بواسطة Nour Samaha | ديسمبر 12, 2017 | Cost of War, غير مصنف
“TWELVE-YEAR-OLD MUSTAFA GRINNED as he bit into an apple, munching away excitedly. Only a month ago, he sunk his teeth into a piece of fresh fruit for the first time in three years. Mustafa, along with his family, survived a siege.
Mustafa’s mother, Sara, her face gaunt like that of her teenage daughter, described how they made it. “We would have to buy tomato paste by the gram,” said Sara, whose family name The Intercept is withholding for security reasons. “Our daily food consisted of rice or lentils. Get meat, fruit, or vegetables out of your head, they didn’t exist. Forget the fridge, there was never any power to keep it running. Forget everything.” Pointing to Mustafa, she asked, “Look at him. Does he look like a normal 12-year-old? Look at the girls. Do they look healthy?”All the children in Deir al-Zour appear small for their ages.
Mustafa looked like a child of eight or nine years old. All the children in Deir al-Zour appear small for their ages. Sara’s daughters had dark circles under their eyes, their skin tinged yellow, and their cheeks ever so slightly sunken in.
Since the end of 2014, the residents of the city of Deir al-Zour in Syria had been all but cut off from the outside, besieged by the Islamic State as it attempted to consolidate its power base across northern Syria and Iraq. Water, fuel, electricity, and channels for communication slowly disappeared. Basic food products like tea, sugar, meat, and fresh produce became unaffordable luxuries, held hostage by a handful looking to profit off the siege.
After months of intense battles, the Syrian army and its allies broke the Islamic State siege on Deir al-Zour in early September. It took another three days for Syrian forces to reach the main entrance of the city; the Islamic State had surrounded the nearby military post with thousands of landmines.
The city is the capital of a region of the same name. Deir al-Zour Governorate, too, was mostly freed from the Islamic State’s grip following months of heavy fighting by both the Syrian government and its allies on one side of the region and the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces on the other. Today, control of the province is split along the Euphrates River: The government and its allies control the territory south of the river, while the Syrian Democratic Forces and its allies control the territory north of the river.
Sections of the road to reach the city of Deir al-Zour still remained under Islamic State control for a few weeks after the siege ended. Traveling by air remained the only way to access the city. By mid-October, however, according to Syrian military officials, the road leading directly to Deir al-Zour was cleared of standing threats. Aid trucks, civilians, and, finally, journalists were finally able to travel by land to the city.
Deir al-Zour is a shell of what it used to be. Once a bustling city home to around 700,000 people, now the city’s roads are pockmarked by years of shelling; its buildings lie crumbling, caught between destruction and abandonment; and the city still wants for basic services, such as electricity and communication lines. Mobile phone reception is sporadic at best, and most houses are running full-time on generators or large battery packs. A World Bank report released in July 2017 estimated that Deir al-Zour province suffered the highest housing destruction as a result of the war.
Residents who stayed behind, approximately 100,000 by January 2017, as the blockade drew on endured a double siege: One siege by the Islamic State, which prevented people or supplies from entering or exiting; and the other inside city limits, perpetrated by those who saw in the misery an opportunity to turn a profit.
Today, they are war-weary, undernourished, and frustrated. While some neighborhoods are pushing to return to normal, there is an underlying concern that, just as the city had been overlooked during the siege, its residents will quickly be forgotten about as the cries of liberation and victory fade away.
SITUATED BETWEEN THE two former Islamic State capitals, Raqqa and Mosul, the city of Deir al-Zour, on the banks of the Euphrates River, was a flashpoint in the conflict, yet its residents were overlooked by all the warring parties. As a result, residents suffered at the hands of local war profiteers inside the city while also fending off attacks, infiltrations, and onslaughts from the Islamic State, which sought Deir al-Zour to consolidate its control over the surrounding area.
At the outset of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad in 2011, Deir al-Zour was a hotbed of opposition activity, and was attacked by the Syrian army. By 2013, rebels from the Nusra Front and other groups held the city, jostling for control with other rebel factions and fighting off government offensives. By 2014, the Islamic State took over much of the surrounding area and laid siege to the city — until its defeat this fall.
The road to Deir al-Zour, a nine-hour drive from Damascus through a vast expanse of unfriendly desert, reveals how much still needs to be done before civilians can return to any sort of normalcy following the Syrian government’s recapturing of territory from both the Islamic State and the Syrian opposition. Palmyra, the last major town before Deir al-Zour that was recaptured from the Islamic State — for the second time — in March 2017, is still in ruins. Only a handful of civilians remain. Instead, pro-government militiamen — from the Lebanese group Hezbollah, to the Afghan Fatemiyoun group, to local Syrian forces — dot the streets, with each faction commandeering its own residence from what buildings still stand, while Russian troops guard the ancient ruins.
Most of the vehicles traveling beyond Palmyra have a military purpose. The Russians are here, along with Syrian regular forces and pro-government paramilitary groups. Pickup trucks with Syrian, Afghan, and Lebanese fighters pass by, their flags flapping in the wind. One particular checkpoint on the main thoroughfare connecting the province of Homs to northeastern Syria — the cities of Deir al-Zour, Al Mayadeen, and Abu Kamal — is manned by a Syrian soldier, a Russian soldier, and an Afghan fighter. At the entrance of the recently recaptured town of Sukhnah stands a massive billboard with the words “Death to America and Israel” plastered across it, with Fatemiyoun flags at its edges.
As the road approaches Deir al-Zour, the landscape is scattered with small clusters of flat, one-story houses, now abandoned and derelict. Just beyond the main Syrian army checkpoint, an arch with large pieces of its mosaic tile design missing welcomes visitors to Deir al-Zour. According to local residents and Syrian military, landmines still dot the vast expanse of desert stretching out around the city entrance, making it unsafe to travel by foot. After another Syrian army checkpoint, a large statue of a jug welcomes visitors, but no one stops here — Islamic State snipers still lurk in the distance.
As the city turns to residential blocks, Syrian army checkpoints dot the streets. Jeeps with young men in military fatigues — a mix of Syrian army and local pro-government forces — can be seen driving through the connecting neighborhoods. They are keeping close watch over what is left of Deir al-Zour; in the western outskirts of the city, entire neighborhoods are completely destroyed, the enormous scars of the Islamic State’s presence and the subsequent battles that forced them out.
ON A RECENT night, the market on Wadi Street inside Deir al-Zour was full. The city was pitch-black, except for the flicker of battery-powered bulbs. Explosions could still be heard in the near distance above the din of generators but were not threatening enough to stop people from socializing. Before they were routed, shelling from the Islamic State drove people to take cover, for fear of becoming one of the thousands of civilians killed in 2017 during the battle for the city. Now, smoke-filled coffee shops bustle with young men puffing hookah, gathered around the few TV sets currently operational in the city. Others pause by the market stalls, inspecting the fresh produce, now more readily available.
Loud whispers of the “tujjar” — the Arabic word for traders or anyone who demands money in exchange for something, including services — float between shoppers in the souk, as residents, vegetable sellers, and even children talk of how they were, as one shopkeeper described it, “under siege on the outside and the inside.”
The tujjar tended to be locals, either from the city or the countryside, who capitalized on the Islamic State siege. They sold everything from bread, wheat, rice, bulgur, and canned food, to aid, diesel, wheat, oil, government passes, and spaces on planes or helicopters to be airlifted out. The tujjar hailed from many different backgrounds. Some were from local gangs who had been absorbed into the different branches of the National Defense Forces, a pro-government militia; others, like Hossam Qaterji, were high-powered businessmen who organized aid drops and allegedly negotiated trade deals over wheat with the Islamic State.
