The rise of Mustafa Tlass also meant the rise of his hometown, Rastan, where Suleiman lived. Rastan was shaped like an inverted droplet, its northern part tucked into a bulge where the winding Orontes River was dammed. Powerful, rich families like Suleiman’s lived in stone-faced villas within view of the dam in lower Rastan. Poorer ones were confined to upper Rastan’s drab low-rise concrete. The town’s fifty thousand people sat in the middle of a line between Homs and Hama, about twenty kilometers from each city, along the asphalt aorta locals called the international highway but maps listed as the M5. It linked Syria’s two most populous provinces—the capital, Damascus, and the northern commercial heart, Aleppo.
Defense Minister Tlass turned Rastan into a town of military sons, its men swelling the officer corps. All a potential recruit from Rastan had to do was approach the defense minister or his aides to be fast-tracked into a military college. Sometimes, he didn’t even need to pass a medical exam.
Suleiman’s immediate family, however—his father and uncles—were industrialists. They owned factories producing plastics and fertilizers, cotton-spinning mills, and a vegetable-oil bottling and exporting business. Suleiman managed the Hama branch of the National Insurance Company, a firm for which his family had the coveted license to operate in Homs and Hama. His monthly paycheck of 120,000 Syrian pounds, $2,553 in those days, was about ten times the average.
Rastan was considered so loyal to the regime it was dubbed “the second Qardaha,” a Sunni version of the Alawite village that was the Assads’ hometown in Latakia Province. Suleiman was proud of the moniker, of the hefty association to power it carried, but he was also aware of his privilege. He was a rich young man drawn to the ideas of communism and socialism, at least as they appeared in his books. He had no illusions about how Syria’s socialist model was applied in reality: “The leader is a dictator and the people are his slaves,” was how he put it. The Assads ruled Syria, or, more pointedly, Syria was “Assad’s Syria.” That’s what the billboards and posters had declared for decades. Like so many of his generation, Suleiman was conditioned to think that way, raised on secular Baath Party slogans that deified the leader. His school mornings began with robust salutations to “our commander for eternity, Hafez al-Assad!” He’d worn the military-style khaki uniforms mandated as nationwide school attire until other colors and styles were permitted after Hafez’s death. Like all the other students, he carried placards and portraits of the president in quasi-military schoolyard parades choreographed by his teachers. He believed that Syrians were “simply like this, that nothing will change here for us.” If there were people who thought otherwise, even in the heady early months of 2011, Suleiman didn’t know any—or at least any who would admit it to him.
Suleiman couldn’t imagine a revolt in Syria. Not in a state built on silence and fear and an emergency law. Under the permanent state of emergency, Assad’s Syria banned public gatherings except those officially sanctioned; it arrested people for vaguely defined offenses such as threatening public order and disturbing public confidence; it monitored everything from phone calls to personal letters and censored the media prior to publication. Assad’s Syria was a mukhabarat state whose intelligence agents didn’t bother with the pretense of discretion. They didn’t need to. The men in black leather jackets who could make people disappear had legal immunity “for crimes committed while carrying out their designated duties.”
Suleiman glanced at the television in that café in Homs, where an image had drawn his gaze away from his date. The screen was set to Orient TV, a Syrian satellite station based in the United Arab Emirates. Shaky footage showed a group of people, no more than several dozen, marching past storefronts. Suleiman assumed it was from Egypt or elsewhere in the Middle East. After about thirty minutes, the clip was replayed. This time, the café owner turned down the music and turned up the television’s volume. Suleiman realized he was watching something filmed about an hour and a half south of him.
The amateur video was captured that day—March 15, 2011, the date widely considered the start of the Syrian uprising—near Damascus’s famed Souq al-Hamidiyeh. Small protests were also reported in Daraa in the south, Hasaka in the northeast, Deir Ezzor near Iraq, and in Hama. The sun’s glare bouncing off the cameraman’s lens was strong, blurring some of the images from the souq, but the shots, taken from behind the protesters, showed people clapping and walking, including a woman in a white headscarf. “Peacefully, peacefully,” they chanted, as well as “God, Syria, freedom, that’s all!” modifying the more common “God, Syria, Bashar, that’s all!” (Or Hafez, back in the day.)
