dianadarke

Syria and Turkey commentary

Archive for the tag “Syria”

13 May 2025
1 Comment

A Profile of Ahmad al-Sharaa, President of the New Syria

Tonight Donald Trump announced he will order the lifting of sanctions on Syria ‘to give them a chance at greatness’. It is a momentous declaration of confidence in the new man at the top, a man widely dismissed in the West as a religious militant, a jihadi extremist.

I am writing this post tonight because I profoundly disagree with the profiles put forward in recent months of Ahmad al-Sharaa, formerly Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, by The Economist, the Financial Times and The New York Times. They are all obsessed with his past, with his changes of direction and allegiance, with what they call his ‘chameleon’ nature. They are also convinced that he is driven by a lust for power, calling him ‘the great pretender.’

In my view, they are wrong. They misjudge and misunderstand the man, basing their analyses on the factual details they have been able to glean from various sources about al-Sharaa’s previous history and his background. They do not understand how his brain works, with some even confessing that they are puzzled by how he has managed to persuade other people to follow his directives and gain a following.

Here, I should reveal that I have an extra tool at my disposal – namely, a professional qualification in graphology earned over twenty years ago which enables me to analyse his handwriting and to see into his mind, to understand his motivations and his priorities. Handwriting is brainwriting and cannot lie. Through its subconscious elements like spacing, flow, direction, continuity, pressure and speed, it reveals the secrets of a person’s makeup, their character, their drive, their moral integrity, their strengths and weaknesses. These are elements that apply irrespective of the language or the script. I was trained on English and French handwriting, a two-year course of study with French external examiners in written and oral papers, but the same principles apply in Arabic, or indeed in any other language. Obviously when talking about a script direction being progressive, in English progressive is left to right, while in Arabic it is right to left. For regressive it is the other way round – in Arabic left to right, in English right to left.

Let us look at the case of Ahmad al-Sharaa. I first saw his handwriting when it appeared online at the end of the 10 March 2025 agreement signed between him and Mazloum Abdi, commander of the SDF, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. The contrast between the two men’s handwriting and above all their signatures was striking.

Looking at Mazloum Abdi, his signature is not progressive, but doubles back over itself, unsure of its direction, hesitant, and ends in an unnecessary and cautious dot. Bashar al-Assad, incidentally, had a cautious, self-cancelling signature that tried to big itself up in energy-wasting flourishes that lacked direction. Some years ago I wrote a comparative analysis of Assad father and son, concluding that while Bashar might have been the face of the Assad regime, he was certainly not its backbone.  

Ahmad al-Sharaa on the other hand has the most remarkable signature I have ever seen, in English or in Arabic. The sheer ingenuity and agility in the way it is formed is astonishing. It begins in the top right corner with the four Arabic letters of Ahmad – alif, Ha, mim and dal, before moving back towards the right and seamlessly becoming the letters of Ahmad in English – A, h, m, a, d. The free-flowing movement at the end of the Arabic ‘dal’ cleverly doubles as the ‘A’ of the English Ahmad. The signature then reverts to the Arabic ‘al-‘ of the start of his family name, before ending in a final progressive flourish where the letters of Sharaa are not legible. There are four changes of direction, and the pen never leaves the paper. It is all one smooth stroke, carried out at speed. The movements throughout are highly progressive, never regressive. This is a man who only moves forwards, never backwards, and who is always open to all manner of solutions, approached from a variety of angles. He thinks outside the box and shows great adaptability and flexibility, whilst remaining true to his own vision. He is not driven by greed for power or money, but rather by a genuine belief that he has the ability to bring Syria forward into a new and progressive future. He is not dogmatic, stubborn or difficult.

His writing illustrates clearly the complex journey he has been on in his life to arrive at where he is now.  His many changes of direction have been integral and necessary parts of his life. A signature of this complexity has taken many years to evolve, and certainly did not suddenly appear on 8 December 2024 with the fall of Assad. It is not just pragmatism, as western analysts like to describe it. It is far more than that. It is his ability to adapt quickly to changing situations and to move progressively with the flow of events as they unfold. This is a skill that requires deep intelligence, thoughtfulness and good judgement combined, all exercised simultaneously and at pace. On top of that there is also an element of playfulness and humour, making him likeable and popular. The New Syria would be hard pushed to find a better man to navigate the challenging road that lies ahead.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/05/13/ahmad-alsharaa-trump-syria-bashar-al-assad/ad208860-300e-11f0-8498-1f8214bba2d2_story.htmlhttps://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/trump-to-remove-sanctions-against-syria-gives-chance-at-greatness-to-country-2724330-2025-05-13

https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/trump-to-remove-sanctions-against-syria-gives-chance-at-greatness-to-country-2724330-2025-05-13

Posted in Uncategorized and tagged , , , , , ,
09 Feb 2025

Spiritual Material: William Morris and Art from the Islamic World

Anyone familiar with Islamic art will long have known how heavily William Morris drew his inspiration from the Islamic world. One glance at his patterns is enough  – the repetition to infinity, the twisting foliage, the richly entangled fruit and birdlife, the stylised designs that are often botanically impossible yet speak to us at some deep primordial level – all are hallmarks of Islamic art. Curiously, ever since his patterns were popularised, appearing in every imaginable accessory in our kitchens and living rooms, from curtains to coasters, from tablecloths to mousemats, those same iconic Morris designs have been subsumed as ‘quintessentially English’,  somehow deemed to be an intrinsic part of our British cultural identity. It is the same blind spot that exists with Gothic cathedrals like Notre-Dame, proclaimed to be ‘quintessentially French’, synonymous with the French national identity, by those oblivious to the Islamic origins of such rich architectural styles and ornamentation.

Until, that is, it is pointed out in exhibitions like ‘William Morris and Art From the Islamic World’, still running till 9 March 2025, where the eye can become trained. All credit is due to the William Morris Gallery, the fine Georgian family home in Walthamstow where Morris grew up, for staging this exhibition, and for highlighting to a British audience what has been hiding in plain sight all along. The gallery’s guiding mission has been to bring the communities of Walthamstow, where one in five of the population is Muslim, closer together, an outreach project to show how different cultures have intertwined and inspired creativity since time immemorial. Maybe a future exhibition at the V&A could do the same for Islamic architecture and European medieval styles like Romanesque and Gothic?

The starting point of the exhibition is a smallish room which brings together items from the Islamic world all of which, crucially, once belonged to Morris and his family. Though Morris himself never travelled further east than Italy, he acquired a range of carpets, textiles, metalwork and ceramics mainly from Iran, Syria and Turkey, which clearly served as his prototypes, using them to decorate his homes. This geographic range is very important to the curators’ careful and deliberate choice of phrasing in the title ‘Art from the Islamic world’, a much more accurate description than was common in Victorian times when all Islamic art was labelled ‘Persian’, considered the ultimate in Orientalist chic. Even today, museums like the Jackfield Tile Museum in the Ironbridge Gorge perpetuate such misnomers in their labelling, describing English tiles that are clearly copying Ottoman Turkish tile designs as ‘Iranian-influenced’.

Fritware/Stonepaste Tile. Unknown. Fritware, mould made, painted in blue, green, turquoise and black under a colourless glaze, height 26.6 cm, width 27 cm, depth 2.8 cm, weight 2627 g, circa 1574-1599. Ottoman Period. Syria, Damascus. Forms part of a panel comprising twenty three tiles, C.4-1928. This tile probably formed the edge of the original panel.

When Morris, who often railed against the privileged society into which he was born, first launched his business  in 1861, opening an interior design shop in Oxford Street, he was trying to bring his styles to the middle classes, well aware that most of his commissions were for wealthy clients with more money than aesthetic sense. ‘I spend my life ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich,’ he lamented. Some mocked his hand-made approach to design and craftsmanship as ‘thoroughly medieval’ and ‘useless’.  At the time, his style of artist-led designs, using quality materials and hand-craftmanship was pushing against the tide of the Industrial Revolution. ‘I have never been in any rich man’s house,’ he declared, ‘which would not have been the better for having a bonfire made of nine-tenths of all that it held.’ It was part of his ‘Crusade against the age’, and in the end his persistence prevailed, for by the turn of the century, Morris & Co had become a by-word for good taste. He sold to important clients in Europe, America, Australia and Canada, exhibiting at international trade fairs in Paris, Boston and Philadelphia to raise the company’s profile. He learned to be a businessman, buying out his partners, and extending his product range to more affordable off-the-shelf items like wallpapers, fabrics and tiles. The Arts and Crafts movement, spearheaded by Morris, began in England and flourished in Europe and America between 1880 and 1920. On his death aged 62 in 1896 his coffin was draped in a magnificent 17th century Ottoman brocaded velvet from his own collection, made from silk and metal thread in Bursa, the first Ottoman capital.

Regret that his products were beyond the reach of the ordinary working class contributed to Morris’s growing political activism. Acutely conscious of his own privileged status in high society, he denounced the increasing industrialisation of the time, and became a socialist aged 50. He criticised the British government’s attempts to drag the country into a Russian-Turkish war in 1877, warning against ‘false patriotism’ and the dubious motives of the ruling classes who were led only by desire for profit.

Becoming a fervent environmentalist, he descried the despoliation of the landscape, and fought to stop pollution of the Thames and the destruction of Epping Forest. Although a nervous public speaker, his belief in his cause led him to give up to a hundred lectures a year, sometimes three a week, determined to make a difference. Driven by idealism, he wanted to imagine a world in which communities were equal, with no concept of private property, where craftsmanship and creativity could flourish. In 1877 he founded SPAB, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and led the campaign to save the west front of St Mark’s in Venice. He was also outraged by the appalling restoration of St Albans, where the new pseudo-Gothic west front damaged much of the original fabric.  

