SYRIA, IN THE BEGINNING
The civil war is now five years old. A writer who was there tells how it began,
ISTANBUL, TURKEY— In 2007, Syria was a country of organized chaos, where everything worked precisely as much as it needed to and not an inch more, where kids stayed up late and no government authority warned their parents to do otherwise. Some Syrians sought fun at nightclubs, others found solace in the mosque. There was no Daesh, no refugee crisis, no war.
Arriving at Damascus’s grubby bus station in January of that year, I wondered if telling everyone at home in Ireland that I was leaving permanently was such a good idea. I had moved to Syria months after graduating university in a personal rebellion against Celtic Tiger Ireland’s faux, self-congratulatory party world.
I spoke no Arabic and had little knowledge of the region’s people and politics. I had no job, no income; I knew no one. I was motivated by frustration, a frustration that saw me through the 36-hour bus journey from Istanbul to Damascus and again when I found myself on the wrong side of Damascus, alone, late at night, because I misunderstood someone’s directions.
It is a stereotype that Syrians are friendly, and it is true in comparative western terms. But in 2007 Syria was also a deeply troubled country. Colonial Europe had taken a dagger to the Middle East early in the 20th century and 100 years later the wounds had become festering sores in the form of dictators.
Still, from 2007 until 2010, Syria was a country on the up. In 2008, President Bashar Assad was then French president Nicholas Sarkozy’s guest of honour at Bastille Day celebrations in Paris. Two years later, Vogue magazine sent a top writer and photographer to Damascus to profile Syria’s “secular” first lady, Asma Assad.
More important to Syrians was the opening of a dozen international private banks. Before then, young Syrians depended on their parents for money to buy a car or to pay for a wedding; now mortgages and car loans liberated anyone with a stable job from the yoke of their father.
However, away from the cities a three-year drought that began in 2008 was destroying families in the east. Thousands fled to the cities where, without bank accounts or employment, they fell into poverty and desperation. Climbing into taxis in 2010, blow-in drivers from the countryside would ask me “Where’s that?” when told where to go.
Working as a reporter under the Assad regime was a challenge long before 2011. Repression was rising. My Syrian friends had repeatedly warned: “Write about anything you want, but don’t take on politics or religion.”
So when security forces began to crack down on protesters in March 2011and the world’s media wanted to know what was happening, reporting became not only difficult, but dangerous. It didn’t matter — in the way it didn’t matter for local demonstrators — that by then I spoke Arabic and knew my way around the city and its satellite towns.
It helped that I rarely put a byline to my writings and that my residency in Syria was secured through an Irish business newspaper that hid my articles behind a paywall. But even basic acts of journalism proved trying. Asking people in the street about the emerging “crisis” risked both parties being outed to intelligence agents. Syrians were more afraid of me than I of them, and with good reason — that’s how a dictatorship keeps its people down.
Away from the violence and revolutionary furor, regular folks started acting differently, too: motorists no longer stopped at traffic lights and homeowners began to build additions without seeking municipal approval. These actions may sound trivial, but they have spun around in my head since then — why would people abandon the certainties that meant their society functioned? In retrospect, they reveal something: for generations, Syrians had lived under a ruthless and cunning regime that told its people what to do, how to think and what to say. When that power slipped, it was like taking the cap off a bottle of shaken cola.
Seeing a country disintegrate in such apparently inconsequential ways was nonetheless chilling; to counter the feeling that the world around me was collapsing, I often repeated to myself a propaganda dictum used by the government ostensibly to stop people from protesting. It went: “ana ma il-qanoon” (I’m with the law). But by vowing not to be drawn into the chaos, I was doing the government’s own work.
At times it was easier to pretend that life was normal enough. By the time I married a local girl in a tiny Catholic church outside Damascus two months after the revolt broke out — a church separated from the capital by a string of checkpoints — it was less difficult to be of the mind that what was good for Syrians was good for me.
Like everyone else in Syria we struggled on, for 10 months, through the rolling blackouts and rocketing food prices. I would, like anyone else with a car, spend entire days driving from gas station to gas station in search of enough fuel to get through another week. When we needed cooking gas we were happy to pay inflated prices — in full knowledge we were contributing to a market that made it more difficult for others to afford.
The chilling day I finally decided to leave Syria involved an assignment to a poor suburb of Damascus called Saqba. It was February 2012. Days earlier, the nascent Free Syrian Army had been in control of the district, but over a weekend it had been taken back by the regime. I, along with a couple of foreign reporters, including the foreign editor of the London Times, Rick Beeston, went searching for an underground hospital. What we found instead was far more chilling: a mass grave. Locals said it was the work of government militias who had rampaged through the neighbourhood in the days before.
There is nothing romantic about journalism that sees you staring into the eye sockets of men who have had their noses hacked off and their torsos blackened by fire, as happened in Saqba that day. There is nothing exciting about looking into the eyes of a mother of seven from Idlib, in northern Syria, whom I met recently on the Syrian-Turkish border where she recounted how her husband went missing and alluded to having been raped by jihadists.
Every day, I ask myself whether I should walk away from the Middle East because journalism makes no difference in the face of such slaughter. But the feeling persists that these are events of historical consequence. And because I was there at the start, it’s my job to continue documenting them.
What is troubling now is the growing assertion that the war in Syria is this month five years old; in an important sense, that’s simply not the case. I was there in 2011, and what I saw was not a two-sided war. It was a government unleashing hell on its people.
But don’t take my word for it. Ask the skinny students who unfurled a flag emblazoned with the word “freedom” outside Damascus University in 2011 if they thought themselves war combatants. Ask the young women and men who risked their lives by imploring their fellow countrymen — and the world — to stand up against oppression if they are terrorists.
Claiming today that the war in Syria is five years old writes these brave people right out of history. And that, I know, should never happen. Stephen Starr lived in Syria for five years until 2012. He is the author of Revolt in Syria: Eye-Witness to the Uprising. He now lives in Istanbul.