Syrian Dust: Reporting from the Heart of the War

by Francesca Borri

  on the screen, the BBC is talking about Moadamiya. It looks like Somalia, with those bodies that are all bones, yet it’s only six miles from the center of Damascus, where bankers play tennis at their clubs. Because while the world is focused on chemical attacks, Assad has discovered a more economical method of mass destruction: siege and starvation. Below the monitor, three guys are playing pool.

  All the others, at the tables, are chatting. Laughing and drinking beer.

  On the screen these gaunt bodies. Skeletal. Invisible.

  I chose Amsterdam because, though it’s true it doesn’t have a lake, it has all these canals, all these cafés. And maybe one day, I thought—maybe one day I’ll find the same radiant light as that time in Piediluco. And partly because I don’t know anyone here. And right now, “I cannot get on with . . . people”—any question, any topic seems pointless. Utterly pointless. “He wants me to tell him about the front [but] I realise he does not know that a man cannot talk of such things.” Then again. All Quiet on the Western Front.8

  At Waterstone’s, the English bookshop, the only book on Syria is an anthology of articles by Marie Colvin. “You do a great job,” my landlord tells me as he explains the keypads for the heating, for the bicycle alarm. “Without people like you, we would have no idea what’s happening in the world. You must be proud,” he says. “Your work is vital.” His wife comes in. “Do you know this girl is from Aleppo?” “Aleppo?” she says. “Are you Iraqi?” “No, no,” he says. “Syria. She’s in Syria. You wouldn’t think so, right? So young . . . She’s embedded with the Americans.”

  The UN announced today that it will no longer count the dead. It says its sources are unreliable, the count is too tricky. And so, instead of putting an end to the war, it’s putting an end to the body count. At 130,000. As for the rest, not only won’t they have a name, but they won’t even be a number.

  One hundred thirty thousand deaths, nearly 2.5 million refugees, 7 million people displaced. The UN has asked for 6.5 billion dollars for a humanitarian tragedy which, it warns, is devastating neighboring countries one by one. There is fighting in Lebanon now, and street-by-street hostilities in Tripoli, in the north, which is divided between Sunnis and Alawites like a small-scale Syria. Refugees make up 20 percent of the population in a country that was already collapsing on its own. While in Geneva they’re planning a peace conference. With Russia and the United States. With the regime and the official opposition, the European Union, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. With Indonesia, Mexico, Luxembourg, even South Korea.

  But without Iran. And without the rebels.

  Who are too engaged, at the moment, to go to Geneva.

  All the Syrians can do is die or run. And often they die anyway, like the 366, not counting the missing, who drowned on October 3, 2013, off the shore of Lampedusa. The dead were granted honorary Italian citizenship. The living were sent back.

  Of the 2.5 million refugees registered at the United Nations, 97 percent were admitted from neighboring countries. Europe, in December 2013, took in fourteen thousand refugees. No, that’s not a misprint. It’s really fourteen thousand. Eleven thousand of which went to Germany. Britain, the country that most wanted to intervene, that supposedly cared the most about Syria, took in zero refugees.

  And now that Assad feels stronger than before—now that he knows that no one will bomb him, that all he has to do is refrain from using gas—it’s easy to get a visa to go to Damascus again. And once more we have these articles describing life as usual, restaurants, cafés—articles that assure you that everything is normal under the regime, everything but the economic crisis: “Unemployment is beginning to be felt here too, you know? The other day I was at the gym and someone stole my iPhone.”

  Six miles from Moadamiya.

  The first photos from Moadamiya continue to arrive punctually, every morning at five. And they show skeletons. The one in today’s image is chewing cardboard. They’ve eaten cats, dogs, leaves. Rats. Roots. There’s nothing left. Only skeletons, nothing more. “We sit in silence all day,” they write to you, “because talking consumes calories.”

  Moadamiya.

  I call a UN official. “But no, look,” he tells me, “technically we can’t talk about starvation. We detect cases of food insecurity, of course, a widespread uneasiness, but no, the term isn’t appropriate. We can’t call it starvation.”

  But we can call you a dickhead.

  Moadamiya.

