An Arabian Journey Read online

  ‘Is that an iPhone 7 Plus?’ he said in passable English.

  ‘It is,’ I replied, somewhat surprised.

  ‘What do you need? A Samsung?’

  ‘No, thanks, I just need a Syrian sim card and some credit.’

  The boy said something in Arabic to the man behind the kiosk, acting as my translator. The man shuffled under the counter for a plastic card with the sim, which he broke loose and handed to me in exchange for some Syrian pounds with President Assad’s head on them. I took out my UK sim card and replaced it with the Syrian one. After a few seconds, I received a message from the provider: Ministry of Tourism welcomes you in Syria, please call 137 for information and complaints.

  I’m not sure how many tourists Syria had received in the last seven years since the conflict began, but at least the people were optimistic.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked the lad.

  ‘Bassam,’ he replied. ‘I’m from Raqqa. But even though I’m an Arab, I knew I had to escape when Daesh came. I was studying computer science at the university, but they destroyed it. So I came here and now I’m looking for work.’

  ‘Why Al-Malikiyah?’ I asked, surprised that he’d chosen to come to a predominantly Kurdish and Christian town.

  ‘It’s tolerant here,’ he said with a smile. ‘Everyone is welcome. There’s Kurds, Assyrian Christians, Armenians and Arabs, all living together in peace. Look at the churches and mosques side by side. We’re all friends here and it’s peaceful for now. Daesh are far away and I don’t think they’ll win now the government is taking back control. The only people we have to worry about are the Turks over there.’

  He motioned to the north, flicking his head in the direction of the mountains. ‘They bombed this town in April. But it’s still better than Raqqa. My house has been destroyed there and most of my family are gone.’

  He led me down the street, past some children wearing white robes. Not Arabic ones, though – these were karate uniforms.

  ‘They love karate here,’ Bassam said, imitating a martial-arts stance and chopping through the air with a vocal swoosh.

  ‘Like I say, the Kurds are very nice. They’re stuck in this little corner of Syria and they’re really the only ones fighting Daesh properly. Nobody gives them any help and even the Americans who promise them the world have deserted them now. You’re not American, are you?’ Bassam looked at me apologetically.

  ‘No,’ I replied.

  ‘Good,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘The whole place is a mess. And everybody knows that it’s the Americans who started it.’

  ‘Do people really think that? What about the revolution, about the Arab Spring and the uprising against Assad?’ I asked, wanting to try to understand something of the background to this infernal civil war from those who had witnessed it first-hand.

  ‘Pfft,’ he snorted. ‘Think it? They know it. The revolution was a joke. This whole war is just a game between the big countries. Iran, Israel, America, Russia and Saudi Arabia. They just come and screw around with things until they get what they want.’

  ‘And what do they want?’ I asked.

  Bassam laughed. ‘How long have you been on this journey for?’

  ‘This is my first day,’ I told him.

  ‘Then I suppose you’ll find out,’ he said.

  With that he walked off and disappeared down an alleyway in the market. The sun was setting and I figured that I’d better find a place to stay before it got dark. Even though normality seemed to prevail in this little oasis of calm, I kept reminding myself that this was a country at war, and nothing should be taken for granted.

  I found the hotel a few blocks away. As the policeman had directed, it was on a side street near to a church. I knocked on the iron gates of the three-storey building and sent a cat bounding down the road. A young man in a tight red T-shirt opened the door to the gate and welcomed me inside the courtyard. He looked like a body-builder. I noticed a tattoo on his rippling biceps only half covered by a sleeve. It was the face of Jesus and some hands praying, surrounded by a rosary.

  ‘I’m Yasim.’ He smiled, flashing some gold teeth. His grip was iron-like.

  ‘Where are you from?’ he asked.

  ‘England,’ I told him.

  ‘I love London. I’m Swedish,’ he said, giving me a thumbs-up.

  ‘Swedish?’

  ‘Yes, well I have a Swedish passport now at least. I’m a refugee.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, somewhat taken aback. With his enormous barrel chest and the glint in his eye, he didn’t really fit my stereotype of a refugee.

