THE ARAB WORLD'S TWILIGHT ZONE

I had no idea where to start. That morning in July 2001, Oxford Business Group (OBG), at that time a publishing company start-up, had sent me from my base in Cairo to Damascus to carry out "the most comprehensive study of Syria ever compiled." Getting projects of that magnitude off the ground in an Arab country was always hard, but after eight years of study and journalism in the Middle East, I understood this better than most. Many Arab countries had local independent English-language publications of reasonable quality that were softly critical of the state and society. So it was normally just a matter of taking the editor out to lunch or buying a few drinks and asking for a few names of people with whom to speak. The ball would then soon start rolling, and six to eight months later, we would somehow manage to publish our report.

This wasn't going to work in Syria, however. The state's virtual monopoly on media ownership, as well as its tight control of access by foreign journalists, meant that no such publication existed. A colleague from OBG gave me the number of Leila Hourani — a young Syrian woman with whom he had once worked, and who, he said, knew her way around. I had given her a call that morning, and, to my surprise, she agreed to meet me for lunch at Gemini, an upmarket restaurant in Damascus's Abou Roumaneh district.

Leila turned the head of every man as she entered the restaurant's front door. Her doll-like face, curly brown hair in the bouffant style, form-fitting clothes, and five-inch heels made it easy to understand why many Arabs regarded Syrian women as the region's most beautiful. What I learned that lazy afternoon in Damascus, however, was that Leila's best quality was her candor, a rare attribute to be found under a dictatorship where most people are afraid to speak their mind.

Leila got right down to business and gave me a summary of the biggest unfolding story of the year: President Bashar al-Assad's promise to reform Syria. The thirty-four-year-old ophthalmologist had taken the reigns of control in Syria exactly one year ago that day upon the death of his father, the infamous "iron man" dictator Hafez al-Assad. In his inauguration speech — delivered only days after the Syrian parliament had had to change the constitution to lower the minimum age for a Syrian head of state from forty to thirty-four years to allow Bashar to assume his post — the young Assad urged Syrians to "accept the opinion of the other." Like many Syrians during what became known as the "Damascus Spring," Leila was excited with the idea of change and loved her new president. Nevertheless, every time she mentioned his last name, Leila lowered her voice and looked over her shoulder.

Bashar's coming to power was a story that I had followed from afar. After Assad's acceptance speech, scores of "discussion groups" formed throughout the country to address a whole host of Syria's political and social problems. At first, the state tolerated the forums — after all, many forum organizers believed that they were carrying out the discussions in Bashar's name. But as the discussions got increasingly critical of the regime, it struck back. A group of officials who had been close to Bashar's father — known as the "old guard" and led by vice president Abdel Halim Khaddam — were said to have advised the president to close the groups. Forum participants who were critical of regime corruption were imprisoned. While some discussion groups continued to function, Leila said that most, if not all, Syrians had no idea what was going on.

As we finished our appetizers, Leila turned the subject of the conversation to her family. By her style of dress, I thought Leila was Christian, as followers in the Arab world were not subject to Islam's conservative dress codes. In fact, Leila was Sunni — the daughter of Hassan Hourani, an agricultural engineer from the Houran region, which is south of Damascus. After joining the Baath Party in the late 1950s, Hassan was sent on a United Nations (UN) scholarship to France to study desertification — the loss of arable land to the desert, which was damaging Syria's agricultural production. After returning to the Houran in the mid-1960s, Hassan married Samia, an English teacher from a nearby village. The couple moved to Damascus in 1970, where Leila was born six years later.

The Baath Party was something I had only really read about. Based on the Arabic word for "renaissance," Baathism was a secular ideology that called for the unification of the Arab world into one country as the quickest way to solve its problems — most notably liberation from Israel, created from the former British Mandate of Palestine, whose flag the party even adopted as its own. Baathism functioned in another way on Syria's domestic scene: as a vehicle for minority rule over Syria's majority Sunni Muslim population. In the 1950s, Alawites — members of an obscure offshoot of Shiite Islam — filled the ranks of Syria's Baath Party and the army's officer corps. When the Baath seized power in a military coup in March 1963, Syria's Christian, Circassian, Druze, Ismaili and Shiite minorities, amongst others, saw the Baath as a path to freedom and a means to power. Under four hundred years of Ottoman rule, Syria's majority Sunni population had set the rules of the game, keeping minorities under the yoke. The Baath's secularism provided an ideological bulwark against traditional Islam.

The "Renaissance Party" was vulnerable to Syria's most virulent political disease, however: its penchant for military coups. Between independence in 1946 and 1970, various juntas and factions had overthrown or changed the government no less than seventeen times — making it one of the world's most unstable political entities.

