The Stalled Revolution

Ten days with Syrias besieged protesters.

James Harkin

O
n a Monday in late February, I received a
Facebook message from a Syrian activist noti-
fying me that a demonstration was due to start
in half an hour in a heavily guarded section of
Damascus. The occasion was a funeral, and so
the protest was likely to be large. Two of the five martyrs are
children, and funeral processions for children are always big,
the message explained.
I took a cab to the Kafr Sousa district, an area that is home
to many government buildings, and walked for 20 minutes,
until I came upon about 75 casually dressed men toting ma-
chine guns. These were the shabihathe plain-clothes, pro-
government militia who have taken the lead in suppressing
the rebellion. Their presence suggested that I was headed in
the right direction.
I followed a barely perceptible trickle of young people down
a residential side street. Old men stood around nervously, as
if waiting for something to happen. A boy of about ten came
darting up the middle of the street, his face partly obscured by
a hoodie. Allahu Akbar, he shouted as he ran. I fell in behind
him and, after passing another line of heavily armed men, there
it was: a nondescript mosque with several thousand ululating
mourners huddled outside.
The body of a twelve-year-old boy was being held aloft on a
wooden boardhe had apparently been shot by the army dur-
ing a previous protest. I could see no Western journalists or

12
Apr il 1 9 , 2 0 1 2 The Ne w R e publ ic Se a n McC abe
 anyone from Syrian state television. Lo-
cals had clambered on the back of a dis-
used truck and were shooting footage
on iPads and digital recording devices.
When I took out my phone to take a pic-
ture, however, a masked man approached
and suggested that I put it away.
For a time, the shabiha looked like
they might not let anyone leave. Even-
tually, however, the funeral procession
began to move, with a group of teenag-
ers at the front. A bearded man told me
that this was common: Young people
have more energy than us, he said, so
they take the lead. I approached a nat-
tily dressed young man in his mid-twen-
ties wearing a beret and a cardigan, and
introduced myself as a journalist. Have
you Coke and onions? he replied. This
response was not as nonsensical as it
sounded: When the demonstrations
are targeted with tear gas, protesters
rub Coca-Cola into their eyes and use
onions to take care of the acrid smell.
The young man, Mohammed, told me
as we walked that the demonstrators
were shouting to the child, Your father
said, Hold your head up high, and to
his parents, We are all your son. At fu-
nerals, he explained, mourners avoid po-
litical statements so as not to provoke
the army or the shabiha. A single men-
tion of Bashar Al Assad could provoke
a hail of bullets. He warned me that, if
anything happened, I shouldnt run for-
ward or backward but tear off down a
side road. You cant get arrested, he
said. You are going to be our voice.
As we marched through narrow streets,
people congregated on their porches and
balconies to watch and pay their respects.
The adults were stony-faced, but the chil-
dren were smiling, and one or two were
AP Photos: Assad by Bassem Tellawi; angry mob by Amr Nabil; all others by Rodrigo Abd
dancing. A group of boys began pound-
ing hard on the iron grille of a closed
shop front, but Mohammed, who seemed
to double as an informal steward, shooed
them away. The owner, he explained, was
suspected of working with the secret
police: We cant give the government
the slightest excuse. If we so much as
light a fire, they will come for us.
Five minutes later, they did. A brief
funeral oration was read, during which
the crowd stood perfectly silent. Shortly
afterward, it tried to push forward and
the shabiha charged. Everyone dashed
for cover; Mohammed and I raced down
an alleyway. After about 100 yards, we
looked behind us and saw no one was
following. We emerged at an incongru-
ously pristine shopping mall, and I in-
vited Mohammed for coffee.
This was my third trip to Syria. I first
visited in October 2010 and again in No-
vember last year. This time, I was partic-
ularly eager to meet the young activists
who are the heart of the movement
against the Assad regime. Three out of
five Syrians are under 25, and, beyond the
lazy clichs about a new Facebook gen-
eration, theres little understanding in
the West of who they are and what they
might want. And so I came back to Syria
for ten days, not as an officially sanc-
tioned journalist but as a civilianliving
in ordinary Damascus hotels and meet-
ing as many Syrian activists as I could.
I
had been notified of the funeral
procession by a young woman named
Nadiaa sassy, fast-talking 21-year-
old student at Damascus University. (Ive
changed the names of some of the activ-
ists with whom I spoke.) Shed shown
up for our first meeting wearing a glam-
orous white hijab and a plastic raincoat.