  ‘What are you doing back here?’ I asked.

  ‘Here, in Malikiyah?’ he said. ‘I’m working, of course. This hotel is the family business. I come here every summer and work, so my dad can go on holiday. Then I go to Sweden for a few months and work there. Maybe I’ll move to London soon. Who knows.’

  I guess that even refugees need to have summer jobs and holidays.

  Yasim showed me through the reception into the garden, where a huge swimming pool dominated the neat manicured lawns. It was empty of water.

  ‘No tourists anymore.’ Yasim shrugged. ‘Only wedding parties.’ He pointed to the far side of the lawn, where some seats had been arranged and bouquets of flowers decorated the veranda. Big speakers and a DJ booth had been set up.

  ‘Sorry about the noise later, it’ll probably get quite loud. The wedding starts at seven.’

  He walked me up to the room, which was basic but clean, and had a view out across the street towards the church. The sun was almost touching the mountains now and the sky was a fiery red. A chorus of prayer erupted across the skyline as the muezzin sang on prerecorded tapes from the city’s minarets.

  ‘Kebab for dinner, okay,’ said Yasim. ‘Do you want beer or whisky with that?’ As he spoke, the first wedding guests began to arrive. Men in flared trousers and shiny suits, with slicked black hair and pointy shoes, sauntered through the garden with women in high heels wearing miniskirts and leopard-print jackets. The music kicked in, blaring Arabic pop songs and pumping techno music.

  It looked like my first night in Syria was going to set the bar high.

  I slept fitfully that night. The racket from the wedding party went on until the early hours, supplemented by sporadic bursts of gunfire that were indistinguishable from the fireworks. At one a.m., there was a bang on the door. It was a Kurdish soldier asking to see my passport. Word had spread there was a foreigner in town and the militia were concerned. He made sure to remind me that tomorrow I should make an early start to leave Syria and get on my way to Iraq.

  I left early, after a breakfast of bread and cheese, waved off by Yasim, who was sporting red eyes that gave him away as a wedding crasher. I walked through the deserted streets at seven a.m. and the company was a few feral dogs and a couple of old men sitting at some tables of a chai shop, smoking and drinking tea and reading the morning news.

  ‘Salam.’ They waved.

  ‘Salam.’ I waved back, and walked east, out of town.

  As the buildings grew smaller and the plain opened up in front of me, I took one last glance to my left towards the Turkish border. Large boulders dotted the seemingly endless ploughed fields that were dusty and brown from a long summer, remnants of a volcanic past.

  This was the very edge of Arabia, the start of a five-thousand-mile journey, and I was jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. Ahead, twenty miles away, was the flowing waters of the Tigris River, and on its far bank was Iraq.

  2

  The Call to Prayer

  When you sleep in a house your thoughts are as high as the ceiling, when you sleep outside they are as high as the stars.

  Bedouin proverb

  Most people old enough can remember where they were on that tragic day in September 2001. Personally, I was on a long-distance coach taking the cheapest road home from Poland, unable to afford a flight after several months travelling on my very first solo journey at the age of nin
eteen. I was heading back to England, eager to begin reading history at the university of Nottingham the following week, and I finally felt ready, having travelled all over Africa, Asia and Europe as a backpacker.

  I was young, enthusiastic and had a great deal of faith in the kindness of strangers. After five months vagabonding, I had it all worked out; I was on the verge of becoming a hippy, with long hair and fisherman’s pants that made me look like a poster boy for a cliché gap-year holiday. I was full of joy and couldn’t wait to spend the next three years making new friends, drinking and maybe even learning something new.

  The news came over the bus speakers as we drove along the autobahn somewhere near the Dutch border. It was a bulletin that interrupted the German radio station’s incessant blaring of 1990s techno music. My school days’ German language came in handy as I could just about translate the mumbled reports from New York. The news echoed through the coach and the other passengers began shaking their heads in unison. As the bus transited through the Netherlands and into Belgium the true horrors of the day began to unfold.