In south London at Merton Abbey, the Gothic ruins of which he restored, along with its water mill (another innovation introduced to Europe from Syria via Islamic Spain) on the River Wandle, he recreated an environment of medieval craftsmanship and techniques.  He used natural dyes like indigo, disliking intensely the synthetic dyes of the times, even though it took him ten years of experimentation to achieve good results. So smitten was he with the beauty of Persian and Turkish carpets, hanging them on his walls or draping them over his tables as far too precious to walk on, that he decided to pioneer the production of hand-made rugs in Britain, recruiting experienced weavers from the declining Spitalfields silk industry, and using specially-built hand looms, hoping that eventually their skills would pass down to the next generation so that Britain might build its own hand-woven carpet tradition. One such example, called ‘Peacock and Bird’ is on display in the exhibition, so strikingly inferior in workmanship to the real thing that it serves as a clear marker that, even with the best will in the world, and the money, such traditions take centuries to accumulate and evolve.

All Islamic art ultimately seeks to recreate Paradise in the form of gardens and rivers, flowers and trees, where hierarchy is absent and where all live peacefully in mutual cooperation. The material and the spiritual world are connected through geometry, the unifying intermediary. This is precisely what Morris the idealist clearly felt drawn to in Islamic art, with its egalitarian traditions and deep respect for nature. As a child he had loved observing birds, flowers and plants in the Essex countryside. One of his most sophisticated patterns, which he named ‘Rivers’, after tributaries of the Thames, is based on meandering diagonal stems and natural growth, so that, as he put it, ‘even where a line ends, it should look as if it had plenty of capacity for more growth.’ This, together with his use of stylised birds and animals in pairs, to give underlying geometric structure to his patterns, are further borrowings from Islamic art. Other motifs he used, like flowers in vases, are also common in Islamic art.

Fritware/Stonepaste Tile Panel. Fritware, mould-made, painted in blue green and black under a clear glaze and framed in ebonised wood decorated with gilding, height, whole, 122 cm, width, whole, 92 cm, depth, whole, 8 cm, height, single tile, 26 cm, width, single tile, 27 cm, circa 1550-1650. Ottoman Period. Production Place: Damascus, Syria.

Granada, the most technically complicated textile Morris ever produced, so complex it never reached commercial production, was woven in 1884 at Merton Abbey. Featuring pomegranates and almond-shaped buds, connected by pointed arches and branches, the name tells us that his inspiration came from the patterns of the Alhambra Palace of the Nasrid kings. Though Morris himself never visited the Alhambra, he knew it through the lens of designer-architect Owen Jones (1809-74), who spent six months at the end of his Grand Tour, aged twenty-five, drawing detailed sketches of the stucco wall patterns of the palace, and acquiring a fascination with geometry, colour theory and the use of abstraction in decorative ornament. The result was his seminal work The Grammar of Ornament (1856), still used as a sourcebook in design schools internationally.

As the Gothic Revival got underway, the wealth generated from industry and trade, together with religious reform, resulted in a frenzy of churchbuilding, leading Morris to enter the market for church furnishings, like stained glass, embroidery, furniture and metalwork. Many of Morris’s contemporaries shared his interests and beliefs, like stained glass designer and tile-maker William de Morgan who also joined the Arts & Crafts movement. De Morgan moved his business to Merton Abbey, where he reproduced the fourteenth century ‘lustreware’ techniques of Muslim craftsmen, inspired by Islamic and medieval patterns. His tiles also decorate the walls of Leighton House in London’s Holland Park with its famous Arab Hall, a showcase of original sixteenth-century Damascus tiles procured on behalf of the painter Lord Frederic Leighton (1830-96).

A separate room in the exhibition is devoted to Morris’s daughter, May Morris, who travelled to the Islamic world after her father’s death. It displays the various items, especially textiles, she brought back and clearly valued highly, becoming a collector herself, as well as a donor.

A beautifully illustrated book, titled Tulips and Peacocks in a nod to the most prized flower of the Ottoman Turks, and the most loved bird of the Persians, has been published by Yale University Press specially for this exhibition, featuring a collection of ten essays by different specialists, including excellent contributions from the exhibition’s curators, Rowan Bain and Qaisra M. Khan, each exploring aspects of Morris’s connections to Islamic art. The front cover shows the distinctive 17th century Damascus tiles that Morris had acquired, in a pattern he called ‘Vine trellis’, purchased by Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum after his death, and now reloaned by the Fitzwilliam for display at this exhibition. The book is on sale in the gallery’s shop, along with an impressive array of Morris-themed memorabilia for gifts or souvenirs.

Morris believed that through his work he could act as a bridge allowing craftspeople of the past to pass on their knowledge to contemporary artisans. The enduring popularity of his patterns suggests this may have been no idle dream, as people continue to respond to the same quasi-mystical, other-worldly qualities in his designs which echo those of Islamic art. Just below the surface, there is always the sense that something divine, something bigger than us mere mortals, unites us in our humanity. In this, perhaps, lies Morris’s universal appeal.  

[A version of this article first appeared in The Times Literary Supplement (The TLS) on 17 January 2025]

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/arts/visual-arts/william-morris-and-art-from-the-islamic-world-review-diana-darke

Posted in Islamic art, Uncategorized and tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment
15 Jan 2025

Rebuilding Damascus

With its future in the balance, a cultural historian looks past the corruption, violence and trauma of recent decades to the almost lost history of collaboration and shared traditions between Muslims in Syria and Christians in Europe. By DIANA DARKE [as first published 10 January 2025 in The Tablet]

Buildings have stories to tell, in Syria none more perhaps than the magnificent Umayyad Mosque in the heart of the walled Old City of Damascus. It embodies the very soul of Syria, a sacred site where for over two millennia multiple civilisations and religions – Aramean, Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Islamic – have coalesced yet also survived in their own unique form. No surprise, therefore, that the new de facto ruler of Syria, Ahmad al-Shar’a, leader of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, the Organisation for the Liberation of Syria (HTS), chose to head straight there to pray after entering the city on 8 December.  

Syria has long been overwhelmingly Muslim but the Umayyad Mosque claims the heads of John the Baptist as well as Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson. While still a cathedral, following the Muslim conquest of Damascus in 634, the building was shared by Christians and Muslims for close to a hundred years, as were the cathedrals of Homs and Hama. They were only converted to mosques once the Muslim population, small at first, gradually expanded. Top Byzantine Christian mosaicists then followed the brief of new Umayyad masters to cover the walls of the courtyard with breathtaking visions of the Islamic Paradise, timeless landscapes of fantasised trees, gardens, rivers and palaces in shimmering green and gold. 

When rulers change, life for those uninvolved in the fighting tends to continue as before. The best architects and craftsmen are summoned to work on new prestige projects, irrespective of their religion, just as the most entrepreneurial businessmen find new opportunities. It was the same in Umayyad Spain when elite Muslim craftsmen were summoned by new Christian rulers during the Reconquista, to transfer their innovative engineering technologies like pointed arches and ribbed vaulting, as well as their decorative repertoires, to prestige abbeys and cathedrals. As late as 1492 the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella appointed a Muslim master builder to look after all royal buildings in Aragon, a position that then passed to his son. 

I bought a semi-derelict Ottoman courtyard house in Old Damascus in 2005. Full of wonder that I, as a foreigner, was able to buy a chunk of a UNESCO World Heritage site, I embarked on a three-year restoration project, guided by a Syrian architect and a team of fifteen craftsmen, experiencing first-hand the labyrinthine corruption of government and legal systems. To learn more about the house itself, I re-entered the academic world to study Islamic art and architecture. Deciphering the decorative styles of the house gave me the essential foundation for my subsequent work, connecting the almost lost history of collaboration and shared traditions between Muslims in Syria and Christians in Europe, traditions that formed the springboard for the architectural styles we know in Europe as “Romanesque” and “Gothic”.

In the new Syria of 2025 a Christian wheeler-dealer who made a fortune during the war in the transportation business is now raking it in as a high-end hotelier.  Among Aleppo’s traditional soap-making family businesses, trade is up by 80%. My lawyer, who throughout the war bemoaned the fact that most of his caseload was divorce work, is now kept busy by clients asking questions he cannot answer. Many, like me, had their houses stolen during the war by profiteers writing fabricated intelligence reports against them. By a miracle, despite being labelled a British terrorist with links to armed groups, I went back in 2014 and retook possession, evicting my previous lawyer, his mistress and baby, along with a fake general on a forged lease. 

The interim government faces huge challenges. Disentangling the different currencies, legal and education systems that operate in the different regions of Syria will take a long time. Add to that the complication of how to monitor the movements of returning refugees, as well as compiling a new electoral roll, and the three-year period Al-Shar’a suggested last week will be needed to draft a new constitution – four years for proper elections – in a unified Syria, becomes an ambitious target.  

Al-Shar’a has promised to make Syria inclusive for all, including women. The country’s central bank has just appointed its first-ever female governor. Many commentators outside the country gnash their teeth, convinced that HTS, a Sunni Islamist group once aligned with Islamic State and al-Qaeda, remains a jihadi extremist outfit similar to the Taliban. Yet at least so far, its leaders appear ready, as are the majority of  Syrians inside the country, to take Syria on a new trajectory, and seem prepared to engage pragmatically with the “international community” that failed it so badly, some elements of which even went so far as to rehabilitate Assad as if he were a fact of life, never understanding how hollowed-out his regime was, how unrepresentative of the overwhelming majority of Syrian people. 

