Damascus is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth, a place where the past is unusually tenacious. In recent years, neighboring capitals like Beirut and Amman have succumbed to Dubai-style makeovers, but Damascus has remained a city of low stone and concrete buildings. There are no Walmarts, no Starbucks franchises, few glass towers. The globalized world is evident only in the form of a Four Seasons hotel, its limestone façade incongruously white. Nearby, a piece of riverside ground has been given over to the construction, now stalled, of a shimmering “discovery center” for children. A sign outside reads, “Let us shape our future, not wait for it.”
Despite the talk of the future, Damascus feels as if the Cold War had never ended. Russia has been Syria’s primary sponsor for decades, and the city’s policemen wear Soviet-style peaked caps and shoulder epaulettes. The façade of the National Union of Syrian Students is defiantly social-realist, with a logo that depicts two crossed fists grasping a flaming torch. Men wear mustaches and smoke constantly, in every public place. In a restaurant one evening, I realized that the crooner on the stereo was Julio Iglesias. It is as if time had stood still since 1982—the year that Hafez al-Assad, the country’s secular President, crushed a rebellion led by the Muslim Brotherhood in the city of Hama, deploying tanks and artillery in a three-week siege that reduced the Old City, the rebels’ stronghold, to rubble. An estimated twenty thousand people were killed, but as counter-insurgency the operation was resoundingly successful. “Hama” became a byword for the regime’s ruthlessness and a blunt warning to potential opponents. Syria’s Islamists didn’t raise their heads for another generation.
At the time of the Hama operation, there were portraits of Hafez all over the country. Now images of his son Bashar al-Assad, who, at forty-six, is the country’s current President, are everywhere: in front of public buildings, in offices and shops, on billboards and in bus windows. As a young man, Bashar seemed unlikely to follow his father’s example. He was quiet, studious, and apolitical; he attended medical school, then left for London to pursue an ophthalmology residency. His older brother, Basil, was the heir apparent, but, in 1994, he died in a car crash. Bashar was brought home to be groomed as Hafez’s successor, and was sent to the military academy in the city of Homs, where he acquired the rank of colonel. Still, he kept a low profile, until 2000, when Hafez died. Within days, he was made head of the armed forces and of the ruling Baath Party. He was thirty-four, six years too young to be President, so parliament lowered the eligible age, and he was elected to a seven-year term, as the sole candidate. In 2007, he was elected again, winning ninety-eight per cent of the vote.
In office, Bashar presented himself as an unassuming family man and an advocate of transparency and democracy, and he spoke out vigorously against corruption; a former chairman of the Syrian Computer Society, he authorized limited access to the Internet in 2000. But he has made no essential changes to the status quo. He has imprisoned dissidents, journalists, and human-rights workers, and his secret police torture suspects with impunity. In the spring of 2005, he told reporters that “the coming period will be one of freedom for political parties,” yet he and his relatives still run the country. His younger brother Maher commands the Presidential Republican Guard and the Army’s élite Fourth Armored Division; many Syrians claim that he was seen firing into a crowd of protesters last spring. Several of Bashar’s cousins, members of the Makhlouf family, run intelligence agencies. The billionaire Rami Makhlouf, operating under Assad’s auspices, has developed lucrative interests in everything from telecommunications and construction to banking, oil, and gas. He and Maher are increasingly despised in Syria.
“There is a narrative about Bashar as a good guy, that everything bad is coming from the evil brother or cousin,” a Western diplomat based in Damascus said recently. “That’s all bullshit, I think. It’s him. He’s the senior member of the family, and he’s in charge. He may not have the gravitas of a leader like, say, Mubarak, but he’s extremely smart and knows how to lie and to adjust his message to the audience.”
The Baath Party has held power since 1963, in large part by maintaining aggressive domestic surveillance. At the Sheraton Hotel, unsmiling men in long fake-leather coats are permanent fixtures. In pairs, they sit silently in cars in the parking lot and on couches in the lobby, staring unabashedly at strangers. They are from the Mukhabarat, Syria’s intelligence agencies: military, Air Force, state security, and political security. Syria is one of the most insidious police states in the world, modelled on the old East Germany, with a pervasive network of informants.
Last March, in the city of Deraa, a group of schoolchildren, who had been caught scribbling anti-government graffiti, were taken into police custody and tortured. As the story spread, Syrians, swept up in the fervor of the Arab Spring, broke their silence to demand political reforms. Assad promised a series of gradual concessions, which he said would culminate in a revised constitution. Meanwhile, across the country, his security forces killed and detained and tortured hundreds of unarmed protesters. In some cases, the mutilated bodies were sent back to their families as a warning. Refugees poured across the border, into Lebanon and Turkey.
Over the summer, officers and soldiers deserted from the Army, and a low-level armed rebellion began to coalesce. From bases inside the country and in Turkey and Lebanon, the rebels declared the formation of a Free Syrian Army, and began launching attacks on regime forces. As the peaceful protests turned into an armed revolt, people started warning of civil war—an alarming prospect in a place as factionalized as Syria.
