As I concluded a reporting trip through northeastern
Syria two summers ago, a friend asked whether I would like to visit several
Syriac Christian villages a bit off the beaten path. He had already directed my
travel thus far, and I had mostly finished my work. I agreed, and the next day
I found myself speeding off with a designated driver and two young soldiers in
the Syriac Military Council.
Wherever we stopped, I got
out of the car and asked a few people about local history and current affairs.
As we talked, they often offered me thick coffee and processed sweets. Our
visits inevitably included a tour of the village’s Syriac Orthodox church.
These churches are only used on special occasions since there are rarely enough
people around to sustain a weekly Mass. Festivals are held on the feast days of
the church’s patron saint, and, of course, weddings and funerals are celebrated
there. The village’s cemetery is always in the church garden.
Our second day, we came to
a village different from all the others. Here Syrians and Arabs lived alongside
each other. An Arab faction within the Syrian Democratic Forces manned a
checkpoint outside town. In the other villages, the local garrison typically
followed the Kurdish Y.P.G. or the
Syriac Military Council. The Syrian soldiers in my
car waved politely, calling the young guy at the checkpoint “comrade” in Arabic
(rafiq) instead of Kurdish (heval) or Syriac (hawro). We stopped at a house, and one of the Syrian fighters
got out. He knew everyone in each village; we had even stopped at his mom’s
house to get the keys to one of the churches as we were passing through. But
the family he was looking for wasn’t home. He suggested we try another house
nearby, since he knew the owners as well.
The others walked into the
garden, announcing themselves in Syriac as I trailed behind. An older woman
emerged from the house and welcomed us. The soldiers spoke to her—explaining in
Arabic so I could understand—that I was a foreign journalist and had come to
ask a few questions about the village and the Syrian community here and that I
wanted to see the church. She told us to go visit the church while she prepared
coffee. She summoned her two grandsons, who were listening to the conversation,
and handed the older one a set of keys.
When we walked through a
gate into the churchyard, I noted that the church was the smallest one we had
seen yet. But the village’s Syrian community of three families clearly took
decent care of it. The outside was tiny and very simple: drab grayish paint to
match the drab grayish countryside and a small sign in both Syriac and Arabic
saying that it had been built in the 1990s. Before we entered, one of the
Syrian fighters approached a nearby house and knocked on the door. An Arab
family emerged, and he explained that they were showing a foreign journalist
the church. I didn’t join him, since he signaled for me to hang back. I waved
from afar. They waved back.
We had seen five churches
the previous day, and the interior of this one was not much different than
those. We didn’t linger. Later, the old woman told me its history, which was
bound up with her own. Like many Syrians in the region, her family had lived in
what is now Turkey until the Assyrian genocide of 1915. They fled the Ottoman
government and settled in a village further north along the Syrian-Turkish
border. When her father moved to this village, he was the first Christian. She
was born here and was part of the small Syrian community that had built the
church. That community was now dwindling, and life had become lonely as there
were no other Syrian villages around. I asked about the Arab militia outside
town. She said they were respectful.
As we got up to leave, she
insisted we stay for lunch, clearly not wanting to lose the infrequent pleasure
of guests. The others decided to keep going (I secretly wished we could stay).
She showed us one more thing before we left. She had a shrine in her backyard
to a saint whose bones her mother had uncovered. It was visually underwhelming:
just a pile of rocks, one of which had a rudimentary cross carved into it. But
it seemed to fit this dusty village on the edge of the desert. And I was
intrigued by the story behind it, which I only followed with difficulty because
the old woman frequently switched between Syriac and Arabic in her explanation.
As far as I understood, her mother had dug up the bones, and a female saint had
appeared to her in a dream, saying that the bones belonged to her.
