In the Lion's Den Read online

  On the other hand, FIRDOS programs seemed tightly controlled and its beneficiaries’ stories too good to be true. At first I chalked it up to a language barrier: five years of English-language journalism and office work at OBG had eroded my Arabic language skills. Nevertheless, my journalistic experience in Cairo had taught me that development projects in the Arab world seldom went according to plan. For example, FIRDOS’s pilot microfinance program to support small business ventures had a payback rate of 100 percent—an unlikely percentage given the risks of starting thousands of microenterprises. After all, what were the chances that every business would succeed? The obstacles that beneficiaries had overcome sounded genuine and compelling, but the ending of each story was apparently always the same: FIRDOS was their ticket to paradise.

  When I returned to Damascus, I stopped by to thank Rola for arranging what I felt was a very interesting trip. “Yes, I know,” she said knowingly. “The first lady would like to meet you for a ‘chat’ about what you saw.”

  Asma al-Assad’s secretary called me a few days later to schedule an appointment. She told me to wait at 6 PM on the corner outside my apartment building, where a car and escort from the palace would meet me. When I tried to offer my address, the secretary politely cut me off midsentence. “We know where you live, Mr. Tabler,” she said.

  At 6 PM sharp, a man with dark hair, bright-blue eyes, and ivory skin, dressed in a black wool trench coat, met me at the side of the curb and motioned me into the backseat of a black Honda Accord. I knew who I was going to meet, but I had no idea where I was going. As the car snaked up the road from Mezze to Mount Qassioun, the heights overlooking Damascus, I tried to make small talk with the drivers in Arabic about the cold and rainy weather that winter. Both acknowledged with a glance that I was talking to them, but they said nothing, their faces stern. Halfway up the hill, along a right-hand bend in a thicket of willow trees, the car veered off the highway onto an old country road whose passage was obscured by dangling branches. Men with machine guns appeared among the trees at both sides of the car as we approached an iron gate. A guard with features nearly identical to my escort’s looked at the driver’s face, then glanced at mine. Without saying a word, he motioned with one hand, and the gate in front of us swung open. Fifty meters ahead was a small dacha with a classical facade. The car pulled up to the building’s front door. Another guard, looking identical to the first, opened the car door. “Up the stairs to your left, sir,” he said.

  This wasn’t my first meeting with a head of state or his wife in the Arab world, so I had a good idea what to expect. This usually involved waiting, sometimes for hours, in an antechamber while staff served strong cups of Arabic coffee or tea. Sometimes the VIP’s aides would try and spin stories as well. Once, while waiting to meet the Palestinian president Yasir Arafat in Gaza, for example, one of his staff tried to convince me that the Monica Lewinsky scandal was a Jewish plot to undermine the peace process.

  As I entered the room, I saw Asma al-Assad sitting behind her desk, quietly writing. I was shocked—no one had asked me for my ID or searched my bag. She glanced up, put down her pen, and greeted me with a tender handshake and smile. It was clear why she had caught the president’s eye: standing about five foot eight with bobbed blond hair and friendly eyes and in good shape, Mrs. Assad was a vision of refined Levantine beauty.

  I also soon understood why he had married her. In a place where few things were as they seemed, she was surprisingly open and genuine, telling me all about her life within the first hour of our discussion. Asma was born in London in 1975 to Fawaz Akhras, a well-regarded cardiologist who hailed from a prominent Sunni family from the Syrian city of Homs, and his wife, Sahar, a former first secretary in the Syrian embassy in London. After a public-school education in Britain, Asma entered King’s College, University of London, earning high marks and graduating with a first-class-honors bachelor of science degree in computer science and a diploma in French literature. The following year, she started work at Deutsche Bank as an analyst in a hedge fund. In 1998, she joined J.P. Morgan’s London office, where she became an investment banker specializing in mergers and acquisitions for biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies.6

  The reasons for her next step she didn’t explain. After three seemingly successful years in the world of finance, Asma returned to Syria and married Bashar al-Assad. The marriage raised eyebrows in Syria for one particular reason: Asma was Sunni, and Bashar was Alawite.