Assad leads a secular regime dominated by the Alawites, members of an offshoot sect of Shiite Islam. Traditionally the country’s underclass, the minority Alawites have only recently come to power; fifty years ago, they had limited legal rights and were regarded suspiciously by their neighbors as pagans. Christians, the country’s second-largest minority, are aligned with them, and together they constitute about a quarter of Syria’s twenty-two million inhabitants. Sunni Muslims make up the large majority; the rest are an imponderably complicated mixture of Palestinian refugees, Druze and Bedouin tribesmen, Kurds, Armenians, Circassians, Turkomen, and a few dozen remaining Jews. In Damascus, a professor of international affairs told me, “We have forty-seven different ethnic and religious groups. So you cannot divide up this country; it’s like a cup of water. If you drop it, it’s gone.”
Throughout the region, nations took sides based on religion; the Shiite-led governments in Iraq and Iran supported Assad, while Sunnis in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey insisted that he leave office. It is, for many, a proxy conflict. Iraq’s disenfranchised Sunni minority, who a few years ago received Syrian assistance for an insurgency against the U.S. military, have raised funds for the rebels and sent them weapons. The Arab League, fearing an enormous conflict, suspended Syria from membership in November and later called on Assad to step down.
Instead, he heightened his attacks. Late on the night of February 3rd, the Syrian Army launched a barrage of rockets, tank shells, and mortars into a rebel neighborhood in the restive city of Homs, killing scores of men, women, and children. It was believed to be the bloodiest episode yet of the Syrian conflict; coincidentally or not, it came on the thirtieth anniversary of Hafez al-Assad’s assault on Hama. The next day, China and Russia vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the Syrian government’s use of violence. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the veto “a travesty,” and the U.S. and Great Britain recalled their ambassadors. Dismissing the West’s reaction as “hysterical,” the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said that Assad had promised him he would “halt the violence, wherever it came from.” This sounded like diplomatic sophistry. Russia maintains its only Mediterranean naval base in Syria’s port of Tartous, and continues to supply the regime with weapons. A friend of Assad’s assured me that Russia and Iran would continue to support Assad: “There will be security challenges in the coming months, but I feel certain his worst days are behind him.”
In Homs, the Army’s bloody assault continued, and by mid-February at least four hundred people had been killed. As the first anniversary of Syria’s upheaval approaches, the outlook is ominous. In addition to Homs, where about a third of the city is in rebel hands, there is combat in half a dozen other cities, and in towns and villages in the countryside, especially along the Turkish and Lebanese borders. More than six thousand people are dead; tens of thousands have been arrested, including children; and nearly a hundred thousand have fled their homes. With dozens more dying almost every day, Syria is sliding into a vicious civil war, but Assad has given no indication that he will relinquish power. “For Bashar, it’s do or die,” the diplomat said. “It’s existential. The security services are still cohesive and strong, and he won’t step down, because he believes it could be his death.”
The town of Zabadani sits in the mountains twenty miles northwest of Damascus—not far, according to local tradition, from where Cain killed Abel. It is a pretty enclave of forty thousand people, close to the Lebanese border, and in recent decades it has been a summer resort, where wealthy Damascenes build villas and Gulf Arabs go to escape the summer heat. It is also smack-dab on an old smugglers’ route—reportedly a vital avenue for weapons coming from Lebanon to arm the spreading revolt.
Since last spring, the Syrian military had struck there several times, killing about a dozen protesters, as residents fled into the mountains for safety. The local members of the Free Syrian Army fought back, and a truce was called between the Army’s Fourth Division, which operates in the area, and the rebel officers. The local Baathist government reduced its presence to a few buildings at the edge of town, and the F.S.A. declared Zabadani “liberated.” For the first time anyone could remember, Syria’s government had peacefully ceded control of a piece of national territory. No one seemed sure what to make of it.
The Arab League had been allowed to launch a modest observer mission to Syria, and on January 21st I joined a delegation that was visiting Zabadani. The town overlooks a river valley with a patchwork of cherry and apple orchards, where new villas and farms have begun to spread. Across the valley, a high, barren ridgeline was blanketed with snow. We pulled up in front of a municipal building protected by sandbagged barricades and armed soldiers, and the military hastily ushered in the observers, a dozen Algerian, Sudanese, and Moroccan diplomats. A few shops were open, but shopkeepers and passersby stared quietly, disguising their loyalties. The building, the local Baath Party headquarters, had been occupied by a Syrian Army contingent, the last representatives of the regime in Zabadani. Below a huge portrait of Assad, the Army commander explained the situation in a tone of diplomatic opacity. “There were differences between two sides in the town, and so, in the interests of the nation, this arrangement has been made,” he said. The truce was apparently negotiated through an influential local member of the Baath Party, with contacts on both sides. Assad’s friend suggested to me that the regime had allowed the F.S.A. to take some territory so that its members would show their faces; later, it would go in to finish them off.