Sara described how the tujjar lined their pockets. “The aid drops we got were collected by the tujjar, divided into two, of which half was put into warehouses to expire” — in order to inflate prices — “and the other half would be sold at exorbitant prices to the residents in the souks,” she explained. They “are also responsible for our suffering.”
Once the sun set, gangs would often loot the neighborhoods and houses of those who had fled. According to one resident, his neighbor found his entire kitchen, including the fridge, for sale off the back of a pickup in a nearby city.
“Just watch now, the pickup trucks coming back from Al Mayadeen, full of goods looted from the homes there,” said Abu Mohammad, who asked his proper name not be used because of security risks. “These gangs did the same here, inside our city.”
“Everything was for sale in Deir al-Zour,” explained Mohammed Saleh Alftayeh, an expert on the Syrian military and politics, who is from Deir al-Zour. “Everyone had something that others needed.”
In order for a government employee to be able to leave the city, for instance, he would have to get official permission, which came at a price. Once the government employee left, he would have to pay his way through checkpoints on the outskirts of the city to allow him to travel by land or pay even more to be allowed to use helicopters or a cargo plane. And the fees increased as the siege went on.
In February 2015, the fee to get airlifted out was around 25,000 SYP (around $100 at the time) per person, according to a number of residents both inside and outside the city, including those who left via airlift. In the fall of 2015, when Islamic State forces crept too close to the airport, airlifts by cargo plane stopped entirely. With only smaller planes — and therefore fewer seats — making the flight out, prices skyrocketed. By October 2015, the fee had increased tenfold: A family of three would have to pay 700,000 SYP — and, even then, a waitlist remained, full of people waiting to escape.
Those who could not afford to be airlifted risked their lives by attempting to cross by land through Islamic State territory.
WITH MOST OF Deir al-Zour liberated from the Islamic State siege, attention has now turned to reconstruction and returning civilians. But based on how little attention was paid to Deir al-Zour during the siege, some residents feel the city’s reconstruction needs will again be overlooked.
“I doubt it will be a focus for the government in terms of reconstruction,” said Alftayeh, the military and political analyst. He pointed to the government’s retaking of the war-torn city of Aleppo in December 2016. “It has been almost a year now for Aleppo, and there is no organized, government-led reconstruction,” Alftayeh said. “As long as there is no international funding, I doubt there will be serious reconstruction in Deir al-Zour, where the scale of destruction is huge.”
Residents are expected to come back to the city, yet two months after the siege was broken, only a slow trickle have returned. “There will be a flow back, partly because the section that was under the control of the government during the past years is in better condition that other parts, and it can accommodate significant numbers,” said Alftayeh, “and partly because the government wants internally displaced people to return to their original cities, Deir al-Zour included.”
In late September, the government issued a decree stating all public sector employees must return to their original workplaces within a month; in the case of Deir al-Zour, the deadline was extended to the end of the year.
Some humanitarian organizations are eager to see public sector workers return home, including to Deir al-Zour. “Public sector workers tend to fall into the poorest class bracket, and they are the ones who provide the basic services to any community for it to work properly again,” said one official working with an international organization across Syria, who asked for anonymity because he was not permitted to speak to the media, “so we are keen to see them return.”
Those who stayed behind and weathered the siege in Deir al-Zour, however, are less optimistic about the future. Haifaa, another resident in Qusour who was forced to stay behind while her husband left to seek medical treatment for their child in Damascus, said, “It will be another 10 years before anything can get back to normal here.””
[This article was originally published by The Intercept.]
بواسطة Kheder Khaddour | ديسمبر 10, 2017 | Cost of War, غير مصنف
“In the midst of Syria’s wartime devastation, the regime saw a path to its own revival.
November 2017 marks the effective end of Syria’s armed conflict and the beginning of movement toward a political settlement. In all likelihood this will allow the Assad regime to retain much authority. Instead of forcing the regime to compromise, the mechanisms of war and destruction, including the anti-Islamic State campaign, allowed it to block any political transition, destroy the prewar order, and create a new one in which it could survive.
Syria’s destruction has its genesis in the Assad regime’s loss of control over much of the country in summer 2012. At that time, it had become clear that the regime could not simply push its opponents off the streets and silence dissent. Within months the momentum of war had picked up as rebel factions took control of pockets of territory, the regime withdrew from Kurdish-populated areas, and gradually the conflict took on a multilayered dimension involving local, regional, and international actors, provoking massive damage in the country.
The regime’s barrel bombings of opposition areas systematically destroyed entire neighborhoods of Syria’s most populous cities. Fighting displaced over half of the country’s population, and a wide array of forces contributed to the destruction, each in pursuit of its own objectives. Jihadi movements gained ground, and in summer 2014 the Islamic State established a self-declared caliphate across Syria and Iraq, provoking foreign military intervention from a U.S.-led coalition, accompanied by heavy bombing campaigns. Starting in 2015, Russian bombing helped the regime retake opposition areas. A year later it was Turkey’s turn, as it deployed troops in northern Syria in support of opposition factions and to block the advance of the People’s Protection Units affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party.
Most participants in Syria’s war have thrived in its destruction, but many also ended up being destroyed themselves. The Islamic State is the latest and most notable example of this phenomenon. The only party to the destruction that managed to hang on was the regime, in spite of its limited military capacities.
The war offered the regime a means of navigating a transition from a prewar order to a new one. By annihilating the environment in which its opponents could operate, the war left the regime with no counterpart with whom it needed to negotiate. In fact, destruction served as a buffer against negotiations, enabling the regime to remain in place.
Seen from this angle, Syria’s physical destruction had less a military aim than being a central factor in the political struggle to win the war. The regime survived the destruction of the physical and social makeup of Syria and thereby won leverage to steer the reconstruction effort, control the return of populations, place them in positions of dependency with regard to the state, channel funding through new, loyal intermediaries between Damascus and Syrian cities, and empower new business figures. It also obliged the international community to deal with the regime in order to resolve the massive refugee crisis.
But rather than demonstrating the regime’s genius in orchestrating the conflict, the enormous scale of the damage necessary for it to retain its hold over power only proved the regime’s weakness. As it could not adapt to meet the demands of its citizens, the regime took advantage of the instruments of war to alter the surrounding environment. Faced with its own limitations, it could find no means to win except to destroy the prewar Syrian order. Aleppo, Homs, Deir Ezzor, Darayya, and most likely Raqqa, all seriously damaged, were either recaptured by the regime or are likely to be, allowing it to take the lead in their reconstruction. The ruins of war had the paradoxical effect of bolstering the regime’s potential to regain control of what, in 2012, it could not defend militarily.
Aleppo is perhaps the best example. It is a city that the regime lost and could claim back only once many of its quarters, in particular those in its eastern half, were obliterated (destruction to which not only the regime contributed, but also other political actors, opposition groups included). Because the business class had abandoned the city, the regime forged new relationships there through a fresh network of business figures.
The debate over Syria’s reconstruction frequently begins from the standpoint of returning Syria’s physical and social fabric to its prewar state. However, reconstruction is not a mere technical question. Indeed, the very sites that need to be rebuilt, versus those that remained intact throughout seven years of fighting, were a product of decisions by actors about what to destroy. Regardless of how reconstruction funding flows into Syria, a new order has been in the making since the collapse of the prewar order and there will probably be no returning to the economic or social arrangements that existed prior to 2011.