Syrian friends forced into exile during the war (along with nearly a third of the Syrian population) are scattered across Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Germany, Norway and Canada. From a range of professions – architect, lawyer, hotelier, tour guide, environmentalist – not one of them was able to continue their former work in their host countries. All struggled to make new lives for themselves and they feel they have lost thirteen years of their life. Even harder to bear is how in recent years refugees from Syria have been made to feel increasingly unwelcome, the mood turning against them in their host countries as right-wing populism has risen to heights where it is destabilising Europe as well as Syria’s neighbours. Most now plan to return, to rebuild their lives and their country, bringing with them new expertise and knowledge. After Germany’s 6000-plus Syrian doctors have left, they will be missed by its aging population, their worth only recognised once it is too late. Friends who stayed also feel the last thirteen years have been wasted, their country devastated by aerial bombardment from the Assad regime and Russia, sanctioned and isolated from the outside world.

Nothing screams “CHANGE” to me more loudly than the sudden arrival since 8 December of the world’s media, banned since 2011. During the 54 years of the Assad dynasty’s rule – 30 years under Hafez from 1970 till his death from leukemia in 2000 and 24 years under his second son Bashar – it was never easy for journalists to get visas into Syria. Control of the narrative was always an essential part of the Assad grip on power. 

“Come in and report without restriction” was the message from al-Shar’a. In a country with so many secrets to uncover it is a journalist’s dream come true. Heartwarming scenes like a man exiled for 50 years reuniting with his 100-year-old mother have competed on our screens with tales of torture and abuse from the prisoners streaming out of the “slaughterhouse” in Seydnaya. Thank God the Assads’ filthy linen has been exposed for all to see. 

Blacklisted for years, I was able to slip into Syria seven times since the uprising began in March 2011, most recently as part of the Crazy Club, hiding under the cassocks of the clergy. Now I can return openly. The situation inside Syria is complicated and varies considerably from region to region but prices for most things have got cheaper and the Syrian pound’s exchange rate has stabilised. Embassies are re-opening, schools and universities have reopened and civil servants are back at work. In Damascus the hotels and restaurants are brimming, not just with journalists but also with foreign delegations – even from the US – queuing to offer support and investment. But water and electricity remain in short supply. As the architect living in my house explains: “They told us, ‘You were silently patient for 54 years, be patient for a few more days and you will have bright times to come.’ But it turns out we have no infrastructure. We still have electricity for only one hour in the day and one hour in the night.” 

Even so, he is happy, along with my other Syrian friends, that they are starting the New Year without Assad. Turkey has taken on responsibility for repairing the airports, roads and trains while Qatar will get priority in the energy sector. The White Helmets, trained to dig bodies out from under the rubble of Russian and regime air strikes, are now redeployed to clear that same rubble left untouched by Assad for years. 

None of Syria’s museums were looted during the lightning offensive led by the Idlib-based HTS. In fact, their government-in-waiting, now installed in Damascus with the same ministers in the same portfolios, reopened the Idlib museum after its priceless cuneiform tablets had been ransacked by the Assad regime’s soldiers. Assad posed as the protector of Syria’s cultural heritage, and claimed all his opponents were extremist terrorists, but when the rebels entered Damascus, historical sites like the National Museum and the al-Azm Palace were guarded. Sectarianism, too, was a narrative pushed hard by the Assad regime, yet in Idlib, al-Shar’a took care to foster positive relations with Druze and Christian communities, as he is doing now in Damascus. 

Much of Syria’s cultural heritage, damaged across the centuries by fires, earthquakes and wars, has later been rebuilt, each time more beautiful than before. The Umayyad Mosque’s Jesus Minaret, added in the eleventh century, resembles a campanile, and is named for the spot where, according to local folklore, Christ will descend on the Day of Final Judgement, a blending of Christian and Muslim beliefs typical of Syria. Mary receives more mentions in the Qu’ran than in the New Testament, and Old Testament stories like Abraham and the sacrifice of his son form key festivals in Islam. Syrian Muslims have historically attended church services at Christmas and Easter with Christian friends, while mosques have welcomed those of all faiths and none. 

The pressures are great and the future is precarious, but the Syrian people have the skills, the ingenuity, the innovative mindset and instinct for survival, despite the obvious deep trauma and hurt, to create a new Syria, one that may ultimately serve as a model for the wider Middle East.  

[A version of this article was first published on 10 January 2025: https://www.thetablet.co.uk/features/rebuilding-damascus-the-liberation-of-syria/]

Posted in Syria, Uncategorized and tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment
28 Dec 2024
1 Comment

Notre-Dame, Trump and the new Syria

In a surreal twist of timing, President-elect Donald Trump was the guest of honour at Notre-Dame’s special reopening service on 7 December, at the very same time that the rebel offensive in Syria was reaching its whirlwind climax. Hours later, on Sunday 8 December, the world woke up to find that the Assad regime had vanished, following Bashar al-Assad’s night-time escape to Moscow, and that Notre-Dame was fully open to the public, following its intensive five-year restoration after the 19 April 2019 fire.

Syria too has been burning for the last 13 years. ‘Assad or we burn the country,’ was the message scrawled on walls across the country by his much-feared shabiha (secret police), along with slogans like ‘There is no god but Bashar’ and ‘Do not kneel for God, kneel for Bashar’.

Syria and Notre-Dame now both face a new future simultaneously. Restoring a fire-damaged medieval cathedral to a tight deadline was a huge challenge, one that many people thought impossible. Rebuilding an entire country, restoring its social fabric, regenerating its decimated economy after so many years of war is, of course, a challenge of an entirely different order, one that is almost beyond conceiving, a challenge that will involve many difficult steps and take many decades to achieve. But it is doable, with the right backing.

Did Trump give a single thought to Syria as he sat through the cathedral service? Probably not. Arriving in Paris that morning, he had dismissed the country, posting on his Truth Social network: “Syria is a mess, but is not our friend,” then adding “THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!”

The very next day, however, the dynamics on the ground inside Syria had suddenly changed in a way no one had thought possible. In less than a fortnight the Islamist rebels from Idlib had swept out from the north, taking charge of Aleppo, Hama and Homs, while Druze rebels from Suweida in the south surged up to take the capital Damascus just in advance of them.

Despite his determination not to get involved, Trump may yet find himself, once in office on 23 January 2025, wrestling with decisions about the new Syria that will affect America directly – what to do about the US troops still stationed there, whether or not to support the Kurdish-led SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) in Syria’s oil-rich northeast, whether to use them to clamp down on a resurgent ISIS and above all, whether to lift the sanctions and the rebels’ terrorist designation in order to allow the country to rebuild. Speed is of the essence, as with Notre-Dame’s rebuilding, so that everyone believes in the project and its feasibility.

Notre-Dame’s Connections to ‘Stealing from the Saracens’ and ‘Islamesque’

Notre-Dame has played a crucial role in my own recent work – it was the April 2019 fire and the world’s reaction to it that triggered my book ‘Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe‘ in 2020. Its sister volume ‘Islamesque: The Forgotten Craftsmen Who Built Europe’s Medieval Monuments‘ has just been published, coincidentally, a few days ahead of the cathedral’s 2024 reopening. To mark the occasion I wrote an article for Middle East Eye pointing out how Europe’s great medieval cathedrals, like Notre-Dame, owe much to highly skilled Arab master craftsmen.

‘Islamesque’ is a revolutionary piece of research, challenging the European art history world and its use of the architectural term ‘Romanesque’. The book has garnered a starred review in Publishers Weekly, an honour awarded to books ‘of exceptional quality and distinction’. Yet while my attention would ordinarily have been focused on ‘Islamesque’, I have found myself instead consumed by the new developments inside Syria, following every twist and turn, even asked to give media interviews by outlets like the BBC. My Syrian friends, both inside and outside the country, are ecstatic about the demise of the Assad regime. The ones inside said it felt unreal, as if they were watching a movie, with events all around them unfolding so quickly. After 54 years of milking the country like their own private farm, the old regime, its posters of Bashar so omnipresent, just melted away overnight. Their illusion of strength and invincibility was, in my view, always hollow, held in place by little more than fear and by the terrible tentacles of the Assad security and intelligence branches, all seventeen of them, modelled on East Germany’s monstrous STASI, a network that reached into all corners of society, leading people to believe that even the walls had ears. Such fear does not breed loyalty – it used to annoy me when commentators said that Assad still had a lot of support among Syrians inside the country.

Syria and Notre-Dame also share many connections. For example – and you will find no mention of this in any of the overwhelmingly Europe-focused documentaries, books and articles written about the cathedral’s restoration – the structure’s sturdiness can be traced back to early fifth, sixth and seventh century archetypes of the twin tower model still extant in Syria’s northwest, where stonemasonry skills are literally as old as the hills. The three limestone massifs of Jebel Zawiya, Jebel Barisha and Jebel Ala formed the local building material for all Syria’s early churches. Close to two thousand such structures remain scattered among the ruins of some eight hundred settlements in the rebel-held Idlib Province, despite the Assad regime’s and Russia’s aerial bombardment of the last decade and despite the heavy earthquakes that have afflicted this region of northwest Syria since time immemorial, . These Byzantine settlements, known as the Forgotten Cities, were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in June 2011, just three months after the start of the Syrian war. 

Trump is almost certainly unaware of these and the many other cultural connections between Notre-Dame and Syria, let alone how the Gothic or ‘Saracen’ elements in Notre-Dame cathedral then found their way across the Atlantic, into cathedrals like Washington DC’s National Cathedral, the spiritual home of America, into Gothic campuses like Yale University and even into the heart of American democracy, Washington DC’s Capitol Dome, with its ‘Saracen’ Islamic double dome.

Whether or not he knows or cares about this architectural backstory of so many American monuments, Trump has the power to transform the new Syria. He could, in an act of faith and leadership similar to that which enabled Notre-Dame to be rebuilt in five years, have the vision to do a deal with Turkey’s President Erdogan on the Kurdish PKK elements within the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) that also allowed the 2000 US troops to go home to America, and to then lift the US sanctions that were imposed against the old Syria in recognition that the new Syria deserves a chance to rebuild itself from the inside. In my dreams, this would enable the country to rise from the ashes and shine like a beacon in the region surprisingly speedily. It could even be a vital part of Trump’s legacy – to help create a new Syria – and as a by-product, even to eradicate Islamic terrorism from the globe forever. Once peace and stability are restored in the Middle East, extremist outfits like ISIS would find no more drivers for recruitment. Their base support gone, they would simply melt away, as surely as the Assad regime melted away once its ideological hollowness was apparent to all.