  No photographs of the wedding appeared in local newspapers, which some Syrians told me was a sign of the Assad family’s displeasure with the president’s choice. Asma told me that the secrecy surrounding her wedding allowed her to get to know her homeland better. So while the British press speculated that the president’s wife was now living the life of luxury, Asma instead made an incognito journey around Syria. She said she wanted to talk to and meet Syrians openly, not as the wife of the president. She said she needed to talk to people in a normal environment to listen to and understand their problems. She said she visited around one hundred villages in all but one of Syria’s fourteen governorates. Since Israel occupied the Golan, that probably meant all Syrian territory under the regime’s control.

  Asma said, “Villagers are very pure, very willing. Young people don’t want to leave their villages, but economic opportunities don’t exist there.” While this seemed hard to believe, I understood her point: Syrian cities were already crowded and full of shantytowns. During the 1980s and early 1990s, Syria had one of the world’s highest population growth rates in the world. If they all came to Damascus and Aleppo for work, life would be miserable for everyone.

  Some of the “discussion forums” of Bashar’s early days in office were rumored to have tried to register under the associations law, the statute governing civil-society organizations that dated back forty years—long before NGOs existed. But the reason why NGOs couldn’t register was political; some of the “discussion forums” of Bashar’s early days in office had tried to register under the associations law, which alarmed many in the regime. They had probably followed the Egyptian government’s legal battles with Western-funded NGOs in the 1990s that tried to promote democratic change. Some in the Syrian regime were rumored to believe that the NGOs were “Trojan horses” designed to bring down the regime.

  To protect FIRDOS, Mrs. Assad explained that she registered the NGO as a charity, which legally restricted its work but allowed it to operate. She also placed the organization under her “patronage,” a term that I knew, from my years of working in the Arab world, meant that she called most, if not all, the shots.

  I suddenly felt confused. If we had had this conversation during my first project in Syria, when reform euphoria still gripped the country, it would have been consistent. However, times had changed. The legislation to open private banks in Syria, passed in April 2001, had yet to be implemented—in fact, not a single bank had even been named. Those who had originally written about the potential of private banks wouldn’t write for me anymore, and my buddy Ibrahim was in jail.

  So I asked her about these recent setbacks and the reasons behind them. She smiled and said reform in Syria would continue, but it was taking longer than expected. “When you are in our situation, you come to depend on people you would not have to elsewhere,” she said impenetrably. Did she mean that the Syrian regime was next on Washington’s hit list? Or was it because it was a minority regime? “If we opened the market to private banks now, and the staff at the Central Bank was not prepared to handle it, there could be chaos. Would that be good for the country?”

  I had experienced the incompetence of Syrian public officialdom firsthand. Only a few weeks previously, the Syrian Central Bank governor—the Syrian equivalent of the Federal Reserve chairman—had grilled one of our analysts on last year’s OBG report. During a three-hour meeting, he read aloud every line of the financial services section in Stalinist fashion, screaming “This is a lie!” at the end of every sentence. While I didn’t dou
bt that OBG was capable of making mistakes, the notion that everything we wrote was untrue was simply nonsensical.

  I didn’t agree with everything she said, but Asma al-Assad seemed genuine and was very likable. After working in Syria on and off for two years, it was just refreshing to meet a talented person in such an interesting—and powerful—position. While many of her projects seemed naïve, her motivation to improve her fellow man in such a tough environment was seductive. I felt so comfortable with her that when I shook her hand to say good-bye, I nearly called her by her first name.

  Excited by my visit with Syria’s first lady, I began writing my article on FIRDOS the next morning. I was familiar with NGO activities in Egypt as well as the problems associated with Cairo’s sprawling shantytowns, so it was an easy task. When I visited Mounir Ali at the Ministry of Information that week and told him about my interview with the “first lady,” he looked surprised. “Just a point of clarification,” he said pedantically. “Officially, the first lady of Syria is Anissa al-Assad, the late president’s wife and President Bashar’s mother. Asma should be referred to as ‘the wife of the president.’”

