Authors: Joby Warrick
U.S. officials watched the developments closely, sensing potential in the young Western-educated leader. What if Syria—so accustomed
to playing the part of agitator and rogue—could be persuaded to take a more constructive role in the region? It was a distant hope, at best. Syria under Bashar al-Assad remained a chief supplier of arms and cash to Lebanon’s Hezbollah militants, and a conduit for jihadists headed for Iraq. Damascus also possessed one of the world’s largest stockpiles of illegal chemical weapons, including deadly sarin gas. And yet there were hopeful signs. Assad’s security forces sometimes cooperated with the United States on counterterrorism cases, and the country’s intelligence service occasionally made a show of arresting terrorist recruits at the airport and border crossings. Moreover, Syria’s first family cultivated a public image that suggested a desire for closer ties to the West. Unlike his father, who preferred lectures and insults when entertaining Western guests, the younger Assad could hold a finely nuanced conversation on regional politics in flawless English. His wife, the elegantly beautiful Asma, was a British-raised economist who wore Christian Louboutin heels and promoted women’s rights and educational reform. Massachusetts senator John F. Kerry, the future U.S. secretary of state, was among a parade of American officials to pass through Damascus and pronounce Assad to be someone the U.S. government could work with.
“
My judgment is that Syria will move; Syria will change, as it embraces a legitimate relationship with the United States and the West and the economic opportunity that comes with it,” Kerry, then the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, said after a 2009 visit.
By late 2010, the Obama administration was ready for a bold step: it would appoint a U.S. ambassador to Syria for the first time since 2005, when relations between the countries hit a new low over alleged Syrian support for terrorism. To fill such an important post, the White House settled on a candidate with an impressive record for managing Middle East crises: Robert Ford.
The appointment had legions of doubters. So many senators opposed the notion of upgraded diplomatic relations with Syria that the White House dared not risk subjecting its candidate to the usual confirmation hearing. Instead, President Obama waited until Congress adjourned for the Christmas recess to name Ford as the fourteenth U.S. ambassador to Syria on December 29, 2010.
The president’s choice for the job had misgivings of his own. Ford’s distinguished service in Iraq had earned him his first ambassadorship in 2006, as the chief U.S. diplomat to Algeria, but two years had passed, and he was eligible for a new assignment. Ford considered Tunisia and Bahrain, both regarded as interesting but quiet postings. Syria, by contrast, was a notoriously brutal police state that openly supported anti-Israel militants. The job description there would consist of delivering regular scoldings to the regime over its support for terrorism.
“I don’t want to go to Syria,” Ford told his boss. “All I’ll be doing is fighting with the Assad government all the time.”
But he went. Just three weeks after his appointment, Ford was on his way to Damascus. A week after that, he was presenting his letters of credence to Assad in the presidential palace.
At the ceremonial meeting in Assad’s hilltop residence, Ford watched the Syrian leader carefully for clues about the personality behind the charcoal suit. Seated in a powder-blue chair in a reception hall, Assad was affable and charming, showing no trace of the condescension so common among the region’s palace-bred autocrats. He was tall and narrow-shouldered, with pale-blue eyes, and a trim mustache offsetting a weak chin; he spoke with the quiet self-assurance of a man who had grown into middle age without having to raise his voice. The meeting was going pleasantly enough until Ford gently broached the subject of the State Department’s most recent report on human rights, with its lengthy catalogue of Syrian abuses, including official repression, torture, and murder. No sooner were the words uttered than the host’s entire countenance changed. The volume never varied, but Assad was enraged.
“
The last country in the world that I’m going to take advice from is the United States,” he said in a low snarl. “Not on human rights. Not after what you’ve done in Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and Afghanistan.”
Ford listened politely, summoning up as much diplomatic reserve as he could.
“Mr. President, the issues you just raised are perfectly legitimate,” he said. “We should have to explain ourselves. But we’re going to raise our concerns with you, too. And if we’re going to make any
progress on this bilateral relationship, we’re going to have to have frank discussions about it.”