A few hundred yards away, on a street lined with flat-roofed houses and apartment blocks, we entered “liberated” Syria. Excited young men and boys thronged the street, shouting. They said that government troops had come in a week before and, for three days, had fired on the town with tanks, rockets, and heavy machine guns. They pointed indignantly to holes in the buildings where shells had hit, and spread out shell casings and shrapnel at the observers’ feet. A farmer pointed toward the leafless orchards in the valley and said, “You should see what they’ve done to the apple trees.” Another man cried, “They have tanks gathered outside the town. After you leave, they will come here.”
The town was mostly Sunni, and, in the square, people chanted, “God is greater than injustice.” They also chanted, “The people want to internationalize the situation,” which a bearded, tired-looking man interpreted to mean that the inhabitants of Zabadani wanted outside intervention: a U.N. no-fly zone, like the one that had helped depose Muammar Qaddafi, in Libya. They needed protection of some kind; the rebels claim to have forty thousand soldiers nationwide, and the Army has half a million, including reservists and militias. To one of the Arab League observers, the man said pleadingly, “How can we just stand there and let them go into our homes?” A woman, wringing her hands, said that her son had been shot dead. There was gunfire in the distance. Army tanks, we were told, were waiting half a mile down the road.
In the adjoining town of Madaya, a group of rebels greeted us at a house where they had made a base. A pale, haunted-looking young man in a wool greatcoat gave his nom de guerre as Abu Adwan and said that he had been an Army lieutenant in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, until last June, when he defected. The rebel army was a decentralized, amorphous organization. Though it was ostensibly linked to the Syrian National Council, a political body of exiled dissidents, it operated on the ground more like a series of armed Occupy Wall Street groups, built around soldiers who had defected from the Army and found sympathizers at home. There were about a hundred defectors in the Zabadani area, Abu Adwan told me, but they had scarcely any weapons, and the truce would not last: “The government will attack for sure. It cannot allow us to have a free zone.” Although other F.S.A. fighters wore scarves or balaclavas, he did not cover his face. When I asked him why, he smiled thinly and waved his hand. “It doesn’t matter.”
A young man named Anas said that he had been finishing a law degree in Damascus, but because of the unrest he had been unable to take his exams. “I will have to take them later—who knows when,” he said, laughing. Anas calculated that fifteen people had died in Zabadani during the attacks. In mid-July, he and a friend named Shahi had run from the troops during an assault on the town. Anas was captured, and taken away to be interrogated. He was held for thirty-six days and beaten badly, he told me. “It’s normal for us,” he said, shrugging. He was lucky. Shahi was shot dead. Another friend who was caught in the same incident hadn’t been heard of since.
Before the observers left, hundreds of townspeople gathered in the main square to shout slogans and call for freedom. Anas told me he knew that Zabadani’s moment of “freedom” wouldn’t last; the Army could come back in whenever it wanted to. “It will be a black end,” he said flatly. “But we will have to face it.” He added, “I’m sorry to say this, but the Alawites are involved in the repression, and there will be a sectarian civil war.”
Last summer, as the uprising gathered force, Assad made a televised speech. “Conspiracies are like germs, which increase every moment and in every place,” he said. “And it is impossible to exterminate them. But we can strengthen the immunity of our bodies.” (In response, protesters jubilantly chanted, “The germs want the fall of the regime.”) Assad added, “What is happening today has nothing to do with development or reform. What is happening is sabotage.” As I toured the country, the government’s argument that the protesters were nothing more than “armed gangs” was persistently advanced.
In late January, the Information Ministry organized a press trip to the embattled city of Homs. In a walled concrete yard at the military hospital there, a brass band waited next to a group of officers, standing at attention and holding large wreaths. On the ground were three flag-draped coffins. A group of doctors and nurses had gathered, holding small Syrian flags. Next to them were women in black clothes, the widows, mothers, and sisters of the men in the coffins. On the far wall was a large banner featuring Assad, a blue sky, and a wind-rippled Syrian flag.
The officers had been waiting impatiently for us to arrive before starting the funeral. The bodies in the coffins belonged to soldiers who had been killed near Homs, two of them in an ambush the previous day. Thirteen soldiers had been killed in all, and, in a small cold-storage room, we were shown black trash bags containing the remains of others, who had been burned beyond recognition.
Outside, the doctors and nurses chanted, “O Bashar, we give our blood and souls to you.” Then the military escorts lifted the coffins from the ground, while the women ululated. The men with the coffins began walking slowly as the brass band played a dirge. The mourners followed, the women chanting, “Hail to the Army. God, Fatherland, and Bashar are all we need.” Around the corner, a white van waited with its rear doors open. The coffins were placed inside, and the van drove off. The funeral was over.
Back on the bus, our minders told us that we were going to a neighborhood called Hamidiya; we would be able to get out there to talk to the residents, but we shouldn’t stray. One of them explained nervously that the rebels now held “a lot of Homs,” areas that the Army wouldn’t enter.