  Meanwhile I’m here and this city—this city is so strange. I listen to a debate about the Left and the prospects of the peace movement. The question is why did we mobilize for Bosnia, for Iraq, and not for Syria? Of the three speakers, one begins with Rosa Luxemburg, the other with the contradictions of capitalism. The third wonders whether the rebels lack the functional equivalent of a working class consciousness. And the problem is: if we support the rebels, we support Al Qaeda. Whom, however, we are fighting in Pakistan. The enemy of my friend is my enemy, but what if the friend of my friend is my enemy? Is the friend of my enemy my friend? And what about the cousin of the enemy of the enemy of my friend? And why don’t we talk about the factories of Bangladesh anymore? In that box to the left, a euro to send blankets to the refugees, thank you.

  Meanwhile.

  Meanwhile I read the mail as I listen: Mohammed Noor was kidnapped by Al Qaeda today, and my last fixer was killed by a mortar along with my last interpreter. Whose daughter has meanwhile pronounced her first word: “MIG.”

  But it’s not true that no one is interested in Syria.

  They invited me to come on RAI 1 for a reality show starring broke showgirls, singers, and TV personalities living among the refugees.

  Meanwhile I wander around Amsterdam, and Amsterdam is beautiful.

  Meanwhile I see myself reflected in the windows of the shops, of the cafés with all those people inside.

  Life.

  I look at my reflection in the water.

  Amsterdam.

  In the end I left too.

  We all left. And yet it’s not that the war in Syria became more dangerous. By and large, it wasn’t much better a year ago, when Aleppo was one fierce explosion every six seconds, the wounded with no time for a last breath before a mortar pulverized them. Except that we were with the rebels then, and the rebels, no matter how stricken, were fighting for freedom. And we were there to bear witness, to show the world Assad’s crimes. Now that Aleppo is starving, however, nothing but hunger and sharia, women covered up Afghan-style and malnourished children, now that a new regime has replaced the old, we’ve suddenly discovered what war means when you are not embedded. Now we are here to attest, to show the world the rebels’ crimes as well, and both the rebels and the regime hunt us as enemies.

  This war hasn’t become more dangerous, only more real.

  And now that for us, too, the war is what it has always been for civilians, a war in which no one is innocent, no one is immune, a war in which no one is welcome—we all got out.

  It was February 2012 when I decided that I would write about Syria. When I saw those photographs in Time. In the hospitals in Tripoli, in Lebanon, the Homs survivors who had housed, helped, and protected Alessio limped toward him, moved: finally Syria was on the front pages. Now they capture us. Why? What changed since that day in Tripoli?

  Don’t we have responsibilities here? We’re journalists, our role is to ask questions. Why are we in the crosshairs? Maybe because so many were here just for the money, for a single feature, a single photo, an award, a contract, and so for the Syrians we became a trade, a business like any other? Maybe because, when Abdallah, who made the work possible for so many of us, was killed, no one left a flower on his grave, not after he’d defended us and enabled the arrest of two kidnappers? Maybe because all we wrote about was blood, blood, blood, because it was easier, because it was less expensive, giving the world a misleading portrait of Syria, a grainy pict
ure that now generates uncertain and confused policies? Maybe because we flocked to the border by the dozens after the chemical attack, only to disappear, disappointed, when Obama chose not to bomb?

  Maybe because, whether we’re here or not, it’s all the same to the Syrians? Because to them we are merely the reflection and expression of the international community and its cynicism?

  Our role is to ask questions. Even of ourselves.

  I was reading the usual email a few nights ago, “No thanks, beautiful reportage, but not interested in Aleppo,” and I was on Twitter when a plane roared overhead. In a second, everyone followed me—all of them, I’m afraid, waiting for my last tweet from under the rubble. And my reaction, since I was more than a journalist at that moment—I was just like any other person with a plane over her head and death at her door—my only reaction was: go to hell.

  And I shut down.

  Now here we are with our Hostile Environment Awareness Training (HEAT), borrowed from the military as if we too were in the army. Only—only words are important, aren’t they? He who speaks evil, thinks evil. And commits evil. Syria is not a hostile environment. It’s a dangerous and complex environment, and so, of course, training is essential: but it is not hostile. Because we aren’t here to oppose an enemy. Everyone thinks it’s about money. About money and strength. But there are things that cannot be bought. Like respect. You have to build human relationships, not contractual ones. Because that’s the only real safety in situations like this: social protection.

