Syrian president Hafez Assad declares war on Israel, October 6, 1973

Liberation Daze

Hope, fear, and uncertainty in postwar Syria.

When I first visited Syria, on Easter Sunday 1973, Christian families were attending Mass and calling on one another with presents of sugar-coated almonds. To this twenty-two-year-old graduate student hitchhiking to Aqaba from Beirut, Syria was a mix of delightful chaos and state-imposed monotony. Christians, Druze, Alawis, and Jews were free to practice their faiths. Unlike in Saudi Arabia, alcohol was legal. Women not only drove cars, they worked in offices, shops, and restaurants. Some chose to wear headscarves, but many chose not to.

At the same time, billboards reminded citizens of their duty to the Baath Party’s founding motto: unity, freedom, socialism. Children wore military-style uniforms at school, and informants spied on their neighbors. The image of Hafez al-Assad, who had been president for just over two years, was ubiquitous. When I visited Damascus some months later, protesters threw eggs at a foreign dignitary. I asked my philosophy tutor at the American University back in Beirut whether he thought the Syrian government approved. “If the Baath Party doesn’t want people to throw eggs,” he said, “the chickens don’t lay eggs.”

That was the Syria I came to know over fifty years, through wars, attempted coups, the death of Hafez, and the accession of his son Bashar. It seemed unchanging, unchangeable, even throughout fourteen years of civil war. And then, on December 8 last year, it all changed. Assad was gone…

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Syria’s New Rulers Get a Makeover

The messages started appearing on my phone as soon as I left Syria in mid-January. At first, there were links to articles, and social media posts, about threats to Alawis and Christians. Then came friends’ accounts of scary incidents. One woman wrote that a police officer from the new government ordered her to cover her hair. Another told me a Sunni friend – a friend – threatened to kill her. A Christian businessman I’ve known for years texted that he would no longer send me anything political via WhatsApp, because the new government was watching.

The atmosphere was already changing from what I had observed at the beginning of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) government under its leader, Ahmed al-Shara. Shara had dropped his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, along with the battle fatigues from his years leading Sunni Muslim fundamentalists against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. With a trimmed beard and a new suit, he was receiving and visiting fellow heads of state from the Middle East and beyond. An American delegation was so impressed that the US revoked its $10 million bounty on Shara’s head for terrorist crimes.

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Beirut Gets a Reprieve—but for How Long?

If history is any guide, the latest Lebanese ceasefire may well have broken down by the time you read this.

Whenever I hear the word “ceasefire” about Lebanon, I reach for my stopwatch. During the first phase of the civil war there, in 1975–76, we would give numbers to each successive ceasefire. Our tally ran out of steam after 100.

Each time, something—a Christian boy dating a Muslim boy’s sister, a car theft, a drug deal gone wrong, flying a party flag in the wrong neighborhood—would kick-start a fresh wave of violence. One of Beirut’s early front lines was a street between Christian and Muslim neighborhoods. Western journalists—of whom I, as a young stringer for various publications and radio networks, was barely one—left the St. George Hotel bar long enough to observe exchanges of fire, pick up a few quotes, gather some color, and file in time for dinner. Then we would wait for the next ceasefire.

The fighting escalated with the introduction of artillery and snipers, whose favored targets seemed to be women and children. There was a period when the violence paused at the end of each month. It took us a while to realize why: It was payday for the militiamen, who held their fire long enough for the banks to reopen. Checks cashed, they started firing again. I am not making this up.

Lebanon’s war has taken many forms since then: Israel against the Palestine Liberation Organization; Maronites against other Maronites; Maronites versus Druze; a faction of the Lebanese Army against the Syrian Army; the Shiite Amal militia against the Palestinians; Israel versus Syria; and the recurring conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. The one constant is the ceasefire: a false promise of peace that gives the belligerents a chance to regroup and rearm.

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Aftermath of IDF strike on Bachoura 2024

Lebanon’s Year of Living Ambiguously

After the Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah decided to draw Lebanon into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, tit-for-tat bombings along the border with Israel overshadowed the country’s political and economic plight.

Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities describes the imaginary Maurilia, whose inhabitants invite visitors “to examine some old postcards that show it as it used to be.” In return the visitors “must praise the postcard city and prefer it to the present one.” The “lost grace” of Maurilia approximates Beirut’s, which likewise “can be appreciated only…in the old postcards.” It is with nostalgic regret that from time to time I examine postcards in the decaying souvenir shops of Beirut’s once-fashionable Hamra district. They depict, in sepia and color-tint, Ottoman mansions, lush gardens, venerable covered souks, a seafront promenade, ancient mosques, churches and synagogues, Roman columns amid metropolitan chaos, and a magnificent central plaza originally named the Place des Canons. After World War I, it was renamed the Place des Martyrs to honor the nationalist partisans whom the Turkish military governor, General Ahmed Jamal Pasha, hanged there in 1916 for defying his crumbling empire.

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The expendables

Forty-one-year-old Police Constable Trevor Lock was at his usual post, guarding the Iranian embassy in London, on the morning of April 30, 1980. At 11.36 he noticed a young man whom he took to be “another Iranian student” approaching the building. “Then”, writes Ben Macintyre, “he saw the sub-machine gun.”

The “student” fired a round that shattered the half-open glass security door and lacerated PC Lock’s face. Joined by two other armed men, he rushed inside, and soon three more armed confederates arrived. Thus begins Macintyre’s perfectly paced and thrilling account of the six-day standoff between the British government and young zealots seeking justice for their fellow Arabs in the Iranian province that they called Arabistan and Persians knew as Khuzestan. Thirty-one people – diplomats, local staff, journalists and visa applicants – were in the building when the gang began rounding them up and threatening their lives. Five managed to escape in the initial confusion, leaving twenty-six as hostages to be bargained against ninety-one political prisoners in Iran. The new Islamic government in Iran refused to consider making concessions, and Margaret Thatcher’s year-old administration would not grant the terrorists safe passage out of the country with their hostages.

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In Lebanon, Israel Is Only Sowing the Seeds of More Bloodshed and Terror

The history of Israel’s incursions into Lebanon are a series of lessons in futility and the arrogance of power. If only anyone were paying attention.

The Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza is appealing for fuel to run its generators amid a siege and evacuation order by the Israeli military that threatens the lives of its patients, including more than a dozen children in the Intensive Care Unit. At the southern end of the Strip, the Mohammed Yusuf al-Najjar Hospital was forced to cease operating by Israeli military pressure—depriving Gaza of its only kidney dialysis unit. Elimination of hospitals has become a normal aspect of what the United Nations calls Israel’s “concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system.” It is worth reflecting not only on the two hospitals’ fates but also on their names: Kamal Adwan and Mohammad Yusuf al-Najjar. They tie Gaza to Lebanon, where I was living on the night both of them were murdered.

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Abd al-Qadir protecting Christians in Damascus by Jan-Baptist Huysmans, 1861

From the ashes: a ground-breaking account of an underexamined horror

Armed gangs of men and boys rampaged through the Christian Quarter of Damascus for eight days and nights in July 1860, burning, looting, raping and murdering. Colonel Charles Henry Churchill, who had served as vice-consul in Damascus before taking up permanent residence in Mount Lebanon, recorded multiple atrocities:

The violation of women, the ravishing of young girls – some in the very streets amid coarse laughs and savage jeers, – some snatched up and carried off … Men of all ages from the boy to the old man, were forced to apostasise, were circumcised, on the spot, in derision, and then put to death. The churches and convents, which, in the first paroxysm of terror, had been filled to suffocation, presented piles of corpses, mixed up promiscuously with the wounded and only half dead; whose last agonies were amidst flaming beams and calcinated blocks of stone falling in upon them with earthquake shock. The thoroughfares were choked with the slain.

The orgy of violence petered out on July 17, leaving more than 5,000 Christians dead and their neighbourhoods reduced to ash. Survivors crammed into the uncertain protection of the city’s ancient citadel, while Muslim toughs outside the walls bayed for their deaths.

