Our Women on the Ground

by Zahra Hankir

  Today, five years since I left Damascus, I am still in Beirut. Hope seems completely lost for most Syrians, including me. There’s too much killing, destruction, and loss. The diaspora is too big. The damage this war has caused goes far beyond the figures quoted in media about the human, economic, or social costs.

  The connection and bonding that Syrians had to their community and their home country is forever lost. There is too much pain and trauma that people are carrying along with them, and only justice can help them heal. Justice for their lost loved ones, for their material losses, for their dignity, and for their diaspora. Only justice for all can bring Syrian society back together.

  What we are witnessing today is the rule of the powerful—even if those in power are responsible for the Syrian catastrophe. And that won’t bring peace or justice to Syria.

  Although I chose to be here, in Beirut, so I could be as close as possible to Damascus, I feel farther from my city than ever before. It is not my city anymore. It is occupied by the winners who have blood on their hands, and by foreigners who are altering its identity. I feel powerless, unable to protect Damascus, and still unable to stop the killing. I sit on my balcony in Beirut and watch the sea, not knowing where I belong anymore. My Syria is gone—at least for now.

  Hurma

  Zaina Erhaim

  Five long, shapeless tops; a pile of loose-fitting, dark-colored jeans; a knee-length coat; and a video camera. Those were the contents of my wardrobe for more than two years, when I lived in the rebel-held area of Aleppo, known as eastern Aleppo city. Few things changed between the seasons, as we had to dress conservatively year-round. However, at some point, I decided to settle my camera into a large safety box we’d bought to protect our passports and precious belongings from being destroyed should the house be bombed.

  “Would you really care about your camera and passport if you got stuck under the wreckage yourself?” a friend asked.

  “If I were to be buried by the rubble of my own home,” I replied, “you’d hear me screaming out the safety box’s passcode, demanding that my passport and camera be brought along with me to the hospital.” My camera, my passport, and I live or die together.

  Conversations about death in my part of the world aren’t gloomy or depressing; they’re as common as conversations about the weather in the UK. Mind you, I wasn’t bothered by the weather while I briefly lived in London for my master’s degree. It was the ubiquity of black and gray clothing that I found depressing. I have always disliked dark colors. In my “real life”—my life as a layperson and not a journalist—I have only two to three dark pieces of clothing in my closet, hidden among dozens of green, blue, pink, and red garments. When I reported from Aleppo, the hardest thing for me was putting on a dark headscarf just before leaving the house after I’d carefully chosen my outfit for the day.

  * * *

  —

  Back in early 2011, when the uprising erupted in Syria, I finally started to feel like I belonged in my own country. The antigovernment demonstrations demanding democratic reforms from President Bashar al-Assad represented everything I’d long hoped for: freedom of expression, a free press, elections, and an end to fear. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets to peacefully demonstrate against the regime. Some held olive branches, while others would sing and dance, even at the funerals of those killed during the previous day’s demonstrations. Despite the government’s crackdown on the movement’s leaders, and the looming risk of being shot when protesting in the streets—or tortured to death while in detention—Syrians continued demonstrating until 2012, before the uprising turned into a war. But even after experiencing all of that hope, I found myself fighting the same fight that I had won so many years ago: the fight not to wear a hijab.

  If you ask anyone why women in Syria should be covering their hair, they might cite the Qur’an. But why is this rule enforced so much more strictly now than it has been in the past? The answer is simple: many fundamentalist Muslims are now armed, giving them the unlimited power and impunity to suppress women, whom they believe to be the weaker gender.

  I come from a conservative community in Syria, in Idlib city, and my family had tried to force me to wear the hijab at fifteen years old. I won that battle: I refused to cover my hair simply because I couldn’t see why “all the women in our town do” was enough of a reason for me to do so as well. I will never forget the shame I was forced to feel when I was harassed and called names on the streets. I can’t count the number of times I was groped while on my way to school, in broad daylight. Even though I had adamantly refused to put on the headscarf, I couldn’t help but feel responsible for being touched inappropriately. But I never gave up.

  After the uprising, fifteen years later, I fought the battle again and lost. I had tried to resist. I had thought: I am not a foreign journalist who’s in Syria for a short trip to do some reporting before heading back home. This is my home, and I should force these people to accept who I am. I should once again fight the same battle I had fought as a teenager, this time with strange, armed men in a chaotic corner of my country, known as the most dangerous area in the entire world for journalists.

  But I and other women activists and journalists had become “minors” in Syria. Any man had the right to check the length of our sweaters, the color of our outfits, who we were moving around with, and who we were talking to. They even had the right to scrutinize the fabric of our pants. Jeans signaled that we were not locals, or that we were activists, since many consider them to be a Western form of clothing.

  “Minor” wasn’t just a term: I was quite literally treated as one. I needed a man by my side to travel, to be able to move from one neighborhood to another. The chaperone had to be a mahram, meaning an allowable escort—a man who has a close blood relationship with me, such as my father or uncle. In my final couple of years in Syria, I had to fake having two brothers (I used their sisters’ IDs), four maternal uncles (my mother’s surname is not written on my ID, so this was easy), three cousins, and two husbands. It wasn’t always funny. When passing through an ISIL checkpoint in Raqqa in December 2013, I was riding along with a thirty-one-year-old doctor—the brother of my friend Sara—and I was carrying her ID. I had to memorize all the information about Sara that I could, since we expected them to interrogate us separately to make sure we were relatives. I sweated profusely until the Tunisian jihadi decided to let us pass.