  I’ll never forget the silence on the ferry across the English Channel as returning tourists stared in shock at the television screens, watching on loop as the twin towers came crashing down. Every newspaper shared the same image. Everyone knew that things would never be the same again. A new inter-civilisational war was about to commence and its initiators were lined up on our screens for all to see: dark-eyed, sinister-looking Arabs, intent on the destruction of Western civilisation. They were the perfect enemy.

  Of course, there had already been the Gulf War in 1990–1, the Iran–Iraq war before that, and both Afghanistan and Iran were ruled by psychotic religious zealots. In Saudi Arabia they enjoyed chopping hands and heads off, and Beirut was a byword for bombs. But terrorists aside, the stereotype of an Arab was either a shepherd riding a camel across a desert, or a wealthy sheikh dripping in gold, hiding his hawkish face behind a pair of oversized designer sunglasses.

  Whatever we thought of Arabs in their own lands, in general it didn’t affect our perception of the dishdashi-wearing shopkeepers we would occasionally say hello to on the Edgware Road or Atlantic Avenue. Before 9/11, Muslims had existed in relatively peaceful anonymity in the United States and Europe, but as soon as George W. Bush announced the West’s ‘War on Terror’, a long shadow was cast across the entire region and all of its expatriates.

  Much has been said about the rights and wrongs of the Second Iraq War and many people blame it for the ills of the early twenty-first century. It seems to have defined a generation – my generation – in a way that is usually the case for much larger conflicts. By military standards, the Iraq war was a minor skirmish. Lasting only a month, it was really an artillery bombardment followed by a swift coup d’état. The war, at least from the American and British perspective, was effective, rapid and, at that time, apparently justified. Casualties were limited to only those military targets that resisted, and the city of Baghdad was left largely undestroyed. Civilian casualties numbered into their hundreds, rather than thousands. It was a job well done.

  In May 2003, shortly after the statue of Saddam Hussein had been pulled down by American troops, and the war officially declared won, I had just finished my second year of studies. I remember watching as the American flag was hoisted over Baghdad and thinking to myself what interesting times we lived in, however ominous. Through a combination of chance and curiosity, I’d ended up completing a number of modules of my degree course in Middle Eastern history. I’d studied the early Crusades and examined their impact on medieval Islamic culture in the Levant, and I’d reviewed the consequences of Pan-Arabism in the mid-twentieth century.

  I had studied travel literature of the Silk Road and read the journals of eighteenth-century pilgrims who undertook the overland route to Jerusalem. I’d read about the conquests of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan; the history of Persia; the travels of Ibn Battutah and even dipped into the Qu’ran. But it niggled me that I hadn’t seen the places other than in my imagination. I wanted more than anything to see the Dome of the Rock; the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; Petra; Wadi Rum; the gates of Damascus and the souks of Sana’a.

  I was having a beer with my housemate Alex in Nottingham to celebrate the end of exams, which is how most interesting journeys begin. Alex was a medical student and young eccentric – highly intelligent, brave, fun to be with and well read – and he had the added charm of never saying no to an adventure.

  ‘Why don’t we go to Egypt this summer?’ I said. ‘We can go and see what Cairo is like. I really want to see the Pyramids.’

  A wide grin spread across his face.

  ‘Excellent. I’d been thinking something similar myself,’ he said. ‘Let’s go to Israel as well, and then we could take the boat to Greece and backpack through Europe.’

  Alex’s father was Greek and lived in Athens, and his mother was Jewish, so it made perfect sense. I knew he’d be game for it.

  So, a couple of months later, at the end of July, we boarded a plane to Egypt with a very loose plan and whatever spare change we had left from the term, which wasn’t very much.

  It was a summer to be reckoned with. We spent a few days exploring the souks of Cairo and the banks of the Nile; then we headed east over the Suez Canal and trekked across the Sinai Desert. We scaled the mountain where Moses received the commandments and saw the remaining twigs of the burning bush. After that, a fortnight was spent admiring the domes of Jerusalem and the churches of Bethlehem. I’d fulfilled a childhood dream of seeing the Levant with my own eyes, and it did not disappoint.

