INSIDE SYRIA’S WAR
Gareth Browne tours the devastated country – with Assad’s shameless apologists
“Welcome to the crazy club!” laughed Baroness Caroline Cox in the lobby of a ritzy, five-star Beirut hotel. Her words would mark the beginning of a one-week journey into the heartlands of the Syrian regime and the war-racked cities under its control – Damascus, Homs and Aleppo.
As the fighting in Syria has fluctuated over the past seven years, the member of Britain’s House of Lords has organised many trips into areas loyal to President Bashar Al Assad under the watch of his feared secret police, the Mukhabarat. She organises them with her associate, the Rev Andrew Ashdown, a British Anglican priest.
They say the trips are for research, but they are first and foremost a show of solidarity with the Syrian people. In previous meetings they have taken tea with man at the heart of the conflict, President Bashar Al Assad; other journeys have led them to the front lines of the conflict.
Father Ashdown, for instance, was in Aleppo in December 2016 as the government unleashed its final bombardment to reclaim the heart of the revolution’s last rebel-held areas.
The pair have touted these tours as pastoral ventures. But they have attracted a wave of criticism for being inherently political, seen to be sidling up to a regime accused of a litany of crimes against humanity. That list includes, and is not limited to: gassing its own people, torture, death by hanging and enforced sieges on civilian-populated areas.
What was an already controversial trip had become all the more significant on the day of our departure: Saturday, April 14. Hours before we set off for Syria from Beirut, the US, Britain and France fired more than 100 cruise missiles at three suspected chemical weapons production sites in reaction to the Douma gas attack that killed at least 43 people a week earlier. Eighteen people were on the bus as it hit the road to Damascus – clergy, academics, journalists and members of the House of Lords.
For one week I was to be an honorary member of the “crazy club”. Syria has become an increasingly hostile place to report from. So journalists who seek access must grasp the rare opportunities to report from the ground.
In an indication of just how powerful the church has become in Syria, it was the Syrian Orthodox Patriachate who had vouched for those invited on the trip. The regime awarded visas to a number of individuals who would probably have been denied entry under all other circumstances.
Controversy surrounding the trip grew and seeped into the British public’s consciousness after Giles Fraser, former canon chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, posted photos on Twitter of the group’s meeting with the Syrian Grand Mufti, Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun, and the Minister for Religious Affairs, Mohammed Abdul Sattar.
As the week progressed, it quickly became clear that the trip was anything but pastoral. Individuals who claim to operate as independent journalists in regime-held areas, pushing the Assad line on social media, namely Vanessa Beeley and Tom Duggan, were brought in to speak with us separately. Both have no identifiable ties to a reputable news organisation.
The group challenged Duggan, who told us the White Helmets, a Nobel Peace Prize-nominated organisation of first responders saving lives in the rubble of air attacks, had in fact been murdering civilians before they were forced to flee from the besieged enclave of Eastern Ghouta. Members also challenged Beeley, who offered her alternative perspective of the conflict. Her views include suggesting the Charlie Hebdo attack was a false-flag operation and that Al Qaeda was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
Robin Yassin-Kassab, author of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War, says actors such as Beeley are vital to spreading misinformation about Syria in aid of the regime.
“I think they play an important role, a couple of years ago, I would have dismissed these people as irrelevant lunatics, sadly I was very wrong. They may well be lunatics, but they are not irrelevant. Indirectly I think they have been very influential indeed,” he says.
“[People like Beeley] help to feed conspiracy theories into the mainstream, that’s their function. If the mainstream was healthy, they wouldn’t be relevant.”
While Mr Fraser and others in the group bought a deal of scepticism to the trip, assertively challenging Duggan and Ashdown, there was an undeniable sense from outside that the group had naively wandered into becoming the regime’s useful idiots.
Two instances stood out. First, Baroness Cox would repeatedly draw attention to her House of Lords questions about the British government’s alleged funding of “terrorist groups”, grouping the White Helmets into that category. Second, Lord Hugh Dykes, Baroness Cox’s colleague, deemed it appropriate to warn Syrian parliamentarians about the dangers of the US’s vast defence spending.
There is little doubt that such visits are used by Syrian officials to claim legitimacy. In his high-rise office, Mr Sattar boasted of meeting with former British foreign secretary David Miliband “in this very office”.
Grand Mufti Hassoun, who Amnesty International says ordered the execution of 13,000 inmates at the notorious Sednayah prison, asked the delegation why he had been denied a visa for Britain. “I wish to speak in front of the British Parliament,” he tells us, bragging of a recent address he made to the Irish parliament in December 2016.
The legitimacy derived from such photo opportunities and visits has become an integral
part of the regime’s normalisation project, says Mr Yassin-Kassab. “The regime needs legitimacy; it needs as much legitimacy as it can get within Syria. That’s what these visits offer,” he says.
“It looks good for them to have their photo taken with an English priest, or member of the House of Lords.”