[end]

Posted in Syria, Uncategorized and tagged , , , , , , , , , ,
01 Mar 2023
1 Comment

The Turkey/Syria Earthquake strikes at the birthplace of civilization

Gobekli Tepe

The sheer scale of the disastrous series of earthquakes in southeast Turkey and northwest Syria is hard to absorb, especially in a region already blighted by a decade of war, displacement, drought and disease. As if that were not sufficient punishment, the cruel weather has added another layer of suffering with its comfortless blanket of snow, making rescue efforts even tougher, whilst leaving thousands of shell-shocked souls to freeze in the open, homeless.

For many outside the region, it may seem a faraway tragedy that has no direct bearing on their own lives.  But as someone who has visited the area repeatedly over several decades, I feel that, beyond the humanitarian crisis unfolding day by day, there is a bigger picture that needs to be explained, to help grasp how connected we all are by oft-forgotten historical and cultural ties.

Historical and Cultural Context

The discovery in the 1990s of the world’s oldest temples, a series of mysterious circular structures on the summit of Göbekli Tepe (‘Pot-bellied Hill’ in Turkish), turned all previous perceptions of man’s early history on their head. Overlooking the once lush grasslands of the Fertile Crescent, northeast of Urfa, they were built by nomadic hunter-gatherers some 12,000 years ago, pre-dating Stonehenge by 6,000 years, and the world’s earliest city at Çatalhöyük, also in eastern Turkey, by a full 3,000 years.

Gobekli Tepe

Similar groupings of circular temples have been identified in northern Syria, collectively proving that man’s first construction efforts, were devoted, not to building settlements, but to the worship of deities connected with the sun, the moon and the circular seasonal cycles on which he depended. The temples were first unearthed in 1994 by German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt, who tragically died before seeing UNESCO inscribe them on its World Heritage List in 2018.

World heritage sites 

As recently as 2021, UNESCO added the late Hittite site of Aslantepe (‘Lion Hill’) near Malatya and the Euphrates, in recognition of its significance in illustrating how a State society first emerged in the Near East, along with a sophisticated bureaucratic system that predated writing. Among the finds were the world’s earliest known swords, evidence of the first forms of organised combat used by the new elite to maintain their political power.

Aslantepe, two lion men in combat

Towering above the Tigris, UNESCO’s other World Heritage Site (2015) that lies within the earthquake zone is the brooding city of Diyarbakir, whose mood seems reflected in its massive black basalt walls. It too is part of the ancient Fertile Crescent, an important regional centre commanding the surrounding fertile plains throughout Hellenistic, Roman, Sassanid Persian, Byzantine, Islamic and Ottoman times. Its elegant ‘Ten-Eyed’ bridge, built by the Seljuks in 1065, still spans the river below.

Further testimony to the onetime prosperity of the region is the site of Zeugma on the Euphrates, famous for its collection of superb mosaics, among the finest in the world. Once a thriving frontier town on the eastern edges of the Roman Empire, where 5,000 troops were garrisoned to defend against the Persians in the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE, it was also known as Belkıs, a reference to the Queen of Sheba  and her legendary wealth. Rescued, along with many other ancient sites, from the flooding caused by the modern Birecik Dam on the Euphrates, the spectacular mosaics graced the floors of rich villas, but today are housed a new purpose-built museum in nearby Gaziantep, epicentre of the first 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck overnight on 5 February.

Zeugma mosaic, the so-called ‘Gypsy Girl’

Those who know Aleppo will find in Gaziantep many echoes of that more famous Syrian city. Not for nothing did so many Syrian refugees fleeing war in their own country take refuge in Gaziantep as their city of choice. In the days before the artificial borders imposed by Britain and France after World War One, the two cities were closely linked. Easily the most sophisticated city in southeast Turkey, Gaziantep, long hailed as the pistachio capital of the world, boasts around its prominent Seljuk citadel an old quarter, much of which was built by the Ottoman Governor of Aleppo. Like Aleppo, it has a mixed Muslim/Christian population, with its Christian population in Ottoman times likewise much larger than today. Their churches and mansions are still scattered about the old Christian quarter, often now converted to musical venues or boutique hotels. The citadel itself has suffered damage in the earthquake, so the historic quarter of which it forms the heart must also have been affected. Like Aleppo’s historic centre, it was the subject of extensive restoration projects, and experienced boom-level growth in recent times, its citizens deeply proud of their shared heritage and identity.

Gaziantep Citadel

Border ironies

Earthquakes do not recognise political boundaries, and just as Gaziantep was part of the Ottoman Province of Syria till 1922, so Aleppo too, less than 200km to the south, has suffered damage, both to its iconic citadel mound and to its surrounding historic areas. Friends have told me of their homes, newly restored from the war, damaged once again, by force majeure, as if accursed. Aleppo’s Great Umayyad Mosque, located at the foot of the citadel, has been undergoing restoration funded by Putin’s ally, the Russian politician Ramzan Kadyrov, President of Chechnya. The mosque’s unique 1,000 year-old Seljuk minaret miraculously survived many earlier earthquakes, only to collapse in cross-fire in 2013. Its rebuilding is a dauntingly complex jigsaw that is in progress, 60% complete, which has somehow survived this quake.

In more border ironies, the Province of Hatay in southeast Turkey belonged to Syria till 1939. Known before then as the Sanjak of Alexandretta, it was incorporated into Syria under the French Mandate in 1918 at the Ottoman Empire’s demise, but the French then gave it to Turkey in anticipation of a new war against Germany, a bribe to buy Turkish neutrality. Syrians have never accepted the transfer and most Syrian maps still show it as part of Syria.

Now eclipsed by the mosaics at Zeugma, Hatay boasts its own, much older mosaic museum in its capital city of Antakya, ancient Antioch, also hit by the earthquake. Built by the French, it was considered in its day second in the world only to the Bardo Museum in Tunis, displaying, in scenes like Narcissus and Echo and the Drunken Dionysus, the licentious lifestyle of banqueting and dancing against which the early Christians here preached. St Peter’s Rock Church cut into the cliffs behind the city was founded in 47CE by Peter, Paul and Barnabas as the first church after Jerusalem. Matthew is said to have written his Gospel in Antioch. Even before the arrival of Christianity, the city was very mixed, with Greek, Hebrew, Persian and Latin all spoken in its streets. ‘If your aim in travelling is to get acquainted with different cultures and lifestyles, it is enough to visit Antioch’, wrote Roman historian Libanius. ‘There is no other place in the world that has so many cultures in one place.’

St Peter’s Rock Church, Antakya (ancient Antioch)

Cycles of history

Today the population remains very mixed, with large communities – both Muslim and Christian – blended together. Among the early churches in Antioch was the octagonal Domus Aurea (Golden House), a magnificent structure thought to have been Constantine the Great’s palace chapel, built in 327CE. Destroyed by fires and earthquakes in 588, its exact location is lost to us today, but it is known through the description of contemporaries to have served as the prototype for the octagonal Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy, from where the Emperor Charlemagne took his inspiration for his own palace chapel at Aachen, Germany.

Parts of the Crusader castle of Marqab, built from black basalt to dominate the Mediterranean coastal plain, are also damaged from the earthquake, with collapsed towers. Second in power only to the mighty Krak des Chevaliers, its cellars were stocked with enough provisions to last a thousand men for a five-year siege. Originally an Arab stronghold fortified in 1062, it was captured by the Byzantines in 1104, then sold to the Knights Hospitaller. It fell following a brief siege to the Mamluk army of Sultan Qalaoun in 1285, who whitewashed and thus preserved the frescoes in the chapel. One depicts a striking vision of Hell in which a huge bishop is sitting naked in a fire, with two devils tending the flames, along with two monster-headed figures flying overhead.

Marqab Castle, near Baniyas, Syria

Such cycles of history, filled with so many seismic twists and turns like earthquakes, wars and invasions, have all played their part in the ever-shifting balances of power in this region of great strategic significance. When looking at the horrors that are unfolding in southeast Turkey and northwest Syria today, it is impossible to predict how the current disaster will shape the future of this most volatile of regions.

The complex political landscape at play in both countries is likely, without huge international support, to hamper progress towards the imperative delivery of aid, while fledgling efforts that were underway for restoration of cultural heritage sites, especially in the blighted and fractured territory of Syria, will inevitably be pushed even further down the agenda.

Past parallels show us that rival powers are likely to continue to vie for control of this once Fertile Crescent, where the tectonic plates of so many past civilisations have struggled for survival, in ways that have shaped us all.

This piece first appeared in Middle East Eye on 9 February 2023:

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/turkey-syria-earthquake-birthplace-civilisation-strike

Posted in Syria, Turkey and tagged , , ,
06 Jun 2022

Putin in Palmyra: how Russia won the ‘truth’ battle in Syria and learnt lessons for Ukraine

Putin’s ‘Victory Concert’ in Palmyra, 5 May 2016

When Russia entered the Syrian war in September 2015, I started to watch RT, Russia’s state-controlled TV network. That’s a six-year dose of studying how Russia projects its worldview to a global audience, a master class in alternative reality and information manipulation. These same techniques are now being reprised in Russia’s reporting of its “special military operation to liberate Ukraine from neo-Nazis.” All independent media outlets in Russia have been forced to close, ensuring that only President Vladimir Putin’s version of events reaches Russian ears and eyes.