Most histories of the Damascus “events” portray them as merely the aftermath of Druze massacres of as many as 20,000 Christians in Mount Lebanon the previous spring. The American-born Oxford historian Eugene Rogan’s original and thoroughly researched history demonstrates that the massacres, while related, had similar but separate causes. His fascination with the history began, as so often with good historians, while he was looking for something else.

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If Joe Biden Really Wants to Celebrate Press Freedom, He Should Free Julian Assange

Joe Biden will celebrate World Press Freedom Day tomorrow. But it is a safe bet that he’ll have nothing to say about Assange or Imran Khan, both behind bars for defying the US.

President Joe Biden’s eloquence, such as it is, soars highest when he hymns alleluias to the free press. “Courageous journalists around the world have shown time and again that they will not be silenced or intimidated,” he proclaimed last year on the occasion of World Press Freedom Day. “The United States sees them and stands with them.” He reprised the theme last week at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner: “There are some who call you the enemy of the people. That’s wrong and that’s dangerous. You literally risk your lives doing your job.” The assembled correspondents, although themselves confronting no risk greater than crossing Pennsylvania Avenue to rewrite press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s handouts, applauded their stalwart champion.

The administration’s commitment to freedom of the press is rivaled only by its devotion to democracy beyond America’s borders. The public need not wait until 15 September — International Democracy Day — for the State Department to support fair elections in, say, Pakistan. Donald Lu, assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, shared his concern for Pakistani electoral integrity in testimony to a House subcommittee on March 20. Lu, referring to February’s contested results, stated, “We have never used the term ‘free and fair’ in the characterization of this election.” Lu mentioned, among other deviations from democratic norms, “mass arrests of those in opposition, the shutdown of internet, and censorship and pressure placed on journalists.”

To the world’s journalists and Pakistan’s voters, the message is clear: America has your back. American actions, however, send a message at odds with Biden’s and Lu’s rhetorical flourishes: Don’t mess with Uncle Sam. Those who do will end up like Julian Assange in London’s Belmarsh Maximum Security Prison and Imran Khan in Rawalpindi’s Adiala Jail…

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Demonstration for Julian Assange, Barcelona Feb 20, 2024

The US Government’s Plot to Murder Julian Assange

While dictators kill troublesome journalists with guns and missiles, democracies can afford to be more patient. But the end result is the same.

In most of the countries whose wars I’ve covered over the past 50 years, journalists were fair game. The first deliberate killing I remember took place during Lebanon’s civil war in May 1976, when a sniper shot Le Monde correspondent Edouard Saab. Saab, who also edited Beirut’s French language daily, L’Orient-Le Jour, had excoriated the Syrian regime for stoking Lebanon’s violence … The Syrians were not the only ones killing writers in Lebanon. In 1966, supporters of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser murdered Kamal Mrowe, the esteemed editor-publisher of the Arabic daily Al Hayat. Mossad killed Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani in Beirut in July 1972, two months before I moved there … That’s just the Middle East. In other regions where I’ve worked soldiers and politicians murdered journalists with impunity. There is barely a corner of the globe where reporters are not targets of the powerful forces they challenge. The United States presents itself as an exception, despite its toleration of friendly states, like Saudi Arabia and Israel, that have killed journalists. On World Press Freedom Day, May 3, last year, President Joe Biden declared, “Courageous journalists around the world have shown time and again that they will not be silenced or intimidated. The United States sees them and stands with them.”

America did not stand with the reporters and camera operators from Al Jazeera, Reuters, and Spain’s Telecino in Baghdad when US forces fired on and killed them on April 8, 2003. The case that the killings were unintentional wore thinner in July 2007, when a US Apache helicopter killed a group of unarmed civilians on the streets of Baghdad. Among the dead were Reuters journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh. Only WikiLeaks’ publication of the “Collateral Murder” footage, complete with the crew’s voiced glee at the killings, exposed the official lie.

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Medic carrying wounded Palestinian child in Gaza, 17th October 2023

Aren’t the Children of Gaza Worth Saving?

If our answer is yes, then we have to stop sending Israel the weapons that kill them. No one turns his back on a child whose life is threatened. This is how it should be. Who turns away from a child in danger? Why then the silence on the children killed, maimed, buried alive and orphaned in Gaza since the 8th of October last year?

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