Destruction and reconstruction are not necessarily neatly complementary, with one smoothly following from the other. Instead, the cycle of destruction and construction replaced a deadlocked political transition in Syria, developing in the context of a war that none of the sides were winning. In many cases this cycle was integrated into the political objectives of the regime, creating a fertile environment in which the regime could survive, despite its shortcomings.”
[This article was originally published by Carnegie Middle East Center.]
بواسطة Mohamad Ali Nayel | أكتوبر 17, 2017 | Cost of War, Reports
During a misty summer dawn, on Friday 30 June 2017, Lebanese Army Forces (LAF) troops—reinforced with several tanks—stormed two Syrian refugee camps located on the outskirts of Arsal, in northeast Lebanon. The first, al-Nour Camp, is located in Jafar. The second, Qara, is located in Wadi al-Hosn. That dawn, LAF soldiers took their positions surrounding each of the camps and waited for the zero hour. Once the time came, around six o’clock in the morning, the troops began moving into the camps. As the soldiers combed through the tents that made up the refugee camps, they came under attack from unidentified armed men. According to reports, the armed men who shot at the LAF soldiers were affiliated with either Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (formally known as Jabhat al-Nusra) and the Islamic State—both sets of whom infiltrated the camps. Seven LAF soldiers were wounded and another was killed during these military raids.
Details Emerge
During the clashes between the army and gunmen, the troops continued to comb the tents. In some instances, they tossed hand grenades into tents—resulting in severe human casualties and material damage. By the end, the LAF had demolished approximately thirty housing units in the camp, while damaging dozens of other housing units and killing nineteen people. According to local sources, “it was the army that launched an attack using heavy weapons that caused one wall to fall on a girl, killing her, and another that killed a handicapped man—whose corpse was confiscated and handed back for burial days later.” After the battle was over the army arrested 356 Syrian men. Several estimates put the number of people injured during the raid at over three hundred. According to both Lebanese and Syrian sources on the ground in Arsal, there were no suicide bombers during the raid.
Yet the above details were not necessarily those announced by the LAF in its communications with the public in general and the media in particular. According to Reuters, the LAF claimed “five suicide bombers attacked Lebanese soldiers as they raided two Syrian refugee camps in Arsal at the border with Syria.” The news agency went on to report that the LAF “said seven soldiers were wounded and a girl was killed after one of the suicide bombers blew himself up in the midst of a family of refugees. It did not elaborate.” To Syrians, and some Lebanese, this particular set of raids was considered a most brutal military operation against the most destitute Syrian refugees in Lebanon. More importantly, the events ushered the beginning of a new manufactured discourse about the LAF, Syrian refugees, and alleged terrorist threats.
Following the raids, images circulated on social media showing hundreds of Syrian men handcuffed. Most were topless, tagged with spray paint on the backs of their naked bodies. Many of these Syrian bodies show signs of recent severe beatings. Some of the residents of the two camps managed to escape to other neighboring camps. Many others were detained by the LAF. As the day came to an end, a hashtag in support of the LAF began trending across social media: #Purge_the_hills of_Irsal.
In the days that followed the raids, the living conditions Syrians in their ransacked camps deteriorated to a point beyond the capacity of local relief organizations to address. Remarkably, the UN High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR)—which is the international body tasked with overseeing assistance to Syrian refugees and which has facilitated the establishment of several camps around Arsal—was absent and provided no protection to refugees during this disaster. In the weeks that followed the raids, thousands of Syrian refugees in Arsal returned to Syria as a function of the deteriorating conditions. It merits considering the fact that the situation deteriorated so much in Arsal that these refugees preferred to return to what they had originally fled from in Syria. Those Syrian refugees that remained in Arsal, continue to be terrified by random arrests. Many of them spend their nights in hiding on side roads and in between graves of the village’s main cemetery.
Framing the Narrative
As the dust settled on that day of the raids, there appeared to be two very different yet complimentary operations at play. The first was a military operation to “cleanse” the camps from the alleged presence and threat of dangerous militants. The second was public relations campaign to establish hegemony over how the raids were represented, which include celebrating the idea and concept of “cleansing.” Despite initial confusion by residents of the camps and those that followed the conflicting news that emerged, the end of the day featured a specific set of facts and framing of the facts that dominated the public sphere. There were now two narratives of what transpired: one that was fed to and disseminated by Lebanese media outlets; and another that was only whispered among those left alive in Arsal.
The production of the official narrative of what transpired in Arsal was very clearly intended to compliment the military operation from the start. The Lebanese minister of defense was quoted as saying the “incident showed the importance of tackling the refugee crisis – Lebanon is hosting over 1 million refugees – and vindicated a policy of ‘pre-emptive strikes’ against militant sleeper cells.” The crucial question that remains unanswered is how was brutalizing the bodies of Syrian refugees supposed to solve the refugee crisis?
In the Beqaa Valley, three refugee camps were burned down in the day immediately following the raids in Arsal. The fires killed at least three people and left hundreds homeless (or tentless) with severe burn injuries. There were conflicting reasons for the alleged arsons that began to spread. The inhabitants of the camps insisted that there were unknown assailants who set fire to the camps. They also claim that the nearby local police did not take their pleas seriously when reporting the men or the fires. Alternatively, the mainstream media reported that the reasons for the arson remained unknown. Some hinted that the cause of fires was high summer temperatures. Furthermore, the army raided refugee encampments in different areas of Beqaa, detaining many Syrians for entering Lebanon illegally or not having residency permits.
Destroying the Evidence
It was not enough for officials to frame the narrative and feed it to local and international media outlets. They went so far as to destroy evidence which contradicted their narrative. Diala Shehadeh is a lawyer representing families of the Syrian men who the LAF arrested in Arsal and later died in custody. She gave a written account on her Facebook page of how the attempt to establish credible autopsy reports of the men’s bodies undermined. She accused military intelligence of seizing the samples she was transporting for independent autopsies, and then sending those samples to the governmental hospital. Shehadeh’s Facebook account included a video of this encounter.
As her account began to spread on social media, the Beirut Bar Association issued a directive preventing Shehadeh from appearing in the media pending a decision by Antonio Hashim, the head of the Beirut Bar Association. Shehadeh’s potential testimony was an inconvenient truth that had to be censored before it could have undermined the official framing of events. On 4 July 2017, the military issued a statement stating the cause of death for the four detained Syrian men. It “said that four detainees who ‘suffered from chronic health issues that were aggravated due to the climate condition’ died before being interrogated. It identified them as Mustafa Abd el Karim Absse, 57; Khaled Hussein el-Mleis, 43; Anas Hussein el-Husseiki, 32; and Othman Merhi el-Mleis. The army did not specify where it had detained them.”
According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), “On July 4, 2017, the Lebanese military issued a statement saying four Syrians died in its custody following mass raids in Arsal, a restricted access area in northeast Lebanon where many Syrian refugees live. On July 14, Human Rights Watch received credible reports that a fifth Syrian detainee had also died in custody.” HRW went further to state that on “July 15, the army released a statement saying that it detained 356 people following these raids. It referred 56 for prosecution and 257 to the General Security agency for lack of residency. A humanitarian organization official told Human Rights Watch that children were among those detained.” HRW concluded that “any statement that the deaths of these individuals was due to natural causes is inconsistent with these photographs.”
