The Latest From Damascus

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC now, what the revolution in Syria might mean for Syrians and for everybody else. People are asking so many questions. Will the new leaders respect democracy and human rights more than the two generations of brutal rule by the Assad family? Can the many refugees, millions, safely return home? Why have the United States and Israel already staged military operations there in the very first days of Assad being gone?

Could the revolution come next to Syria's ally, Iran? As our guest on this today laments in a new article, why wasn't the UN doctrine of the responsibility to protect ever enforced over the last decade and more as the regime's war crimes mounted? Our guest is Mohammed Sergie, Persian Gulf regional editor for the news organization Semafor. He is also from Syria's second largest city, Aleppo. Mohammed, thanks so much for your time today. Welcome to WNYC.

Mohammed Sergie: Thank you for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Would you tell us some of your own story first? I see you grew up in Aleppo, Syria's second largest city like I said. Population, around two million if I have my numbers right. You were working as a journalist in New York in 2012, covering finance, but switched at that time to document your home country's revolution. You wrote that you had left Syria after high school because you could. What year was that and why did you want to leave?

Mohammed Sergie: Yes, it was 1997, so I was actually born in the United States. My parents are both doctors and they were doing the residency there. They wanted to go back to their country and contribute to their people, so they moved us back. I was seven years old, went to Syria at a time in the mid-'80s where it was a pretty impoverished place. Just came out of a different war, a different civil war, and another brutal war by Assad's father, which he put down by killing 40,000 people in the fourth largest city in Syria at the time in 1982.

When we got there, we couldn't get bananas. There were no tissues. There was no Kleenex. It was just a very difficult upbringing, but things opened up. By the time I left high school, there was some optimism. Also, when I was done with high school in 1997, there was no internet there. They just allowed computers. Satellite dishes were still banned. We could only have two state TV channels to watch. We were restricted in terms of information. I had a US passport, came to the US, and wanted to pursue something else.

I became a journalist. I worked all around, worked in the Middle East. Then when I was in New York in 2012 or 2011 when the revolution started, my parents were still in Aleppo. I actually covered some of the stories. They were front-page stories in The Wall Street Journal about the protest with no byline, which is very unusual for the journal to publish because it was only my reporting. I couldn't put my name on it to protect them at the time.

Brian Lehrer: Wow.

Mohammed Sergie: Once they left in 2012, which was a crazy thing, they left when the battle of Aleppo began, packed up and came to the US. I took the flight the opposite direction and went right into the war.

Brian Lehrer: Wow, because it was safe for your parents for you to cover the war and it was the time of the so-called Arab Spring in 2012. What did you think you were returning to Syria to document?

Mohammed Sergie: I wanted to write a different type of story. The story that initially began were peaceful protests that caused a fracture of the Syrian military. When the government started shooting down protesters on the street, it was week after week of 100 people being killed every Friday. They finish their Friday prayers, come out, they protest, kill 100 people, then they go in and bury them the next day, and then they shoot another 20 to 30 people while they're burying them on the funeral procession.

This continued on for about six months or so. After that, people started breaking away. They started defending themselves. The government actually, initially, they would leave arms for people to pick up so that they can say that they're fighting against terrorists and armed rebels, right? They didn't want to be portrayed as fighting against their people. This then turned into a bit more of an armed conflict.

The government probably made the wrong mistake. They made a mistake. The Assad regime thought that they could quell it, but people just hated them so much. Once they smelled this whiff of freedom that they can get rid of them, they really rebelled. In 2012, when I was going, that's when a lot of other neighboring countries started to get involved in financing some of the groups.

Then, of course, there was Al-Qaeda militants that came through from Iraq and from Waziristan. They also sent a contingency. We got everybody in Syria. They came from all over the world to come and fight this holy war in my country. I felt that the Western media, which I am a part of and was a part of, would come into Syria and take a look. There's 20 million people. They would go and find the three or four foreign fighters that they can find in a town.

They would ignore everything else that was happening. The majority of the people who were killed were civilians. The majority of the people who are fighting are Syrians, and yet they just want to focus on these foreign international terrorists, which I get why it was the main story, but it wasn't the story of the revolution. The people that actually moved this country are the people living there.

Brian Lehrer: Important context.

Mohammed Sergie: Yes, I wanted to document their stories.

Brian Lehrer: Important context even to relay now, even all these years later, but then you write that you stopped covering the war in 2014, disillusioned by a world that had forsaken the Syrian people. How so?