  But here we are. Studying the history of the Kalashnikov, not the history of Syria. Learning how to survive in the jungle. “Threats” my manual lists in the first chapter: “1. The locals often do not speak English.” The problem, if anything, is that we don’t speak Arabic.

  Meanwhile I wander around Amsterdam and can only say of my last two years: a failure. Two years, and readers barely remember where Damascus is. Barely remember who Assad is. Because it was a war for freelance journalists—and now they’re all in Cairo, and from Cairo they will then all go to Kiev. All covering the countries that cost less, and increasingly, countries that you can enter without a visa, since to obtain a visa you often have to indicate the publication for which you write, and no one will now commission a piece from you. If you get killed, no one wants to be responsible. And so no one writes about the Central African Republic. About South Sudan. Bahrain. Chechnya. And how can you build relationships, step by step, how can you win trust, respect, in Syria, when even the best newspapers now have only one correspondent each for the entire Middle East? Buy a paper, even one of the best publications, and it reads like a low-cost daily; and it’s not just the war reporting. Because no piece requires as much resourcefulness as an investigative report—let’s report what’s possible, not what’s important. Let’s write only about the front, only about those who are fighting. Any revolution, thus, becomes a war. Their freedom depended on us too.

  The news is homogenized by descriptive articles that don’t cite police records, how many died and where, or what caused the deaths. What’s more important when you’re writing about a sniper? How many victims he struck, or that car parked in front of the door as if he’s at the office? What explains a war more? What the hell are we, stenographers or journalists? Does Syria really only speak of Sunnis and Shiites, the rebels and the regime? Does it really have nothing else to say to us? We aren’t notaries.

  That rubble, is it really just about Aleppo?

  And while it was all so difficult, the regime, the rebels, the Islamists, the publishers, and the editors—not only weren’t we journalists able to work together—but we all thwarted one another. I thought I had seen it all after a colleague sent me into the snipers just so she could finish first in the cavalcade. But the evening before I entered Aleppo, this last time, a reporter from the U.S. called half of Antakya to have the Free Army stop me—because he’d been there for ten days and couldn’t get in, and how would it make him look now, a man who has won dozens of awards, to be beaten by a girl? In the end you go to Syria and the danger is not just Al Qaeda, not just missiles, not just bullets: the danger is other journalists.

  And maybe worst of all, my mother was sick these past two years. One of those illnesses where you wander from doctor to doctor, from treatment to treatment, and no one knows what it is. And in the evening, when I was on the phone with her, when I didn’t need to explain how I felt being in Syria—in two years no one ever asked me how my mother was.

  Or how I was.

  Lorenzo Milani wrote: “My neighbor is not Africa, not the proletariat, but those around me.”9 And if you’re not able to ask the person living beside you how she is, how on earth would you ever be able to write about Syria?

  All I can say about my last two years: a failure.

  Yesterday Molhem Barakat was killed. Reuters had bought him a Canon, but not a helmet. Not a bulletproof vest. He was seventeen years old. And so he died, a child photographer, while we were looking for a child soldier. Sent to the front for ten dollars a photo.

  That rubble, is it really just Aleppo?

  Every time. “There’s nothing to write about.” Yet each time, you come back, and you find you’ve crossed another red line: from gunfire to aircraft, from planes to missiles, from typhus to leishmaniasis, from leishmaniasis to polio, even now as I’m writing. I’m writing about Moadamiya and already there’s a hunger crisis in Ghouta as well. I reread what I have written and already there is a hunger crisis in Yarmouk too. And then from hunger we have already moved on to an even more economical weapon, more capable of mass destruction, and even swifter: explosive barrels. Barrels. Filled with nails and dynamite. An average of thirty barrels a day. A thousand deaths a day. As many as a chemical attack, every day. Then again, now that people no longer die from gas but from everything else in Syria, nobody cares.

  Nobody. Except you keep getting these messages: “They’re killing us all!” Hour after hour, minute after minute, “Where are you? Where are you?”

  I don’t know. I don’t know where we are, I don’t know. My most read piece, in these two years, was my piece on freelance reporters: the only piece that doesn’t talk about Syria. And every comment, every criticism ducks responsibility—I called that UN official first, I needed some data, and he said: “But it was the American, right?” Because I had tweeted that thing about “starvation.” An inappropriate term. “It was the American, wasn’t it?” he said. “That guy is just an asshole.” And each time you’re tempted to yell: “I was talking about you! I was referring to you! You are the asshole! I was talking about you!” Every time. They all think you’re not talking about them. But no. I was talking about you. You in particular.

