Moments later, there was a knock at the door. Shokri answered it, tentatively cracking the door open.
“Who is the woman who just left this house?” a man’s voice asked through the opening. “I want to speak to her.”
Shokri summoned Hanaa, who came to the door and found a tall, stern-looking army general standing there with his machine gun strapped to his side.
“It was me, General. I wanted to get bread for my family.”
“So why did you suddenly turn back?”
“I was too scared, General.” Hanaa kept her eyes lowered respectfully. “There were too many men in the street.”
As he listened to her, the general’s eyes showed a glimmer of sympathy and his voice softened. “I insist that you get food for your family. But you need to go now, while there aren’t any snipers. They’re never out between noon and four.”
Hanaa and Shokri were stunned that this man seemed to be helping them. “Thank you, General, thank you. Allah ma’ak [God be with you],” Hanaa replied, collecting her shopping bag and following him outside. He returned to his group of soldiers, but watched as Hanaa disappeared into the store, then later emerged with her allotted six loaves of bread. When she passed him on her way back to the house, he asked gently, “Did anyone bother you?” She shook her head, keeping her eyes lowered. “Good,” he said. “You should get home now.”
Hanaa quickly made her way home. Back in the kitchen, she remarked, “There is humanity left in people,” as she unpacked the bread and the family gathered for a simple feast.
As the siege wore on, Doaa’s family slowly discovered that many young soldiers were not out to hurt them. Four soldiers in particular—dark, handsome Ali; green-eyed Bahaar; short, boyish Nero, and tall Abdul Aziz—who were all stationed outside their house, were always kind to the family. Ali was nicest of all, often slipping Hanaa a loaf of bread and a few tomatoes with a shy smile while on duty. House searches conducted by these young men were performed halfheartedly, as they usually moved through the rooms quickly and left the shelves untouched and the drawers unopened. Sometimes they lingered inside the house, charging their mobile phones, chatting about the news of the day, or playing with Ayat’s toddlers. On a couple of occasions, they even gave Shokri money for food. Doaa and her sisters felt strangely protected by them and didn’t grip their knives in the same way they did when other soldiers entered their home. Doaa saw clearly that those kind, young soldiers didn’t want to be there any more than her family wanted them there.
One day there was a desperate knocking on their door. Prepared to face yet another raid, Doaa was surprised to find a young man in his early twenties, shaking in fear. He was carrying a gun and had his face covered with a kaffiyeh, a checkered black-and-white scarf.
“Help me!” he pleaded. “I’m with the FSA and the regime is after me. The soldiers are going to kill me!” Doaa had heard that many men who were part of the demonstrations had now joined together to form an armed opposition to the government and named themselves the Free Syrian Army.
“Come inside,” Doaa responded immediately, looking up and down the street. While she couldn’t leave him out there to be killed, she also couldn’t be caught sheltering an FSA soldier. So she quickly came up with a plan to hide him. She and Saja took four cardboard boxes and got the young man to sit against a corner of a room that was crowded with mattresses and small tables. They arranged the boxes around him and covered them with a blanket to resemble a chair. It looked lumpy and a little awkward, but they thought it might work if the sympathetic soldiers conducted the next raid.
They waited an hour before the inevitable knock came. To their relief Ali was standing at the door, but just behind him they saw an officer they didn’t recognize, and they began to panic.
The soldiers filed in, and after a quick look around the room Ali announced, “There’s no one here.” Doaa was certain he noticed the new “chair,” but he said nothing about it. She held her breath waiting for the soldiers to leave. But then the unknown officer asked Ali to lead him to the roof. They marched upstairs as the family waited below. After several minutes they returned, satisfied with their search. They finally left the house, and when the door closed behind them, Doaa and Saja yanked off the blankets and deconstructed the chair. The young man pulled himself up from his crouched position. Hanaa brought him a glass of water, and as he reached for it, he kissed her hand, looking around at the family. “Thank you. You saved my life!” After some hasty good-byes, he mounted the stairs to the roof and escaped over the side of the building.