Historic events would ensure that no such discussions would take place. Within two weeks of the meeting, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was driven out of office. Four days after that, Libyan security forces fired into a crowd of protesters in Benghazi, setting off a civil war that would topple the Libyan leader, Muammar Qaddafi. In early March, rioters clashed with police in the capitals of Yemen and Bahrain. And at last Syria, having seemed impervious to sparks from the revolutions south of its borders, caught fire in the span of a single turbulent week. On March 18, violent protests broke out in the southern city of Dara’a after police arrested and tortured local teens for writing antigovernment graffiti. On March 20, a mob torched Baath Party buildings in Dara’a, and police fired back with live ammunition, killing fifteen. On March 25, huge crowds poured into the streets there and in other cities, from Hama and Homs in the west to Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, in the north. The House of Assad, so brutally efficient at keeping the peace at home, faced its worst domestic crisis in three decades, and the window for fruitful diplomatic engagement with the United States, its longtime adversary, slammed shut.
In Washington, State Department officials, scrambling to stay atop a half-dozen simultaneous meltdowns in the world’s most turbulent region, watched to see which path Syria’s uprising would take. Would Assad implement political reforms to try to stay ahead of the protesters, as the sovereigns of Jordan and Morocco had done? Would he share the fate of Egypt’s Mubarak, jettisoned by his own generals in a bid to preserve peace and their own skins?
Syria’s president quickly made his choice clear. From the beginning, Assad signaled a resolve to avoid the concessions that, in the minds of many of Syria’s elite, had directly precipitated the fall of Mubarak in Egypt. There would be no serious effort to accommodate protesters’ demands for political and economic reforms. Instead, Assad would seek to bludgeon, gas, and shoot his way out of the crisis. In the first week alone, at least seventy protesters were killed, and hundreds of others were thrown into makeshift holding cells.
The international watchdog Human Rights Watch later confirmed reports of
twenty-seven interrogation centers set up by Syrian intelligence, where detainees were beaten with clubs, whips, and cables and given electric shocks. Yet the protests continued to grow.
The suffering by ordinary Syrians was, in the view of many U.S. officials, not only tragic but also wholly avoidable, if Assad were a more capable leader. Syria’s biggest problems in 2011 appeared to be mostly economic: high unemployment, worsened by a prolonged drought that had sent rural villagers into the cities looking for work. The country’s myriad ethnic and sectarian divisions had mostly been subdued after decades of secular Baathist rule. Many of the early protesters in Aleppo and Hama were angry not at Assad per se but at corruption within the president’s inner circle. Frederic C. Hof, a former army expert on the Middle East who was appointed as special envoy to the region in 2009, wondered in the early weeks if Assad might still try to buy himself some goodwill by reining in some of his more extravagant relatives and dealing leniently with those protesting police brutality.
“
The country’s problems were being exacerbated by a general impression that Damascus elites were literally making out like bandits,” said Hof, recalling his thinking at the time. “The president had spoken about reform and so forth, and people thought,
inshallah
, maybe he’ll do something.
“If he had handled reform and protests smartly, he could have had himself crowned emperor of Syria,” Hof said.
Instead, with brutal displays of force—nearly all of it captured on cell-phone cameras—the Syrian leader managed to unite much of the country against him. He still controlled considerable assets. Of twenty-one million Syrians, Assad could reliably depend on members of his minority Alawite sect, which controlled the country’s elite army divisions and the security services. The remaining 87 percent of the population would have to be bought off or subdued. But how long could that last?
Not long. That was the consensus view of White House officials who watched Syria implode in the spring and summer of 2011. By April, Assad was deploying army troops against unarmed civilians.
By May, tanks barricaded the main squares of Hama, and snipers picked off individual protesters from rooftops. The demonstrations cooled for a while, then roared back to life in the early summer, seemingly unstoppable.
“The early intelligence was that Syria’s ‘spring’ was not likely to go anywhere—it would be killed in the crib, and in a vicious way,” said a senior U.S. official who monitored the daily cable traffic from Damascus. “Then the conventional wisdom shifted quickly. It went from ‘Nobody could get rid of Assad’ to ‘There’s no way to stop these people.’ ”
—
Robert Ford could not sit still. In twenty years of assignments in the Middle East, he had never failed to find a path to the turbulent center of whatever crisis happened to be unfolding in his host country. It was about to happen again in Syria, this time in a way that would capture the attention of millions of people and put the United States clearly on the side of the demonstrators—or so it seemed to the Syrians themselves.
