Homs, Syria
Hassan the smuggler got on his motorbike and disappeared up a dirt track that led from Lebanon into Syria. He did not return and an hour or so after nightfall we heard long, echoing bursts of automatic fire. Hassan had been captured by a Syrian Army patrol, said one of the villagers. No, he had run away, said someone else. He had been killed, said a third person. He had escaped. He told us the story the next morning, grinning triumphantly. He had bolted when it became clear he could not bribe his way out and the patrol was going to hand him over to the secret police. Just before he ran, pursued by bullets, Hassan, a Sunni, told his captor, an Alawite officer: ‘My family and my tribe know where you live. If I die here tonight, they will slaughter your village.’
It was a telling exchange. The public impression of the Syrian revolution so far is a simple one of almost unbelievably brave protestors being shot down in the streets for their peaceful demand for freedom. That remains true but in a week of travelling covertly in the country we also saw a growing insurgency. And always hanging in the air was the sectarian question, hovering malignantly, informing people’s fears, increasingly dictating their actions.
We entered Syria from Lebanon with volunteers running guns to those who have taken up arms against the regime. The volunteers were all Sunni, like 75 per cent of Syria’s population. Some were Lebanese Sunnis. They were wary of the Lebanese villages nearby which were Shiite, or which were Alawite, like the 10 to 12 per cent ruling Syrian minority. Those Lebanese villages were supporting their Syrian counterparts too, said the smugglers. It is easy to see how this conflict could spread.
We crept across the border just before midnight, happy that we had not accepted Hassan’s offer of a lift on his motorbike. We walked through apricot orchards and across farmland. Instructions were given to us in tense whispers. The Syrian Army had reinforced the area, said our guides; they had also laid mines. None of this, though, had sealed the border and each man carried two or three Kalashnikovs to give to the fighters inside.
Our destination was Homs, the main centre of opposition to the Syrian regime. Activists helped us to slip past an army observation post on foot and into the Sunni district of Bab Amr. There was an atmosphere of siege. Armoured vehicles sat on the major road junctions. Driving within sight of a checkpoint, someone fired a burst of shots over our heads. Our car did a rapid U-turn. Half an hour later, a teenage boy was brought past us from the same place, raw muscle and cartilage in his knee exposed by a bullet wound. While we were in Bab Amr, too, a six-year-old boy was killed while playing on his front doorstep, Rashida al Yassin told me how she had lost three members of her family, all shot. Her son had been at a demonstration. Her grandson was out buying bread. Her brother-in-law was at home when a passing armoured vehicle fired through the window, she said.
Was the democracy struggle worth such sacrifice? ‘Our men were driven to demonstrate because of the total injustice of the past 40 years,’ she said. ‘There’s no fuel to heat the homes in winter, when you go to register for electricity they won’t give you a line. We have nothing while they are living in luxury and spending money.’
By ‘they’, she meant the ruling Alawites. Abu Mohammed, one of the men leading the armed struggle in Homs, said: ‘At least Hafez had the sense to give a few jobs to the Sunnis,’ referring to Syria’s former leader, father of the current president, Bashar al Assad. Abu Mohammed, tough-looking, shaven-headed, tracksuit-wearing, would no doubt suit the regime’s propaganda, which paints the democracy movement as the voice of a Sunni underclass.
But Abu Mohammed has a degree in Arabic literature. The good jobs were reserved for the Alawites, he said, so he had become a tobacco smuggler, a trade that meant having a few guns around. He had brought out those weapons when, he said, masked state security men first opened fire on the demonstrators in Homs in April. He claimed there were about 500 fighters in Bab Amr now, many of them soldiers who had deserted from the government forces to form the Free Syrian Army.
Lieutenant Abdel Razik of the Free Syrian Army told me they had Alawites, Christians and Druze as well as Sunnis. ‘People are joining this revolution regardless of their sect,’ he told me, ‘we are all together with one hand to get rid of his unjust regime. It is impossible that this will end in civil war because we are one blood and one people. The revolution is being guided by civilised principles, not barbaric feelings and instincts.’
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That is certainly what the international community would like to hear. But is it true? And do the Free Army’s growing band of new recruits see it that way? The answer is yes — and no. We witnessed one defection from the government’s army to the rebels: five soldiers running, under gunfire, into Bab Amr. Tracer fire arced back and forth for more than an hour. One of the soldiers, Ahmed Daleti, explained why they had deserted. ‘They gave us the order to shoot on the demonstrators,’ he told me, ‘so we said “No”, these people are peaceful. They just want freedom. We are all one people, one blood — we couldn’t just shoot them.’ By ‘one people, one blood’, though, Daleti was talking about fellow Sunnis, rather than fellow Syrians.
Again and again the people I met accused the regime of inflaming sectarian tensions. Haydi Abdullah used to be a nurse at the military hospital in the Alawite town of Latakia. After the trouble started, he said, the authorities sacked Sunni staff and replaced them with Alawites. Haydi claimed to have seen four patients, injured democracy protestors, murdered in the hospital. ‘They would receive all kinds of insults from the nurses and doctors. “Bastard, son of a bitch, whore, son of a dog, you spy, you agent of Israel.” One man would have survived but they beat him and stabbed him with needles. And if my face had shown even a sign that I was upset, I would have been sent to jail. But,’ Haydi continued, ‘the medical staff doing this were not just Alawites. They were Sunnis, too!’ It’s certainly true that the regime still enjoys wide support.
On the way out of Syria, we joined about a dozen fighters as they debated whether to attack an army checkpoint. They sat crosslegged on the floor, automatic weapons leant against the wall. ‘No, we don’t want to kill those guys, they are Sunnis, our relatives,’ said one of the men. ‘If they are Alawite, don’t hesitate,’ said another.
The conversation was interrupted by a mobile phone, the ringtone a lyrical chant of ‘Dear God, promise us victory’. Those words have Salafi associations — you would sometimes hear them intoned over videos of suicide bombings in Iraq. To these men, it is already a sectarian conflict. Women have been raped by the Shabbiha, the ‘ghosts’, as the Alawite militia are known. Sunnis have been taken off a bus passing through a Shiite village and shot, they said.
In the end, the rebels decided to attack a base rather than the checkpoint because there was, they believed, more chance of killing Alawites there. They hit it with rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns, and killed two soldiers and wounded two more, they said.
The revolution is not yet simply a battle between majority Sunnis and minority, ruling Alawites and their Shiite and Christian allies. But the longer this goes on, the greater the chance that a once noble struggle for democracy on the streets will become an ugly sectarian conflict.
Paul Wood is reporting from Syria for the BBC.
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