Stimulating a Nationalist Mania
As time passed and more information from Arsal emerged, it became clear that the official framing of the Arsal raids and their aftermath was meant to justify the military operation while at the same time delegitimize efforts at solidarity with Syrian refugees in Lebanon. As the propaganda became ubiquitous, an ultra nationalist sentiment turned Syrians in Lebanon to an enemy within. They were rapidly dehumanized.
In response, the Socialist Forum called for a sit-in in solidarity with Syrian refugees to take place in downtown Beirut on Tuesday 18 July. The organization applied for and received official clearance from the Municipality of Beirut for the sit-in. This initiative challenged the dominant discourse and threatened to obstruct the systematic campaign to rally public opinion around the LAF. In order to undermine the initiative, apologists for the raids took to social media and created or shared a Facebook page titled the “Syrian People’s Union in Lebanon.” This page hijacked Socialist Forum’s call for a solidarity sit-in and sought to incite (or act like it was inciting) the public against the army. Yet several people noticed the use of Lebanese dialect in these posts, which led many to wonder which intelligence branch was operating the page. It was then that the Socialist Forum’s permit for the sit-in was leaked from inside the municipality, which then threatened the safety of organization’s members whose names were on the permit. In an atmosphere of extreme fear and intimidation, the Socialist Forum decided to canceled the sit-in.
Surrounding these developments was intensity of rumor production and circulation, primarily through social media (Facebook and WhatsApp in particular). What was effectively fake news regarding the intended sit-in by Socialist Forum was mobilized into a heightened sense of Lebanese nationalism. By the climax of the circulation of these rumors, the sit-in was framed as a call by Syrians to publicly insult the LAF. What followed was a literal festival of publically bashing Syrians. This in turn further stimulated the nationalist sentiment as violent images and videos went viral on social media. Several videos showed euphoric mobs of Lebanese men beating up Syrian boys and men.
In one video, a group of five Lebanese men grabbed a young Syrian man by the arm and led him around. One sees a bewildered victim being slapped around by a man who is also filming the act. The cameraman then invites his friends to partake in the beating of the trapped Syrian man as they shout, “Where are your papers?” A slap on the Syrian man’s head is followed by his timid replies of “my papers are at home, master. By god I didn’t do any thing, master.” The fact that this man had no papers on him was reason enough for this Lebanese mob to attack him, kicking and beating him, while shouting at him, “What are you doing out on the street at night? Fuck your sister . . . Do you support ISIS you fucking pimp? Fuck you and fuck ISIS. Are you going to protest tomorrow you pimp?” And another slap. At this point in the video, the Syrian man starts attempting to use his free arm to block the punches from different directions. The video ends with men shouting at their captive, summing up the essence of the nationalist hysteria that swept the country: “Say God and the Lebanese Army! Say fuck ISIS! Say fuck the most important person in Syria!” The insistence on the evocation of the Lebanese army’s superior status by these Lebanese men portrayed the transcendence of the army into a divine savior and sacred cow in the many of the public’s imagination.
This was not the first time Lebanese men mob Syrian men in Lebanon. Bursts of violence against Syrian men can be traced back to 2005, following the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and the subsequent withdrawal of the Syrian military from Lebanon. This was also the year that ushered in the wave of political polarization and attendant socioeconomic breakdown in Lebanon which has now reached a critical stages. Yet the Syrians are certainly not the first group to experience the lash of intentionally mobilized Lebanese hyper nationalism. Palestinian refugees in Lebanon have had their share of violence since 1948. It is a kind of violence that is literally pumped into the psyche of resentful Lebanese citizens, diverting their anger toward the other, the “stranger.”
The Intimacy of Nationalist Frenzy
On the morning of Monday 17July, there was Lebanese wartime music playing on the street in our neighborhood. The unusual calm that overtook a weekday morning in Ras Beirut felt like the same kind of quiet the city exhibits in times of war. On the street below the apartment, there was a neighbor’s car blasting the music. The sky blue Kia had one of its front doors wide open. Around it stood men from the neighborhood who had flocked to the music. There they were: the barber, the butcher, and the taxi driver, along with three other men sipping coffee and blowing smoke in silence and anticipation. All six men had their heads craned in one direction, waiting to catch every soundbite of breaking news about the topic that the country was gripped by. The scene did not bode well. I quickly had a flash back to previous periods of war in Lebanon, when the intensity of events overtook the daily routines and their chaotic noise. War—and there was talk of war—certainly unites. However, that particular type of Beirut moment corresponds to particular wars: when Israel attacks Lebanon; or at times when the Lebanese army attacks non-Lebanese residents of the country. People had literally taken the bait and began feeling like and thinking of the country was being at war.
It is worth noting that the Monday I am describing was that which followed the cancellation of the Socialist Forum sit-in, which was originally planned for Tuesday of that same week. It was during the weekend before these two days that we can identify the consolidation of an official narrative that succeeded in diverting peoples’ frustrations and directing it toward the “stranger” within. Then, the minister of interior announced a total ban on demonstrations throughout the country. He asserted that he has given instructions to reject all protest permit requests in order to preserve security and peace. It is worth noting that was all happening at the same time the other protests were planned against the government’s planned increases to various taxes and fees.
On Friday 21 July, I was chatting with the manager of a construction site in one affluent Ras Beirut neighborhood. Being much older than the twelve builders on the site, and the one who had been in Lebanon the longest, Abu Ahmad makes sure each worker is doing his assigned job from seven in the morning until five in the afternoon. As we spoke, Beirut’s sun was hotter than usual. With Friday prayers about to begin, the street had suddenly quieted down. From a distance, I could hear the imam of the nearby mosque. It was then that I realized Abu Ahmad and his team were still working on the construction site even though it was their habit to take their lunch break after coming back from Friday prayers at the mosque. I asked Abu Ahmad why he was not at the mosque for Friday prayers. He looked at me with suspicious eyes, then wiped the sweat from his forehead with the red towel on his shoulder. He went on cleaning his whole face with the towel as if trying to hide his sense of guilt for not attending Friday prayers at the mosque. “Look my brother, we don’t need the headache. May God forgive us for abandoning our duty.” I asked what he meant by not needing any headache, and since when was it a problem to go to the mosque on Friday? My question was followed by a good ten seconds of silence as Abu Ahmad started to get fidgety, moving his towel from one shoulder to another. As I stood there waiting, he said, “Can’t you see what is going on? Syrians have to be careful these days not to arouse any suspicion. Any word we say or any place we attend has to be one of the utmost necessity. It is better that we focus on making our living here.” Abu Ahmad’s sunburned wrinkled face became twitchy. He was visibly uncomfortable as he went on saying, “Look, my brother, it maybe the signs of the end of times and God only knows, a pious Syrian these days could easily be mistaken for an extremist.” Abu Ahmad walked away looking around as if to see if anyone else was listening to our conversation. As he walked away, he said, “May god keep the watching eyes away from us.” This was another indication of how fear-stricken Syrians had become in context of their intensified dehumanization following the Arsal raid.
Structural Scapegoating or Fundamental Racism?
