Chapter 3: Syria

2013-2014

What was being ignored overseas was much more dangerous. Syria had also been infected by the Arab Spring and was imploding. The protests had moved beyond protesting and the nation was sinking slowly and inexorably into a civil war. Hafez Assad had been brutally efficient at suppressing revolt in his country, but his son, Bashar, could only claim to be brutal. The unrest kept growing. By the fall it was him and his minority Alawite tribe and their Iranian supporters, most of whom were Shia Muslim, fighting the Sunni majority, with the Christian and Druze minorities switching sides as circumstances changed, as well as various radical elements who came in to turn the country into an Islamic state. Half the time the rebels were fighting each other. The one thing that everybody managed to do at all well was kill civilians indiscriminately. To describe it as butchery was to insult butchers.

The problem had begun in 2012 as the Arab Spring began, and just kept sliding downhill. There was probably a very brief period in mid-2012 where a massive air strike and intervention might have killed Assad and allowed some form of replacement to take over and strike a peace deal. Whether that would have worked was questionable at best and would have required exquisite timing and superb intelligence. Regardless, we didn’t do it, and when John McCain left office, he commented to me that it was Hillary’s mess now. Nobody expected it to improve anytime soon.

As 2013 progressed, it became more and more obvious that there were going to be no easy solutions. Vladimir Putin was providing unconditional support to the Assad regime, including all the weapons he could ask for. The Russians had access to a naval base at Tartus on the Mediterranean coast. As permanent members of the U.N. Security Council they were categorically voting down all U.N. attempts to force Assad out or coerce a peace process. The country itself was too large and populous to allow any sort of invasion and was virtually landlocked aside from the Russian base. Worse, Syria had chemical weapons, and after Kurdistan, nobody wanted to mess with them. Meanwhile the killing went on.

The civilian population reacted as expected, by beating feet out of the combat zones. That was most of the country. By the end of 2013 civilian deaths were approaching 50,000, and almost a half million Syrians were living in refugee camps in Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, and Kurdistan, often in appalling conditions.

Refugees and refugee camps are found on every continent except Antarctica and are simply disastrous. (Yes, even North America. The U.S. and Canada take in thousands of refugees a year, and Mexico has camps in the south filled with refugees from Central America and some semi-rebellious areas.) They are certainly nothing new in world history. One of the reasons the Goths invaded the Roman Empire was that they were refugees fleeing the Huns. Likewise, Israel was founded by Jewish refugees fleeing Europe after World War II. They made their way to British Palestine, got organized, kicked out the Brits, and then over the next two decades fought three wars and kicked out the Palestinians, making more refugees. Yes, I know it’s more complicated than that, it always is, but that is the gist of things.

Forget about the United Nations being helpful. The U.N. is all about diplomacy and peace. The theory is that when some country starts coming apart at the seams, the U.N. will try to calm things down by various resolutions and commissions and peace talks. Any refugees are only temporarily displaced, and after a happy conclusion to whatever is bothering the home country, they will be sent home. That is the modus operandi of the U.N. and the only option they offer. As for U.N. assistance, the United Nations is one of the most corrupt operations around. There is no way that mid-level bureaucrats at the United Nations can afford Park Avenue addresses on their paychecks alone. Aid money is siphoned off routinely.

The refugees almost never go home. The reason the refugees left home in the first place is because the victors back home don’t want them hanging around. Maybe it’s ethnic cleansing, maybe it’s simply thievery and a land grab, maybe it’s because the homeland is now destroyed. The refugees have nothing to go back to, and the victors don’t want them back. The same applies to the places the refugees escape to. Half the time the neighboring countries are only marginally better off than where they escaped from. The refugees arrive, often on foot, with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

The locals who greet them are not amused. They look different, they dress different, they talk different, and none of them asked if they could come and visit. They live in tent cities without food, water, or sanitation in numbers too large to imagine. They frequently are seen as competitors for whatever food, water, and jobs are available, and there is never enough. During the initial stages of a refugee crisis, money and donations can flood in, but soon enough, another crisis occurs, and the refugees are left to fend for themselves. Some refugee camps, for instance in Lebanon and Jordan, are 50+ years old. Oh, and forget about improving things. Bankers are not about to loan money to squatters without any documentation.