As Doaa watched him go, a sense of triumph and satisfaction filled her chest. After weeks of bowing down to soldiers and feeling helpless, she had won a small victory against the men occupying her home. She began to wonder what else she might be able to do.
During the eleven days of the siege and since the start of the uprising, the state-run news agency, SANA, announced that the government had completed its mission to “chase out elements of terrorist groups” and to “restore security, peace, and stability” to Daraa. General Riad Haddad, director of the military’s political division, announced that the army would withdraw its six thousand troops in phases and that the city would return to normal. But during those eleven days, while Doaa and her family had remained locked inside their home, the world had taken notice of their plight, and news reports began to release details of the more than two hundred deaths and one thousand arrests that had occurred during the siege. According to the Syrian state media, as many as eighty soldiers had also died. As the news spread around the world, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton warned the government of Syria that there would be “consequences for this brutal crackdown,” and European leaders began to discuss sanctions. Human rights groups reported that at least six hundred people had died across Syria in the seven weeks since the crackdown on demonstrators had begun, and eight thousand had been jailed or gone missing.
Doaa noticed with relief that the tanks outside their house began to leave their positions, and fewer armed soldiers patrolled the streets. Despite all this, it became clear that things were far from back to normal. Decomposing bodies of protesters lay uncollected in the streets, and the stench of rotting flesh filled the air. On top of the death, there was destruction. The girls had not gone to school since the siege began, and they were anxious to get back to see their friends and resume their studies. But the school remained shut, and the road they once took to get to school was now lined with pockmarked buildings, some of them abandoned, with doors left open revealing the intimate spaces where lives had once been lived.
Still, Shokri was determined to get back to work as his money had run out during the siege. But every day when he left for his shop, his family wondered if he would make it back home alive. They heard stories of cruel government snipers who seemed to make a game of shooting people, regardless of age or gender. As people came out of their homes to collect the bodies of the dead left in the streets, those people were shot at as well. No one was safe under all this madness, and Hanaa urged Shokri to be cautious, reminding him that she herself had witnessed a man shot dead as he was leaving the mosque. They had also seen a video of a pregnant woman lying dead in the street having been shot in the belly.
Scared but determined to support his family, day after day Shokri made his way through the checkpoints on his bike and opened his shop. But most of his clients were too afraid to come. His salon was in the heart of the al-Saraya neighborhood, the operations center of the regime in the old town, which had become a target for the now well-armed opposition. Sitting in his shop, he watched the battles between government forces and the opposition unfold around the courthouse and other government buildings.
“There’s a war going on in this city and you expect people to get their hair cut? Are you crazy?” his neighbors would ask him. But Shokri was sure that some of his customers would come for their ritual shave and trim, and he desperately needed their business to feed his family. “My death will come whe
n God decrees it,” he would tell people.
One afternoon in late June, as he was cutting a client’s hair, Shokri heard gunfire. He left his client’s side to peer out the door and saw a group of men running from the shots.
“There they go again,” Shokri told his client, and went back to trimming his hair. By then, Shokri had grown accustomed to the sound, and he took pride in continuing his work in spite of the unrest around him.
“Another day in the revolution,” replied his client wearily. “But I still need a haircut, it’s been months. God damn them all.”
Suddenly, both men heard a loud rumbling noise. In the reflection in the shop mirror, they could see a huge vehicle approaching slowly, straight toward the salon. It looked as if it were about to roll right over them. The client jumped out of the chair, gasping in fear, and pulled the towel from around his neck, dropping it to the floor.
“I haven’t finished your haircut,” Shokri pleaded, trying to calm him. But the client disappeared around the corner, his hair only half-cut. The tank then suddenly turned and rumbled around the center of the square.
