The Syrian Sunset, page 31
The line was quiet for a very long time. Finally, Karimov said just above a whisper, “Thank you, Shai.”
AFTERWORD
In February 2014, five months after the G20 Summit in St. Petersburg, Russia invaded Crimea. In February 2022, Vladimir Putin’s troops stormed into Ukraine.
The Russian military intervention in the Syrian Civil War began in September 2015, after a request by the regime for military aid against the rebels. In August 2015, the Syrian government entered into a treaty with Russia where Russia controlled and operated the Khmeimim Air Base, newly constructed by the Russians, adjacent to the Russian naval facility of Tartus near Latakia on the Syrian coast. Beginning in 2015, the Russians greatly expanded their port facilities.
Simultaneously, Russian bombers lifted off from Khmeimim and attacked military groups opposed to the Assad regime. These included the Syrian Free Army, the Syrian National Coalition, the Islamic State of Iraq, and the al-Nusra Front. Russian special operations forces deployed across Syria. In 2017, Russia announced Khmeimim Air Base had become a permanent Russian military installation. Ostensibly there to bomb ISIS positions, they released regularly on Free Syrian Army targets. At the end of 2017, Russia announced its troops would remain in Syria permanently.
The all-out military assault on Daraa commenced on April 25, 2011. On May 5, the last protestors dared dart into the streets. So many disappeared that the civilian death toll was estimated, with little confidence, at 250. The children of Daraa had ignited the Syrian Spring uprising.
The graffiti in Daraa, Bethlehem and on the Mezzeh Mosaic Wall, the 1982 Hama massacre, the Military Intelligence Directorate bombing, the sarin attacks on Ghouta and elsewhere, Institute 3000, Saydnaya Prison, Mezzeh Military Airport Prison, the destruction of Adam’s Cave, the Nasib Crossing, the British House of Commons vote against intervention, the G20 gathering in St. Petersburg, the Kerry-Lavrov tete-a-tete in Geneva, and the demonstrations in Tirana are all factual. Often a historical novel is easier to write as actual events exceed imagination.
On January 7, 2014, slightly less than four months after the Kerry-Lavrov agreement, Syria delivered its first shipment of sarin to the Syrian port at Latakia. The chemical weapons were loaded on a Danish ship that sailed into international waters. China and Russia provided escort to the US ship, the MV Cape Ray, for neutralization using hydrolysis.
On January 16, 2014, Italian Transport Minister, Maurizio Lupi, announced that Gioia Tauro, a port in southern Italy, would be used to transfer Syrian chemical weapons to the Cape Ray.
On June 17, 2014, the last 8% of Syria’s chemical stockpile was transferred from Latakia to the Danish ship Ark Futura.
On July 2, 2014, over 600 metric tonnes (158,000 gallons) of the precursor chemicals for sarin gas were loaded onto the Cape Ray in Gioia Tauro. In six weeks, the first 581 metric tons were neutralized aboard the ship.
Syria’s VX stockpile was neutralized at Porton Down in Great Britain.
At room temperature, chlorine is yellow-green and twice as heavy as air. Chlorine reacts promptly with water in the mucous membranes and airways to form hydrochloric and hypochlorous acids, leading to acute inflammation of the conjunctiva, nasal mucosa, pharynx, larynx, trachea, and bronchi. Those exposed may suffer acute lung injury and acute respiratory distress syndrome. Severe exposure leads to death.
On April 10-11, 2014, while sarin was in route to Latakia, the Syrian regime dropped chlorine gas on the rebel town of Kafr Zita north of Hama. 107 were affected, five seriously.
On April 11 and 16, 2014, unidentified chemical gas was released in the suburb of Harasta, in Ghouta in eastern Damascus. From the affects, it appeared to be sarin.
April 12, 2014, chlorine again descended on Kafr Zita, hospitalizing five.
On April 12, 13 and 18, 2014, chlorine gas was launched at rebels in Al-Tamanah in Idlib province. 137 affected.
Chlorine attacks continued on April 18 in Kafr Zita, 100 people affected, 35 hospitalized. On April 21, 2014, two chlorine barrel bombs stuck a residential area. 133 affected, 4 seriously.
On April 22, 2014, chemical barrel bombs hit Dariyya, the western suburb of Damascus, killing 4 and wounding 30.
Al-Tamanah was hit again with chlorine on April 29, May 21, 22, 25 and 29
Kfar Zita on May 19, 21 and 22
Al-Lataminah in the Hama district on May 29
July saw chlorine attacks in Kfar Zita and Aleppo
August in Kfar Zita
February and March 2015 witnessed chlorine attacks in Dariyya, Aleppo, Idlib, and Daraa, the seat of the uprising in the south. That year the number of chlorine gas attacks climbed into the hundreds. Most often the regime targeted opposition-held suburbs to cause panic and force fleeing. Residents did and those loyal to the regime commandeered their homes.