Mohammed Sergie: This was something that I grew up. [chuckles] I wasn't young when I was doing this, but I thought that never again was a thing. I mentioned the former Syrian-- He was an appointee from President Obama, Fred Hof. Very fantastic diplomat and a great American to boot. Brilliant, brilliant man. He just couldn't understand why this is being allowed. He was actually part of the backchannel discussions with Iran on their nuclear program. There was this, let's say a calculus that was done.

How much should we allow the Assad regime to kill and the Iranians and their proxies to maim and slaughter in this country in order to come up with a nuclear deal with Iran, which is a greater national security threat to both Israel and the US and everyone else? I get it. That, I understand. I never thought that that would be part of the discussions in real life when people who honestly were willing to take any sign from Americans when Robert Ford at the time, who was the US Ambassador to Syria, there was an ambassador there in 2011, he went to the protests in Hama, the fourth largest city, which were incredible protests, also came up with great songs.

When he went there and he relayed what he saw, he's like, "These are people who like America and we should be able to support and put as much pressure as possible." You went against this dictatorship that obviously wants to stay in power and Iran, which has this project that stems-- they call it the Axis of Resistance or Shia crescent, whatever you want to call it. Basically it's to project power into Israel to contain Israel's response on Iran. With all those factors playing, use chemical weapons, kill as many people as you want. Now that the torture chambers are opened in Syria, we're starting to see what this regime looks like and what we knew and what honestly-

Brian Lehrer: -what the world ignored. Would you have wanted to see the United States military or any other outside force with enough firepower to go to war against the Assad government do so? You're talking about 2012, '13, '14. The world had just seen how that turned out in Iraq.

Mohammed Sergie: The request was no-fly zone. That was the request. Don't allow a blanket of cover for about 50 kilometers south of the Turkish border so that the people who have already rebelled and have gained and had won the territory from the Assad regime. What we're looking at now, we say the rebels came out of a small enclave. They actually controlled about 60% or 70% of the country at the time on the ground.

They were just sitting ducks and being picked up from the air and being bombed using what they call barrel bombs. These are very indiscriminate, very large weapons. It didn't allow the Syrian people who were controlling this territory to even have a breath. All they could think about was, "Where's the next bomb going to come? We need to rebuild our field hospitals and provide aid." They were asking for a no-fly zone. The whole thing was like, "How much is it going to cost? How do we deconflict?" Russia wasn't there at a time, so there was no deconflicting with Russia. It was a no-fly zone. Nobody was asking for boots on the ground. The boots on the ground were actually Syrians and they were already there.

Brian Lehrer: You characterized--

Mohammed Sergie: By the way, sorry, the Patriot missile systems that were installed in southern Turkey were to protect the NATO ally, which is Turkey, and that's great. They literally would shoot down missiles and rockets that were coming from Syria if they were going to go into Turkish territory. If they landed 5 kilometers into Syrian territory and took out 50 people in a camp, literally, the missile systems would just watch those Scuds and other types of missiles just drop down on people.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, I wonder if we have any Syrians or Syrian Americans or people with other connections to the country listening right now who would like to call in and tell us how you're feeling seeing this revolution unfold. What happened to you or your family under the Assads? What do you hope or fear about what may come now or anything you want to say or ask? Anyone with ties to Syria, first priority right now if you happen to be listening. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or anyone else may call to or text with a question for our guest, Mohammed Sergie, Persian Gulf regional editor for the news organization Semafor. 212-433-9692, call or text.

Mohammed, you characterize what happened here now as a revolution. You use that word, "A complete reversal of the old order, a fight for freedom against tyranny that most people, even those in other oppressive states, can't imagine," you write. For outsiders who never did pay much attention to Syria's domestic situation, how would you begin to describe the nature or extent of that tyranny that you say even people in other repressive states can't imagine?

Mohammed Sergie: Yes, it's a repressive state. I live in the Middle East, so I'm surrounded by them. I'm fortunate to live in the Gulf where, for all of their critique that you have these governments, they actually have a good social contract with their people and people are treated with dignity. In Syria, the government runs it, or the Assad regime really, the small elite that were around it. In Arabic, we say they run it as a mazrah, as a farm. We're just livestock in their farm.