Orient TV broke with its regular programming. It looped the footage and muted the audio, taking calls live on air from viewers in Syria and abroad. A man from Assad’s hometown of Qardaha called in: “This footage that you are broadcasting—what is it? Somebody gathered his brothers and cousins and filmed them. That’s it. Don’t make fools out of us. The person who filmed this knows that is all it is and everyone is laughing at him. We are all with Assad! We are all sons of Assad! God, Syria, Bashar, that’s all!”
Suleiman’s date leaned in toward him. “Is something happening here?” she whispered. “Is it really here?”
He didn’t know. In Syria, he said, “there was nothing called politics to speak of.” No side except the regime’s in a one-party state. No politics of opposition in a system bound by razor-sharp red lines every citizen knew not to cross. The rules were clear in Assad’s Syria: bread instead of democracy, subservience for state subsidies and a measure of stability and security. Rules enforced by fear. Fear of the state’s certain and overwhelming retaliation for any move against it, as in 1982 against Islamists and in 2004 against stateless Kurds. Fear of what would replace a dictatorship that had crushed alternatives. Fear of the kind of wholesale state collapse that propelled more than a million Iraqis into Syria after 2003, and, decades before that, cleaved Lebanon into sectarian militias for fifteen years until 1990. Fear that was less an emotion than a physical presence, a heaviness that burrowed between shoulder blades and lived there, gaining weight. It could steal a person’s breath with a single question, an inquisitive glance, an invitation to coffee or tea from the mukhabarat—code for an interrogation. It was a fear accumulated over decades, built on the bones of those who dared challenge the country’s one-party, one-family, one-man rule.
But Suleiman had just watched a small crowd in the heart of Damascus marching and calling for freedom, and it was broadcast on satellite television. As he left the café and drove his date home, the shaky amateur video kept replaying in his mind, along with a single thought: He knew from his history books that no empire lasts forever. After the images he had just watched, after Egypt and Tunisia and the unfolding events in Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain, nothing really seemed impossible—or certain—in Syria any more.
TWO WEEKS LATER, on Friday, April 1, Suleiman moved with the other barefoot men flowing out of Al-Mahmoud Mosque, near his home, after noon prayers. It was an imposing structure, built by his late grandfather and namesake, with a creamy stone façade and twin minarets stretching into the sky like the gray tips of sharp pencils. He looked at the men around him. Would any of them say or do anything to start a protest like the one a week earlier, Rastan’s first? The demonstration on Salibi Street in upper Rastan had lasted no more than ten minutes. Suleiman was in Damascus that day.
The men dispersed. Al-Mahmoud Mosque was one of three main ones in town. Curious to see what was happening elsewhere, Suleiman and an older cousin drove to Al-Kabir Mosque (also known as Abu Ammo), about a kilometer away in the center of town. Men were in the courtyard putting on their shoes, others were streaming out barefoot when a single brazen cry shot out: “We want freedom!” Suleiman looked around. Who had dared utter such words in the “second Qardaha”? A whisper rustled through the crowd, the name floated to Suleiman: Mohammad Darwish. He didn’t know him. He would later learn that Darwish was just eighteen, a student from upper Rastan, scrawny,
with gelled cowlicks that fell in semicircles on his forehead.
The youngster could have been heckled or beaten and handed over to one of the three mukhabarat offices in the town, or to the local Baath Party chapter. Instead, the men outside the mosque, including Suleiman, erupted into the chant. They surged down the main thoroughfare, Revolution Street, named for the 1963 coup that brought the Baath Party to power. Rastan had crossed the regime’s red line. All it took after forty-eight years was a student’s cry.
Suleiman moved, dreamlike, in slow motion yet accelerated, heart racing ahead of him. Hands clammy. He formed words from thoughts locked deep inside, where no one could report them. They escaped through his dry mouth. He repeated the chants with abandon, felt the strength of a crowd, the unity of people speaking with one voice, the fear and certain knowledge there were informers among them. Goosebumps rose on his skin. The simple act of speaking was subversive. It was intoxicating, empowering, liberating, terrifying.
