MoA vraagt zich af: is dit er doorheen geglipt...?
May 26, 2017
Syria - Truth Slips Through In The New York Times - NATO Preps to Fight Iran And Russia
The New York Times Magazine has an interesting piece about east Aleppo. Robert Worth visited it recently and talked to people there. The NYT editors/censors inserted many of their standard slander against the Syrian government, but the can not drown out the realities described therein.
Thus the piece is headline: Aleppo After the Fall but one of the key sentences in it says just the opposite:
Yasser said he was one of the first people to come back [to east-Aleppo], right after what he — like everyone else I met — called the liberation.
Jihadi propaganda claims of government bombing of random hospitals without reason "verified" by a Skype call to some al-Qaeda propagandist in Idleb- are mixed with reality based on-the-ground reporting:
On my second day in the city, I went to see the Aleppo Eye Hospital, a sprawling compound that the rebels had used as a military headquarters. As we walked through the burned and shattered building, my government minder and the soldiers guarding the place kept picking up markers of the rebels’ Islamist leanings. They weren’t hard to find. A fire-blackened car out front still had the Qaeda logo on its hood. ...
Unfortunately the piece also includes factual errors:
The reporter, an Aleppan named Rida al-Basha, described the neighborhoods where [looting] had taken place and named the militias, including the notorious Tiger Forces, whose leaders include well-known thugs.
I do not doubt that looting has taken place after the liberation of east-Aleppo. Those who supported the "rebel" invasion of their city will have lost everything. But looting by the Tiger Force "militia"? The Tiger Force are the Special Operations Division of the Syrian Arab Army, not a "militia". It is led by highly professional officers, not by "thugs". Its leader, General Suheil al-Hassan, has been in the army for over 26 years. The division is armed with Russian T-90 tanks and other heavy assault equipment. It is an offensive unit which has been very busy on various fronts. It is not a mopping up or occupation force for urban areas that would have time for organized looting in Aleppo. The quoted claim is inconsistent with those facts.
But still - the Magazine piece is filled with detailed story of real people who factually tell what the "rebels" have done to their city. How they looted every factory and house down to the copper electricity wire and sold everything off to Turkey. Wherever the story is based on real reporting it confirms the view and position of the anti-Islamist Syrian majority which supports its government. After years of claiming the opposite in its hundreds of anti-Syrian propaganda pieces one wonder how the NYT editors let this pass.
One anecdote even reveals who the Syrians will choose as their future leader:
My Syrian businessman friend told me that he twice gathered about a dozen people for dinner and offered them a hypothetical in strict confidence. It is up to you to name the next president of Syria, he said. Whom would you choose? The guests were all Syrians, and none supported the regime. To his surprise, almost all of them named Assad.
And that, dear reader, is why the U.S. and its proxies are against truly democratic elections in Syria. Their nemesis would easily win and prevent the planned neo-liberal looting of what is left of the Syrian state.
The Islamic proxy forces of the "west", al-Qaeda under its various disguises, Ahar al-Sham and even ISIS are mostly done. The latest especially is no longer a capable military force but is reverting to guerilla levels of operation. Its final defeat will take a long time but it must and will be achieved by local forces.
Despite that the U.S. pressed on NATO members to let the NATO organization join its "fight against ISIS". The single NATO members were already part of the U.S. coalition. But NATO as an organization brings large scale command and control capabilities as well as additional resources. (All under U.S. control.)
Make no mistake - "fighting ISIS" is not the real purpose of the move. The U.S. wants NATO support to invade Syria from the north in Idleb as well as from the south near Deraa and from the south-east starting at the al-Tanf border station to Iraq. Syria and its allies will now be fought under the disguise of "fighting ISIS" which factually can no longer be the purpose. Thus NATO, together with Wahhabi Gulf forces, will now be engaged in an expanded war not only against the Syria government but especially against its Russian and Iranian allies. Trump's endorsement of anti-Iranian rhetoric on his visit in Saudi Arabia served a similar purpose.
Syria and its allies will try to prevent a further invasion by cutting off al-Tanf and holding on to Deraa city - thereby blocking any wider military moves. But those measures will probably be in vain. Unless some sane voices intervene we are now at the beginning of a far wider and more dangerous war that can easily slip out of anyone's control.
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Posted by b at 09:49 AM | Comments (64)
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Hier het artikel uit de New York Times.
U kan dus controleren of MoA de uitspraken die hij zegt te citeren, werkelijk daar kan hebben gelezen.
Ik heb het artikel niet geklezen, maar ongetwijfeld zal het zeer negatief ove rAssad zijn. Dat mogen we ook verwachten.
Tochlijkt het me dat de uitspraken die MoA citeert ook een belangrijk deel zijn van de realiteit in Syrië,en die is dus anders dan wat men ons doorgaans wil doen geloven.
As the Syrian civil war turns
in favor of the regime,
a nation adjusts to a new reality — and a
complicated new picture of the conflict emerges.
a nation adjusts to a new reality — and a
complicated new picture of the conflict emerges.
Continue reading the
main storyShare This Page
One morning in mid-December, a
group of soldiers banged on the door of a house in eastern Aleppo. A male voice
responded from inside: “Who are you?” A soldier answered: “We’re the Syrian
Arab Army. It’s O.K., you can come out. They’re all gone.”
The door opened. A middle-aged man appeared. He had a
gaunt, distinguished face, but his clothes were threadbare and his teeth looked
brown and rotted. At the soldiers’ encouragement, he stepped hesitantly forward
into the street. He explained to them, a little apologetically, that he had not
crossed his threshold in four and a half years.