Nadia seemed well-to-doher parents,
she told me, were comfortable but not
richand she spoke in perfect, American-
accented English. She refused my offer
of coffee. In the coffee bars, someones
rest wounded patients in State hospitals
Who cares about the
agenda of the Saudis
or the Qataris? Nadia
demanded. We just
need the weapons.
always listening, she explained. So we
walked to the nearby Ummayad Mosque
and sat down outside.
Nadia had been involved with the anti-
government movement for less than two
months. Shed been quietly sympathetic
to the protesters when demonstrations
first broke out across Syria last March.
But she hadnt joined in, because of the
horror stories about the way the Syrian
regime treats female political prisoners.
Then, in December, Arab League observ-
ers had arrived to monitor the regimes
treatment of the opposition. Baathist
supporters of the Assad government de-
cided to organize rallies to demonstrate
their strength. One was planned for Da-
mascus University; those who didnt
want to take part were ordered to leave
the campus. Nadia told me that a friend
of hers stayed behind and was raped by a
shabiha. Not long afterward, Nadia went
on her first protest.
Since then, she has become accus-
tomed to the threat of violence. She
told me almost matter of factly about
one demonstration shed attended in a
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district called Mezzehabout 20,000
people gathered amidst falling snow.
(Footage of this rally can be seen on You-
Tube.) Without warning, the shabiha
opened fire. I hit the ground immedi-
ately, Nadia told me. Most of the bul-
lets went above our heads. I could hear
them whizzing past.
Together with a group of fellow stu-
dents, Nadia helps organize demon-
strations. She would occasionally send
me cryptic text messages inviting me
to check my Facebook account, where
I would find directions to protests. Her
texts tended to arrive at the last minute:
The pervasive security presence in Da-
mascus means demonstrations are fre-
quently organized on the fly.
Her group also coordinates the deliv-
ery of medical supplies to beleaguered
opposition strongholds like Homs,
where activists fear hospital employees
will turn them in to the authorities. Their
caution is justified: In February, a report
released by the U.N.s Office of the High
Commissioner for Human Rights found
that security forces systematically ar-
... to interrogate them, often using tor-
ture. The report also noted that sections
of two hospitals had been converted into
torture centers, where security agents
chained seriously ill patients to their
beds, electrocuted them, beat wounded
parts of their body or denied them med-
ical attention and water.
As we sat talking outside the mosque,
a posse of shabiha wandered past in
green khakis, handcuffs jangling from
their waists. Some appeared to be barely
more than teenagers. But Nadia was
more concerned by a pudgy, bearded
man holding a camera and staring in
our direction. Secret police, she said.
Nadia estimated that one in four Dam-
ascenes have some kind of relationship
with the sprawling Syrian security state.
In March, documents allegedly leaked
from the Syrian security apparatus and
published by Al Jazeera noted that 1,000
security staff were deployed around the
Ummayad Mosque alone. (The day after
I met Nadia, I discovered that the se-
cret police had been asking questions
about me. State security. They wanted
to know who you were and who youd
been meeting, a man told me. Its nor-
mal, but be careful.)
Nadia suggested there might be fewer
prying eyes in the mosque, so we re-
moved our shoes and walked inside.
Nadia belongs to Syrias Sunni Muslim
majority. The political ruling class, how-
ever, is dominated by Alawite Muslims,
a minority offshoot of Shia Islam. Nadia
April 1 9 , 2 012 13
told me that her opposition cell contains
both Christians and Alawites as well as
Sunnis, but all the same, she is eager to
see a democracy with a Sunni coloring.
And, like many Sunnis, she sees a con-
spiracy in Assads apparent invincibility.
Shes convinced, for example, that Barack
Obama and the Israelis are working to-
gether to keep Assad in power.
It wasnt long before Nadia lost her
faith in the possibilities of a peaceful rev-
olution. In the middle of December, Syr-
ian opposition groups called a national
general strike. Everything duly closed
down in rebel strongholds like Daraa,
but participation in the main cities
Damascus and Aleppowas patchy, ei-
ther because of passive support for the
status quo or because people were sim-
ply afraid. Nadia became deeply angry
at the government, but also at her fellow
Damascenes, many of whom have been
quietly keeping their heads down dur-
ing the uprising. How can they just sit
around in coffee bars and enjoy them-
selves, pretending all this just isnt hap-
pening? she demanded.
