Two Sisters: A Father, His Daughters, and Their Journey Into the Syrian Jihad

by Åsne Seierstad

  It was a smaller war within the larger one. The war in Syria consisted of hundreds of minor conflicts, many of them centuries old. They all concerned the same things: land, soil, resources. One conflict was taking place right outside Osman’s blue gate.

  The five rockets had been launched by Kurdish YPG guerrillas in reprisal for an attack. Two of them had come down near a hospital, two in a residential area, and one in the middle of the roundabout. On Twitter, Jabhat al-Nusra promised revenge.

  The Kurds and the Islamists had been quarreling over control of the border areas since the beginning of the civil war. The Kurds wanted a coherent territory, not scattered cantons within Sunni-Arab land. The problems had intensified in early August when YPG erected a lookout tower near Atmeh, viewed by the Islamists as a violation of a local agreement forbidding forts. They accused the Kurds of shooting from the tower and launched an attack.

  According to the deal, the Kurds were to keep east of the Euphrates and the rebel forces to stay west. But one of the Kurdish cantons lay on the west of the river, in the same little pocket of land as Atmeh, and this had led to repeated clashes. Each side blamed the other for reneging on the agreement.

  Atmeh had become a more dangerous place. Coalition forces were bombing, IS was waiting for an opportunity to take over the town, and the Kurds were exerting pressure only a mile or so away. The border areas, with their supply lines and smuggling routes, were the locations of a lot of death.

  Things were better under Assad, Osman now opined. When Assad was in power, you could get on with your life, things were predictable and not all bad, as long as you did not get mixed up in anything. Arrests were not made at random; people knew the score. No one was taken without a reason. Osman recalled the opposition to the war among the businessmen in Aleppo before he left there. The trading town had long refused to join in the revolt against Assad. People had feared the consequences; they had, after all, seen what had happened in Iraq, a long and drawn-out fight to the death between Sunnis and Shias. Syria could only be worse. Aleppo had held back, tried to stay out of it, until that was no longer possible. The city was now an inferno.

  “Rockets will rain upon the Kurds,” Osman threatened. “Are you coming down?”

  Osman knew two arms dealers in Dubai. They could meet him in Hatay. They wanted a sample of the red mercury to check its quality. Osman had responded that his suppliers were willing to send a drop of the substance for them to take a look at, but only on payment of a $10,000 advance. The price per pound was, after all, $1 million.

  Sadiq could find no peace. He felt an acute urge to do something. One last heist.

  It was early September. If he did not leave this week, it would be too late, the taxi course was due to start and failing to show up would mean losing his job seeker’s allowance.

  He boarded the afternoon flight to Istanbul.

  “I’m in Hatay!” he texted to Osman when he landed. “Come and meet me!”

  It was hot and sunny, with a drowsy atmosphere prevailing in the town. Sadiq walked the same streets he had previously walked searching for his daughters, waiting for a call from the middlemen and his Syrian network. He dropped by his favorite places, first the breakfast café that served the best beans, after that Gulp, the bar on the corner by the modest Sugar Palace. He called Osman. No answer. He felt alone. He had made the trip on impulse. Madness. They were going to be fooled, he thought. Before leaving, he’d been told by someone that there was no such thing as red mercury, that any trade in it was a pure con.

  Most of the tables at Gulp were empty. The only customer besides Sadiq was an older man. He was dressed in shorts and a faded T-shirt and was halfway through a large glass of beer. He had a reddish-gray complexion and looked tired, like an old laborer. The skin on his hands was coarse. He smoked, took a sip, sighed, and took another. Late morning turned into afternoon. Sadiq noticed the man’s identity card on the floor beneath his chair, together with several Turkish lire bills. He drew the man’s attention to it and the man picked up both the card and the money.

  “Monthly salary,” he slurred. “If I drink any more, I’ll probably lose my trousers as well.” He laughed hoarsely. He had a Syrian dialect.

  Sadiq drummed his fingers on the tabletop. Another hard-luck story was the last thing he needed.

