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to leave Syria,’ she added, ‘but I didn’t have the choice. I was
being threatened and I was becoming a threat for the activists
who were helping me.’
Then there were what I called ‘the Believers’, Assad’s
followers, some of them as devoted to him as St Paul had
been to Jesus, but others who were simply concerned that,
as a minority of a minority – Alawites are an offshoot of the
Shia branch of Islam – they would disappear if the radical
Sunnis came to power.
There was a sub-faction of the Believers who only wanted
to save their own skin: they did not want to get hauled
away to jail by Assad. They privately did not approve of the
regime’s torture cells and bombing raids on Aleppo, but they
found the news hard to believe, and, above all, they did not
want the radical Islamists in power.
Then there was another category: those who believed in
nothing other than staying alive, putting a meal on the table,
stepping across a street without getting sprayed with shrap-
nel, or travelling in a car without getting stuck in traffic next
to a car bomber.
Sometimes the categories shifted. The longer I stayed, the
wider became the range of activists I would come across. I
knew some who became Believers after ISIS – the Islamic
State of Iraq and Syria, sometimes called ISIL, sometimes
called Daesh in Arabic – came to power, simply because they
did not want to live under that kind of Islam: one where
women doctors were beheaded, where children were taught
to hate anyone who was not like them, where only the most
literal, most radical form of Islam was accepted. There were
also rebels who shifted sides, moving from being supporters of
falling apart, and before they knew it each and every one of
them would be betrayed. But the bubble had not yet burst.
For several weeks running, I watched the fevered hedon-
ism of the Thursday afternoon pool parties at the Dama
Rose Hotel. That first week it was like every other start of a
weekend. By lunchtime, women were rushing to hairdressers;
the roads leading out of the city – those that were still open –
were clogged with luxury cars. People who could do so were
still heading outside the city to the villages, taking their kids
to amusement parks, or en route to country villas for parties,
weekend picnics or dinners.
Restaurants such as Narenj, which takes up nearly half a
block in the Old City and served traditional Arabic food to
the elite, were still packed. I went to a wedding there one
afternoon, and was served plate after heaving plate of lamb,
chicken, rice, dates, oranges and honey-drenched sweets. I
was painfully aware that less than an hour away by car, assum-
ing there were no roadblocks, people in Homs were starving
to death, a massacre was going on in Houla, and refugees
were crossing the borders of Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan
searching for a way to feed their families.
The most surreal aspect of the Dama Rose parties was
that they were taking place in the hotel, which was home to
those 300 frozen, frustrated UN soldiers from fifty different
countries, who had been brought in to be ‘monitors’. On a
top floor their boss, the Norwegian General Robert Mood,
the chief monitor, was installed with his own team.
On 14 June 2012, their operations would be suspended
because it became too dangerous for them. Eventually, most
of them were pulled out, and a skeleton staff of UN workers