Ford would admit to no particular bias, but in fact he owed a debt to ordinary citizens of Syria for kindnesses shown to him nearly three decades earlier. In 1983, Ford, then a skinny twenty-five-year-old student of Arabic with a mop of curly brown hair, made his first trip to Syria during a break in classes at the American University in Cairo. He and a schoolmate traveled by bus from Amman to Damascus and arrived in the Syrian capital very late, after most of the shops were closed. The city was packed with Iranian visitors on holiday, and the two Americans were turned away by one hotel after another. Just as they were resigning themselves to a night on the street in a strange city, a friendly hotel clerk called them over.
“You’ll never find a hotel this late at night,” the man said to the two dirty, road-weary foreigners. “Sleep at my house tonight, and I’ll bring you back here early tomorrow.”
Minutes later, the two youths were in the modest apartment where the man lived with his family. Though it was past midnight, the Syrian prepared a small supper, and the three stayed up talking for
hours. When it was time to sleep, the host apologized for not inviting the Americans to stay longer. “If you stay more than tonight, I will have the secret police knocking at my door tomorrow,” he explained.
Other Syrians Ford encountered were equally warm. Just days before, an American warship had shelled a Syrian troop position in the hills above Beirut. Yet, when Ford found himself on a bus filled with Syrian soldiers, he was treated with a graciousness that still stuck with him decades later. “Welcome!” the troops said after discovering two Americans on the crowded bus. Some gave up their seats for the foreigners, and others peppered them with questions about dating rituals and whether all American women were like the ones on the hit TV show
Baywatch
. In a more serious moment, one of the officers in the group pulled Ford aside to make a request.
“When you get back to America,” the officer said, “tell them we are not
barbar
”—barbarians.
Some twenty-eight years later, the government’s
barbar
were loose in cities throughout Syria, snuffing out ordinary lives. The working-class Syrians whom Ford had admired when he was a young man were organizing into neighborhood defense committees, the precursors of rebel militias. For now, nearly all the killing was being committed by one side, and it was hard to be dispassionate, even for a neutral diplomat whose job was to appeal to both sides for restraint. Whatever his personal feelings, Ford could not stray beyond the script approved by Washington, which, in the midsummer of 2011, was sharply divided over what to say. President Obama had not yet called on Assad to resign, as he had done more promptly in the cases of Mubarak and Qaddafi. Among some of the president’s aides arose new worries that the Syrian regime could suddenly collapse on itself before the U.S. administration could take a stand. The timing was critical: During Egypt’s uprising, Arab leaders lambasted Obama for symbolically abandoning Mubarak, a longtime U.S. ally, while he remained the country’s legitimate head of state. On the opposite side were Egyptian protesters who accused the White House of acting cowardly, waiting until Mubarak was all but finished before publicly breaking with him.
There were, however, ways to show support for peaceful protest
without uttering a word. Since the early weeks of the uprising, Ford’s senior staff had held low-key meetings with opposition leaders and posted carefully worded encouragement on the U.S. Embassy’s Facebook page. But Ford’s big gesture—the one that would infuriate the Assad regime and symbolically ally Washington with the protesters—grew out of a bid to prevent a massacre in Hama, a city in northwestern Syria where anti-Assad rallies were regularly drawing huge crowds. After weeks of clashes and scores of deaths, Assad fired the provincial governor on July 3, 2011, and deployed tanks and troops in rings around the city’s suburbs. An uneasy calm prevailed for three days, with large numbers of protesters occupying Hama’s center while Assad’s heavily armed security forces waited on the outskirts.
Ford watched the standoff from afar before making his move. He dispatched to Hama one of his aides, a twenty-six-year-old woman who passed easily between the capital and the outlying cities, for a personal assessment of the demonstrators and their intentions. She came back with photos and an impressive report: tens of thousands of people were gathering in the city’s main plaza daily, and—contrary to Syrian media accounts of looting, vandalism, and kidnapping—the crowds were as well behaved as anyone could hope. Ford relayed the reports back to Washington.