The Dariyya municipality of Damascus west of the Mezzeh Military Airport, held 130,000 before the uprising. By August 2016 the population had shrunk to 7,000. Unable to break the siege and starving, the 700 remaining rebels surrendered and were allowed safe passage to the opposition stronghold of Idlib. After the forced resettlement to the north of the remaining population, the city was empty.
On March 24 and 30, 2017, sarin was used against rebels in al-Lataminah in the Hama district.
On April 4, 2017, a government air strike dropped sarin on rebel-held Khan Shaykhun in the northwest. It injured between 300 and 400 and killed 80. In response, President Trump initiated a strike against the government airbase at Shayrat, located near Homs, from where the bombers departed. In a UN emergency meeting, Russia vetoed a motion for international retaliation against the regime for violating the Chemical Weapons Convention treaty Syria had finally signed in 2015.
On April 7, 2018, Syrian forces dropped two chlorine canisters on residential areas in the city of Douma, ten kilometers northeast of Damascus. One did not release its payload. The other, with a high concentration of chlorine, struck an unstable roof of an apartment building and within minutes killed between 40 and 50, and injured up to 100. On April 14, France, the United Kingdom and the United States launched missiles at four government targets associated with this attack. The strikes claimed to destroy Syria’s remaining chemical weapons capabilities.
On June 2018, a Syrian Mi-8 military helicopter operating out of Dumayr Airbase, forty kilometers northeast of Damascus, dropped a chlorine bomb on the rooftop balcony of a residential building in Douma. 34 deaths were known to have been tallied.
On July 6, 2018, a helicopter dropped a chlorine payload which struck a multi-story apartment building in Douma killing 49 and injuring over 600.
Chlorine gas attacks continued.
On April 1, 2015, the Syrian liberation forces overran the Nasib Border Crossing from the Daraa region into Jordan, closing the chief conduit for bi-lateral trade valued at two billion dollars per year. At that time in the north, the Bab al-Hawa and Azaz crossings into Turkey were also in rebel hands.
On July 10, 2018, the regime recaptured the Nasib Crossing.
In September 2021, Jordan reopened traffic through the Nasib Crossing in a move to boost the two countries’ struggling economies.
Civil War toll between 2011 and 2022:
500,000 civilians killed
8-9 million displaced internally
4 million displaced externally
Bashar al-Assad responsible for approximately 96% of civilian deaths
ISIS responsible for 2%
Russia 2%
The remaining came at the hands of the Free Syrian Army and Kurdish forces.
On April 15, 2021, the Syrian Network for Human Rights in Paris (SYNR) estimated that in the first nine years of the civil war, the regime had dropped 82,000 barrel bombs.
On August 30, 2021, the SYNR in Paris published its 10th annual report on Enforced Disappearance in Syria. The known number since the March 2011 uprising was 102,287 including 2,405 children and 5,801 women, the vast majority detained by the Syrian regime. The report indicated that the first years of the mass uprising saw the highest percentage of enforced disappearances, because the demonstrations were taking place in areas under the control of the Syrian regime.
The torture victim, Mazen al-Hamada, returned to Syria—maybe wracked by the West’s failure to help, maybe bones increasingly brittle from the world’s coldness, maybe longing for the hearth of home, maybe so haunted from those fifteen months of torture, many in Mezzeh Military Airport Prison—maybe he could no longer bear to stroll along Amsterdam’s canals with their colorful houses reflected in the water. Apparently fantasizing he could mediate between the regime and the West, in 2020 Mazen al-Hamada reversed his exodus and after three visits to the Syrian Embassy in Berlin to negotiate terms, he flew back to Damascus. Upon arrival he disappeared. Nobody since has seen or heard from him.
While a college student at UC Berkeley, I traveled to Lebanon where I met a Syrian student at the American University of Beirut. He suggested that I take a shared taxi from Beirut to Damascus as visas were granted readily at the border. I spent a day in Damascus, was followed by the mukhabarat and fled back to Beirut. In 1977, Dutton, Hodder and Stoughton in Great Britain and a number of countries worldwide published my first novel, The Damascus Cover. Forty years later in his final film, Sir John Hurt along with Jonathan Rhys Meyers appeared in the movie adaptation of my novel. The member of British Parliament, Brooks Newmark, whose conversation with Secretary of State Kerry is referred to above, had read The Damascus Cover. While walking together in Los Angeles after the film was released, he said, “It’s time for you to return to Damascus.” He meant with a new novel.
