by Mike Thomson
All these difficulties meant that Ayham had to prioritise the patients he was best equipped to treat. I wondered whether, in a town stalked daily by unimaginable horrors, there would still be a fear of dentists. ‘I think people in Daraya are just as anxious about going to the dentist as everybody else,’ he said, smiling. ‘It is normal. And I tell them they should see it as such. The fear of dentists is everywhere, regardless of war and shelling. One of my own fears is going to the doctor’s. I don’t know why I worry about that, particularly these days when we have anaesthetics. Not that I have any of those at the moment.’
Ayham was visibly upset when he talked about the children he treated: ‘Many children come to visit me seeking help, but my lack of equipment means I often have to turn them away. I have to be very careful not to do anything that might leave them with a lifelong problem or an ugly smile. Tooth extraction is particularly challenging with children.’ Due to Ayham’s lack of anaesthetics, some of the children he operated on had to put up with a great deal of pain. But he said, his voice becoming low and angry, how could you explain to young children that the only reason they were suffering was because a dictator was blocking aid from entering their town? Ayham was clearly distressed about the hardships being suffered by children in Daraya. Some, he told me, had had to have limbs amputated, others would spend the rest of their lives paraplegic or quadriplegic. Many had lost their mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers, and were alone in the world. ‘Although they physically still look like children,’ he told me, ‘their struggle for survival puts years on their lives.’
His words invoked photos I had seen of young girls and boys in Daraya, lugging carts full of branches for firewood or sitting in long, snaking queues, awaiting handouts of food for their families. Some just sat quietly staring down at the ground, as if the weight of the world was on their shoulders. War, Ayham said, had stolen their childhood. But he felt that at least he was doing something. ‘Anyone who lives here needs to feel that they can help in some way. When you witness the constant shelling, the hunger, the lack of medicine and children dying in the streets, you can’t just stand by and do nothing. Knowing you are helping even just a little, is the only way to keep sane.’
Later that day, Ayham was back at the secret library having heard that some more medical books had arrived that might be valuable for his dentistry work. Abdul Basit told me that his friend began poring over the two hefty volumes as soon as he arrived. He said that Ayham always seemed to get something useful from the medical books he read: ‘He reads everything he can about medicine and dentistry and never stops learning. Every day he gets better at his job. He is an example to us all.’
To me, Ayham’s determination to overcome his lack of training, the shortages of medicine and equipment, and the very siege itself, was extraordinary. Hungry, sleep-deprived, frightened and in constant risk of his life, he carried on–just like Daraya somehow did.
Chapter Eight
As 2015 dawned, President Bashar al-Assad was feeling increasingly confident. So much so that he boasted that his army would win the war by the end of the year. His forces were fast encircling rebel-held Aleppo, Syria’s most populous city, and threatening to sever the rebels’ supply of arms from Turkey. But weeks later, his opponents fought back, capturing a strategic crossroads on a key route into Aleppo. Then came another blow for the Syrian leader. The large town of Idlib, in the far north-west of the country, fell to al-Qaeda-linked extremists, Jabhat al-Nusra (al-Nusra Front). This was the second biggest town to be captured by rebels since the start of the war four years earlier.
Daraya’s beloved secret library had been born in a basement and the intense, ongoing bombing meant that more and more residents were spending much of their lives in one too. Now the battle for the rebel-held town was also going underground, as the conflict spread from the skies and the streets, to below people’s feet. A maze of narrow tunnels snaked through the earth, man-sized wormholes, as soldiers burrowed their way under each other’s lines. Those creeping along these dark, damp passageways hoped to spring a surprise on their unwary foes. Unlike the rebels who took many months to dig tunnels by hand with spades and pickaxes, pro-Assad forces had powerful machines that could speedily carve out the earth. But there was a drawback to this faster method: the machines made so much noise that rebel fighters could hear them from a long distance away, which gave them the chance to sabotage the operation while the tunnels were still under construction.
While those fighting in the tunnels were spared the destruction of street-level warfare, life down below was its own kind of hell. Most tunnels were little more than a foot-and-a-half wide and less than six feet high. Taller men struggled to walk upright, and breathing could also be a problem as the air became stuffier the further you were from the entrance. And with no lighting, fighters needed torches or had to use the glare of their phones to navigate. These cramped, subterranean passageways were no place for the claustrophobe.
Deep underground, there was no front line, no tell-tale markers to indicate where you were. Without landmarks, fighters needed maps. Misreading these, which was quite easily done in the grave-like gloom, might mean stumbling into the enemy or surfacing right by his guns. Noise travels easily underground. Talking on phones or radios, a sneeze or a cough could get you killed. Casual conversations, or the crunch of a boot, might alert the enemy to the location of a rival’s tunnel. Sometimes one side, while making their way through the darkness, would discover the entrance to their enemy’s passageway, and underground fire-fights would follow. On other occasions, death would come from carefully placed mines, which were hard to spot in the subterranean gloom.
