A Disappearance in Damascus (5 page)

Meanwhile the countryside, where half the Syrian population scraped out a living, was in the midst of the worst drought ever known. Farmers were abandoning their fields and flocking to the cities, where they found themselves competing for jobs with refugees eager to work for scraps. A decade of migration from the countryside into cities that could not integrate them fast enough brought two disparate worlds—that of “haves” and “have-nots”—into collision.
¹²
The majority of those have-nots just happened to be Sunni (though the majority of the Syrian army is also Sunni)
¹³
. While the initial protests inspired by the so-called Arab Spring involved urban progressives, including Alawites
¹⁴
and other liberals critical of the ruling clique, the solidarity was short-lived. After government forces fired on protestors, spurring more protestors, and some of the protestors armed themselves to shoot back, Saudi Arabia saw a chance to strike a blow to an ally of its enemy, Iran, transforming what had been a civil uprising into a sectarian proxy war. As foreign jihadists poured in through Turkey, they brought their own interests, neither Syria nor democracy among them. The revolution was over—hijacked by outsiders.
¹⁵

At a corner store I bought necessities: coffee, milk, a bottle of Lebanese wine. Upstairs in my empty apartment, I turned on the air conditioner that served as a kind of white noise, dulling the racket of the street party outside. Pouring wine into a kitchen tumbler, I wandered out onto the terrace. If the apartment was modest, designed as a mother-in-law's
suite, the terrace was a wonder. The entire rooftop, twice the size of the apartment itself, was painted flamingo pink, including the fountain that was its centrepiece. It was the kind of terrace where I imagined dinner parties, tuxedoed waiters, champagne in some era long past.

The war was still far off, in another country, and time remained to do things differently here. From the edge of the roof, I could almost see my favourite bakery, closed for the night, where working-class men in thin T-shirts perspired in front of an open furnace from which emerged delicious cheese and zaatar pastries that they never let me pay for. I was a visitor, a guest. “If you have any trouble, just call us,” they said, self-appointed guardians of my well-being. I was never able to pass by without being waved over to accept a pastry, hot from the coals, which they made me feel, by their humility and graciousness, was a gift to them as much as to me.

On the rooftop across from mine a troupe of boys, ten or eleven years of age, were singing an American boy-band ballad, choreographing their dance moves in the shadow of a giant satellite dish. The lyrics belted out in accented English floated over to me like a happy serenade. “Girl…don't you know?” The night air pleasantly cool, the wine sharp and almost sweet, the moon overhead a spotlight illuminating this performance for its audience of one.

WITH AHLAM MY WORK
entered a new phase. With her to guide me, as summer counted down, I came to know Little Baghdad's streets, its alleyways, its cramped apartments, dimly lit to conserve electricity. Even when we could easily walk to meetings with refugees we usually took taxis to avoid being seen together. She had noticed a man lurking outside her building, taking photographs of her when she came and went. Two others had followed her when she went to buy groceries. One pretended to take a picture of the other but the flash went off in her face. There were revenge killings between Iraqis, and militias who followed their victims over the border to Syria, so she wondered if it was her kidnappers, putting the fear into her.

Yet wherever we went together we were greeted warmly. Doors opened, pillows were propped behind our backs as we sat down, tea poured. She embraced the women; sometimes they wept while she held them. “You are my eyes,” she would say, in the Arabic way. “You are my heart.” Afterwards we
always ended up back at her apartment to discuss what we had heard and seen that day, and any news she had had from her contacts in Iraq.

“A lot of things have gone crazy down there,” she said, tearing open a pack of cigarettes. “Do you know they are putting underwear on the animals now?” She was talking about al-Qaeda, which threatened to kill farmers who didn't comply along with their livestock. “They've started hanging cloth over the animals' backsides. Cows, donkeys, sheep. Only the chickens are exempt because they can't tell male from female.”

We laughed at the absurd image, imagining the lengths one must go to in order to put underwear on farm animals. “And you aren't allowed to sell a cucumber beside a tomato in the market anymore, or make a salad with cucumbers and tomatoes, because the cucumber is male and the tomato is female.”

Ahlam's apartment was always a hive of activity. Not only her two “monkeys,” as she called her children, who turned out not to be shy at all. They were always tussling, playing, or draping themselves around her neck as if she might be taken from them at any moment. And they had to compete for her attention: there were always refugees waiting to talk to her. Sometimes three or four—on more than one occasion I counted a dozen. They would explain their situations and she would promise to see what she could do.

But what could she do for the woman whose husband had been shot in the back by American soldiers while taking his television to a repair shop, who was now responsible for supporting five children while caring for her paralyzed husband? What could she do for the widowed mother of a teenaged
boy who had been tortured by militants? His mother was now trying to stop his constant suicide attempts, though she had three other children to care for and he could not be left alone near a knife, a shoelace, an electrical socket. What for the man who brought a sheaf of documents proving that he had worked as an interpreter for the Marines, before his house was blown up? He was trying to get accepted to the United States but was told he needed a reference letter from no lesser rank than an American general. “Why didn't they tell me that earlier, when I was hired?” he asked me. “I can't get one now.”