Only later did I realize
that I had missed something essential, and wished I had asked for more details
about the story. I was confused about the timeline. Did the mother dig up the
bones first, and then see the saint in a dream? Or did she see a saint in a
dream, who told her to dig at that spot and she would find her bones? I’m a
Catholic, and I was not prepared to discount the possibility of a miraculous
occurrence. I wanted to believe the story was true. But the next day, as we
drove back to Iraq, I could not help thinking that the sequence of events
mattered a great deal. If she had dug up the bones first, the apparition could
simply be a subconscious effort to handle the trauma of disturbing a grave.
Indeed the old woman said that her mother had prayed at that pile of rocks
every day and took meticulous care of the site. But if the dream happened
first, then the story appeared much more plausible. Either way, I intend,
someday soon I hope, to return, take her up on the offer of lunch, and learn
the truth.
When I left the village it
was with a certain understanding. It was exclusively Arab until this woman’s
father became the first Syrian to arrive. Others followed, and at its peak the
Syrian community there numbered twenty to thirty families. They had now mostly
left, many to the city of Qamishli and others further afield to Sweden or to
America. An Arab Muslim family lives in the house that shares the grounds with
the church. The church’s keys are with the old woman, who trusts her grandson
to open it for visitors. And the Arab militia that provides security in the
village treats the small Syrian Christian community with respect.
But back in Iraq, that
understanding was challenged. It happened unexpectedly. I was sitting in the
office of a Syrian organization with the friend who organized the trip, as well
as another man I had not met previously. When I mentioned the name of the
village where I had seen the shrine, he said he knew about that village. He
addressed me in Syriac, telling me about the problems it faced: how the Arabs
had prevented the Christians from entering the church, how there was sectarian
tension, and how the Arab militia was aggressive towards the Syrian villagers.
He claimed that the village had once been exclusively Syrian, but now the Arabs
had moved in and most of the Syrians were leaving. My friend translated all
this into Arabic for me. I replied that I had only just visited the church, and
that the keys were in the hands of a Christian family. I also repeated the old
woman’s contention that it was actually the Syrians who were the newcomers and
that the Arab militiamen had been respectful.
We reached a conversational
impasse, made worse by the need for translation. Here was an entirely different
version of this village’s story: a former Syrian enclave whose original
Christian inhabitants were being pushed out by Arab Muslims; an Arab militia
harassing Christians even preventing them from entering the church which I had
myself visited. What was I to believe? With my own eyes I had seen that the
church keys, or at least one set of them, were with the Christian family we had
visited. It seemed unlikely that the Arabs were preventing them from using the
church. And when I asked about the Arab militia, the woman responded that they
were respectful, and she had sounded
sincere. Why should she not have been? The militiamen had politely waved
through the Syrian soldiers with whom I had been traveling. And what about the
village’s history? Was it originally Syrian, Arab, perhaps both? Archival
records of the Ottoman Empire, or the French Mandate, or the Syrian state might
provide an answer. It is a mystery but a solvable one. The weight of evidence
to me seems to favor the old woman. She actually lives there and should know
better than anyone what the relations are like between her and the Arabs in the
village. She should know when her father came there and whom he found when he
arrived.
But after a decade of civil
war in Syria, there is very little trust between anyone. I now wonder whether I
should really have believed that this woman would tell me all the problems of
her village. I speak neither Syriac nor Kurdish, only Arabic, which makes me an
outsider in northeastern Syria, not unlike one of the Western journalists in
the Beirut bars who wait for the conversation to switch back to English from
French or Arabic so that they can presumptuously explain Lebanese politics to
their Lebanese friends. For the old woman, telling me what I wanted to
hear—that the Arabs treat her well, that there are no problems in the
village—was the safest bet. That
doesn’t mean, though, that there are problems. The absence of evidence is not evidence of
absence, but neither is absence of evidence itself evidence.
