Syria's Secret Library

by Mike Thomson

  After the bombing forced Sara and Amena to move classes down to the basement, they were plagued by a lack of light. Being underground, there were no windows, and with little or no mains electricity available, the lights could only be powered by a generator. Although the school did have one of these, they had no fuel to run it. This meant the children had to struggle in near darkness to read any of the few books they had. I asked Sara whether she had considered taking her pupils to the secret library. She shook her head and sighed deeply before telling me that as the library was situated in a very dangerous area of town, only those who lived nearby could go there. And while most families might have known that the library existed, she said, many wouldn’t have known exactly where it was due to the need to keep its location secret. Also, even if they had known, it would not have crossed the minds of most parents to take their children there, as such a journey would have meant putting their lives at even greater risk than they were in already. Sara was clearly frustrated at being unable to take her pupils to a place she knew they would love: ‘One of the first school outings we thought of arranging, after moving the class into the basement, was to the secret library. We knew the children would really enjoy it there. They dreamed of sitting quietly in a place filled with books. But unfortunately because of the heavy shelling we had to postpone the trip.’

  At least Sara had been able to go to the secret library regularly herself since it opened. She was ecstatic on first hearing of its existence, having been an avid reader all her life. Since the siege started, she had been unable to get her hands on many books, yet the library enabled her to choose from a plethora of titles, and all for free. Initially, given the fact that the library was in a dangerous area of town, Sara’s husband, Bashar, who worked for the council, would walk with her, but he was often too busy. As a result, she later made this perilous, but rewarding journey alone. ‘I will never forget,’ she told me, ‘how exciting it was to walk in there and see all those wonderful books.’

  At first Sara felt uncomfortable when she saw that the library was mainly being used by men. Sometimes, she told me, she was the only woman there. Although she was always made to feel welcome, she was relieved to hear that special visiting hours for women were being organised. The only other downside to her visits was that the more she saw of the secret library, the more she realised how much the children were missing out. Here were books on just about every subject you could think of, all kept in such a safe place to read. Yet the journey there was just too dangerous for the children.

  During one of our chats about the library, Sara went on to recount how she regularly saw a ‘very lovely and hard-working’ teenage boy there. He would sit, head down, engrossed in his books, silently mouthing the words he was reading. Sara recalled how his head would move from side to side as he followed the words on the page. Now and again the small, wiry figure would be interrupted by people looking for a particular book, or returning one they had borrowed, but he would soon be back in his seat once more, reading. One day, intrigued, Sara sat down beside the boy and introduced herself. Delighted to be in the company of a school teacher, he told her that his name was Amjad and that he was fourteen years old. He explained how the bombing meant that it was very hard for him to get to school, so he spent much of his time in the secret library, either reading or helping to run it. The beaming Amjad clearly loved spending time there and believed that other children would too. Sara remembered him telling her what he often said to his friends: ‘Just come and visit! It is so much better than staying at home looking at the walls. I say to them, you don’t have TV now anyway, so why not come here and educate yourself? It’s fun.’

  Amjad told Sara how worried he was about having fallen behind with his school work. ‘He was quite upset about this,’ Sara recalled. ‘He said to me, “Miss, I want to be able to read just as well as you in the future, but I’m not learning much any more. I used to do so well in school.”’ Sara’s school, though not far from where Amjad lived, did not cater for older children, so he had become reliant on using the secret library’s books to teach himself. Evidently, much as he enjoyed it, it was proving an uphill struggle.

  During one conversation with Sara, a close friend, Aysha Fayyad, came into the small, dimly lit room at the back of her house. Not wanting to interrupt our conversation, Aysha, a teacher in her early forties, sat quietly in a chair a few feet away. But, after being encouraged by Sara, she began telling me that she too had founded a small school in the town. Aysha had set it up around the same time as Sara had set up hers, soon after the siege began in November 2012. She called her makeshift little centre, ‘The Hope of the Nation’. Like Sara, Aysha had kind, dark eyes and a ready smile, but she also exuded a steely determination. It turned out that her decision to start the school was motivated not only by the desire to ensure that Daraya’s children were educated, but also by a personal tragedy in her life. At first she chose not to elaborate on what had happened. I felt reluctant to pry, sensing that she was still struggling to cope with the memory. But after a deep sigh, Aysha broke the lengthening silence, her voice laced with sadness. ‘My fifteen-year-old son left school when the violence first started and he joined rebel fighters on the front line. Before long he was dead. This made me think of all the other children who take this path. Might they suffer the same tragic end?’ While Aysha chose not to dwell on the fate of her son, it was clear that she felt unremitting sadness and frustration at having been unable to save his life. ‘The situation was so bad at the time that I could not stop him. The regime’s forces were making big advances, so I had no choice. I watched him walk away and join the rebel fighters. They gave him only brief training before putting a gun in his hand and sending him to the front. I simply couldn’t do anything about it. There seemed to be nothing I could say.’