This underground war was waged with various objectives in mind. Advancing rebel fighters might set up a base in a particular building, then by digging a tunnel beneath it, could escape if later outnumbered by pro-Assad forces. On other occasions they would burrow under their enemy’s lines. A surprise attack could be followed by a quick descent back underground. Pro-Assad forces used different tactics. They often used tunnels to gain access to tall buildings on rebel-held land. Their snipers would then make their way up to the roofs of such structures and fire at the enemy below.
Above ground, the long battle for Daraya took a more traditional form, though even there the front line could be difficult to define. I studied Google Earth satellite pictures of the terrain, as well as photos sent to me by people on the ground. It was very hard to make out where the territory of one side ended and the other began. All I could see were ruins and rubble, one shattered, lifeless street crumbling into another. But to the trained local eye, a line did exist between the two, and survival depended on being able to spot it.
Rateb, one of the fighters with the FSA, told me more about the ground they fought on. Rebel posts, he said, marking military positions, varied according to the type of terrain, but the barricades used around them were all composed of barrels filled with soil and debris. These could absorb light shelling and machine gun fire. Rebel posts in open land were often connected by shallow trenches or deeper tunnels, so that fighters could move along their positions without being seen. This was harder to do in urban areas, where rebels had to use roads and paths, so these routes were protected with barricades, often draped with curtains and stuffed with soil and household furniture. The distance between the posts ranged from just a few metres to as much as 100 metres, according to the terrain and the concentration of enemy soldiers. Fighters at each post were split into three main categories. The most numerous were the watchmen, armed with light guns, whose role was to look for any signs of an enemy attack. Then there was a much smaller number of snipers who moved from one post to another, looking for the chance to target the regime’s soldiers. Members of the third section, referred to as ‘special forces’, were tasked with coming to the aid of posts in danger of being overrun.
To get a better insight into what life was like on Daraya’s front line I asked Anas and Abdul Basit if they could arrange for me to spe
ak to any more of the FSA fighters they knew. The request was greeted with a big intake of breath. I was told that the FSA commanders would have to be consulted first–there was, after all, a war going on. I was reminded of the old Second World War slogan, ‘careless talk costs lives’, and reassured Anas and Abdul Basitt that I wasn’t planning to ask any militarily sensitive questions.
Anas soon texted me to say that my request had been granted. The following day I arranged to talk to one of the fighters at the secret library via video link. It was another busy day there with Amjad bustling around in the background and people coming and going at regular intervals. Sat in an armchair next to the library’s dining table was thirty-one-year-old Alaa Muaddamani. His neatly trimmed beard gave him a bit of a military look, though this was offset by his purple baseball cap and sky-blue T-shirt. Originally from Damascus, Alaa was drafted into the Syrian army’s riot police just before the war began. For a year his job was to stop protests by people like Rateb, Anas and Abdul Basit, all of whom would later become his close friends. Disgusted with his job, he defected from the army and moved to rebel-held Daraya, where he was taken on by the town council. His initial role was to take care of civilians during attacks on the town. With bombs and shells raining down, that job was easier said than done. Angered, after witnessing the slaughter of several civilians, he enlisted with the FSA. From then on Alaa would be fighting the very force that he had only recently been a member of back in Damascus.
It soon became evident to me that Alaa was not the sort of man to boast or exaggerate. He began by making it clear that he hadn’t had a clue what soldiering was all about when he first arrived in Daraya, having previously only been trained to suppress riots. But he told me that the FSA soon schooled him in military tactics and how to use a gun. Many of those he trained with knew no more than he did, and most had never fought in a battle before. The first thing he noticed was how basic the FSA’s weapons were in comparison to those of the regime’s forces. Their only high-tech weapons were grenade launchers or RPGs, though due to foreign funding they later got hold of some heavy rifles.
One thing that had long puzzled me was how the rebel forces had managed not to run out of ammunition. At this point they had been besieged for nearly four years, cut off from the outside world, yet they were still able to exchange fire with the well-equipped pro-Assad forces. How, I asked Alaa, were they managing to get hold of the zillions of bullets they needed to carry on defending their town? Alaa smiled at this question and slowly nodded his head. Then, scratching his full, dark beard, he pushed back his chair and sighed.
‘This has been done by many different ways during our four years of siege,’ he replied finally. ‘One of those ways,’ he explained, ‘was by smuggling ammunition and weapons in cars and trucks from the neighbouring town of al-Moadamyeh. This worked well for a while. Then government forces discovered what was happening and that route was blown. After that our best option was to try and get what we needed by smuggling it between the regime’s checkpoints.’ These, he said, were often several hundred metres apart, sometimes as much as a kilometre, so it was possible to do this without being spotted. ‘People would come from outside with the weapons and ammunition and drop them at a previously agreed place. Then fighters from inside Daraya would go and pick the weapons up.’
After a while, Alaa went on, the government forces had rumbled this method too and the rebels had to come up with yet another plan. While they were working on that, an unexpected success on the battlefield gave them the chance to fortify their supplies. As the FSA forced government troops into a rapid retreat from a number of positions around Daraya, they were able to capture a large stock of guns and ammunition which their enemies had left behind as they fled. But it would never be enough, given the length and ferocity of the ongoing conflict and the siege they were living under. Unless they could find a way of getting hold of a constant supply of ammunition they would eventually run out of bullets and that would be the end of their defence of Daraya.
