Syria's Secret Library

by Mike Thomson

  As time went on, the government forces responded with increasing ferocity. On some occasions demonstrators were fired on using live ammunition, and there were also cases of people being beaten to death. Without their inspiring leaders, peaceful defiance became difficult to sustain and rebel resistance in Daraya grew increasingly hard-edged. Former students who had been devoted to non-violent revolution were beginning to take up arms, many seeing this as a necessary form of protection from the Syrian security forces.

  Rateb abo Fayez, a fresh-faced eighteen-year-old economics student with an immaculately cropped short, dark beard, was typical of many protesters at that time. He had been convinced that non-violent protest was the best way to bring positive change to the country, but, he told me, the brutal actions of the security services he witnessed during the demonstrations were putting this policy under growing strain. One incident in particular sticks in his mind: ‘One protester was trying to get away and ran into a butcher’s shop. A group of government soldiers rushed in after him. A few minutes later they all came out, dragging the protester with them. His body was covered in blood. I’ll never get that awful picture out of my head, I’ll never forget it.’ After that incident, Rateb said, the security forces went from attacking protesters with wooden sticks to using weapons and many people died. ‘This,’ he said, ‘was the turning point. The violence had escalated to the point where it had become a war.’ For Rateb and his friends, there was no going back from here.

  Within the next few days Rateb joined the Free Syrian Army (FSA), a country-wide force comprised of a hotchpotch of armed anti-regime groups. His younger brother Raed also joined several months later. Conscription to the Syrian military is compulsory for all men from the age of nineteen. University students are allowed to postpone their enlistment, but must still serve on finishing their studies. Many of the young men in Daraya would have been conscripted to the government forces, but escaped this fate because from late 2012 it was beyond the regime’s control. Rateb’s father, a carpenter, had been shot in the arm by a sniper, so was unable to join the rebels. Instead, he volunteered to work with the medical teams who treated the mounting number of injured civilians, while his wife looked after the family home.

  In November 2011, the Arab League suspended Syria from its ranks and imposed sanctions on the country, accusing its government of failing to implement an Arab peace plan. This brought a renewed mood of optimism and defiance in Daraya. The town’s history of peaceful protest, combined with the recent death of ‘Little Ghandi’ and the disappearance of his colleagues, had got it noticed around the world.

  Around this time Anas started a diary. On 1 January 2012 he wrote:

  Today for the first time, the flag of the revolution flies above the main palace. The regime’s flag was earlier taken down. It is such a beautiful and indescribable feeling to see our flag flying over the city. A delegation from the Arab League visited us. This is the first foreign delegation to come here. It makes me realise that it is down to us alone to explain the revolution to the world. I usually spend this month of the year preparing for my exams but I’ve decided to skip some of them and get authorisation to postpone my studies. This way I can avoid being conscripted into the army that is killing our people. For now, things look very unclear and no one knows what will happen to us. But we are hopeful the regime will fall soon.

  Also still hopeful that the world was listening, was a group of mainly ‘citizen journalists’ in Daraya, around half of them women. At the end of January 2012, they published the first issue of a weekly underground revolutionary newspaper, Enab Baladi–Grapes of my Country, in honour of Daraya’s famous grapes. The paper’s stated aim was to peacefully advance a democratic society via credible, independent and in-depth reporting. Before long, however, one of the publication’s most prominent founders, Nabil Shurbaji, was arrested in Daraya by the security forces and is believed to have died in jail. These were his last reported words: ‘Dear Lord, exonerate us from any blame for any bloodshed or killing in Daraya, for any reason or justification, and exonerate us from blame in any act of torture or injustice perpetrated against any human being whomever they may be.’ Despite Shurbaji’s death and the ongoing conflict, more than a million copies of Enab Baladi have been distributed since the launch of the newspaper.