  The rebel fighters were always on the look-out for new recruits, telling the inhabitants of Daraya that young people were urgently needed to help defend the town. Aysha told me that many youngsters had answered the call to battle, some even younger than her son. Fortunately, some mothers were luckier than Aysha. Their sons, many of whom had fought alongside her boy, survived and eventually came home. Tears welling up in her eyes, Aysha recalled how she often pleaded with her son not to enlist. But he would always reply that if everyone did what their mothers asked, the regime’s soldiers could simply walk into Daraya. ‘Who will stop them if I do not?’ he would ask her. ‘You have to let me go.’

  This made me think how this had to be a situation faced by so many mothers–not just here in Daraya, or elsewhere in war-ravaged Syria, but around the world, throughout history. Then I thought of Anas and Abdul Basit, and the other young men who had chosen to build a library rather than fight a war. Perhaps their love of books and reading, their joy in creating rather than destroying, was unusual. Aysha seemed to agree: ‘I would say nearly every boy’s dream is to fight. Most of them witnessed the massacre here in 2012. They saw cold-blooded murdering by government soldiers. Some even saw their parents being killed right in front of them. So I’m sure they all had this dream of revenge and joining the fighters who are defending us all. But I think some go to war without really knowing why.’

  Aysha added that she hoped others had managed to think things through, and truly understood what they were fighting for. No soldiers, she insisted, whether young or old, should ever bear arms without knowing why.

  Following the death of her son, Aysha became increasingly concerned that, without education, children might prove easy recruits for extremist groups such as al-Qaeda and IS. By January 2014, IS had already taken over the Syrian city of Raqqa in the north of the country and would go on to sweep across vast areas of Syria and Iraq. Every day, large numbers of young men, local as well as foreign, flocked to join them. Many parents had no idea what their sons had done until it was already too late; others feared that defying such extremists might endanger their whole family. A few even encouraged their sons. IS did, after all, pay those who joined them, in a
shattered country where there were few jobs to be had. An even bigger number, especially in the early years of the war, approved of their children joining moderate rebel forces, like the FSA. Filled with bitterness at what the Assad regime had done, this at least gave them the satisfaction that their family was fighting back.

  It was not as if boys who went off to battle were leaving happy, settled lives. From personal experience, Aysha was concerned that many of these boys would end up with weapons in their hands, perhaps thinking that it was better to kill than be killed. She did her best to encourage children to continue with their studies, getting them to help her pin up flyers advertising the schools that existed. ‘While bombs were falling,’ she continued, ‘I would pass children playing in the street and think how much safer they would be back in school. It seemed to me that we had a basic choice. To stand by and watch our children be killed or pushed into the arms of terrorists, or set up a school to help stop this.’

  At first, some children did not adjust to school life and thought only of joining the war. But Aysha was relieved to find that most soon came to be appreciative and enthusiastic about being able to resume their studies. ‘Some of them said to me, If we’re going to die in this war, we would rather do so in school, studying for a better future, than be killed wandering the streets.’

  The older children were particularly important as the younger boys looked up to them for guidance. If the older boys stayed in school and resisted the call to fight, most of their little brothers would do the same. Aysha added that if her pupils chose to enlist after they had finished school, then at least they would be better equipped to understand what they were fighting for. In fact, by the summer of 2016, several rebel groups did promise to stop recruiting youths under eighteen years old.

  Like Sara, Aysha had had great trouble finding books for the children in her class. She and the other teachers began by going to abandoned schools to look for some, but while they managed to find a few this way, there were not enough for her pupils. In the end, her school’s most fruitful source was her father’s private library–a vast collection of books on religion, education, human development and literature, many penned by famous Muslim writers. ‘I can still remember how beautiful many of these books were,’ Aysha told me. ‘Some of the smaller ones had really nice animal stories for children and lots of interesting drawings. One of my favourite books was The Gold Sutures by Sharh Ibn Aqeel, I read that several times. I also loved looking through his many medical books, or others on space and historical titles about the Ottoman Empire and the two world wars.’

  Aysha told me that many of the books seemed huge and very heavy. One tome she picked up was more than fifty centimetres long and thirty-five centimetres wide, perhaps the local version of War and Peace. Smiling, Aysha told me more about her literary father, who had let her take whatever titles she wanted. He had had to leave Daraya just after the massacre because her mother had cancer and needed specialist medical treatment. Initially they had settled in a suburb of regime-controlled Damascus, but her father felt constantly in danger there. He and his wife had to travel to hospitals around the city and feared they would be arrested at one of the many checkpoints. Their identity papers showed that they were from rebel-held Daraya, and that fact alone was potentially enough to get them arrested. As Aysha’s mother’s health deteriorated, her father became ever more desperate to get her the care she needed. Finally he gathered all the family’s savings and flew her to Saudi Arabia for treatment. Sadly, she could not be saved and died two years after leaving Daraya. With the town still under siege, there was no way that Aysha could go to see her mother and comfort her in her dying days. It was also five years since she had last seen her book-loving father. ‘One of my fondest memories was of him sitting there with his glasses on, holding as many as five books in his hands at a time. He would comment on each of them, switching from one to the other. This is always the vision that comes into my head when I think of his library. He would sit there happily, surrounded by books to his left and to his right. I can still picture him sitting there so clearly.’

