Inside Syria: The Backstory of Their Civil War and What the World Can Expect (3 page)

Assad bobbed and weaved around these and other questions. He claimed calls for democratic change were really efforts by the United States to weaken his government. He claimed to be creating a dialogue with Syrian intellectuals to discuss domestic reform.

“It takes about a year of dialogue to define the frame” for negotiations, he told me.
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That was in 2006. Five years later, no meaningful dialogue had taken place, let alone reform.

In March 2011, the Arab Spring came to Syria, and people raised many of the issues I had asked about in the interview. It's not because I had a crystal ball; large numbers of Syrians had been raising those issues for decades. In a panic, Assad implemented some reforms. He lifted the state of emergency, gave citizenship to most of the disenfranchised Kurds, and opened a dialogue with moderate opposition leaders. Had he made such reforms in 2006, Assad would have been hailed as a farsighted leader.

By 2011, it was too late. The uprising against Assad and his entire
regime had begun, and there was no turning back. Syria's ruling elite became increasingly isolated, internationally and domestically. The Arab League—composed of twenty-two states from the Middle East and North Africa—voted unprecedented sanctions against Syria and later voted to recognize the Syrian opposition and eject Assad's government. The United Nations sent several observer missions and tried to broker a peace agreement. All the efforts failed.

The regime has suffered a number of high-level defections, including the Syrian ambassador to Iraq, a Republican Guard brigadier general, and the prime minister. Every week saw desertions by lower-level military. Syria faced serious economic problems as well. But as ultra-right-wing rebels gained strength within the opposition, Assad rallied some Syrians to his side, arguing that a secular strongman is better than Islamic rule.

A big question remained: Will the Syrian people blame the country's crisis on the Assad government or the rebels?

I received a partial answer during a very unusual trip. Syrian authorities organized a media visit to an elementary school in the southern city of Daraa, where the uprising began. Government officials wanted to show that life had returned to normal. All was going according to plan when the children came out for morning recess.

Then, spotting the TV cameras, the children suddenly began chanting, “Freedom, freedom,” one of the main antigovernment slogans. Then others chanted “Syria” and similar progovernment slogans. Government officials leading the delegation went pale. Here, in front of the whole world, stood the divided Syria.

“The political chasm has reached the schools,” said my translator, who was assigned by the government to accompany me on this visit. “First graders are now politically motivated.”
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The fact that students dared to chant antigovernment slogans during an official visit did not bode well for Assad and the future of the Syrian government.

Uprisings aren't new in Syria. To fully understand the revolt that began in 2011, we need to look at the country's tumultuous history.

If Americans know anything about twentieth-century Middle East history, it's likely gleaned from watching reruns of
Lawrence of Arabia
. The 1962 epic film featured an all-star cast riding camels across the desert while fighting the evil Ottoman Turks during World War I. I enjoyed watching the film as a teenager, particularly Peter O'Toole's heroic portrayal of T. E. Lawrence. Later, as a college student and anti–Vietnam War activist in the 1960s, I wondered if the film accurately portrayed history. It took me years to find out.

Peter O'Toole has become the iconic image of Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence: tall, lanky, and blond. The real-life Lawrence stood only five feet five inches tall, so short that he didn't even look like a British Army officer. But the two men did share fine blond hair and very blue eyes.

The life of T. E. Lawrence was inextricably intertwined with the modern history of Syria. He was born in 1888 and entered Oxford University in 1907. Lawrence began his early career in 1909 with a walking tour of Syria, then part of the Ottoman Empire. He made two more trips to Lebanon and Syria after graduation to work on archaeological digs overseen by the British Museum. Lawrence had learned to speak colloquial Arabic and wrote his PhD thesis about Crusader castles in Syria.

Lawrence became a quasi–Indiana Jones by using his archaeological travels as a cover to spy for the British military, although history does not record his owning a bullwhip. Some historians dispute whether Lawrence spied for the British before the war. But without doubt, British intelligence was very interested in the area being studied by Lawrence because of the nearby bridges and a new railway line being built by the Germans.
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Lawrence's mentor, who got him the archaeological job,
worked for British intelligence. And, without doubt, Lawrence in his early travels did carry a 9mm Mauser pistol.

After the outbreak of World War I, Lawrence officially joined British Army intelligence and was posted to Cairo. He developed both a respect for and a romantic affinity for Arabs, a marked departure from the colonial arrogance of the times. His fellow colonialists suspected him of being too sympathetic to the natives.