The man gazed around for a moment as if baffled, his
eyes filling with tears. The regime of President Bashar al-Assad had just
recaptured the city after years of bombing and urban warfare that had made
Aleppo a global byword for savagery. This frail-looking man had survived at the
war’s geographic center entirely alone, an urban Robinson Crusoe, living on
stocks of dry food and whatever he could grow in his small inner courtyard.
Now, as he stumbled through an alley full of twisted metal and rubble, he saw
for the first time that the front lines, marked by a wall of sandbags, were
barely 20 yards from his house.
Three months later, in March, he sat with me under the
tall, spindly orange tree in his courtyard and described how he barricaded
himself in when the fighting started. He goes by the name Abu Sami, and he has
the mild, patient manners of a scholar; he taught at Aleppo University before
the war. In the early days of the rebel takeover, he said, his nephews used to
drop by with fresh bread and meat. But starting in 2013, the shelling grew
worse, and he would go six months or more without seeing another human face.
There was no water, no electric light; he gathered rainwater in buckets and
boiled it and used a small solar panel to charge his phone. He made vinegar
from grapes he grew in the courtyard. He treated his illnesses with aloe and
other herbs he grew in pots. Once, when a rotten tooth became too painful, he
yanked it out with pliers. He cowered by his bed when bombs shook the house to
its foundation.
Photo
Abu Sami at his home in
eastern Aleppo. CreditSebastián Liste/Noor
Images, for The New York TimesPhoto
Inside Abu Sami’s home. CreditSebastián Liste/Noor Images, for The New York
Times
Most of all, he sustained himself by reading. He
carried out a stack of books from his bedroom to show me: treatises by Sigmund
Freud, novels by Henry Miller, histories of science and psychology and religion
and mythology and cooking, a book on radical theater by the American drama
critic Robert Brustein. Some were in Russian, a language he learned as a young
man. “I read these things so I wouldn’t have to think about politics or current
events,” he said. He read plays — Shakespeare and Molière were favorites — and
in his solitude, he found that he was able to see the entire drama acted out in
his mind, as if it were onstage.
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He led me upstairs to see his dusty study, where the
walls and ceiling were shredded with dozens of small shrapnel holes that let in
fingers of sunlight. He picked up a bomb fragment, rolled it in his palm and
laughed. He pointed to the house next door, where his neighbor, a quiet man who
kept pigeons on the roof, had lived until a group of rebels arrived, shouting,
and dragged him from the door. They brought back his corpse half an hour later.
I asked Abu Sami why he never left. He gave the same
answer that so many others gave me: because it was his house. And because day
after day, year after year, he kept thinking, Surely this war is about to end.
In the eastern Aleppo streets beyond Abu Sami’s house, little
has changed since the December morning when he rediscovered his ruined city. A
narrow alley leads to an open area where a “hell cannon” still sits, the
homemade howitzer used by rebels to fire on government-controlled western
Aleppo. Beyond it, there are buildings with pancaked roofs, evidence of Russian
and Syrian bombs. There are piles of rubble so high that entire streets remain
impassable. Throughout the former rebel zone that once proudly called itself
“free Aleppo,” there are hospitals and schools and houses — it goes on for
miles — that have been reduced to uneven heaps of stone and broken concrete,
where the faint smell of buried corpses still lingers.
In the United States, the drawn-out siege of Aleppo —
where the Syrian regime and its Russian allies repeatedly bombed hospitals and
civilian areas — was widely deplored as a war crime comparable to the worst
massacres of the Bosnian war during the 1990s. The refusal to intervene, some
said, was a defining moral failure of the Obama administration. On the other
side, regime supporters saw only the rebels’ atrocities and their manipulation
of civilians for propaganda. The “fall” of Aleppo, they said, was really the
“liberation” of a city from terrorist rule, and a sign that Assad had all but
won the civil war.
Both portraits are false and self-serving. The Syrian
tragedy started in a moment of deceptive simplicity, when the peaceful
protesters of the 2011 Arab Spring seemed destined to inherit the future.
Chants for freedom turned quickly to insurrection, bullets and war. But it took
some time for outsiders to recognize how different Syria was, how its internal
schisms — like tightly coiled springs — would provoke the fears and ambitions
of all its neighbors. The Saudis and Turks wanted to replace Assad with a
reliable Sunni client, while Iran and Hezbollah held fast to their one foothold
in the Arab world. Russia, which intervened decisively in 2015, had its own
motives: flouting American designs and protecting a reliable autocrat. The
United States, having expected Assad to fall on his own, dithered over support
for the rebels.
Aleppo became the rebels’ last major urban redoubt.
Its fall reconfigured the Syrian battleground: The Saudis and Turks resigned
themselves to Assad’s rule, and their rivals exulted in a victory that seemed
to justify years of blood and treasure. The Assad regime happily stepped out of
the limelight as the world’s attention turned back to capturing Raqqa, the ISIS
capital in Syria’s northeast.
Photo
The destroyed citadel in
Aleppo’s Old City. CreditSebastián Liste/Noor
Images, for The New York Times
One small measure of the regime’s confidence was a
renewed willingness to let Western journalists — including me — travel the
country. I was under the usual police-state surveillance, with a minder from
the Information Ministry accompanying me during my travels outside Damascus.
But scarcely any Americans had been to Aleppo since the regime’s victory in
December. The city had become a symbol of sorts, a sprawling commercial hub
where every faction seemed to have left its mark. I had been trying to get back
there for years; it was a place I loved when I covered the region from Beirut.
I wanted to wind back the clock and make sense of how a city that seemed so
averse to politics — of any kind — had been torn apart.
