Tribes with Flags: Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria
‘Tribes With Flags’ is the gripping story of Charles Glass's dramatic journey through Greater Syria which provides background context to a troubled region once again in the headlines.Charles Glass began his journey through the former Arab nations of the Ottoman Empire by exploring farms, refugee camps and feudal palaces to capture the full spectrum of Levantine life. But his literary and spiritual ramble was abruptly interrupted when on 17 June 1987 he was kidnapped by Shi'a militants. What followed, 62 days later, was a daring escape that captivated the world’s media.In this classic travelogue, the former ABC Middle East correspondent records an adventure which took him through Turkey, Syria, Israel, Jordan and the Lebanon. An honest, colourful and immediate tale of wanderlust and history, ‘Tribes with Flags’ is an essential back-story to our understanding of the complexity of the region, and the gripping testimony of one of the few hostages who has escaped its maelstrom to tell his tale.
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TRIBES
WITH
FLAGS
Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria
CHARLES GLASS
Detail from “Syria”, Tallis’ Atlas, 1841
“A man may find Naples or Palermo merely pretty;
but the deeper violet, the splendour
and desolation of the Levant waters
is something that drives into the soul.”
James Elroy Flecker
Beirut, October 1914
CONTENTS
Dedication
Epigraph
New Introduction by the Author
PART ONE
1The Legacy of Alexander
2The Army of the Levant
3The Last Ottoman
4Minarets and Belfries
5No-Man’s-Land
PART TWO
6Six-Star Brandy
7Where Armies Failed
8A Consular City
9The Survivors and the Dead
10The Village of a Pasha
11The Road
PART THREE
12The Old City
13Meleager’s World
14This Bad Century
15Queen of the Desert
16Provincial Loyalty
17Enemies of the Goddesses
PART FOUR
18Excursions
19A Blood Feud in the Mountains
20Foul is Fair
21The Ghetto
22Monks and Martyrs
23The Family and the Plain
24The Slumber of the Dead
25Disrespectful Dancing
26The Last Day
PART FIVE
27The Black Hole
28Recalled to Life
About the Author
Also by Charles Glass
Copyright
About the Publisher
Twenty-five years ago, I traveled by land through what geographers called Greater Syria to write a book. The journey began in Alexandretta, the seaside northern province that France ceded to Turkey in 1939, and meandered south through modern Syria to Lebanon. From there, my intended route went through Israel and Jordan. My destination was Aqaba, the first Turkish citadel of Greater Syria to surrender to the Arab revolt and Lawrence of Arabia in 1917. For various reasons, my journey was curtailed in Beirut in June 1987. (I returned to complete the trip and a second book, The Tribes Triumphant, in 2002.)
The ramble on foot and by bus and taxi gave me time to savor Syria in a way I couldn’t as a journalist confronting daily deadlines. People loved to linger over coffee and tea, play cards, and talk.
Many of the civilian members of the Baath Party, whose founders claimed to believe in secularism and democracy, deserted its ranks when the party took power in 1963. They rejected the militarization of the party, which kept power not through elections but by force of the arms of its members within the army. Among those who left the party was the father of Rulla Rouqbi. I met his daughter a few weeks ago at the hotel she manages in Damascus. Faissal Rouqbi had died in April 2012, and this explained why the attractive fifty-four-year-old was dressed in black. A vigorous supporter of the revolution that began in Syria a year earlier, she believed hers was the same struggle her father had waged against one-party military rule.
“I was questioned twice by the security forces,” she told me in the hotel’s coffee shop, which looks out onto a busy downtown street. “They did it just to show me they know what I am doing and they are here.” She said that, because young dissidents gathered in her coffee shop with their computers, the police cut the hotel’s WiFi connection. Nonetheless, several young people were there discussing the rebellion—much as their forefathers did in the old cafés of the souks that the French destroyed to put down their revolts—over strong Turkish coffee or newly fashionable espresso.
The rebellion against tyranny was by 2012 turning into a sectarian and class war that threatened to destroy Syria for a generation and drive out those with the talent, education, or money to thrive elsewhere. Neither side spoke of conciliation. The endgame for each was the destruction of the other. Foreign backers appeared, as in Lebanon from 1975 to 1990, to encourage confrontation in their own rather than Syrian interests. Nothing had changed since Britain and France occupied the Ottoman provinces of Greater Syria during World War I.
A glimmer of hope came from the economist Nabil Sukkar, formerly with the World Bank. “The opposition is not going to retreat,” he told me in Damascus. “The stalemate could last to 2014.” Bashar al-Assad’s term of office was scheduled to end in that year, when, Sukkar believed, he could stand down without losing face or having his Alawite community punished. He continued, “For [Kofi] Annan to succeed, there has to be compromise from both sides. The regime must stop killing, and the opposition must stop smuggling [arms]. And foreigners must stop sending arms. Then there can be a cease-fire and a transition government.” However unlikely that seems today, it could work if Russia and Iran compel the regime and the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar push the opposition to achieve it. Otherwise, Syrian will fight Syrian—just as the Lebanese did—in what the respected Lebanese journalist Ghassan Tueini called “a war for the others.”