  I smelt frankincense in the church of the Holy Sepulchre and looked out across the glinting stillness of the Dead Sea. I walked in the footsteps of Jesus, Moses and Abraham. Memories of Sunday school were still fresh in my mind and I felt a deep joy and sense of satisfaction that I’d seen places none of my peers had at that age, and been to places most of my family could only dream of. I tasted falafel and hummus, and ate fresh fish from the Sea of Galilee. I saw camels in the dunes and even rode a donkey through the gates of Petra.

  We stayed as guests of Alex’s Israeli relatives in Tel Aviv and watched as the sun set over a golden Mediterranean. The turmoil in Iraq, which had unfolded earlier that year, seemed distant and remote as we swilled beers on the beach and partied with hippies in Eilat.

  It was good to be young and carefree. We’d planned to take a boat from Haifa across the Mediterranean to Cyprus and Greece, and from there to hitchhike home through Eastern Europe. But there was no rush; we had a whole six weeks to play with, and as long as we were back in time for the new term in September we could go wherever we wanted.

  In spite of our relaxed itinerary, it goes without saying that we weren’t prepared for the suddenness with which our plans were dashed when, on 19 August, a Palestinian suicide bomber exploded himself in the city centre of Jerusalem, killing twenty-five civilians and injuring a hundred more. As Alex and I sat on the beach enjoying our holiday, the news spread through Israel like wildfire, and the country went into lockdown.

  It was the start of a new wave of violence across the region. Security was beefed up everywhere. As Israeli Special Forces scoured the country searching for terrorists, the boats out of Haifa were cancelled, the border back to Egypt was closed and it appeared that we may well be stuck.

  ‘Leave while you still can,’ said Ronnie, Alex’s uncle. ‘This place is about to explode.’

  ‘But we can’t go back to Egypt, and we can’t afford to fly home,’ said Alex.

  Ronnie shrugged and said he wasn’t able to give us any money. ‘If you go to Jordan today, you’ll be able to go north from there into Syria and get to Europe through Turkey that way. Good luck to you, though, even if I was allowed to go myself, I wouldn’t go anywhere near those hell holes.’

  It seemed we didn’t have a choice. We packed our bags and made for the eastern border. The Israelis had halted all incoming traffic over the Allenby Bridge, b
ut they let us leave when Alex told them he was Jewish. We took a bus to Amman and a few hours later we found ourselves in the capital of Jordan.

  But just as we celebrated our successful escape out of Israel, it appeared we had jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. That afternoon, at four-thirty, as we were checking into a cheap hostel, a massive bomb exploded at the UN headquarters in Baghdad, killing the United Nations special representative and dozens of others. This time it was al-Qaeda. Jordan, fragile in its location sandwiched between Israel and Iraq, decided to close its borders too. Now Alex and I really were in a pickle. There was no going back to Israel and Syria was closed off as well.

  ‘There’s only one thing for it,’ I said to Alex, as we sat on the roof of our grotty little hostel, smoking a shisha.

  ‘What’s that? We can’t ask for any money; both our parents think we’re safe and sound on a beach holiday in Greece. They’d go nuts,’ he said.

  ‘We can’t let a bomb or two stop us,’ I urged. ‘There’s only one border left open. Let’s head east.’

  Alex looked at me blankly.

  ‘Are you actually suggesting we cross into Iraq?’

  ‘Yes, if it’s our only option. There are Americans on the border, they’ll surely let us in. We can say we’re journalists or something. Then we can find a way north up to Turkey.’

  ‘Are you mad?’

  ‘Well can you think of a better idea?’ I asked him.

  In all honesty I couldn’t quite believe I was suggesting that we hitchhike to Baghdad, but it seemed a preferable option to asking my parents for money to fly home and admitting defeat.

  Alex shrugged. ‘No, not really. I suppose it’ll make a good story one day. If we survive.’

  And so that’s what we did.