  A year later, at one of the checkpoints in northern Aleppo in 2014, I ran into trouble again. At the time, I was still refusing to wear a headscarf. “Who is she?” the young man asked my male chaperone.

  “She’s a Syrian journalist from Idlib,” my friend answered.

  “A journalist? From Idlib? Are you kidding me?” the armed man mocked. “She’s obviously a foreign journalist. We don’t have any women journalists here.”

  “Well, I’m from Idlib city—the Dabeet neighborhood, to be exact—and I have a heavy dialect, too. Here’s my ID,” I interjected, waving the document at him.

  “Wow, you speak Arabic well,” he said. “Where did you learn it? And this ID could easily be fake.”

  The idea of an impostor with fake Syrian identification papers who speaks in an authentic Idlibi dialect was, apparently, easier for the armed man to accept than the idea of an unveiled Syrian woman journalist.

  After a series of clashes like these with soldiers at checkpoints—many of which caused my male chaperones great distress—I decided to start covering my hair with the Palestinian keffiyeh, carefully wrapping it around my head in the way Arab men traditionally do to protect themselves from the desert sun. The change didn’t help to lower my profile, however, so in 2015, I started to arrange the keffiyeh around my head as if it were a full headscarf, covering my hair completely. By the time I left Syria for southern Turkey for good in 2016, I was wearing a long, dark coat along with a formal, regular hijab.

  The only way I could challenge t
hose dim colors while living in Syria was by wearing bright underwear and colored pins on my scarf. They were tiny dots of color, yes, but they made me feel better. I didn’t quit using my expensive antiwrinkle cream either. “There’s a helicopter hovering above our heads and a barrel bomb could be breaking both of us into pieces at any minute, so why the hell are you worried about aging?” my husband at the time, Mahmoud, would ask. There’s a chance we may live through this war and come out of it in one piece, I thought. And if we do, all of the hard work I put into sustaining my skin’s elegance will have paid off. I want to live a long life, and to write about what I witnessed so that no one will forget what happened here. And I want to have supple, crease-free skin, too.

  * * *

  —

  During those years, barrel bombs were toying recklessly with my existence.

  The regime cut off all roads to the city in 2016, foreshadowing the upcoming siege and blocking the entry of food, medical supplies, and fuel. (At the time, Mahmoud bought a motorbike to reduce his consumption of fuel, which had become rare and expensive. He constantly dreamed about fruits and vegetables because he was sick of eating canned food.)

  However, I was fighting on a different front, an internal one. Who was Zaina? Was Zaina the obedient, dependent, modestly dressed woman who cooks delicious feasts in huge pots for her guests? Or was Zaina the powerful, busy, liberated woman who challenged the society around her by becoming its first female journalist? The real answer is that the two women were taking turns without overlapping. The first emerged while she was inside Syria, and the second was liberated one meter away from the HOŞGELDINIZ (welcome to Turkey) sign at the border.

  Helmets and bulletproof vests are common in my country: they’re used for protection by male reporters stationed at the front lines, or as accessories for people to take photos with. Mine were mostly needed when I went shopping for groceries, or when I filmed from hospitals and schools. Those were the most dangerous places to report from, because they were continually targeted by the Bashar al-Assad regime and its allies, the Russian forces.

  I have two particularly precious photos—souvenirs, you could say—of myself in a bulletproof vest. I was with my friend Hamoudi Bitar in the suburbs of Latakia. He was only twenty-one years old at the time, an ambitious architecture student, and he was acting as my fixer, helping me to arrange meetings and travel logistics. We’d just passed some extremist-controlled areas in the Jisr al-Shogour area. Even though we claimed we were cousins, we faced great difficulty when crossing through checkpoints. Hamoudi, in particular, had to bear the brunt of the questioning—why was he traveling on his own with a young woman?

  After we’d finished the reporting trip, we drove along the beautiful mountains of Akrad, but I started to feel overwhelmingly depressed. I was where I belonged—my homeland—but I could not accept that I had to be this dependent on someone else. I felt weak. Hamoudi sensed my sadness, and suddenly stopped the car at the edge of the road. “Get out of the car and bring your camera,” he said firmly. I thought someone was following us, or that he’d spotted a land mine, until he said, “Take off your headscarf. Enjoy the air in your hair and be yourself,” and began to snap some photos of me.

  PHOTO BY HAMOUDI BITAR.

  Hamoudi was a conservative man from my city, Idlib. All of the women in his family were veiled, and he wouldn’t propose to a woman who didn’t wear a headscarf. However, in that moment, he supported me, risking his own life to give me a few precious minutes of relief.

