Global News Journal

Aflaq, symbol of Iraq and Syria’s shared past

The blue-domed memorial Saddam Hussein built in Baghdad to honour Baath party founder Michel Aflaq, a Syrian Christian who started the movement that dominated Iraq for decades and governs Syria today, has been turned into a shopping centre for U.S. soldiers. Aflaq’s tomb, sitting at the centre of a vault adorned with Koranic verses and Arabesque designs, has been boarded up to make way for a barber shop, a store selling kitschy Iraq souvenirs, a pirate DVD vendor and a ring of other stores.

The new mall at Aflaq’s tomb, located on what is now a U.S. military base in central Baghdad, has thus sealed off a powerful symbol of the deep, and often strained, shared history between Iraq and Syria, one which is being tested in a new feud between Baghdad and Damascus.

Last month, Syria and Iraq recalled their ambassadors after Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki accused Syria of sheltering mebbers of the Iraqi Baath party whom he blames for backing attacks that killed around 100 people in Baghdad last month.

The Aug. 19 bombings marked a U-turn in the slow improvement of relations between Iraq and Syria, which for decades had stunted diplomatic relations. Since 2003, they have been at odds over U.S. and Iraqi accusations that Damascus has allowed foreign insurgents to stream across its border into Iraq.

Damascus refused Maliki’s demand that Syria turn over Iraqi Baathists believed to be behind the August attacks and accused Iraq of being ungrateful for its efforts to care for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi war refugees now living in Syria.

But Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must be unnerved by Maliki’s request at the United Nations for a formal inquiry into the attacks.

Euphoria at Saddam’s fall becomes a sigh

I still remember what my father-in-law told me that fateful day in 2003, as we sat riveted by the sight of American soldiers on television pulling down the iconic statue of Saddam Hussein from its pedestal in a Baghdad square.

My father-in-law, whose brother had fled Iraq after being jailed for a few days after Baathists took the power in 1969 and who was never a Saddam supporter, was reflective.

“The only thing I fear is that a day will come in which we will regret Saddam’s fall,” he said.

During a visit a couple of months ago to Jordan, where my children, my wife and her parents have lived in self-exile for almost two years, I asked my father-in-law whether he had come to regret the end of that era.

“Unfortunately, yes,” he said, his voice filled with disappointment. Since then, I haven’t been able to drive his response from my mind.

For five years, I have been asking myself the same question: how did it come to be that Iraqis like my father-in-law, driven to live as an illegal immigrant outside Iraq, rue Saddam’s fall?

I can say without hesitation that many Iraqis share my father-in-law’s feelings. Not because they supported Saddam, although there are many who still do, but because the hopes of a better life that were born in April 2003 have been crushed.