Syrian Dust: Reporting from the Heart of the War

by Francesca Borri

  Even though readers write to you. They write to you because they want to know:

  “Really, these chemical weapons, how many are there?”

  “And what’s going on in Egypt? We don’t know anything anymore!”

  “And Libya, what’s happening now in Libya? Who’s in government?”

  “Why isn’t there a line or two on Pakistan? Is the story about the drones true?”

  “And chemical weapons, what’s the situation? Why don’t we know anything anymore?”

  Dozens of emails like that.

  Every day. All these notes from readers. All wanting to know.

  And messages from Syrians. In desperate refrain: “They’re killing us all! Where are you? They’re killing us all!”

  Only our readers and the Syrians. Otherwise, it’s always the same:

  “Call the rebels, okay? They’ll tell you about it. And anyway, it’s all on YouTube. What are you doing still there? There’s nothing to write about. There’s nothing to report, get it? Nothing. Nothing, don’t you understand? There’s nothing to report, what do you still want with Syria? They’re where they were a year ago, get it? Don’t you see?”

  Nothing.

  And so I stay at home in the evening. I read, study.

  I look at Alessio’s photos.

  No one calls me. Then again, friends in Italy are at the end of their rope, drained by the crisis. All unemployed or with a contract about to expire, all going through a bad time, all with degrees and no work, no rights: no future. Disheartened.

  Scattered far and wide. They reply, “Sorry, but I don’t feel like talking. I feel like a worthless loser.”

  All lost and crushed.

  Sorry, they say. “Syria is all I need tonight. All I need are the world’s problems.” And it’s true: nearly forty years old, a doctorate, and you can’t afford to pay a dentist. There’s Anna with a young son, a husband whose contract wasn’t renewed on Tuesday, five months of salary in arrears, and a boss, meanwhile, who drives around in a Porsche and says there’s a crisis, we all have to make sacrifices. And here I am with my Syria, with my wars. What can I expect? They, too, are at war.

  Defeated.

  While the editors, as usual, are waiting for a piece ASAP, and the rest doesn’t seem to concern them. All they say: “Let us know when you come back from Aleppo.”

  When I come back. Sure.

  If I come back.

  And so I stay home in the evening. Looking through Alessio’s photos.

  And wondering what’s the point.

  I think about my old prof, Cassese. Who would have sought justice.

  I think about international law, about my old life.

  While I’m here looking for a way to get into Aleppo rather than a way to drag Assad to The Hague. Because anything I may write, no matter how good, whatever life I may risk, this war and every war will go on. Cassese would have tried to stop it. He would never have settled for reporting on it.

  It’s not as if I’m the BBC. As if I can change anything.

  Here I am with all my energies focused on a way to get into Aleppo.

  All my energies wasted here, wondering what’s the point.

  I’m thinking about Cassese. And I miss him.

  I only know that I miss him, sitting here, thinking I have made a mess of everything.

  And still I keep looking at those photos.

  Once, twice, a hundred times.

  Those eyes. It’s been two years now, but they nail you every time.

  Every time. You think you’re looking at them, and instead they’re looking at you.

  There’s a story and it’s not over.

  That day at al-Shifa. That doctor. When he told me: “Don’t write that everything is at a standstill, that there is no progress. The dead are making progress.” And what he had in his hand: bloody bits of skull I thought were plaster.

  He too is now dead.

  The only one who calls me is Daniel. Daniel Bettini, foreign bureau chief at Yedioth Ahronoth. The leading Israeli newspaper. “I’m sorry,” I told him, “I’m really focused on Syria, you know?” I would have liked to write about all the changes taking place between the Israelis and the Palestinians—because everything is changing between them, even if they are where they were forty years ago. I would have liked to write about a thousand other things these past few months. I said, “I’m sorry.” He told me that writing about Syria, about people under siege, starving, forgotten by the world, writing about Syria today “is the most Jewish thing you can do.” He said, “You’re a Jew, when you’re in Aleppo.”

  And so he calls me. All the time.

