The New Middle East (60 page)

After Homs many of the young revolutionaries began to put down their video cameras and take up guns. When the rebel fighters finally fled Baba Amr, after four weeks of bombardment, most of Omar’s group also made it out alive. By this time though three had been killed. Jedi escaped to Aleppo. It was there, while the city was still under the control of the government, that he was arrested. The young man considered by his friends to be the bravest of them all was tortured until he gave up the names of dozens of other activists.

Homs was where the Arab Spring woke up to the reality of the New Middle East it had created. As Syria began its civil war it became clear that the narrative had changed from the uprisings of the previous year. When it began, the protests in Syria were about the same causes that had brought about change in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya: democracy, equality, and a chance to shrug off the dictatorial regime of Bashar al-Assad. By the time the uprising had entered its second year the dynamics around it had changed. The protesters wanted the same things, but the Gulf states, and in particular Saudi Arabia, sensed an opportunity. They sought to exploit the turmoil in Syria to diminish the influence of Iran. By its third year the Syrian civil war had gone beyond anyone’s control. It wasn’t even clear what kind of Syria there would be when the fighting ended. ‘Something has been broken in Syria, and it’s not going to be put back together perfectly, immediately, anytime soon – even after Assad leaves,’ said President Obama.
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The patchwork of religions and sects in Syria reflected the broader fragmentation of the region along sectarian lines. The Pandora’s box of Sunni–Shia sectarianism had been opened by the American mismanagement of post-invasion Iraq. It had allowed the Iranians far more influence in their neighbour’s affairs than they could ever have dreamed of. Saudi Arabia wanted to turn the clock back. The head of the US military’s Central Command, General James Mattis, told a Senate hearing that ‘the collapse of the Assad regime would be the biggest strategic setback for Iran in 25 years.’
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The first attempt to unify the opposition had focused on Syrian exiles. In December 2011 Hillary Clinton met with, and thus anointed, a group of exiles calling themselves the Syrian National Council, SNC. After their discussions in Geneva the State Department declared: ‘The United States considers the Syrian National Council to be a leading and legitimate representative of Syrians.’
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Then together with the EU, the Arab League and other largely like-minded countries and institutions they all met under the banner of the ‘Friends of Syria’ in Tunis the following February. It was a pointless meeting because the Syrian exiles were made up of largely irrelevant people with no influence whatsoever over the fighters inside the country. To illustrate its worthlessness the Saudis walked out, complaining that too little was being done to support the Syrian rebels on the ground.

The Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, while sitting in a meeting with the American secretary of state Hillary Clinton, responded to a question from the media about arming the Syrian opposition with the words: ‘I think it’s an excellent idea.’ So they did. A few days later Hillary Clinton, in a mild rebuke to the Saudi statement, said:

We have a very dangerous set of actors in the region; al-Qaeda, Hamas and those who are on our terrorist list to be sure, claiming to support the opposition. You have many Syrians more worried about what could come next . . . but I want to make clear for anyone watching the horrible massacre that is going on to ask yourself ‘OK what do you do?’ If you bring in automatic weapons which you can maybe smuggle across the border, OK what do they do against tanks and heavy artillery?
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However it emerged the following year in public testimony to Congress that by the summer of 2012 Hillary Clinton, the defence secretary Leon Panetta and the then director of the CIA David Petraeus had all supported arming the rebels. They presented a plan to the president. He rejected it.
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The White House was furious its internal divisions had been laid bare at the Congressional hearing.
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So in 2012 the US administration’s policy was to wait and hope that economic sanctions imposed by the West and the Arab League would provoke either the regime’s collapse or an internal coup. ‘There is no plan B,’ a Western diplomat I met in neighbouring Lebanon told me that summer. Throughout the year food and fuel prices did shoot up, factories closed and jobs were lost, but the regime still managed to cling on by digging deep into its foreign currency reserves. Those Syrians who could started to send their families and their money over the border into Lebanon. Iraqis who had earlier fled to Syria during the civil war there started drifting back home. Iraq was far from stable and still suffered from regular massive suicide bomb attacks, but the level of violence in Syria far outstripped that of its neighbour even during Iraq’s most wretched days.
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Those losing the most in the economic crisis were on the same side of the sectarian divide as those trying to bring the regime down. Much of the business class was drawn from the Sunni Muslim community. They had worked within the system and profited from it. They were thought to be an influential force in the country, and the Western governments hoped that as sanctions bit they would be able to place pressure on the regime from within to resolve the crisis by adopting the so-called ‘Yemeni model’. This was supposed to play out with Assad stepping aside, as Yemen’s President Saleh had done, and then perhaps going into exile with some of his ill-gotten gains.

‘Saddam Hussein lived under sanctions for ten years. What was the result?’ said Wa’el as we sat in his still air-conditioned office in Damascus during the war. ‘The sanctions on the country are affecting the poor people, not the rich. It’s not affecting the regime.’ Wa’el was one of those Sunni businessmen who had managed to make money under the regime. This didn’t mean he was some kind of collaborator, though he was far from a revolutionary. Everyone had to work within the system if they wanted to stay out of jail, get their kids into school and provide for their families. Everyone in Syria recognised that. No one believed before 2011 that anything was ever going to change. The Assad regime had a hold on everyone because it knew all their secrets. Corruption was not a by-product of the regime, it was integral to it, because it was a tool of suppression and it touched every aspect of a Syrian’s life.

