Syria's Secret Library

by Mike Thomson

  Of all the things that I had heard during this difficult conversation, this shocked me the most: ‘Are you saying,’ I asked her carefully, ‘that you are not making plans for the future because you do not believe you have one?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied.

  Having found so much extraordinary hope in this beleaguered Syrian town, where many young people would rather read books than fight wars, I was utterly devastated by Islam’s last words. The job of a journalist is to observe and report what you see happening, but I wanted to do something, somehow, to help.

  Thinking of little Islam, as well as the secret library itself, I called a small charity based in Britain that had been helping to get relief into Syria. It might sound like an odd request, I said, but could they take books in? It clearly did seem like a strange request, until I told them about Daraya’s secret library and the many children there who were deprived of almost anything to read. About three days later one of the charity’s directors called me back. ‘I would love to do this,’ he said, ‘but the Syrian government won’t even allow much of the food and medicine we’re trying to get into rebel areas, and I’ve been told that they would be very suspicious about books. Besides, it would be hard to justify carrying books over food and water.’ I totally understood his point, but felt he had no idea just how important books were to people under siege. As Anas had said, ‘Just like the body needs food, the soul needs books.’

  Shortly after my conversation with Islam and Um Ismaeel, in early July 2016, scores of children were killed by a ferocious barrel-bomb offensive on Daraya. Talking to Anas about this, I was struck by his growing concern for the prospects of the youngsters left in the town. ‘They will have spent years living through chaos and destruction,’ he told me, ‘which is likely to blight their futures as well as their pasts.’ Anas believed that despite the best efforts of those who were teaching them during the siege, their education had been badly damaged. To Anas they were a lost generation. Yet these were the leaders of tomorrow, the ones whose job it would be to rebuild this traumatised nation. ‘It makes me feel so sad,’ he told me. ‘This revolution was supposed to benefit them. Yet they are the ones who are suffering the most.’

  Given how intensive the fighting had become following the Syrian army’s latest offensive, I wondered why parents in Daraya continued to send their children to classes at all. Why not keep them at home and worry about their schooling later? The answer, I was told, was that school basements were still safer than most homes.

  As if Islam’s testimony wasn’t enough to articulate the damage done by this siege, there was no doubt in Sara’s mind that the carnage on the streets was taking its toll on the nerves of her young pupils. In a recent exercise, she had asked the children to close their eyes while she described her vision of heaven to them, a place where rivers were made of honey and chocolate, and there were flowers everywhere. She then asked them to visualise their own image of heaven, and after ten minutes asked several children to describe what they had imagined to the class. One little girl, Yana, was asked to speak first. Keeping her eyes tightly shut, Sara expected to hear about a calm and magical world, far removed from the one her pupils were living in. But when the little girl began to speak, Sara was shocked. Little Yana merely described her father standing over her family’s broken electric generator. He kept telling her that he had been trying to fix it but did not know how. Sara thanked Yana and turned to eight-year-old Amir. Looking nervous and shaking slightly, Amir talked of a plane coming towards him out of the sky. It was diving faster and faster and screeching as it came. He and his family were all running to their basement. They looked up and saw a bomb falling towards them. No matter how hard they ran, they made no progress, but the bomb was getting closer and closer. The boy became so terribly upset that he was unable to finish his story. ‘I can’t relieve their stress,’ Sara said, trying to keep her voice even. ‘I can’t help them live for even a moment in an imaginary heaven. They simply can’t seem to visualise such a place. They clearly can’t imagine that somewhere like heaven exists.’

  Part of the children’s nightmare appeared to be down to the long-running lack of food. ‘Lessons require concentration and it is hard to have that if you are constantly hungry, and your mind thinking of nothing but food,’ said Sara. Yet despite this, there were moments when such deprivation brought out the very best in them, such as when Sara decided it was time to give out the biscuits that Sawsan, the head teacher, had hidden away for emergencies. Handing one to every second child, she told those with biscuits to break theirs in two and give one half to the child sitting next to them. Her hope was that this tiny bit of food would bring them at least a few moments of happiness. And it certainly did that. When Sara looked around the classroom, it was as though the children had treasure in their hands. They were concentrating hard, taking tiny little bites, in an attempt to savour the taste and make their meagre half biscuit last as long as possible.

  Then Sara noticed that one of the children, a boy called Joram, had not given half to the girl next to him. After telling him off for being greedy, she made Joram give the girl her share. One of Sara’s colleagues told her later that she had watched Joram put his half of the biscuit in his bag without eating it. The next day Sara was told by the boy’s mother that he had given that half to his little sister when he got home. Their father had been killed just two days before and now he clearly felt responsible for looking after her.

  As she recounted this incident, tears come flooding back into Sara’s eyes: ‘I was upset for a whole week after this. But I know I can’t show my feelings to the children. I mustn’t ever cry in front of them. They need to feel that the adults are coping, to help them believe that they can cope too, though I must admit that in a way, children like Joram are teaching me. They are helping me to see the world differently.’

