A Friend and Two New Blogs from Syria

Giant Assad poster on the front of the Syrian Central Bank.  I may have posted
this picture already, but it's just so...so propagandistic.

My friend and former landlord from Syria was in Cairo last weekend, and he brought with him some chilling stories about what life has become in Damascus.  He had left Syria in a rush about a month and a half ago without warning anyone.  A friend had skyped with him and he had a big bandage on his head, so we knew something was wrong, and indeed the next day he booked it out of the country.  Syrian security forces now randomly scoop up citizens to extort and fear money or confessions by tactics of violence, though my friend's arrest may or may not have been random.

Pro-government marches of students (who likely had no
choice) were a common sight even while I was there.

He had been sending news reports and pictures to old friends at Al Jazeera and the BBC, carefully rotating internet cafes to avoid being caught, but given his activities, it was not entirely a surprise when one day he heard the sound of boots running outside the cafe.  Seconds later a host of soldiers barged into the cafe and went straight for him.  He force-shut down his computer to get rid of any evidence of his illicit transfers, but they noticed the suspicious activity, and seemed to have come for him anyway.  They bludgeoned him in the head with a rifle and dragged him off to a jail cell.

Knowing they probably didn't have any hard evidence against him, my friend played the part of a scared innocent until the guards floated the possibility that he could bribe his way out.  For about $3,000 (obviously a huge sum of money by Syrian standards), he was allowed to escape.  Aware that the conspicuously large bandage on his head would probably attract the suspicion of another band of security thugs, my friend liquidated what of his assets he could, arranged for his family (his parents and siblings - he has no wife or kids) to stay in Turkey, and then he fled to Lebanon the next day.

Flyers like these were all over Damascus.
This one says "A thousand congratulations
for the love of the people [i.e. Assad]"

Since then he has been living between Berlin and Geneva with friends trying to get a job helping refugees through the UN.  He came to Cairo for an interview to be a sort of go-between official between the UN and Somalian refugees.  Yeah, he actually wants to work in Somalia, but he has done a lot of work like that before, and that's all another story.  Even though he can't help his country anymore, his desire to help the underprivileged has not been dampened.

But when I met with him in Cairo, the recently healed wound on his forehead still just visible, there was a kind of sadness just barely noticeable whenever he would fall silent.  His usually goody, absurd sense of humor seemed ever so half-hearted and distracted, and you could tell he is worried.  It doesn't help that he is originally from the city of Hama, one of the most violent cities in Syria right now, and the city that was massacred during the regime of Hafez Assad, the current President's father.  In the end though, my friend was lucky to have the ability to get out of Syria.  Not all of his countrymen have the same connections that he does.

The Stalinist-esque motivation for citizens to  decorate their cars,
shops and everything else with pro-government propaganda
was in full swing by the time I left.

Then there are the foreigners who are trying to get back in to Syria.  They are a small group, but they exist, those few with connections to the balad a-sham who can't stand the iron curtain of secrecy that has been drawn around it as the situation continues to deteriorate.

In that vein, here are two blogs written by anonymous foreigners who initially left Syria but have since come back.  I don't secretly know who they are, but even if I did, I wouldn't tell you any more information than that.  It's obviously not safe for them to be blogging from Syria right now, so anonymity is key.  All I'll say is that from what I've read, they're both quite good, writing on a wide range of topics related to the situation in Syria in admirably concise posts.  I highly recommend checking them out for a more intimate picture of what life in Damascus is like right now.

A Cup of Cardamom (Cardamom is the spice that Arabs and Turks mix into so-called Turkish coffee found everywhere in the Middle East)

The Ajnabi ("Ajnabi" is the Arabic word for foreigner)

This kind of thing would really only happen in Damascus or Aleppo.