For Palestinians, Syria is a closing door and an opening window

The crimes attributed to the Assad regime against Syrians, Palestinians, and Lebanese make it very hard for anyone to shed a tear on a tyrant regime that controlled its people with steel and fire

By ELIAS ZANANIRI/THE MEDIA LINE DECEMBER 16, 2024 17:50 Updated: DECEMBER 16, 2024 17:52

PEOPLE CELEBRATE the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad, in Sednaya, Syria, this week. The spectacular collapse of the Assad regime has introduced both uncertainty and opportunity, the writer notes. (photo credit: AMMAR AWAD/REUTERS)

The Syrian regime under Hafez Assad and his son, Bashar, had always been a puzzle for the Palestinians. They couldn’t figure out if it was a regime they loved to hate or they hated to love.

Although Syria had the chance to play a pivotal role in the region, it focused on fighting the Palestinians a lot more than the effort it made to fight Israel, the perceived occupier of the Palestinian people. Ask any Palestinian about the Syrian regime under the father and later his son, and he will immediately tell you it never shot a bullet at Israel after the 1973 October War. For the Palestinian majority, this is not only an indication but damning evidence that Syria was not on the side of the Palestinian national rights.

The Syrian regime offered lots of lip service to the Palestinians. Still, it spared no effort to take over the PLO and turn it into a Syrian proxy, like Ahmed Jibril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) and Zuheir Mohsen’s As-Sa’iqa, Arabic for thunderbolt. Most Palestinians in Syria knew these two as senior officers in the country’s secret service.

The Arafat-Assad animosity

Understanding the complexities of the love/hate relationship between Syria and the PLO requires a return to the mid-1960s of the last century when Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat moved to Syria to prepare for launching the Fatah movement in 1965. Syria was chosen because of its joint borders with Israel and because the Baath Party that ruled the country presented itself as “the revolutionary regime” whose aim was to liberate Palestinian territories. It wasn’t.

Tension erupted between Arafat and Ahmed Jibril, the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Front. Yusef Urabi, a Syrian officer of Palestinian origin, initiated a meeting to ease the tension. Neither Arafat nor Jibril attended the meeting; they sent their representatives instead.

PEOPLE CELEBRATE in Damascus, this past Friday. It is hard to exaggerate the jubilation of the Syrian people when they heard the news about the fall of Bashar Assad, says the writer. (credit: YAMAM AL SHAAR/REUTERS)

Shortly after that meeting, Urabi was assassinated. Syrian Defense Minister Hafez Assad, who was a close friend of Urabi, ordered the arrest of Arafat. A three-judge court panel served Arafat with a death sentence. However, Salah Jadid, Syria’s de facto leader from 1966 to 1970, pardoned Arafat a while later. Assad never forgot or pardoned. His animosity to Arafat escorted his life’s phases one by one until his death. His son, Bashar, must have merged that animosity with his DNA. At the March 2008 Arab summit in Damascus, Bashar Assad urged Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to declare war on Israel and promised support. According to sources who attended the session, President Abbas responded that the Palestinians would happily join an army led by Syria to fight Israel but would not indulge in a war that some Arabs would only watch on television, express their remote sympathy, and do nothing to help.

During the September 1970 civil war in Jordan, Assad, by then the president, refrained from supporting the PLO against Jordan and sealed his country’s border with the monarchy to prevent Palestinian factions from fleeing Jordan into Syria. With the help of mutual friends of both Arafat and Assad, the former crossed the border into Syria along with some 2,000 Fatah fighters and from there to Lebanon, where they set foot in South Lebanon, which later became known as Fatahland.

Ahmad Jibril was a ruthless Palestinian whose allegiance to Assad’s regime came at the expense of his loyalty to his country and the Palestinian cause. The story of Bashar Sharif Ali Saleh, a Palestinian from the West Bank city of Jenin, illustrates how ruthless Jibril’s personality was.

Bashar was released upon the collapse of the Assad regime after spending 40 years in Syrian jails because Ahmad Jibril considered him a person of interest. In an interview with him at the Palestinian embassy in Damascus after his release, Bashar said he joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestinian territories -General Command, PFLP-GC, whose leader then was Ahmad Jibril.

One day, Bashar and a few volunteers were sitting in a room when Jibril suddenly entered. Everybody rose except for Bashar. “I know it was a mistake that I didn’t stand up, and instead, I shook Jibril’s hand while seated,” Bashar said.