Even Syrians have trouble answering that question. In
March, I met a lawyer named Anas Joudeh, who took part in some of the 2011
protests. Joudeh no longer considers himself a member of the opposition. I
asked him why. “No one is 100 percent with the regime, but mostly these people
are unified by their resistance to the opposition,” Joudeh told me. “They know
what they don’t want, not what they want.” In December, he said, “Syrians
abroad who believe in the revolution would call me and say, ‘We lost Aleppo.’
And I would say, ‘What do you mean?’ It was only a Turkish card guarded by
jihadis.” For these exiled Syrians, he said, the specter of Assad’s crimes
looms so large that they cannot see anything else. They refuse to acknowledge
the realities of a rebellion that is corrupt, brutal and compromised by foreign
sponsors. This is true. Eastern Aleppo may not have been Raqqa, where ISIS
advertised its rigid Islamist dystopia and its mass beheadings. But as a symbol
of Syria’s future, it was almost as bad: a chaotic wasteland full of feuding
militias — some of them radical Islamists — who hoarded food and weapons while
the people starved.
As for the regime’s victory there, it probably would
not have taken place if Turkey had not withdrawn some of its rebel proxies to
focus on fighting the Kurds. Aleppo may have helped the regime’s morale, but
the war is likely to grind on for years, sustained and manipulated by outside
powers. Assad needs them: His army has been decimated by war and desertions.
That may help explain his use of chemical weapons in the town of Khan Sheikhoun
in early April, which prompted the Trump administration’s slap-on-the-wrist
missile strike. With his manpower running out, Assad cares more about
reinforcing his rule — at any cost — than rehabilitating his reputation in the
West, which might have provided loans to help rebuild his shattered country.
All the same, Aleppo was a turning point, and in some
ways an emblem of the wider war. Its fall appears to have persuaded many
ordinary Syrians that the regime, for all its appalling cruelty and corruption,
is their best shot at something close to normality. This is almost certainly
true for the Trump administration too. President Trump may call Assad an
“animal” and hint at more airstrikes, but he cannot unseat him, because he
knows that the alternative is not the kinder, gentler place once dreamed of by
opposition activists. It is anarchy, where the warlords rule not from the
presidential palace but from every town and every street.
‘No one is 100 percent with
the regime, but mostly these people are unified by their resistance to the
opposition.’
First they stole everything,
then they burned everything,” Freddy Marrache told me as I stumbled along in
the darkness behind him. Above us were vaulted medieval stone roofs,
interrupted here and there by huge shell holes. “This was the spice market —
it’s totally gone. The front line was just here.” Underfoot was a slurry of ash
and garbage. Marrache, a 48-year-old businessman with a pale, shaved head and
an air of quiet alertness, made frequent visits as a child to Aleppo’s Old
City. The souqs were its crown jewel, a cloacal maze of market
stalls packed with spices, fabrics, silks, leather, soaps, gold, meat, fruit,
carpets, toilet seats — almost anything. It went on for more than eight miles,
one of the largest covered markets in the world. Aleppans used to say that a
blind man could find his way through them by following the smells of the
merchandise. Then, in 2012, the rebels came, and the souqs became
the perfect refuge for urban guerrillas.
Marrache and his sister, Marie-Michelle, had offered
to show me the remains of the Khan al Nahassine, a grand old house attached to
the souqs that was built in 1539 and has been owned by their
family since the 1800s. I first saw it a decade earlier, when their mother,
Jenny Poche Marrache, walked me through it. She was then in her 60s, and she
had a sour elegance that seemed to match the place. I remember her complaining
about Islamists as she chain-smoked and concluding acidly in French, “Soon I’ll
be dead, and it won’t matter.” She waited patiently as I stared at the parade
of antiquities on every wall: paintings, sculptures, documents, old musical
instruments, photographs. That house was a shrine to the old Levantine world of
which Aleppo — with its polyglot traders, its mix of Europe and Asia,
Christianity and Islam — had been the center. Jenny died in 2015, before she
could see the extent of the damage to the house.
Everything was gone. Even the copper wiring had been
stripped out. The walls were still there, but on the far side some rooms had
collapsed into the courtyard after heavy shelling. “You remember the painting
that was here?” Freddy asked. I did. It was of a woman in Renaissance dress,
the wife of the first Venetian consul in Aleppo. (Aleppo still has honorary
consulships for many European countries.) The painting was memorable because it
was painted in the same room where it hung; you could recognize the other
objects and the shape of the wall. Freddy explained that the painting had
turned up in Turkey, like much of what the rebels had stolen across Aleppo. An
Istanbul antiques dealer told them that he would sell it back to them for
$20,000. When they protested that it was stolen, Freddy told me, the dealer
said dismissively, “I get things from Syria every day.”
Photo
A wall where pictures used to
hang in the Khan al Nahassine. CreditSebastián Liste/Noor
Images, for The New York Times
Back in the souqs, I kept trying to
superimpose my memories of the place. We passed near the silk merchants’ area,
now blackened and silent. Before 2011, I used to stop there and visit a
flamboyant young trader with a round, cherubic face. He would give me tea and
drape me with scarves. His little stall was covered with pictures of gay icons
like Judy Garland, a reference that his Syrian partners seemed not to get (or
perhaps they just didn’t care). I still have his business card, with a picture
of Oscar Wilde and the quote: “I can resist everything except temptation.”
Aleppo in those days was a magnet for footloose journalists and adventure
tourists. We would spend hours getting lost in the souqs and
then stop for drinks in the dimly lit bar at the Hotel Baron, gazing at its old
unpaid bar tab left by T.E. Lawrence, our heads swimming with nostalgia for an
era we knew only from books.
Now parts of the city were literally unrecognizable.