To simply attribute what has transpired as a function of Lebanese citizens being “naturally racist,” as some activists do, is to negate the ongoing systematic campaign to produce a literally permissible body for the public to vent their outrage on. Categorizing all outbursts of violence against Syrians as a function of permanent racism is an over-simplification that overlooks the workings of this systemic campaign. Beyond being morally irreprehensible, the demonization and targeting of Syrians has effectively diverted many Lebanese citizen’s frustration at their own rulers, channeling it toward scapegoating Syrian refugees. This violence against Syrians did not simply surface, it was mobilized, encouraged, and sanctioned through the speeches of Lebanese politicians, the branding of Lebanese public relations firms, the coverage of media outlets, and the manipulation of social media networks.
The influx of Syrian refugees since 2011 has created contradictory sentiments among the broader population of Lebanon. On the one hand, there is an element of genuine human sympathy, which can be identified in numerous individual acts of kindness, generosity, and solidarity. One Lebanese mother opened up her dead son’s grave for a Syrian family to bury their son. He had died in a fire that consumed al-Raed Camp in the Bekaa Valley, and yet all the surrounding villages refused to have him buried in their graveyards.
On the other hand, political elites and forces, along with affiliated media outlets, propagate a dominant narrative that demonizes Syrians. They have actively scapegoated Syrian refugees and literally blamed them for economic, social, and security failures in the country. These discourses are then replicated echoed and contributed to through the daily politics of many individuals and groups, forging a xenophobic and racist popular culture that is anti-Syrian refugees. This scapegoating and dehumanization is not a function of some natural inclination toward racism. Rather, it signals a deep crisis that the Lebanese state and its ruling elite have been facing at least since 2005, which intensified during the 2015 garbage protests. This crisis is simultaneously political, economic, and social.
One must not lose sight of the fact that this most recent wave of anti-Syrian xenophobia has effectively diverted some of the social pressures and political frustrations that were targeting the government in particular but the political elites more generally. This is not new of course. Quite the contrary, these political forces have regularly deflected attention away from themselves, mobilizing parts of the population against the weakest bodies in the country: women, migrant workers, refugees, and the impoverished.
With the public caught up in the nationalist rhetoric of standing with the army and defending the nation, the political elite were able to use the Arsal operations and their aftermath to reset the public agenda. The elites effectively deflated significant (and angry) calls for protests against the government’s plans to pass a controversial tax bill. The public outrage against the government was, according to some analysts, poised to galvanize the public in ways reminiscent of the 2015 protests. Instead, many of those energies now took up alleged threat posted by Syrians and the need to defend the LAF against material and symbolic injury. This is evidenced by the fact that politicians convened a closed parliamentary session and indeed passed the controversial tax bill with little to no public scrutiny as to what was being plotted inside an illegitimate expired parliament. On Wednesday, 19 July, parliamentarians had passed a second legislative bill concerning taxes meant to finance the public sector wage hike. The bill was passed with some amendments. Article 11 of the bill imposed an exit travel fee for those leaving Lebanon through the airport. The new tax bill made all Lebanese citizens, independent of income levels, owe the same percentage as tax. The worker who earns a monthly salary of $400 delivering drinking water now pays the same tax rate as a millionaire who owns luxury apartment buildings on Beirut’s seafront. These new taxes were an addition to a different set of tax hikes approved in March, including an increase in the VAT tax rate to eleven percent.
Syrian and Lebanese: Victims of the Same Social Order
As the battle to “cleanse” Arsal’s hills was waged by LAF and Hizballah, all eyes were fixed on the extensive live coverage of the battle. The dominant public discourse was at its peak when centered in scenario that pitted a hero fighting a villain. The LAF was made to look like everyone’s protecting father and the “Syrians” were dressed in the role of the villain. As the battle intensified in the hills of Arsal, a public relations campaign swept the country. The LAF became a brand. Advertisement companies, who ran ads for banks, restaurants, and various economic sectors now pushed images of military men with sleazy catch phrases about protection.
One day, I was sitting and melting inside a taxi that was moving sluggishly through Beirut’s traffic. While the radio was playing nationalist songs interrupted by breaking news from the battlefield, a scene of wretchedness unfolded outside my passenger widow. In between bumpers, a frantic moth-eaten man was carrying a young girl who wrapped herself around his thin body. The man was holding a yellow money note in his other hand and anxiously waved down a woman across the street from him. His eyes were wide open in astonishment. As he shouted in the direction of the woman across the street, his voice grew more high-pitched. He beseeched her. Shuffling single-mindedly toward the man was a woman who pried herself from her shady spot under a massive rubber tree on the other side of the street from him. She began to zigzag her way between the slow-moving cars. The woman herself was holding an infant while two young boys clung to her as they tailed on her heels.
“Come over, move quickly, bring the children and hurry up. The man in the black car just gave me 10,000 liras [approximately six dollars].” This exhausted woman was merely reacting to her husband’s urgency and astonishment. “Come, come hurry up grab the bag of tissues and go to the man in the black car before he drives away. I’m telling you he gave me 10,000. Look 10,000.” The frantic husband flashed the yellow note for his wife to see. The struggling woman was clearly trying to maintain her composure, but her face failed to hide her embarrassment. Streams of sweat ran down her forehead. She pushed closer to the black car. But the traffic light flashed green and the black car drove away. As our car started to move away the husband’s voice broke out in anguish, shouting at his apparent wife who just missed their chance to perhaps score another 10,000.
While we sat in the car and watched this scene of a Syrian family struggling on the streets selling hand tissues and not yet begging, the taxi driver next to me snapped. “10,000? How nice, did you see that? The Syrians are living much better than us in our own country. Nothing is left for us.” The woman in the backseat and I both remained silent, dumbfounded by the humiliating experience that took place right next to us. After few seconds of silence, the taxi driver went on again, “I drive all day so I can take 40,000 liras home.” To this, I responded with “at least we are still sitting inside the car.” The driver, who was no older than forty, released his clinched hands from the steering wheel wiped his sweaty palms on his jeans and replied “by god you are right, may god never bring us to such disgrace. May god help them get out of the street. What a terrible situation for us all, O god forgive us”. The car drove away from the scene of human devastation and the driver took out his generic pack of cigarettes and offered me and the other passenger to join him. As he lit his cigarette, inhaling deeply, the taxi driver went back to the usual line of resentful complaints cursing and insulting Lebanese politicians: “The thieves….”
بواسطة Hashem Osseiran | أكتوبر 11, 2017 | Cost of War, غير مصنف
“Turkey’s discussions with al-Qaida-linked militants ahead of its deployment in Syria’s Idlib province indicate that a wide-scale offensive against the militant group may not be Ankara’s primary objective, according to Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute.
BEIRUT – Turkey on Saturday announced the start of its second major cross-border military operation in Syria, and Turkish troops are now preparing to deploy alongside Syrian opposition groups in a province controlled largely by al-Qaida-linked militants.
The campaign aims to enforce the so-called de-escalation zone agreement in territory currently held by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) alliance in Idlib province, but phase one of the Turkish-led operation may not involve an all-out confrontation with the militant group, according to Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute. While later phases may see more concerted action against the extremists, for now, a negotiated settlement seems to have taken shape, he told Syria Deeply.
“I am told that HTS and Turkey reached a final agreement to establish a Turkish protected buffer zone from the Idlib border village of Atme through Darat Izza to Anadan into western Aleppo,” Lister said. “From what I’m told, HTS agreed at most to leave these areas and agreed at minimum not to interfere with Turkey’s operations in that zone.”
Syria Deeply spoke with Lister, who has spent the past week meeting with Syrian opposition groups in southern Turkey, about Ankara’s strategy in Idlib, the sentiment among participating rebel groups and what this upcoming operation could mean for the Syrian war.