  In September 2013, a year later, Hamoudi was killed while filming a battle on the outskirts of our city. The journalistic norm of “keeping a distance with your sources” is, to me, an abstract concept, as removed from reality as “living alone on an island.” My sources are my schoolmates, relatives, and family members. And those death counts flashing on your screens contain my first lovers, teachers, neighbors, and friends.

  * * *

  —

  During those years in Syria, I felt like I’d been floating, with no past and no stable present. It was easier to deal with that uncertainty when I was in the crossfires of the war. When you face death on a daily basis, you don’t plan for tomorrow. Why would you, if it might not come? Wasting your time is not an option. You go about life, knowing you’re lucky to be alive. Sometimes when I made plans with friends for the following week, they’d casually add, “If God allows us to stay alive until then.” But beyond all of the wreckage are some of my most precious memories. Expecting death gave me the luxury of being an adventurer, even an irresponsible one.

  I still considered Aleppo my home. The house I lived in was situated less than 165 yards away from the Syrian regime’s barracks, which meant that it was on an active front line. It was a charming house compared with the dwellings of the rest of that part of the city, despite the bullet and shrapnel marks on its walls. Mahmoud and I replaced what was left of the glass windows of the house with compressed plastic to remove the potential danger that flying broken glass could inflict upon us. Death, however, is inevitable in Syria, with or without plastic windows.

  It’s possible to get used to witnessing daily destruction in your immediate surroundings. I once saw a coffee vendor serving customers while rescue workers belonging to the White Helmets, a civil defense unit, were collecting body parts in front of his shop after an attack. Another time, I had a trivial discussion with a friend shortly after witnessing a bleeding, injured little girl cry out in shock after a missile strike on her school. I cleaned her blood from my car while asking casually, “What do you want to have for lunch today?”

  Only now, after stepping away, do I realize how deep the trauma must be for a person to be able to go on with life after witnessing such horrific scenes. When you suddenly stop being in danger, you begin to feel the burden of the trauma you’ve experienced.

  * * *

  —

  Toughness and resilience aren’t unusual for most of the Syrian women I know, especially those who, like me, come from closed-minded communities. We challenge the traditions we were raised with. And we were raised to believe we should be nothing but feminine, likable dependents. We were even made to feel guilty for being harassed on the streets of our hometowns. After deciding to revolt against the patriarchal society I lived in, I had to deal with the consequences of my rebellion. There were many. “You will go to hell.” “Surely, you will end up a spinster.” “You will ruin the family’s reputation and destroy our honor.” “You will bring shame to the city of Idlib.” These are some of the attitudes that I had to fight.

  I have committed all the sins that could potentially be committed in such an awful war zone. I am a Syrian; a woman who lived in the most masculine of spaces; a journalist in a land of warlords; a secularist living among different kinds of extremists and foreign jihadists; and a human rights defender among war criminals, some claiming to be fighting for the other side, and some claiming to be pro-freedom, on my side. All of these combined meant I was far more scared of being assassinated than of being randomly killed by the Syrian army. I would be a great target, someone a fighter would be proud to have killed. After my murder, the killer would be guaranteed a place in heaven, where they’d be gifted with pretty girls. They would be a proud patriot because they would have eliminated a voice that threatened the image of Assad’s Syria.

  One of the few common threads that run through the different parts of Syria (including territories controlled by the Kurds, ISIL, the Assad regime, rebels, Turks, or al-Qaeda) is that if you are deemed a propagandist or a traitor, you must be killed. In my weakest moments, I couldn’t even share stories, photos, or bits and pieces of news on my social media accounts. I had to harshly censor myself. My loved ones volunteered to do so on my behalf as well. They would read what I intended to make public, then tell me to either publish or not publish the content. Then I started taking notes of the things that I couldn’t make public—at least
for now. Over the past four years, I have barely had ten articles published, even though I have written eighty pages of outlines and notes saved in a file on my laptop entitled “Can’t Be Published.”

  Despite having taken all of these precautions, I was still deemed reckless. I was still risking my ability to stay inside Syria for the “useless right of self-expression.” While I showed my support for the Charlie Hebdo journalists who were murdered by Islamist terrorists in Paris in 2015, for example, other activists in Aleppo were demonstrating against the magazine. They set fire to Charlie Hebdo’s emblem because its journalists had once insulted the Prophet Muhammad. Shouldn’t we be glad that they were massacred and that their families were suffering, then? I had to be the one and only voice against that sort of extremism, riding against the tide, harming not only myself by expressing my controversial opinions but also my family and friends.

  Being a journalist and an activist was never easy. Before the uprising, I had been allowed to work as an activist specializing in gender equality and women’s rights, most of the time. But when I pursued an internship opportunity in 2008 that would have allowed me to dig deeper into Syrian civil society, the military security forces interrogated me, giving me clear orders not to get involved in anything related to human rights. In 2015, I couldn’t even show my support for a homosexual man who had been thrown by rebels from the rooftop of the Al-Bayan hospital tower in Aleppo for his “crime” of being gay. Doing so could have gotten me killed, as a lesson for those daring to disrespect tradition and religion. In the best-case scenario, I’d have been given a warning and told to disappear to avoid being captured. In the past seven years, I have made major sacrifices and paid heavy costs for what was supposed to be freedom.