  After the article had been edited, I sent a copy to Rola to forward on to Mrs. Assad. After a few days, Rola reported back that the “first lady” loved the article and handed me a memory pen containing an electronic copy of an amended version. The only addition was a quote from FIRDOS’s external relations coordinator Nouar al-Shara, the daughter of foreign minister Farouk al-Shara, reading, “FIRDOS is different because we work with people, not for them.”

  Shortly after my meeting with Asma, US policy toward Syria began to change. On March 3, 2003, Secretary of State Powell declared in a speech before Congress that it was the objective of the United States to “let Lebanon be ruled by the Lebanese people without the presence of the Syrian occupation army.”7 Since Washington’s tacit “deal” with Assad over Lebanon in the autumn of 1990, Powell’s words marked the first time that a US official referred to Syria’s “presence” in Lebanon as an occupation.

  On March 17, Powell withdrew a draft resolution from the UN Security Council, which had called for the use of military force to compel Saddam Hussein to disarm. Washington announced that existing resolutions were enough to justify the use of military force in Iraq. War was coming fast, so I hurriedly cleaned out my Damascus apartment and prepared to fly the following morning to OBG’s other project, which was located in Tunis. Most Syrians I knew warned me that during the Gulf War, international telephone lines and other communications with Syria were disconnected for over a week—which was time I could not afford to be cut off from OBG while it was going through frantic regional expansion.

  I stopped by to see Rola. I wanted to tell her about my early departure and thank her for all her help. After a few minutes of small talk, she suddenly surprised me by saying that she had been talking with Bouthaina Shaaban about ways to improve Syria’s image. She was referring to the spokeswoman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—a former translator for Hafez al-Assad. “We’d like to hear your ideas on how to do that. Once the war is over, come to Damascus and we will talk about it.”

  Before leaving Damascus, I stopped by the US embassy to say good-bye to a few friends. The thoroughfare in front of the embassy, normally filled with cars, was jammed with people, queuing in front of the Iraqi embassy. Buses were parked nearby, with scores of Syrian youths sitting inside. When I finally made it into the chancery, a friend pointed out of the window toward the Iraqi embassy. “They say they are volunteering to go fight us in Iraq,” he said, eyebrows raised.

  In Tunis, I returned to the chaos of OBG’s global expansion. From my hotel room, I followed the story of US troops invading Iraq via CNN. Reports from journalists and camera crews embedded within US troop units dominated the news coverage, which eclipsed Syria’s response to the invasion. The Tunisian government’s restrictions on the Internet made checking the news difficult. I was also suffering from a sort of “burnout” regarding Syria that OBG staff often experienced immediately after a report. However, from what I could see, US-Syrian relations seemed to be taking a turn for the worst.

  Syria’s response to the invasion was defiance. Volunteers to wage “jihad” against occupation forces continued to gather in front of the US embassy in Damascus. When Washington protested diplomatically, the gathering point was moved to the old Damascus International Fairgrounds.

  On March 27, Assad officially confirmed Syria’s support for resistance against US forces in Iraq. In an interview with Lebanon’s As-Safir newspaper, Assad said that “if the American-British designs succeed—and we hope they do not succeed … there will be Arab popular resistance.”8

  Later the same day, Syria’s grand mufti, the elderly Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro, called on “Muslims everywhere to use all means possible to thwart the aggression, including martyr operations against American, British and Zionist invaders…. Resistance to the belligerent invaders is an obligation for all Muslims.”9 A few days later, Syrian foreign minister Farouk al-Shara announced before the Syrian parliament that Syria had a “national interest in the expulsion of the invaders from Iraq,” and praised Iraqis’ “courageous resistance” to the US-led invasion.10

