In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [38]
As the snapping of cameras died down and the photographers got their fill of images, we just stood there, blankly staring at Bashar and his wife, not daring to speak. Reading the situation, he said with a big smile, “Before anyone asks for a photo, let’s take one together and get it out of the way.” The Syrian journalists laughed with relief and excitedly huddled around the president and first lady. The journalists’ faces were filled with glee—in a dictatorship like Syria, a photo with the president wasn’t for your scrapbook but for your office wall. Its message was elegantly blunt: “I’m connected—think twice about messing with me.”
It wasn’t until the bus ride back to Beijing, however, that I realized the degree to which Syria’s isolation during Hafez al-Assad’s rule made Syrians so suspicious of the outside world. I had not yet had a chance to talk with most of the Syrian journalists, so they didn’t know that I spoke any Arabic. I could hear a number of journalists sitting behind me in the bus talking about me. One in easy earshot said that I was “an American spy” and that the “first lady shouldn’t trust me.” One of them—a Syrian who worked with a wire service—struck up a conversation with me in which he said that he felt all foreign correspondents were spies. As I looked out of the window at the haze hanging above Beijing’s burgeoning skyline, I wondered if Joe Battat had to put up with such talk before China’s economic engine took off.
The first lady didn’t speak to either me or Rola on the entire trip. During a visit to a women’s center in Beijing, Rola sat on Asma’s right-hand side. When the first lady didn’t even look Rola’s way, I knew she was out of business as Asma’s handler. It was an inauspicious end to a job that Rola never had on paper. I, however, realized that if I was on the trip, I was somehow “OK” with the first lady.
Two days later, the palace’s press liaison announced that the president and the first lady would be returning to Syria early and forgoing a scheduled trip to Shanghai. No reason was given. Standing out on the tarmac at Beijing’s international airport in front of Assad’s Syrian Air 747, members of the press gossiped about the reasons for the early departure. For days, the first lady had been limping badly during official functions. The press handlers told us that Asma had fallen while working out during her first day in Beijing. Most chalked up the early departure to her injury. Lebanese journalists on the delegation, who were being fed news from Beirut, said that Israel’s trade minister was also scheduled to visit Shanghai at the same time. Hundreds of Chinese companies were lining up to meet the Israeli minister, which apparently angered the Syrian president.
There were plenty of signs that the Chinese were not taking the Syrians very seriously. For example, only a handful of Chinese companies attended a meeting in Beijing with the Syrian businessmen who were accompanying Bashar. One Syrian businessman told me that the Chinese were not very interested in trade with Syria because its traders had a very bad reputation: many didn’t pay their debts, and most bought only irregular goods (seconds) and reconditioned Chinese products.
When I got back to Damascus, the city was abuzz with talk of why Assad had returned early from Beijing. One rumor speculated that there had been a foiled coup attempt. Another, backed up by other rumors in the United States and elsewhere in the region, said that American aircraft based out of Iraq had been violating Syrian airspace in hot pursuit of Baathists and “foreign fighters”—radical Muslims seeking to wage jihad in Iraq against US forces.
Getting confirmation of either report was impossible. However, when the Ministry of Information suddenly organized a supervised trip to take me and a group of journalists to the Syrian-Iraqi