Nadia told me that she believes the
only way forward is to keep up the pres-
sure on the regime with demonstra-
tions but also, if necessary, to topple it
by brute military force. If were going to
have a war, we need proper arms, not the
few Kalashnikovs that the Free Syrian
Army has, she said. Despite her enthu-
siasm for armed insurrection, however,
shes never actually met anyone in the
Free Syrian Army (FSA).
T
hree days l at er, an activist
named Khalid, whom Id met on
my first trip to the country, ar-
ranged for me to interview two mem-
bers of the loose collection of armed
units who make up the FSA. Khalid took
me to a huge, ornate building, where, in
a small annex, two soldiers sat on plas-
tic chairs. Damascus was in the middle
of a power outagea symptom of the
economic sanctions imposed on Assads
regimeand so, for the next half hour,
with Khalid as my translator, I inter-
viewed the pair in total darkness.
What I knew of the FSA came largely
from the brief period in January when
Western journalists had managed to ac-
company Arab League observers around
the country and interview rebel soldiers.
But these ruddy-cheeked young men
looked very different from the hard-
ened fighters Id read about in the pa-
pers. Both were from farming families in
Kafr Batna, a suburb about three miles
east, and both had defected from the
Syrian army. Grim-faced but unfailingly
14 Apr il 1 9 , 2 0 1 2 The Ne w R e publ ic
polite, they told me theyd quit because
of the brutal military response to civil-
ian demonstrations in their areas. Sol-
diers had broken away from the army in
small groups, joining with civilian volun-
teers to protect their communities from
the security forces and the shabiha. The
men said they only took orders from
the officers whod defected with them,
but, when communications permitted,
they were in touch with similar groups
around the country. As their numbers
increased, the FSA grew boldertheyd
lay ambushes and booby traps to meet
the army when it showed up to quash
demonstrations. The regular Syrian
army retreated, and for a brief time the
FSA was able to move freely around the
towns and countryside surrounding Da-
mascus. I asked if theyd killed shabiha,
and both said they had.
But, at the end of January, the Arab
League monitoring mission was sus-
pended because of the increasing vi-
olence, and the regime made its move.
Within 20 miles of
Homs, my cell phone
went dead. A cloud of
black smoke hovered
over the city.
The Syrian army shelled Kafr Batna and
then followed up with a ground assault.
Both men had been on the run for a
month, moving between safe houses to
avoid detection. If apprehended, they
faced execution. The economic sanctions
against the Syrian government, they be-
lieved, were worse than uselessthey
took a long time to work and only hurt
ordinary people. The soldiers claimed
that the FSA was 20,000 strong in the
countryside around Damascusbut
was badly in need of heavier weaponry
than Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled
grenades (RPGs).
Right now, the men admitted, they
werent capable of taking and holding
territory from the regular Syrian army.
As things stood, they werent even sure
they should be going on the offensive:
After all, theyd defected to defend their
families and communities from injustice,
not to launch a civil war. We have many
chances to attack, said one, but we
wont do it: The reaction would be harsh
and terrible. If anything, it was now the
people who were protecting the soldiers,
rather than the other way around. Peo-
ple have been arrested just for making
us a cup of tea, one told me. One of the
soldiers said 13 members of his family
had been arrested because of his activi-
ties; anyone with his surname, he added,
would automatically be arrested at a
checkpoint. At least for the time being,
these soldiers were emissaries of a tem-
porarily defeated guerrilla force.
O
ver coffee after the funeral
procession, Mohammed told
me, in his halting but careful
English, that he grew up in the south-
ern city of Daraa, where the first pro-
tests broke out last March. There, he
and his brother had published an infor-
mal newsletter they called The Hall of
Shame. It contained a list of the peo-
ple in his village who they believed were
passing information to state security in
return for favors or contracts. If youve
been giving information to the secret
police, then this is a friendly warning to
stopor face the consequences, one of
the newsletters said.
For the last few years, Mohammed
had been working for most of the week
in Damascus for the government. The
pay was lousy, but he counted himself
lucky to have work at all. His friends and
family are scattered over both sides of
the conflict. His girlfriend is a govern-
ment supporter, he said, from an area
where almost everyone is pro-govern-
ment. I asked if he told her about his
opposition activities. Most of them,
he said with his laid-back smile. Things
were easiest in Daraa, where everybody
knows everyone. In Damascus and
Aleppo, the population is more transient
and thus more paranoid: No one trusts
anyone. His mother was a staunch sup-
porter of the Assad regime; Mohammed
warned her that shed only change her
mind when the trouble arrived in her
own house.