  On the pavement outside, a Syrian family was having a heated discussion. The father was angry and the mother was in tears. The father had bought a kebab for each of the children. One of his sons had asked for another.

  “And who’s going to pay? Who’s going to pay? Who?!” the man shouted. “WHO is going to PAY?” He emptied his pockets, throwing small change on the ground in front of his son before turning to go while calling out: “I’m not hungry, I’m not hungry, you all go ahead and eat!”

  The man rounded the corner. His family quickly gathered up the coins and hurried after him, out of Sadiq’s field of vision.

  Suffering wherever you looked.

  He had to get hold of a Turkish SIM card. Using the Norwegian one was expensive. Sadiq always had two telephones in Turkey, a smartphone with a Norwegian subscription so he could go online where there was Wi-Fi, and an older model he could use with a Turkish SIM card. The telephone shop he had usually used, which also sold crocheted baby clothes and slippers, was just up the street.

  When he got there, an older man and a younger woman were in front of him in the queue. Judging by their dress, they were poor, the man was wearing a white tunic and a keffiyeh, the woman a black abaya and hijab.

  “It’s not possible,” the man behind the counter said. “We can’t register you.”

  The father and daughter were stateless refugees from Syria. They had lived at a refugee camp outside Damascus for thirty years and never received Syrian citizenship. Therefore, they had no national identification or social security number for the shop assistant to enter into the system, meaning he could not sell them a SIM card.

  “No matter how much I want, it will not go through the system,” he explained.

  For Turkcell the man and his daughter did not exist.

  Then it was Sadiq’s turn.

  Nationality?

  Norwegian.

  ID?

  Sadiq handed him his passport.

  He was deemed worthy of a Turkish SIM card.

  He called Osman from the new number. Still no answer. It was 100° in the shade. He went to the same old juice presser who had always served him and ordered an avocado juice with pistachio seeds. Osman still didn’t answer.

  He continued on to Four Friends, where the kitchen was open twenty-four hours a day. The waiters came over and greeted him.

  “How’s it going?” they asked.

  “Good,” Sadiq replied.

  But things were far from good.

  At sunset he made his way down to the empty, air-conditioned dining room in the hotel and ordered a bottle of ice-cold water. They had Wi-Fi there and he could try to raise Osman on Viber and WhatsApp. He found a socket and sat down to charge the phone. There was some activity at least—the screen lit up, the battery percentage rose.

  The smoking ban had made it to Hatay, so he had to go outside for a cigarette. The foyer doors were open. He stood on the street inhaling nicotine until he was dizzy. He felt a light breeze on his back, between the material of his shirt, clammy with sweat, and his skin. A tickling sensation. He had the wind at his back now, did he not?

  He went back in to his telephone. Eventually he received a text message.

  “Hang tight,” Osman wrote. “Await message!”

  Sadiq made his way to a hipster bar across the street from the hotel. A bowl of popcorn accompanied the beer he ordered. It occurred to him that he needed salt. That’s probably the reason he was so exhausted, he thought. He finished the bowl.

  His telephone rang. It was the middlemen from Dubai. He went to meet them, but nothing came of it. They traded in all kinds of things, he gathered. But they were on different planets. His mind was els
ewhere. The night was heavy.

  His head was pounding when he awoke the next day. He texted Osman. The border was closed for the time being, so he was not coming.

  Was Sadiq supposed to sell the mercury on his own?

  No, no, Osman replied, he would back him up from Atmeh.

  The next day Sadiq walked around aimlessly. The middlemen did not show up in the evening. He went to bed. The night was hot and clammy. His head hurt. The only air getting into the room was through a little opening high up under the ceiling, it was impossible to breathe. He cursed himself for making the trip. Gloom began to take hold.

  “What are you waiting for? Answer me!” Sadiq shouted into the phone the next morning. The promise of easy money had not materialized.

  “Okay okay,” Osman replied. “I was driving south toward Al-Harem yesterday … then there was a load of shooting. Chaos! Many killed. Sadiq…?”

  But Sadiq was no longer listening.

  He had no more space in his head.

  33

  VOICES IN THE MIND

  Sadiq was having a hard time focusing.