Many of the refugees had received letters ordering them to leave Iraq or die. Often the letters were signed with sinister names that reminded me of heavy metal bands. The Angel of Death. The Death Division. Sometimes they were accompanied by a bullet, drops of blood, a chicken head. As if dictated from a central office, these letters explained that the person belonged to such-and-such a sect, and was therefore an infidel, a terrorist, a “threat to national security.”

Sometimes these letters were a tool of the sectarian cleansing that drove out people like the mild-mannered high school history teacher I met through Ahlam. Slim, early thirties, lame in his left leg from birth, he was one of the hundred thousand professionals who lost their jobs in the very first order issued by Paul Bremer in May of 2003. Coalition Provisional Authority's Order Number One—“the De-Baathification of Iraqi society”—was intended to purge the new political system of any influence from the former regime by firing members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and banning them forever from working in the public sector. What the order failed to acknowledge was that many people
had only joined the party to keep their jobs or avoid harassment from Hussein's secret police; and anyone who wanted to pursue graduate studies
had
to join. Bremer's single order effectively lobotomized the country.

“I learned about it when I went to pick up my salary,” said the history teacher, who was one of forty thousand schoolteachers fired. The next day looters showed up at his house. “They stole every stick of furniture.” Then his life was threatened. He came from a city in southern Iraq. “It's a mixed city, Sunni and Shia, but the new leaders were sectarian Shia. I know for a fact that all those killed in my city were ex–Baath Party members because they had master's degrees or doctorates, so they had to be. If I show my own face in town, the authorities have my name and my photograph. I will be hunted and killed.” He spent three years roaming the countryside with a tribe of nomads who treated him as a guest until he eventually raised the money to bribe an official for a passport that allowed him to come here. He missed his wife and three small daughters, but his presence had put their lives at risk. “They are better off without me.”

With the change in regime, Iraq had splintered into multitudes of militias. Some fought the Americans—these were mainly Sunni—some fought the new government, some fought one another. (The Mahdi Army, the largest of the Shia militias, supported by the poorest of the slum-dwellers, fought the Americans
and
the Sunnis
and
the government, although they had seats in government.) Some of the fighters were foreign, whether Saudis who joined groups like al-Qaeda, or Iranians advising the government—it turned out power had been handed to Shia political activists who had
taken shelter from Saddam Hussein in Iran in the 1980s—but most were Iraqi. And most of them, for all the evil they did, believed they were fighting to defend themselves and protect their communities, which had predictably fractured along tribal and religious lines, since whom do you call in troubled times but family and friends? Plus the militias gave them jobs, cars, phones and protection—and often no choice.

Politics were behind many of the death threats, but as often as not they were simply a cover for organized crime, an excuse to kick people out of their houses and steal their property and businesses. Gangsters were living in the best villas in Baghdad, driving around in company cars. Who was going to stop them? Everyone said the police
were
the militias now.

“We moved from one dictator to a multi-dictatorship system,” an Iraqi journalist told me. “People who can harm you, shut you up or put you in jail. A young guy can come and tell you not to walk down this street, and you have to obey. This young man is a dictator. So now we have tens of thousands of dictators.”

On the market street two blocks from Ahlam's apartment, which I occasionally walked through on my way home, the scent of fresh baking lured me into the Baghdad Bakery, where glass cases displayed cookies and syrupy sweets. The four Shia brothers who owned it with a Christian friend had recently closed up shop in Iraq and reopened here. They used to live in a wealthy Sunni neighbourhood of Baghdad that they could no longer enter. Their houses and factories had been taken over by gangs. The brothers could not explain what had happened, how the war had turned
neighbour against neighbour. “All six of our sisters married Sunnis,” said one of them, a grey-haired Scotch-drinker in a madras shirt, “and I don't even know how to pray.”

A lot of the people I spoke to seemed disoriented, stunned. “I'm dizzy,” a young man told me. “I don't know what I'm doing here.” A year shy of finishing a degree in English, he had just lost his father—tortured to death—and his mother spent all day gazing at her husband's photograph, refusing to let go of his clothes. Though his mother was Shia and his father was Sunni, his name was Omar, an identifiably Sunni first name. “And that's big fucking trouble,” he told me. “My name is a curse.”

Militants had tried to recruit him and so had the Americans, since they needed interpreters. He fled to Syria because he wanted nothing to do with either. “The militias killed my father, and the Americans—they brought this war. Before we never had this Sunni–Shia problem. Now we are like in America, black against white.”

Most of the refugees insisted they were “all Iraqis.” If I asked which sect they belonged to, they looked as if my words had caused them pain. “We ran from it there,” Ahlam explained. “We don't want to talk about it here. Whoever is doing these things is fighting for power and money, not for the future of Iraq.”

