Erdogan Rising. Hannah Smith Lucinda

Erdogan Rising - Hannah Smith Lucinda


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Iraqi children died in the 1990s through the direct or indirect impacts of the sanctions, which placed an almost total trade embargo on the country.

      My fixer Mohammed recalled that time quite differently. ‘Baghdad was amazing, so many parties,’ he said dreamily. The good times for the Brotherhood families only came to an end in 2003, when the US-led ‘Coalition of the Willing’ invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam. Ten years on, Mohammed still sneered in disgust when he thought about the capture, trial and execution of a man who, whatever the errors of the West in toppling him, was one of the most brutal dictators in modern history.

      Whenever Mohammed spoke of Saddam, it was with a finality that implied there was no other reasonable point of view. ‘Saddam was a very great man,’ he would say – and there was no way of persuading him how ironic it was that he was now embroiled in an uprising that was, purportedly, all about freedom from another dictator. Quite how or why he and his brother had come back to Syria from Iraq in 2011 would always remain a fuzzy enigma. Looking back, I’m sure that those old family ties were the reason why Mohammed was in Aleppo, a city with which he had few links, and why he was so keen to take me straight to the headquarters of the Tawhid Brigade, the Brotherhood’s armed proxy in the city. Three decades had passed since Assad the father had crushed and banished the Syrian Brothers. Now, in the Syrian revolution, they saw their chance to take revenge on the son.

      The Tawhid was described by its apologists as a moderate Islamist group, which, in comparison to Al-Qaeda and Isis, it was. But moderate is a relative term. The more time I spent around the Tawhid, the more irritated I became at the strict code of Islamic behaviour they forced on me, a foreign atheist journalist who had come to tell their story. On the streets of Aleppo, a multi-faith city in a multi-faith country, they commanded that I wear the headscarf. They said it was to ‘show respect for the people’. It wasn’t; instead, it was all about respect for the Tawhid. Usually, when I entered ordinary people’s homes in Aleppo, the first thing they did was tell me I could remove the headscarf if I wanted to.

      One day in May, as I was waiting inside the Tawhid’s base in a baking hot car with an agonising migraine for an interview that never materialised, and growing gradually more furious at being ordered to wear an uncomfortable symbol of someone else’s faith, I ripped the headscarf from my head. ‘Fuck this,’ I muttered to myself.

      I will never forget the looks I got from the surly fighters hanging around the base. Several times I heard them whisper between themselves ‘sahafiya’ – ‘journalist’. To their credit, no one approached me and told me to put the headscarf back on, but I could feel the intense hostility.

      Even more troubling was Hajji Marea’s willingness to accept the presence of Jabhat al-Nusra, Al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, in Aleppo and to fight alongside them on the front lines against Assad. Nusra’s base was next door to the Tawhid’s, and they had kept their hostages – including foreign journalists and aid workers – in the basement of a building the two shared. James Foley, the American reporter later passed on to Isis and murdered on camera, is believed to have been held in that basement while he was in Nusra’s hands – and while Hajji Marea was receiving the rest of us for interviews in a room just metres away. We never did find out if Hajji Marea knew the extent of what Nusra was doing – he was killed in a regime airstrike in November 2013. Most of the Syrians I knew changed their Facebook profile to a picture of him on news of his death.

      In August 2013 I visited the Tawhid’s base for the last time, and found the road outside had been freshly tarmacked and a promenade of elegant white flagpoles erected, leading up to the heavily guarded entrance.

      ‘We call it the UN,’ laughed Mahmoud, the suave, funny and far more intelligent fixer I had found after firing Mohammed. Mahmoud was no fan of the Tawhid.

      I was disgusted at the arrogance too – this tacky show, this waste of desperately needed funds, just metres from water mains burst by artillery and schools and homes obliterated in the fighting.

      But in Syria I also saw what happens to the trimmings of a personality cult when it crumbles. Across the rebel-held north in 2013 I came across the same banners depicting Bashar al-Assad that I had seen in that Damascus souk two years earlier, only now with his eyes scratched out and obscenities scrawled across his face. I found what was left of a bust of his father, Hafez, the architect of this terrifying regime, in the lobby of a hydroelectric dam that had been taken over by Jabhat al-Nusra. Somehow, they had managed to almost completely incinerate it. Another statue of Hafez in a nearby town had a leather sandal rammed into its mouth – the ultimate Arab insult.

      And when I returned to Aleppo in the spring of 2014, after a bleak winter in which Isis overran the rebels in the east of the city and Assad’s forces started dropping barrels filled with explosives from helicopters, I found the Tawhid had been bombed out of their base. The old eye hospital, already tattered when they occupied it, was now just ruined columns jutting out of rubble. Those flagpoles were a row of twisted stalks, and with Hajji Marea dead his undisciplined mob had forgotten their once-eternal fealty to their leader and had been absorbed by rival factions. It’s what happens to them all, in the end.

       Turkey’s cults

      Maybe it was because I wasn’t looking for them, but I didn’t pick up on the first hints of Turkey’s personality cults until I had been there for several months. Although I was living in Antakya I was barely connected to Turkey at first. I worked inside Syria, hung out with Syrian refugees in Turkey during my downtime, and devoted most of my attention to the war over the border. Turkey was the place I came back to at the end of assignments in the war zone, to drink beers and wear sleeveless tops and enjoy the unlimited electricity and hot water on tap. I sat in shisha cafés in the Turkish border towns as I wrote my articles about what was happening on the other side of the frontier and whatever was going on politically in Turkey was just background noise – unless it overlapped with what was happening in Syria.

      I knew of Atatürk, of course. Every Turkish guidebook mentions him, and warns tourists not to speak ill of him in public. I also remembered a passage in a book I had read as a teenager, written in the 1930s by a Turkish woman who had been so proud when her leader travelled to Europe wearing a suit and trilby hat like every other modern leader. Apart from anything else there is no way to avoid Atatürk in Antakya; a crude rendering of his face is cast in lights on the dramatic mountains that loom behind the town, visible from every street and rooftop terrace. The first time I saw the stylised line drawing of his face that is rendered in paint or metal signage in every public office in Turkey, I was struck by how much he bears a likeness to the British pop star Sting.

      Erdoğan and the AKP I knew of mainly because they rose to power when I was in my first year of university in Manchester. One of my classes focused on contemporary European politics – a hopeful, expansive subject at that time. The theme de jour was the endless possibilities for EU enlargement, and the imminent accession of the central European states that had once been Soviet satellites. In my seminar that day we had discussed the Turkish elections and their implications for Europe. Amid all the doom of that year – the slow cranking up to the war in Iraq, the worsening quagmire in Afghanistan – it seemed to be a glint of hope. The Turkish secularists who were howling at the rise of these seemingly benign Islamists were the ones who looked like fundamentalists.

      The Gezi Park protests, which started when I had been living in Turkey for three months, were the first major news story I took note of. They made small waves down in Antakya, where the local population of Turkish Alawites – members of the same sect of Shia Islam as Bashar al-Assad – held thinly attended protests in the main square. Maybe my views on Gezi at that time were coloured by the Syrians surrounding me: they mostly viewed Erdoğan as their champion – no other world leader was opposing Assad and welcoming refugees so consistently – and they distrusted the Turkish Alawites for their kinship with Assad’s hated regime in Syria. The tear gas used by the Turkish police to put down the demonstrations in Taksim seemed minor compared to the live rounds fired by Syrian security forces on protesters there.

      But, after Gezi, I started noticing how Erdoğan was becoming much more than a prime minister. When new football stadiums opened,


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