SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
NPR's Emily Feng recently wrapped up a reporting trip to Syria, and as Syrians celebrated the end of Bashar al-Assad's regime, she kept seeing one man's face everywhere. She wanted to know who he was, so she and NPR's Jawad Rizkallah went looking.
EMILY FENG, BYLINE: I saw him on Syrian flags, on posters, on the sides of buses and cars. And then I heard him everywhere, too...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ABDUL BASET AL-SAROUT: (Singing in non-English language).
FENG: ...In cellphone ringtones and on loudspeakers. And I learned his name - Abdul Baset al-Sarout.
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD #1: (Singing in non-English language).
FENG: People sang his songs to me in jubilation on the streets, even children.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
AL-SAROUT: (Singing in non-English language).
FENG: Al-Sarout was already beloved for playing on Syria's youth soccer team, and his untrained voice channeled the public's anger into action and into protests against the old regime run by the Assad family...
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD #2: (Singing in non-English language).
FENG: ...Even when government snipers started firing on demonstrators. Al-Sarout became the poster child of the revolution. I wanted to find out more about him, except he was killed in 2019. But I heard a name when I visited the northern Syrian city of Homs - a man people said wrote Al-Sarout's songs.
AYMAN AL-MASRI: (Non-English language spoken).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: On purpose.
FENG: And so we tracked him down.
AL-MASRI: I'm Ayman al-Masri.
FENG: This is Ayman al-Masri. He's a sedate man with heavily lidded eyes. Before the revolution, he sold car parts and owned a cake factory. But when antigovernment protests kicked off in 2011, he became a revolutionary and a writer.
AL-MASRI: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: He started penning chants and lyrics for activists. "I wrote for a lot of singers," al-Masri tells me.
AL-MASRI: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: "But al-Sarout had a special charisma and kindness." The hint of a rare smile arches al-Masri's lips. "He understood me, and I, him," al-Masri says.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD #3: (Singing in non-English language).
FENG: If al-Sarout was the revolution's saint, al-Masri was its scribe. Al-Masri wound up writing all of the singer's some 130 chants and songs, including this one.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
AL-SAROUT: (Singing in non-English language).
FENG: "To glory and dignity and chivalry," Al-Sarout sings. Homs, his beloved city, will save Arab honor.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS)
FENG: The pair met when the singer quite literally walked through this store, al-Masri's former home in central Homs. Al-Masri remembers it had been around midday. The singer was fleeing government soldiers after a protest.
AL-MASRI: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: Al-Masri's home in the early days of the revolution was known as a safe haven, and so al-Sarout stumbled in, looking for a place to hide. Al-Masri recognized him immediately as Syria's famous soccer goalkeeper.
AL-MASRI: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: Al-Masri said, at that point, he had a bunch of lyrics, but he'd been looking for the right person to give voice to them. And so, on that very day, in his living room, the two men forged a creative partnership. Today, the house where they met is a bombed-out shell.
We're standing outside of a shelled house, bullet marks on the walls. It used to be pink, but the paint has faded now.
It was struck and raided several times by Assad's forces. Everything al-Masri once owned went up in flames. Later, the regime destroyed his cake business as well, in retaliation for his lyrics.
AL-MASRI: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: We walked the streets of Homs with al-Masri. He showed us where he and al-Sarout protested and sang, despite numerous assassination attempts.
AL-MASRI: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: "Those days were the pinnacle of happiness, the sweetest of my life," al-Masri tells me. Al-Masri and the singer became famous for their music, but they had to go into hiding.
AL-MASRI: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: Al-Masri says they never spent more than a few nights in any one place. Then they went underground - literally.
AL-MASRI: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: They paid to obtain a map of the city's sewage system. The two traversed the front lines of the urban guerrilla war that had consumed the city of Homs by that point. They crossed enemy lines through the city's sewage tunnels, emerging from grates in the dead of night to meet so al-Masri could give al-Sarout his newest lyrics. Here they are practicing together in 2013...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
AYMAN AL-MASRI AND ABDUL BASET AL-SAROUT: (Singing in Arabic).
FENG: ...Holed up together during the siege of Homs, a major offensive that laid waste to much of the city. Around then, al-Masri says the two men who had once been so in sync started to diverge.
AL-MASRI: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: Al-Masri, a committed pacifist, believed his pen was his most powerful weapon, but by 2012, al-Sarout had picked up a gun. He'd decided to become an opposition fighter. Here's his childhood friend and former teammate, Raed el-Khalid.
RAED EL-KHALID: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: El-Khalid says al-Sarout saw no other way to resist a regime that was increasingly murderous.
EL-KHALID: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: El-Khalid spent almost seven years fighting alongside al-Sarout. He watched as his joyful, big-hearted friend tired and hardened. Al-Sarout struggled with the death and destruction, but he increasingly advocated for violence over singing as his preferred tool for regime change.
EL-KHALID: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: El-Khalid says al-Sarout often prayed that he would die fighting. His father and five brothers had all been killed. In 2019, al-Sarout got his wish. He'd been fighting in northern Syria when he was badly injured in a drone strike. El-Khalid was among the soldiers who evacuated him to Turkey for treatment. Abdul Baset al-Sarout died of his injuries the next day. He didn't live to see the revolution he'd sung for succeed.
EL-KHALID: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: El-Khalid did, but in his joy, he feels like there's an entire chapter still missing, he says. Al-Sarout is missing, he says. And al-Masri, the lyricist, is now a songwriter without his singer. Today, he wanders Homs and sees the past.
AL-MASRI: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: "Al-Sarout's scent, his presence, is everywhere in Homs," al-Masri says. "There is no street here that we have not walked down together."
We get in a car and head to what remains of the singer's family home.
JAWAD RIZKALLAH, BYLINE: This is the house here.
FENG: The one that the kids are playing on?
RIZKALLAH: Yes.
FENG: The regime destroyed much of it, but the memory of al-Sarout is very much alive here. A gaggle of children, some born after al-Sarout died, surrounds me as I approach. Who lived here? - I ask them.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #1: Abdul Baset.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #2: Abdul Baset.
FENG: Abdul Baset al-Sarout, they say. Al-Masri is next to me. He's carrying a worn, spiral-bound A4 notebook - the notebook where he handwrote most of the first songs al-Sarout sang.
AL-MASRI: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: Opening his notebook, he reads one of his and al-Sarout's chants. The wall's been blown open, so we face the setting sun.
AL-MASRI: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: "My companions have gone ahead of me," he recites. "We will live on, for this world is fleeting." Al-Masri has started writing again since the regime fell, he tells me. His new songs are different, though. They're about life and hope and rebuilding.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
AL-SAROUT: (Singing in non-English language).
FENG: Emily Feng, NPR News, Homs, Syria.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED SINGER: (Singing in non-English language).
AL-SAROUT: (Singing in non-English language). Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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