  In February 2012, the conflict escalated from an ongoing series of skirmishes to all-out war. On the third of that month, President Assad’s forces began shelling the city of Homs. The bombardment lasted a month, before regime troops took control of part of the city. But by July the fighting had spread to Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city. International efforts at mediation continued to fail and in August 2012 Kofi Annan quit as the UN/Arab League’s Envoy.

  The military situation in Daraya was deteriorating by the day. As Anas recorded in his diary:

  the regime’s forces have been deployed right across Daraya. The government has erected checkpoints in front of mosques. When people began demonstrating after prayers they started shooting at them.

  And the very next day:

  The funerals of those killed yesterday were held early so that the martyrs could be buried in the morning. These did not go as planned. Government forces showed up and shot at protesters. I am horrified to say that now twenty-four of them have been killed in just two days. My dear cousin was among them. He was nineteen years old. His death represents a disaster for both myself and my family. We are so very sad and fear the same fate may await us all soon. We have called this Black Day.

  The use of brutal force by President Assad’s security forces to crush the uprising was now rebounding on his regime. In July three of his senior security officers were killed by fighters from the FSA. The following month a member of Assad’s own regime spoke out against his ruthless suppression of those who opposed him. The Syrian Chargé d’Affaires in London, Khaled al-Ayoubi, resigned saying that he was no longer willing to represent a regime that had committed such violent and oppressive acts against its own people.

  And then the eyes of the world returned to Daraya. Austin Tice, a former US Marine working in Syria as a freelance journalist, vanished three days after his thirty-first birthday. The last place he had been seen was Daraya. As a younger man, Tice had risen to the rank of second lieutenant in the Marines, but after two deployments he left the military, enrolling in law school at Georgetown University in Washington. However, this didn’t work out for him and he re-enlisted as a reservist. But after seeing active service in Afghanistan, he left the army for a second time. Rather than going back to his law studies, Tice decided to pursue a career as a freelance war photographer and journalist, making his own way to Syria via Gaziantep in southern Turkey.

  This was Tice’s calling and he went on to report from many areas of Syria, including war-ravaged Homs, providing copy for the Washington Post, the BBC and NPR. He travelled the country in the company of a Syrian fixer and translator to whom he had been introduced in Turkey. During this time Tice met fellow US journalist James Foley, who was later captured and beheaded by IS fighters. Just four months on, Tice himself suddenly vanished.

  Nobody knows for sure what happened to him, but it is widely believed that Tice was abducted by the Syrian security services. Most of his work had, after all, been done while embedded with rebel fighters and he had also reported on human rights abuses allegedly committed by the regime, so he would probably have been viewed by Damascus as anti-government. However, the Syrian regime swiftly denied that it was holding him. The following month a grainy video appeared on YouTube, in which a convoy of vehicles driving across a barren and hilly landscape suddenly comes to a sudden halt, and a group of men in what looks like traditional Afghan dress and black headbands approaches. Armed with automatic rifles and rocket launchers, they jump out of a white pickup truck shouting ‘Allahu Akbar!’ while manhandling a bearded hostage, closely resembling Austin Tice, and then disappear from view.

  No group has claimed responsibility for Tice’s abduction and some experts
who have studied the video believe it was staged. They point to the fact that the Afghan-style dress seen in the film was not something worn by Syrian rebel groups at the time, and they even suspect that the video could have been made by the Syrian security forces in order to deflect accusations of his abduction from themselves.

  Soon after the disappearance of Tice, Daraya was surrounded by tanks. Then, following reports of renewed attacks by the FSA on the nearby Mezzeh air base, the town’s electricity supply was cut off. Anas became increasingly alarmed. He noted in his diary:

  Although traditional visits to the tombs of the martyrs have gone ahead, as usual worrying news is coming in from outside the city. We hear that the regime has taken control of much of Western Ghouta and has started attacking Kafarsousa and al-Moadamyeh. The Free Syrian Army of Daraya is helping its al-Moadamyeh branch and victims of the fighting were carried all the way to our village for treatment. I was in the house when my cousin’s husband was brought to us. He had been shot in the back. It’s a really bad injury and we’ve been told that he is going to be paralysed from the waist down. We are all sad and very worried about him.