  Streets, roads, squares, culs-de-sac, rules, regulations, taxi meter, weekend rates.

  He was spending most of the day at the library in Sandvika. He looked at Arab news sites. He checked mail and messages. He did his homework. He went back online. Osman called him about the middlemen in Dubai. He fantasized. Wrote poetry. Studied. Recalled. Forgot. Hospitals, schools, embassies, churches, mosques. Graveyards, parks, sports arenas.

  He was supposed to memorize every single little street in Oslo. Tors Gate, Odins Gate, Løvenskiolds Gate, Gyldenløves Gate. He learned about traffic management systems, outpatient transport, credit management, first aid, customer service, and safety procedures. Can you drop off passengers at a bus stop? Are you required to have a child seat in the car?

  “How are things with you?” Osman asked him one morning.

  “Ah, this taxi course, you know,” Sadiq answered.

  “Ha ha, I should send Mehmut to Norway to give you some competition!”

  “I have a load of Mehmuts to compete with. This country is already crawling with foreigners,” Sadiq wrote back. “Lots of Syrians now too. You should come over, bring your family.”

  Osman paused before responding.

  “Yes, I might. I don’t know how life is going to be from now on. Both al-Nusra and IS want me working exclusively for them … I’m running a huge risk. I should get my family out, my wife and daughters at least, but then there’s my parents to think of, I don’t know, you’re going to have to help me, promise me that, if I have to get out…”

  Sadiq promised.

  * * *

  September 30 was the date for the exam.

  The candidates were issued fifty questions along the lines of “Which route would you take from the Central Station to Ekeberghallen sports arena?”

  At the same time as the new batch of prospective taxi drivers were filling in answers in Oslo, the Federation Council in Moscow was approving the deployment of Russian air power in Syria. Mere hours after the decision, Russia dropped its first bombs over Homs.

  After handing in his exam papers, Sadiq took the train to Sandvika, traipsed up to the library, and turned on a PC. A weight had been lifted. The first exam was over. Then he read the day’s main news and a heavier burden took its place. The war had escalated. It would be even more difficult to get his daughters out. According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, the attack had targeted IS, and their missiles had hit military installations, vehicles, munitions stores, communications centers, and supply lines.

  The Russian media rejoiced in Vladimir Putin finally tidying up Syria. Russia would show the world how to win a war and how to crush terrorists.

  Over the following few days, the Russians bombed everything but IS. Only one Russian strike out of ten affected the terrorist organization. Most of the damage was done to the FSA—the only secular force in Syria—and Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaida’s Syrian arm, along with several other militias linked by their opposition to Assad.

  The goal was clear: to keep their ally in the Middle East in power.

  The bombs were dropped on the peripheries of territory held by the rebel forces. The tactic was to weaken them sufficiently for government troops to retake lost ground. Several of the American-backed groups, some trained by the CIA, were also bombed.

  The militias were quick to regroup, find cover, or conceal themselves, while the civilian population remained unprotected against death from above. Moscow insisted their attacks were surgical strikes against terrorists, but many of the bombs were dropped far behind the front line, often in areas Syrian government forces intended to attack. Hospitals, residential areas, and schools in rebel-controlled towns were hit. No target was too soft.

  Thus far in the war, the Syrian air force had been responsible for the greatest loss of life. It had used imprecise weapons like barrel bombs—oil barrels or similar receptacles packed with high explosives and metal shrapnel. These were dropped at a height just out of range of the rebel forces’ antiaircraft defenses. Even a gust of wind could determine where they actually landed. They were unguided; they hit where they hit, detonating with devastating force. A red-hot, flying metal fragment could sever a child’s arm, or cut the child in two. When you saw a barrel being dropped from above, you had thirty seconds before it hit the ground.

  Thirty seconds.

  While Assad’s pilots were dependent upon clear weather to drop their explosives, the Russians’ airplanes were far more advanced. Protection was no longer to be found in a layer of fog or clouds.