Just when things were looking very bleak, however, there was a breakthrough. It involved no ingenious new smuggling routes, nor fresh success on the battlefield. It all came down to regime officers and their thirst for money. ‘Some of our people were able to do deals with corrupt officers who agreed to sell weapons to us, as well as ammunition. So, the same people we were fighting during the day would sell us weapons at night. A meeting place would be arranged and the corrupt officers would talk terms and then draw up a plan with FSA fighters. A drop-off point for the weapons would be agreed and then our fighters would come and pick them up.’ I asked him if he was surprised that senior Syrian army officers were happy to sell weapons to their enemy, knowing that these same arms would later be used against their own soldiers. With a shrug Alaa replied: ‘It might be surprising to you, but it wasn’t really to us. We had become used to the lack of ethics and morality among some of these army officers. They put money above everything. Let me tell you, some of these officers did not only sell us the weapons, they actually delivered them to us themselves.’
I have heard many tales of corruption during wars but this really was extraordinary. However, given that the regime soon got wise to the various smuggling methods, I asked Alaa if the more ethical army officers had not eventually got wind of this too. ‘I believe they knew, at least to some extent, about this sort of thing and tried to control it. But that is very hard to do. It is for this reason that the regime changes the soldiers on its checkpoints regularly.’
Alaa believed there was another reason why this corruption wasn’t stopped. Some shipments of ammunition picked up by the rebels contained bullets that were booby-trapped, having being filled with TNT explosives. This meant that when the rifle was fired it would explode, killing or injuring the rebel fighter who had pulled the trigger. But, Alaa went on, the high command did seem to have managed to clamp down recently on corrupt officers and the local FSA’s shortage of weapons had got worse again. The regime had also cleared large areas of land around Daraya, making it more difficult to go there without being spotted. As a result, more rebel fighters had died while trying to smuggle in rifles and ammunition. It was still one of the riskiest tasks they had to do.
One of the many things I was keen to find out more about was what it was like on the front line in Daraya. Alaa told me that a great deal depended on what type of terrain they were fighting on. In some areas fighters faced almost constant exchanges of fire, while other spots were much calmer. He reiterated that in rural areas the two sides might be separated by hundreds of metres, which would often be composed of a kind of no-man’s-land between isolated farm buildings. Such areas would be constantly bombarded. ‘In agricultural areas,’ Alaa continued, ‘we dig ditches and then make them into tunnels by covering them with wooden planks. That way we can move along our lines without being seen. We also use these shallow tunnels to get our munitions to other fighting points.’
However, regime forces had now discovered many of these, and had done their best to destroy them. ‘They rolled their tanks over the tunnels and ditches and blocked them up so that they could not be used any more. In some cases, when they were being really thorough, they even got tractors to fill the ditches with sand.’ They also spent time tracking the FSA’s supply lines, cutting off weapons being taken from one area to another.
Sometimes the regime’s forces would use their superiority in weaponry and numbers to advance very quickly after long periods of stalemate. Very often, though, they would then halt their advance to consolidate their new positions. This gave rebel forces the chance to reinforce their new lines. When time allowed, they would dig ditches about a metre and a half deep and place tall sand barriers, more than the height of a man, in front of them. Where there was time these would be reinforced with concrete, stones and anything else available. Such ceasefires would offer a brief pause from the carnage for soldiers and civilians alike but these could never be relied on. Alaa remembered one time when the regime had agreed t
o a temporary truce, but the day before it was due to come into effect, their forces began bombing rebel positions. ‘On that day,’ Alaa told me, ‘I lost five of my closest friends. They were some of the finest fighters we had on the front. They had been terrific at motivating us all and we always felt stronger when fighting by their side. That was an extremely devastating day for me. In fact, it was a devastating day for all of us.’ He went on to tell me that the rebels had lost more than the lives of their men that day. When, after the initial bombardment, regime forces advanced, the rebels were taken totally by surprise and had to abandon many of their hard-won positions. ‘We were just praying for it to get dark,’ Alaa said, ‘which is when the battles usually calm down. Of all my time in the siege so far, that is the one day that I will never forget.’
All this death and suffering seemed so far from the comfortable leather chairs and neat rows of elegantly bound books of the secret library. It was as if all the mayhem was a world away, or taking place in a different country or time. While I had been talking to Alaa, Rateb had come into view and I could see him sitting patiently next to a pile of library books he was looking through. As somebody who had been through several intense battles, I was keen to draw him in.
Some of Rateb’s most harrowing memories seemed to have been when the fighting was at close quarters. ‘Sometimes both sides are in the same building, even on the same floor. In fact, I can remember one occasion when there was just one empty room between our forces. We each made holes in the wall on our own sides and fired into the room beyond, hoping our shots would go through the wall opposite. In the end there were so many bullet holes, these walls looked like sieves. There we were, sitting just a few metres away from each other, waiting either to kill or be killed.’