One man figured out how to stop it. In November 1970, defense minister Hafez al-Assad seized power in a bloodless coup — much like his predecessors. But instead of relying on the Baath's minority base, Leila said, Assad reached out to two key constituencies of Syria's Sunni population that didn't like each other. The first was Damascus's historically powerful trading families. As merchants on the Western terminus of the Silk Road, these Damascene families were extremely rich, were educated abroad, and often spoke foreign languages at home. Many lost their businesses to the state's program of nationalizations in the late 1950s and 1960s. By selectively reversing some of these nationalizations through what he called the "Correctionist Movement," Assad won over a good portion of Damascus's merchant class.

The second were rural Sunni farmers like Leila's extended family. For centuries, these families eked out an existence in the Euphrates Valley to the east and the Houran area south of Damascus. Like Syria's minorities, these peasants didn't fare well under Ottoman rule and were generally regarded as uncivilized by Damascus's trading elite. Assad offered peasants who joined the Baath Party and its professional associations an education, jobs in the public sector, state financing for houses, and, for the most talented, a chance to live and work in the capital.

Assad's policies earned him respect among a majority of Syrians, and the regime quickly stabilized. He buttressed his domestic moves with aggressive moves on the regional level as well — he joined Egypt in a surprise attack on Israel in the October War of 1973. Syrian forces were ultimately defeated, but international intervention to stop the war transformed Syria's conflict with Israel into a cold war battlefield. The Soviet Union provided Syria with millions of dollars in military equipment and financial aid. Persian Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia, provided Syria with billions of petrodollars in aid — money that had resulted from the war's boom in the price of oil. The United States engaged Syria as well, extending $534 million in foreign assistance between 1975 and 1979 to coax Syria to the peace table with Israel and out of the eastern camp.

From what I could remember of recent regional history, the courting didn't last long. When Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel and moved into an American orbit, Syria formed the "rejectionist front" of groups opposing what became known as Camp David. The same year, Syria formed an alliance with the leaders of Iran's Islamic Revolution against their common rival, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. As Iran continued to rail against America as "the Great Satan," the United States's Gulf allies, led by Saudi Arabia, cut off aid and investments to Syria. The country's economy contracted, and discontent set in.

It was then that Assad's new order was challenged by the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization with a strong following in the conservative northern Syrian cities of Hama, Idlib, and Aleppo. Branding the Alawite-dominated Assad regime as "apostates," the militant wing of the Brotherhood waged a terrorist war against regime figures and government institutions. Leila said she remembered her father taking her out of her first-grade classroom after the Brotherhood car bombed the Ministry of Information across the street from her family's apartment.

In February 1982, Assad ordered Syrian special forces to surround the Brotherhood's headquarters in Hama. What happened next was something that featured prominently in almost every Syria domestic news story I had ever read. Using artillery, the regime leveled the Brotherhood's warren in the backstreets of Hama's Old City. Tens of thousands of people were killed. The regime also launched a sweeping campaign of arrests — not only of suspected Brotherhood members but virtually all regime opponents, including communists and Arab nationalists who hated the Brotherhood as much as the regime. Acute fear gripped the country as the economy fell deeper into recession.

Nearly a decade later, Syria emerged back on the international scene, due largely to tectonic shifts in the international balance of power and shifts in its regional alliances. With its Soviet patron in political and economic chaos, Assad joined the American-led alliance to oust the forces of his Baathist rival, Saddam Hussein, from Kuwait. In return, the United States gave its tacit consent for Syria to use its forces in neighboring Lebanon to implement the Lebanese National Reconciliation Accord, otherwise known as the Ta'if Accord, named after the city in Saudi Arabia where the agreement was negotiated to end Lebanon's civil war.

After the war, Leila and her family expected that, given the regime's strong position and good terms with the West, Assad would release political prisoners and launch sweeping reforms to overhaul the country's moribund public sector. In the end, economic reform was limited to a single law for foreign investment. The prisoners who emerged from jail were mostly communists and Arab nationalists, which left thousands of others associated with the Muslim Brotherhood "disappeared." And while I didn't fully realize it then, it was the specter of those who never emerged from Syria's prisons that kept Leila's — and every other Syrian's — voice to a whisper when they spoke about the Assad family.