In al-Hatab Square, once one of the prettier spots in the Old City, I found
only a giant, uneven mound of rubble and earth that rose 15 feet above the
street, with grass growing in it. I almost stepped on an unexploded Turkish gas
bomb surrounded by yellow spring flowers. On the square’s edges, half the
buildings were destroyed. It was hard to believe this was once an orderly urban
setting, lined with restaurants and hotels. The last time I was in Aleppo, in
late 2010, I stayed at a beautiful old boutique hotel near the square, the Beit
Wakil. I remember the owner taking me down into a dark, earthen-walled
subbasement to show me a network of tunnels built centuries earlier. You could
travel all the way to the citadel — the great medieval palace that towers over
the Old City — without going aboveground, he said. They were built during the
17th century, when intermittent wars often made streets too treacherous to
walk. “Perhaps we will need them again,” he said.
What destroyed Aleppo? It was
not the sectarianism that is often held up as a key to the Syrian war. It was
not just “terrorism,” the word used by regime apologists to fend off any share
of blame. Those things played a role, but the core of the conflict in Aleppo,
as in much of Syria, was a divide between urban wealth and rural poverty. It is
not new. Travelers in the Ottoman era used to describe the shocking gulf
between Aleppo’s opulence and the countryside surrounding it, where peasants
lived in almost Stone Age conditions. Later, this divide mapped onto the city
itself, as eastern Aleppo spread and filled with poor migrants. Deeply religious
and mostly illiterate, smoldering with class resentment, they became the foot
soldiers of a violent insurgency led by the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1970s.
That rebellion burned for years and culminated in the Syrian regime’s notorious
massacre of 10,000 to 30,000 people in the city of Hama in 1982. Hundreds of
people were killed in Aleppo, too, and a siege atmosphere marked the entire
city. The Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa, who grew up in Aleppo during those
years and wrote a novel about it, told me in 2008 that the city’s cosmopolitan
traditions had helped protect it. But he added: “All this has harmed Syrian
society so much. If what happened in the 1980s were to happen again, I think
the Islamists would win.”
One tragedy of Aleppo is that this rift between rich
and poor was slowly mending in the years just before the 2011 uprisings. An
economic renaissance was underway, fueled by thousands of small factories on
the city’s outskirts. The workers were mostly from eastern Aleppo, and the
owners from the west. A trade deal with Turkey, whose border is just 30 miles
to the north, brought new business and tourists and optimism. I remember
sitting at cafe table with two Turkish traders just outside the citadel in late
2009. Tourists thronged all around us, and the two men talked excitedly about
how new joint ventures were melting the animosity between their country and
Syria. “Erdogan and Assad, they are like real friends,” one of them said,
referring to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.
This kind of optimism was one reason the revolution
took so long to reach Aleppo. All through 2011, as the rest of Syria erupted in
protest, its largest city was quiet. But by 2012, in the villages just beyond
the city’s edges, weaponry was flowing in from across the Turkish border and
battalions were being formed. “The countryside was boiling,” I was told by
Adnan Hadad, an opposition activist who was there at the time and belonged to
the Revolutionary Military Council in Aleppo, a group led by Syrian military
officers who defected. The council was eager for more European and American
recognition and sensitive to Western calls for the preservation of most of
Syria’s state institutions. But local rural people tended to side with a more
Islamist and less patient group called Liwa al-Tawheed. Tawheed’s members
“considered themselves more authentic” and had begun getting their own funding
from Persian Gulf donors, Hadad told me. In the spring of 2012, Tawheed’s
members began pushing for a military takeover of Aleppo, accusing the council
of excessive caution and even secret deals with the regime. The council
resisted, saying they should move only when it was clear that the city’s people
wanted them to. In July, Tawheed took matters into its own hands. Armed
insurgents flooded eastern and southwestern parts of the city, taking over
civilian houses as well as police stations in the name of the revolution. Hadad
considered the move a “fatal mistake,” he told me, and resigned from the
military council.
By then, eastern Aleppo had become a rebel stronghold.
In early 2013, elections for provincial councils took place, giving the rebels
a civilian veneer. But the councils, initially funded by the Syrian branch of
the Muslim Brotherhood, were soon under pressure from the Nusra Front, the
Syrian Qaeda affiliate, and other hard-line groups. Later, ISIS forces captured
parts of the city and forced residents to live by their rigid code. In theory,
Aleppo was an embattled showplace for the Syrian revolution’s aspirations. In
fact, most civilians were dependent on a patchwork of armed rebel factions for
food and protection. The constant pressure of war left almost no room for a
real economy, and many of the city’s factories had been repurposed by the
rebels as military bases.
Now Aleppo’s great economic engine lies in ruins. One
afternoon, a 45-year-old factory owner named Ghassan Nasi took me to the
industrial area just west of Aleppo called Layramoon. The sounds of the city
dissipated as we drove west, and when the car stopped, there was an eerie
silence. An entire district that once hummed with 1,000 small factories was now
abandoned, most of its buildings shattered and burned. “It is a 100 percent
loss here,” Nasi said. We walked down a dusty street to his factory, a textile
and dyeing house that employed 130 people who worked 24 hours a day in three
shifts. The door still had its metal filigree gate and marble steps. “This is
where workers stamped in and out,” he said.
Inside,
the huge factory floor was burned black and strewn with rubble. The rebels had
used it to make weapons, he said. His old office had been used to house
prisoners. Nasi told me quietly that he collapsed to his knees upon seeing it
again last summer. “I lost $10 million in machinery, $4 million in land,” he
said. “Even if we rebuild, the machinery is gone, and with the sanctions, we
cannot buy new machinery.” On top of that, there is inflation: The American
dollar was worth 47 Syrian pounds before the crisis, and now it trades
unofficially at about 520. And Turkey — where much of the Aleppo factories’
machinery was transported and sold, often with the collusion of Syrian owners
who wanted to avoid losing everything — now sells similar textiles for less.
