Welcome to D-Tour

The first thing most people say when I tell them I’m going to Syria is “Be careful.”

No one ever explains exactly what that means; but by the way they hold my shoulders and look at me as though we may never see each other again, I suppose they are imagining some cross between a bombing, a beheading and a twist on the film “Not Without My Daughter”.

Which is, of course, exactly why I want to go.

Call me crazy, but there just have to be some better things to associate with the country where half of my family lives than violence and hatred.

But when you label a country as a member of the junior varsity axis of evil, I can understand why it’s difficult for people to feel warm and fuzzy when you tell them that you are heading there.

There just aren’t a lot of stories coming out about average, everyday Syrians to whom we can relate and that’s one thing I hope to offer you here.

I hope to introduce you to Syria’s barbers, plumbers and backgammon fanatics, tell you the latest jokes people are exchanging on the street and find out what folks halfway around the world dream about at night.

More than violence, I fear serious food poisoning, inadvertently offending my Aunt Leyla by forgetting to call the minute my plane lands and, in the company of my beautiful and sophisticated cousins, looking like the complete slob that I am.

The irony, perhaps, of all of this is that I know as well as anyone that the Middle East can be a dangerous place: In November 2005, my cousin Rima and my uncle Moustapha were killed during an orchestrated bombing of three hotels in Amman, Jordan.

And that brings me to tell you about another reason I’m going to Syria.

I was in the Herald newsroom that morning of the attack, walked right past the television where the news was breaking and never imagined that the incident, halfway around the world, had any connection to my family.

Several hours later, after a phone tree of calls from friends and relatives who saw my cousin and uncle named as victims of the attack on Al-Jazeera reports, I sat in silence with my parents at our home in Carmel, watching CNN replay a video of the inside of one of the hotels for several hours.

Days later CNN was playing what was to me a much more disturbing video: A woman in a headscarf and long robe walking in front of the camera, opening her long coat to reveal an explosive belt.

Her name was Sajida Al-Rishawi. Several days before the attacks, she and her husband had allegedly come to Amman, rented an apartment and practiced detonating the explosive belts they would wear into the hotel lobbies.

Only her belt hadn’t exploded.

Now she was in Jordanian custody and CNN was playing the short clip of her over and over again. It looked as though she was pacing and repeatedly opening her coat to reveal the explosives.

More disturbing than the belt was the expression on her face. She looked emotionless.

As the days passed, we learned from news reports that Sajida’s relatives and friends had been killed by American soldiers in Iraq. The reports suggested that this was her motivation to attack these hotels that were frequented by Westerners.

In some way, it should have been easy to cast Sajida aside as some confused, backwards and violent person out for revenge.

But I couldn’t help feeling curious about this woman in the explosive belt, just one year older than my cousin whom she had been willing to kill.

What had her life been like up until the moment she reached the hotels? Had she gone to school? Did she have young children like my cousin? There were a lot of questions I had, but I think really the main question was what brings someone to kill strangers?

It was a question that I was ruminating for the next two years and one that was still rolling around in my head when two other key events happened.

Less than a year after the attacks, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaida operative who apparently orchestrated the Amman attacks, was killed in a US airstrike.

A friend sent an email, suggesting that I must feel relief to learn that he had been killed. But I felt only distress that he had been killed in a surprise attack much the same way he had sent operatives to kill my relatives. No cause seemed to be advanced, no deeper meaning was found in my relatives’ deaths with this airstrike.

Several months later, I heard news that my high school friend, Nate, a Marine serving in Iraq, had been killed by a roadside bomb in the al-Anbar Province. I had lost touch with Nate after college, but I was incredibly upset to hear the news of his death and found it difficult to keep from falling apart when we buried him on a wintry hillside in Reno.

Nate’s death felt like the last straw. What was the meaning of all of this destruction, of these Arab, American and Arab-American deaths?

There seemed to be no winning or losing, only raised stakes, greater misunderstanding and more sadness. My thoughts remained with the very puzzling Sajida.

Labeling her as a terrorist or calling what her alleged cohorts had done a tragedy didn’t answer any of the questions I had about how or why this had happened.

And to me, the labels were only numbing and smacked of the same kind of broad-brush thinking that led to these tragedies in the first place. The question remained: Who was this woman?

So, pushed by what seem to be the most poignant events in my life so far, I have decided to follow through on an idea I had right after my cousin and uncle were killed and I am on a mission to try to talk with Sajida who is in a Jordanian prison, awaiting execution.

I’m also on a mission to experience and write about average, everyday life in Syria as well as get to know my family a little bit better.

This is the best antidote I can offer in response to impersonal acts of violence and dry, lifeless accounts from halfway around the world that seem to only make us stranger to one another. I only hope you will find these stories as compelling as I will in finding and sharing them with you.