Acts of War

FORTY

The Syrian Army base at Quteife was little more than a few wooden buildings and rows of several dozen tents. There were two twenty-foot-tall watchtowers, one facing northeast and the other southwest. The perimeter was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence strung from ten-foot-high posts. The base had been erected eleven months before, after Kurdish troops from the Bekaa Valley had constantly attacked Quteife for supplies. Since then, the Kurds had stayed away from the large village.

The twenty-nine-year-old communications officer, Captain Hamid Moutamin, knew that the raids and then the peace were intentional. When Commander Siriner had decided where he was going to set up his own base in the Bekaa, he'd wanted the Syrians to establish a small military presence close by. Access to the Syrian military was an important part of Siriner's plans. Once the base at Quteife had been built, Captain Moutamin had used his ten years of exemplary military service to get himself transferred there. That too was important to Commander Siriner's plan. When both goals had been accomplished, Commander Siriner had gone ahead and estabilished his own base in the Bekaa.

Moutamin was not a Kurd. That was his strength. His father had been a traveling dentist who serviced many Kurdish villages. Hamid was his only son, and after school or on vacations he often accompanied his father on short journeys. Late one night, when Hamid was fourteen, their car was stopped by Syrian Army troops outside of Raqqa, in the north. The four soldiers took the gold his father used for fillings, as well as his tobacco pouch and wedding band, and sent them on their way. Hamid wanted to resist, but his father wouldn't let him. A short while later the elder Moutamin pulled the car over. There, on the deserted road, under a bright moon, he suffered a heart attack and died. Hamid returned to the home of one of his father's Kurdish patients, an elderly printer named Jalal. He telephoned his mother and an uncle came to get him. The funeral was one of sadness and rage.

Hamid was forced to leave school and go to work to support his mother and sister. He worked at a radio factory on an assembly line where he had time to think. He nursed his hatred of the Syrian military. He continued to visit Jalal, who, after two years, cautiously introduced him to other young people who had had run-ins with the Syrian military. All of them were Kurds. As they exchanged stories of robbery, murder, and torture, Hamid came to believe that it was not just the army but the entire government that was foul. They had to be stopped. One of Jalal's friends introduced him to a young visiting Turk, Kayahan Siriner. He was determined to create a new nation in the region where Kurds and other oppressed people would live in freedom and peace. Hamid asked how he could help. Siriner told him that the best way to weaken any entity was from within. He asked Hamid to become what he detested. He was to join the Syrian military. Because of his experience on the assembly line, Hamid was assigned to the communications corps.

For just over ten years Hamid served his Syrian commanders with seeming loyalty and enthusiasm. Yet during that time he secretly communicated troop movements to Syrian Kurds. His information would help them to avoid confrontations, steal supplies, or ambush patrols.

Now he had been given his most important assignment. He was to inform the base commander that by chance he'd intercepted a message from a Turkish Kurd. The man was alone, on the eastern side of the Anti-Lebanon range. He was a quarter mile west of the village of Zebdani, just within the Syrian border. Apparently, said Hamid, the man had been based there for quite some time and was reporting on Syrian troop movements. Hamid provided the base commander with the infiltrator's exact location.

The commander smiled. No doubt he saw a promotion for himself to a more prestigious base if he could find and break a Kurd spying for the Turks. He dispatched a unit, twelve men in three jeeps, with orders to surround and take the prisoner.

Hamid smiled inside. Then he took a break and made sure the motorcycle he intended to take was fueled up.