It was midday, but the streets were deserted, and the air was thick with winter mist. The bus drove through zigzagging barricades made out of rocks and barrels, then stopped at an intersection where armed soldiers huddled behind sandbagged fortifications. In a corner store, the proprietor, a middle-aged man with a pleasant face, said that the situation in Homs was “not so good.” He pointed toward a Sunni neighborhood, Khalidiya, a few blocks away, which was controlled by the rebels. “The men attack and go—they are invisible,” he said. There had been kidnappings, and killings of Alawites and Christians. Before the violence, he had kept his shop open until 3 A.M., but now he closed at 5 P.M. I noticed that the shop sold wine, and he explained that he was Christian, like most of the neighborhood’s residents. The Christians, ten per cent of Syria’s population, are broadly pro-government, and fearful of what might happen if the Sunnis gained power. A plainclothesman came into the tiny shop and stood behind me, unabashedly listening in, and the shopkeeper went on speaking, as if he weren’t there.
“Should Bashar step down?” I asked.
“No,” the shopkeeper replied.
Out on the street, a number of men had gathered, and one of them, a wiry, forthright man in his forties, said his name was Maher. Like the shopkeeper, he was a Christian. He had worked abroad for years on oil rigs owned by an American company, but he decided a few months ago to return home to protect his family; the rebels, he explained, were occupying houses, to use as bases from which to attack the government. A few days before, though, the Army had taken control of a few streets, and some shops had reopened; people could go to work, and their children could attend school.
Gunfire broke out from the direction of Khalidiya, and Maher’s eyes roved up and down the street. “I am not a supporter of the President or a member of the Baath, my friend,” he pronounced. “But I have seen the truth.” Echoing the government’s line, he said that the rebels were drug dealers, criminals, members of Al Qaeda. He spoke of their torture and execution houses, where they slit victims’ throats like sheep. Once, he said, an old man and woman were asked for their I.D.s at a rebel roadblock, and the two were shot dead merely because they were Alawite.
“The government should be tough,” he said. “I don’t mind staying in my house for three days to let the government clear all the houses, because they are hiding in innocent people’s houses.” He added, “Only, in my opinion, they are not innocent, because whoever hides a killer is part of the killing.” As we left, he and his friends broke into a pro-Assad chant.
At times, the inspection tours devolved into obvious political theatre. In front of a government building in Damascus one morning, some members of the pro-regime militia known as the Shabiha gathered to sing an anthem with the refrain “Long live thugs.” A toothless woman wandered up, pointed at some tough-looking characters with automatic weapons who were sitting in a jeep, and shouted at me, “Do they look like killers to you? Could they kill women and children, as they are accused of doing?” I answered, “Yes, they do,” but she ignored me and walked off to shout at someone else. At a police hospital in the nearby suburb of Harasta, security men showed off a car that they said had been captured from F.S.A. fighters. A uniformed man opened the trunk and, with a flourish, produced hand grenades—ten of them, wrapped in pristine casings with Hebrew lettering. He held them up in the air, wheeling around so that the crowd, and the cameras of state television crews, could see clearly.
But at other times it was evident that the regime could not entirely control what we saw. Clock Tower Square, in central Homs, is where the first demonstrations were bloodily suppressed; reportedly, scores of protesters died there in April, when the Army attacked during a sit-in. When we visited, the large plaza was almost deserted. The bus let us off three blocks away, in front of an old café, but before I had walked a block the minders nervously called everyone back. A tall, burly man with a salt-and-pepper beard was bellowing, in English, “Why are you here? This is not where you need to be.” He waved toward the neighborhoods that were held by the rebels. “Go to Baba Amr, go to Khalidiya, that’s where you should go!”
The minders tried to herd us back onto the bus, but the bearded man, who I later discovered was a prominent lawyer, had everyone’s attention. He shouted that terrible things were happening in his city. When asked who was responsible, he suggested that the regime was using thugs to intimidate people. “Army or security or military, I don’t know!” he yelled. “They are wearing sports shoes! You know a military wearing sports shoes?” He added, “I trust the men in uniforms with helmets and boots. I don’t trust these men with sports shoes.”
Men in long black leather jackets appeared at the edges of the crowd: Mukhabarat or Shabiha. They stood close together and whispered, and some moved in toward the bearded man. A few old men emerged from the café and tried to coax him inside, but he shook them off.
A reporter asked, “How is life here?”
“Life?” the man shouted, waving his arms. “There is no life! There isn’t life here in Syria.”
Men crowded around, yelling angrily in order to drown him out. One of them called to us, “You can go anywhere you like in Homs! Everything is fine.” Another man challenged him: “You want NATO to come to Syria? Is that what you want?” There was shouting and pushing; the secret police swarmed. The bearded man called to the reporters, “Take my name! Tomorrow my name will be on the board,” referring to a list of Homs’s daily dead. Then the crowd descended into chaos, and he was pulled away.