Lawrence sought to distinguish himself from the typical British colonial. At the same time, he realized the contradiction of being British in an Arab land, an issue that would plague him throughout his life. “Some feel deeply the influence of native people, and try to adjust themselves to its spirit,” Lawrence wrote. “To fit themselves modestly into the picture, they suppress all in them imitate the native, and so avoid friction in their daily life. However, they cannot avoid the consequences of imitation, a hollow, worthless thing. They are like the people but not of the people…”
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But the Arab leaders of the revolt against the Turks had a decidedly different perspective on Lawrence. Most saw him as a minor British liaison officer who became famous only after the war. Abdullah ibn al-Hussein, one of the leaders of the Arab revolt, had to convince his followers of Lawrence's usefulness in military matters. He forbid Lawrence from making direct contact with tribes under his control.
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Lawrence's seemingly contradictory role became understandable in the context of his political goals. He favored independent Arab states, but only to be governed by friendly Arab monarchs who supported Britain and opposed France. Lawrence was an advocate of neocolonialism.

The Ottoman Sultans ruled the area that is now Syria from 1517 to 1918. The provinces that are now Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine included numerous tribes, ethnicities, and religious groups. The Ottomans allowed some local autonomy to feudal Arab tribal leaders. Local noblemen ruled in rural areas so long as they paid taxes to Constantinople (Istanbul). They allowed Christians, Jews, and Muslims to control their own personal-status laws, such as marriage and divorce.

Both conflict and cooperation had historically existed between Christians, Muslims, and Druze, a distinct ethnic group that split off from Shia Muslims nearly one thousand years ago. The Ottomans played one group off another to maintain their rule. To further complicate matters, European powers sought to extend their influence by supporting certain groups. The French backed the Christians, and the British supported the Druze.

Like all colonialists, the sultans also used brute force. In those days the Ottoman Empire extended into southern Europe. The sultans brutally suppressed an 1875 rebellion in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Yugoslavia), the 1876 rebellion in Bulgaria, and an Armenian uprising from 1892 to 1893. The Ottoman Empire was impacted by the same nationalist and democratic movements as other countries around the world. Around the turn of the twentieth century, revolutions had erupted in Russia (1905), Iran (1906), China (1911), and Mexico (1910).

With the outbreak of World War I, the Ottomans sided with Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire against Britain, France, and Russia. The British, and to some extent the French, hoped to use the war as a means to divvy up the Ottoman Empire, as well as seize control of German colonies. Not surprisingly, the British Empire and French colonial empire were happy to use Arab nationalism to help defeat their enemy. While paying lip service to Arab independence, however, both powers planned to extend their colonial empires at the expense of the local populations.

Lawrence of Arabia
more or less accurately portrays how the British sought a wartime alliance with Sharif Hussein ibn Ali, governor of Mecca, and his sons. Alec Guinness portrayed Faisal bin Hussein, one of Hussein's sons, although the real Faisal was twenty-nine years old when the war began and Guinness was forty-eight when the film was shot. As the official who governed Islam's most holy city, Sharif Hussein represented a political alternative to the Ottoman Turkish Sultan Mehmed V, who was then the recognized leader of the Muslim world. Hussein, the patriarch of the Hashemite family, claimed to be a direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammad and thus offered a credible
case for an alternative, pro-British leadership of the Muslim world.

Hussein offered to support the British in return for a guarantee of a postwar independent Arab nation under his rule that would encompass virtually the entire Middle East. His vision of an independent state was decidedly conservative, opposing many of the reforms imposed by the Turks. He would not allow women to work. Hussein favored a strict version of Islamic Shariah law, including amputations of thieves' limbs.
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Such views didn't stop Sir Henry MacMahon, the top British diplomat in the region, from responding favorably to Hussein's offer. Even then, Western empires feared the power of Islamic movements. Lawrence prophetically sought to divide the Muslim world by promoting pro-British Sharif Hussein against Sultan Mehmed V.

Referring to the violence needed to overthrow the Ottoman Empire, Lawrence wrote, “If we can arrange that this political change shall be a violent one, we will have abolished the threat of Islam, by dividing it against itself…”
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MacMahon wanted to leave the impression that he supported Arab independence, but he intentionally clouded his support with opaque and ambiguous diplomatic language. The British government had no intention of actually granting independence.
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But Lawrence's Arab allies knew little of Britain's long-term plans. Hussein, his sons, and other nationalist leaders trusted that the British would carry out their promises. Auda Abu Tayi was one of them.

An old color-tint photo showed Auda dressed in a plain, white keffiyeh, brown robes, and carrying both a curved dagger and a sword. He had dark skin, a black mustache, and goatee. He looked the part of a fierce desert warrior. Anthony Quinn portrayed Auda in
Lawrence of Arabia
.