Reviving Syrian industry, and the social glue it might once have provided, is
next to impossible.
I asked Nasi what had become
of his workers. He said about 70 percent of them joined the rebels. He didn’t
seem bitter or surprised about this. Some lived nearby, so when the area was
divided, they had little choice. As for the others, they were poor and ill
educated and religious, and the rebels promised them a lot. “The average salary
for workers was about a hundred dollars a week,” he said. “The rebels paid
more.”
For many Aleppans, caught up in a conflict they had tried to avoid, the
only rule was survival. On a warm spring morning in 2013, a 22-year-old man
named Yasser lay bleeding in the middle of a street in eastern Aleppo. Moments
earlier, he had carried his mother, mortally wounded by a sniper, into his
grandparents’ car. As he watched the car pull away, three bullets struck his
legs and left arm. He collapsed into the street and could not move. Shots rang
out over his head: regime soldiers trading fire with rebels on either side of
him. The soldiers heard Yasser calling for help and told him to come toward
them. “I can’t move,” he shouted. Then a rebel spoke from a nearby building,
promising to help. When he answered, a regime soldier called out, “Who are you
talking to?” The rebels quickly warned him not to answer or they would kill
him.
“I was very scared of both sides,” Yasser told me
later. “If I went to one side, the other would kill me.” He lay there, his
limbs going numb, too frightened to move or speak for more than four hours.
I met Yasser in March in Sha’ar, the most devastated
neighborhood in eastern Aleppo. He was short and solidly built, with a snub
nose and a gruff manner. He was selling tomatoes and cucumbers from a stand, on
a block where many buildings were in ruins. Across the street was a fruit
stand, and next to it, a loud generator, set up by the government to supply
electricity. Surprising numbers of people walked the streets. This place had
been almost completely empty a few weeks earlier, but now that Russian mine-clearing
teams had been through and the rubble was mostly pushed aside, Sha’ar’s
residents were returning to their homes. (More than 100,000 went back to
eastern Aleppo between January and March, according to the International
Organization for Migration.) Yasser said he was one of the first people to come
back, right after what he — like everyone else I met — called the liberation.
It was a gesture of defiance, aimed at the rebels. “What we lost, we will get
it back,” he said. He wore military fatigues, and he told me he re-enlisted in
the military after he got out of the hospital in 2013. “My blood type is
O-Assad,” he said.
Later, Yasser showed me the
place where he was wounded. It was the first time he’d been back since it
happened, and the block had changed, like most of eastern Aleppo. “There was a
checkpoint here, there were sandbags there,” he said. He pointed out the
first-floor window where an old man had talked to him through curtains as he
lay on the street. He showed me the building where he thought the sniper had
been hiding, about 100 yards away. He explained how his ordeal had ended: An
airstrike hit the building, and the sniper vanished. A man on a motorbike
rescued Yasser, carrying him to a house, where someone cleaned his wounds.
Later, he was taken to a hospital, where a doctor told him that his mother was
dead. The doctor put a needle in his arm and told him to count to three, and he
blacked out.
I found Yasser’s story credible, and his uncle later
backed it up. But as I stood on the street with him, I found myself wondering:
Did he really know who shot him? Bullets were coming from each side. As he lay
there bleeding, whom was he more frightened of — the rebels or the regime?
Yasser clearly knew how his government is portrayed in the West and seemed
defensive about it. He told me a rebel group tried to blame the regime for his
mother’s death. Later, he said, the same group admitted its guilt and offered
blood money, which the family refused to take. This seemed less plausible. He
walked me down the street to his uncle’s house, where he said we would hear
another story about what the rebels had done.
Yasser’s uncle was a big,
heavyset man with a jowly face and a look of weary resignation in his eyes. He
welcomed us into his tiny apartment, where he offered me a stool and sat down
on his old brass bed. He sighed and apologized for being unable to offer us
tea. Then he showed us his scarred arm and told us the story of how his family
was devastated in January 2013. He was driving his pregnant daughter to the
hospital when machine-gun fire riddled the car, killing his wife instantly and
wounding everyone else. He told me rebels from the Free Syrian Army pulled them
from the car and rushed them to a nearby hospital. I asked who fired on them.
“I don’t know,” he said.
There was a silence. Until
that moment, I had not heard anyone miss an opportunity to blame the rebels.
With my government minder looking on, Yasser began asking where the gunfire had
come from. Wasn’t it from a tall building nearby? Weren’t the rebels in that
building? The uncle shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said again. I had the
impression that he was profoundly depressed and past caring about what he was
supposed to say. Yasser kept pressing. Eventually, the uncle caved in and said,
Sure, it was probably the rebels. “My wife died a martyr,” he said. “For the
F.S.A., I cannot say, because they helped me and my wife. I cannot say how they
are with other people.” And then quietly, he began to cry.
There is a billboard hanging over one of Aleppo’s main intersections that
shows a soldier wearing a helmet, with his entire face shrouded in shadow.
Beneath it are the words “Aleppo in Our Eyes.” The image stuck with me. Which
Aleppo? Whose eyes? In Arabic, the expression conveys affection, but the words
also seemed to hint at the city’s fragmented loyalties, its atmosphere of
enduring suspicion. It wasn’t just regime allegiance that made people like
Yasser tailor their stories. He refused to be photographed, and when I asked
why, he hinted that the rebels might still be able to find and kill him, even
after the regime’s triumph. Another man described receiving a visit at his home
in government-controlled Aleppo from two ISIS members, who calmly blackmailed
him and went on their way, unhurried. The city had changed hands so many times
that no one could be fully confident whose eyes would be watching them.