  Aysha told me that her father’s library had taken up more than one room. While the bulk of it was housed in a large room downstairs and a smaller one next to that, many more books were to be found in his bedroom, and still more littered shelves in the family’s spacious guestroom. Their house had been home to this vast library for as long as she could remember, as her father had started accumulating it before he met her mother. Each week it would grow, and as shelf space ran out, piles of books would spring up elsewhere. Not that Aysha and her brothers and sisters ever thought that there was anything odd about this–after all, the library had been there as long as they had.

  The only category of books that Aysha had found it hard to find were those on science. Unwilling to accept defeat, she had turned to the Internet and whenever the signal was good–which from my own experience was not often–she would download science papers and articles for her classes and construct lessons from them. I found it difficult to imagine how it was possible to teach often terrified young children, when bombs were falling all around. How could the children concentrate on their lessons when the ground and the walls around them were shaking and in danger of falling in? How did parents cope with seeing their children off in the morning knowing that they might not make it back? How much of a struggle was it for teachers, watching their young pupils set off on their dangerous journey home? They must have been constantly listening for the dreaded sound of approaching planes. Aysha nodded, saying: ‘There are days where there is continuous heavy bombing and shelling. Sometimes it hardly stops. During days like this we open the school for only one or two hours at most, usually from six to eight a.m. in the morning.’

  Those hours were usually among the quietest times of the day. As Aysha had mentioned, school hours often varied from day to day, according to how much shelling and bombing there was. And, as was the case in Sara’s school, all lessons at Aysha’s school were held in a sandbag-barricaded basement. It seems strange to think that in the UK, a few inches of snow or stormy winds can lead schools to close their doors. Yet in Syria, where children might be bombed or shot at without warning, they often stayed open. And what is more, Aysha believed this was not just to keep parents happy: ‘What most inspires us is the fact that despite all the dangers we’ve been talking about the children really want to come to school. Some days, when there is heavy bombing and shelling, I arrive at school expecting to find the classroom empty, only to discover that most children are there.’

  Aysha was also convinced that school helped ease the trauma of children during wartime, by enabling them to share their worries with each other. This belief helped motivate her and the other teachers to continue their jobs on such dark and dangerous days. Their aim was to try and make life as near to normal as possible for the children, at a time when all they otherwise knew was chaos, fear and loss. To this end, they arranged special entertainment days, when the children could all play their favourite games together. During rare ceasefires, they were taken on day trips to farms on the edge of town. Aysha described how they loved to see the animals. Sometimes she let them stay behind after class for an hour or so, to play with their friends. But of course there were the bad days too. ‘The worst times are when children or their parents have been killed. Every child in this school is like our child. So whenever one of them is killed I feel like I’ve lost one of my own children. Thank God none has been killed at the school, but at least twenty of them have died in bombings at home. Others have been killed while out playing in the streets. Some of the dead have been newborn babies. It causes me such pain.’

  Sadly, much more pain was to come. By March 2014, more than 300 barrel bombs had been dropped on Daraya since the beginning of the year. And on the twenty-fourth of that month yet more were to die, when Syrian government tanks briefly broke through some of the rebel defences around the town. Parents faced the agony of not knowing whether the sons and daughters t
hey had sent to school that morning would return home alive.

  I called Sara one cold March morning. In London, a week of bright, sunny weather had come to a bone-chilling end. Flurries of sleet lashed the windows of my first-floor study. Outside the gusting wind was bullying some loose canvas sheeting on the roof of my garden shed, punctuating the gloom with eerie whistles and moans. As usual the Internet connection in Daraya was problematic, the scratchy pops and whines on the line not all that dissimilar to those of my wind-battered garden. Finally, on what must have been my sixth or seventh attempt, I got through. Sara, who was normally so positive, whatever was happening, sounded deeply depressed. There was no school that day. ‘I feel dazed,’ she told me. ‘It’s like what is happening around me now isn’t real. I’ve stopped reacting much to it. Yesterday I was told that the bomb which hit the building next to me here weighed 500 kilograms. I don’t know how anyone knows that, but it was certainly a huge explosion.’

  Then came silence, interrupted only by the sound of distant explosions. I waited for Sara to continue but the silence went on. Was she still there? Had I lost the line? I looked down at my mobile. The connection was not strong enough for a video link, but I could see a symbol saying my voice call was still active. Then, at last, to my great relief she spoke again:

  This barrage is getting worse. I should go down to the basement, but I haven’t moved yet because I feel numb. Many of us are like this now. I’ve been getting violent shakes. After these I can’t remember anything. I even forget what my family looks like. I actually can’t remember their faces. I think it’s the fear, it’s the shock. Whenever there’s a barrel bomb or heavy shelling my instant reaction is to escape that particular moment. So I forget the faces I love. I forget what I am doing. I even forget what my husband looks like.