Syria Deeply: Do we know which opposition groups are part of the Turkish-led alliance?
Charles Lister: So far, it seems to be largely a combination of Euphrates Shield forces and a collection of FSA [Free Syrian Army] groups from Idlib, who were previously victims of HTS aggression. Groups like the Free Idlib Army, the remnants of the 13th Division brigade, and potentially some former members of the Hazzm Movement. But my impression is that this is really a Turkish-led campaign and that opposition group involvement will only be secondary. They will primarily be there for support.
Syria Deeply: What is the scope and aim of the Turkish-led operation?
Lister: So far, I don’t think there is any intention to go as far south as Idlib city. I think this would require a much more significant military operation than what Turkey is able and willing to do. At the moment, I think we are looking at phase one, which is for Turkey to pursue its own interests: to protect its borders, deter Kurdish threats, minimize further refugee flows and eventually […] establish some territory in Syria that refugees in Turkey could move back into. In a sense, what we are looking at is Turkey trying to secure its own internal national security interests and to potentially contribute toward further stabilizing at least some parts of Idlib.
Turkey and some of the opposition’s secondary intention in this first phase is to establish a Turkish protected area in northern Idlib, which can be used to start a slow and gradual campaign to undermine HTS. Some of Turkey’s long-term partners in Syria, groups like Failaq al-Sham and Ahrar al-Sham, are on board with this strategy. They don’t want to enter a full-scale confrontation with HTS. Instead, they want to more methodically undermine the extremist wings of HTS, particularly to try to encourage defections and divisions within HTS to make it a more manageable competitor rather than an adversary.
From what I’m told, Turkish intelligence has been working on this for some time already, in cooperation with opposition groups previously close to HTS. A spate of recent assassinations are apparently linked to this subversion campaign and, perhaps more importantly, so are a number of recent audio leaks of HTSinternal communications.
Syria Deeply: What is the sentiment among rebel groups in Idlib?
Lister: Every single group that I have met with [in Turkey] over the past week, which spans all the Euphrates Shield groups, all the main FSA groups across Syria, Failaq al-Sham, Nour al-Din al-Zinki brigades and Ahrar al-Sham, have expressed support for Turkey’s intentions in Idlib. The one key area of difference is that groups within the Euphrates Shield and within the FSA seemed more determined to initiate a conflict with HTS, whereas groups like Failaq al-Sham, Zinki and Ahrar al-Sham strongly opposed the idea of a full-scale confrontation because they thought it might potentially strengthen HTS. They advocated instead for a slow and methodical campaign of undermining HTS from the inside.
But, these groups unanimously agreed on [their] suspicion, opposition and hostility toward HTS and particularly toward [HTShead Abu Mohammad] al-Julani. Over the three or four years that I’ve met with all of Syria’s opposition, this was the first time not a single group expressed some element of defense or support of HTS.This definitely struck me over the past few days. Al-Julani appears to have burned a lot of the bridges he built earlier in the conflict but he does still hold several advantageous cards.
Syria Deeply: HTS militants allegedly escorted a Turkish reconnaissance unit into Idlib on Sunday, implying that there have been talks between Turkey and HTS. Have there been any negotiations and do we know what their focus was?
Lister: As far as I am aware, there have been around three or four meetings, including one that took place yesterday (Sunday). In yesterday’s meeting, HTS and Turkey reached a final agreement to establish a Turkish protected buffer zone from Atme through Darat Izza to Anadan into western Aleppo. From what I’m told, HTSagreed at most to leave these areas and agreed at minimum to not interfere with Turkey’s operations in that zone.The idea here would be to replicate what Euphrates Shield looked like at the beginning of the Euphrates Shield operation, which was also preceded by a full Nusra Front withdrawal from areas of Turkish operations.
Syria Deeply: Why would HTS agree to a deal with Turkey considering that it has been a vocal critic of the de-escalation zone agreement?
Lister: I think we need to draw a distinction between what HTS says for its public audience, and what is being done behind the scenes, which is much more murky and political. Al-Julani is not only fearful of an all-out confrontation with Turkey and the opposition, his biggest fear is something catalyzing internal defections from the original Nusra core of Syrian fighters now within the larger HTS alliance.
This core is almost entirely composed of local Syrians who have been recruited into the Nusra Front, which later rebranded into Jabhat Fatah al-Sham and later formed the HTS alliance. Throughout this process, the Nusra core has become even more heavily Syrian, which for al-Julani is an invaluable source of local credibility that protects his forces from attack by most rival opposition groups – as we have seen in 2017. If Turkey or any other opposition faction – working by themselves or together – managed to create an alternative reality somewhere in Idlib, I’m told al-Julani’s biggest fear is that some of those Syrians will jump ship and join them, thereby weakening al-Julani’s credibility on the ground and creating opportunities to isolate him from the revolutionary street. So his greatest fear is internal defections and I think this is why he has channeled so much energy into negotiating with Turkey to prevent a full-blown confrontation.
Syria Deeply: Reports circulated of a series of defections from HTS in the weeks leading up to the campaign, as part of a larger Turkish effort to isolate HTS in Idlib. Which groups have defected and what is the scale of defection?
Lister: The major big loss was the al-Zinki movement. I was told Turkey had some kind of role, potentially with some opposition support, in making this happen. But there have been some other smaller defections from within the HTS core – small HTS sub-factions and local units. The latter are more concerning to al-Julani than anything else, as they represent the partial or possible disintegration of Nusra’s core Syrian structure.
Syria Deeply: There has been a lot of focus on HTS being the primary target of this campaign. What about the Kurds?
Lister: For Turkey, the [Syrian Kurdish] YPG is just as much of a concern and perhaps an even more critical concern than HTS. The fact that Turkey is looking to establish a lookout post or a launching-pad base on Mount Barakat, which overlooks Kurdish-held Afrin, speaks to that.
At the moment, however, I don’t think there is a prospect for a military operation in Afrin. But there is a Turkish effort to exert some kind of influence and a potential deterrent threat on the area to discourage the YPG from moving further into opposition territories. Russia seems to have lent its support to this, which is intriguing.
Syria Deeply: Turkish officials, including the president and prime minister, said that Turkey will cooperate with Russia on the Idlib campaign. What does this mean for the FSA?
Lister: I was actually sitting with all the Euphrates Shield leadership when Erdogan gave this statement. None of them expected this apparent comment of Russian air support and they were all opposed to it. They were genuinely incensed by the idea that Russia could be providing them with support from the air. Let’s see how that plays out. If Russia does provide air support, I think that may cause some problems.
Syria Deeply: Could it be a deal breaker?
Lister: It could potentially be a deal breaker. All the armed groups, who don’t already have a presence in Idlib, would lose credibility there if they entered into an alliance with Russia. It’s pretty well known that the Russians have been bombing Idlib on and off for a long time. So I think active Russian military involvement could be a deal breaker. But I’m not sure if that is going to end up being the case.
The answers have been edited for length and clarity.”
[This article was originally published by Syria Deeply.]
بواسطة Olivia Alabaster | أكتوبر 11, 2017 | Cost of War, غير مصنف
“Transitional justice is the only way forward for a lasting peace after the inevitable outcome, activists and lawyers say.
It is a narrative that regional and world powers have begun to accept: the Syrian war is over, and Bashar al-Assad has won. After six years of conflict, and half a million dead, what little military will remains – on either side – is focused on defeating the remnants of Islamic State.
