By Dr. Adnan Buzan

During one of those heavy years when the Ba’ath did not merely rule Syria, but sought to infiltrate homes, schools, gatherings, and even the whispers behind closed doors, Kobani seemed like a city deliberately placed on the margins of the map.

A Kurdish city in the far north, far from Damascus and the centers of decision-making, yet never far from the eye of the security apparatus. The regime knew that geography alone was not enough to subjugate people; it therefore needed fear. And when fear lasts long enough, it ceases to be merely an individual emotion and becomes a social system.

It makes a neighbor watch his neighbor, a friend doubt his friend, a shopkeeper become a source of information, a political gathering a risk, silence a means of survival, and a word a potential crime.

Thus Kobani lived through its heavy years knowing that walls had ears, streets had eyes, and cafés had a memory that never slept. Yet the regime could not monitor everyone itself. It needed people from the city. Among them was a man known as Jartu.

During that historical period, it was not considered an ordinary matter, in the eyes of many people in the city, for a Kurd from Kobani to join the Ba’ath Party. For broad segments of the Kurdish population, the party represented a centralized Arab authority associated with policies of marginalization, surveillance, and pressure on Kurdish identity.

But Jartu and Fartu chose their own path—a path that gradually brought them closer to power and its security apparatus.

Jartu joined the party, then attended the Ba’athist Commando Course, and thereafter gradually moved closer to the circles of the security services, until he became connected to Military Security in the area.

At the time, the head of the Military Security detachment was a man known as Abu al-Fida, who held the rank of musāʿid (assistant) in Military Security.

Having lived in Kobani for years, he came to know most of its faces, names, homes, and families. He knew who talked about politics, who opposed the authorities, who was afraid, who could pay, and who could not.

Over time, a strange relationship developed between the security apparatus and the people of the city: fear on one side, money on the other, and violations met with deliberate overlooking.

According to the widely circulated local account, Abu al-Fida accepted bribes from people and, in return, turned a blind eye to certain violations. Even some Kurdish political figures, according to the story, did not always end up behind the doors of the security detachment.

There was room for bargaining.

And it was here that Jartu’s story began to take a different turn.

He did not like seeing Abu al-Fida being lenient.

He believed that people were moving around more freely than they should, that some politicians were still speaking, and that the city had not been completely transformed into silence.

So he decided to become more security-minded than the security apparatus itself.

He began contacting officers senior to him.

He established lines of communication with officials in Aleppo, and then his contacts extended to officers in Raqqa, even though Raqqa was a different governorate and had no direct administrative relationship with Kobani.

He did not merely want to carry out what was asked of him. He wanted to establish a place for himself within the security network, and to prove that he knew more, reported more, and had access to higher-ranking officers.

He thought that more contacts would increase his value.

But he failed to understand a simple rule of the security world: authority may tolerate a subordinate, but it cannot tolerate a subordinate who believes he has become greater than his position.

Abu al-Fida began to hear.

A call here, another there; an officer from Aleppo, a name from Raqqa, a piece of information, a report. Until the phone of the detachment scarcely fell silent.

Then Abu al-Fida exploded in anger.

He summoned Jartu and said to him angrily:

“You son of a bitch! You started out working for me, and now you want to become greater than me! You won’t let me sleep because of all the calls from the officers you keep contacting.”

The dispute was not between a man and an opponent of the regime.

It was, according to the story, a dispute between an informant who wanted to rise and a more senior informant who feared that he might rise too far.

And within security states, that may be the most dangerous crime of all.

The acceptable informer is the one who knows his limits. But the one who begins building his own network, collecting the names of officers, bypassing the detachment to which he is attached, and creating an independent sphere of influence for himself may suddenly cease to be a tool and become a threat.

And so, instead of entering the detachment as an informer, Jartu one day entered it as an accused man.

He was arrested.

According to the account, Abu al-Fida put him inside the dawl āb, a notorious torture device used by the Syrian security apparatus, and beat him relentlessly until he was exhausted.

At that moment, Jartu was no longer the regime’s eye.

He became a body beneath the regime’s hand.

The informer himself became an object of punishment.

The man who had watched others learned, for the first time, what it meant to be the one being watched.

He was then taken out of the detachment, his kalābiyya—the traditional Kurdish outer garment—was put on him backwards, and he was left barefoot to run through the streets of Kobani.

And here the first story ends.

But the more important story begins here.

For the question is not only:

What did Jartu do?

The question is:

What did memory do with all of it?

How can a man whose name, in the memory and narratives of the people, became associated with informing and the security apparatus later become one of the notables of the region?

How can the detachment disappear while some of those associated with it remain present in the social landscape?

Today, as the story is told, Jartu became the owner of a madīfa and a place serving qahwa murra—bitter coffee: a traditional social gathering place where men sit, and where people’s affairs are discussed. Perhaps even those who once feared merely hearing his name now enter it.

What a paradox!

The man who was said to have sent reports to the security services became the host of a social gathering.

The man who had been part of the surveillance network became part of the network of social prestige.

The man who once ran barefoot through the streets of Kobani came to have a chair on which others would sit around him.

But the paradox lies not in Jartu alone.

It lies in the memory of society itself.

Authoritarianism does not end simply because its institutions fall.

The detachment may close. The security vehicles may disappear. The times may change. Yet the traces of the system can remain—in relationships, in social standards, and in the way people perceive influence, prestige, and fear.

And this is the most dangerous face of authoritarianism:

It does not merely want to rule you; it wants to reshape society from within.

It wants to decide who deserves respect, who deserves fear, who becomes a notable, who remains an outcast, who has the right to speak, and who must remain silent.

In societies that have lived for a long time under repression, roles sometimes reverse in painful ways:

A man with a controversial past becomes the host of a madīfa.

The witness remains silent.

People forget.

And details are buried beneath the rubble of passing years.

Thus, authoritarianism does not entirely die when power falls.

Part of it remains in memory.

Part of it remains in relationships.

And part of it sits quietly in the madīfa, before a cup of bitter coffee.

The Ba’athist regime knew that arresting everyone was impossible.

It did not need to arrest everyone.

It was enough to make everyone feel that they could be arrested.

And from this was born the network of fear:

Eyes watching.

Ears listening.

Tongues carrying information.

Names traveling from a house to a security detachment, from a detachment to an officer, and from an officer into a file.

Then the years passed.

The times changed.

The faces changed.

Many doors were closed.

But Jartu remained.

A madīfa.

Bitter coffee.

Men sitting together.

And the memory of a city that knows, forgets, or pretends not to know.

And here the question becomes larger than Jartu himself:

Does authoritarianism truly end if its standards remain alive within society?

And can a just memory be built if we place the victim and the informer, the witness and the collaborator, in the same row, and then ask history to remain silent?

History does not need revenge.

But it needs one thing:

Not to lie.

Cities do not heal through forgetting.

And memory that refuses to confront its past becomes another madīfa—a vast gathering place where everyone sits, drinks bitter coffee, and talks about the past...

while avoiding the question that must never be allowed to die:

Who was sitting on the other side of the door when Kobani was afraid?

Finally, Abu al-Fida died, while Jartu and Fartu remained alive.

The years passed, and faces and roles changed.

And then Jartu became one of the notables of the clan and the region, a respected social figure held in esteem and regard.

As if the security detachment had never existed.

As if the dawl āb had never existed.

As if the streets of Kobani had never preserved the memory of his barefoot footsteps.

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