  And then Mustafa Barghouti. I worked for him a few years ago. He’s a doctor. A doctor and a deputy, one of the leaders of nonviolent resistance to Israeli occupation. But also of resistance to Hamas and Fatah, since for the Palestinians, by now, they are as much an obstacle to freedom as the Wall. We had an idea of doing a book together. But while I was in Ramallah, my head was in Aleppo. “I’m sorry,” I told him, too. I would have liked to do a thousand other things these past months. He told me that writing about Syria, about people under siege, starving, forgotten by the world, writing about Syria today “is the most Palestinian thing you can do.”

  I looked at Alessio’s photos one last time.

  I don’t even know where he is.

  But I’m sure he doesn’t sleep. That at night, he talks of bloodshed and fighting.

  Because there’s a story in them. It’s no use. Once you’ve seen.

  And you can’t unsee.

  “don’t worry,” Ahmed tells me, as we cross the last checkpoint and enter the city, as a mortar strike makes the air shudder. “Now that you’re in Aleppo, you’re safe.”

  And he ducks his head to dodge a sniper.

  My first time here, a little over a year ago, I wasn’t even wearing the veil under my helmet. Then, after the veil, one day they asked me to wear a long pullover. After the long pullover, a garment down to my ankles. And now even a wedding ring on my finger—“Because you must always walk beside a man, the man to whom you belong.” And now that the Islamists are in control, and the priority for many is not Assad but sharia, now that the rebels’ crimes have been added to the regime’s crimes, and journalists are forbidden to enter—currently, eighteen of us are missing without a trace—today my helmet is a veil. My bulletproof jacket is a nijab. Because the only way to slip into Aleppo is to pass for a Syrian woman. Disguised. No questions on the street, not even a notebook, a pen. “But it’s not really a matter of the veil,” a woman tells me, having recognized me immediately by my skin, by my hands. “To look like a Syrian today you have to be filthy, haggard, and desperate.”

  Aleppo is nothing today but hunger and Islam. Kids play on swings in the narrowest alleyways to avoid the mortars—boys on the right holding their plastic Kalashnikovs, girls on the left already veiled, while a couple of jihadist fathers caringly push.

  About one million Syrians still live here in Aleppo under the control of the Free Army. They never had the $150 to pay for a car to the Turkish border. Dozens of children, barefoot, ragged, and disfigured by the scars of leishmaniasis, tag after emaciated mothers, also barefoot and completely in black, fully covered, all with bowl in hand, in search of a mosque where bread is distributed, yellow with typhus. And their eyes bore into you when you meet them, like all genuine children of war, who are never the ones we show you in newspapers or on television: the ones who smile gratefully when you hand them a biscuit. Because these, in contrast, are real children: exhausted, mute, eyes dazed by the horror of life. We don’t show you these children or the children cut down by Assad’s missiles, whom you can find pieces of—heads, limbs—in the hospitals.

  Meanwhile even the doctors are children now, “Because everyone here has either left or died, and as the world quib
bles over fossil fuels, we continue to be killed,” says Abu Yazan, twenty-five, a student and impromptu head doctor. Who, he admits, not only has little more than disinfectant and bandages in the supply room; he also has no idea how to treat his patients: “It’s one thing to amputate a leg, another to treat ischemia.” Aleppo had about five thousand doctors. Today it has thirty-six. Outside the entrance, a tent with a bucket and brush: the only available antidote in case of a chemical attack. And, of course, nameless bodies outside. People pass by, raise the sheet, make sure it’s not one of their loved ones.

  They’re on their own, the Syrians, completely alone, on this side of the red line. Here where you don’t die from gas, but from hunger, so nobody cares. 126,000 victims, more than 2 million refugees, 7 million displaced. Almost half the population. Plus the hundreds of thousands under siege—in Homs, in Damascus, everywhere—about whom we know only what little is passed on via Twitter, pictures of skeletons roaming the fields in search of leaves and roots. While state TV was broadcasting the list of concerts in theaters in the center last night, the imam on Al Jazeera was authorizing Syrians to cook stray dogs.