Kurdistan had some refugee camps. As Syria devolved into chaos, some refugees began coming across the border. Depending on who was counting, Syria was about ten percent Kurd, and while about a quarter million Syrian Kurds had emigrated to Kurdistan before Syria began to collapse, that still left about two million in Syria. Almost all lived in the north and northeast, the areas bordering Turkey and Kurdistan. Syria was another made-up country, where the borders were drawn as straight lines when the Allies carved up the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. The Kurds in Syria thought of themselves as Kurds, not Syrians, and not as Arabs. The Kurds in Kurdistan felt the same way and were nowhere near as pissy about the Kurdish refugees as they might have been. There was a fair bit of sentiment in Erbil towards helping the refugees.

By refugee standards Syrian Kurdish refugees were in great shape. Both Kurdistan and Turkey had growing economies and were able to absorb a certain degree of influx. In addition, the Syrian Kurds were considered cousins, at least, and I pushed the Turks to not get too pissy and to rely on the Kurdish minority in Eastern Turkey to assist. Probably the worst refugee crises occurred in Africa, in the various Sahel conflicts between Muslims, Christians, and animists. The women have often been gang raped along the way, sometimes by the people who sent them packing, and occasionally by the people rescuing them, and when I say women, I mean any and all females, right down to children too young to understand what is happening. They were still in better shape than the men because you can recover from rape. The men and the boys were simply killed. If they were lucky, they get shot, because the alternative was usually being slowly hacked to death with machetes. At least nobody was hacking the Kurds to death.

As the spring rolled around in 2014, and the military campaign season got into full swing, Syria descended even further down into Hell. The Assad regime began targeting just about everybody who wasn’t Alawite, shelling and bombing civilians seemingly at random. Another 50,000 Syrians died by mid-summer, and another half million moved out. Most of the refugees went to Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan, but at least 100,000 Syrian Kurds moved across the border into Kurdistan.

The Kurdish response was two-fold. First, several refugee camps were set up along the border, where refugees crossing the border were directed. These were only transient camps and were designed to be temporary. The refugees would get some shelter, food, and medical aid, and be questioned. Who were they, did they have relatives or friends in Kurdistan, did they have a place to go? More permanent accommodations were available in the central Erbil area, and even if it was simply a rented shack or garage, it was probably still better than a tent along the border. The Buckman Foundation assisted, and I put my Washington connections to work drumming up financial support. The level of refugees was not so large as to be destabilizing, but it would require considerable financial assistance. Second, the Assad regime really pissed the Kurds off! The Kurds began repositioning military resources towards the southwest border region. Assad responded by firing artillery and sending bombers across the border to the refugee camps. As if sending them away with nothing but the shirts on their backs wasn’t bad enough, now they were being killed from the sky!

I just prayed that the Syrians didn’t break out the nerve gas and go after the Kurds. They had already used it in small attacks against rebels in the heart of Syria. They hadn’t gone near Kurdistan, though. Best guess? Assad figured that after what happened to Iraq when they gassed American troops there, if he pulled a similar stunt in Kurdistan, it would be his head on the chopping block.

Hillary didn’t do much more than wring her hands and give speeches. Ever since Syria started coming apart at the seams, she had been blustering with Assad, drawing red lines, and issuing fearsome warnings about what couldn’t be allowed to happen. In every case she had been ignored and Assad had done what he was going to do anyway. She looked like an idiot and would have to backtrack and explain why it really wasn’t a red line after all and how it hadn’t really been crossed anyway. Her last great hope had been that Syria’s long-time friend and arms supplier, Vladimir Putin, would be able to control the situation, but that hadn’t worked out so well. A week after the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, Hillary’s buddy Vlad had invaded and annexed eastern Ukraine and cut off gas supplies to western Ukraine. She wasn’t getting any assistance from them! The only bright spot to that clusterfuck was that under John’s and my administrations, we had pushed for liquefied natural gas ports to be built in the Baltic, and the Europeans could now import gas from America whenever Russia got playful.

From what I was hearing back home, she didn’t have a clue how to fix Syria, not that I had any idea either. Besides, Somalia was proving to be as much of a disaster as Afghanistan had been. We were sending another 25,000 soldiers there by August, and Muslim militants and insurgents were pouring into the country. As for Kurdistan, the 47^th Brigade had orders to avoid confrontation and assume a non-threatening and non-aggressive posture. They stopped doing border patrols and confined their activities to launching drones. I knew that the commander of K-MAC had protested this, because he was relieved of his command by the ambassador, an unprecedented action! (Normally the State Department would go through Defense for something like that. Still, the ambassador had the legal authority as the highest ranking American in the country.) His thought, and I agreed with him, was that an active patrol along the Syrian border would keep the Syrians from attacking across it. Assad wasn’t crazy enough to screw with the American Army. As an American, I was deeply ashamed of the way we allowed the Syrians to attack civilians we could defend.

