December 1, 2012
Letter From Syria
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Darkush, Syria
THE scene is almost biblical. You step down through tall reeds, cross the
Orontes River from Turkey in a small rowboat and are received by a local
contingent of the Free Syrian Army, outside the Syrian town of Darkush. One of
them shows you the picture on his cellphone of a Syrian girl who was just taken
across the river to Turkey with what turned out to be fatal wounds from a Syrian
Army helicopter attack on her village. The helicopters, the rebel soldiers say,
dropped barrels with nails and explosives on her house. Meanwhile, over here in
the mud are three fresh graves with bodies that just floated down the river.
Some days it's just an arm or leg that washes up. Although this is "liberated"
territory, in the background you can hear the low drumbeat of shells slamming
into some town over the hills. I ask the rebel local commander, Muatasim Bila
Abul Fida, how he thinks all of this will play out. His answer strikes me as
very honest. "Without the help of Iran and Hezbollah, he would be gone by now,"
he says of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. But even after he goes, there
will be a great sorting out. "It will take five or six years," he adds, because
the Islamist parties "want Shariah, and we want democracy."
In my visit along the Turkey-Syria border, I am struck at how so many different
people want so many different things for Syria. It is unnerving. A Christian
businessman from Aleppo tells me that if a real election were held in Syria
today, the besieged President Assad would still win "with 75 percent of the
vote," because most Syrians crave the order that he provided and are exhausted
by war. But a few hours earlier at an impressively run Syrian refugee camp set
up by Turkey outside the Turkish border town of Antakya, I interviewed young
Syrian Sunni Muslim men who had fled from the Assad family's largely Alawite
stronghold of Latakiya, just down the coast. They spoke about the deep
unfairness of the Syrian system and how Alawites were getting an unfair share of
the pie. "When we first protested to demand reforms, the regime did not do
anything," said Yahya Afacesa, "and then we started to shout and demand freedom,
and the regime attacked us. So there was no way to fight the regime peacefully."
He and his colleagues insisted, though, that the problem in Syria was the Assad
family, not the Alawite sect, a Shiite offshoot from which the Assads hail and
which dominates the regime. These are secular young men, and they still took
pride in Syria's multisectarian identity and harmony, which, it should be
remembered, has deep historical roots in this region. Indeed, before visiting
them, I met with the Chamber of Commerce of Antakya. The chamber's president
proudly displays outside his office a poster of more than 20 different churches,
mosques and even a synagogue still operating in his town, which is just a few
miles from the Syrian border. I repeat: There are cultural roots for pluralism
in this region that a new Syrian government could still fall back on — but
there's also the opposite.
A case in point: In Antakya I met two Turkish logistics experts. They spoke
about the "Arab foreign legion" of Islamist fighters from as far away as
Chechnya and Libya who have come through their town and crossed the Orontes to
join the battle in Syria. They scoffed at the idea that Syria will emerge as a
democracy from a war in which its main arms suppliers are the Islamic-oriented
monarchies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The main Saudi and Qatari desire is that
Syria shift from being an Iranian-Shiite-dominated country to a Sunni-dominated
one. Democracy per se is not their priority.
One of the two Turkish experts has another business in Qatar. To get permission
to work and operate in Qatar, he explained, he needs a local Qatari to sponsor
his work permit. "If you have a work permit and you want to leave the country,
you need your sponsor to give you written permission," he noted. "If your
sponsor dies, his son inherits that right." His Qatari sponsor's son is very
young. Yet, "if he says I cannot leave, I cannot leave. I do business [in Qatar]
but I have no rights at all. ... We joke that we are `modern slaves' there. And
this country is trying to bring democracy to Syria?"
These stories illuminate for me the enormous number of crosscurrents and mixed
motives driving this revolution. Without a strong, galvanizing Syrian leader
with a compelling unifying vision, backed by the international community,
getting rid of Assad will not bring order to Syria. And disorder in Syria will
not have the same consequences as disorder in other countries in the region.
Syria is the keystone of the Middle East. If and how it cracks apart could
recast this entire region. The borders of Syria have been fixed ever since the
British and French colonial powers carved up the Arab provinces of the Ottoman
Empire after World War I. If Assad is toppled and you have state collapse here,
Syria's civil war could go regional and challenge all the old borders — as the
Shiites of Lebanon seek to link up more with the Alawite/Shiites of Syria, the
Kurds in Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey try to link up with each other and create
an independent Kurdistan, and the Sunnis of Iraq, Jordan and Syria draw closer
to oppose the Shiites of Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.
We could be entering a new age of Middle East border-drawing — the
do-it-yourself version — where the borders of the Middle East get redrawn, not
by colonial outsiders from the top down but by the Middle Easterners themselves,
from the bottom up.
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