In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [59]
While Syria’s deepening relationship with Iran made international headlines, the regime began to reorient its rhetoric and propaganda toward Islam. At first, the symbolism was largely political. On the streets of Damascus, posters with images of Assad, Ahmadinejad, and Nasrallah, all surrounded by roses, began appearing on shop facades and car rear windows. Larger banners with Syria is protected by god were strewn throughout the Syrian capital. Syrian flags, with the slogan written into the middle white band alongside two stars—reminiscent of Saddam Hussein’s addition of “Allahu akbar” (God is great) to the Iraqi flag after his forces were driven out of Kuwait in 1991—hung from buildings. State-owned radio and TV repeated the slogan so many times that it quickly turned into a mantra.
By January 2006, however, there were real signs that the regime was reorienting itself away from its secular past and toward Islam. In September 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. States throughout the Arab world demanded that the Danish government apologize for the incident. Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s refusal to do so, because his government “does not control the media,” as it would violate “freedom of speech,” fell well short of most Syrians’ expectations.
On the morning of February 4, banner-wielding protesters began gathering near Rouda Square in Damascus for what would be the biggest diplomatic incident since the storming of the American ambassador’s residence in 2000 in response to US-coalition air strikes on Iraq.
Around 3 PM, demonstrators marched toward the Danish embassy located in the adjacent neighborhood of Abou Roumaneh, where Leila and I were sitting in that neighborhood’s local Kentucky Fried Chicken—Syria’s first Western fast-food restaurant. As I tucked into my three-piece-chicken combo meal, I noticed a swelling crowd through the restaurant’s front windows. When the demonstrations first started, uniformed security services patrolled the streets and traffic policemen directed cars across the district’s main thoroughfare. Soon, however, the waves of protesters could not be controlled. Leila and I rushed out of the door to see what was going on. The crowd was angry but not unruly. Uniformed security agents were gathered at the far end of the boulevard, where a perpendicular street led to the three-story villa housing the Danish, Swedish, and Chilean embassies.
As I rounded the corner of Abou Roumaneh Street, pushing my way through security forces dressed in olive green, I began to hear something that sounded like popcorn popping. About thirty yards down the street, protesters were stoning the Danish embassy. I stopped in my tracks and took a photo.
As I got closer to the embassy, I heard calls of “Allahu akbar” punctuated by sounds of shattering glass. Around a thousand protesters were pushing hard toward the embassies, packed into an area the size of half a football field. Flags of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad fluttered in the air. Banners with enigmatic slogans in English, such as we are ready printed in blood-red ink, dotted the crowd. I was a bit surprised, since Syrian protest banners are usually handmade, full of horrible English spelling and grammar mistakes. What happened next helped me understand just what that slogan meant, a little about where it was coming from, and who was behind it.
The front gate of a church adjacent to the embassy complex was open, with no signs of forced entry. Half a dozen Syrian men, between the ages of fifteen and fifty, were trying to scale the wall of the embassy from the church garden. As the crowd cheered the