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He added: “I should have behaved like the others. Jibril ordered his men to shave my head, strip me of my military uniform, and take me to jail. Since then, I was moved to three different jails, the last of which was Adra prison.” Before Adra, Bashar served 12 years in Sednaya Prison, the notorious torture center near Damascus. Videos and interviews with prisoners held in Sednaya and released by combatants belonging to Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham (Organization for the Liberation of the Levant) or HTS told unbelievable stories of how their wardens treated them.

Accounts of despicable torture in Assad’s jails

Adra was one of the hellish jails where the Syrian regime locked its opponents. The former officer in charge of this lockup and torture facility, Samir Othman Al-Sheikh, who lives in the US, is facing three torture charges before a federal grand jury in Los Angeles. In 2020, Al-Sheikh immigrated to the US and, three years later, applied for citizenship.

Walid Barakat is a Palestinian who flew to Damascus in 1982 to enroll in one of its universities. He was arrested upon arrival and sent to three different prisons until he was taken to Sednaya Prison in 2001, where he stayed until his release after HTS combatants stormed Damascus. He couldn’t even tell why he was arrested.

Another prisoner told reporters upon his release from one of the former regime’s prisons that he was a witness when a newly detained activist was brought to prison and interrogated by one of the guards. According to the witness who featured a video captured in the streets of Damascus, the guard asked the newcomer to the detention center about his job. When the man said he was an ophthalmologist, the guard pushed his finger into the man’s eye and gouged it out.”

Michel Kilo, a well-known Syrian opponent of Assad’s regime, gave an interview to Dubai TV in 2012 and told the story of a boy who was born to his mother in jail and never left the cell until the moment he met him. The following testimony of Kilo is taken from that televised interview:

“I was held at a military interrogation facility. One guard, whose two brothers were in jail, asked what my name was. We were forbidden from giving our real names and were told to identify ourselves based on our cell numbers. The guard was nice enough that I told him my name. A few days later, he came at around 0300 hrs. to my cell and took me out. Locked behind sealed walls with no windows, we could not tell the time or differentiate day from night. The guard wanted me to tell a story to a little boy who was kept with his mother in another cell. Upon opening the cell door, the mother took her son to the corner and started crying and pleading, ‘Don’t rape me.’ The guard soothed her and said he brought an educated Syrian to tell her son a story. The guard looked at me and said, ‘You are a writer. I challenge you to tell a story to this boy.’ I started my story about a bird that flew to a tree. The boy interrupted me and asked, ‘What is a bird, and what is a tree?’ I felt devastated and frustrated as tears of sadness and pain ran down my face. The boy never saw anything apart from his cell walls.”

The boy’s mother was 26 years old. She was raped in prison, became pregnant, and gave birth to her son, who knew nothing about birds, trees, balls, playgrounds, or the sun.

Kilo, a Christian Syrian, was born in Latakia, near Assad’s ancestral hometown of Qardaha. He held many official positions in the country and was critical of the regime. He was first arrested in the 1970s and then in 2006 for three years. He died of COVID-19 in 2021 at a French hospital.

The Lebanese Civil War in the 1970s

Syria’s role in Lebanon during the civil war and after has always been controversial. Hafez Assad played all factions. He claimed his troops crossed into Lebanon to support the national forces against the Phalangists and other right-wing militias whose opponents branded them as isolationists. He then turned against the leftist and national forces to defend the isolationists. All that Assad wanted was control of Lebanon. He couldn’t care less who his targets were on a given day.

Ribhi Halloum was Yasser Arafat’s adviser in the mid-1970s. He said he was with Arafat and several Fatah Central Committee members in Damascus when they were invited to chat with President Hafez Assad. After a few minutes of an open meeting with the delegation, Assad asked Arafat to join him for a close tête-à-tête meeting in an adjacent room. Twenty minutes later, Arafat came out with a piece of paper and a disturbed facial impression. Halloum said: “Arafat asked us to join him as he left the palace. We entered our cars after Arafat swapped my driver with his and jumped into my car. He changed cars for security reasons, as his four or five cars’ entourage could be easily recognized. We hit the road to Beirut.”

