by Tima Kurdi
“Tell him we have a baby Ghaliboo,” said Abdullah, referring to his nickname for our dad.
Baba was so happy. “Alhamdulillah! I can’t wait to meet the new Ghalib in the family. Abdullah has such a good heart to name his son after me. I know he’s going to be a great father. That boy is the only thing he has talked about for nine months.”
It was another revelation when, a few days later, after the family was back home in Kobani, I heard Abdullah speaking to his son, saying, “Habibi, talk to your Ammeh, Auntie Fatima.” His voice had that beautiful new pitch that a loving father reserves for his baby. And as for me, I’d experienced the privilege of becoming an aunt many times already. But now I felt something extra, as if I had honoured my pledge to my mom to help Abdullah have a family.
In his first two years of life, Ghalib was a crybaby, just like I was as a child. Nobody knew what was wrong with him, but whatever his early-life ailments, they disappeared when he learned to walk. Rehanna and my sister Maha grew very close during those years. Rehanna and Ghalib came to visit Maha every day at noon so that they could prepare the big daily meal together. As soon as Ghalib could talk, he called Maha Teta, Grandma, even though my sister was very young, with rosy cheeks, and not the boy’s grandmother. In the evenings, Rehanna, Abdullah, and baby Ghalib often returned to Maha’s rooftop patio to drink tea and watch the world go by.
Rehanna’s dad and brothers built a simple, concrete one-bedroom house for Rehanna and Abdullah. It was still attached to her family’s home, but it gave Abdullah’s young family some privacy. Abdullah also set up a salon at the front of their house, but it was hard to get clients in Kobani. The lack of work worried Abdullah, but Maha told me that Rehanna always had a way of calming Abdullah.
“Inshallah, you could touch the sand and turn it into gold. It will get so much better in the future,” she would always say.
Rehanna loved to do embroidery, and she had a sewing machine that could make special patterns on cloth. She was so good at embroidery that her friends and neighbours would hire her to make beautiful, personalized patterns on blankets, pillowcases, and duvet covers.
“Rehanna was so easygoing,” Maha recalled. “She always said, ‘We have tomatoes, hot chilies, and bread. What more do we need?’ ” In many ways, Rehanna was just like my baba. She felt rich if she was with family and they had the basic provisions of life.
Despite Rehanna’s positive attitude, though, Abdullah couldn’t turn sand into money to pay the bills. Soon after Ghalib’s birth, they started commuting to Damascus, where they would stay during the week so that Abdullah could find enough clients to make money. It wasn’t an easy decision, as travelling across Syria had become increasingly risky.
On the eve of Ramadan in July 2011, hundreds of people in Hama, my father’s birthplace, were killed when they were caught in the middle of the fight between the regime and the rebels. Many citizens had no choice but to flee to the big cities of Damascus and Aleppo to seek work and safety. Soon there were rebel groups everywhere, and fighting had spread from Idlib province in the northwest, to my summer vacation region of Latakia on the Mediterranean, to the suburbs of Damascus. By October, people began to utter the words that almost no one in Syria wanted to hear: civil war.
The rebels went on the loudspeaker at the local mosque in Rukn al-Din, calling out for all men between the ages of eighteen and forty to join the rebel groups. Like so many other civilians, no one in my family wanted to take one side or the other.
“It’s crazy here now,” said Abdullah over the phone. “Both sides expect us to take up a rifle and point it at our friends and neighbours. I’m not risking my life and my family’s lives. You don’t even know who or what you’re fighting for or against. Inshallah, life will return to its old peacefulness, but that seems more like a dream every day.”
In our neighbourhood of Rukn al-Din, rebel groups set up headquarters in the streets, while the government had taken over the top of Mount Qasioun. My family and others were literally caught in the crossfire of intermittent battles.
One morning, after a near-sleepless night with gunfire constantly crackling in the distance, Rehanna and baby Ghalib went over to Hivron’s for a visit. “I’m putting all my kids down,” said Hivron, after Rehanna had put baby Ghalib down. Hivron made some tea, and the two women tried to enjoy some quiet adult conversation. Suddenly they heard the crack and whistle of a missile so loud that it woke up all the kids.
“, Oh my God, sister. Is it coming in our direction?” asked Hivron, running to the window. Ghalib started to wail and the other kids came running or hid under blankets. Everyone listened to the whistle, waiting for its horrifying pitch to end in an explosion—how close, nobody knew. Five seconds, ten. Then, finally, there was an explosion in the distance.