Of course, both versions
could both be right about different elements of the story. The woman could be
right about the village’s history—that the Arabs were there first and that her
father was the first Syrian there. At the same time, the man could be right about
sectarian tensions in the village that she didn’t want me to see, fearing
perhaps that mentioning it would put her in danger. Or a dispute could have
occurred, say, six months ago. Perhaps the Arabs locked the church in a fit of
rage, and later they duly re-opened it and apologized for the insolence of the
young hothead of the group. No hard feelings, the Syrians might have said. Come
drink coffee and eat processed sweets at our house and we’ll forget it ever
happened. No interlocutor is entirely reliable, and almost no interlocutor is
entirely unreliable.
Whatever the reality, most
people outside the village now remember it as the place where the Arabs oppress
the Christians. Does the man’s mistaken impression about the village’s history
suggest he is also wrong about the current tensions? Of course not, but I was
still inclined to discount his version because of his distance from the village
and because his information seemed to contradict what I had observed myself.
But who knows? We have all misremembered something about which we felt certain.
It does not mean that all of our other memories are false or mistaken.
Let’s say I had to write
about the village. What would I say? And how would readers receive it?
Reporting in Syria is often spotty, not least because most journalists are just
passing through and generally don’t speak the language. It’s a reminder of how
tenuous “the news” can be. As my grandfather once put it, when we read the
local paper, ninety-five percent of the time the reporter knows more than we do
and we believe his telling of events. But five percent of the time we know the
story better than the reporter. In those cases, we see all the gaps in the
story. We know that the sequence of events is wrong, or that it only tells one
side of the story, or that some of the interviewees are making themselves out
to look better than they really were.
In the Middle East, this
tendency is amplified. Reporting requires time and resources, both of which are
limited even in the best of circumstances. Most journalists have to believe
people when they tell their own stories or offer accounts of events they have
witnessed. The possibility that what they are hearing contains some admixture
of false memories, or even outright deceptions, can never be entirely ruled
out. Had I not met the second man and spoken only to the woman, I would have
felt reasonably comfortable writing a short news article about the village with
its tiny church and its dwindling Christian community. I would have focused on
the other more newsworthy issues we discussed: the fires that were burning
crops in the area, the Islamic State, the Syrian civil war. I would not have
hesitated to pass along what I had learned as fact. But then, by happenstance,
I was given more information that contradicted what I had been led to believe.
I am glad I did not have to write about it.
My fellow journalist Rania
Abouzeid was not so lucky. In No Turning Back, her book about Syria, she chronicled a massacre in the
city of Jisr al-Shughur carried out in 2011 by the Syrian government. Only
years later did she discover that this account had been largely false. But it
seemed like there had been little room for doubt at the time. She had
interviewed so many people fleeing from Syria into Turkey, all telling the same
story. These, it turned out, were mostly repeating something they had not
actually witnessed, though they believed to be true. Anyway, it was in keeping
with the narrative surrounding the conflict in Western media at the time. The
truth—that rebels had surrounded government soldiers and opened fire—would have
been harmful to the rebels’ cause. It was first told by a rebel commander on
Syrian state television after he was captured, but was dismissed as implausible
because it appeared on the propaganda network of the state broadcasting arm of
a dictatorial regime. But even then, there were reasons to believe him. He did
not, for instance, repeat the pro-government talking points shared by other
guests on state television. He rejected the interviewer’s insistence that he
refer to armed groups as terrorists. And he emphasized that the government did
not, in fact, give orders to open fire on protesters. Only by sticking with the
story for several years was Abouzeid able to uncover the truth, or at least
part of it. Had she not done so, her original reporting would have passed from
journalism into history.
How many journalists in the
Middle East approach their work with such humility? For obvious reasons, their
main priority tends to be finding some exclusive story, one that involves a
pressing issue or a novel angle or both. A simple example: a European
journalist in Erbil, the city in Iraqi Kurdistan where I live, approached me
shortly before the coronavirus pandemic to ask whether I knew of any musicians
in Iraq who were doing something innovative. She was looking to write about
young Iraqis challenging the status quo through music but was at a dead end.
The problem was that even young Iraqis’ musical tastes were pretty traditional.
