Airstrikes Stir Emotion, Concerns Among Syrians in Houston
For Yaser, an engineer in Houston, the new U.S.-led airstrikes on Islamic State militants in his Syrian homeland refreshed his simmering anxiety about his father’s imprisonment, and about the conversation Yaser can’t bear to have with his father about his treatment in captivity.
A commercial photographer, Yaser’s father disappeared from their war-torn hometown of Aleppo in July 2013.
While the U.S. attacks have Yaser cautiously optimistic about the extremist threat that has dogged the Syrian people from one side, they also raise fears about the government that has pressed them from the other, the government that could fill any vacuum left by the Islamic State, the government that imprisoned his father.
“He wasn’t necessarily active” in the resistance against President Bashar al-Assad, Yaser said. “But it could be something you say to someone and an informant would write a report against you.”
For four weeks, the family didn’t know where Yaser’s father was or if he was alive. Eventually a family friend learned he was being held by the government as a political prisoner. They paid a ransom to release Yaser’s father, and he has since relocated to Saudi Arabia.
Human rights organizations have documented mistreatment and torture of Syrian detainees, including being forced into stressful positions, sexual abuse and beatings.
Yaser, whose full name is being withheld because he fears retribution against his family, has seen hundreds of videos online describing and depicting what happens to those taken by Assad’s forces. When he reunited with his father for the new year, they didn’t discuss those four weeks in prison.
“To this day it hurts me that I haven’t spoken to my dad about that incident,” Yaser said. “I can’t get myself to talk to him about it.”
Ripples of excitement
News of the U.S. taking its first direct military action against the Islamic State in Syria sent ripples of excitement through some of Houston’s Syrian expatriates and refugees, jaded by more than three years of civil war with a death toll of about 200,000. But it’s an excitement tinged with anger, anxiety and doubt. Some wish for broader action against the Assad regime; others question the ability of the United States to interfere again in the Middle East without sowing a new decade of chaos.
Syrians are “in a position between ISIS and Assad, being squeezed from both sides and being killed from both sides,” Yaser said, using an acronym for the Islamic State. “They would feel better if the attack was on both … they both represent tyranny.”
While the U.S. has carried out airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Iraq, Monday’s actions were the first inside Syria. President Barack Obama announced the participation of five Arab countries, seeking to deflect criticism that the United States is going it alone on another Middle Eastern war with no clear end in sight.
“The idea that we can get rid of this extremist group but still let Assad terrorize people is naive at best,” said Shiyam Galyon, president of the Houston chapter of the Syrian American Council, which faults the United States for not supporting mainstream Syrian opposition. “If the goal really is just ISIS then it will set a really disturbing and disgusting precedent for future genocides.”
Syrian Americans in Houston number in the thousands, according to the Syrian American Club, a social group that, unlike the council, avoids political involvement. Houston’s Syrian American community is an increasingly important source of emotional, political and logistical support to refugees, given the civil war and the closure in March of Syria’s consulate in Houston.
Question of morality
Ussama Makdisi, an expert in U.S.-Arab relations, said the new military action amounts to the United States going to war against an extremist group that is a symptom of American policy, “its own sort of architecture of domination” in the Middle East.
“The idea for anyone to pretend they have moral clarity in this situation has to be really questioned,” said Makdisi, professor of history at Rice University.
“The U.S. doesn’t have moral leadership in the Middle East given the invasion in 2003 and the extraordinary chaos since 2003,” he said.
Yaser questions the effectiveness of air strikes on a terrorist group. But he is cautiously hoping they lead someday to a calmer, safer home to which he and his father can return. Yaser hasn’t visited since 2001.
“I suspect that if I go back they might have my name on the blacklist,” he said.
Houston Chronicle,
Mark Collette