My visit then had coincided with the decision of the Arab League mission to withdraw from Syria. During that two-week visit, I had witnessed firsthand the systematic oppression the Syrian regime perpetrated in the areas inhabited mostly by Sunni Arabs and the deadly reactions to the protest demonstrations that had become quite frequent at the time. I had gotten trapped amidst armed clashes when the forces of the regime had attacked a funeral in Duma, a town half an hour from Damascus that provided a great deal of support to the rebels, and an unarmed demonstration in the district of Kabun, which could be reached by a ten-minute ride from the capital. I had desperately sought shelter during these incidents when one person had gotten killed in Kabun and seven in Duma with dozens of others injured. I had been finally carried away by the wave of rebellion the security forces of the regime had been trying to quell with all their might when, in the wake of the clashes on the night of January 26th in the district of Harasta 15 km from central Damascus, the house I was sharing with an unarmed dissident had been stormed by the victorious regime forces along with many others in the neighborhood and I had been arrested and forced to leave Syria.
My name having been entered in the list of banned people after this arrest, it could no longer enter the country through official channels. Therefore, I made my way into Syria, the northern reaches of which were controlled by the rebels as far south as central Aleppo, by crossing the border at Kilis illegally this time, accompanied by Michael Weiss who worked for a British think tank, Mahmoud Elzour who also doubled as our guide, and Army Captain Yusuf who had severed his ties with the Syrian regime last February and joined the rebels (Captain Yusuf was killed by tank fire during the clashes with the Syrian regime in Aleppo’s Saladin quarter on August 15th). I found out that Mahmoud, who was in his early fifties, had come to Antakya upon turning over his successful business selling vehicle spare parts to the construction industry in Atlanta, USA, for the last twenty years and had devoted himself to financing an army division in the town of Al Bab to the north of Aleppo using his own means and additional sources he could mobilize.
On August 2nd, 2012, we set out from Antakya and headed for the Kilis county of the Gaziantep province in a Volkswagen van owned by Juma who was from Antakya and hauled cargo between Turkey and Syria until his business came to a standstill because of the incidents in Syria. When his transportation business went into a hiatus, Juma started serving as a guide for the foreign journalists driving about in the region. I noticed that his constant shuttling across the area had made him privy to certain information I had not heard from anyone else.
In my second entrance into Syria, the whole road from the border to Al Bab some 35 km away appeared to be cleared of regime forces. It was late in the evening when we reached Al Bab where we were to stay for the eight days to follow and take a ride almost every morning to Aleppo accompanied by a member of the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Embarking on the trip to Aleppo both excited me and sent shivers down my spine every time what with all the news I had recently read about the violent clashes taking place there.
Although located only 45 minutes from Aleppo, Al Bab, where approximately 200,000 people live, had repelled the regime forces out of the city very recently. I got the impression that the townspeople relished the total freedom they had for the first time in their lives. Getting the chance to interview many members of the local populace and dissidents was invaluable to me as far as feeling the revolutionary pulse of Aleppo was concerned. I asked dozens of questions about Turkey’s role, daily life in Syria, the people’s ideals and fears, and the like to many different individuals during this month of Ramadan when people sat up chatting until the pre-dawn start of fasting.
In this seemingly small town, the conversations between the local residents generally revolved around exchanging the latest news from the front lines of the conflict – whether they’d been to Aleppo that day and, if they had, what districts had the clashes been occurring in. Next to conflict talk, the most common conversation topics were the posting of the reports on the demonstrations of the day and any additional photos to YouTube or Facebook. Another topic of debate was the municipal and administrative tasks that needed to be done in Al Bab now that the regime forces and their authority had been dispensed with. The conversations taking place in a hookah house or the home of a dissident as the news commentary came on Al Jazeera or Orient TV which reported extensively on the Syrian Revolution usually lasted from after the evening prayer to the pre-dawn meal.