  Syria’s change in policy elicited a corresponding change in Washington’s approach to Syria. Under Washington’s constructive engagement policy, the State Department had eschewed criticizing Syrian policy in public in favor of private but frank discussions. But when battlefield reports came in of Syrian-supplied Russian Kornet antitank missiles and night-vision goggles being used to attack US forces, the Department of Defense adopted a new, harder line with Damascus. On March 28, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters that the United States had information regarding the shipment of military supplies from Syria to Iraq that pose “a direct threat to the lives of coalition forces.” When asked if the regime itself was responsible for the shipments, Rumsfeld simply replied, “They control their border.”11

  Two days later, Powell hardened the State Department’s line on Damascus as well. Since Bashar had taken the reigns of power in 2000, the State Department’s assumptions were that the young president was not fully in charge of the regime he had inherited from his father and that certain rogue elements were able to carry out security-related activities without the knowledge of the presidential palace. With evidence piling up of Syrian support for resistance to the US invasion, however, Powell laid blame directly at Assad’s doorstep. “Syria faces a critical choice,” Powell told an audience at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. “Syria can continue direct support for terrorist groups and the dying regime of Saddam Hussein, or it can embark on a different and more hopeful course. Either way, Syria bears the responsibility for its choices, and for the consequences.”12

  On April 2, Bouthaina Shaaban, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson, gave the world an indication of how Syria’s support for resistance would work, at least rhetorically, for years to come. On the one hand, the regime would continue to exercise the Arab world’s most liberal visa policies for Arab nationals. On the other, the regime did not accept responsibility for patrolling its border with a US-occupied Iraq. “If anybody is going, it is beyond our control as the government,” she said. “We have long borders with Iraq and we can’t put a policeman on every single meter.”13

  As American forces continued their assault on Baghdad, the war of words escalated between Washington and Damascus. On April 11, President Bush warned Syria not to offer safe haven to Iraqi officials. The warning was based on US intelligence that convoys of vehicles had crossed from Iraq to Syria in the first week of the war, possibly carrying members of Saddam Hussein’s family and key members of the regime. US forces later fired on a Russian diplomatic convoy from Baghdad to Syria that reportedly had been carrying Iraqi officials as well. On April 14, Powell said that the United States “will examine possible measures of a diplomatic, economic or other nature as we move forward.”14 In the days that followe
d, US special forces shut down the last Iraqi pumping station on the Kirkuk-Banias pipeline, cutting off the flow of sanctions-busting oil flowing from Iraq to Syria.15 They also bombed the Syrian Trade Center in Baghdad. This kicked off speculation that the Department of Defense was drawing up contingency plans for a US attack on Syria.16

  The Syrian leadership’s comments resonated not only with Syrians opposed to the invasion but also with a lot of people across the Arab world. At a rally in Egypt’s al-Azhar Mosque, a center for Islamic jurisprudence, protestors shouted, “Bashar, Bashar, set the world on fire!”17 For anyone familiar with Syrian history, Assad’s turn away from the United States and toward jihadists and Salafists—who hated the Syrian regime—was surprising to say the least. Many Islamists in the Arab world regarded the minority Assad regime as apostates, especially after the regime’s bloody suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood’s uprising in 1982.

  As Iraqi resistance to the US invasion fell apart, there were signs that Assad appeared to be complying with Washington’s demands and that a diplomatic resolution to the crisis was in the cards. On April 16, the US Central Command (CENTCOM) in Qatar announced that the numbers of people moving between Syria and Iraq had fallen sharply, due in part to the deployment of US forces along the frontier. Later the same day, Powell announced that he would soon visit Damascus for a “very vigorous diplomatic exchange” with President Assad. Two Iraqi regime members who had taken refuge in Syria—including Saddam Hussein’s bodyguard and a son-in-law—showed up back in Iraq a few days later. By April 20—a mere month after US forces invaded Iraq—President Bush announced that there were “positive signs” coming out of Damascus regarding American demands.18