The Kurds were not amused, either. I spoke with several members of their military and government about what was happening. By the spring of 2014 I was spending more and more time in Kurdistan, either in Erbil or in the border areas at the camps, and some time talking to the Turks about the problems they were facing. I also spent a lot of time with the Peshmerga. They were funneling a lot of Russian small arms and weaponry across the border to the Syrian Kurds. The Syrians responded by shooting back across the border (to be fair, that wasn’t unreasonable of them) further angering the Kurds. The Syrian Kurds had formed a couple of political parties, which joined together to form the Syrian Kurdish Union Party, and they had control of various ‘People’s Protection Units’, somewhat informal groups of local fighters. The Kurds sent Peshmerga cadre to join them and train them, and to develop a more professional force. It was beginning to get very complicated along the border.

In June I was with Marilyn in a refugee camp west of Sinjar, maybe five miles from the border. President Barzani called me and asked me to come to Erbil for a discussion, and Marilyn said she would stay behind at the camp. Her maternal instincts were going full blast, and she was working as a volunteer in one of the border camp clinics. Barzani was sending out photos of her doing this, often in a dirty or bloody smock, and begging for donations. She told me to go. It was about a four-hour drive considering conditions and security checkpoints. I promised to be back that night.

It wasn’t what I expected. President Barzani personally asked me to visit Syrian Kurdistan and to see the conditions there, so that I could report back to the world what was happening. He would send me with some Peshmerga bodyguards and whatever reporters he could scrounge up, so that a Westerner could report on what was happening there to the rest of the world. He thought I would be more credible than a reporter or a Kurd. I didn’t tell him, but I suspected he was right. I told him I would have to talk it over with my wife, and no matter what, she wasn’t coming with me into an active war zone. Otherwise, I tentatively agreed to do a visit.

I was back at Sinjar that evening, and Marilyn agreed to my going into Syria. She wasn’t really thrilled about that, but I promised to stay completely in the northeastern districts with my Kurdish protectors. I had no death wish. I spent the evening prepping a bag with some spare clothing, my usual combat safari casual, though I left my DCU jacket behind. I didn’t need to be wearing a uniform when I was a noncombatant. The Syrians under Assad would claim I was ‘invading’ and the worldwide audience needed to see me as a civilian.

Two nights later we drove across the border into Syria. We were met at the border by some Syrian Kurds. The Syrian Army was active during the day, but didn’t really do much at night, a typical third world army. Traveling with us were Richard Engel from NBC and Christiane Amanpour of CNN. I was surprised that Al Jazeera wasn’t sending anybody, until I was told that they were siding with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and in Syria. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of that. Regardless, we drove around in a three-vehicle car and minivan convoy for most of a week, meeting with various members of the Syrian Kurdish Union Party and People’s Protection Units, and filming some of the devastation. There had been fighting throughout the region, and several towns and small cities were now nothing but rubble. The Peshmerga traveling with us in civilian clothes were quite irate about this, and after three days we drove from Syrian Kurdistan into more Arab areas in the center of the country. Some of the stories we heard were bone chilling.

Engel and Amanpour did nightly broadcasts from the road, and I was interviewed along with Syrian Kurds. I wasn’t sure whether the two reporters ever twigged to the fact that my bodyguards were Peshmerga. They never said anything, and I certainly didn’t tell them. If anything, my guards seemed to find this a fine personal joke and laughed about it with the translator and me. One time Engel, who spoke fluent Arabic but did not speak Kurdish, asked what the men were joking about, which only set them to laughing more, especially when I played dumb and told him I didn’t know.

Then, after we had been in Syria for five days, and when the reporters wanted to do something else, we made plans to head back across the border. That was when we got word that the Syrians had been irate about the ex-American President traipsing through the war zone with reporters and had responded. They had bombed the Sinjar refugee camp.

The camp my wife was at.

I couldn’t reach her, but the reports that Engel was getting from the scene were that a flight of at least four Syrian fighters had crossed the border that morning and dropped bombs and cluster bombs across the camp. Hundreds were dead or wounded, and the Syrians were promising to repeat the action. Nobody knew yet what had become of Marilyn Buckman, but she was known to have been present.

I felt an icy chill come over me when I heard this. We were going back to Kurdistan that night, and there was nothing I could do until then. I knew I couldn’t run around and scream like a chicken with its head cut off. I also knew that if anything had happened to Marilyn, I was going to spend whatever it took and personally nuke Damascus. We crossed the border as soon as it got dark and drove straight through to Sinjar.