  By statute UN aid is distributed through the only recognized government, which is Assad’s. Which, however, imposes so many restrictions on movement that a large part of the aid ends up in areas under the control of the regime. The regime claims that it ensures the safety of the humanitarian workers, even though it has arrested and tortured those who have tried to reach areas under rebel control.

  And those who managed to reach them were then seized by Al Qaeda.

  In theory, Aleppo has a civil administration, the Revolutionary Council. But it was appointed from abroad by the National Coalition, which was created by the international community in opposition to Assad, and whose decisions here are of no interest to anyone. Its delegates have lived in Europe for years—too long. And in any case, only $400,000 arrived, to restore electricity, disinfest the streets of rats, reopen the schools. The hospitals. Forty cents each. It ran out. Lakhdar Brahimi, UN mediator for Syria, earns $189,000 a year.

  The only place in Aleppo where you can find a little bread is the mosque.

  And so it’s no wonder that when I ask to meet with the person in charge, I find myself at the Islamic court. Or rather, disguised, I find myself at the house of Al Qaeda’s Luay, his wife’s black silhouette knocking at the closed door and leaving the coffee behind it. Every rebel group has its representative in the court. I ask what law they apply and he replies: “Sharia sharia,” meaning they don’t apply a written code but the will of the judges. “Because in our tradition, the judges are experts in jurisprudence. They are men of authority whom the community trusts.” Except that in Aleppo, as usual, everyone is either gone or dead, and so even the judges are children: Luay is thirty-two years old. Before the war he was a practicing attorney. “In fact, it is not easy,” he admits. “Everyone has a weapon here and has no need for a court to obtain justice. But above all, it is not easy dealing with the rebels. Looting, extortion. When we attempted to try Nemer, the leader of the more violent militias, his men surrounded the court until we dismissed the case.”

  The court, in return, issued a ban, duly posted at the entrance to the Karaj al-Hajez checkpoint, the crossing point between the two halves of Aleppo. It looks like a main road, but it’s actually something out of a Stephen King novel, controlled by snipers from the three minarets of a mosque. At the checkpoint, the sign says: “Transporting food and medicine is prohibited.” Because while at first it was the regime that surrounded and starved the rebels’ half of the city, now it’s the rebels, having captured all the access roads leading into Aleppo, who surround and starve the regime’s half of the city. People tape slices of meat on themselves, fill fake TV sets with eggs. Every now and then, there’s an abrupt shot, someone dies. And for half an hour, an hour, the street empties out, the corpse lying there in the sun, a cat sniffing at it. Then the first arrival, a little boy, appears warily from a side street, hesitates a moment, and quickly crosses. A second one, then a third, and the street grows crowded again, the corpse still there. The snipers, in their minarets, wait confidently.

  Syrians no longer speak of “liberated areas,” but of east Aleppo and west Aleppo. They no longer talk about Assad, injustice, oppression. On their cell phones, they no longer show you pictures of their children or their brothers killed by the regime, but simply beautiful photos of Aleppo before the war. Because no one here is fighting the regime anymore: the rebels are fighting each other.

  Those who aren’t engaged in looting and extortion are busy opposing ISIS, which now insists on being called only al-Dawlat, a.k.a. the State, as if it were a new regime. “We are even less free than before, if such a thing is possible,” one of the last activists still here tells me. One of the last still alive. “Because before, unless you were politically engaged, no one interfered in your private affairs. Now everything is forbidden: music, alcohol, cigarettes,” he says. “It is not just a matter of Christians and Alawites. Now, all Sunnis who, like me, interpret the Koran differently from Al Qaeda are in danger. Assad targets my life. These people target my lifestyle too.”

  And yet, he explains, it’s a fundamentalism that was imported from abroad. By Islamists, and by Hezbollah, who fight alongside the regime. “You continue to be divided on intervention, not realizing that outside intervention has been going on for months.”

  People are whispering again in Aleppo, walking with their heads down. In July, Mohammed Kattaa was shot for having inappropriately uttered the name of the Prophet.

  He was fifteen years old.

