Malek - The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria

Damascus, May 2013

B Y THE TIME I LEFT S YRIA IN M AY 2013, MANY IN MY FAMILY WERE happy to see me go.

For them, the day hadnt come soon enough.

The country was already more than two years into the blackness that would consume it. Its disintegration would see hundreds of thousands killed; millions displaced from their homes both inside and outside Syrias borders; villages, towns, and cities in rubble; unknown numbers disappeared; and the futures of several generations stolen.

When authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya were overthrown in 2011, all eyes turned to Syria as if it would be next. But despite both peaceful and armed opposition, the regime that had ruled Syria for over forty years remained entrenched. Syrian president Bashar al-Assadwho had inherited power from his father, Hafez al-Assadblamed a foreign conspiracy at work against Syria. The regime dismissed any reports that would belie its account of events as fabrications, venomously accusing the media of perpetuating lies. Western journalists had already disappeared and died in Syria to much international attention. Syrian journalistsprofessionals and those initiated in citizen reportingwere dying as well, just more silently and in greater numbers.

So as far as many in my family were concerned, my being both a dual national American and a journalist added up to nothing but trouble, and the sooner I left, the better.

While most foreign journalists were denied legal access to Syria, I had been able to enter and move about Damascus with relative ease. Though I was born abroad, both my parents are Syrian, and, more importantly, had registered my birth with the government, in anticipation of our planned return to Syria, where they had intended to raise their family. That meant that I had a Syrian national identity card and the access it can provide.

Ever since moving to Damascus in April 2011, I had been constantly answering inquiries as to what I was doing there. Although people regularly pry in Syriamost often about your relatives, your marital status or prospects, or your income and propertythe question as to why I was in Damascus now was more than mere prosaic meddling. It was potentially dangerous.

Unlike in many other cities, there is no anonymity in Damascus. There is no disappearing into it. Four different security bodies, known collectively as the mukhabarat, with at least twenty-two branches in the capital alone, have for decades carried out the regimes surveillance of its people. (It is estimated that the mukhabarat have 65,000 full-time employeesor 1 for every 153 adult citizensalong with hundreds of thousands of part-time or unofficial employees.) They are a much less refined version of the Stasi, with very little of the East German agencys precision or accuracy. What they lack in sophistication, though, they more than make up for with gusto.

The best way to explain this is with a joke I first heard back in Syria in the 1990s. It goes like this: the worlds intelligence services gather at an elite training site. Present are the CIA, the KGB, Israels Mossad, and the Syrian mukhabarat. They are brought to the edge of the forest and told they must each go in, track a certain fox, and bring him back. Both the CIA and the KGB get it done in an hour. The Mossad completes the task even faster. The last to go are the Syrian