Our Women on the Ground

by Zahra Hankir

  But though in some ways the deal brought peace and stability back to Lebanon, it didn’t heal the wounds of war. The nation remained deeply divided and extremely precarious.

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  By the time I graduated from the Lebanese American University in Beirut in the spring of 2002, I had lived through a decade of intermittent fighting between Lebanese Christian and Muslim militias and their foreign allies. Major regional and international events also unfolded during that period, including the second Gulf War in Iraq, the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, and the war in Afghanistan. The Arab-Israeli conflict was always there, sometimes a leading story and sometimes a distant murmur.

  A few years later, in 2007, I found myself in Beirut again, this time as a reporter. The streets were full of fighting and debris, much as they had been in my childhood.

  The new turmoil had been set off by the assassination of former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri in February of 2005 by a massive car bomb in Beirut. His death, widely blamed on Syria and its allies in Lebanon, split the country into two camps: a Shi’a one backed by Syria and Iran and led by Hezbollah, and a Sunni one backed by the West and led by Hariri’s supporters. Christians were divided between the two camps. The results were a seventeen-month-long political stalemate and a string of political assassinations.

  The first round of fighting broke out on January 23, 2007. A protest that day turned violent when Hezbollah supporters blocked roads leading to Beirut with burning tires and cars and clashed with loyalists of the Sunni government.

  At the time, I was a reporter for a Lebanon-based English-language newspaper called the Daily Star and a stringer for the New York Times.

  I had heard reports that morning of men in black balaclavas brandishing batons and blocking access to and from Rafic Hariri International Airport, Lebanon’s only civilian airport. I hitched a ride there on a scooter driven by an old acquaintance and Hezbollah supporter, a man in his midfifties named Abu Ali who had fought in the civil war.

  When I arrived, the scene was tense as passengers begged and pleaded with protesters to be let in and out of the airport. Black smoke filled the air and young men were feeding pits of fire with rubber tires and trash. I approached a group of protesters, introduced myself, and asked why they were rioting. As I listened and took notes, a man suddenly came charging at me, trying to grab my notebook. But I was quick, holding it close to my chest and running toward Abu Ali, who was a few meters away with his back turned to me. The other man and a couple of other protesters were chasing me, but as soon as I started calling Abu Ali’s name and they realized I had come with him, they let me leave with my notebook. If not for him, I don’t know what might have happened to me that day.

  A few months later, during a funeral procession for victims killed in another round of clashes, a friend of mine who was a foreign freelance photojournalist got in a fight with a mourner over the photos he was taking. Since neither of them spoke the other’s language, I went over to them to help mediate. The argument quickly escalated as more mourners got involved, and I was pushed and shoved violently. I don’t remember how the fight was broken up, but I do remember sobbing hard as soon as I was alone. I did not cry because I feared for my life. I cried because I felt very vulnerable and completely unable to defend myself physically as a woman.

  As much as I loved my job, there were many times between 2005 and 2008 when I wished to be someone else or somewhere else. I was once looking for the phone number of a contact in my phone book when I noticed that I had written the word dead in parentheses next to his name. The person was Samir Kassir, a prominent columnist critical of Syria who had been killed in June 2005 in a car bomb outside his home. I counted eight other men, politicians and activists, whom I had interviewed many times and who were killed in the span of two years. The conflict was starting to take its toll on me.

  Then, in May 2008, I had a very close call with death.

  The government of Lebanese prime minister Fouad Siniora, who was backed by the West, had recently discovered a private telecommunication network used by Hezbollah. Hezbollah had fought against Israel in July 2006 in an asymmetrical war that devastated Lebanon, known in Lebanon as the July War; the party considered the network a crucial part of its resistance against Israel. (Hezbollah is credited for liberating south Lebanon, home to the majority of its Shi’a population, from an Israeli occupation that lasted from 1982 until 2000.) Siniora announced that steps were being taken to dismantle the network, as it violated the sovereignty of his government. Hezbollah was enraged.

  On May 8, the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said the government’s announcement was “a declaration of war.” No one believed Hezbollah would use its weapons domestically. But the unimaginable happened.

  In scenes reminiscent of the civil war, men with machine guns battled on the streets of Beirut, snipers took positions, and neighborhoods were littered with burned cars and debris. Government supporters, however, were no match for Hezbollah’s military power, and they quickly retreated. The three days of fighting left at least eleven people dead and nineteen injured.

  On Saturday, May 10, I went with my colleague Raed Rafei, who was working for the Los Angeles Times then, to cover the funeral of a young Sunni man who had been killed by a sniper two days prior.

  It was another emotionally charged scene in which sectarian allegiances served to stoke violence. The Sunni mourners vowed to take revenge on the Shi’a and called Hezbollah, which means the “Party of God,” “an enemy of God.” As the pallbearers approached a store owned by a Shi’a man, mourners urged him to close his shop. He refused, and they smashed his windows with chairs and rocks.