Doaa, meanwhile, was learning how to gauge the mood of the city by the number of bullet casings she found on the street in front of her house each morning. She longed to join the demonstrations that had resumed after the siege, but they were smaller now, and no longer peaceful. The air of celebration was gone, replaced with anger and desperation. She knew her father would never allow her to return.
After most of the tanks and the soldiers left the city, a new threat emerged as bombings began. On summer evenings, the family sat outside their house in a strange new ritual and watched other neighborhoods in the city light up as missiles fell. They counted how long it took for the bombs to land and guessed what kind of destruction had occurred from the clouds that mushroomed above. The sounds of heavy artillery shelling and explosions replaced birdsong.
“Alhamdullilah [thank God], it didn’t land here,” they said to each other, feeling guilty at the way war had hardened them. Sometimes they would witness the Free Syrian Army firing a rocket-propelled grenade, and they would all cheer, hoping that it hit its target.
Nowadays, the only thing Doaa and her sisters were allowed to do was cross the street to buy food from the supermarket or bread from the bakery. But prices had almost doubled and any better-quality food was even more expensive.
One day, the family had run out of bread, so Doaa, Saja, and Nawara went out to try to buy some. As they walked toward the bakery, soldiers called out to them, “Where are you going? Go back!”
Doaa answered, “We are only going to get bread.” But the soldiers kept insisting that they should return home. The girls stopped in the middle of the street and bent their heads together, whispering, “Should we turn back around?” They were so hungry their stomachs ached. While they were scared to disobey the soldiers, they also couldn’t bear the idea of going another day without any food. After a hurried discussion, they agreed to make it look as if they were going back home. They had heard that a Palestinian refugee camp in a neighborhood a thirty-minute walk away had food. They decided that they would go there instead. So they turned down the street in that direction. They were about two hundred meters from the camp when the soldiers spotted them again. Furious that the girls had defied them, the soldiers began shouting, “Go back, you dogs!”
This set Doaa off. They weren’t protesting or threatening the soldiers; she and her sisters were just trying to keep their family from starving, and the soldiers were getting in the way of that and being nothing but bullies. Without turning around, she shouted over her shoulder, “We need to eat! You’re starving us!”
“We just want to get food,” Saja added.
Before the soldiers could respond, the girls heard shooting in their direction and the sound of a tank moving toward them. They weren’t sure whether they had become the targets of army snipers for defying the soldiers’ orders or if they were suddenly caught in a cross fire. They immediately threw themselves to the ground, landing hard on the asphalt. Doaa felt the air forced from her lungs as she pressed her face to the ground and heard bullets flying above them like angry bees. Nawara felt the stinging brush of a bullet grazing over her back. If it had been a quarter of an inch lower, it could have killed her.
As soon as the gunfire ceased, Doaa and Saja helped Nawara up and ran through the side streets into the camp, hiding in alleyways until they felt it was safe enough to return home. They gave up on getting food, as the fear of being shot overcame their hunger. As they approached their home, all three of them were pale and shaking, aware of how close they had come to being killed. Nawara had a burn mark on her shirt where the bullet had skimmed her. Ali was on patrol outside their house, and he and his fellow soldiers noticed immediately that the girls were upset. His handsome, kind face creased with concern, Ali asked what had happened. As Saja and Nawara rushed into the house to Hanaa’s embrace, Doaa stopped to tell Ali that they weren’t able to buy any food for the family because they had been shot at. She walked back to her house feeling like a failure for coming home without food. An hour later, Ali knocked at the door and handed Hanaa a loaf of bread and a plastic bag full of ripe tomatoes. Grateful, Hanaa accepted his gift and quickly returned inside to make a meal for her family and to comfort her shaken daughters.
Now that the siege had been lifted and the protests continued, Doaa began to spend a lot of time up on the roof to hear what was happening on the ground. If she couldn’t attend the protests in person, this would have to do.