On my second day in the city, I went to see the Aleppo
Eye Hospital, a sprawling compound that the rebels had used as a military
headquarters. As we walked through the burned and shattered building, my
government minder and the soldiers guarding the place kept picking up markers
of the rebels’ Islamist leanings. They weren’t hard to find. A fire-blackened
car out front still had the Qaeda logo on its hood. Inside, the rebels had put
up paper signs to show how they used the rooms: a room where Shariah rulings
were handed out by a religious sheikh, a document about Islamic punishments.
There was a prison too, and I later met a woman who seems to have been kept
there. She had been captured in a rural village, and the rebels killed her
husband and then moved her from place to place, intending to trade her for
their own prisoners. There were female jailers who beat and cursed her and
called her an infidel. She told me she was given a bottle of water to wash
herself with once every 10 to 15 days. During the final battle for Aleppo, she
often heard the sounds of bombs and mortars exploding nearby, and her jailers
would taunt her, saying Assad’s bombs will kill you.
As I walked through those ruins, it was clear enough
that the rebels who ruled eastern Aleppo had done some awful things there. Yet
the whole hospital tour was designed, at least in part, to mitigate or obscure
a very uncomfortable fact. The Assad regime repeatedly and deliberately bombed
hospitals in the rebel zone, even when there was no reason to suspect that
fighters were based there. No one would discuss this with me during my time in
Aleppo, even when I did not have the minder with me. Instead, I had to speak to
people who fled eastern Aleppo under the terms of the deal to evacuate the city
in December, when the regime recaptured it. They were living in Idlib province,
to the southwest, which is held by rebels, and I spoke to them by Skype. One
was a young man who worked as a nurse at the Omar bin Abdul Aziz Hospital
throughout 2016. He told me that the hospital was rendered inoperable 15 times
by regime airstrikes. Each time, engineers and doctors would rehabilitate it,
only to see it damaged again. When the regime soldiers got too close, they
moved to another hospital, called Al Quds. It was so crowded that they
sometimes tended the wounded in the street outside.
Stories like this have been
amply documented and held up as evidence that the Assad regime is guilty of war
crimes on a wide scale. A nongovernmental organization in Europe has been
working for years to gather documents that would tie the Syrian leadership to
these crimes in a Nuremberg-style trial. That prospect is remote, but there are
signs that Assad, too, may be worried about whose eyes are watching him. This
month, the State Department released satellite photographs suggesting that the
regime is burning the bodies of executed prisoners in a crematory at the
Sednaya prison complex, north of Damascus, in an alleged effort to hide
evidence. The Syrian regime called these charges a “new Hollywood plot.”
One afternoon, I was sitting in an Aleppo cafe with a 26-year-old man who
had just got out of the army after six years. He served all over the country
and had shrapnel wounds on his legs and back. His cellphone rang, and I watched
his eyes widen as he absorbed what was obviously bad news. When he got off the
phone, he told me that six friends from his old unit had just been killed in
Jobar, a suburb of Damascus. The rebels had launched a complex attack using
tunnels and multiple suicide bombers. All in all, about 30 regime soldiers had
been killed. That attack was the start of a rebel offensive that reached the
edge of Damascus’s Old City, keeping residents awake much of the night with
deafening blasts. The rebels mounted simultaneous assaults to the north,
forcing the roads to close for days. I had my own minor brush with the rebel
campaign. As I was driving from Aleppo to the Syrian coast, rebels opened fire
on the road to our right as we passed near the city of Homs. A soldier yelled
at us to move fast, and our driver gunned the engine — we must have hit 100
miles an hour on a tiny two-way road — and told us to duck our heads. The
rebels were just a hundred yards away. I heard their shellfire thumping in the
distance almost everywhere I went.
It is impossible to live in government-controlled
Syria without noticing that there are almost no young men on the street. They
are in the army, or they are dead. Veterans must carry their military papers
with them or risk on-the-spot re-enlistment. At one checkpoint, government
soldiers tried to grab the young Spanish photographer I was working with, who
is easily mistaken for a Syrian; they wanted to recruit him. In Latakia, a
beach town in the regime’s northwestern heartland, I met a 53-year-old
businessman named Munzer Nasser, who commands a militia composed almost
entirely of older men; there are no young men left in his village. One of its
members, he told me, is a 65-year-old whose three sons have all been killed in
the war. Behind the Assad regime’s atrocities lies a fear of demographic
exhaustion. Its rebel opponents have no such worries: They can draw on a vast
well of Islamist sympathizers across the Arab world.
These facts translate into a
genuine gratitude — in regime-controlled areas — toward Russia, whose military
intervention in late 2015 may have forestalled a total collapse. Many Syrians
say they feel reassured by the sight of Russian soldiers, because they (unlike
the army and its allied militias) are not likely to loot or steal. Some of my
contacts in regime-controlled areas are even learning Russian. In Latakia, some
people told me that their city might have been destroyed if not for the
Russians. The city has long been one of Syria’s safe zones, well defended by
the army and its militias; there are tent cities full of people who have fled
other parts of the country, including thousands from Aleppo. But in the summer
of 2015, the rebels were closing in on the Latakia city limits, and mortars
were falling downtown. If the rebels had captured the area — where Alawites are
the majority — a result would almost certainly have been sectarian mass murder.
Many people in the region would have blamed the United States, which armed some
of the rebels operating in the area. In this sense, the Russian intervention
was a lucky thing for the Obama administration too. Andrew Exum, who worked in
the Pentagon at the time, told me that the military drew up contingency plans for
a rapid collapse of the regime. The planning sessions were talked about as
“catastrophic success.”
