Anders cleared his throat and, pointing to Crocker and Akil, said, “Mr. Talab, these are two of the men from our special ops team. Perhaps you’d like to tell them a little about the situation inside Syria.”
As Crocker sat up he felt Fatima’s warm eyes looking him over.
“Yes.” Talab shifted his long frame in the chair and recrossed his legs. “I can tell you that my family is part Lebanese, part Syrian, and we have done business in Syria for years. Damascus was my father’s favorite city. We have investments there and many friends, which is why I travel there often.”
Anders turned to Crocker and said, “Mr. Talab and President Bashar al-Assad went to school together.”
They had Crocker’s full attention.
“Yes. Yes, we did,” Mr. Talab responded. “For two years we were classmates at the al-Hurriya School in Damascus. Bashar went on to study medicine. In those days he wanted to be an ophthalmologist. I traveled to London to get a business degree.”
Crocker noted the familiar tone in which he talked about Assad.
“Interesting,” Janice said. “How well do you know him?”
“Well, we don’t travel in the same circles, but anybody who does business in Syria has to deal with the Assad family.”
“I would imagine. Yes,” Janice responded.
“They can be extremely charming one minute and cutthroat and brutal the next, especially when you cross them. It’s also a family with a history of mental problems.”
“I’ve heard.”
The muscles around Talab’s jaw tightened as he continued. “My younger brother Hamid found this out when he entered into a dispute with the president’s cousin Fawwaz al-Assad over the ownership of a horse ranch outside Damascus. Fawwaz is an avowed thug, who later founded the death squads known as the Shabiha, who hunt down and kill opponents of the regime. He wanted the farm, but my brother didn’t want to sell it.”
Crocker had heard of the notorious Shabiha and wondered if they ever operated outside the borders of Syria. Maybe they were the assassins he had encountered earlier.
“What happened?” Janice asked.
“A week after my brother turned down Fawwaz’s offer, he was pulled out of his bed one night, tortured, and brutally murdered. This happened in September 2009.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that.”
“I say all this, my friends, so you and your people understand my motivation, which is pure and simple-revenge. I hate the Assad dictatorship and deplore its arrogance and brutality, which now all the world can see.”
Makes sense, Crocker thought, though he wasn’t completely buying it.
“So do we,” Anders said.
“That gives us the same goal.”
Like other urbane, educated Middle Eastern men Crocker had met, Talab was hard to read, and Crocker wondered whether his motivation really was that simple.
Again he was momentarily distracted by Fatima, who sipped her tea quietly and listened. She seemed to have a personal agenda, too, which she was keeping to herself.
“I waited,” Mr. Talab continued. “When anti-Assad demonstrations started in early 2011 as part of the Arab Spring, I saw little chance that they would succeed. But we have a large Sunni Muslim majority in our country that has been oppressed by the small Alawite Shiite elite for many years. Some small groups of these men took up arms. The Assad regime responded with customary brutality. Rebels were soon joined by thousands of defectors from the Syrian military.”
“That happened at the end of 2011,” Anders said.
“Yes. The rebels formed what is called the Free Syrian Army. By early 2012, they boasted twenty thousand members. That’s when the civil war really began.”
Anders nodded. “Yes.”
Crocker remembered. The Arab Spring had come as a sudden outburst of anger, frustration, and hope sweeping across North Africa into the Middle East. It caught everyone by surprise, including the United States, which had seemed unsure how to respond.
“The FSA captured territory and the Assad military responded with cluster bombings, artillery, and rocket attacks,” continued Talab. “Civilians fled to the borders of Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon. And other Sunni governments in the area started to take notice. They hated the Assad regime, too, so they wanted to help the FSA. Because of my connections inside Syria, I was approached by some of their intel services. I started to pass money and arms to rebel leaders. I also started to raise money myself.”
If Talab had done half of what he claimed, he was playing a very dangerous game. The Assad regime had a terrifying reputation for dealing with dissidents and enemies. Its military intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, was aggressive and deadly, trained and supported by Russia’s SVR.
“Throughout 2012, the expectation was that the U.S. and its European allies would establish a no-fly zone in Syria and aid the FSA, which would bring about the fall of the Assad regime,” Talab continued. “But we waited, and it never happened. For whatever reason, your president was more concerned with Afghanistan.”
“True,” Anders added with a bitter note in his voice.
“Absent U.S. leadership, different Arab governments started to act on their own,” Talab continued. “They supported various leaders from various rebel groups. Also, other foreign terrorist organizations saw an opportunity to extend their influence. These included al-Qaeda-linked groups like Ahrar ash-Sham, the Suquor al-Sham Brigade, the al-Nusra Front, and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Their stated goal is to impose a government in Syria based on Sharia law.”
Crocker knew that ISIS had become a major concern of the Turkish government because of its control of territory near that country’s southern border. Just last week ISIS insurgents had surrounded the Suleyman Shah tomb, just fifteen miles from Turkey.
Maybe it was ISIS that had ordered the hit on Jared. Given the complicated rivalries within Syria, it was hard to tell.
“As you know, by the beginning of 2013, the Assad regime seemed about to fall, despite the support it was getting from Russia, China, and Hezbollah,” Talab continued. “That’s when its main ally, Iran, jumped into the ring.”
They had done so full-scale, according to the intel reports Crocker had read. The Iranian security and intelligence services were not only advising and assisting the Syrian military, they had also deployed Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) ground forces, the Qods Force, intelligence services, and law enforcement forces to fight the anti-Assad rebels. Major General Qassem Suleimani-the leader of Qods Force and a man Crocker and his team had tried to kill in early 2013-was personally leading and directing the Iranian military effort in Syria. Crocker thought that he’d love to run into him and silence the bastard once and for all.
“Now the situation is a mess, with all sides and groups controlling different parts of the country,” Mr. Talab continued. “If I were to predict an outcome, I would say that Syria will eventually split into fiefdoms-Iran controlling the south, radical Sunni groups like ISIS sharing territory and towns to the north and west with more moderate FSA militias, and Assad and his Alawite allies keeping Damascus and the territory to the east.”
The horror of all this, of course, was the impact on the Syrian people. Rockets, cluster bombs, even chemical weapons had killed almost one hundred thousand of them so far. Another million or so had become refugees.
“This is a regime armed with chemical and possibly nuclear weapons,” Janice pointed out. “They’re heavily armed, desperate and dangerous. What’s even more alarming is the danger of some of the more advanced weapons falling into other undesirables’ hands.”
“Yes.” Talab nodded.
“I know the Russians have promised to monitor the WMDs. But they can’t be trusted. Besides, the Assads listen to no one.”