When I met Bassam Abu Abdullah, a member of the Baath Party, he was wearing a wristwatch decorated with Bashar al-Assad’s face. A balding, mustachioed man in his forties, Abdullah is a professor of international affairs at Damascus University, and a good-natured lobbyist for the government. Over coffee, he argued that, in spite of past mistakes, the regime’s intentions were good, and the announced reforms were more than mere tactical concessions. The violence in Homs was distressing, he acknowledged; there had been abuses by the security forces, and such things had to be fixed. Bashar simply needed time to implement the reforms. “Syria will change,” he assured me. “But it’s the management of the change that’s important. We have already seen various scenarios—Iraq, Libya, and Yemen—and none of them are good.”
Abdullah went to college in Tashkent during the fall of the Soviet Union, and he recalled that Gorbachev, too, had tried to bring change and then lost control. “I know what the collapse of a state means,” he said. He agreed that Assad’s reforms should have come sooner, but maintained that there were good reasons for the delays: the Iraq war, the 2005 car-bomb assassination of the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri—which Syria was accused of masterminding—and the current uprising. All of them had taken “a lot of Syria’s attention.” There were also “corrupt people within the country” who had worked to “prevent change.” At my surprised look, Abdullah said, “Yes, we have corrupt people, and I am not afraid to say so. I want a better future for my country.”
The government had in fact made some reforms, but they were concentrated on the economy, and favored the rich. “It forgot about the people,” Abdullah said. “The market was supposed to take care of everyone, but this policy also failed in the West. In Syria, the people are not as well off; they still look to the state as they do to a mother.” With the lack of economic opportunities, religious sentiments had intensified, especially among the poor. The government needed to open things up politically, Abdullah said, and allow greater freedom of expression. But all these things would be addressed in the current efforts to rewrite the constitution.
According to a recent U.N. report, hundreds of children have died in the government’s attacks in Homs and elsewhere, but, when asked why the regime was killing children, Abdullah said, “Why not ask those who are sending their children into the streets? They are dirty people.” In his view, the violence was being orchestrated by outsiders: Jordanian intelligence agents, narcotics chiefs, Islamists. Eleven fatwas had been issued against him by Muslim extremists, he said; he had sent his wife, who is Russian, and their two daughters out of the country. The bulk of the protesters, he argued, were “uneducated people,” and were being misled. “Some people think they want freedom, but they don’t know what freedom is. They think it is disorder.” He smiled, and said, “I think the security forces will deal with this very soon. If the Army wants, it can finish this in a week.”
Skepticism about the rebels was common among Assad’s supporters. One influential businessman, Nabil Toumeh, informed me that what was taking place in Syria was the result of a plan—dreamed up years before by Zbigniew Brzezinski, and supported by Israel—to help the Muslim Brotherhood take over the Middle East. “After fifty years of persecution, they are being given power, and this will bring the Arab world to a state of backwardness,” he said. Assad’s friend told me, “This is not the Arab Spring. It’s the awakening of the extremes of Islam.” The Brotherhood was trying to seize power in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, but it would not happen in Syria. “There is no reasoning with these people; with them, it is only God.”
But in Zabadani one of the protesters, a Sunni, told me, “There’s no Muslim Brotherhood here. The people are Muslims, yes. But the Brotherhood doesn’t have any real plan for them. What we want is freedom, to be able to protest in peace without being fired upon.”
Little is clear about the rebels. A veteran dissident named Salim Kheirbek told me, “No more than thirty per cent of the people are involved in the resistance. The other seventy per cent, if not actually with the regime, are silent, because it’s not convincing to them, and especially after what has happened in Iraq and Libya. These people want reforms, but not at any price.” Assad’s friend told me that the F.S.A. had only a thousand defectors, and the rest were a fanatical rabble; a businessman from Homs estimated that two-thirds of its members were former soldiers. Those I met told stories of being forced by their senior officers to shoot at civilians, and then, after crises of conscience, fleeing with like-minded comrades. There is a convincing consistency to this narrative. Most also say that their mandate is to protect civilians, and insist that they will stop fighting when Assad and his inner circle step down. They claim that their aims are not sectarian—that they are anti-Alawite only in their opposition to those who run the country—but they acknowledge that their breach with the government falls along sectarian lines. Most of the Army rank and file is Sunni, while most of the senior officers, like the country’s other leaders, are Alawites.
Whatever the rebels say now, Islamists will undoubtedly seek a voice in the opposition. The Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri recently issued a call to jihad in Syria, and there have been suicide bombings in Damascus and Aleppo that are strikingly similar to Al Qaeda attacks. As a regime supporter in Damascus put it, “The Americans used the jihadis against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and then the Syrians used them against the Americans in Iraq; Sarkozy used them against Qaddafi in Libya, and now the Americans are using them against us. In the end, maybe they will work for themselves.” But, for the most part, the Syrian opposition seems to reflect a cross-section of citizens who feel victimized by forty-two years in a security state. Some have been abused by the secret police and are seeking revenge; others are inspired by sectarian hatred; and some are genuine patriots, who simply couldn’t continue to serve a repressive regime. There is no telling which faction will emerge ascendant, but it is likely to be the one that is most willing to use extreme violence. Syria is at war with itself, and, inevitably, all sides will misrepresent their foes and conceal aspects of their own agendas. Even the F.S.A. does not yet know what it is.