Yet Assad’s popularity is due not only to his role as
the guarantor of a secular order. He has also cannily positioned himself as a
unique guardian against his own regime. Just before I arrived in Aleppo in
March, a high-ranking Republican Guard commander in the city issued a public
order declaring a crackdown on “acts of looting, robbery and assaults on public
property and on the freedoms of citizens and their private property.” The order
was a belated recognition of what had been going on for months: an orgy of
looting by the various paramilitary groups that work alongside the Syrian Army,
and even by elements of the army itself.
I heard complaints about
this everywhere I went. Looting has become so common that it has generated a
new word: ta’feesh, to steal furniture. One
reporter for the regime-friendly TV channel Al Mayadeen said in a November
interview that “this systematic looting has exceeded all limits to include
murder as well as stealing and looting.” He went on to describe a “rigorously organized”
process in which the paramilitary groups followed the Syrian Army and pillaged
at will, sometimes “dragging homeowners from their houses and robbing the
houses right in front of their eyes.” Another common tactic, he said, was to
pour gasoline on walls and set a fire “until the tiles on the floors and walls
expand due to the heat. Then they put out the fire, remove the tiles and resell
them.”
The reporter, an Aleppan
named Rida al-Basha, described the neighborhoods where this had taken place and
named the militias, including the notorious Tiger Forces, whose leaders include
well-known thugs. At the end of the interview, Basha said that he had pleaded
with the city government and other journalists to expose these crimes, but that
everyone was too frightened. After the report, Basha repeatedly said he was
threatened with death, and he is said to have fled the country.
Publicly, the Syrian state
deplores these crimes, but privately it seems to condone them as a form of
compensation for the paramilitary groups, whose support Assad needs to
supplement his decimated army. (The rebels do it, too, and sometimes offer an
Islamic justification: ghana’im al-harb, the spoils of
war.) Only when the looting starts to spin out of control, as it did in Aleppo
in January and February, is there a crackdown. But such systematized thievery
has become entrenched in an economy that is more corrupt than ever.
Regime-allied armed groups often set up checkpoints and extort taxes from
farmers and businessmen, making it that much harder to earn a living. “You pay
through the nose to transport anything anywhere,” I was told by a man who
manufactures plastics and has seen most of his profit margin disappear. “Bashar
can’t do anything about this. He is in survival mode.” Meanwhile, war
profiteers (tujjar al-harb — another phrase you hear a lot in
Syria nowadays) have become well-known figures. I was amazed to see new,
lavish-looking restaurants in Damascus; some of them belong to men who are said
to have grown rich from crime. Members of the old Damascus business elite wince
when they describe the clientele in these places. One friend told me, “You see
a guy in a business suit in a fancy bar talking to a thuggish-looking guy in
fatigues, and you understand the conversation without hearing anything.” Some
of these men are also widely said to sell oil to rebel groups for huge profits.
All this may sound awfully
precarious for Assad. But in a sense, it is just a more extreme form of the
game Assad and his father have played for decades. The Assad regime arose after
an unstable period during the 1950s and ’60s, when Syria was shaken by coups
and countercoups. Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, triumphed in part by
managing a constellation of rivals who hated one another but were all dependent
on him. They knew that without him at the center, chaos would return, and that
would be bad for business. This is truer than ever today. And it has a
secondary effect, not unimportant: Many ordinary people now see Assad as their
only hedge against a far more toxic kind of chaos.
My Syrian businessman friend told me that he twice
gathered about a dozen people for dinner and offered them a hypothetical in
strict confidence. It is up to you to name the next president of Syria, he
said. Whom would you choose? The guests were all Syrians, and none supported
the regime. To his surprise, almost all of them named Assad. When he asked why,
the same answer came back again and again: Assad is the only one who can
protect us against his own devils.
While I was in Syria, I found myself thinking now and again about the
vast street demonstrations I saw in Iran in 2009. This was just after the
disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president, when millions of
people marched peacefully through the streets of Tehran. The crowd drew from
every social class, every generation. A peaceful popular movement seemed to
have brought the theocratic regime to its knees. Soon after the largest march,
on June 15, the police and the Basij militia came out in force, spraying tear
gas and beating people with truncheons. Protests went on for months, but
eventually they dwindled to a hard core, and the regime crushed the movement
with relative ease. I often wondered about all those people I saw in the
streets on June 15. At the time, their absence felt a bit like cowardice to me.
Now it feels more like a kind of earned political wisdom. They stayed home not
because they preferred the regime but because they did not want to risk death.
And perhaps because they did not want to see their country torn apart.
Anas Joudeh, the Damascus
lawyer, told me that the absence of this kind of wisdom is precisely what
doomed Syria. For years, he said, he and his friends cast around looking for
someone to blame for the failure of the 2011 revolution. “We often asked, If
only this, or if only that,” he said. “But now I feel that what happened was
destiny. Because there are no political or social forces in Syria. The regime
emptied them out. So when the regime looked to make a deal in 2011, there was
no one there.” I took Joudeh to be saying that the regime might have been
willing to share power, in some limited way, if the opposition had been more
organized, more conciliatory. Perhaps it is naïve to suggest that the regime
could have offered genuine reforms of its own accord. Police states are not
known for voluntarily giving up power in the interest of building a better
future. Assad has spoken the language of reform ever since he inherited his
role from his father in 2000, and he has never followed through on any of it.
Still, there is one story that has haunted me.
