Reaction to American Raid

The fallout from the American raid in Syria on Sunday is beginning. It's been announced that the American School and American Cultural Center is going to be closed in retaliation.

The American School, like others all over the world, follows American curriculum and has classes in English. A lot of the teachers are Americans (I've only met 3, who are here for an "adventure" and don't speak any Arabic). The kids of different embassies' employees go there, the kids of multinational corps and orgs employees, plus some well-to-do Syrians. It's got some posh real estate in Abu Romaneh, near al-Jahiz Park and the Air Force building. The Cultural Center is connected to the embassy and does pretty innocuous stuff like advise Syrian students who want to study in the US and have a weekly movie night.

I'm surprised, since I was in the American Cultural Center today picking up my absentee ballot and nobody mentioned anything or seemed flustered.

What's not closing is the American Language Center (where I just took my GRE Saturday), which is generally acknowledged to be among the best places to learn English in Damascus.

About the raid itself, I hear American media saying the dead are militants including some big fish Iraqi named Abu Ghadiya. But of course they would say that (how long does it take American officials to admit to various bombings of weddings in Afghanistan?) The Syrian media is saying the raid took place at a farm and all the dead are civilians, including three children. How much of either can be believed?

The one thing every non-Syrian news source, Arab and American, agrees on is the location being Abu Kamal, despite that the name is actually al-Bou Kamal. It's ok American journalists, I saw al-Jazeera get it wrong this morning as well.

But the one fallback that I'm not expecting, and that the American community in Syria has been advised to keep a lookout for, it the personal. While I would fully expect Americans to bear personal animosity for the nationals of a country that attacked them (just look at the rise in hate crimes against Muslims after 9/11) I don't expect it of Syrians. Today I ate dinner at a friend's house. The topic came on the news and they asked me why America would do that and if I thought it was a bad thing to kill those poor people. But it wasn't like I was being blamed, just that maybe being an American would give me some insight.

But in terms of the reaction for being in a country that is attacked by your country? To me, closing the school and the cultural center isn't all that bad. In Sha Allah they'll open again later. I might need a job teaching at that American school someday!