Auda led the Huwaytat clan of Bedouin nomads who roamed the deserts of what is now Saudi Arabia and Jordan. In 1908, Auda became a thorn in the side of the Ottomans when he killed two government officials in a dispute over tax collection. They tried to hunt him down but never succeeded.

When World War I broke out, Auda and his kinsmen became key participants in the Arab revolt. He joined Lawrence in the very first
military campaign against the Turks. Auda and his clan were known as skilled fighters, with each man functioning as an independent fighting unit. Such initiative ran counter to British military doctrine that relied on massing troops. But it proved perfectly suited for guerrilla warfare in the desert.

Lawrence of Arabia
portrayed Auda as boorish, greedy, and loyal only to his own tribe. When there was no loot to be found, Quinn's character threatened to abandon the struggle. The real Auda was a desert intellectual and fierce supporter of the Arab cause, not just his tribe. According to Lawrence, “He saw life as a saga, all the events in it were significant: all personages in contact with him heroic, his mind was stored with poems of old raids and epic tales of fights.”
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Auda was a charismatic fighter who also helped unite the other tribes against the Ottomans. He was a key fighter in the Arab revolt's capture of Aqaba and Damascus. Auda is “the greatest fighting man in northern Arabia,” Lawrence once said.

The British were happy to use Auda and other Arab leaders to win the war but relied on other aristocratic families to eventually rule the region. After the war, British officials installed the Hashemites as rulers in Iraq and Jordan. The Ibn Saud family conquered the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia, and the British ultimately made an alliance with them. The Saud family rules Saudi Arabia today. The British were perfectly willing to ally with ultraconservative, religious rulers so long as they politically supported British rule. That policy was promoted by a British leader who would become world famous only a few years later.

My image of Winston Churchill is an elderly man wearing an ill-fitting three-piece suit and chomping a cigar, which for some reason was called a “Churchill.” (In the 1950s, a Cuban cigar company named a particularly large cigar a “Churchill,” and it subsequently became the generic name for that size stogie.) That was the iconic image of Churchill as British prime minister during World War II. But he had a long history as a controversial member of Parliament and cabinet minister dating back to the early 1900s.

Churchill was a political conservative and proponent of expanding the British Empire. The British Navy, the largest and strongest of its era, played a crucial role in maintaining that power. From 1911 to 1915, Churchill became first lord of the admiralty, the cabinet member who oversaw naval affairs. He favored development of airplanes for use in war and wanted to convert the navy from coal to oil. Oil was more efficient, lighter weight, and provided a speed advantage over the coal-fired German fleet.

The British faced one very ticklish problem, however. At the time, Britain had no known domestic oil supplies. The United States was the world's largest producer of petroleum back then. But the United Kingdom didn't want to be dependent on any other major power, even an ally. It wasn't sufficient to buy oil on the open market at a fair price. Britain had to guarantee strategic control of oil supplies on favorable terms—and deny oil to its enemies.

“This control must be absolute and there must be no foreign interests involved in it of any sort,” said one British admiral at the time.
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Imperialist powers, including the United States, have been carrying out a modernized version of that policy ever since. A privately owned British company had already struck oil in Iran in 1908 after establishing a sweetheart deal with the corrupt Shah (emperor). By 1911, Churchill arranged for the British government to secretly buy a majority stake in the company, which would eventually become known as British Petroleum (BP). The British Navy was guaranteed an oil supply for twenty years on very favorable financial terms.

But they needed more. Before World War I, the British had started a joint company with Germans and Turks to pump oil in what is now northern Iraq. Four days after the end of the war, on November 3, 1918, British troops occupied Mosul in northern Iraq. The British produced their first gusher in October 1927 in nearby Kirkuk, after seizing German and Turkish investments and dividing the oil concession among British, French, and American oil companies.

But that was nearly ten years away. Back in 1914, oil was a long-term dream; the Suez Canal was an immediate reality. It was vital for
British worldwide trade, particularly for accessing India, which had become the number one importer of British goods. So the British wanted to protect the canal by controlling areas near Egypt: Sinai, Gaza, Palestine, and Jordan.

The French had their own colonial ambitions, often in fierce competition with the British. They had lost wars to Britain during the 1700s and early 1800s and continued to compete for spheres of influence into the early twentieth century. Although they were allies during World War I, the French never really trusted the British—and vice versa. France entered the competition for oil a few years after the British. France was late in converting its military and industries to oil and was still searching for oil-producing colonies when World War I began.