  He responded by opening fire on the procession. I immediately got down and crawled to take cover behind a garbage container. Raed was walking next to me, and when the gunfire erupted, he also hid. When everything had gone quiet, I emerged from my hiding place and saw the two men who had been standing right next to me moments earlier lying on the ground in a pool of blood. Raed was standing over a body with a point-and-shoot camera. We had both survived and they had not. Their names were Ali Masri and Moussa Zouki.

  I later sneaked into the hospital where the bodies of Masri, twenty-three, and Zouki, twenty-four, had been taken. I found Mr. Masri’s father, Mohammad, lying on a bed in an emergency room. When he heard that his son had been shot, he had passed out and was brought to the same hospital.

  “Tell me what happened to Ali,” he begged between sobs. “My heart is telling me he is dead. A father’s heart knows. He’s dead. Don’t tell me he is not dead. I know he is. Ali, my son, can you hear me?”

  He pulled a picture of Ali from his wallet and kissed it. “Answer me, Ali,” he said, looking at the photo. “Are you dead? Don’t die.”

  I walked out of the room when I could no longer hold back my tears. I went outside and tried to collect myself. When I walked back into the hospital, I saw Ali’s mother. “Ali is here,” she said, pointing in the direction of the morgue. “I want to stay here. He told me this morning he wanted to sleep more. He is going to sleep forever now.”

  Ali and I were strangers. But I still can’t shake off the memory of that day or how senseless his death was.

  * * *

  —

  I first met Anthony in September 2006, shortly after the July War, at a popular rally held by Hezbollah in the southern suburbs of Beirut to mark its “divine victory” against Israel. Because they had held their own for thirty-three days, the conflict was considered a victory by many Hezbollah supporters, despite the fact that at least twelve hundred Lebanese civilians had been killed, entire villages in south Lebanon had been destroyed by aerial strikes, and every major bridge and highway in Lebanon had been bombed.

  I had read Anthony’s coverage of the Middle East, beginning with the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, with great admiration. So when he called to ask me o
ut on a date a few days after the rally, I was very happily surprised. On our second date, we went to the movies. By the third time I saw him, being together felt more like being with an old friend than with a romantic interest, and so we became friends instead.

  But six months later, he asked me on a date again. “What do you mean?” I remember asking him, a little confused. He said, “You told me on our first date that you are more comfortable dating someone you are friends with, so I wanted us to become friends first.”

  By the end of May, I had had enough of Beirut and its protests, bombs, street fights, and never-ending political bickering. Like the toxic fumes of burning tires that constricted my lungs, the conflict had become psychologically suffocating. I decided to take a break and enrolled at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York City. I had been flirting with the idea of graduate school since finishing college, but I hadn’t felt ready to go back to school until that spring.

  There was very little that we didn’t do together. I was happy and in love. When it was time for me to leave for graduate school, Anthony asked me to marry him and I said yes.

  In June 2009, after graduating from Columbia University, I moved to Baghdad to work as a reporter for the Washington Post. Anthony, now my husband, was the bureau chief. We had been married for a year but hadn’t lived in the same city yet.

  I had been to Iraq once before, in December 2002—three months before the U.S.-led invasion, in a time of peace. But the country had changed a lot since then.

  As Anthony had put it in the Washington Post in 2009, “The war in Iraq is indeed over, at least the conflict as it was understood during its first five years: insurgency, communal cleansing, gangland turf battles and an anarchic, often futile quest to survive, in other words, civil war—though civil war was always too tidy a term for it.”

  But the situation on the ground was still very complex. I was anxious about my new job, and about working with Anthony, who was widely considered the most successful foreign correspondent covering the Middle East. I fretted about the stories I would write and those I would miss and whether anyone would read anything I wrote at all. Our living arrangements were not ideal since we had to live and work in a house that served as bureau and home for the newspaper’s local and foreign staff.

  Anthony was a great partner, in marriage and at work. We made a good team and I leaned on him to understand the complexities of Iraq. Together, we brainstormed ideas, planned reporting trips, and sounded out the best translations of quotes from Arabic to English. If I was working late on a story, he stayed up until I finished it. Neither of us ever filed a story before the other read it.

  Our bedroom was on the second floor overlooking a wild garden with palm trees. We decorated with paintings and framed photographs and an antique Persian carpet. It felt like home.

  On quiet evenings, we watched American television shows while eating pints of vanilla ice cream. Desperate Housewives was still on the air at that point, and downloading an episode over the very slow internet connection sometimes took a whole day. But it was worth the effort because the simple pleasure of watching a TV show each week gave our life there a sense of normalcy and routine.

  Sometimes, we went out on date nights. Once we came across a tiny restaurant in an upscale neighborhood of Baghdad called al-Reef, where a man played a medley of Eastern and Western tunes every night on the piano. It remains one of my fondest memories from my life in Baghdad, where both pianists and music venues were scarce.

  I woke up one day in August feeling sick. Anthony and I walked to a small pharmacy and asked for an at-home pregnancy test. The salesperson looked at us disapprovingly, and I knew he assumed we were not married. “Made in Syria” was written in big Arabic letters on the box, which looked like a cheaper version of Clearblue. It cost the equivalent of two dollars.