‘It’s an unbelievable system,’ Wa’el told me. ‘You have to do it even when you give birth to a child, starting from the moment you take your wife into hospital. The nurse does not work unless you give her extra, the cleaning lady in the hospital does not clean the room unless you give her extra. So you start living with the system from the day you are born without knowing it.’ He gave a big belly laugh. ‘Somebody did it on your behalf!’

And like most of the other dictatorial Arab regimes, corruption in Syria evolved into a system of state-sponsored entrapment. ‘There is always a sword hanging over you and they can at any point use it, and legally. The system has been built in such a way that you cannot apply the rules and regulations. You have to operate illegally in anything you do. Today if they come to my office and only take the papers on my desk and nothing else’ – he waved his arms over the neatly stacked piles of documents in front of him – ‘I’ll be in jail for the next five years, because their rules do not allow me to act in the regular proper way.’

When I started working I had the fax machine in the drawer and I made a hole in the side for the wire because it was a crime to have a fax machine until 1995. How can you operate a business if you do not have a fax machine? Companies would laugh if you don’t have a fax machine, but we used to tell our suppliers the fax time is from three to four p.m. We would send them a telex (through the government post office) saying: ‘We have turned on the fax machine, send the faxes!’ And the [Syrian officials] knew everyone had a fax machine because they were the ones involved in smuggling it to begin with from across the border.

So you have the fax machine and so you become a threat to national security because of your fax machine. The whole system is built for you to do something wrong so that they can cut your head off any time they want to. Corruption is everywhere. Dubai, Saudi, are full of corruption but they did build their countries. The difference here is we have been in a standstill for the last thirty to forty years.

From his base in Damascus Wa’el was funding humanitarian supplies for the opposition. The following year, in early 2013, Wa’el was kidnapped by a group of local Shabiha masquerading as a violent Salafist group. They demanded a ransom. He was eventually released after some of his contacts in the regime’s security apparatus intervened on his behalf.

‘Can a body live without a heart?’ Bashar al-Assad had demanded as he tore into the Arab League in January 2012 for what he saw as its betrayal of his nation and his leadership after Syria was suspended from the group. ‘Who said that Syria is the throbbing heart of Arabism? It wasn’t a Syrian, it was President Abdel Nasser, and this is still true . . . without Syria the Arab League is no longer Arab,’ he declared.
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By the time he was saying these words the heart of Arabism was already broken. Throughout his address, after his regime had finally lost legitimacy in the eyes of an institution it had once championed, Assad evoked the call of Pan-Arabism. Most of the rest of the region had buried the idea with Nasser, but decades later Assad still called it the ‘symbol of our identity’. That was because of all the countries that once embraced the idea, Syria needed it most. Of all the people looking for an identity the Syrians were the most lost. Assad was standing in Damascus in one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth. But as he stood raging at his podium he was lying to the world about what was happening in a country that had itself been born of deceit.

‘The Sykes–Picot Agreement is a shocking document. It is not only the product of greed at its worst, that is greed allied to suspicion and so leading to stupidity; it also stands out as a startling piece of double-dealing.’
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These are the conclusions of the historian George Antonius on the backroom deal in May 1916 that carved up the old Ottoman Empire after the First World War and led to the creation of what is now Syria. It was drawn up in secret by Sir Mark Sykes of Britain and Georges Picot of France, who coloured the map of the region into blue bits for France, red bits for Great Britain, and a brown bit, Palestine, where would ‘be established an international administration’. Sykes ended up playing his role in this enterprise by what he called ‘extraordinary luck’ and what others deemed a large amount of guile. He had given the impression to the British prime minister of the day that he was not only an expert on Middle Eastern affairs but that he was also fluent in both Turkish and Arabic. He could not speak either language.
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The Sykes–Picot Agreement was signed in secret because the British had already offered to recognise the same land as an independent Arab state led by the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein Bin Ali, in return for him leading a revolt against the Ottomans during the First World War. The present King Abdullah of Jordan is a direct descendant of Hussein Bin Ali. He would also be the first Arab ruler to call for Bashar al-Assad to step down. The European powers did not honour their commitments to King Abdullah’s ancestor; instead the modern state of Syria came into being as a French mandate. When they finally withdrew in April 1946 they left behind something that could only be properly called a ‘country’ in geographical terms. In response to this European imperialism there emerged, in the early 1940s, the Ba’ath Party, which sought to transcend cultural differences with a form of secular Arab nationalism. Ba’ath means renaissance in Arabic.

There was nothing about Syria that united the people within its borders. They were of different religions and different ethnicities. They had different regional and class identities. So it was not surprising that the nation was completely unstable. Ba’athism sought to give its people a common secular Arab identity. After Syria’s independence there was coup upon coup upon coup, until the Ba’ath Party itself came to power by means of a coup in 1963, and it stayed. When it seized power it introduced a state of emergency, which lasted until it was lifted as a gesture by Bashar al-Assad in April 2011, by which time the country really was in a state of emergency.

As in neighbouring Iraq, under the Ba’ath Party most government jobs and all key posts went to its members. Because it was secular it offered no impediment to progress for the Alawites. It was functional but it wasn’t inspiring. The inspiration to realise the Pan-Arab dream came from Nasser. The last putsch in Syria took place in 1970 and brought Hafez al-Assad to power. He had risen through the ranks of the air force and the Ba’ath Party. He was feared, not loved. Along with Ba’ath Party membership, membership of his Alawite sect also became increasingly important for government jobs and patronage. That concentration of power mainly in the hands of Alawites only increased under Bashar. The son was bequeathed what the father had spent his life creating.