After lunch, Leila took me for a tour of Abou Roumaneh. The architecture of the district's buildings looked like certain quarters of Cairo — a city I had grown tired of. When I had arrived in Egypt to study political science at the American University in Cairo in 1994, I thought that if I just learned Arabic, life in Cairo would be easy. Boy, was I wrong. With better Arabic came better comprehension of the growing number of personal questions from Cairenes I didn't know. Often they asked why I hadn't converted to Islam. It would also be nothing for a taxi driver taking me and a female colleague somewhere to ask if we were married. An increasing number of Egyptians just simply seemed to jeer at Westerners as we walked down the street. While it was hard to point to any one reason for Egyptians' slow shift toward this kind of conservative, in-your-face interpretation of Islam, it coincided with the return home of thousands of Egyptians who had traveled to Saudi Arabia as guest workers in the 1980s. Egyptians told me that many of their countrymen brought Saudi Arabia's less-tolerant interpretation of Islam, Wahhabism, back home and were now disseminating it around the country.

Walking down a street in Abou Roumaneh was a completely different experience. No one asked about my relationship with Leila, who, despite her risqué dress, garnered only glances from passers-by. Shopkeepers were friendly and asked no questions about our religion. People just minded their own business. Car traffic was far less than Cairo, where the air constantly smelled of exhaust fumes. In American terms, it was more like walking down a street in Pittsburgh than New York.

We decided to take a breather in a nearby café. As we sipped on strong cups of Arabic coffee scented with cardamom, Leila asked me about OBG's project in Syria. When I finished explaining all that was involved, she asked me if we had all the proper government permissions. I told her that we had all the paperwork in hand, as well as the backing of the Ministry of Economy and Trade.

"What about the American government?" she asked.

I laughed and told her we didn't need clearance from Washington to work in Syria — journalism was exempt from US sanctions on the country.

"Oh yeah?" Leila said, putting her hand on my shoulder and giving me a big smile. "Remember, Andrew, everything about Syria is political. Go and see your embassy and tell them what you are up to."

I called the economic and commercial section of the US embassy in Damascus the next morning. The secretary immediately patched me through to Mary Brett Rogers, an American diplomat whom I had met the previous week. To my surprise, she set an appointment to see me that afternoon. US embassies officially represent American interests abroad, but they are still an arm of the federal government's bureaucracy. A recent request to see an officer at the US embassy in Cairo had taken about two weeks to set up, due to the need to obtain security clearances and fit the appointment around diplomats' extensive vacation time.

The US embassy in Damascus sits atop Rouda Circle, the center of the Syrian capital's top residential district. The Tora River — one of seven small tributaries that trickle through Damascus — feeds the square's large water fountain. The embassies of other countries, including Turkey, China, and Iraq, are also in the square. President Assad's residence — a common apartment — sits a few hundred meters northwest.

As I passed through "Post One" — the embassy's business gate — I was immediately filled with a sense of irony. Here I was, entering the US embassy in Syria — one of the original nations on the United States's "State Sponsors of Terrorism" list. The list, created by Congress in 1979, "designated" countries that supported groups carrying out car bombings, hijackings, and other terrorist operations — an official mantra tattooed on the inside of my skull after writing it hundreds of times in news stories on Syria.

However, of the scores of US embassies that I have visited in the Arab world, this was the only one that didn't resemble Fort Knox. The August 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Dar Es-Salam and Nairobi spurred the State Department to build a slew of new, more secure embassies in the Arab world. Each had thick concrete walls and crash barriers camouflaged as large concrete planters; some had watchtowers. The design — called "setback" — was based on the recommendations of a 1985 report into another tragic attack: the April 1983 bombing of the US embassy in Beirut (Lebanon was then partially occupied by Syrian forces). Seven months later, another truck bomb destroyed the US marine barracks at Beirut's airport. The 241 marines who perished in the rubble marked the largest one-day death toll for the US Marine Corps since the battle of Iwo Jima.

To protect the American diplomats and staff from car bombs, the new embassy buildings were constructed several hundred feet inside the compound's outer walls. The interior of the US embassy in Amman, Jordan, about three hours by car from Damascus, looked and felt like a futuristic high school somewhere in southern California. The embassy building — with tiled roofs and sidewalks — even featured its own restaurant. Security on the perimeter was as tight as a drum.

Stepping through the gate of the US embassy in Damascus, in contrast, was like traveling back in time — to a world before car bombs. For starters, the embassy building directly touched the embassy compound's outer wall. The chancery — the part of the embassy that houses the US ambassador and staff — was a 1920s-era villa. An American flag foisted at the villa's highest point, above the gate, was surrounded by a bird's nest of barbed wire. The texture of the embassy's stucco exterior was uneven, like a cheap New York apartment whose walls have been plastered over too many times. Two small windows served as the embassy's only portholes to the outside world. Gigantic cypress trees ringed the inside of the compound's outer wall, enclosing a small garden centered on a marble oriental fountain, whose basin held a pool of stagnant green water.