In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [25]
Looking up from a story on a council of ministers meeting, I saw Nouar al-Shara—daughter of foreign minister Farouk al-Shara and the NGO’s external relations coordinator—staring at me while nibbling on a carrot. Of all my colleagues at FIRDOS, Nouar was always the most polite, so I greeted her with a smile and asked her how she had spent her evening the day before.
“Didn’t you hear? They bombed us last night,” she said in between bites. Then she raised her eyebrows, grabbed her coffee mug, and walked out of the kitchen.
As the first lady’s premier NGO, FIRDOS’s office had one of Syria’s fastest Internet connections, so I jumped online and checked the English-language media. After a bit of frantic searching, I finally found the story on the English-language site of the Israeli paper Haaretz. Israeli planes had bombed a Palestinian camp at Ain Saheb, fifteen miles outside Damascus. The raid was in response to a suicide bombing in a Haifa restaurant that had killed nineteen people two days before; responsibility for the bombing had been claimed by the Palestinian terrorist group Islamic Jihad. Israel held Syria responsible for the attack because Islamic Jihad’s offices in Damascus remained open, despite Assad’s pledge to Powell a few months earlier. Syria claimed that it had in fact closed the offices but that only “media representatives” remained in each office’s information bureaus.
My heart started to race. The last time Israel had bombed Syria was during the October 1973 War, which happened to have begun nearly the same day thirty years before. The surprise attack by Syria and Egypt against Israel had been thwarted a few days later by a massive Israeli counterattack. After countless rounds of “shuttle diplomacy” by Kissinger, both sides had signed a disengagement agreement in May 1974, and since then, Syria’s border with Israel was the country’s quietest one.
I ran a few hundred yards down the street to the SEBC offices to see Rola. Through her open office door, I could see her frantically wading through the stacks of papers on her desk. Without looking up from her desk, she simply said, “I heard,” and motioned for me to sit down. For the next ten minutes, she said nothing; instead she nervously searched through the drawers of her desk, then slammed them shut. She then wheeled her desk chair over to me, looked me in the eyes, and said, “We might need to go to Jordan to support the president and the first lady from there.”
I swallowed hard and thought, Jordan? Why would that be necessary? Is the regime about to fall?
“I know it’s hard to understand,” Rola said. “But everyone knows that the Assad regime is based on a sort of understanding between Israel and the Assad family. That understanding was broken last night.”
Panic filled my head. My Syrian friends had told me countless times about the “rules of the game” between Israel and Syria: the Assad family rules Syria, it doesn’t directly attack Israel, and it keeps Syria stable and the Muslim Brotherhood in check. In return, Israel agrees not to attack Syrian soil. Up until this point, however, I had just chalked this up to the conspiratorial nature of politics in the Levant, which often attributed events to the playing out of a sinister plot. Throughout Bashar’s early years in power, there were constant rumors of conflict between the president and the “old guard”—political and security officials appointed by Bashar’s father who continued to serve the new president. While no one was able to specifically name members of this “old guard,” most believed that the group was headed by the Syrian vice president, Abdel Halim Khaddam, the man many held as responsible for the crackdown that ended the Damascus Spring shortly after Bashar came to power. Driving the panic home, Rola said, “I’m going to pay you before the Syrian pound crashes.”
I bid Rola good-bye and ran downstairs, one floor below, to the