I told Mohammed about a trip Id re-
cently taken to Douma, a populous com-
muter town outside Damascus. Douma
had effectively been taken over by its
residents late last year, but, in January,
the Syrian army stormed in, and, when
I visited, the area was clearly back under
government control. The mobile phone
network was still cut off, and, on a balmy
Saturday afternoon, in a town with over
100,000 people, there were more sol-
diers than civilians on the main thor-
oughfares. The only visible sign of the
uprising was the graffiti: get out, we
dont want you here bashar and
bashar is a baby killer. To my sur-
prise, however, Mohammed chuckled
at my bleak description. Bashar treats
us like a chicken farmer, you know. He
 thinks he can pen us in, turn the electric-
ity back on, and well keep laying eggs.
Even though the opposition was suffer-
ing, the regime was losing its power to
cow people, he said. Once, he and his
fellow activists would lower their voices
as they walked past government infor-
mants. Now they talk louder, to show
they are no longer afraid.
Mohammed could be critical of his
own side, too. This movement likes to
talk big, he said. Referring to the funeral
procession wed attended earlier, he ob-
served: There are three people being
buried today, but, by the time the news
reaches Al Jazeera and YouTube, it will
be hundreds. In Daraa the government
switched the electricity off for a week
and everyone was saying it lasted thirty
days. It doesnt help. Nor did he have a
very high opinion of the FSA. Look at
the pictures of the demonstrations, he
said. Its the people who usually are in
the first line, with the Free Syrian Army
behind them. When the army attacks,
they have to run away and leave the peo-
ple behind. Its dangerous.
As we chatted, Nadia texted to make
sure that I was safe. I invited her to
come and meet my new friend. Be care-
ful, she replied. Spies are everywhere.
Dont trust anyone. When she arrived,
she and Mohammed began an animated
but friendly discussion on the state of
the revolution, occasionally breaking off
to translate the highlights into English.
Nadia favored arming the rebellion by
any means necessary. Who cares about
the agenda of the Saudis or the Qataris?
she demanded. We just need the weap-
ons. Mohammed, however, was sus-
picious of armies of any kind and of
outside intervention: He didnt want to
see one armed gang replaced by another.
He seemed more like an old-fashioned
community activist: His goal was to help
build up an indigenous opposition large
enough to sustain a revolution. For now,
neither had thought much about what a
post-Baathist Syria might look like.
T
h e n ext day, I took a taxi to
Homs, a city of about a million
people in the heart of Syria. Within
20 miles of the city, my cell phone went
dead. Around the same time, I noticed
an enormous cloud of black smoke sit-
ting high above the city: fumes from an
oil pipeline that is regularly blown up by
one side or the other.
Homs was once where Syrians went
Anthony Russo
to escape the hustle of Damascus, to
unwind in cafs and restaurants. In the
autumn of last year, however, after the
Syrian army turned its guns on peace-
ful opposition protesters in the center of
the city, the conflict there became more
violent and spread to residential areas
like Baba Amr. In November, Id spent
a few days in Homs, when the city was
under total military lockdown. I knew
a good deal about what had happened
in the intervening three months, but I
was still shocked at how much the place
had changed.
During my previous visit, people
were still going through the motions of
normal life, at least in the government-
controlled center of town. Shops were
open, and in the morning people would
venture out to buy food before scurry-
ing home to avoid the snipers. But, just
like it had done in Kafr Batna, the Syrian
army began a renewed offensive against
Homs in early February, and nearly a
month of constant shelling had left it
shattered. On the road into the Old City,
glass and debris lay everywhere; huge
piles of garbage bags marked every street
corner. At 10 a.m., everything was closed.
When I returned to the hotel Id stayed
in before, it looked like it had been hit
by a shell, and the surrounding area was
so devastated and unkempt that I didnt
recognize it.
My driver was trying to find another
hotel when we were stopped at a check-
point. A soldier asked us to step out
of the car and follow him around the
rear of a disused public building. In a
tiny makeshift office a swarthy man in
a tracksuit, flanked by three teenagers
dressed in khakis, invited us to sit down.
On the table was a loose picture of a
smiling Assad and a few glasses of ne-
glected green tea; in the corner there
was a shabby bed, beside which lay a
small arsenal of Kalashnikovs and an
RPG. In good English, the man in the
tracksuit inquired if I was a journalist.