But a counter-narrative is being pushed by those opposition members in far flung capitals: regardless of the military outcome, transitional justice must be served, and democracy will eventually prevail.
“It’s not about who wins. It’s about how we release the detainees, and ending torture, and finding out where the missing people are,” said Mazen Darwish, a Syrian civil rights activist who himself was released from prison in 2015.
More than 106,000 people have been arrested or disappeared in Syria since the war broke out, according to Human Rights Watch.
“I’m not happy, whoever wins militarily,” he said, speaking to MEE from Brussels.
But, he added: “The most important thing is about the ordinary individual civilians who have suffered. As civil society, we need to guarantee that sustainable peace is achieved.”
The need for peace
The lawyer and president of the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression was in Belgium to stress the urgent need for accountability in the conflict, but before that would be possible, he said, the violence needed to end.
“Firstly, the most important thing is the need for peace,” he said.
“I don’t believe any transitional justice could take place during the conflict, and nor can any political transition take place” while the violence is ongoing.
While a de-escalation deal, brokered by Russia and Turkey in Kazakhstan in July, had seen a reduction in overall violence, September became the deadliest month in the conflict this year, with at least 3,000 dead, including more than 900 civilians.
“The victims have to be given a chance to get accountability and see a process of justice,” Darwish said.
“Only then can a political process follow.”
Last month, for the first time, a Syrian soldier was sentenced in Stockholm for crimes committed in the war, a global first.
A scattering of convictions across Europe have already seen rebel fighters and IS members sentenced for their part in the conflict.
High-ranking officials in hiding?
Nerma Jelacic, a deputy director at Commission for International Justice and Accountability, welcomed the Stockholm development, but said European intelligence agencies should be looking for higher-ranking officials.
“It was quite welcome as it was the first time that someone from the regime has been tried for his crimes,” she told MEE.
“But our hope is that not only the low-level or direct perpetrators be brought to justice, but those who have command responsibility – those of the higher rank, that’s what we need to see.
“We might not see the president standing trial,” she said, “but it might be possible to find some high-ranking officials residing in Europe,” and currently living under the radar.
Darwish said the time is ripe for a renewed focus on the crimes of the war, from every side.
“This is a chance to keep the focus and keep these kinds of crimes under the spotlight… the international community and even Staffan de Mistura want to hide and forget everything that happened. It is not realistic.”
Last month de Mistura, the UN’s Syria envoy, said that the opposition should accept that they had lost the war.
“Will the opposition be able to be unified and realistic enough to realise they did not win the war?” he asked, adding that “For the opposition, the message is very clear: if they were planning to win the war, facts are proving that is not the case. So now it’s time to win the peace.”
Darwish gave a damning indictment of the various peace talks on Syria over the years – parallel but often conflicting tracks, each sponsored by different parties, have run in Geneva, Cairo and Astana.
“Everything that has happened in Geneva and elsewhere up until now has just given the killers time to kill civilians,” he said, adding that UN resolutions condemning the violence also achieved nothing.
“If the international sides are serious in finding a solution to the conflict in Syria, they would start with criminal cases,” Darwish said.
As Syria does not recognise the International Criminal Court, war crimes can only be investigated if Damascus decides voluntarily to accept the court’s jurisdiction, or if the UN Security Council asks the ICC’s prosecutor to open an investigation – a move blocked by Russia and China in 2014.
But such cases in Europe fall under the definition of “universal jurisdiction”, whereby grave international crimes can be prosecuted by any country, even if the crimes were committed elsewhere.
These cases, are, according to HRW, “an increasingly important part of international efforts to hold perpetrators of atrocities accountable, provide justice to victims who have nowhere else to turn, deter future crimes, and help ensure that countries do not become safe havens for human rights abusers.”
Obstacles remain, though, and a case pursued in Spain earlier this year investigating members of the Syrian security services for murder collapsed after a panel within the High Court ruled that it did not have jurisdictionover the case, and that a Spanish connection was necessary. The legal team pursuing the case say they are appealing the decision.
Collecting the evidence
Husam Alkatlaby, in Brussels with Darwish, has spent years preparing for just this moment, and as director of the Violations Documentations Centre (VDC), has been overseeing the collation of such evidence.
And what the evidence shows, he said, must have a direct bearing on what any future government in Syria looks like.
“The government is responsible for the majority of the crimes, so from our point of view, there should be no place for them in the future,” Alkatlaby said, adding that this should also rule out “any other parties who committed crimes.”
Last December, the UN General Assembly established an International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism (IIIM) on international crimes committed in the Syrian Arab Republic, tasked with collecting the necessary evidence for any future trials.
And while this might not take the form of an ICC investigation, Jelacic, from the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, said that alternative courts could receive UN Security Council approval to try cases, such as an international court, in the Rwandan example, or a hybrid court comprising Syrian and international experts – the Cambodian example.
“A lot of IIIM’s work is based on data we have collected from 2012 until now,” Alkatlaby said, alongside evidence gathered from other civil society organisations. “And they are the most important partner here.”
It was time for the EU, and the global community, to stop seeing Syrian civil society groups as merely aid recipients, but as genuine partners, both Darwish and Alkatlaby said.
“We have asked the EU to put pressure on de Mistura to take civil society groups into consideration,” the VDC director said.
Currently, he added, “We think that de Mistura is far away from recognising the need for accountability and justice and looking at the families of those harmed in his policies.”
Despite the current prevailing narrative on Syria, and his own years in government detention, Darwish said he remained positive about what lies ahead for his country, and that there was good news to come soon.
“I’m still optimistic about the future, and moving towards democracy in the Middle East.”
“Even with all this suffering and crisis, in the end we will establish a new democratic country built on principles of dignity and human rights and freedom.”
This article is available in French on Middle East Eye French edition.”
[This article was originally published by Middle East Eye.]
بواسطة Noura Hourani, Marie Nelson, Kholoud Ahmad | أكتوبر 10, 2017 | Cost of War, غير مصنف
“AMMAN: For more than four years, Umm Malak has held on to the hope that her husband Hussein is still alive, sitting in a darkened cell somewhere in Syria.
Hussein, then 32, was arrested by Syrian regime forces on summer day in 2013 at a checkpoint in southern Damascus. A supermarket employee, he had been providing material support—food and supplies—to opponents of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, his wife says.
The summer day he was arrested, Hussein left his house in the town of Aqraba, southeast of the Syrian capital. He, his wife and their three daughters began living there several weeks prior after fleeing regime bombardment of the rebel-held al-Hajar al-Aswad district just south of Damascus.
Hussein was heading to the family home in al-Hajar al-Aswad. He kept birds on the roof there, and periodically returned to give them food and water. That day, he planned to set them free. As bombings increased and the security situation in and around the capital deteriorated, he was not sure he would always be able to reach and care for them.
What Umm Malak knows about what happened next—as related to her later by a 15-year-old neighbor who witnessed the arrest—is that a masked man pointed out her husband to regime security forces at a checkpoint leading into al-Hajar al-Aswad. The men put Hussein in a car and took him away to an unknown location.
Umm Malak, 36, has received no news of her husband since she learned he was taken.
“My feelings tell me that he is still alive,” she tells Syria Direct from the apartment in Amman that a charity pays for her and her daughters to live in. The family shares the apartment with another Syrian refugee—a widow.