The Arab proverb, “He who speaks the truth must not pitch his tent near ours,” might have been written for Putin. With skills honed through decades of working for the KGB, including time spent as a liaison officer to the Stasi in East Berlin, President Putin is a true aficionado of the art of disinformation. He knows how important it is to seize the narrative from the outset and never to deviate from the script. Syria provided him the perfect training ground for Ukraine. RT journalists were allowed free rein inside the country to report the Russian government’s version of events, while Western journalists were denied visas. Russian media repeatedly discredited the work of the White Helmets, whose first-hand film footage of Russian and Syrian regime airstrikes on schools, hospitals, and markets across the country flatly contradicted Russian propaganda. The BBC extensively researched and exposed this tactic in their Intrigue: Mayday podcast series.

To counter Western outrage in Ukraine, Putin uses tactics familiar from Syria, claiming Russian attacks were faked or that Ukrainians themselves conducted them as part of an anti-Russian smear campaign. In Syria Russia claimed to conciliate, while simultaneously denying humanitarian aid to rebel-held areas under siege, in the same way that humanitarian corridors for the evacuation of civilians are routinely thwarted in Ukraine. Residents under siege in Syria were given the choice — starve or surrender. When they eventually surrendered, the Russians brokered “reconciliation deals,” which were then reneged on. Russia used “de-escalation zones” as temporary strategic measures, allowing it to buy time to refocus on military efforts in other areas, exactly as it is doing in Ukraine now. In Syria it then broke the de-escalation agreements, blaming the “terrorists” for violations. To this day, the false narrative persists in many Western quarters that the Syrian war was all about fighting “terrorists” like ISIS. But research has established that more than three-quarters of the deaths in the Syrian war were perpetrated, not by ISIS terrorists and other extremists, but by the Assad regime and its supporters — Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah. ISIS and its ilk killed just 6%. Rarely did Bashar al-Assad and his Russian bosses target ISIS. Instead they went after the moderate opposition — as did ISIS — well aware that they were the real threat. Of the half million Syrians killed, the overwhelming majority were innocent civilians, women and children, not “terrorists.”

Putin and Bashar merchandise on sale in an Aleppo hotel, in April 2018, author’s photo.

As reports mount of chemical weapon use by Russian forces in Ukraine, expect more lessons learned in Syria. Russian media claimed the numerous horrific photos of dead gassed Syrians, uploaded by witnesses at the scene, were fakes, using “actors.” When teams from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) tried to reach sites to collect evidence, they were barred for “security reasons” and told that soldiers were making the area “safe.”

While Russian-sponsored trolls and bots were active on social media in support of Syria’s President Assad, just as they are today in support of Putin’s actions in Ukraine, Assad apologists, including respectable British academics and Members of Parliament, were seduced into parroting these Russian memes, causing untold damage to public perceptions of the Syrian war. The Times newspaper conducted its own investigation into such people. In April 2018 I myself travelled with a delegation dubbed “the Crazy Club” to undermine its message from within. Invited to visit and tour Syria by the Syriac Orthodox Church, we were treated like royalty, and it was easy to see how Christians throughout the 11-year war chose to align themselves with Assad to ensure their own survival. The same thing is happening today with the Russian Orthodox Church, where Patriarch Kirill in Moscow is standing by Putin, giving the Ukraine invasion his blessing and branding it “a Holy War.” By contrast, a multi-faith mission of Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists led by Rowan Williams, former archbishop of Canterbury, has travelled, at some risk to themselves, to Ukraine to meet refugees, hoping to persuade President Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church of the error of their ways. Williams is even supporting calls for the Russian Orthodox Church to be excluded from the World Council of Churches.

If only a similar high-level multi-faith group had spoken out years ago against the way both President Assad and President Putin have used their relationships with the Orthodox Church to project themselves as guardians of the minorities, the war might have taken a different course and much bloodshed might have been avoided.

Instead, tragically, despite initially appearing to support anti-Assad protesters, Western governments, weary of Middle Eastern conflicts, and with no appetite for involvement, kept their distance, leaving a vacuum that first ISIS in 2013 and then Russia in 2015 stepped in to fill. Their inaction was a gift to Russia, emboldening Putin to pursue his goals in Ukraine.

Bashar and Putin together in their ‘virility’ poster: the caption reads ‘The Age of Virility and Men’ in Arabic and in Russian.

Putin understood from the outset how to ensure Russia benefitted from the conflict. He enlarged the Russian naval base at Tartous and developed an air base at Hmeimeem near Latakia, extending the Russian state’s lease to operate them by 49 years. A Russian import-export village was established in Latakia port after 2015 and Russia’s military hardware was showcased. Putin boasted of testing over 320 weapons systems in Syria, while 85% of Russian army commanders gained combat experience in Syria. The cruelest and most efficient of them, Gen. Alexander Dvornikov, has now been appointed to take charge of operations in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.

Neither nation-building nor reconstruction were ever on the Russian agenda in Syria. On the contrary, the Kremlin was content to have a client state that was just stable enough to safeguard Russia’s interests, but not so strong that it no longer needed Moscow’s protection. The same is likely to be true in Ukraine, with Russia spending just enough money in areas it considers strategic, but avoiding large-scale investment that would bog it down, as happened in Afghanistan. Unlike Western governments that require clean endings and to bring their troops home, Russia has shown in Syria that it is comfortable with protracted low-level conflict, often using mercenaries as cannon fodder. In Ukraine battle-hardened Syrian soldiers are said to be recruited at 25 times their Syrian salary to fight for Russia. The Russian TV network Zvezda News, owned by the Russian Ministry of Defense, posted a recent video showing Brig. Gen. Suhail al-Hassan, “The Tiger,” commander of the Russian-backed elite 25th Special Mission Forces Division, involved in air landing operation drills in northern Syria. The Russians are clearly in charge, while the Syrian soldiers are interviewed afterwards, raving about the experience and praising their Russian trainers. Russian media likewise show upbeat interviews with Syrian soldiers purportedly queuing up to fight for Russia in Ukraine, while Western media report coercion among Syrian recruits, who acknowledge that 90% of them die.

Putin and Bashar watching over a Syrian regime checkpoint, January 2019.

Today Syria is a puppet state, with Russia controlling security and defense, while Iran has taken charge of the religious and cultural files. An Aleppo businessman summed up the situation well, describing Bashar as “a man with two false legs, one Russian, one Iranian, hopping from one leg to another as the ground he is standing on is very hot.”

As for the Russian propaganda climax, that came in Palmyra on 5 May, 2016. Knowing the world was fascinated by the fate of Syria’s most iconic ancient site, a magical trading city in a desert oasis first seized by ISIS in 2015, Putin flew in a Russian orchestra from Moscow, led by his favorite conductor, to stage a victory concert in the Roman theatre after Russian forces helped recapture it from ISIS. To crown it all, with the eyes of the world watching, Putin popped up by videolink on the Palmyra stage to project himself as “the Saviour of Syria,” the only international leader truly fighting terrorism. Pocketing massive credit, it was the moment he moved from the Palmyra stage to the world stage, his dream come true, a global player at last.

Soviet ties to Syria go back to the 1970s when the USSR was Syria’s main economic partner and one of its strongest political and military allies. Hafez al-Assad’s long-term vice-president from 1984-2005, Abdel Halim Khaddam, said in an interview from exile in Paris: “You have to understand that, at some point, practically half the Syrian population worked for the Secret Police. Remember that we were formed by the Soviets. That’s why they were so powerful. The intelligence services soon became the main factor in maintaining the regime. The model was the KGB or Stasi. They were everywhere. Thousands of Syrians went to Russia to train and study, learnt Russian, and married Russians.”

Putin has learned much from his Syria playlist, tactics perfected over the years in which he had a free hand in the country. After the fighting in Ukraine is over, with many cities reduced to empty shelled buildings, expect the same tactics employed in Syria, where the regime confiscated all property from people it deemed “terrorists,” using new laws on land it had taken to prop up regime agendas and create facts on the ground, a sly way of gaining revenue while avoiding sanctions.

Today, ironically, I can no longer watch RT on Freeview, Sky, or other Western media channels because, just days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it was taken off the air across Europe and the U.K., deemed “unfit to hold a license.” If only such a concerted Western consensus had been garnered against Russian disinformation in Syria, providing a challenge to the Russian and Syrian regime’s narrative that it was always “fighting the terrorists,” the Syrian war might, in my view, have ended by now, instead of dragging on into its twelfth year. May the Ukraine war at least not share that fate.

This piece first appeared on the Middle East Institute’s website, where Diana Darke is a non-resident scholar with MEI’s Syria Program. She is an independent Middle East cultural expert and Syria specialist, author of My House in Damascus: An Inside View of the Syrian Crisis (2016), The Merchant of Syria (2018), and Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe (2020). The views expressed in this piece are her own.

https://www.mei.edu/publications/putin-palmyra-how-russia-won-truth-battle-syria-and-learned-lessons-ukraine

Posted in Russian propaganda in Syria and tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment
15 Apr 2020
4 Comments

Syrian Secrets rising from the ashes of Notre-Dame

1024px-Incendie_Notre_Dame_de_Paris Notre-Dame fire

Notre-Dame roof and spire aflame on 15 April 2019, but structure intact. Photo from Wikipedia LeLaisserPasserA38.

Who would have thought that last year’s catastrophic fire at Notre-Dame de Paris would reveal so many secrets from its ash? A team of scientists has been gathered under the leadership of a military general to conduct deep background research into the fabric of the cathedral, hoping to understand how on earth the medieval masons and craftsmen made the building stand up. Nothing was written down, no plans were used. The study will take an estimated six years, helping to guide the restoration work.