  On Monday, 20 August, Daraya was shelled for the first time. This was followed, the next day, by a lengthy artillery bombardment. Abdul Basit al-Ahmar, a former business and economics student at Damascus University, who had quit his studies during the protests that year, was in Daraya at the time. This tall, sensitive and idealistic young man told me: ‘It all began when the Syrian regime started ordering civilians in Daraya to hand over the names of any activists or peaceful protesters who were opposed to the government. When we told them that we weren’t prepared to do this, the security forces went wild and began attacking people.’

  When news of the growing number of casualties reached Abdul Basit, he went to a recently set-up field hospital to offer his help. Even though he had no medical training, the staff there were so overwhelmed they immediately took him up on his offer. He was staggered by what he saw–patients, so many of them covered in blood and some with limbs missing–filled the corridors.

  Soon after Abdul Basit began helping out at the hospital, government forces launched another attack on Daraya. Rebels in Homs and Aleppo had been bombarded earlier that month, now it was Daraya’s turn to be repeatedly bombed. The town, with its long history of resistance to many of the policies of both Bashar al-Assad’s regime and his father’s government before that, was a particular irritation for the ruling family. It also lay on the very doorstep of Damascus. Insurrection so close to the seat of power had to be contained. Many of those injured in the offensive were badly hurt and the doctors were so deluged with casualties they simply could not cope. Abdul Basit watched on, desperate to help, ‘But I didn’t have enough experience at that time to treat most of them, and that really distressed me,’ he told me. ‘I remember a badly injured child being brought in to the hospital. Even experienced doctors couldn’t do anything for him. He was in a terrible state and they just didn’t have the medicines and equipment they needed. I watched his life slowly ebbing away. It was the first time I had seen anybody die like that, never mind a young innocent child.’

  As the bombardments continued, Abdul Basit found he was unable to leave Daraya’s makeshift field hospital, due to the constant stream of casualties being carried in. ‘The scene at the hospital was awful,’ he recalled. ‘There was blood and suffering everywhere. It was made even worse by the fact that the hospital was housed in what had once been a school. So alongside the blood and screaming people with terrible injuries were bits and pieces from the classrooms. Places where innocent children had so recently been having their lessons. Instead of caring for these children and protecting their school, the government’s soldiers were destroying it and trying to kill all those inside.’

  There wasn’t much the doctors could do for the many casualties brought in, and it soon became more a case of delaying death rather than preventing it. Volunteers like Abdul Basit used the limited skills they had learned so recently to try to stop bleeding and to dress wounds, but the makeshift hospital was in absolute chaos. Staff did their best to cordon off areas for those needing intensive care, desperately trying to send those less severely injured to other, better equipped, hospitals. But government soldiers simply turned them back, leaving Abdul Basit and his colleagues with no choice but to deal with them. He told me: ‘I won’t forget the smell of blood until the day I die. It seemed to be everywhere. But people did what they could for each other. Every now and then I would stand amid all this horror and ask myself: how can the government kill its own people like this, just because they asked for reforms?’

  Abdul Basit was witnessing both the very worst of what humanity could do, and also the very best–a precursor to the ways in which the citizens remaining in Daraya would help each other. In those early days, those less badly injured would support others while they waited for a doctor; local residents risked coming in to give food to both patients and doctors and, after seeing the terrible overcrowding in the hospital, many offered to house those still able to walk. Nobody knew how long the situation would last, yet people were willing to share what little they had with the injured.