From petty things like paying bribes just to get routine stuff done at the bureaucracy. I myself was hit a few times just walking down the street with overzealous security guards and soldiers just trying to have fun. The real issues that we had were political repression, right? Anybody who would speak out about even the smallest things in government or critique the ruling family would just end up in prison and end up in prison for the smallest of things and for very, very long time in inhumane conditions.

Brian Lehrer: In fact, you describe survivors emerging now from dungeons, you use that word, in Syria that are just a few meters away from trendy bars and cute shops. What kinds of places are you referring to when you use the word "dungeon"?

Mohammed Sergie: They're out right now. The large ones are called Sednaya. That's getting all the headlines and the images are out there. Well, actually, I don't recommend anybody to look at them. I've been to Auschwitz. I've been to these places. It's medieval. That prison itself is more of a concentration camp or an extermination camp. You see the clothes just piled up. We were expecting to see far more inmates, detainees in that prison, but it's now clear that they were just killed there in Sednaya.

The other ones in Aleppo when Aleppo was liberated last week. That's my town right across the street from my father's clinic. My father was an ophthalmologist. I didn't even know this prison existed. I guess there's a small jail, but they opened up the doors at night. It was just a stream of women running out of it. I guess there was a women's prison right there. We didn't even know about it. I knew of a different prison. There was a businessman who my father knew growing up in Aleppo. He had a deal that just didn't go well with a member of the intelligence.

They put him in a cell. He told us the story. He was in a cell in a building on a residential street, but it was multiple floors below ground. They kept him there and whipped him until he made the intelligence official hole on the deal. He had to take a loss and make them hole. These stories were constant, right? It wasn't just people embellishing. It's just the nature of this type of government. Now, we're calling it the most brutal one in the Middle East. It's by far the most brutal one. You don't hear this kind of stuff happening again across the Gulf or even in North Africa and stuff like that.

Brian Lehrer: Now, Assad is gone. He fled to Russia. Thinking back, Egypt's ruler, Hosni Mubarak, as we start to wonder what will come next in Syria, Hosni Mubarak was toppled back during the Arab Spring. We covered the jubilation on this show. In fact, we happened to have an Egyptian democracy advocate guest in our studio, the moment Mubarak's departure was announced. She cried on the air. Tears of joy, tears of hope, but then a few different governments with their own repressive natures have followed. Is Egypt, in any way, a cautionary tale for Syria?

Mohammed Sergie: They all are. They all are. Egypt. I wouldn't even look further. I would say Afghanistan and the return of the Taliban, given the affiliation of the commander who led this latest battle, the final battle that toppled the regime. Huge concerns about that. The thing is we do have a little bit of optimism in a sense. He's been giving the right signals. His fighters have been disciplined. This latest group of fighters that he's had seem to have been trained pretty well.

I don't know if this is true because I actually don't know who they are. Maybe we'll find out later. From what I've seen, they're younger. The pool of younger cadets in that territory are the children of internally displaced Syrians who had to go live in that enclave. Are these the kids that were going home? Are these the ones who were 10 years old when they were displaced? Five, 10 years later, let's say, in their early 20s have been trained up and they're going back.

Hopefully, they haven't been indoctrinated into something that's a new kind of darkness for Syria. After 14 years of this and, honestly, not even 14 years, I'm 44 years old. This is the regime that I've had my entire life. I can tell you, the bar is super low. Obviously, we don't want them to kill 600,000 people in the next decade. If they are repressive but not murderous, the Syrian people will feel that this is a major upgrade than what they've had.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. What a tragic low bar.

Mohammed Sergie: Yes, I agree. Nobody wants to go for that low bar. The aspirations of the Syrian people are far greater than that. One thing that I put in the story, and this is something you can see in all of our coverage of Semafor Gulf, we want to include the reverberations in the region and the flow of capital and the economics behind it. The GDP per capita, adjusted for inflation, cost-of-living metrics is lower today than it was in 1960 and lower today than when the Ba'ath Party had their coup in 1963 and the Assad regime. They've taken the country and actually brought it back half a century. The bar of theirs are really low, yes.

If there's reconstruction and some sort of optimism, some sort of investment, people will feel better. Hopefully, the other positive thing that we have is six and a half million Syrians are refugees abroad. Many of them had difficult times being abroad, but many of them have also gained tremendous skills. That's something that you can look at and say, "Well, if some of these people come back and find an environment and the government that's willing to accept expertise and all indications are that they will accept this because they need to deliver a better economic future for everybody."