The fire also sparked my own desire to study further. This time last year I wrote an article explaining the architectural backstory of the cathedral, how, like all medieval Gothic cathedrals, the origins of its twin towers flanking a monumental west entrance, its pointed arches, its rose windows, its ribbed vaulting can all be traced to the Middle East. Now, after extensive research, I have discovered many more connections, all of them unexpected. The full results will appear in my forthcoming book Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture shaped Europe:  https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/stealing-from-the-saracens/

Meanwhile, here are just a few pointers, to give the flavour. Let’s start with the stained glass, thankfully still intact after the fire. Recent analyses of stained glass in the main cathedrals of England and France between 1200 and 1400 all show the same high plant ash composition typical of Syrian raw materials. High-grade Syrian plant ash soda, known as ‘the cinders of Syria’, was considered superior to the pre-Islamic Egyptian natron ash used by the Romans and the Byzantines in their glass manufacture, and all Venetian glass analysed from the 11th to the 16th centuries shows its consistent use, by law. Medieval Continental Europe imported the raw materials for all its glass since there was no known local source.

Coloured glass windows have been an integral and innovative element of Islamic architecture since the 7th century, starting with Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock which carried coloured glass in its many high windows. They were known as shamsiyyat (from Arabic for sun) and qamariyyaat (from Arabic for moon), showing how the solar and lunar imagery of windows continued into European religious architecture. The Templar knights adopted the Dome of the Rock as their chief Christian shrine after the First Crusade, mistaking it for the Temple of Solomon, an error which resulted in many churches being modelled on a Muslim shrine. Notre-Dame’s famous rose windows on its west and north facades date from 1225-50 and are designed for the light to radiate out from the centre, hence the so-called Rayonnant style.

1280px-Gothic-Rayonnant_Rose-6 North rose window Notre Dame c1250

Notre-Dame Rayonnant-style North Rose Window, c1250, photo from Wikipedia, by Zachi Evenor and Julie Anne Workman, Aug 2010.

Light was also at the core of Gothic cathedral design.  Saint-Denis in north Paris was where the wealthy and powerful Abbot Suger first used Illuminationist thinking as the guiding principle in his new basilica. But who was Denis?

Paris_-_Cathédrale_Notre-Dame_-_Portail_de_la_Vierge_-_PA00086250_-_003 Notre Dame St Denis head

The martyr Denis, Bishop of Paris, holding his head after decapitation on Montmartre, Notre-Dame, Portal of the Virgin, photo from Wikipedia by Thesupermat, Sept 2011.

The Abbot and his contemporaries believed him to be a disciple of Paul, who later became confused with the first Bishop of Paris and patron saint of France, martyred on Montmartre. Centuries later, scholars realised that Denis’s influential work the Celestial Hierarchies, was in fact a hoax, written by a 5th century Syrian mystic monk calling himself Denis in order to get his philosophy noticed. As a result he is known in ecclesiastical circles as Pseudo-Denis, but his trick worked. Today the Basilica of Saint-Denis is universally acknowledged as the first true example of ‘Gothic’ with tall pointed arches enabling the lofty elegant choir. It was used thenceforth as the burial place of French kings.

1024px-Coeur_de_la_Basilique_de_Saint-Senis Saint Denis choir by Bordeled

Basilica of Saint Denis, the first, new, light-filled ‘Gothic’ choir, based on the philosophy of Denis, a 5th century Syrian mystic, photo from Wikipedia by Bordeled, July 2011.

The very symbol of French nationhood and French royalty is the fleur-de-lis. But where was that first seen as an emblem? On the plains of Syria the Crusaders copied the local sport of ‘jarid’, knightly jousting tournaments on horseback where the players attempted to dismount each other with a blunt javelin. Heraldry and the use of family or dynastic symbols was already in use under the Ayyubids and the fleur-de-lis first appeared in its true heraldic form, the three separate leaves tied together in the middle by a band, as the blazon of Nur al-Din ibn Zanki and on two of his monuments in Damascus. Later Mamluk helmets often had nasal guards terminating in a fleur-de-lis. The boy king of England, Henry VI, was crowned king of France aged ten inside Notre-Dame in 1431, against a backdrop of fleur-de-lis.

Sacre_Henry6_England-France_02 Henry VI of England Fleur-de-lis

Coronation of the boy king Henry VI as king of France inside Notre-Dame, against a backdrop of fleur-de-lis, photo from Wikipedia public domain.

Notre-Dame’s central portal carries a stone-carved allegory of Alchemy, a statue of a woman holding books with a ladder and staff. The very word comes from the Arabic al-kimya’ and in medieval times the Middle East was widely acknowledged as the home of advanced experimental science. The use of plant ash in glass was itself a kind of alchemy, an experiment in which the addition of the alkaline (from qily another Arabic word) plant called ushnaan to the silica of the crushed pebbles of the Euphrates produced the world’s finest and most delicate glass, based at Raqqa, the centre of the Syrian glass industry from the 9th to the 14th century. The addition of further chemicals coloured the glass, cobalt for blue, copper oxide for turquoise, manganese for purple/pink and so on.

Alegoría_de_la_alquimia_en_Notre-Dame Alchemy Allegory Notre-Dame

Notre-Dame Allegory of Alchemy on the central portal, photo from Wikipedia by Chosovi, April 2006.

But the ashes of ushnaan also had other properties. They had been used since biblical times as a cleaning agent (Aramaic shuana) where there was no access to water, both in personal hygiene and in clothes laundry. To this day it remains an essential natural ingredient in the Syrian soap industry, as the plant grows especially well south of Aleppo round the salt lake of Jaboul. This is what gives Aleppo soap such a wonderfully soft and silky feel on the skin. It even has the bubbles trapped inside just like the Syrian glass.

IMG_20200302_1634507 Stained glass Canterbury Cathedral c1180 V&A

Stained glass c1180 from Canterbury Cathedral, showing the trapped bubbles from the plant ash. These bubbles also gave the glass extra strength, making it less liable to fracture.  Photo by Diana Darke, taken 3 March 2020 in the V&A Museum, London

The team of scientists at Notre-Dame have made their own unlikely cleaning discovery – that the best way to remove the toxic yellow lead dust from the stained glass windows without danger to the colours is to use baby wipes from Monoprix. The commercial chemical wipes risked being too abrasive. Gentle Aleppo soap would no doubt be even better. How fitting it would be if the cathedral could be cleaned using the very same plant ash that is already inside its stained glass windows.

IMG_20200331_1023356

Syrian soap from Aleppo, with bubbles, made using Syrian plant ash known as ushnaan, famous for its natural cleansing properties, photo by Diana Darke, taken 31 March 2020

A version of this article first appeared in Middle East Eye on 14 April 2020:

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/syrian-secrets-notre-dame

Posted in Europe, France, Syria and tagged , , , , , , , , ,
04 Dec 2019
5 Comments

NATO’s dilemma over the controversial Turkey/Syria border & the Kurds who straddle it

On 22 November 2019 I gave the annual John Martin lecture to the British Society of Turkish Area Studies (BATAS) at Regent’s University, London. My chosen title was ‘Turkey and Syria: deep past connections and deep present differences’, picked months earlier in order to focus attention on what had been, in my view, the long neglected border between Turkey and Syria. Little did I know that it would become, just weeks before the talk, the focus of worldwide attention after a phone call between President Trump and President Erdogan on 6 October 2019. The call was quickly followed by two connected events – the sudden US troop withdrawal from northeast Syria and Turkey’s incursion into Syria to create a long-demanded 30km deep safe zone along the border.

Originally agreed by the French and the new Turkish Republic after World War I, much of the border follows the course of the Berlin to Baghdad railway. A vastly long 822km line running from the Mediterranean eastwards, it crosses the Euphrates River and ends in Syria’s northeast corner where the Tigris River forms the border with Iraq.

It is an area I know well, having visited southeastern Turkey regularly since the late 1970s when first writing and then updating my Bradt guides to Eastern Turkey and to Syria. In fact it was where my feet first touched Turkish soil, after crossing from Syria at the Bab al-Hawa border post in my ancient Citroen 2CV. I therefore discovered Turkey ‘backwards’, entering from the east. At that time Syria was the safe haven, Lebanon was in the grip of civil war (I had just been evacuated from MECAS, my Arabic school in the hills above Beirut) and most of eastern Turkey was under martial law.

Syria engraving by John Tallis & J.Rapkin, c1851, showing wilayats of Aleppo,Tripoli, Acre, Beirut, Gaza (Diana Darke own copy)

To give an overview, I began the lecture by showing a series of historical maps of the region, starting from Ottoman times, when there were no physical borders, only administrative boundaries for tax purposes. The maps showed how, after World War I, what had been the Ottoman province of Syria gradually became smaller and smaller, losing Jerusalem, Gaza and Nablus to Britain in the south, losing Lebanon to a separate state created by the French, and losing the Sanjak of Alexandretta (Hatay) to Turkey in 1939. Syrian maps to this day still show Hatay as part of Syria, since the land transfer by the French was in clear breach of the terms of their Mandate.

Map of Syria drawn by N. Partamian in 1953, showing Banias in the Golan and Antioch within Syrian borders (Diana Darke, own copy)

Perhaps the least known historical map, and the one most relevant to today, is the one I discovered in the Institut Francais du Proche-Orient in Damascus, which shows the religious and ethnic groupings inside Syria and Lebanon. It was compiled by the French Mandate authorities ruling the region in 1935, and it marks the areas inhabited by Kurds along the Turkish border. These Kurds arrived after World War I as refugees from Mustafa Kemal’s new Turkish Republic. Non-Turkish minorities who stayed in Turkey were obliged to assimilate into a new all-Turkish identity and forgo their own cultural identities, so many left, either voluntarily or forcibly. The Kurds who crossed into Syria were later granted Syrian citizenship by the French Mandate authorities, only to have it taken away again by the Ba’athist government in 1962, which left 300,000 of them stateless, known as ‘bidoon’ (Arabic for ‘without’). President Assad of Syria hastily announced he would grant them citizenship in reaction to the 2011 uprising against him, but the UN estimates there are still 160,000 stateless Kurds inside Syria and that the remainder have mainly left the country.