Doaa and her sisters would join in the chants of “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) and then “How can you kill your own sons?” and “Freedom!” Shouting along from their rooftop was a way of participating. Doaa knew that they had to be careful to not be noticed, as being on the roof made them a target for any snipers surveying the crowds from above. Anytime a soldier looked in her direction, her heart pounded. But despite her fear, being on the roof where she could see and join in the chants made her feel connected to the opposition.
One day, as she was in her usual position leaning over the edge of the roof and chanting the slogans along with the protesters, a soldier spotted her from a nearby building where he was stationed to observe the crowd, occasionally firing shots into the streets.
“Get down, irhabiya [terrorist],” he shouted at her. When Doaa didn’t move, he threatened, “Get inside or I’ll shoot you.”
That day Doaa felt emboldened by her fear, and she shouted back, “You’re the terrorist, you’re the one killing people! I saw you!”
At this, the man raised his gun and pointed it directly at Doaa. She quickly realized, in horror, that this soldier really intended to shoot her, so she bolted for the door. As she did, she felt a gust of air as a bullet brushed past her ear and hit the iron door in front of her, leaving a dent before it ricocheted backward and dropped to the ground. Just an inch closer and she would have been dead.
She threw the door open and ran inside to the safety of her home. Catching her breath, Doaa was surprised to realize that despite the bullet’s having just buzzed past her, she was not afraid. She wondered if she was becoming immune to fear. Every day they learned of more people that they knew who had been killed by government forces, but somehow, at this moment, she felt intuitively that the time had not yet come for her life to end. She felt that God had her destiny in his hands, and that the best way to serve him was to do what she believed was right and to follow the direction she received from her prayers. Doaa didn’t want fear to conquer her or her family, and she was resolved to continue living this way.
Through the fall and long winter of violence and food, electricity, and water shortages, the Al Zamels, like all families, did what they could to get by in a city that had turned into a war zone. Shokri brought home just enough money to buy food, and families and neighbors did what they could to help one another.
Then one day in June 2012, when Shokri arrived at his salon, he found that two missiles had
hit the roof, turning the back of his shop into rubble. For over thirty years, Salon Al Fananeen had been his source of income and part of his identity, and now it lay in ruins.
He surveyed the damage, sweeping away shattered pieces of mirror and cleaning the debris from the mangled chairs. He dug out his scissors and brushes, meticulously cleaning off the dust, then placed them carefully back on the half-broken shelf. He pushed the pieces of rubble from the roof to the far reaches of the shop, moved the only undamaged chair to the front, and waited all day for a customer. No one came.
When he returned home that night, Doaa noticed a change in him. His shoulders slumped and his face was blank. He somehow looked smaller than usual. “Baba, what’s wrong? What happened?”
“The shop…” was all he could say. The family tried to comfort him, assuring him that they were relieved to have him home all day so that they wouldn’t have to worry about his safety all the time, but he found no comfort in their words. The loss of his shop took his spirit away. He spent the rest of the day sitting in the same spot in the corner of the house, chain-smoking, and only speaking if someone asked him a question. Doaa sensed that his losing his livelihood was like his losing his manhood, and she desperately wanted to find a way to help him, but the only thing she could do was try to keep his spirits up. “It will be over soon, Baba, we must be patient.”
Shokri’s shop wasn’t the only one that had been destroyed. Ayat’s husband’s popular baklava shop down the street was also demolished by a bomb. He had come late to work that day, just minutes after the missile fell. “God saved me,” he told the family. Days later, another bomb demolished his car. “That was everything I had,” he told Ayat, then revealed his plan to flee for Lebanon where his brother lived. His brother could help find him work and he could send money home for her and the kids. Ayat’s husband had no interest in taking part in the armed struggle for either side. He just wanted to continue to make a living for his family, so instead he joined a growing group of Syrians paying bribes at checkpoints to make their way out of the country for neighboring Lebanon to wait out the war. Ayat and the children would follow him not long after by paying a smuggler to get them to the border, and telling the soldiers at checkpoints along the way that they were headed there to visit relatives.
A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea Page 6