  Even though the Russian attacks were heavy, it was impossible to win the war from the air. By autumn 2015, there were approximately 150,000 rebel soldiers on the ground in Syria, excluding IS. Many were convinced Islamists with a strong belief in paradise and what it had to offer. No militias, none whatsoever, planned to give in.

  Russia wanted to weaken the forces the West could conceivably work or negotiate or bargain with. Putin wanted the world to be left with one choice: Assad or IS.

  The West was in a more difficult position. It was looking for someone to take over from the Islamic State if it was bombed out of existence. They found no one.

  * * *

  “Hell is raining down upon us! Hell is landing on our heads!”

  “Calm down, talk to me, my heart is dry, I’m listening…” Sadiq responded.

  “The Russians are slaughtering us! They’re only targeting civilians! They’re bombing children! It’s us, us they’re hitting. We, who are against IS! They let IS carry on, while we die!”

  Osman sent new reports daily. October was filled with atrocities.

  “They’re blowing our ashes across the country. We’re sinking deeper and deeper. The chaos is also in our minds. We don’t know what to do.”

  One night he rang in tears.

  “The building was completely destroyed, a deep hole, a crater, it was hit by two rockets. One to open it up, the other to kill. They want to get every one of us. In the end only IS and Assad will be left!”

  “Who was hit?”

  “Our friends! They have children, they have families!”

  “May Allah welcome them,” Sadiq said.

  “If I had to take the devil by the hand to beat the Russians and Assad, I would do it. I swear to Allah, I’m ready … but I’m very tired, it’s chaos here…”

  Sadiq stayed up late every night. His dread was intensified by the fear that Raqqa, where the girls lived, would be carpet-bombed. He alternated between giving up on the girls one day and being overwhelmed by a desperate urge to rescue them the next.

  He heard more strange sounds in the apartment. Was that from the stairwell? Outside the window? All these noises were making him jump. Were they also audible when the family was here? Was there an explanation for each of them, the refrigerator, the dishwasher, a pipe, a cupboard door, a branch against the window, someone outside, someone in the apartment abo
ve, an echo in the entranceway? Or was it that damned jinn, half a step ahead of him, laughing?

  He tried to calm himself. He tried to think straight. No, he was not afraid, he was not. He had always been viewed as having ice in his veins. But the October night was so dark, he could not shake his unease. His thoughts turned to the Syrians who had been killed. Where were their souls now? Why did they not come and speak to him? Tell him whether they had entered paradise or hell, so he could know how it actually was. Imagine if those on the other side could let him know what steps to take. Those who had left this world, had they managed to say goodbye before the bomb fell? He thought about Osman’s friends. Children killed in their beds. Mothers rocking babies to sleep. Death from above, had it come suddenly, without warning? Or had they heard the airplanes first? Had they managed to call out “Allahu Akbar”?

  He thought about his dead friends from the war in Somalia. There were so many. Why did they not come to him now and ask: How are things with you? They never did that. He often thought of a childhood friend, a boy who would forever remain a teenager. Sadiq had been the watch commander and was informed of a man who wanted to come into the camp but did not know the password. “Shoot him,” Sadiq, only a teenager himself, had said. The next morning he saw the body.

  Oh, these blasted sounds. They were around him the entire time. While all he wanted was to hear Sara breathing next to him.

  * * *

  The second week in October, a few days after the missile strike that had wiped out the building with Osman’s friends inside, the Syrian told Sadiq that IS had withdrawn from a large area it held close to Hama.

  It took only a few hours to realize why. Osman described the first coordinated attack by Russian airplanes and Syrian ground forces.

  “At four this afternoon Russian planes began bombing the territory al-Nusra and FSA control in Hama. Oh God, this is so terrible!”

  The next day: “At six this morning regime forces entered the area.”

  The Russians were bombing the way for Assad to take back control of the country step by step. The IS retreat prior to the operation testified to a trade-off: Pull out if you want to avoid casualties, we’re taking over. IS and Assad were perfect enemies. Unlike the local militias, which desired regime change, it was all the same to IS who sat in Damascus—as long as they could run the caliphate as they liked. The Islamists had no intention of taking over all of Syria now.