  While the front, meanwhile, hasn’t budged. In the old city, the first unit of the Free Army in which I was embedded a year ago is still there. Still at the same intersection, still trying to flush out one sniper. A difficult job. Those boys too are hungry. They sold their Kalashnikovs to pay for a wounded comrade to be treated in Turkey. In one day of fighting we advance five blocks. Then the ammunition runs out. And we fall back with seven fewer men.

  Because the only real front that still exists here is the sky.

  That’s how you die, with no warning. An explosion out of nowhere, a lightning flash, a blast of wind and the air in flames, blistering, blood and shrapnel—and in the dust, amid the screams, only these torn shreds of flesh, these charred children. There’s no shelter. The houses don’t have cellars. Nothing. Still, the only anti-aircraft protection is bad weather. Just like that, you die. You dig with your hands, there are no bulldozers, and in any case there’s no fuel, there isn’t even electricity. You dig by the light of cell phones, cigarette lighters, the corpses staring at you, packed between remnants of columns.

  And for days, at dawn, in silence, on this shoreline of human remains, you see women bent over as if they are searching for seashells. Between their fingers a scrap of cloth, a remnant of a child. Among them, stray dogs with bones between their teeth.

  That’s how you die, in Aleppo. You die and all that remains of you is a photo in a frame.

  Grass has grown among the rubble. War has become this city’s skin. Amid the scorched carcasses of cars abandoned, left to hibernate where they swerved, the hole of the bullet that hit the driver through the windshield, wild cyclamen, and a bloodied shirt caught in the wheels. In a barbershop, small glass bottles, intact, are still lined up on the shelves. You uncap them and you can still smell the scent of jasmine. Girls covered to their ankles contemplate shop windows displaying fluorescent, dizzying high heels; in the parks, children chase after a ball between rows of graves while a plane, circling, flies overhead, and it’s already been ten minutes now, in a moment it will strike—in a moment someone, one of us, will die. You walk along and a man in front of you suddenly drops: shot down.

  Everything now seems routine; nothing is missing, yet nothing is as it should be. In the ambulances you find fighters at the front, children with Kalashnikovs, their fathers killed, everythin
g all haywire. You find the snipers working shifts, arriving at their station for their stint on time, after their morning coffee; they park in front of the door as if they are going to the office. At the rumble of a mortar, children don’t even turn. Only when there’s a hail of bullets do they begin dickering.

  The most symbolic front, in the end, the most indisputable front, is Bustan al-Qasr, because it has long been the epicenter of the Friday demonstrations. The place it all started. And where it all continues, Friday after Friday. Though now the demonstrations are no longer solely against Assad. And at the rally today there are only children. Because everyone is either gone or dead, and those who haven’t left or died have disappeared into thin air. Like Abu Maryam. Persecuted by the regime, then by the rebels, he was finally seized by ISIS. And vanished. At the head of the procession is his niece Nasma. Ten years old. The van with the amplifiers still has no gasoline; it’s still pushed by hand.

  The displaced refugees, however, haven’t disappeared; they’re still camped not far away, alongside the river. Because for months all its banks have been hollowed out to form burrows. They aren’t shacks, they aren’t caves, you can’t exactly make them out; they’re bits and pieces of things, metal sheeting, wooden boards, plastic tarps. Piled up mounds, heaps of pieces of things. At some point you simply find yourself inside, among women, children, maimed and speechless old people, a boy with Down’s, on the ground his supper of rice and worms on a scrap of cardboard. Because every time you come back to Aleppo, things are always the same for those displaced: only their names change. Ibtisam Ramdan, twenty-five, used to live here with her three children and tuberculosis in a rank tract of sewer pipe. But she ventured out with the youngest in search of bread, one day, and was hit by a sniper. The other two wasted away in poverty until a mortar pulverized them, in this Aleppo strewn with graves, even in the air, this endless monument to unknown people.

  A few yards farther up, the river that divides east Aleppo from west Aleppo continues to spew out the purplish remains of men executed with a bullet to the back of the head, their hands tied. It’s never been clear who they are. Rebels executed by the loyalists, or loyalists executed by the rebels. It depends on your point of view—or maybe only on the current.