Most were not pushing limits, but rather focused on furthering an inherited
musical heritage. Her tone about these traditionalists was dismissive, and she
was frustrated that she couldn’t find what she was looking for. But is the role
of a journalist to decide the story ahead of time and then find the anecdote to
confirm it? Isn’t the conservatism of Iraqi musicians a story in itself? Even
if she found a band that fit her preference, isn’t it noteworthy—if perhaps not
newsworthy—that most of the bands she first examined didn’t fit the bill? In
this sense, the news we read out of the Middle East really does skew our
understanding of the region from afar.
I don’t mean to pick on
this particular journalist. I do, however, find her attitude typical of many
Westerners in the Middle East. They are mostly informed by life in America or
Europe, and they see what they want to see. They tend to make dramatic, even
definitive pronouncements on all manner of subjects, though they don’t speak
the language or read much apart from what other journalists write. They seek
out narratives that seem to be in keeping with stories they have already
decided to tell. They accept things at face value that they ought to question
and question many things that are obvious. They are more interested in getting
things first than in getting things right. While most of them are smart enough
not to get caught passing along information that can easily be disproved, they
seem unaware that truth is not synonymous with facts, especially when it
appears in an unfamiliar context.
All of which is to say that
I can’t help but feel uncomfortable with the way journalists often write about
the Middle East, even if I can’t always put my finger on exactly why that is.
Most English-language reporting here reads as though the writer has found
something objectively true and is reporting it to the reader. Naturally,
stories that fit the favored understanding of issues such as the Syrian
conflict get more coverage than others. Abouzeid’s coverage of Jisr al-Shughur
is a good example. Most people didn’t question it because it appeared to be in
keeping with the Western view of the conflict: Good Protesters versus Bad
Dictator. Likewise, many stories of Christian persecution are passed along in
the American right without questions about whether the situation is more
complicated.
The entire Syrian conflict
revealed that some stories are infinitely complex. Many journalists covering it
have written about the frustration that their early reporting on atrocities did
not prompt the world to take action and stop the bloodshed. But within Syria
there was never a straightforward solution to its political problems and even
the best reporting had no answers about what to do. After all, journalism
cannot hope to answer the questions of politics. It can explain what happened
and how it happened. It cannot explain why something occurred. And in Syria, so
many journalists were wrong about what was actually going on that readers can
be forgiven for starting to doubt everything they read.
Back to our village. It is
possible that one day I will find written evidence that establishes whether it
was originally Syrian or Arab. But the rest of the story will probably not be
verified through archival research. If I ever pursue it further, a broader
range of interviews will probably be valuable. If ninety percent of people I talk
to lend support to one narrative or the other, I will feel reasonably confident
that I have uncovered the truth. I won’t be entirely sure, but I don’t think
the lesson here is that there is no objective truth or even that there is but
we can’t know it. It is more accurate to say that, in addition to documented
facts, perception matters. Much of the disagreement between my two interviewees
might involve a radically different perception of a similar event. I also have
to realize that my own bias will shape how I perceive it.
In the end, I’ll just have
to accept my limitations. I cannot write with so many caveats that the reader
wonders why I am writing at all. Journalists cannot cover every possible angle
even in a very small story, and I am more sympathetic than ever to those who
decide to write even though they still have questions themselves. But I do
think that journalism can be better than it is now. Because of my location it
is easy for me to see the shortcomings in coverage of the Middle East; when I
read about the coronavirus or racial politics in the United States or the
national debt, I know that they must be there regardless of whether I am able
to identify them. As a writer I can be more diligent about what I put on paper,
because I owe it to my readers to do just that. As a reader, though? I still
have no idea.
For now, all I know is that
if I ever read a news story about a tiny Syriac Christian village in
northeastern Syria, presenting a definitive answer to some lingering questions
in my mind, I’ll realize that the writer either knows much more—or much
less—than I do.
Samuel
Sweeney is a writer and translator based in the Middle East. His work has
appeared in the Wall Street
Journal, the New Criterion, and many other
publications.