are supporting theirs, the Qataris are supporting theirs, the Saudis are supporting theirs. It’s very destructive.’

I asked whether they had a common goal. ‘Absolutely not.’

The Syrian opposition had been constantly criticised for failing to get its act together and present a united front. This is partly a consequence of the nature of the uprising. Syria’s, like those in the rest of the region, was leaderless too. When the United Nations got involved its first act was to try to shepherd the opposition groups together under one umbrella. But as it did so it found ‘we had all these parallel and competing agendas at the same time’ tempting them back out again.

It wasn’t only the political leadership of the opposition that could not present a united front – neither could the forces behind them. In a parallel with the early stages of the war in Afghanistan against the Soviets in the 1980s, the funding for the opposition in Syria first came from wealthy individuals in the Gulf. Money and arms were handed over to the head of each Syrian opposition group. But then two relatives leading an opposition group found that if they split into two groups they could both get funding. The decentralised funding model encouraged division within the opposition just as the United Nations was trying to encourage the opposite. ‘It wasn’t intentional,’ the UN official told me, ‘but it was very reckless.’

The United Nations secretary general Ban Ki Moon summed up the mood of the organisation during a visit to the memorial for the victims of the Srebrenica massacre in the former Yugoslavia: ‘I do not want to see any of my successors, after twenty years, visiting Syria, apologising for what we could have done now to protect the civilians in Syria – which we are not doing now.’
⁷

It was this legacy of failed UN missions, General Robert Mood told me the following year, that drove his decision to end his mission when it became clear that neither side in the Syrian civil war was ready to stop fighting:

I remember vividly we had many discussions about ‘remember Rwanda, remember Srebrenica’, remember how the UN has on several occasions become a silent witness, almost protecting the status quo, being accused of becoming very close to complicit. We made the choice . . . it better serves the integrity of the UN to scale down the presence to a minimum, rather than to continue the mission.

When I asked an official in the State Department in late 2012 where the resistance to America taking the lead was coming from, the answer was unequivocal: ‘The President.’ The contrast between the lofty words in Cairo and his inaction over Syria was a symptom of the ‘innate ambivalence of this President’. Obama’s unwillingness to act even after it was clear that Syria was going to descend into chaos confounded and frustrated people in the State Department under Hillary Clinton. Those who have left, like Anne-Marie Slaughter, who is now the president of the US think tank New America Foundation, told me publicly what I had heard others still serving say privately: ‘This is just insane! I just find it stunning that a president who came to power wanting to forge a new relationship with the Muslim world is squandering a clear opportunity, but also risking a whole other generation of people who are going to come into power believing that we say one thing and do another. Or worse, that we absolutely betrayed them.’

There is no risk of that. It has already happened.

All four major outside anti-Assad players in the Syrian conflict – America, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar – misjudged the staying power of the regime. They assumed that Assad would last months, not years, even though the diplomats on the ground were telling them he was still in control. That is because they underestimated how much his regime would sectarianise the fighting. The Turks, encouraged by the Americans, spent the early months of the conflict giving the impression that they were going to play an active role trying to solve the crisis. When it dawned on them both that it was not going to be quick or easy, and that neither Ankara nor Washington could control the outcome, their enthusiasm waned. The Turkish public also soon grew jaded over the trouble on their doorstep and did not want to get drawn into it any further.
⁸

From late July 2012 the Syrian airforce had began ‘deliberately or indiscriminately’ killing civilians.
⁹
Senator John McCain, Obama’s old rival on the stump, had called that spring, when the death toll was around 7,500, for the US to ‘lead an international effort to protect key population centers in Syria . . . through airstrikes on Assad’s forces’. Airstrikes then might have made a difference, but by the following spring the death toll was already ten times higher. By then it had become difficult to know which among the fractured opposition fighters to root for, and whether the country they were fighting over would last.
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‘Everybody missed the train on this crisis,’ a diplomat in Damascus told me. ‘The UN did not show up, the Europeans and Americans did not show up. They left it all in the hands of the Arab League. Then the Arab League started messing it up from day one. They are the ones who radicalised it.’