Journalists are always wel-
come in Syria, as long as
they tell the truth and dont
tell lies, he said, and every-
body laughed. I asked if I
might stay a night in the city,
but the man pointed out
that I didnt have the correct
permission. You know, he
added, we treat foreigners even better
than our own citizens, and we treat our
own people very well.
The man made a few calls to find out
what to do with us, but they seemed to
go nowhere. After a while, he took me
outside to sit in the courtyard as if to
explain what he was up against. In the
distance, I could hear the dull thud of
shells, and he rolled his eyes wearily:
They shell us, we shell them. He told me
The New R epubl ic
that the terrorists had better weapons
than he doesthey get them from nato,
and he had evidence that some of them
are made in Belgium. It was the stan-
dard Syrian government line: that the
uprising was the work of armed gangs,
many of which were inspired by or in-
distinguishable from Al Qaeda. No one
believes us, but the people were fight-
ing rape girls and chop people up with
rusty swords, like something from a
Hollywood film, he insisted.
More than an hour later, the man tired
of us and gave us permission to leave.
On the drive out of the city, I could see a
fresh plume of black smoke rising low to
our right: a still-smouldering Baba Amr,
where the American journalist Marie
Colvin had been killed six days earlier.
T
he morning after I got back
from Homs, I ran into Moham-
med on the street. We laughed and
hugged, and went to a tiny coffee bar in
a nearby alley. The place was no bigger
than a living room, and we were the only
customers; Mohammed ordered Turk-
ish coffee and an ashtray from the boy
standing outside. When we first met at
the funeral procession, Mohammed had
mentioned that he had once been ar-
rested. I asked him what had happened,
and, in a conversation that took nearly
seven hours, he told me the story.
It was the twenty-sixth evening of
RamadanAugust 26and he was at
home watching YouTube footage of a
crowd inside the Rifai Mosque chant-
ing for God and freedom. Security po-
lice blocked the exits and barged in,
beating the protesters and manhan-
dling the imam. Mohammed isnt very
religious, but what he saw infuriated
him. The next day, he joined about 50
young men outside the same mosque.
They shouted explicitly politi-
cal slogans: The people dont
want Bashar! and He who
kills his own people is a trai-
tor! Soon enough, they were
set upon by several hundred
men in plain clothes.
Mohammed remembers
being grabbed by three men
one holding each arm and one holding
his belt at the back, almost lifting him
off the ground. He was forced to run a
gauntlet of jeering secret policemen who
were swinging at him with their fists
and then he was hauled onto a waiting
bus. While the bus was moving, Mo-
hammed remembers being bent over a
seat with his arms tied behind his back
in plastic handcuffs and an elbow being
brought down repeatedly on his neck
April 1 9 , 2 012 15
 his assailants shouting, You want free-
dom, Ill show you freedom. At the end
of the bus journey, Mohammed and the
others were fitted with makeshift blind-
foldsmade, he thinks, out of tire rub-
ber. They were told to perform strange
exercisesto take off all their clothes
and then put them back on again in
quick succession. After a while, they
were taken up eight flights of stairs. En-
tirely naked, they were instructed to
raise both hands and hold one leg up
above the floor for minutes at a time.
Anyone who allowed his leg to drop was
immediately beaten. The next thing he
recalled was being taken to a kind of
wooden bed, where he was held down
by a number of men and beaten on the
legs with what seemed like an iron bar.
When Mohammed tried to stand up, he
found he couldnt walk. In the coffee bar,
he paused and then tried to distract him-
self by blowing a smoke ring across the
room. At this time, I was crying, he said,
and we sat in stillness while, very quietly,
he cried again.
With 14 others, Mohammed was
taken to a different prison. Each man
was assigned a numberMohammeds
was 17and ushered into a large win-
dowless cell, about 25 by 15 feet, which
housed 45 men. His captors took a par-
ticular interest in him. For one thing, his
identity card showed that he came from
Daraa, the starting point for the upris-
ing. Then, they found his mobile phones,
which contained some pictures of The
Hall of Shame newsletter hed written
with his brother, as well as a recording
of one of the protest songs that have be-
come increasingly popular among Syr-
ian activists.
When he found the newsletter and the
song, Mohammeds heavyset interroga-
tor went ballistic. He brought down a lit
cigarette on Mohammeds palm, making
him clench his fist around it. Then he
began playing the protest song repeatedly
on the cell phone, beating Mohammed
in time to its rhythm. The interrogator
demanded to know who was recording
and distributing the songs, but Moham-
med refused to tell him anything. By the
fourth day, theyd discovered photos of
a corpse on one of his phones, a relative
whod been shot dead by security forces.