  With the recent onslaughts, Sara had noticed a real shift in the children’s ability to cope and it seemed to her that since the day of the biscuits, their resilience had slowly begun to ebb away. She didn’t quite know what had caused this, as they had already endured so many years of danger and hardship. But perhaps, she wondered, they had simply reached the limits of their tolerance of hunger, death and destruction. They might also have picked up on the growing fear felt by adults, as the military situation worsened.

  By mid-July 2016 nearly all of the town’s farmland had been overrun by pro-government forces and food supplies were running shorter than ever. So too was space. The remaining rebel-controlled area of Daraya was now a fraction of what it had been before. More families had been forced to flee their homes and join others in whatever overcrowded and bomb-damaged buildings were left standing. ‘Life is now quite miserable,’ Sara told me. ‘The children have begun to lose their motivation and enthusiasm. It’s terrible to see because these were things we’d always admired in them. They’re finding it really hard to cope. They have no energy. Even when we hold sports events to help bring back their enthusiasm, it doesn’t work. This has really shaken me. It’s left me very drained. They are my hope.’

  In an effort to raise the children’s spirits and help take their minds off the siege, Sara had managed to get to the secret library and borrowed some books for her school. But, she told me: ‘It didn’t work. They seem to hate books altogether now and don’t want to have anything to do with them. This makes me feel terribly sad. I truly think it’s because they are so very hungry all the time, some are actually suffering from malnutrition and they just can’t concentrate any more.’

  Sara was determined not to give up and despite the children’s reaction, she continued her visits to the secret library. Her hope was that she might yet find books that would help rekindle her pupils’ fading love of learning and their interest in life. Each visit involved great personal risk and she told me she had nearly been killed trying to get there on several occasions. She often asked her husband to go with her, so that if either of them were injured or killed the other might be able to call for
help, or bring news to the family. Sometimes one of Sara’s closest friends, Najah, who was also a teacher at her school, would accompany her. Najah’s house was halfway to the library from Sara’s home, so they would often meet there and continue on together, discussing the books they were reading, though sometimes they were too scared to talk. Like Sara, Najah loved books, often reading four a month, on a wide range of subjects including religion, education and literature.

  On one occasion they arrived at the library to find that some children had had to sleep there overnight as it had been too perilous for them to try and go home the afternoon before. At other times, they would go through all the risks of getting to the library, only to find that it was closed. As the military situation on the ground worsened this became more common, now that the library staff often couldn’t make it there themselves. So Sara began calling ahead, to check if the library was open before setting out on her perilous journey. But even Sara’s love for the secret library had its limits. When we spoke a few days later, in the third week of July, she told me that the bombing had reached such an intensity that it was impossible to go out at all. The last time she had made it to the library, she said, the only person there was Amjad, who was busily dusting the books and shelves in his loving and cheerful way. None of the adults who had created the library was anywhere to be seen. ‘Seeing the secret library so empty has had a really strange effect on me,’ Sara told me. ‘I don’t quite know how to describe it, but it felt as if the walls themselves were crying. That must sound crazy, but that is really how it seemed. In a way it makes me think of the film Titanic. People back then couldn’t believe that such a great ship could end up sinking. That is the same as the secret library for me. It is the best thing in my life and we have all worked so hard building and maintaining it. Yet now, it’s as if it has died.’

  After that conversation, returning to my own life in safe, affluent London was not easy. I felt very uncomfortable. Even though we were separated by thousands of miles, Sara, Abdul Basit, Anas, Omar and their friends had let me into their frightening world, seemingly holding nothing back. They had shared their pain, grief and loss as well as their jokes, hopes and occasional moments of triumph. At times it often felt as if I was really there with them, inside their besieged city, exposed to the same awful dangers, hardships and horrors. Yet, of course, I was not. I remember one particular Friday evening, when this situation really played on my mind. I had just been talking to Muhammad in Daraya, and hearing explosions all around. Then, at the end of the call, I set off home to spend the weekend with my family. All the way there a voice kept telling me that Muhammad, Sara and everyone in Daraya would not be going anywhere. While I relaxed in front of my TV, or dined in a nice restaurant, they were being shelled, bombed and starved. I’d had this horrible feeling several times before over the months and years I had been talking to people there. The stark contrast in our two, so very different worlds, left me feeling like some kind of journalistic voyeur. Despite the knowledge that I was bringing their plight to the outside world, that feeling continued to haunt me.

  It was becoming clear to most in Daraya that their long resistance against Assad’s forces was nearing its end. Government forces had captured all of the remaining rebel-held farms around Daraya, so this was now a town with no access to crops. From here on, its people had nothing to eat other than the few vegetables they could grow on rooftops and balconies. As if that was not bad enough, the bombing and shelling were growing more intense by the day. Around this time the residents of Daraya watched in horror as rebel-held Eastern Aleppo became completely surrounded by pro-Assad forces. On 16 July the regime tightened its siege by cutting off the Castello Road, nicknamed the ‘road of death’. This dusty two-lane highway, littered with bombed buildings and burnt-out vehicles, had been the last route in and out of Eastern Aleppo. Its 250,000 people were now under siege, just like their counterparts in rebel-held Daraya.