Hivron lost it. She opened the window and screamed, “Stop it, you animals! Don’t you care about the kids? We’re tired of this bloody war. What are you fighting for?” She yelled into the void until her husband, Ahmad, came out, saying, “Shh. Are you crazy? Close the window.”
After that incident, Abdullah packed up their remaining possessions and took Rehanna and Ghalib back to Kobani. From then on, Abdullah would come on his own and stay with Baba whenever he was in Sham for work.
“You wouldn’t recognize our neighbourhood, our city,” Abdullah lamented in one of our daily phone calls. “Armed men that I’ve never seen before come right up to me and demand to know, ‘Who are you? Where do you come from? Who do you support? Bashar or the rebels?’ You don’t know which team they’re on. You can’t say, ‘Where did you come from?’ We just show our ID and answer their questions. It’s too dangerous here now for Rehanna and Ghalib. Thank God it’s still safe in Kobani.”
“It’s a nightmare,” Hivron told me when I called her soon after. “We don’t know what’s going to happen from one minute to the next. You go out to the market, and when you come back, you see strange men standing on your street corner with machine guns, asking, ‘Who are you?’ I ask them, ‘Who are you?’ Sometimes they don’t even answer. They just look at you like you’re a stone.”
In 2012, the conflict went from bad to worse. Mohammad’s son Shergo, who was twelve at that time, happened upon a protest and saw a school friend drop dead from a bullet to the neck. The boy was shot by a police officer. Shergo ran to Mohammad and Abdullah’s salon, and they locked the shutters until it was safe enough to return home. Increasingly, clashes between rebels and military erupted in Rukn al-Din near the salon. There was no safety at any hour of the day. In our neighbourhood and many other districts, bands of armed gangs began to raid houses and kidnap locals. The regime said the gangs were rebels, while the rebels pointed their fingers at the regime. The rebellion had become far too close for comfort. Fighting also erupted in Douma and in Yarmouk.
Sometimes the shock waves from the bombs made the walls and the foundation of my family home and my siblings’ houses shake. Mohammad’s younger kids were aged three and five. Hivron’s five kids ranged in age from fourteen-year-old Rawan to four-year-old Maya. Shireen’s boys were aged eight, ten, and thirteen. Sometimes they had to flee their shaking homes and run to the local park, which wasn’t exactly safe but at least no walls could crash down on them.
“The military is paranoid about people congregating in public,” Hivron told me. “What if they mistake us for government protesters? And the rebels might think we are pro-regime supporters. Either way, we’re a target. We’re stuck in the middle of this crazy situation.”
Picture your own city suddenly turning into a deadly war zone. Imagine being afraid to send your children to school. To go to work and back. To do even the most basic errands. Imagine what it would be like if your friendly neighbourhood suddenly turned hostile. For my family, it also became difficult to secure basic necessities like food and propane. Prices skyrocketed by as much as three hundred per cent, and so did the unemployment rate. The government started rationing the propane supply, allowing each family only
one tank per month for six hundred lira. That price soon doubled and then tripled, and the vendors’ prices also increased dramatically.
The city routinely experienced electricity cuts. Basic survival had become difficult for my family, though I didn’t know just how bad things were at the time. People were becoming even more vulnerable to joining the fight. Gangs of unknown or questionable alliances began preying on the boys and men, saying, “Join us and we’ll pay you enough money to feed your family.” Or worse, “Join us or we’ll shoot you and go to your house and burn it down.” Violent kidnappings became routine. Citizens could no longer safely leave their homes, and they couldn’t trust that they were safe at home. Even a brief conversation with a rebel or with a member of the regime could be misconstrued by the other side as sympathizing with the enemy. It became difficult to trust neighbours and friends, and a growing number of people were “disappeared”: they simply vanished. One awful day, two of Ghouson’s brothers, both young men in their twenties, disappeared. Her family had no clue whether they were taken by the secret police or by rebels, whether they were alive or dead. To this day, they still have no answers.
During this time, Hivron’s thirteen-year-old son, Abdulrahman, and Mohammad’s twelve-year-old son Shergo were playing soccer near the family home when a suicide bomber attacked, the shrapnel from his bomb—along with his flesh and bone—raining down onto my nephews. When Hivron took the boys to the hospital for treatment, they were bleeding and in shock. They were interrogated by security officials.