El Bab lives its freedom
The protest demonstrations in Al Bab started on April 8th, 2011, the second Friday in April, only three weeks after March 2011 when the first sparks of protest were ignited in Daraa in the south of the country. These peaceful protests kept on for more than a year without any incidents involving weapons. This went on until after one year the townspeople were assaulted heavily by the regime once more in April (the 27th in 2012) until the FSA backfired. Bloodshed and loss of property grew as tension mounted when the regime forces reacted more violently to the intensifying protests in May 2012. Al Bab’s main battle with the regime erupted when the townspeople spontaneously filled the city’s squares and streets after three high-level officials of the Assad regime were killed in a bombing incident in Damascus on July 17th. The demonstrations outside several intelligence offices and police stations went on around the clock. The shops in town collectively pulled down their shutters. The FSA summoned its militia to the city and set them to fight against the regime forces. After clashes that went on for days, an agreement was wrought with the help of some of the town’s eminent figures, referred to as the “old people,” that had not broken their relationship with the regime whereby the FSA lifted its siege of the regime buildings and the intelligence and security forces of the Syrian regime promised not to attack the free protest demonstrations of the townspeople of Al Bab. According to Barry Al Bab, the foremost name among Al Bab’s young revolutionary leaders (he preferred to go by this name), the agreement amounted to one in which the townspeople and the regime forces said to each other, “You go your way, I’ll go mine.”
But this state of keeping clear of each other did not last long. Freed from the siege of the FSA militia by the undercover agreement, the regime forces reneged on their promise during the noon prayer en masse the very next Friday and attacked the assembled protesters, thus burning the last bridge between themselves and the townspeople. Inspired by the street fighting that FSA militia had taken to the innards of Aleppo, Al Bab launched an attack to expel the regime forces from the city altogether. On the 29th of July, only a few days before my arrival, when the regime forces had been refusing to accept the FSA militia’s call to abandon a military compound housing an approximately 400-strong Syrian regime unit as well as four or five tanks in the town of Ziraa just outside Al Bab where a siege and fighting had been going on for four days, the militia detonated a water engine under a building in the compound and raided the place, ridding Al Bab of regime forces for good.
Thus, my arrival in Al Bab coincided with the first few days of the regime forces losing control of the city, which no doubt enabled me to witness the atmosphere of freedom in the city more closely and while it was still fresh. During my eight-day stay in Al Bab, I observed on a daily basis the efforts to establish a Civil Council to address all the tasks from garbage collection to jurisprudence and law enforcement that had to be performed in this city with a population close to 200,000 because of the departure of not only the security forces but also the municipal and fiscal staff.
On some days when I did not go out to central Aleppo, I watched the founding efforts of this Civil Council that was being talked about and took some photographs together with the 30-year-old Barry Al Bab. At this stage, Barry was spending his energy to have democracy bloom in this small town by working a sort of grass-roots shuttle diplomacy, together with a handful of companions representing the younger segment of the population, between the town’s “old people” and the “trainers” who had been supporting the protests, and consequently the revolution, from early on.
According to Abdessalam, another young dissident on the Civil Council, the primary task of the Civil Council now was to have the FSA militia leave the city and to build a police force to ensure security in Al Bab. Barry thought the consensus reached at the Civil Council meeting on my last day in Al Bab between the old people and the trainers on common goals laid down in a white paper was the city’s first political victory on its way to democracy after leaving the former regime behind. Now, the 21-member council was engaged in electing the city’s first chief manager.
Considering that the employees of the city administration had left Al Bab at the same time as the security forces, there was no organized entity at present to assume the municipal tasks of a city with a population of nearly 200,000. Instead, a volunteer force consisting of civilians from 12 to 50 years of age as well as FSA members divided up the streets between themselves and collected garbage using some trucks left over from the former administration as I, too, witnessed the evening of my first day in Al Bab. Mahmoud told me that civilian and military elements continued to clean up the city by splitting the districts between themselves. When the schools would open depended on the course the conflict would take. The salaries of all the people to work in public service now had to be paid by the Al Bab businessmen and this augmented the fiscal burden already posed by the schools and education. For the time being, Al Bab was trying to generate funds for medical and first aid supplies, public servants to take care of urgent matters, and fighters.