Why do you have it on your phone? Were
you going to send it to Al Jazeera?
The beatings and interrogations be-
come routinean hour at a time, once
a day. When one of the prisoners re-
turned to the windowless cell, his fel-
low inmates would throw water at him
from all directionstheir way of trying
to lighten the mood. The 45 men only
16 Apr il 1 9 , 2 0 1 2 The Ne w R e publ ic
had six mattresses between them, so
theyd sleep in shifts. When a guard en-
tered, everyone had to stand and face the
wall; those who didnt stand up quickly
enough were beaten.
The men eventually figured out that
they were being held not far from the
Damascus airport, by the Palestine Se-
curity Branchone of the most feared
of the many labyrinthine agencies that
exist to protect the Syrian state. Before
long, they were all listening to each oth-
ers stories. There was a history teacher
from Damascus University, a pharmacist,
a doctor, a lawyer in the finance indus-
try. Then there was a Turk who couldnt
speak any Arabic and a disoriented Syr-
ian exile who claimed that hed been
kidnapped from nearby Lebanon. Most
were well-educated and all were Mus-
lim, but few were very devout. There was
one bearded, deeply religious man from
Homs, Mohammed recalled, and one
day he took Mohammed aside when he
came back from a beating. Dont scare,
The next thing
Mohammed recalled
was being beaten
with what seemed
like an iron bar.
be strong, he told him. You are in the
right! Five minutes later, this mans num-
ber was called, and Mohammed never
saw him again.
Finally, Mohammed was invited to
put his fingerprint to a printed confes-
sion. When he asked to read it, the in-
terrogator began slapping him about the
head, and eventually Mohammed added
his fingerprint to the document. After
that, the beatings mostly stopped, and
instead the guards set about having fun
at his expense. By his tenth day in prison,
they were taking him out of the cell
and telling him to pretend to be a mon-
key in front of other guards and inmates.
They made him sit on top of another
prisoner and pretend to ride him like
a donkey. On the sixteenth day, he was
transferred to another facility, where
some 300 prisoners were crammed into
a room about 25 by 20 feet. Mohammed
would sleep standing up and spent most
of the rest of the time hunkered down
on his knees. But there was a window
which gave him hope.
The following day, along with 200 other
men, Mohammed was taken to a mili-
tary court and charged with incitement
against the government, burning gov-
ernment buildings, and making and dis-
tributing videos against the government.
Basically, Mohammed says wryly, lots of
things against the government. He told
the judge hed been kept in conditions
fit for an animal and that he hadnt done
anything wrong. At that point, he was
transferred to a different court, told not
to do it again, and then released.
T
he Syrian regime is winning
every battle it picks with the armed
opposition. Two days after my trip
to Homs, the FSA in Baba Amr an-
nounced it would strategically with-
draw from the neighborhood: It was
running low on weapons, it said, and
wanted to spare what remained of the
civilian population. The army is now try-
ing to clear Homs of what it calls armed
gangs, just as it did in Douma, Kafr
Batna, and Harasta. After that, it will
likely turn its attention to other pockets
of resistance farther afield. According to
the United Nations, about 9,000 people
have been killed so far, and, according to
the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, 230,000
have been displaced from their homes;
18,000 are thought to be detained in gov-
ernment prisons.
Like Nadia, an increasing proportion
of Syrians feel that the only way to over-
come the government is to meet force
with military force. But many others,
like Mohammed, fear Syria might de-
generate into another Iraqa virulent
hotbed of sectarian fiefdoms and armed
gangs. Some older activists I met, ren-
dered powerless by the daily catalogue
of death and suffering, have become de-
pressed and fatalistic.
And yet, despite the increasingly grim
situation, I was struck by the optimism
of Syrias new opposition. As Moham-
med and I had hastily departed the fu-
neral procession on the day we met, our
sprint slowing to a stroll, Id pressed him
on whether he resented the countrys re-
ligious minorities, many of whom didnt
seem to be taking any interest in the up-
rising or were quietly taking the govern-
ments side. Our revolution isnt a race,
its more like a marathon, he responded,
jokily imitating the labored jogging of
a long-distance runner. Some people
are there from the beginning, and many
others join only half-way through. But,
by the finish line, were all going to be
moving at the same pace and running
along together. d
James Harkin is a London-based writer. His
latest book is Niche: Why the Market No
Longer Favours the Mainstream.
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