Une_carte_des_communautés_religieuses_et_ethniques_de_la_Syrie_et_du_Liban_(1935)

This 1935 French map also clearly shows that the area in which Turkey has now created its ‘safe zone’, the stretch between Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ain, was historically a Sunni Arab and Turkmen dominated region, a fact well known to Turkey and which is why it chose to begin its ‘safe zone’ operation here. Kurds settled there only since 2012 during the Syrian civil war, often displacing the original Sunni Arab population, as part of their push for an autonomous Kurdish region here – what they call Rojava, meaning ‘Western Kurdistan’. These Kurds belong to the PYD, the strongest of the seven main Syrian Kurdish political parties, founded in 2003. Though it seeks to deny such links today, the Syrian PYD is so closely affiliated with the Turkish PKK Kurdish political separatist party that it was commonly referred to as its Syrian wing. When the Assad regime army quietly withdrew from these border regions in 2012, the PYD were quick, as the best organised Kurdish group, to take their place, and have also kept lines of communication open to the Syrian Assad regime, which continued to operate Qamishli airport and to pay local salaries for civil servants and teachers.   

Both the Syrian Kurdish PYD and the Turkish Kurdish PKK parties follow the ideology and teachings of the jailed Kurdish PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, a fact that is made clear by his face appearing outdoors in flags on the battlefield and indoors in PYD office buildings. 

ocalan-1

In my lecture I considered the historic unity of the region, as revealed by the shared architecture of cities like Aleppo and Gaziantep built under the same Ottoman governor, shared trade, and the shared geography of the Fertile Crescent, where dams on the Euphrates have turned deforested plains into productive fields of cotton and wheat. Next I explained about the pockets of Christianity that straddle the border, looking at monasteries that have been newly established on old foundations by Syriac monks like Father Joachim of Mar Augen, on the ridge above Nusaybin in Turkey, looking out over Qamishli in Syria.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Many Syriac communities and other minorities found refuge here after escaping from the Sayfo massacre by the Kurds in 1915. When I had first visited Mar Augen in the 1980s the ruins were being lived in by a Yezidi family.

Before the current Syrian war, the border was very open and easy to cross. There were no visa requirements for Syrians and Turks to cross into each other’s countries, and as a result, many Syrians holidayed in Turkey and vice versa. President Erdogan and President Assad even holidayed together, in a symbol of these close ties.

But this porous border became a problem once jihadi fighters of all nationalities, including Europeans, started crossing it to join ISIS in its newly-proclaimed caliphate based in Raqqa, on the Euphrates in eastern Syria from 2013 onwards. Assad saw Raqqa as a provincial backwater and ignored the rise of ISIS there. Erdogan also underestimated what ISIS would become and was accused of turning a blind eye.

The four-month battle for Kobane in September 2015 was the turning point, when US fighter jets teamed up with PYD Kurdish fighters on the ground to expel ISIS from the city – the US/Kurdish coalition was born. Erdogan protested loudly from the start about this alliance between America and the Kurdish separatists it has considered terrorists since the 1980s when the PKK first began a long-running guerrilla war against the Turkish army in which 45,000 lives were lost. The PYD, in an effort to legitimise themselves in the eyes of the outside world, formed the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) by recruiting some local Arab and Syriac fighters, but it was always Kurdish-dominated. To help understand, consider for example what would happen if Basque separatists, regarded as terrorists by the Spanish government, were to team up with the French army to defeat a group like ISIS. Spain would no doubt have been equally vocal about its displeasure from the outset.

In other words, the current problem that countries like France have with fellow NATO member Turkey’s actions against the PYD Kurds was foreseeable from the start. Turkey was willing to use its own army, but France and others in the US-led coalition against ISIS took the short term, expedient method of fighting ISIS using PYD Kurdish boots on the ground who were already there and only too willing to partner with the US and its allies. These PYD Syrian Kurds wanted to defend their Kurdish majority cities like Kobane and they knew it would play well to them and their image in the long-term, if they were seen to be reliable partners against ISIS.

They also showed themselves to be experts in PR, campaigning in Moscow, in Washington and in European capitals for support of their Rojava project – PYD offices abroad have opened in Moscow, Prague, KRG Sulaymaniyah, Stockholm, Berlin and Paris. Photo features on their Kurdish Kalashnikov-wielding female fighters have appeared so often in the western media that you could almost be forgiven for thinking the female fighters defeated ISIS single-handed. Rarely mentioned is that many of those female fighters were on the battlefront to escape patriarchal domestic dominance, notoriously prevalent in Kurdish society with its ‘honour killings’ and blood feuds. Some women have even set up all-female villages where they can live freely away from their controlling menfolk. Fighting ISIS offered an escape route.

In this highly complex and combustible situation along the Turkey/Syria border, everyone is fighting for different reasons, driven by conflicting aims and beliefs. When it was first formed after the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire by the Allies, this new border between modern Turkey and Syria was porous and easy to cross, and remained so till very recently. But in late 2014, largely in response to European criticism that it was allowing ISIS fighters to cross into Syria without checks, Turkey began construction of an impenetrable 3m high concrete security wall along the border, topped with razor wire. The EU funded the construction, according to German Der Spiegel, keen to protect itself from ISIS.

Today it is complete, the third-longest wall in the world after the Great Wall of China and the US-Mexico border wall. The communities that once straddled it are now divided permanently, for the first time in their long and interwoven history. Such barriers, as has been amply demonstrated in the past, erected as short-term solutions to complex problems, have a way of creating long-term obstacles to peace as well as to people. NATO’s future is at stake, so a well-coordinated, long-term solution must be found.

Syria Turkey border wall

Posted in Syria, Turkey and tagged , , , , ,
03 Apr 2019
3 Comments

New book ‘The Last Sanctuary in Aleppo’

9781472260574 (1)

The cat man of Aleppo, Mohammad Alaa Aljaleel, touched the hearts of millions when his sanctuary featured in a BBC video in 2016. He had to leave the city when it fell to Syrian government forces, but he’s now back – in an area nearby – and helping children as well as animals.

My new book ‘The Last Sanctuary in Aleppo‘ is a joint venture telling his story in his own words, from his childhood growing up in Aleppo, loving cats, becoming an electrician, getting married and having children, till the war turned his whole life upside down and gave him the chance to do what he’d always dreamed of. He is still inside Syria, so we used WhatsApp to communicate, me sending him questions, him replying orally in voice messages. He only speaks Arabic, which is why the publishers approached me, as they needed an Arabic speaker with extensive background knowledge of Syria. After collecting all the information, I wrote the book very fast, 80,000 words in two months. The intensity helped me to turn myself into him, so I could write in the first person, which was the publishers’ brief! A trusted Syrian refugee couple, Raida Mukarked and Ammar Hasan, who used to live in the upstairs flat of my house in Damascus, but who are now displaced to Beirut, helped me collect the information and we have now all become good friends with Alaa, a real team.

Just weeks after the BBC video was filmed, Mohammad Aljaleel (known to everyone as Alaa) watched helplessly as his cat sanctuary was first bombed, then chlorine-gassed, during the intense final stages of the siege of Aleppo.

Most of his 180 cats were lost or killed. Like thousands of other civilians he was trapped in the eastern half of the city under continuous bombardment from Russian and Syrian fighter jets.

As the siege tightened, he was forced from one Aleppo district to another, witnessing unimaginable scenes of devastation. Yet throughout, he continued to look after the few surviving cats and to rescue people injured in the bombing, driving them to underground hospitals.

The evacuation of east Aleppo, December 2016GETTY IMAGES
The evacuation of east Aleppo in December 2016

When the city fell in December 2016, he left in a convoy, his van crammed full of injured people and the last six cats from the sanctuary.

“I’ve always felt it’s my duty and my pleasure to help people and animals whenever they need help,” Alaa says. “I believe that whoever does this will be the happiest person in the world, besides being lucky in his life.”

After a brief recuperation in Turkey, he smuggled himself back into Syria – bringing a Turkish cat with him for company – and established a new cat sanctuary, bigger and better than the first one, in Kafr Naha, a village in opposition-held countryside west of Aleppo.

Map

Using the same crowdfunding model employed successfully in east Aleppo, funds were sent in by cat-lovers from all over the world via Facebook and Twitter.

But Alaa has always worked for the benefit of the community, as well as the cats themselves.

In Aleppo, he and his team of helpers bought generators, dug wells and stockpiled food. Even at the height of the bombing, they ran animal welfare courses for children, to develop their empathy. They also set up a playground next to the sanctuary where children could briefly escape from the apocalyptic events taking place all around them.

Alaa and Ernesto
Alaa and a cat called Ernesto

The new sanctuary has expanded to include an orphanage, a kindergarten and a veterinary clinic. Alaa and his team resemble a small development agency, providing services that government and international charities cannot or will not. He strongly believes that helping children to look after vulnerable animals teaches them the importance of kindness to all living creatures, and helps to heal their own war traumas.

“Children and animals are the big losers in the Syrian war,” he says. “It’s the adults who so often behave badly.”

Alaa rescues a child in 2016GETTY IMAGES
Alaa rescues a child from rubble in Aleppo in 2016

As a boy growing up in Aleppo, Alaa had always looked after cats, spurring his friends to do likewise, even though keeping cats and dogs as pets is not customary in Syria or the rest of the Arab world.

He started working aged 13, as an electrician, but also turned his hand to many other jobs – painter, decorator, IT expert, satellite-dish installer… he even traded toys between Lebanon and Syria.

Alaa and a kittenGETTY IMAGES

He worked hard and he learned how to get things done. “May the dust turn to gold in your hands, Alaa,” his mother used to say.

His dream was to become a fireman like his father and work in search and rescue, but such jobs were handed out only to those with connections, and the connection through his father was not enough. So for years his applications were rejected.