He didn’t need to do it. He hadn’t suffered the indignities of a state oiled by bribes at every level of power, the daily humiliations that infected every banal aspect of life for other Syrians—from securing a university placement or a business license to fast-tracking installation of a landline, or getting a job. He wasn’t like other young men—unemployed and frustrated, stuck with few prospects and without the means to marry and move out of home. He didn’t have family members disappeared by the mukhabarat.
He was a rich man with the right name. No personal reason to rebel against a system that had afforded him privileges. No enmity beyond a deep sense of the injustice it meted out to others. For Suleiman, that was enough. His Syria, the one he dared to imagine, belonged to all of its citizens. It was not Assad’s Syria. “I knew a lot of people weren’t in my situation, that a lot had been harmed by the regime, really harmed to the degree that many families were destroyed, financially or physically,” he said. “It all made me say, ‘Enough. We need to change this.’ ” It was as simple and as difficult as that. Mohammad Darwish was the spark, the fearlessness Suleiman wanted to follow, the hope and courage he needed.
Suleiman reached into his pocket, almost reflexively, and pulled out his smartphone, a Sony Ericsson X10. He started filming but was reprimanded by those around him who feared being identified. They recognized and feared this son of lower Rastan from the Tlass clan. Whose side was he really on? He put away his phone and continued walking, but after a while one of his friends yelled out, “Shabab, guys, look forward, keep your faces forward, we’ll film you from behind!” This time, fewer objected. Suleiman held his phone high and captured a brief snippet of his first protest.
The small crowd walked to the end of the street and then dissipated at a fork in the road near a bakery, unsure of whether to take the slight right toward the statue of Hafez al-Assad at the entrance to the town, or to turn left and loop back toward Al-Kabir Mosque. People peeled away in the confusion. Suleiman and his cousin drove home. He told his parents about the protest, but not that he’d participated. He remembered the footage on Orient TV in that café in Homs. If his town was going to be part of what was happening in Syria, he wanted people to know. He decided to join a protest every week and film it. He saw it as a duty, “like it wasn’t even an option to not try and do this, regardless of what it cost.”
The next Friday, April 8, Suleiman prayed in Al-Kabir Mosque instead of his grandfather’s. After prayers, Mohammad Darwish again shouted a slogan, and everyone followed him. Suleiman captured almost a dozen clips, most of them less than a minute long, and then rushed home to his family villa. It sat on a slight incline with a view of the Rastan Dam. Suleiman and his cousin bolted up the short flight of stairs from the pavement, swung open the heavy black metal gate, and passed the garden on the left with its grapevines and canopy of trees—walnut, apricot, almond, and mulberry. They turned right, into the house designed by a Czech architect, through the high-ceilinged living room with its brick chimney, up the staircase with its wooden railing, into Suleiman’s room.
Suleiman had a 1MB DSL line, a luxury in a country of twenty-three million people with fewer than 122,000 broadband subscribers. The line wasn’t cheap. It cost 1,950 Syrian pounds a month (about $40 at the time—nothing for Suleiman, but roughly a quarter of a teacher’s monthly salary), but it meant he could upload videos in privacy. Internet cafés demanded personal details and an ID card before allowing patrons to log on, and owners had the ability to spy on their customers by sharing their screens without permission.
Suleiman opened his Acer laptop, transferred the footage, and activated the proxy he had used to access Facebook before the government unblocked it. He and his cousin searched for Orient TV, Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, and a slew of other stations they knew of, as well as others they didn’t, like Shaam News Network, or SNN, which they came across during their search. They didn’t have contacts at these outlets. They found generic e-mail addresses, created a new e-mail account with a fake name, kept the subject line simple—Protests—and started uploading. The Internet often cut out, forcing them to restart. After about three hours, Suleiman hit SEND. Then he and his cousin watched the inbox, hoping for a response. None came.