Arafat, Halloum, and Khalil al-Wazir, the second in command of Fatah and the PLO forces, were in the car heading to Beirut. Al-Wazir, also known as Abu Jihad, was in the back seat with Halloum. He asked Arafat why he was so disturbed after meeting Assad. Arafat took that piece of paper out of his pocket and gave it to Abu Jihad, who looked at it and asked Arafat why those names were on the list. Arafat said, “Assad wanted us to kill all those on the list and, in return, promised to crown me the ruler of the region.” Abu Jihad took another look at the list and commented that it was such a weird list of key political players in Lebanon and Palestinian territories , right and left, patriotic and isolationist.

Abu Jihad suggested to convene the Central Committee to discuss the Syrian request. Arafat didn’t want to wait. He instructed the driver to head directly to Moukhtara, the Druze mountainous stronghold that looks down at Beirut. The Druze leader, Kamal Jumblatt, was number one on that hit list. He was eager to hear what Arafat’s decision was. Arafat promised to let him know within hours. To cut a long story short, Arafat sent a written response to Assad via Salah Khalaf, a member of the Fatah Central Committee and the one in charge of the overall security operation of Fatah. The message read: “I expected you to give me a list of Israeli army generals to target.” A day later, the Syrian forces in Lebanon shelled the Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp near Beirut so heavily that it became a symbol of the Syrian crimes and those of the Phalangists against the Palestinians.

In 1977, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat announced in a speech before the Egyptian Parliament that he wouldn’t hesitate to go to the Knesset and speak to the Israelis from its podium. Yasser Arafat was present. The Syrians wanted Arafat to come out openly and condemn Sadat for what he said. Arafat didn’t comment on Sadat’s speech and preferred to give time to see if Sadat meant what he said. At the time, Ali Mamlouk and Ali Haydar, both senior intelligence officers in Syria, went to Arafat’s office in Damascus and threatened to assassinate him and instate Mohsen of As-Sa’iqa in his place as PLO chairman. Arafat took their threat seriously. It wasn’t clear if Arafat wanted to join Sadat at the time, but the fact that the Syrians openly threatened to assassinate him lit the red light. Syria, for him, was no longer a haven for Fatah and the PLO. The threat also illustrated the deep efforts by the regime to penetrate the PLO and turn it into its proxy.

In a chat over WhatsApp with an old acquaintance who lives in Gaza, we discussed the potential fallouts of the latest regime change in Syria. He said most of those he knows in Gaza are perplexed not knowing what kind of Syria will emerge after Assad once the interim phase is over and democratic elections are held.

“However,” he said, “I can tell you for sure that getting rid of Hamas control in Gaza is an excellent victory, and so is the case with the disappearance of the Assad regime. Put them together, and you get a double victory that must serve our Palestinian cause away from cruelty and bloodthirst.”

Ahmed al-Sharaa, the HTS leader, expressed his belief that Syria needs to democratize all its institutions. Known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Golani, al-Sharaa told a Syrian television channel that many domestic issues in Syria need urgent treatment and solutions. Therefore, he added, the leaders of the new regime are not out there to fight Israel.

“We want the Iranian presence in Syria to end so Israel would have no more excuses to attack Syria,” he said. He sounded more like a leftist rather than an Islamist as he reasonably discussed the future he expects for Syria. He said, “Syria needs a transformation from the mentality of revolting against the tyranny of Assad’s regime into a state mentality where issues must be dealt with collectively and in cooperation with all segments of the society.”

Since he quit al-Qaida, al-Sharaa has done his homework correctly. He dropped his nom de guerre and preferred to be called by his real name. He also removed his al-Qaida camouflage, as he understood that it would not encourage the Syrian public to support him and his group. Modernizing Syrian governance is genuinely needed, and al-Sharaa is convinced that he and his colleagues in the new country’s command must follow this line.

It is uncertain if Syria will become a Western-style democracy. Only time can tell if Syria is moving in that direction. From a Palestinian perspective, it is better to have a neutral Syria than a country that proclaims to support the Palestinian national struggle while it does nothing. A senior Fatah member who graduated in Syria and spent most of his years in the country said he would prefer to see Syria sitting on the fence watching what happens in the region to a Syria that stabs the Palestinian people in their back. He added that Syria “is a closing door and an opening window.”

“We hope it will be a window of positive and fruitful change in a country that deserves to live in a democratic regime honoring human rights and individual liberties.”