The white-haired, 61-year old exile has come to the hospital to see the refugees from Syria. He used to be a diehard Ba’athist Party member back in that country. But when some Baathists split in the 1980s, he joined the faction associated with the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Eventually, he abandoned it in disgust and chose to live in southern Turkey. For the past 20 years, he has lived away from politics. But now, the trim, mustachioed man is once again involved with the work of the Ba’athists. This time, however, he is tending to the Syrian party’s many victims.
He doesn’t want to provide his real name but, over the past few weeks, he has become, in his own words, “Abu al-Forsan,” Arabic for the “father of the knights,” knights being the closest word in English to a term that refers to men of great courage, honor and integrity. His knights are the 70 or so wounded Syrians now receiving care in Turkish hospitals in this southern border city. “They are my children,” the man says. “If I don’t see them every day, I feel like I have wronged them.”
He is not unknown to the regime in Damascus, which he says, recently sent one of his brothers over from the family hometown of Aleppo in northern Syria to warn him against helping the wounded protesters. “My brother came for just a few hours, just to deliver the message that they know what I am doing and they want me to stop.”
But Abu al-Forsan won’t stop. At 11 a.m. one morning, he was barreling up the stairs of a hospital in Antakya, carrying bags of plastic slippers and knock-off Nike attire to distribute to the Syrian patients. He entered a room with two young men from the northern Syrian town of Jisr al-Shughour. One had a bullet still lodged in his right eye; the other, who was also shot in the face, had a patch over his left eye. “Uncle, it’s good to see you,” the man with the patch said. “Tell me, what’s the news from Jisr? I can’t understand the news here, it’s all in Turkish!” The former Ba’athist recounted what he knew, before turning to the other young man, pulling his cell phone out of his back pocket, dialing a number, and handing it to him. “We found your brother. He’s in a camp. Here, talk to him.” The man was overjoyed.
For many Syrians — hurt, frightened and alone in a foreign country — Abu al-Forsan is the closest thing to family they have. The hospital visits benefit him too. He says they are a chance to right what he considers the wrongs of being in the Ba’ath Party. “I was 26 years old when I joined. I thought it was about pan-Arabism. I believed its motto of ‘unity, freedom and socialism,'” he says. “It was all lies. There was no freedom. The only place I’d dare open my mouth was at the dentist.”
He left Aleppo in 1981, initially crossing the northern Syrian border into Turkey, where he says up to 300 rebel Syrian Ba’athists and their families had sought refuge. Syria and Iraq were deeply hostile neighbors for decades, in an inter-Baath struggle that had as much to do with the personalities and egos of the countries’ two leaders, Iraq’s Hussein and Syria’s Hafez al-Assad , as it did with political ideas. “Everybody wanted to be a leader,” Abu Forsan says laughing, referring to the rebel Ba’athists in Turkey. “So I distanced myself from them all.” After six months, he left for Iraq, where he lived a lavish expenses-paid lifestyle, courtesy of Saddam’s faction. But the party soon ended when Abu al-Forsan says he was asked to join his host’s fight against Iran . “I refused, so they cut off my expenses, and cancelled my Iraqi passport. They gave me a three-month travel document.”
