In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [92]
Sitting at my desk, I could hear a deep humming noise outside our office. I assumed the noise was from welders working next door, a building which had been under continuous construction since the day we moved into office in 2005. The humming got louder and began to pulse, which reminded me of the sound you might hear in a sci-fi film like The War of the Worlds when a spacecraft is about to attack.
Suddenly, a trainee in the magazine’s writing program came running into my office. “Evacuate the building!” he screamed.
Running out of the office, the acrid smell of burning plastic filling the air, I immediately saw the problem as I got out of the door: smoke was billowing from the Free Zone’s transformer building, located next door to the Syria Today offices. When the staff reached the other side of the street and joined employees of other local businesses fleeing the chaos, I could see flames and smoke coming from different electricity-transmission boxes along the main thoroughfare. Instead of blowing some fuse or breaker somewhere in the Syrian grid, the meltdown continued, the humming growing louder as sparks flew out of the corrugated metal vents of the transformer building.
Several hundred employees of the various Free Zone businesses just stared in disbelief as the owners of cars near the transformer building frantically tried to move them out of harm’s way. Othaina, braving smoke and mortal danger, ran back into the Syria Today offices, threw the main electricity switch, then ran back out. Thara, our office administrator, wept openly. “It’s just chaos,” she said to me in English, wiping tears away from her cheeks.
About twenty minutes later, someone somewhere turned off that entire sector of the Damascus grid to stop the meltdown, and the humming stopped. An olive-green Land Rover with blackened windows and stencils of Bashar’s silhouette then arrived at the transformer building. The license plates indicated they were from one of the country’s security branches. No one got out of the vehicle, which sat there for two or three minutes, then drove around to the junction boxes that were on fire, and sped down the street and out of the Free Zone.
Syria Today staff, their faces in shock, watched as firemen put out the flames. When it was over, I just told them to go home—we could operate without Internet service, but without power, there was simply nothing to do.
The July meltdown was just the latest sign that Syria’s infrastructure was under considerable stress from increased demand and difficulty in performing maintenance due to US sanctions. In mid-June, ADSL Internet connections all over the city died, paralyzing businesses such as Syria Today, which had benefited from the “new economy” that Bashar’s opening up to the outside world had made possible. In the past, a couple of phone calls and a few thousand pounds to our wasta, or influential friends, in the state-owned telecommunications establishment would have solved the problem. But this time was different: no matter how many times we called, no one was able to fix the problem.
The magazine’s IT manager said that there was nothing she could do, as the problem was happening all over the country. Much slower dial-up connections still worked, however, so we set up an Internetaccess terminal in the newsroom. Productivity ground to a halt, though, and most employees simply stayed home and used their personal dial-up accounts.
Flying on Syrian Arab Airlines, the state-owned national carrier that was later rebranded Syrian Air, had become an increasing problem as well. US sanctions on Syria banned all exports of goods with more than 10-percent American content. A waiver in the sanctions allowed exports of repair parts to Syria via export licenses, applications for which Syrian Air’s suppliers had to file with the US Commerce Department in Washington. During the 1990s, when relations between Washington and Damascus were arguably at their all-time best (as Syria was involved in