AL-KABIR MOSQUE SAT in the center of town, along the socioeconomic border between upper and lower Rastan. Demonstrations occurred there every Friday after prayers. Like elsewhere in Syria, the mosques were launching pads for protests, because, under the state of emergency, they were among the few public places where people could gather. Al-Kabir Mosque on Revolution Street was opposite a State Security office, but the mukhabarat agents inside the branch (and their informers among the worshippers) did not openly molest protesters, unlike in the smaller town of Talbiseh, about twelve kilometers south of Rastan. In Talbiseh, protesters were shot dead by security forces. More than once, Talbiseh’s men brought their town’s victims to Rastan’s main square outside Al-Kabir Mosque. “Look at our dead! Stay sitting! Stay quiet while we are being killed!” they would say through bullhorns.
Talbiseh was appealing to the honor of Rastan’s men, seeking to shame and anger them into bolder antigovernment action. Apart from living in “the second Qardaha,” Rastan’s people had a reputation for being stubborn and escalating even minor disputes into violent feuds between families. The people of Rastan neither forgot nor forgave easily—and they had guns. In Syria, weapons were strictly controlled—unlike in Iraq, for example, and other parts of the Middle East where guns were part of every home’s furnishings. Private ownership, licit and illicit, was just 3.9 firearms per 100 people in Syria, a tenth of the figure in Iraq. But in Rastan, most homes had weapons ranging from hunting rifles to Kalashnikovs, a privilege that came with the town’s perceived loyalty.
On Friday, April 15, Rastan protested, as it had been doing every week. This time, when the crowd reached the intersection near the bakery, instead of dissipating, it shifted right, toward the statue of Hafez al-Assad. Nobody orchestrated it, there was no one leader. Those behind followed those in front. There was a certain democracy to it in that anyone could yell out a suggestion and people voted with their feet, either following or ignoring. Somebody said, “Let’s go to the statue, let’s bring it down!” and the mass of chanting men moved in that direction. Suleiman raced ahead to the monument, waiting for the thunder of voices rumbling down the street.
The marble statue of a standing Hafez, a flag draped across his outstretched arms, stood on a white stone platform, in front of a signpost with embossed black lettering that spelt out RASTAN WELCOMES YOU in cursive Arabic script. It was a grand monument, clearly visible to the left of the M5 highway.
The clapping, rhythmic roar neared, but the crowd had thinned. Some men detoured to pick up tools, such as sledgehammers. Others feared what was about to unfold, wanting no part of it. Several climbed the statue and started methodically striking its neck as the space around the monument filled osmotically.
“Qoloo Allah, Qoloo Allah, shaab il Rastan, mo hayalla! [Say God! Say G
od! We are the people of Rastan, not just anyone!]”
Suleiman was afraid. He recognized men watching the crowd whom he knew worked for the intelligence agencies. Some were from his own family. They would not shield him from this act of grand insolence. Insulting the Assads was the reddest of red lines, and the mukhabarat no doubt were taking names.
Suleiman slipped his phone into his pocket. Should he walk away? Was he already implicated? Was this revolution worth the risk to him? He had everything to lose, nothing to gain personally. It had happened in Tunisia and in Egypt, he thought. If it had taken weeks there, he figured it would take months in Syria—I can put up with it for that long. He was almost certain the regime would fall just as surely as Hafez’s statue. It was just a matter of time and determination. The security and intelligence men in his family would have no power over him then. He resumed filming.
Hafez’s marble form was as resilient as the old man had been in life. It mocked the mighty heaves and blows. Tradesmen in the crowd suggested that heat might weaken it, so tires were set alight at the statue’s feet. “One! One! One! The Syrian people are one!” the crowd chanted.
The head fell off first. Men pounced on it before it stopped rolling, smacked it with their shoes. It was driven to Talbiseh and paraded through the streets like a corpse, propped on a tire attached by rope to the back of a pickup truck. Talbiseh had goaded Rastan into bolder action, and Rastan had responded with a sympathetic contemporaneous expression of rebellion.
No Turning Back Page 2