  On 24 July an artillery and rocket bombardment against rebel positions was followed by a ferocious offensive. This was beaten back by the rebels, who claimed to have destroyed a Russian minesweeper and killed nine Syrian government soldiers. Around this time, I managed to speak again to Omar Abu Anas, who was still fighting on the front line with the FSA. Sadly, he told me, the deteriorating situation meant he had little opportunity to read any more. He also had little time for talking on the phone, and I only managed to speak to him briefly. Initially, Omar steadfastly claimed to be optimistic, insisting that because President Assad’s family had been in power for many decades, the rebels could not expect to defeat him overnight. But when I pointed out that time appeared to be something that the rebel forces in Daraya now had precious little of, Omar’s mood darkened. After a deep intake of breath, he replied: ‘To be honest, things are getting much worse. Too many people are being martyred and it’s not just Daraya–it’s the whole revolution. In Daraya, my friends are dying every day. One day I see them alive, and the next they are dead.’

  Despite this, and the fact that his life was now in more danger than ever, Omar’s main concern was for Daraya’s beloved library. ‘I swear the library holds a very special place in all our hearts,’ he told me. ‘Every time there is bombing and shelling nearby, we pray for it. In the past the library has nearly been hit several times and we’ve come close to losing all of its books. That would be terrible. It is so treasured by us all.’

  In order to help protect the secret library, Omar and his friends had recently placed more sandbags around it, after becoming increasingly convinced that the regime’s forces had found out its location and would soon send their planes to bomb it. ‘What dictator,’ he asked me, ‘would stand by and watch the people he is fighting educate themselves with books, some of which his regime has banned? There is no doubt,’ he continued, ‘that Assad would want to destroy the secret library.’

  It seemed strange that, with the whole town apparently on the verge of falling to government forces, Omar was still so concerned about preserving the secret library. I began to wonder whether he was unaware, or perhaps in denial, of the military situation around him. But from what he had already told me, that was evidently not the case. Omar clearly saw the library, and its contents, as something indivisible from the revolution itself. A part of the very soul of those fighting for it.

  Four days later, on 28 July, shelling and artillery fire came raining down again, pounding central areas of Daraya. It was the beginning of yet another offensive by government forces, aimed at winning full control of the town. The regime’s helicopters hovered above, dropping their barrel bombs. In his audio diary, Abdul Basit recording his terror: ‘A helicopter is over us now… I can hear the noise of its rotor blades. Listening to that sound is making my heart beat fast. Now I can see it, I think it is loaded with barrel bombs… it is falling fast… shrapnel is everywhere… the flames. All our nights are like this now. We go to bed with this, we wake up with this.’ Trapped in the carnage below, civilians posted videos of napalm attacks on residential areas. Reports came in of mounting injuries among rebel fighters defending the town. Later that day the Syrian army’s 4th Armoured Division broke through rebel lines, taking a 300-metre-long strip of territory in Western Daraya. Among those killed in the battle, was the key rebel leader, Abu Aref Alayyan.

  Sadly, he was not the only casualty.

  Chapter Twelve

  On Thursday, 28 July 2016, the result of my many months of interviews with the people of Daraya was broadcast on BBC Radio 4. A slightly shorter version was also transmitted on the BBC’s World Service, giving the story of this beleaguered town and its inspirational secret library a worldwide audience. The half-hour documentary generated a tremendous reaction from listeners, both in Britain and across the globe. They were both moved and inspired by this extraordinary community who were celebrating books and learning amid all the killing and hatred. Many listeners wanted to donate books, though that was almost impossible to organise given the intense fighting and iron siege aroun
d the town. One of the comments I liked most was, ‘Syria doesn’t feel like a distant land any more’, a tweet that echoed the effect these candid and courageous testimonies had had on me, that whatever our country, belief system or culture there is more that unites us than sets us apart. A tweet I mentioned earlier from an American lecturer on International Affairs in Washington DC read: ‘I have been researching and teaching about Syria since 1993. When I awoke this a.m. and listened to your programme, I felt a glimmer of hope for the future of Syria for the first time in a long time.’ Abdul Basit, Anas, Amjad and their friends had clearly touched many lives beyond those in their beleaguered town.

  Perhaps even more important was the response that came from those I had talked with for so long in Daraya. ‘Mike, I have just heard our radio documentary! It was wonderful to hear our story finally told to other countries. Everyone [is] much excited. We feel alone no more.’ That text came from Malik. Without his enormous help and enthusiasm it would have been hard to have made the programme. I had sent him a link to the broadcast from the BBC website. Part of me dreaded what he and others in Daraya might think. No criticism would have been more devastating than one that came from them. After all, it is their story, not mine. But Malik, as well as others from Daraya, couldn’t have given the programme a warmer response. At least they had now been heard. Year after year of almost unremitting siege and bombardment had left many there feeling abandoned, convinced that the world didn’t care. Some wondered if much of the international community had even heard of their troubles, such was the apparent lack of interest in their fate. Now, at what looked like their twilight hour, recognition had come at last. But, sadly, this came too late for one person I was beginning to get to know.