  My Iraqi colleague once took me to visit his wife’s doctor for a routine obstetric checkup in my first trimester. The doctor was puzzled as to why I chose to stay in Baghdad when I could carry my pregnancy in a safer and healthier environment abroad. I pointed out that Iraqi women delivered healthy full-term babies every day. “But they don’t have a choice,” she said. She ordered an ultrasound, and although everything was normal she told me I would have to spend the rest of my pregnancy in bed to avoid a miscarriage. I suspected it was her attempt to convince me to leave. I ignored her advice and never saw her again.

  I did think of her when, five months into my pregnancy, I got in a car accident. My car skidded when I tried to slow down before a blind curve. The road was wet and the vehicle spun out of control, flipped, and landed on its roof. I was unscathed.

  In January 2010, three massive car bombs exploded within minutes of one another in three separate neighborhoods in the city. The targets were hotels frequented by foreign correspondents and businessmen. The third blast exploded at 3:37 p.m. on January 25 and was close enough to our house to shatter many of our windows.

  The blast struck the Al Hamra Hotel, which was across the street from the Washington Post building and home to many of our friends and colleagues. Anthony and I had left the Post in December and joined the New York Times bureau in Baghdad; we were living about a mile away. I was seven months pregnant that day, and for the first time since the 2005 explosion in Beirut that killed Hariri, I did not want to go to the bombing site. At that moment I felt a bigger commitment to motherhood than to any news story, no matter how important it was.

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  By the end of 2010, Anthony and I, along with our newborn son, Malik, were living in Beirut, where Anthony had been appointed the bureau chief for the New York Times and I was a reporter. The situation there and in the Arab world in general—save for Iraq—was stable.

  But on December 17, 2010, a young fruit vendor set himself on fire in a Tunisian village following a dispute with the local police. The incident sparked protests that were captured on video and seen by millions across the world. A popular rebellion soon broke out, and twenty-eight days later President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali stepped down after twenty-three years in office.

  Protests then spread to Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria. Before the popular revolutions, most Arab countries had lived under repressive regimes that restricted freedoms and violated basic human rights.

  In January 2011, Anthony called me from Cairo’s Tahrir Square, where he was on assignment for the New York Times, so that I could listen with him to the jubilation that had erupted among protesters when President Hosni Mubarak’s regime was felled. I was in Beirut and he wanted to share with me this epic moment in the history of the Arab world. Many, including Anthony and me, could not believe it was happening.

  Encouraged by the successful revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, activists on social media soon called for Syrians to take to the streets of Damascus in what they called a Day of Rage against the government of Bashar al-Assad. Assad had inherited power in 2000 from his father, Hafez, who had ruled the country for nearly three decades with an iron fist.

  I drove to Damascus on February 4, 2011, to cover the potential protest for the New York Times and headed to the parliament building, where it was scheduled to be held. But no one showed up. “Syria is the last country where regime change will occur,” a political activist and dissident told me later that day.

  I visited Syria again in September with a Syrian friend and colleague who was working and living in Beirut. By then, more than twenty-six hundred people had died since the uprising, which had eventually erupted in mid-March in the poor southern town of Dara’a. The capital was yet to witness any unrest, but the general mood was somber, and many feared that the struggle to dislodge Mr. Assad could turn into a civil war, unleashing sectarian bloodshed in a country where ethnic and religious minorities had long coexisted.

  The Syrian rebellion marked its seventh year in March 2018. Hundreds of thousands have been killed, an
d the regime still seems as strong as ever.

  Syria is not the only country where the popular uprising failed to achieve its goals. Despite the bloodshed, many regimes managed to survive rebellions against them. Some rulers implemented modest reforms, while others violently silenced dissidents. Yemeni and Libyan leaders were overthrown, but the countries degenerated into chaos. A stricter military government rules Egypt now and fighting continues daily in Syria.

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  I sometimes think of Anthony’s death as an unintended consequence of the Arab revolts. So was the week he spent in captivity in Libya in March 2011. His car was stopped at a military checkpoint manned by soldiers loyal to then Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. He and three other New York Times colleagues who were traveling with him along the eastern coast of Libya were arrested and held captive for almost a week. I was in Beirut with Malik at the time, and for four days no one knew anything about their fate.

  Anthony later said that one soldier had wanted to execute them on the spot. He told me he really thought he was not going to make it out alive. But instead, he and his colleagues were sent to a detention center in Tripoli that was under the control of the foreign ministry. The ministry released them six days after they were arrested to Turkish diplomats serving as intermediaries between Libyans and American officials.

  Six months later, in August 2011, Anthony went to Syria to cover the uprising. Unable to enter legally (he had been blacklisted after a reporting trip he made in 2005 that angered the regime), he crossed the eastern Lebanese border into Syria sitting on a scooter behind a young smuggler. He made it home safely a week later.

  A second trip was arranged for February 2012. This time he would sneak into the country from its northern border with Turkey. My friend and New York Times colleague in the Beirut bureau, Hwaida Saad, worked her contacts and organized the trip. The smugglers who agreed to take him arranged to hike and travel by horseback across the mountainous border between the two countries.