The first rebels I met in Damascus were jumpy and suspicious. It was on the morning of Wednesday, January 25th, in the furniture-making eastern suburb of Saqba. At a major intersection, a dozen fighters, wearing kaffiyehs over their faces and armed with Kalashnikovs, were stopping traffic to check I.D.s. I was with a Syrian translator named Abdullah. The rebels told us to get out of the car and asked to see our identification papers. Abdullah looked worried. There were other fighters across the road; one man walked over carrying a rocket-propelled grenade launcher on his shoulder. The fighters peered at Abdullah’s I.D. card. Satisfied that he was not a state security agent, they agreed to speak to us, and we moved into a nearby garage.
When asked why they were fighting, one said, “What we want is to stop the killing of children, the raping of women.” Another said, “What we want is a free country, without racism, with equal opportunities for everyone.” Several pulled out laminated blue cards, identifying them as defectors from the Army. They were very young, in their late teens and early twenties. One said that he had worked for state security in Deraa, where the uprising had begun; another was from the northern province of Idlib; a third was from Homs. “We are soldiers who were ordered to kill the people,” one said. “I was at a checkpoint, and if I didn’t shoot they’d shoot me.”
Another fighter, a few years older, introduced himself as Mohammed Nur; he was the third-in-command of Saqba’s rebels. The F.S.A. represented “all Syrians,” he said expansively. “We’re Christian, Alawite, Druze, and Sunni.” The regime had exploited communal tensions, he conceded, persuading Alawites that they were at risk and, in some cases, arming them. But the rebellion was “not about being against one sect—it is about wanting democracy,” he said. “If Bashar and the people around him leave the country, it’s over.” With that, a man came running up and said something to Nur, who began barking orders to the other rebels. They all moved away fast. The Army was coming; there would be fighting soon.
We drove through rebel-controlled territory for more than a mile, moving past armed men at barricades, others patrolling in cars, and teen-agers in civilian clothes acting as sentinels. The atmosphere bristled with danger. Almost all the businesses were closed, but a furniture showroom was open, and the owner invited us to sit down in his comfortable office. He had a fireplace, with logs burning in it. An employee brought us tea. The situation, the owner told us cautiously, was “uncomfortable.” He had never expected to see rebel fighters on the streets of his neighborhood. The Syrian Army had not entered Saqba in a month, he said—not since the Arab League observers arrived. “The government is trying to avoid problems,” he explained. But what had led to the situation in the first place, he said, was the “mistreatment of people by the security forces.” That had created a lack of trust. “If a small percentage of that trust can be restored, the problem will end.”
The shop owner paused and said, “The situation cannot continue like this. The government should be flexible with the people, take into consideration their points of view. We have people who are with the regime and people who are against it. Both sides need to listen to one another.” He had recently flown home from a trip to Turkey, and in a seat near him was a woman with a small boy who was constantly shouting and jumping around. Finally, he told the boy to be still, and the mother explained that he was simply excited. She was Syrian but had been living in the United States; this was the child’s first visit to his homeland. “I suggested to her that this wasn’t the best time to be visiting. She said, ‘I decided to come because I love my country.’ She then said, ‘God, Syria, and Bashar only.’ A young man seated nearby turned and said, ‘God, Syria, and freedom only,’ and they began arguing. Soon six rows of passengers were involved. Eventually, I shouted to everyone to be silent, and I said if we were in the sky and couldn’t find a solution it might stop us from reaching land.” When the flight arrived in Damascus, someone told security what the young man had said, and he was taken into custody. Only when the shop owner intervened was he let go.
The shop owner hoped that wise people could help mediate. “Right now, it’s important to leave space for the mind,” he said. “I can’t vouch for either army. What I really want is for the government to speed up its reforms. We know that the Army can come here and destroy and impose whatever regime it wants, but is this sense or is it nonsense? If there is an agreement between the two sides, wouldn’t this be a better solution?”
On the morning of January 28th, the Arab League observers went to Rankous, a rebel-held mountain town twenty miles northeast of Damascus, and, along with a couple of other journalists, I followed them. On a snow-covered plateau, a few miles past the ancient Christian town of Sednaya, there was an Army post; from there the road led off into a high ravine. The observers got out of their cars and strolled around, enjoying the crisp mountain air. Then, after a few minutes, they began walking back to their cars; they had decided not to go to Rankous after all. The leader of the delegation told me that the commander at the post had said there were rebel snipers in Rankous, and they might be attacked. I pointed out that if the observers went only where the Syrian regime wanted them to they might as well go home, and the diplomat nodded. If things continued as they were, he predicted, the mission might be suspended.
The other journalists and I resolved to drive on, and, around a bend, we came to an Army checkpoint, where soldiers came running out and asked us where we were going. We pointed ahead to Rankous. “It’s dangerous there,” they warned, but let us proceed. A few minutes up the road, four vans carrying families stopped. They told us they were fleeing after a night of shelling by Army tanks based on hilltops surrounding the town. One of the men pointed to a series of muddy tank tracks that led off into the snow-covered fields and disappeared over a ridge. The town, which had a population of twenty thousand people, was down to fifty families, they said.
