Their hope lay in the Lion’s successors loosening the grip.
Hafez’s firstborn son, Bassel, was groomed to take over the throne. One January morning in 1994, he crashed his sports car at a roundabout on his way to Damascus Airport and was killed instantly. Consequently, his brother Bashar, studying ophthalmology in London, had to undertake an intensive course in military training and political instruction. There were many who doubted Bashar was strong enough to carry on the regime.
When Hafez died of a heart attack in 2000, the intellectuals, as well as the Islamists, saw a glimmer of hope. The young eye doctor opened the door for a debate that would never have been tolerated under his father—the Damascus Spring. In the absence of a free media, the discussions were carried out in the salons—muntadayat—of private houses. These discussions resulted in a demand for reforms. The Statement of 99 was a manifesto drawn up by ninety-nine Syrian intellectuals demanding political diversity and a state governed by the rule of law that would allow freedom of expression and the right to organize. In January 2001, the Statement of 1,000 went even further, demanding democracy and a multiparty system.
Then came the Damascus Winter. Pressure from the army and the old guard in the Baath Party led to a reverse in the thaw, and leaders of the reform movement were jailed.
All other parties were to remain banned. Homage was to be shown to the new president. His image was hung on walls and lampposts, in bazaars, in offices, schools, and hospitals. Everywhere you turned, Bashar al-Assad looked down upon you, just as the face of his father before him, the old pilot, once had. The only update from his father’s time was that the young Assad posed in sunglasses à la Top Gun.
* * *
Osman had just turned nineteen when Bashar took power. Osman had left his parents in Atmeh to train in Aleppo as an electrician.
Syria had become a backwater. The barren areas in the north were stagnant, there was hardly any industry; people lived off what the land could offer—beans, lentils, and chickpeas. But things were stable. You had a fair idea how the autumn harvest would turn out and knew the price of a goat and what news would be broadcast on TV. The new president promised reforms in his Five-Year Plans, but the benefits of any economic growth were concentrated in the hands of the few, the hands of those holding Bashar’s.
One Syrian man in four was unemployed. Osman figured out there was more money in being a trader than an out-of-work electrician. Cheap Syrian products fetched a good price in Turkey; likewise, you could buy goods that were hard to find in Syria for a reasonable sum in the neighboring country. He got married and moved back in with his parents in Atmeh, who owned an olive grove close to the Turkish border. It was this proximity to the border that created the conditions for profit: Income was earned from legitimate trade, from more dubious dealings, and from smuggling.
The border guards looked the other way as long as their palms were greased; otherwise Osman made use of herding tracks and crossed the border on foot. As living standards increased in Turkey and stagnated in Syria, there was more money to be made each year. The price of a carton of cigarettes was many times higher across the border, and there was good money to be made in the diesel trade.
In Atmeh, the identity of the smugglers was an open secret. Nobody was making a fortune. There were too many at it for that. Every family had one member involved in “the business,” while the rest toiled in the olive groves, worked the barren earth, or just sat around.
Then everything changed. Syria, as people knew it, would disappear forever.
* * *
One late afternoon in February 2011, after school was finished, a group of boys in Dar’aa, a city in the far south of the country, met up to play football. Afterward they sat around talking. One of them got an idea—to write a message of protest against the president on the wall of the school. Iyak al-dawr ya, doktor the fifteen-year-old spray-painted on the wall before they all ran home. Soon it will be your turn, Doctor. The headmaster read it the following morning and called the police. The pupils were taken in for interrogation in groups of ten. After one of those accused of being complicit, a fourteen-year-old, was beaten bloody, he named the others involved.
The boys were arrested. And disappeared. Their parents went to the police, who merely shrugged. Gradually people began to gather outside the police station to demand the release of the boys. When the fathers again marched in to see the police, they were told to forget their children. “Send your wives and we’ll make some new children for you,” was the response of one of the station chiefs.
The demands for the children to be returned escalated into protests. The security forces opened fire. The first two lives in the rebellion that would later claim hundreds of thousands were lost in Dar’aa.
After a month in prison, the boys were released. Their schoolbags along with their schoolbooks were returned to them, and they were informed that the president—al-Doktor—was granting them an amnesty because it was Mother’s Day. The boys came out with a vacant look in their eyes. They had been burned, cut, beaten; some of them were missing fingernails.
This was how it began. With the letters of a child on a wall.
The protests did not spread as they had in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, where public disorder took place in the capital cities. Damascus was controlled too effectively for that. Informants and plainclothes policemen were everywhere, and any form of protest would be reported within seconds and put a stop to within minutes. Buses carrying men from the security forces drove around the city, the men ready to spring into action at a