Brian Lehrer: Let me read you some text messages that are coming in from listeners. These two are along similar lines. One says, "I'm curious, do you think the new regime in Syria will be another Islamic majority regime like in Afghanistan?" I guess they mean with Taliban-like policies. Another one with a personal connection says, "I'm thrilled for the Syrians. Assad was a monster and had to go. I am concerned for my Armenian family there. They are Christians. Can your guests speak to that?"

Mohammed Sergie: Yes, the Afghanistan one, I think it's still to be seen. They haven't shown that tendency. I think they will be more Muslim and more closer to the fabric of society that is Syrian. Syria is a conservative majority Sunni Muslim society and the Assads were not in that sense. I think the new makeup will be that way. In terms of how they will treat Christians, the indications so far are good. Aleppo is a city. When I was growing up, it had 10% Christians. Some of my best friends are. One of my closest friends lives in a different country. I asked him, "How are you feeling?"

This was even before the toppling of the Assads. Just with Aleppo liberated from Assad, he goes, "Euphoric and worried, but mostly euphoric." They also understand that it's a heavy weight to have that the only way that you are going to be secure in a country and-- I don't know how secure they were to begin with. There's been a mass exodus of Christians since 1970 from Syria. The only way you're going to be secure is if you kill a million of your compatriots and put them in dungeons. I don't think that's what the Armenians want either. I think there's a way to provide security for everybody there, I hope.

Brian Lehrer: Another listener asks in a text, "Why is Israel using the fall of Assad as an excuse to bomb Syria?" That listener says "excuse." There's a New York Times headline that says, "Israel strikes military assets across Syria to keep them out of rebel hands." I'll add that in this country or from this country, the US military acknowledges dozens of US bombings to weaken ISIS in the transition. How do you understand why now and how it may affect anything there or, internationally, these Israeli and US military strikes the last few days?

Mohammed Sergie: On the Israeli side, I'm going to say it openly because I'd like to be open in this discussion and I think it's good to hear. My Syrian friends will hate me for it as well as Palestinians and others. Look, Israel has national security interests. This is a great opportunity for them to degrade basically any type of threat that could emerge, so why not? I think that's probably how they're looking at it. It doesn't seem like they've targeted civilians as far as I can tell. I don't think there have been civilian deaths, but I could be mistaken.

I'm honestly not checking on every death, but it seems like it's mostly material. The weapon systems, I think there's still some chemical weapons out there. For me, I've only seen Syrian military hardware being used to kill Syrians. I don't find it to be a necessary deterrent for foreign powers. No foreign power wanted to invade us even when we were being slaughtered on social media. I'd rather not be there, but that's my personal view. I understand. Everybody wants to have a strong military.

Brian Lehrer: There's so much more we could get into, but we don't have time for it in this segment about Syria's relationship with Iran now. They've been allies. Now, as Syria transitions from Shiite rule to Sunni rule, maybe not so much. That might have implications for Israeli security on, I guess, the positive side and Saudi security and other Gulf states security on the positive side.

We have time for one more question. I'm going to put it in the context of international relations, but based in Washington and the current transition to the Trump administration because a listener writes, "This is a reminder that Tulsi Gabbard," who has been nominated as Trump's national intelligence director, "that Tulsi Gabbard defended Assad's regime and as such, the torture and detention camps." Anything from where you sit on Tulsi Gabbard or is that too far outside of your beat?

Mohammed Sergie: It's a little bit outside my beat. I know exactly who she is and what she said. I've kept tabs myself. I have to say, if I'm going to take a page from the new commander and conqueror of Syria, Ahmed al-Shar'a, who used to be known as Abu Mohammad al-Julani, the former Al-Qaeda member, he said we should be merciful and open a new page. If she'd like, I would do the same. People have opinions. People make decisions.

I believe hers was very, very wrong to even consider that the Assad regime is someone we can do business with. On the other hand, in national security type of requests and cooperation, the United States has done business with the Assad regime. It's documented when we were what is called extraordinary renditions. Some were done with the Assad regime. Very famously, a Canadian citizen was tortured there and then released. Sometimes you make deals with dark powers, so that's my--

Brian Lehrer: There, we leave it with Mohammed Sergie, Persian Gulf regional editor for the news organization Semafor, in this case, Semafor Gulf, who, as he's been telling us, has a background in Syria's second largest city, Aleppo, a family background and a childhood background. Thank you very much for joining us today. We really appreciate your insights.

Mohammed Sergie: Thank you, Brian.

 

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