At the edge of Rankous was a barricade, a pile of dirt and rocks studded with a few oil barrels. One of them was spray-painted with black script that read “Jaysh al-Hurr”—Free Syrian Army. We stopped in a small plaza, and a pickup truck full of fighters arrived and guided us through deserted streets to a house near a mosque. Inside, in an upstairs room with an old-fashioned woodstove, a handsome, short-haired young man in uniform warmly invited us to sit down. He was Abu Khaled, the commander of the Free Syrian Army contingent in Rankous. He was thirty-three, and just a few months earlier had been a Syrian Army officer, assigned to a checkpoint in one of the most embattled districts of Homs. There had been many abuses, he said: at one point, a fellow-officer shot a woman and her child without provocation, saying that he wanted to teach the people of that neighborhood “a lesson.” Eventually, Abu Khaled had defected, taking along the thirty men who served under him. They were from all over Syria, but had agreed to come with him to defend Rankous, where he had grown up.
Outside, there was a burst of gunfire, and a couple of heavier thumps that sounded as if they had come from tanks. Abu Khaled sent some of his men to find out what was going on. The F.S.A. had controlled Rankous for several weeks, he told me, and in the past five days the Army had made a concerted effort to surround the town. It had attacked with tanks and anti-aircraft guns, and snipers had fired from the high ground. Abu Khaled’s men had only one mortar, a sniper rifle, and the Kalashnikovs they had deserted with. He handed me his mobile phone and asked me to look at a short video clip. It showed a young man in uniform in someone’s arms, being comforted as he died. Abu Khaled touched his heart. It was one of his men; those were his hands cradling him. An old civilian named Abdul Karim, the town elder, had joined us, and he said that his brother’s children, too, had been killed in the shelling.
There was more gunfire, and something came whizzing past the house. Abu Khaled gave orders to evacuate, and, as his men scrambled, he asked us to switch off our cell phones and remove the SIM cards, in case we were being tracked. At the door, Abdul Karim placed himself in front of me, grabbed my arms, and made me hug his waist so that he could shield me as we went down the stairs.
In a nearby house, we were led to a back room, where we were met by a young couple, their baby, and an older woman. They had us sit down and brought us tea, while outside the shooting continued. The old woman, weeping, cut up apples and insisted that we eat them. I asked her why she hadn’t left, and she said that her family was poor and had no relatives to go to. Abu Khaled said, calmly, “We are ready to die to defend the people.” If the town’s remaining civilians left Rankous, he and his fighters would go somewhere else. How would they get past the Army? “We will crawl between their checkpoints,” he said, laughing. “Don’t worry about us!” They had yogurt and apples, and the bakery still opened up one day a week. They were not far from the Lebanese border, and were able to smuggle in heating fuel.
The rebels told me that, a few days before the siege began, a representative from the intelligence services had sought out Abdul Karim to say that the Army was willing to agree to a truce, as in Zabadani. “The message was ‘Don’t approach us, and we won’t approach you,’ ” he said. “I asked about getting the bodies of our martyrs that they had taken away. They said, ‘Give us your weapons and we’ll give you back your bodies.’ ” He refused, he told me: “We are not terrorists. We are a people with history. We know what’s going on.”
Abu Khaled said emphatically that he and his comrades were not motivated by hatred of Alawites. It was a delicate subject; at first, he referred to them only as “the people of a certain sect.” In Homs, sectarianism had been nurtured by the regime. There were forty-six Army checkpoints in and around the city, he said, and at each one there were representatives from the Mukhabarat. “These people put the idea into the heads of eighteen-year-old soldiers that they’re facing an Israeli conspiracy, Al Qaeda,” he said. Listening in, the young woman blurted out, “This is a Sunni town. That’s why they’re shooting at us.”
By late afternoon, the house next door had been hit and one of the rebels had been wounded in the leg, but the shooting continued. It seemed out of the question to drive out. The regime soldiers knew we were there and yet had begun attacking the town; they could not be trusted to restrain themselves. I called the most senior Syrian government official I knew—Jihad Makdissi, the Foreign Ministry spokesman—and asked him to persuade the Army to stop its attack so that we could leave. He lectured me for a moment—why had we gone to Rankous without permission?—but agreed to intercede. Eventually, a call came, and we were told to get out of Rankous immediately. We listened; the gunfire had stopped.
A young rebel drove in front of us down to the plaza, and then we were on our own, driving back into the rolling open land. At the Army checkpoint, there were soldiers waiting, with their weapons at the ready. One of them, a young teen-ager, circled us and stared intently, keeping his finger on his weapon’s trigger. An officer asked angrily, Hadn’t we seen the terrorists in the town? We acknowledged that there were some rebels, but pointed out that there were civilians, too. He scowled and told us that his soldiers had been attacked by terrorists. Some had been wounded, and others had died.