On March 30, 2011, Assad
delivered a televised speech to Syria’s rubber-stamp Parliament that is widely
viewed in retrospect as a crucial step in the country’s descent into war. He
had kept silent during the previous two weeks of protest and violence. Some of
his advisers and proxies had hinted, in the days beforehand, that he would make
historic proposals, offering a hand to the protesters and paving the way for
genuine national reconciliation. Much of the region tuned in as Assad walked up
a red carpet into the Parliament building past a cheering crowd. But his speech
quickly turned into a familiar, embarrassing spectacle, with lawmakers chanting
his name and interrupting his speech with fawning accolades. Assad delivered a
hard-line speech deriding the protesters as dupes of a foreign-backed plot to
destroy the country. He closed on an ominous note, saying: “There is no
compromise or middle way in this. What is at stake is the homeland, and there
is a huge conspiracy. ... We have never hesitated in defending our causes,
interests and principles, and if we are forced into a battle, so be it.”
One former regime official
told me that he recalls watching the speech with a sense of shock and dismay.
He and other high-ranking officials had heard in advance the details of what
the speech was supposed to say. It had been drafted, they were told, by Vice
President Farouk al-Shara, and it emphasized reconciliation with the
protesters. Shara had received input from several other top officials with
similar inclinations. This version of the speech even had the support of
Hezbollah’s leaders, who believed that genuine gestures of compromise could
head off a war, the former official said. Other people close to the regime have
echoed this account, though there are analysts who are skeptical; it’s almost
impossible to be sure about what happens in Assad’s secretive inner circle.
What is certain is that Assad did not deliver the
speech that was expected. Instead, the former official said, he scrapped it at
the last minute in favor of a much more aggressive text. “When I heard the
speech, my feeling was — we are in for a long fight,” the former official told
me. “I was in my office. We looked around at each other and did not say a
word.” He remains convinced that if Assad had given the other speech, the past
six years would have unrolled very differently, and oceans of blood might have
been spared.
Few people in Syria have any patience for this kind of wistful talk.
Former regime critics like Joudeh now confine themselves to pressing for the
smallest-bore reforms: better training for the police and judiciary, more local
control in towns and cities, a diminished role for the Baath Party and its
outmoded Arab Nationalist bromides. But even this will not happen while the war
continues, and it may be even less likely afterward. Assad has a genius for corrupting
everyone around him, in ways large and small (some of his advisers are said to
be receiving land in bombed-out rebel areas). Even giving in to these mild
measures of hope can start to make you feel dirty, as if you had been played
for a fool. The alternative, of course, is an ecumenical cynicism toward
everyone and everything. This is the default mentality for most Syrians I know.
In my time in Syria, I met
one person who seemed to evade both of these traps. I hesitate to use the word
“hero,” because he would violently reject it. But he held onto a dogged civic
idealism that was divorced from hope of any kind. In a sense, he was the
inverse of Abu Sami, the professor who shut himself off from the war inside his
home. He was a 57-year-old engineer named Tarif Attora, who appeared to be
working himself to death running a group called the Aleppo People’s Initiative.
He and his teams repair water pipes and electricity lines and supply food and
medical aid to people in need. They do this in both regime and rebel areas,
unlike the White Helmets, the rescue group that was lionized in an Academy
Award-winning documentary. He is the only person I know who has the unreserved
admiration of both rebel leaders and die-hard regime loyalists.
I met Attora in the initiative’s office, where he sat
at a battered desk with a vast map of the city — east and west — on the wall
behind him. The desk was covered with stacked files and old coffee mugs, and he
interrupted our talk several times to bark instructions to site managers.
(“Don’t strain the lines. You’re getting 50. It should be 25 to 30.”) He has
steel-gray hair that is cut short and flat on the top of his head, and his face
— stark, creased with vertical lines, square-jawed — looks a bit like Albert
Camus’s might have if he lived a decade longer.
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The initiative started in July 2012, when Attora
gathered roughly 30 engineers and other professionals — all Aleppo residents —
to talk about how they could help protect the city. Some were with the
opposition, some were not, and there were arguments. They agreed on one thing:
the need to keep the lights on and the water running. So they asked the
authorities for permission and began reaching out to all the rebel groups. Soon
they had hundreds of volunteers working with them and repair crews going
everywhere, even the front lines. The state water company supplied pipes and
materials, but apart from that, the initiative is entirely self-funding, Attora
said. Six of its members have been killed. Many others have been wounded,
including Attora.
He told me several harrowing
stories about his work in what he called “hot zones.” Twice he came close to
being killed, and his back is now broken in two places. Jihadi groups were in
control of Aleppo’s main power plant for more than a year, so he ended up
dealing with them a lot. Once, he saw something that left him traumatized for
months. He asked me not to report the details, because it might anger the
people involved and limit his ability to work with them. Despite the trauma —
which still haunts him — he did not want to jeopardize his ability “to continue
working in all areas,” he said.
I asked Attora why he does
it, and he hesitated. He seemed uncomfortable dealing with abstractions.
“Freedom doesn’t come from destroying the country,” he said as he put out what
must have been his 10th cigarette since our conversation started and lit
another. “Look, people consider me opposition,” he said. “But the way I see
opposition — it doesn’t mean I must destroy my country and put us back 100
years. That kind of opposition is a betrayal of the country, a betrayal of the
ideals I’ve grown up with.”
He
seemed unsatisfied with his words, and he glanced around the room, as if he
were looking for an excuse to stop talking and get back to his engineers. It
was getting dark outside. “We all served the politics of other countries in our
own land, whether we knew it or not,” he said. “Everybody has to wake up. To be
brave, to admit they’ve made mistakes, to come back to the right way.”
I stood up to shake Attora’s hand and say goodbye. His
face cracked into a smile, and the phone rang. He picked it up, and instantly
he was at home again, supervising repairs on a power line that would probably
be blown up again tomorrow.
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