“Osman has good contacts, he can help you,” the older man said, clearing his throat.
Sadiq began to cough. He assuaged the pungent taste with strong, sweet tea.
Each time they were finished smoking, Abu Omar set about rolling two more. And so it continued.
Eventually he heard a door opening and a sink being filled with water. The rest of the household was stirring. Now they would head out and find his daughters. According to the smugglers in Hatay, they had most likely been driven precisely to where Sadiq now found himself—in Atmeh.
Osman joined them around ten. In daylight, Sadiq could see he had light brown freckles and an auburn beard, a typical northern Syrian.
A platter of eggs, olives, cheese, and zatar, a purée made from fresh thyme, sesame seeds, sumac, and oil, was carried in by Osman’s younger brothers. Warm bread and more tea were also brought in.
It was time to negotiate. Sadiq had to pay for a car, men, and the rent of the Kalashnikov. He needed two minders, the price was $10 a day plus expenses per man. He would get the Kalashnikov for $20 a day. Without people to guard him, he could not go outside. Because Sadiq too could fetch a price. There were criminal gangs among the ranks of the militias, who kidnapped foreigners and handed them over to Assad or the Islamists. If you were alive, Osman told him, they would throw you in a cell and demand $5,000 from your family or government for your release; if you were dead, they would ask for only $2,000. In that case, you would be placed in a freezer, your corpse stacked on top of others, until they received payment for you.
“Hence the guards,” Osman said. “But you need to be on the lookout too, keep an eye on everything going on, these are troubled times.” He sighed. “But you’re safe here in Atmeh. Everybody knows us here.”
His father, a retired colonel from Assad’s air force, looked at his son in silence. Then shook his head.
“No one is safe in Syria.”
The land of fear, the country was called. For many Syrians fear had become a part of themselves; it was impossible to separate from it. Present in every breath they took and every beat of their hearts; lodged in their minds and in their stomachs. It lay deep in their souls. And the older you became, the more afraid you were.
Typically, it had been the young who had gone into the streets to demonstrate when the protests against the dictatorships in the Arab world broke out. Older people had been more skeptical. Disobedience would be punished as it always had been. They did not possess the fearlessness of the young. They had seen too much.
For decades, Syrians had lived under the Assad family. When Hafez was born in 1930, his father had already been given the nickname al-Asad—“the Lion”—for his early opposition to French rule, and later to the Syrian authorities. Hafez was brought up in a poor village inhabited by the Alawite minority, leaving at the age of nine to become the first of his family to be educated beyond primary school. He sought out milieus where Alawites were accepted, developing an early hatred for the Muslim Brotherhood, whose members in Syria came from affluent, conservative families. At sixteen, he joined the Baath Party, whose motto was “unity, liberty, socialism,” and began networking. He made friends among poor Sunni Muslims and Christians, united in their opposition to the bourgeoisie who ruled the country. The army and the party were good career paths for ambitious young men of modest means. Hafez rose quickly through the ranks at the military academy in Homs, which offered free room and board, a grant, and pilot training.
Hafez al-Assad was in his midthirties in 1966, when the Baath Party staged a successful coup, in the wake of which he was appointed minister of defense. Following a fierce power struggle between the military and civilian wings of the party, the former proved victorious, and in 1970 Hafez al-Assad seized all power in a new coup. He demonstrated particular brutality against religious opposition; Islamists were tortured and killed.
There had been clashes between the regime and Islamists from the beginning of the 1960s. Over the course of the ’70s, the Muslim Brotherhood abandoned peaceful opposition and adopted guerrilla tactics. Representatives of the regime were killed in a series of car bomb attacks. One morning the duty officer at the military academy in Aleppo called all the Alawite cadets to a meeting, whereupon the unarmed young men were massacred by the officer and his accomplices. The following year, in 1980, Assad narrowly avoided a similar fate in a grenade attack, when one of his bodyguards sacrificed himself in the blast. The president’s revenge was merciless. Members of the Brotherhood were executed by the hundreds, the organization was banned, and membership was punishable by death.
The attacks on the military and local Baathist Party supporters continued. In early 1982, Islamists declared the Sunni-dominated city of Hama “liberated.” The regime decided to crush opposition once and for all. In the space of a few weeks, the army, under the leadership of Hafez’s brother Rifaat, razed the city to the ground. Twenty, perhaps thirty thousand people were slaughtered, but no exact figures and no pictures of the killings exist. Only afterward did rumors about what had happened leak out.
Assad and his clique ruled, but Sunnis, Shias, Christians, Islamists, Kurds, and Druse all formed the apparatus of power, sharing privileges as well as guilt. The tactical alliance with the Sunni middle class in Damascus and Aleppo was of particular importance. The Alawites, who made up scarcely 11 percent of the population and were regarded by dogmatic Sunni Muslims as infidels, had never previously held political power. Avoiding favoritism toward any of the main religious groups was the strategy, and in so doing Assad created a relatively secular state.
Islamists ended up in cells and torture chambers. Intellectuals laid down their pens,