By the time he let us go, it was dusk, and shiveringly cold. As night fell, we drove back across the snowy mountain plain toward Damascus; there were tanks everywhere, in the fields along the road and at the intersections. It looked as if a major assault were about to begin.
That night, the military resumed its shelling of Rankous, and the next day it launched several ground assaults; Abu Khaled’s men fought back, killing half a dozen regime soldiers. The Arab League observer mission was formally suspended, and, the day after, the Army sent troops to the Damascus suburbs, and then to Zabadani and Homs. It was a general offensive, even if none had been formally declared. A pro-regime newspaper editor in Damascus told me that the rebels’ control of the suburbs had been an illusion, which the government had permitted, in order to “put flesh on the ghosts” before crushing them. Soon afterward, news came that Abu Khaled and his young son had been killed.
On January 30th, I took the eastern highway out of Damascus to the Tishreen Military Hospital, to see the Army’s latest casualties; there had been more than fifty a day for the past three days, in and around the city. On the way, I passed troop-transport trucks crammed with soldiers dressed for combat, and at the edge of Saqba soldiers were blocking access roads. Over the rooftops, I saw columns of black smoke rising from where the fighting was taking place. A government minder who had accompanied me was shocked. He asked worriedly, “Is Syria going to be like Iraq?” Until that moment, he hadn’t really understood the extent of the country’s problems; he confessed that he had never seen an anti-government demonstration. He asked, “Are we in denial?”
The same day, the diplomat in Damascus told me that it was too late to stop Syria from sliding into civil war. “We’re watching a country go off the edge,” he said. “This is going to be ugly.” He had hoped that there could be a negotiated settlement, similar to the recent one in Yemen—a “soft landing, whereby the Assads can get in a plane with all of their toys and fly to Dubai or wherever.” But Russia was stubbornly opposed; no one knew how to negotiate with the rebels amid the violence; and, until the opposition convinced the Alawites that they were not the targets of the uprising, a détente with the Army seemed unlikely. “Most of the officer class is Alawite, and there are very few senior officers defecting,” the diplomat said.
But the government could not hold on forever. With unrest all over the country, the Army was spread thin, and on the front lines food and fuel were running short. The troops were tired and increasingly demoralized. Even though the regime had cut off electricity, food, and medical care to rebel areas, the opposition was gaining confidence. Another diplomat in Damascus said, “Fear has gone from the people and it has not been reintroduced. People have come out on the streets, and they’ve stayed out.” He added, “I never had any doubt about the regime’s capacity for violence, but I didn’t realize how stupid its leaders were. We warned them that, once they started shooting people, sooner or later people would start shooting back. Even if they were to try a reform process, it wouldn’t fix things now. They’re now obliged to carry it off with repression.”
The newspaper editor in Damascus suggested, conversely, that the country was stuck with Assad. “The collapse of the regime will lead to atrocities, communities targeting communities, as in Rwanda,” he said. “You can blame whom you like, but this is a fact. The state has to continue functioning, because, if it doesn’t, then, as in Homs now, there will be sectarian violence. That’s why the decision was taken to go strictly, heavily, into the suburbs, with all the loss of life that we’re seeing. So this idea of Assad stepping down won’t happen, because he is the Army. The only way to save the country is to support the regime to change itself. All the other scenarios lead to civil war, sectarian violence, and a failed state.” Assad’s best hope, he suggested, was a combination of unrelenting violence toward the active rebels and greater reforms to persuade the moderates. Last week, the regime announced that a draft of the revised constitution, months in the making, will be submitted to a public referendum on February 26th. Meanwhile, the Army is proceeding with its offensive.
In Damascus, I met Aimad al-Khatib, a Sunni businessman in his fifties who embodied the chaotic interplay of Syria’s factions. He had recently been abducted, in Homs, by three men who forced their way into his car at gunpoint. After making him hand over his money, his I.D. card, and his cell phone, they took the car and drove off. Khatib went to the local rebel authorities, and, in an hour, they caught the culprits. “They handed me the keys to my car, the money, everything except the cell phone, but gave me money to reimburse me for it,” Khatib said. “They showed me the men they had caught, and, after I identified them, they began beating them in front of me. The people that robbed me are the same ones killing people with I.D. cards that show them to be Alawites.”
Khatib is a leader of the Syrian National Solidarity Party, one of four new parties granted legal status in December. He told me that he had been part of an attempt to broker a dialogue between the government and the opposition, but had given up when it became obvious that the regime was intent on using force. He expressed a kind of cynical resignation. The Russians were supporting Bashar, in order to preserve their international prestige; Saudi Arabia was against him, in order to weaken Iran; Turkey wanted to bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power. Khatib hoped for “a real national-unity government, in which not even the Alawites will be excluded.” But, with violence spreading across the country, it seemed too late for that.
“What will happen? ” I asked.
“There will be a civil war.”
“When will it begin?”
“It’s already begun.”
Few people in Syria were so outspoken, and I asked Khatib if he was concerned about his safety. He smiled wanly and said, “If God wants to take my soul, let him have it.” ♦