On the way home to Los Angeles from my first trip to the Middle East so many years ago, I traveled to the Soviet Union to meet dissident leaders and bring some of their writings on microfilm to London, which I managed unimpeded. The British group tour conducted by Intourist, the Russian tour operator, took me to Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and then to Tashkent and Samarkand in Soviet Central Asia. On my own in the Old City of Samarkand, I happened across a group of tailors, all working on sewing machines. When I indicated that I was American, they pointed at their American made machines and chorused, “Zinger, zinger.” It is mere conjecture that I met someone resembling Alisher Karimov then.
About The Author
Howard Kaplan
Howard Kaplan is a native of Los Angeles and has lived in Israel and traveled extensively through Lebanon, Syria and Egypt.
At the age of 21, he was sent on a mission into the Soviet Union to smuggle a dissident’s manuscript on microfilm to London. His first trip was a success. On his second trip, he transferred a manuscript to the Dutch Ambassador inside his Moscow embassy. A week later, he was arrested in Khartiv in Ukraine and interrogated for two days there and then two days in Moscow, before being expelled from the USSR. The KGB had picked him up for meeting dissidents and did not know about the manuscript transfers.
He holds a BA in Middle East History from UC Berkeley and an MA in Philosophy of Education from UCLA.
Books By This Author
To Destroy Jerusalem
When a neutron source ─ a necessary component in triggering a nuclear explosion ─ is stolen in New York, the CIA calls on Shai Shaham, the legendary Mossad field agent.
To trace the stolen neutron source, Shai needs to locate where and how those behind the theft are obtaining plutonium so he heads to Amsterdam to meet Ramzy Awwad, the Palestinian agent who Shai had been ordered to kill at the end of a mission together. He doesn't know if Ramzy is more likely to help stop the plotters or join the Palestinian people in the midst of the first intifada (uprising) in the Occupied Territories.
Set in 1990, TO DESTROY JERUSALEM is the tale of a terrifying plot that spans the globe, from Rio de Janeiro to war-torn Beirut to the West Bank. As Shai rushes to avert catastrophe, he unearths a link to the underground intifada in Jerusalem, and he tracks the conspirators until they thwart him with an ingenious plan to bridge the heavily fortified northern border into Israel.
Whether Shai will be able to depend on Ramzy to help stop a horrific attack is a question on which the fate of these peoples ─ and the greater world ─ depends.
The Spy's Gamble
Shai Shaham, an Israeli intelligence officer, contacts old friend and adversary Ramzy Awwadl, a former PLO intelligence officer and one of the great writers of his people, to help locate the missing prime minister.
But can they trust each other?
Can their friendship withstand the turbulent political landscape?
Eli Bardinl — an agent who is feeling the strain of being away from his wife and children for so long in the field — is also tasked to contact Ramzy for the help in finding the missing sub. It seems the Russian have great interest in the technology, and he must locate the prime minister... because losing him is a national calamity that threatens to upset a delicate political balance in the most terrifying ways.
Starkly depicting the excesses of both sides and moving through actual events, THE SPY'S GAMBLE relies on in-depth research to weave a thrilling tale of suspense of reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.
The Damascus Cover
In a last ditch effort to revive his career, washed out agent Ari Ben-Sion accepts a mission he never would have 30 years ago ─ to smuggle a group of Jewish children out of the Damascus ghetto.
Or so he thinks.
In Damascus, a beautiful American photographer, Kim, seems to be falling in love with Ari. But, she is asking too many questions.
His communication equipment disappears. His contact never shows up. The operation is only hours away and everything seems awry.
Realizing that he's caught up in a bigger and more dangerous game, Ari is desperate to succeed... and he's willing to risk everything... even his life.
The Damascus Cover is a gripping thriller with enough twists and turns to keep the reader intrigued until the explosive ending.
Bullets of Palestine
Israeli Agent Shai is dispatched to eliminate a terrorist threat. To succeed in his mission, Shai must win the trust of Palestinian Agent Ramzy, who will help him gain access to the infamous and dangerous Abu Nidal.
Shai is under orders to kill Ramzy when the mission ends. But instead, they forge a friendship that transcends the hatreds of their heritage.
Loyalties are tested. Will they work together to capture Abu Nidal or betray each other's trust?
In a conflict where both sides dehumanize each other, two extremely human men are caught in the cross-hairs of the larger war.
The Chopin Express
The young man had learned too much. He suspected Andrei hadn’t committed suicide and worse, he knew the Israelis had uncovered the Russian transmission system.
If the Soviets go hold of Steve in his present condition, he’d tell them everything. So Steve Barth presented too great a threat. He had to be eliminated. There was no alternative.
A tense high-voltage novel of Russia’s secret war against the Soviet Jews and of an innocent young student ensnared in the violent web of betrayal and terror.
Howard Kaplan, The Syrian Sunset