The sanctuary's vet, Dr Youssef
The sanctuary’s vet, Dr Youssef

“Of course I would never have wished for a war in order to make my dream come true. I wish I could have achieved these things without the suffering I have seen,” he says.

“God blessed me by putting me in a position where I could help people by being a rescue man, but in my worst nightmares I never imagined a war like this for my people or for my country, or even for a single animal.”

During the siege in Aleppo he used to visit both Christian and Muslim old people’s homes, distributing food. Extremist groups such as al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra regularly chided him, calling him a kaafir, an unbeliever, but he continued regardless.

Vet checking cat's mouthGETTY IMAGES

“Our Prophet Muhammad was good to everybody. He spoke with all Christians and Jews. I believe in Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, because all of them had a noble aim. I’m a Muslim, but I am not a fanatic. I just take from religion everything that’s good and that I can learn things from,” Alaa says.

Despite the difficulties he has endured, Alaa has always maintained a wicked sense of humour. At the new sanctuary, a tabby called Maxi the Marketing King is chief fundraiser, soliciting “green kisses” in the form of dollar bills via social media accounts.

Maxi, aka King Maxi
Maxi, chief fundraiser

Alaa wears a T-shirt with “Maxi’s Slave” written on it, and gets ticked off for smoking too much or for not cooking gourmet meals. He admits his shortcomings. “We submit to Maxi’s authority as the ruler of his kingdom. But even with Maxi’s leadership it wasn’t easy to launch the new sanctuary,” he says.

Maxi's "slave"

This is an understatement. The rebel-held area where Alaa now lives is semi-lawless and when powerful gangs realised he was receiving funds for the sanctuary, they attempted to kidnap him. He was no longer being bombed, but his life was still at risk.

As well as cats, the new sanctuary has dogs, monkeys, rabbits, a chicken that thinks it’s a cat, and an Arabian thoroughbred horse.

“There are so few thoroughbred horses left inside Syria now that I worry about finding him a mare to breed with. I plan to perform the role of a traditional Syrian mother and try to find him a wife, so that he can have children and start building up the population of thoroughbred horses in Syria again,” Alaa says.

Fox at the sanctuary
An injured fox, rescued by the sanctuary…

All the animals have names, generally awarded by Alaa. An aggressive black-and-white cat who came to the sanctuary, stole food and terrified all the other cats was nicknamed al-Baghdadi, after the Iraqi leader of Islamic State (IS).

“Of course, this cat was a million times better than that evil murderer al-Baghdadi, but this name came to mind because his presence in the sanctuary coincided with the arrival of IS gangs in Aleppo,” Alaa says.

Cat and cockerel
… a cockerel that behaves like a cat…

A large ginger tomcat was given a Trump hairstyle and christened The Orange President of the Sanctuary. A pair of speedy acrobatic cats were called Sukhoi 25 and Sukhoi 26, after Russian fighter jets.

“They’re old planes, but effective enough for the job required of them in Syria. We always knew when the Russians were coming to bomb us because of their very loud engine noise. We’d shout: ‘Watch out! A Sukhoi is coming!'”

Alaa’s reputation inside Syria has travelled far and wide, and the government is well aware of his activities.

A hawk
… and a resident bird of prey

In 2017 he was called by the Magic World Zoo, south of Aleppo, which asked desperately for his help to feed the neglected lions, tigers and bears – which he did, despite the dangers of the journey which involved passing through Jabhat al-Nusra checkpoints. While there, he discovered he had been recommended by the Syrian Ministry of Agriculture.

“It was funny that the ministry knew about us and was handing over responsibility for the zoo animals to us,” he says. “The Magic World Zoo gave me a lot of headaches.”

Alaa was eventually able to negotiate a solution for the animals with a charity called Four Paws, which arranged for the animals that hadn’t died to be transported out of Syria to new homes in Belgium, the Netherlands and Jordan.

A rescued tiger from the Magic Zoo, in transit through TurkeyGETTY IMAGES
One of the rescued tigers, in transit through Turkey

In the new sanctuary he looks after 105 children, of whom 85 are “orphans” (in Syria the word covers children who have lost a breadwinner, as well as those who have lost both parents). Only 11 children actually sleep in the orphanage at present, because it isn’t finished, but all receive education, food and clothes, for which Alaa pays 25 euros per month.

The biggest risk is the instability in the region. Clashes break out periodically, as it’s close to the border with Idlib province, which is controlled by rebel groups who often fight each other. No-one knows what will happen next to that part of Syria and who will end up in charge.

Feeding time at the sanctuary

“I blame all fighting parties equally – no matter who they are or why they say they’re fighting – for the killing of civilians,” Alaa says.

“We are rebuilding our communities and my role in that is to rebuild my sanctuary for cats. Friendship between animals is a great thing and we should learn from them. I’ll stay with them no matter what happens.

Alaa covered by cats

“It seems the world cannot solve wars and conflicts these days. That’s why there are now so many refugees around the world, but especially here in the Middle East.

“I do not want to be a refugee. I want to stay in my country, in Syria. I want to help people in any way I can.”

Related links:

My BBC Breakfast TV interview with Naga Munchetty about the book:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-47473772

  • House of Cats Ernesto (official website)
Posted in Syria and tagged , , , , , ,
29 Jun 2018

Assad’s New Syria

On my recent trip to Syria, a bus-full of bishops, reverends and members of the House of Lords was my cloak of disguise, the perfect garb in which to pass under the radar of the regime and hear, not the official line which was pumped at us full throttle at every opportunity, but the voices underneath. As one of our group, who had come with an open mind, described it at the end: “It’s like an orchestra in which the strings are playing too loud, drowning out the other instruments. Some sections of the orchestra are simply missing, their instruments broken, unable to play any more……”

How do you heal a broken society? Syria’s First Lady, Asma al-Assad, has one answer – you set up branches of Syria Trust, her flagship charity founded in the year 2000 when her husband Bashar al-Assad inherited the throne. Before the war it had roaming 4WDs with teams of manicured rich kids dispensing computers in villages. Today it has 15 community centres round the country dispensing “Intellectual Capacity Development” and “Psychological Support Programmes”. We were given tours of two such centres in Aleppo, surreal pockets of ultra-modern, high-tech installations amid the devastated wasteland, by grinning youthful Assad loyalists fitted out in spanking new uniforms embroidered with the charity’s name. Films ran constantly in the foyer areas showing regime soldiers treating children and citizens with gentle care. Black and white photos gracing the walls did the same. Silent women sat in front of empty sewing machines, summoned to be on parade.

The cheerful staff left on buses as soon as we did, but while we were there, they handed out brochures called ‘Manarat’, (Beacons) describing how they would encourage ‘critical thinking abilities’ in children. To what end? To challenge the system? A fake freedom since the curriculum is tightly controlled. The “Life Skills” development programme for over 13s talks scarily of “effective citizenship” and “purposeful contribution”. A whole generation is about to be brainwashed into the service of Assad alone. Graffiti all over the country, on the long drive from Damascus to Aleppo, spells it out: Al-Assad lil-Abad (Assad for eternity), Al-Assad wa laa Ahad (Assad and no one else) and Allah, Hurriya, al-Assad wa bass (God, Freedom, Assad and that’s it). The merchandising is also in full swing – Bashar mugs, Bashar and Putin photos for sale in hotel lobbies, Kerbala soap for Iranian visitors.

A society is being broken, bit by bit. For now, Assad is rewriting history, with Putin’s help, to cover up the original cause of the damage. Everything is laid at the door of ‘the terrorists.’

On the drive back from Aleppo we stop at Adhra Al-Madaris, one of the many ‘reception centres’ housing refugees displaced from the Ghouta after the Russian-led Syrian Army offensive just over a month ago. This one holds about 5,000 and they are being held like animals. It is the first taste of reality on the trip, raw humanity without filters, deeply affecting for everyone. Surprisingly, the soldiers guarding the camp allow us in to talk directly to the refugees, and because of the size of our group, the Arabic-speakers among us are able to slip off into the crowds. I was invited by a woman and child to come to her ‘home’ and she led me through a maze of small curtained spaces, each one for a family, to her own tiny space with nothing but a thin mattress, a plastic sheet on the floor and a gaping hole in the concrete roof.

The room fills up quickly with more and more women till we are about 15 squeezed into the tiny space. They offer me water from a tin cup, since they have nothing else, no facilities to cook or make tea. Desperate to tell me their stories, it emerges hygiene facilities are horrific, with just one squalid toilet, food is a sandwich for breakfast and macaroni served up centrally as their cooked meal. They hate it and agree they were better nourished under the siege where they had meat and vegetables in their village of Hammoura. All they want is to go home but they are trapped with no information and nothing other than the clothes they are wearing. I ask how they had been treated by the rebel fighters during the siege and they say fine. There was no problem.

There is an Arab proverb that runs: If God wants to make a poor man happy, he makes him lose his donkey, and then find it again. Assad, like a vengeful god, has destroyed the country and driven out half its population, pronouncing it much ‘cleaner’ than before. Now he is preparing to give back the donkey, lame and mutilated, to those left behind, hoping they’ll be so grateful they won’t dare complain. But social justice in Syria, so smothered under the official narrative now, will break through soon enough – it is only a matter of time.

A version of this piece was first broadcast on the BBC’s From Our Own Correspondent programme on Radio 4 on 28 April 2018, see link below:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09zt3vc (starts at 06.00 minutes in)

Related articles:

https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2018/06/30/how-a-victorious-bashar-al-assad-is-changing-syria

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/06/30/syrian-refugees-could-turn-into-the-new-palestinians

https://www.thenational.ae/world/mena/the-crazy-club-inside-the-british-propaganda-trips-that-seek-to-legitimise-assad-s-barbarism-1.724176

 

Posted in Syria and tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Post Navigation

← Older Entries