“I’ve searched and searched for him, but come up with nothing,” says Umm Malak. Some people in her situation pay lawyers and regime officials for confirmation of whether detained loved ones are alive or dead, but she hasn’t done so.
“It costs a huge amount of money, and there is no guarantee that the answer I received would be true,” she says.
Umm Malak’s friends and acquaintances talk, whispering that after more than four years with no news, it is unlikely that her husband is still alive. But without proof one way or the other, she holds on to hope.
For friends and families, disappeared detainees exist in a space between life and death. Prolonged absence forces a difficult choice—assume loved ones to be dead and move on with life, or wait, perhaps for years, in the hope that they are still alive.
For many women—the wives of the disappeared and detained—that choice is particularly fraught. To divorce an absent spouse—even one presumed dead—and remarry can bring accusations of betrayal and abandonment from extended family, in-laws and society. To remain alone and wait may demonstrate loyalty, but also brings increased scrutiny and judgment from society as a single woman or female head of household.
An estimated 92,000 detainees are currently held by Syrian government forces as of this year, according to the UK-based violations monitor Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR). Among them are more than 76,000 victims of enforced disappearance since March 2011, according to an August 2017 SNHR report.
Enforced disappearance, according to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, is the “arrest, detention or abduction of persons by, or with the authorization, support or acquiescence of, a State or a political organization, followed by a refusal to acknowledge that deprivation of freedom or give information on the whereabouts of those persons.”
Since Syria is not a member state of the Rome Statute, the country is not within the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction.
What enforced disappearance means in Syria is that more than 76,000 people with lives and hopes and loved ones who were detained—at protests, at checkpoints, in their homes and on the street—have vanished.
The first news following a disappearance may take the form of a phone call from a prison official telling relatives that their loved one is dead, and asking them to come collect their identification documents.
Others eventually find them online, among the thousands of grim photos of the starved, beaten bodies of detainees smuggled out of Syria in 2014 by a military defector codenamed “Caesar.” Some look through the 28,000 grim images and still come up empty-handed, a bitter relief.
Many times, detainees who knew the person are released and give loved ones the news that their sister, brother, mother, son has died.
But thousands of others still do not know what has happened.
The “ongoing and daily agony” of these family members, according to an August 2016 SNHR report on detainee disappearances, is particularly deep for “wives, mothers and children who bear the greatest burden from an economic and social standpoint.”
Financially, this is because those who disappear may be the sole breadwinner for a family. Socially, the decision made by the wives of the missing to either wait—like Umm Malak—or divorce and remarry, is not just personal, but public, with social consequences.
“I have gone through a lot of suffering and condemnation from society,” says Umm Malak.
The experiences of two women who chose differently—Umm Malak, a single mother of three, and 24-year-old Naela Fayez, who obtained a divorce after hearing news of her husband’s death in prison and remarried—illustrate a few of those consequences.
Together, their stories illustrate some of the challenges faced by the wives of disappeared detainees, whichever path they take: to wait and hope, or divorce and remarry.
‘My right to keep living’
Naela Fayez knows her ex-husband Ali is dead, she says. Neither she nor any member of his family has seen his body—or any trace of him—since he was arrested in 2012 at a regime checkpoint in the south Damascus suburb of Babila.
Ali worked in construction and was on his way to work when he was detained and disappeared one morning, says Naela. He had attended local demonstrations against the government of Bashar al-Assad.
After her husband, the family’s sole breadwinner, went missing, Naela and her two young sons moved in with his relatives in Syria’s southern Daraa province. In 2014, with violence increasing and living conditions deteriorating in Syria, she fled with her sons to Jordan.
In 2015, Ali’s family in Daraa received a phone call from the al-Khateeb Branch of the Syrian regime’s State Security in Damascus. A voice told them to go to the branch and collect Ali’s documents. The family understood from this directive that he was dead, likely killed under torture. No one from the family risked going to collect the papers, fearing a trap.
Naela believes that Ali is dead, but with no body, no proof and no closure, his family refuses to accept that. Stories and rumors of detainees believed to be dead who return years later give them hope.
Even so, one year after that fateful phone call, and four years after her husband went missing, the now 30-year-old mother of two boys went to a sheikh in Jordan who gave her a ruling allowing her to remarry another Syrian—her cousin. She then did.
“In the end, I am a human being,” says Naela. “It is my right to keep living. I will not stay trapped and waiting.”
According to Islamic religious law, which governs the marriages of Sunni Muslims including Naela and Umm Malak, a wife may be granted a divorce if her husband is missing and presumed dead for between two and four years, depending on the school of thought.
The question of how and when a wife may divorce an absent, presumed-dead husband and perhaps remarry is becoming increasingly important as the war continues and the fates of tens of thousands of missing Syrians remain unknown.
In September 2017, the opposition Syrian Islamic Council, based in Turkey, issued a religious ruling defining procedures for separations and divorces for the wives of husbands who have been missing for a prolonged period.
The fatwa clarified that a woman may ask the court to issue a ruling as to the missing spouse’s death or absence and that she may remarry afterwards. However, should the missing husband return, any marriage in his absence would be annulled.
“If the husband is missing and nothing is known of his whereabouts, as in the case of a detainee, and he is thought most likely to be dead, then the wife must wait four years, then another four-month waiting period,” Abu Bakr, a religious judge in opposition-held Syria told Syria Direct earlier this year. “She may then remarry, without needing the permission of the court.”
The pro-regime newspaper Al-Watan reported this past January that some 4,000 requests for separation or divorce had been registered in the state Sharia Court by wives of missing husbands in 2016.
But although Naela’s second marriage was religiously and legally permissible, her ex-husband’s family accused her of disloyalty.
“They attacked me, accused me of betraying him,” she says. “They completely reject my new marriage.”
Prolonged conflict with her former in-laws about her remarriage and what would happen to the children—under Islamic law they were to stay with her, but the family wanted them—sparked problems with Naela’s new husband. Ultimately, he refused to raise her children.
In the end, Naela sent her children to live with their father’s family in Daraa and shortly afterward moved to Egypt with her new husband.
“My heart burns without my children,” she says.
‘No matter how long his absence’
Umm Malak says she will wait as long as it takes for her husband to return. If Hussein is still alive, he is now 36 years old.
“I will wait for my husband no matter how long his absence,” says Umm Malak. “I won’t accept raising my daughters with any man but him. I will not divorce him and become another executioner, while he is suffering terribly under torture.”
But although Umm Malak has not chosen to remarry, she still says she faces intense social pressures and scrutiny.
As a single mother, Umm Malak says she is under a microscope, with community members scrutinizing every choice she makes. As the wife of a disappeared detainee, she is held to a high standard, any change in her life bringing “looks of suspicion and mistrust.”
“I am seen as a broken person, easily taken advantage of,” says Umm Malak, “especially by men.”
Fadel Abdul Ghany, the chairman of SNHR, emphasized the social impact of enforced disappearances on those left behind in the monitor’s August 2017 report.
“The mental, physical and emotional toll [that disappearance cases] have on the victims and their families make this crime a form of collective punishment against the community,” wrote Fadel Abdul Ghany.
As the years drag on, life continues. In Egypt, Naela lives with her new husband. In Jordan, Umm Malak raises her daughters as best she can under the gaze of prying, judging eyes.
Hanging over it all, Hussein’s absence is a deafening silence, an unfinished story about a country on fire and a man who left home to free his birds and disappeared into a void.
“My life is a prison of waiting,” she says.”
[This article was originally published by Syria Direct.]