Avoiding the regime cameras would prove a challenge. Often it seemed that the most important person in the room was the one with the camera. Every public event would be featured in the Syrian state media. After one of our meetings with church officials, the headline read: “British delegation visits Syria”. The impression given was that this was an official, government delegation. Despite Baroness Cox’s claims that the trip was pastoral, it was not portrayed in the Syrian media as that at all.
As the group crossed back into Lebanese territory by bus, I asked Baroness Cox about her accusations that the “UK was funding terrorist groups in Syria”. I asked exactly which extremist groups Britain was supporting. She declined to answer, citing parliamentary privilege – the Houses of Parliament’s legal immunity for statements made in its house.
I sought clarification on her positions. Does Russia have a more ethical foreign policy than the UK?
“I think in Syria, they do,” she says. Should Britain welcome President Al Assad for a state visit? “I don’t see why not.”
The trip was an embodiment of how Syria, and its history, is being rebuilt in the image of one man. Any talk of initial uprisings would be accompanied by the claim that protesters were paid by foreign powers. “I remember the first days – I asked the kids protesting, I called from my balcony ‘How much are they paying you?’ They said 500 Syrian pounds (Dh3.5) each,” Haysam Kozma, 61, tells me in Homs.
These version of events possessed minimal acknowledgment of any opposition that is not an ISIS or Al Qaeda-affiliated group. Just as the opposition slogans that sparked the revolution have been removed from the walls of Homs, the historical narrative has been whitewashed. It was this binary choice between Mr Al Assad and ISIS that seems now to be the underlying principle of the Syrian government.
At an accommodation centre in Adra on the outskirts of Damascus, families who fled Eastern Ghouta told me of their exhaustion after five years of a hellish siege. “We don’t want your aid, or food, we don’t want jobs, we just want our homes back,” cried one woman, failing to hold back the tears, her young daughter in her arms.
There are millions like that woman, in Syria and abroad, living in the indignity of a refugee camp. It remains unclear if those forced to flee the country will ever be able to return.
A massive effort in demographic engineering is under way. Former rebel heartlands are slowly being repopulated with groups the regime believes it can rely on for support. Driving into Homs from the south, the construction of new residences is clear to see. And locals, such as Mania Khashoun, a communications trainer from Homs’ Hamdiya district, told The National that people moving into the city were Alawites and others loyal to the regime. “My Alawite friends come into the city for work. They live close, but not too close.” This in a city long regarded as the nucleus of the Syrian revolt.
A new piece of legislation, law No 10, was issued earlier this month. It gives private property owners just 30 days to register and prove their ownership of property, and with millions unable to return to the country, it essentially sets the scene for widespread property confiscation by the government. It is largely those who supported the opposition who are yet to return, even years after the government’s recapture of certain cities. As Syrian author Leila Al Shami wrote in the Lebanese newspaper Al Jumhoriya, the law is an “attempt to implement demographic change”.
In Aleppo, Yanal Bashkour, who works in the office of the presidency, defends the new law. “If they want to get their property back, they can come back, it’s no problem,” he says.
But such an attitude appears to ignore the practical dangers of returning, many of those who fled are wanted for evading conscription into the Syrian Arab Army, or merely expressing non-violent support for the opposition. Millions face lengthy jail sentences if they ever return.
Indeed, Mr Al Assad has indicated as much. In a 2015 speech he said: “Syria is not for those who hold its passport or reside in it; Syria is for those who defend it.”
“Millions of Syrian have not only been brutalised by the war, but have lost their homes, their communities, their anchors of political and national identification, possibly for ever,” says Tobias Schneider of the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin. “Syria might move into a post-conflict period, millions of Syrians won’t.”
At a public meeting with Governor Talal Al Barazi in Homs, it becomes apparent that Father Ashdown essentially encourages the propaganda by organising such meetings, and the very public telling of peoples’ tales, for the group’s viewing. There is little genuine dialogue, and similar sessions throughout trip descend into competitions to publicly praise the Syrian president, and share horror tales of beheadings and drownings at the hands of the opposition.
In perhaps the most surreal moment of the trip, Baroness Cox called the group to attention to thank our half dozen Mukhabarat minders on the penultimate day. The men had shadowed us at almost every moment, listening in on every conversation. They are the foot soldiers in an organisation that instils unabated fear into the average Syrian. As a gesture to thank them for “keeping us safe”, she presented them with a set of tin plates from the gift shop of Buckingham Palace. There was bemusement on all sides.
A visit to two psychosocial centres in Aleppo managed by the Syria Trust, a charity set up by the country’s First Lady, British-educated Asma Al Assad, was illustrated with glossy literature and buzzwords like “life skills” and “family planning”.
But as the group departed, so too did the students, bussed in on our account, the whole visit staged, much like the wider reconstruction of Syria – a facade in the image of one man, propped up by his backers in Moscow and Tehran.
The crazy club had checked out of the Old City of Damascus, but what was patently clear was that the madness of Syria’s dictatorship is booked in for the long-run.
Syria might move into a post-conflict period, millions of Syrians won’t TOBIAS SCHNEIDER Global Public Policy Institute, Berlin