  Abdul Basit told me that during this period, a doctor he was working with at the hospital heard that his mother, sister and niece had been badly injured. They were all brought in for treatment, yet even though they were his relatives, the doctor did not prioritise them over others. There was a triage rule: patients were given treatment according to who would benefit the most, as some patients had little chance of survival. When their time came, the doctor did what he could for his relatives, but his young niece was beyond saving. Abdul Basit recalled: ‘There wasn’t really anything he could do for her. I’ll never forget that. She died just a few hours after being brought in. He knew he couldn’t save her but could prevent others from dying. After she passed away, he kissed her before giving her body to the burial team. He then carried on with his work.’

  That offensive was the precursor to what is alleged to have been one of the worst massacres of the Syrian civil war.

  In August 2012, hundreds of pro-Assad soldiers backed by helicopters and armoured vehicles poured into Daraya and sealed off all escape routes. Rebel fighters in the town withdrew, in what they said was an effort to help limit civilian casualties.

  Adel, a cousin of Anas Habib, recorded much of what he witnessed over those terrible days:

  Soon after arriving in Daraya the regime’s forces arrested fifty people. I was among them. Local civilians came out onto the streets to see what was happening and could hear people being killed. They all then waited for their turn to come. Among them was a twenty-year-old man who was with his fiancée. They executed him right there on the spot in front of her. Then they took his fiancée to a place nearby and raped her. She complained to an officer but he just shrugged and laughed. He didn’t care. She had wrongly assumed that he had no idea what was happening and would have stopped it if he did.

  Adel went on to tell me that a cousin as well as his neighbour and their baby had also been killed by the soldiers. Pictures of their bodies were broadcast by the pro-government Addounia TV channel. He had only found out what had happened to them after talking to two young men who had managed to flee the carnage.

  Anas’s father was distraught. He decided to get his son and the rest of the family out of the town and head to their farm in the neighbouring village of Jdayde. Everyone packed quickly and jumped into their battered old car. They took side roads in the hope of avoiding army checkpoints but as their car turned a corner, soldiers started shooting above their heads–a warning to them not to try and drive away. Anas’s father approached the checkpoint slowly, then stopped the car. Everyone feared the worst after witnessing what had been happening over the previous few days. But, fortunately, after searching the family’s car and finding nothing incriminating, the soldiers let them go.

  By around noon that same day, pro-Assad soldiers had taken control of the w
hole town. They chased away the last remaining FSA fighters and began to clear the streets. That done, they pushed into people’s homes as part of a door-to-door search and arrest operation. While all this was happening other members of Anas’s extended family fell victim to random attacks: ‘We heard news that a missile had hit an apartment block near my cousin’s house,’ Anas told me. ‘My aunt and her daughter and nephew tried to take refuge in their basement, but were hit by another missile as they made their way down there. It was terrible. We didn’t find out what had happened to them until we reached our farm. It was heartbreaking. No one was able to bury them, so their bodies were moved to a no-man’s-land where they were finally buried with a group of other people who had been killed.’

  The army continued to arrest people in large numbers and soldiers searched the city looking for weapons, as well as anti-regime activists. By all accounts this first group behaved comparatively well. But, as Adel recalled, the second wave of soldiers that arrived were very different: ‘They were savage. They arrested lots of people and executed some of them in groups. People were just shot where they stood. Others were tortured in front of their families. We heard reports of massacres happening all over Daraya. These carried on the next day too. It was horrific, there were bodies everywhere. It was very hot and the city began to stink. To be honest, we were all petrified. We heard horror stories about gruesome killings taking place all around us. It felt like a terrible nightmare that would never stop.’

  Abdul Basit, who had stayed in the hospital throughout the killings, told me that when the streets suddenly went quiet, he and some colleagues went outside for the first time in several days. ‘After the massacre was over the government forces left Daraya. It was only then that many of us discovered the full scale of the horror. There were corpses everywhere. We started piling up bodies and taking them to the cemetery for mass burial. The atmosphere was so sad, so terrible. I remember that it was raining much of the time. It felt as if the heavens were crying with us.’