Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [79]
“I already don’t believe it.”
“Houthi’s dead.”
“What?”
“Houthi’s dead. They killed him in a cave last night.”
“Who did?”
“The Yemeni army. There was a big shootout. He’s dead.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah! I just heard about it from some contacts. Top officials.”
“COME ON!” I shouted at him. “Are you kidding? You expect me to believe that?”
Since our afternoon of qat and Snoop, formalities had fallen away.
“It’s true.” He spread his hands. “I swear to God. It’s true.”
“I can’t believe you. Do you think I’m an idiot?”
“I swear.”
“This is insulting, Faris.”
“All right, fine. But it’s true. You’ll find out soon enough on your own. I’m trying to give you a tip.”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“Suit yourself.”
“Well, wait. Can you get somebody else to talk about it with me? Somebody from the military, intelligence …?”
“They’re all in meetings. About Houthi.”
“Later?”
“We’ll see.”
Faris’s story was true. Or at least, it became recorded history. The defense and interior ministries released a joint statement. The wires picked it up. I wrote 612 words that appeared on page A-3 of the Los Angeles Times on September 11, 2004. Everybody pretended this was the end of the war we’d never seen. But Houthi had a father who took over for him, and the guerrillas raged on. He had brothers, too. And so it went, and so it goes. The unseen war is pounding along still. Last time I flew out of Sanaa, in 2007, I sat with a friend on the plane back to Cairo. Just before takeoff, we watched fighter jets roar off into the sky, one after the next, loaded up with bombs.
“Jesus,” he said. “They’re pounding the hell out of something.”
“Yes,” I agreed, “it looks that way.”
TWELVE
A CITY BUILT ON GARBAGE
On Valentine’s Day in 2005, hundreds of pounds of explosives roared in the heart of Beirut. Death had been dispatched for Rafik Hariri. The blast was strong enough to tear a hole in the city, and to expose Lebanon as a country divided.
A few words about Hariri: He was a sixty-year-old Sunni Muslim, and he was rich beyond all dreaming. He had grown up poor in the southern city of Sidon. When he came of age he set off for Saudi Arabia, ingratiated himself to the royal family, and earned billions in construction. He waited out Lebanon’s civil war there, rubbing robed elbows with sandalwood-scented Saudi princes and gathering bottomless stores of money. When peace came at last to Lebanon, so did a reinvented Hariri, flesh packed into fancy suits, throwing cash to orphans and scholarships and mosques like a Muslim Rockefeller, to build his mansion and let them whisper about the source of his wealth. He came home fresh and rich to a cowering nation with the audacity to imagine that he could reinvent his country just as he had reinvented himself. He became the prime minister and, stone by stone, he rebuilt downtown. He lured tourists back. He flew Pavarotti on his private 727 to sing at Beirut’s rebuilt sports stadium, the one Israel had bombed at the start of the 1982 invasion.
Hariri was not universally adored. His manic reconstruction had helped saddle the country with $30 billion in debt and, moreover, he colluded with the Syrian government, which had been invited under a 1989 peace deal to linger in Lebanon after the civil war as a de facto occupying power. But then, in those years, no important leader in Beirut spurned the road to Damascus; they all cut deals with Syria’s Assad dynasty. But recently, Hariri’s loyalties had shifted. He was trying to get Syria out of Lebanon; he was conspiring with Washington and Paris for a UN resolution. He told his friends that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad threatened him: I would rather break the country over your head than lose it. And then the bomb struck his motorcade. He had left Parliament that morning and finished his coffee at a café on Beirut’s resurrected Place de l’Étoile. The explosion killed his bodyguards and his former economy minister; it killed twenty-one people along with Hariri.
Hariri’s mansion loomed over the apartment blocks and tightly packed shops