Sharia courts at work
Another important and indispensable entity that left Al Bab together with the regime was the city’s courts. Efforts were under way to institute sharia courts to replace them. A sharia court established in Al Bab’s old courthouse was trying to become functional by following the road map provided by the Religion Council that currently had 15 members. The court had not yet started hearing cases and issuing sentences but it was trying to bring order to the city and to help by issuing fatwas. The qadis passing judgments barely numbered a dozen. The Council had only been founded in mid-July. In an interview with the incumbent qadi Usame Zoeytir during our visit to the courthouse, I found out that the council members each came from one of the 15 FSA companies in town. Qadi Zoeytir explained that the FSA companies appointed these representatives from among clerics that had stood behind the revolution from the beginning and allegedly had public support behind them. Zoeytir said there were a couple of pending cases in court as of the evening of August 6th when I visited the courthouse, a homicide and a theft, but these had not yet been taken up because the establishment of the court had not yet been completed.
During our interview, the qadi also stated that the judges in the sharia courts did not receive any formal education but had field experience. According to the qadi, Syria after Assad had to be governed in accordance with democratic principles and sharia rules; secularism had to be denounced. Pointing out that they could coordinate and coexist with such a secular system if necessary, the qadi somehow felt obliged to note, without waiting for my question, that the Turkish model, i.e., one in which a religious and conservative government like the Justice and Development Party (AKP) was in power but secularism was in place nevertheless, would be suitable for Syria as many Syrian Sunnis agreed.
The qadi of the sharia court was wholeheartedly in favor of air support by NATO or the USA to the FSA militia but avidly against any foreign military boots treading upon Syrian soil. He predicted that Turkey would be Syria’s best friend in the post-Assad era, a forecast shared by many Aleppo folk.
Tax office turned into rocket
manufacturing center
I went on strolling through Al Bab. The intelligence and security buildings stood empty. The pictures of Assad adorning their walls were removed, torn up or burned. The buildings vacated by the regime soldiers told a history lesson to discerning observers. Several city residents vied to be my guide on my tour of these most dreaded buildings of the regime. The tax office and the town hall served as headquarters for FSA militia as they awaited their new occupants.
When we paid an unannounced visit to the Tax and Fiscal Affairs Office, one of these abandoned buildings, in the afternoon of August 8th, a small meeting was in progress, chaired by Abu Ali, the deputy leader of the Abu Bekr company which was the strongest company (katibeh) of the FSA forces in Al Bab. I asked the FSA man in charge what his duty was for the day – given that the tax and finance services were no longer available in the city. He answered that he was responsible for meeting the needs of the 15 FSA militiamen who were engaged in manufacturing rockets by hand. Abu Ali played me a video clip on his cell phone showing how these hand-made rockets were tested. When I asked him how they learned to build rockets and where they got the materials from, he replied, “Information is everywhere, on the Internet, on Google…” He also mentioned that the materials used were simple although he declined to go into detail about them.
The “New Turkish Model” is quite popular
Democracy and self-government were quite popular among all the residents of Aleppo we were able to interview, as they were in Al Bab. Still, serious questions persisted about secularism. An approach that was either reluctant or skeptical about secularism was clearly visible among all of the dissidents I was able to talk to both in the suburbs of Damascus where I had spent two weeks during my first trip to Syria and in Aleppo this time. It was not a coincidence that the principles of secularism were mostly regarded as anti-religious. The “Turkish Model” had therefore become a panacea for everyone. It was quite interesting to see how the “Turkish Model”, the opinions about which I had surveyed during my previous visit, had come to be rated as number one among the ideal solutions by many Syrians who were quick to broach the subject of the post-Assad era before I even hinted at it. It was evident that Turkish secularism and the piety of Erdo€an and his AKP had found their reflection in the conscience of the Syrians as a solution which successfully married the aversion of Syria’s Sunni Muslims against secularism and their passion for democracy and voting.