Before the uprising began the Syrian regime had had high hopes for the year 2013. It was also looking forward to lots of international attention. There was going to be a kind of coming-out party. Even Mickey Mouse was invited: a 22-million-dollar new home was to be built for him in ‘Disney Syria’. The tourism ministry had plans for a big promotional push in 2013 to put Syria on the map. ‘Every place tells a story’ was its catchphrase.
¹¹
If Mickey had moved in he would have had a lot to write home about, because he was due to live in Homs. The story of Homs changed the conflict. Homs was where the wider world first learned of the savage brutality of the Assad regime and then realised it didn’t care enough to do much about it. Homs was where the world began its betrayal of the Syrian people.

In February 2012, and for the first time in the Syrian revolution, it was possible to watch the regime bombard civilians live on air. It happened in the Baba Amr district of Homs, and watch was all the world did. ‘Yesterday the Syrian government murdered hundreds of Syrian citizens, including women and children, in Homs through shelling and other indiscriminate violence . . .’ said President Obama on 3 February. ‘Assad must halt his campaign of killing and crimes against his own people now. He must step aside and allow a democratic transition to proceed immediately.’
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The previous August he’d said exactly the same thing, insisting: ‘For the sake of the Syrian people, time has come for President Assad to step aside.’
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None of these statements, nor any that followed, made any difference, because none of them included an ‘or else’ if Assad didn’t stop the slaughter. Even those who broadly supported Obama have judged that his passive response will haunt the region. ‘I do think the question that is going to nag at the world after the Arab uprisings is the lack of response on Syria,’ Ambassador Barbara Bodine told me.

The self-styled Baba Amr Brigade had not run away when they had the chance. They had stood and held their ground with a few light weapons. A small group of activists decided that they would set up video cameras to broadcast the conflict. They were trying to recreate the ‘Benghazi moment’, a point at which the international community would be forced to act to stop a massacre taking place in a large city by well-armed troops attacking almost defenceless civilians. But this time the United Nations did not leap into action. As President Obama observed, the massacre was allowed to take place.

‘We thought that when we started the live stream and the rockets began falling down that there would be a “no-fly zone” or that they would come immediately and stop this.’ As he said these words Omar Shakir began to chuckle. He was suddenly amused at his own naivety. Before the uprisings Omar, at the age of twenty, thought he had his life all mapped out. He was going to study medicine. He had started to learn German because he had a place in a university there. He ended up crammed inside a room with twenty people hoping that a shell wouldn’t come through the roof.

If you heard a voice in English on TV or radio from Homs during the fighting then it would have been Omar’s. Along with a small group of activists he created what they called a ‘media centre’ to get the story of their city to a world outside that he thought would care.

I feel disappointed because we heard rumours that they will attack us and that they will use every possible gun. So we brought a good camera, a MacBook, all the equipment to make a live stream [of images]. I came out after twenty-one days. And as I came out of the [escape] tunnel I thought Bashar al-Assad is going to stay until 2014, because he was shelling us with rockets, tanks, field artillery, mortars, he carried out crimes, he raped the women, and I thought with this live-stream camera something big will happen . . . I don’t know what more he has to do. After Baba Amr he did the whole city. So three months of shelling the city and they [the international community] were still talking about what they want to do.

One of Omar’s group had studied management, so he organised the eclectic mix of youngsters into teams, each with a different task. Most were students like Omar. One sold cigarettes, another was an IT graduate. One youngster called Jedi sold vegetables. Jedi filmed the most dramatic images because he was willing to take the greatest risks. They started with mobile-phone images and then used their savings to buy cheap cameras and then borrowed money from their relatives to get better ones.

At this stage those images were much more dangerous to the regime than anything the fledgling Free Syrian Army (FSA) could muster. The regime finally stopped Omar and his friends on the nineteenth day of the bombardment when a round hit the media centre, killing among others the journalist Marie Colvin from
The Times
.

‘At the beginning of the revolution, if you carried a weapon it’s OK, maybe they will arrest you for one or two months and then they will release you,’ said Omar. ‘But we had a friend from the beginning of the revolution, they arrested him in May 2011. Over the following year they broke his arms and his fingers and every time it healed they broke them again. Even now he is in prison. Anyone filming and sending to the outside, those people were the most wanted.’