One afternoon Ahlam and I took a taxi to the end of a dusty alleyway not far from her apartment. It was the home of a former Iraqi intelligence officer who was a Sunni and a captain in the once fearsome Fedayeen Saddam, a paramilitary group made up of Shia as well as Sunnis that had reported directly to Saddam Hussein. The captain told me
that the biggest mistake of the war was to “lay the Iraqi army off work.” He was referring to Order Number Two of the Coalition Provisional Authority: to fire the Iraqi army and intelligence services without securing the weapons depots. (And to disband the border guard, throwing open the country to smugglers and foreign fighters.
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) These unemployed soldiers—well-trained, angry and with families to feed—formed the core of the militias that were fighting for control of Iraq.

The man spent his days feeding and bathing his wife, who had been paralyzed when their farmhouse near Baghdad was hit with rocket-propelled grenades by the Badr Brigade, a Shia paramilitary group connected to the new Iraqi government. She was thin, with lustrous black hair that tumbled from her sea-green headscarf. She had been lying on a mat in a corner of their apartment for the past two years, ever since the family had fled to Damascus. “Hysterical paralysis,” read the medical report her husband showed me.

Their eldest daughter had been killed in the attack, their eldest son abducted and tortured with electric cables to the head—now he babbled incoherently and was violent unless drugged. Their nine-year-old daughter was left badly burned. They could not afford surgery for her burns, which had puffed up like a topographical map. Nor were they able to send her to school: their presence in Syria was illegal because the family did not have a residency permit. To acquire a permit he would have to cross back into Iraq, and re-enter Syria legally. If he did that he believed he would be killed. “Whoever captures me gets thousands of dollars,” he said.

“What about the girl?” I asked Ahlam as we took our leave. Outside, the sunlight was blinding. Her father told
us his daughter didn't go outside much because some local children bullied her, taunting her as “the burned girl.”

“None of this is her fault,” I said. “She's just a child. She should be in school.”

“She will marry a man who beats her and have children who can't read,” Ahlam said.

The eight-hundred-kilometre drive from Baghdad to Damascus takes twelve hours, much of it through barren desert navigated at high speed to avoid roadside bandits, but it slows to twenty-four tense hours if you are stuck behind army vehicles. Ahlam's youngest brother, Salaam, had spent the past four years as a driver ferrying passengers back and forth in his SUV. “A dangerous job,” I said to him. “For sure,” he replied. A baby-faced guy of thirty-five with the build of a nightclub bouncer, he showed me his four identity cards—his own, a Shia, a Sunni, and a neutral college ID that bought him time to figure out what to say if the intentions of the men who stopped his vehicle were unclear.

Since the highway from Iraq into Syria passed through Anbar province, a desperately poor Sunni stronghold that had witnessed more violence than anywhere outside Baghdad (it would later fall to Islamic State), Salaam gave his Shia passengers what he called “lessons in how to stay alive,” telling them which sheikh to say they knew, which region to say they were from, and which family, in case they were stopped. Once, ambushed by bandits with machine guns protruding from the sunroof of a black BMW, one of his Shia passengers was so frightened he forgot the lesson. He began stammering in front of the gunmen. Salaam slapped him across the face.
“Speak, man!” he ordered. His passenger remembered the lesson and survived.

“Most of my passengers from Baghdad are highly educated people,” he told me. “Everyone who returns says they've run out of money, so they have to go back, even if they know they will probably be killed. If they can sell something there, they come back to Syria.”

Salaam often stopped by Ahlam's apartment with news from the village where they had grown up. Of their beloved mother who still lived along the Tigris River but would no longer eat fish because she was convinced the fish were feeding on bodies dumped in the waterway. Of the latest viral videos, like the one Salaam showed me on his phone of a young fighter from the Mahdi Army, film-star handsome, arrested by Iraqi security forces while trying to flee in a wedding dress and forced to do a strip tease.

“Do you think they killed him?” I asked, handing him back his phone.

He shrugged. “Him? He's probably back out on the street.”

By day I was going out to speak to frightened people, and at night returning to my apartment, my terrace, the moonlight overhead. “Sorry I missed you on chat,” I emailed my boyfriend, explaining the long hours. It was impossible to convey what I was seeing in a brief email, so I didn't try. I was meeting people in shock, people needy but asking nothing from me; it would be shameful to ask something of a guest. They were surprised by my interest in their stories because, as they said, quite rightly, “This happened to everyone.” The women gave me gifts, shyly, apologizing that it could not
be more. On the windowsill in my apartment was a bottle of perfume that made me sad whenever I looked at it because I knew I would never use it. Yet I could not refuse without giving offence, without saying outright that they had nothing and I everything. I felt the awkwardness of taking their gifts, and then taking more: their stories, the accounting of what had been lost.