Although disappointment with Turkey was regularly voiced because of Turkey’s failure to live up to the expectations it stirred up especially among the Sunni population in Syria by the explicit and repeated promises of the AKP government leader Erdo€an that “We are not going to allow any more massacres the Syrian President Assad may attempt in Syria”. Turkey’s image was clearly seen to be ahead of those of the European countries and the USA thanks to Turkey’s welcoming stance toward both the armed and the unarmed elements of the Syrian dissidents. Neither the FSA militia nor the unarmed dissidents appeared satisfied with what Europe and the USA had generally done to the Syrian Revolution. On the contrary, according to the numerous conspiracy theories I had heard, not a few Syrians were convinced that in reality the West was not so eager to let Assad go. The fact that no Western country was ever mentioned in the ranking of Syria’s three leading allies in the post-Assad era, the subject of my favorite interview question during this last visit, was something that should definitely send the alarm bells ringing in these countries.
Abu Usame’s yearning to join the FSA
As we started our march with Mahmoud, the Syrian who helped us make our clandestine entrance from Kilis to Syria, I couldn’t help but notice Abu Usame who joined us in another vehicle from Kilis. He looked congenial with his innocent features, well-kept beard, and 28-year-young countenance and spoke pretty fluent English. I asked him right away what he was up to in Syria – especially in Aleppo where the fighting was getting more and more violent. Usame told me that his family came from Ramallah in Palestine. His grandfather migrated to Homs in Syria with his family in 1948 but they still considered themselves Palestinian. Usame’s purpose was to visit his family in Homs. He said he had flown from Dubai, where he had spent the last five years, to Istanbul and from there to Gaziantep before reaching Syria via Kilis. He knew full well, though, that traveling from Aleppo to Homs was impossible under the present circumstances in Syria.
As we marched on, Abu Usame made the acquaintance of Captain Youssouf, a regime deserter since February who had subsequently joined the ranks of the FSA and was now marching towards Syria with us, and lost no time to divulge to him his true reason for coming from Dubai: to join the FSA. Having left Syria five years ago to save money to pay for partial exemption from compulsory military service, Abu Usame worked as a graphic designer for various economy newspapers in Dubai, which afforded him comfortable living standards. He wasn’t alone in this, he said, as many of his peers also made a getaway to the Gulf countries for the same purpose.
The primary reason why Abu Usame left his homeland was the disappearance of the country’s middle class before the Syrian Revolution got under way and the apparent lack of any possibility of acquiring better economic conditions for the people in the lower-income classes. I was now getting the same answer from Abu Usame as I got from the revolutionary youths during my January visit to the environs of Damascus: that their greatest grievance was the absence of economic opportunities and their need for freedom.
Abu Usame’s parents, an electronics repairman and a housewife, continued living in Homs. His comeback dream was to join the FSA and to save the Syrian cities, starting with Aleppo, from the regime’s rule before finally rejoining his family.
My weeklong housemate in Al Bab, Abu Usame seemed to be taking stock of the fact that seeing his dream realized by the end of this one week wasn’t going to be so easy. As the FSA militia was giving up some of the ground it had gained in Aleppo in the previous weeks, no news was forthcoming from the FSA divisions he hoped would accept his application for conscription. Abu Usame was not motivated by revenge; he simply wanted to help bringing freedom to Syria by joining one of the 15 FSA companies in Al Bab. He had the chance to present himself to the commanders of three companies during the week. His favorite among them was the Abu Bekr, the oldest and largest company in Al Bab. Unfortunately for Abu Usame, he had neither been promised a weapon nor given a date for conscription although he had communicated his request to the company. He was already giving signs of disappointment and probably considering calling off the whole adventurous undertaking by the time I departed from Al Bab.
Can democracy be permanent?
The city of Al Bab to the northwest of Aleppo that the Syrian regime had been forced to totally withdraw from was like a test ground where one could clearly observe the difficult and painful steps the people had to take in order to build democracy. The townspeople of Al Bab were engaged in a struggle to plot the course of their own destiny when a bloody battle was raging in Aleppo only 35 km away. Who will emerge victorious from the fighting in Aleppo would doubtless determine the fate of the smaller Al Bab. Therefore, practically the only answer I got from the town’s residents when I asked them how it felt to experience freedom for the first time in their lives was, “We cannot be safe here until Aleppo’s fate is known.” Although many believed that the days of the Syrian regime were numbered, the Damascus regime with its considerable superiority in military equipment and air capabilities had not altogether given up on its plans to recapture the towns to the north of Aleppo that were currently trying to make their self-government take root.