  About us in particular.

  And yet . . . when I speak,

  my words remain in the air

  like corks on water.10

  Kevin Carter was my age. Thirty-three years old. He took this photo in Sudan, a child on the ground with a vulture behind him. During the famine. He took the photo and went away, because they had told him not to touch the children, not to touch anyone, that he might catch something. So he took the photo and left. No one heard anything more about that child.

  They tried to trace him, but no one could.

  Kevin Carter won the Pulitzer with that photo.

  Three months later he committed suicide.

  I think of him, in the evening.

  While Amsterdam is so beautiful. So offensive, while Aleppo is dying.

  While I write my book. I think I understand him.

  While I gaze at the houses. At the night, the lights. I stare at the lights in other people’s homes. And all those lives, so normal, so appealing, those lives that will never be mine.

  While they tell you: “You’ve been translated into nine languages. Now a book. Two extraordinary years,” they say. And you ask them: “Who is Assad? And the rebels? Who are they? What do t
hey want?” And nobody knows anything. “Do you know she’s come from Aleppo?” “Aleppo? But wasn’t Gaddafi killed? I thought the war was over.” “No, no, that one is in Libya. She’s in Syria. She’s with the Taliban.”

  Two years and no one knows anything.

  I don’t even know what’s happening on the other side of Aleppo.

  And, meanwhile, the Syrians I have written about in this book are all dead.

  In Aleppo they’re fighting again. Because while the rebels clean out the shops, empty the houses, the factories, while they resell the copper from electric cables, while they resell even the metal water piping, and while the Islamists focus on the caliphate, Assad is back on the offensive. His men have finally broken through the resistance in the southeast, at al-Safirah. It was the base of Liwa al-Tawhid, the chief brigade in Aleppo. And from al-Safirah, in a few hours, the battle has flared again. Colonel al-Okaidi, commander of the Free Army, has resigned. For once, al-Okaidi admitted, it wasn’t a matter of a lack of weapons and ammunition: Liwa al-Tawhid was engaged north of Aleppo, not against Assad’s troops, he decried, but against other rebels.

  On the other hand. At Wadi Deif, in Idlib province, Jamal Maarouf’s men have continued fighting for months, each time stopping a moment before the regime’s troops surrender, in order to go on receiving funds from their Gulf backers.

  While explosive barrels rain down. A thousand deaths a day and there is no shelter. Everyone tries to flee, but the rebels are fighting with Islamists at the border over control of the supply routes and arms smuggling, so the border is closed.

  “Where are you? They’re killing us all! They’re killing us all! Where are you?”

  We’ve all left, one by one. Gone.

  And me too.

  I’m here now, trying to write, to report, but I’m jumpy, I get up every five minutes, I read, make a call, distract myself, looking for an excuse to pause, to defer, to run from the page time after time, because once you’ve written you can no longer forget, once you’ve seen you cannot unsee. These two months here have been harder than my two years in Syria, and I definitely feel out of place, now that I no longer have anywhere to return to, now that even Ramallah is not my home, now that exile is permanent and now that I really am Palestinian, they were right, and I really am Jewish. There is no return, and so I pedal, I pedal swiftly around this city, the music of Radiohead or U2 in my headphones, in search of a light that I can’t find now that I’ve lost everything, and so I pedal, I pedal swiftly, only this, head down to dodge the snipers as Aleppo lies in wait behind every noise, every shadow, every flash an explosion, every clack of a woman’s heels the sharp report of a sniper, and it’s no use, it sounds like an incoming plane—it will always be an incoming plane—but it’s only a gate sliding shut, now that everything is reduced to rubble, and I pedal, pedal, pedal swiftly, no longer knowing where to go, with nothing to go back to anymore, and I try to keep going, but every corner, around every corner of the entire city, there’s another city behind the city, an echo in every voice, while to my right, suddenly, the World Press Photo center runs by me and I think about April, I think about the day of the awards ceremony, how everyone was looking at those photos, Gaza, Syria, Afghanistan, all the wars, all the dead, and they were all there discussing contrast, color, framing, the latest Nikon, among the dead, and how, from the stage, all Alessio said was: “I am ashamed.”