“Suddenly it’s too dangerous for the boys to play soccer,” said Abdullah. “You can’t trust anything or anybody.”
“Please consider moving back to Kobani, at least temporarily,” I begged Baba when I spoke with him on the phone.
“Hay souria. Bilad al-Sham. This is Syria. Our city has survived for thousands of years,” he responded. “It’s the oldest living city in the world.”
“But the whole country is shattering,” I cried.
“Our country is the cradle of civilization,” he countered. “It has survived many battles. Many occupiers. Many ethnic and sectarian clashes that tried to pit neighbours and friends and families against each other.”
No matter what I said, my baba wouldn’t be persuaded to leave. He seemed certain that the city would survive. But with the fighting happening all around my family’s homes, it wasn’t Sham’s survival I was worried about.
Chapter 5
Qawee kal dhi‘b
Tough as a Wolf
By the middle of July 2012, more than one million Syrians had to flee their homes. The most feasible option for the displaced was to seek refuge in less dangerous areas within Syria. But too many regions had become dangerous, with hundreds of different rebel groups assuming control of cities, towns, and villages, and fighting against al-Assad’s military forces. Some of these regions were called “liberated,” meaning liberated from the regime. More often, it meant being liberated from food, water, electricity, schools, hospitals, and safe shelter. And if you happened to be a woman and your town had instituted ISIS’s laws around proper dress, you were “liberated” from the freedom to leave your house without a khimar and an abaya, the face-covering veil and ankle-length robe. If you were Shia, Alawite, Kurdish, Armenian—name any ethnic or religious sect—you were “liberated” from the right to exist in your own country, unless you disowned your heritage and your beliefs. And if you were a Sunni Muslim who believed in secularism and ethnic and religious tolerance, you had to “liberate” yourself from liberal ideals.
Syrian citizens were caught in the middle of a civil war, which meant they had to pick a side or leave the country altogether. Many families fled to the border countries, including Lebanon to the west and Jordan in the south, or to the northern countries of Turkey and the Kurdish republic of Kurdistan to the northeast. All these countries had created refugee camps near border towns, though many families had to go to the big cities of Beirut and Istanbul to find work. When people started trickling into Lebanon and Turkey, they were not given legal work permits, and so they had to make a living in the underground economy, which made life very difficult.
Abdullah lived in Kobani, but he continued to commute to Sham for work. It was no easy task. The highway from Aleppo to Damascus straddled many territories under the control of various different rebel groups. One day, Abdullah was returning from Sham to Kobani. He was near Aleppo, inching ever closer to his home, when a group of long-bearded men seized him.
“You are a Kurd, and all Kurds are kafreen,” they yelled, meaning, “You are not true Muslims.” They spoke Arabic with the accents of foreigners. They got even angrier when they saw that Abdullah had a pack of cigarettes, which they considered haram, forbidden. Then they accused him of being a Peshmerga fighter.
“Tell us about your next mission,” they yelled. “Tell us where you’re getting your weapons. Who are you getting them from?”
“, Wallah, I swear to God, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Abdullah responded. “Yes, I am Kurdish, but I grew up in Sham, and I’m not involved with anyone.”
But they didn’t believe him. They dragged him to a nearby house that appeared abandoned. They took him to a room where four captive men dangled from ropes like sides of beef. They tied Abdullah up the same way. From the other rooms, he could hear men whimpering, or outright screaming in pain. The air was thick with the smell of sweat, urine, and blood, so intense that Abdullah started to vomit. Periodically, men would appear to beat and torture him: for being Kurdish, for having haram cigarettes, even for daring to fall asleep.
“Tell us the whereabouts of your comrades and your stockpile of weapons,” they ordered.
“, Minshan Allah. For the sake of God, I’m not a fighter. I’m just a barber with a wife and a baby boy,” Abdullah said.
“Every Kurd is going to be killed,” the terrorists continually reminded him.
After many days of beatings and torture, Abdullah began to wonder if he’d ever see his family again. After more than a week of this torture, the terrorists entered the room armed with pliers. They held open Abdullah’s mouth and yanked out his teeth, one by one. It was so painful that Abdullah passed out at some point, flickering in and out of consciousness throughout the ordeal. When they finally finished, they left my brother with only the stumps of a few deeply rooted molars. He was living in a horror movie; no civil human being can even imagine it. Soon after, the terrorists concluded they had the wrong man. They threw him out and threatened that if he told anyone what had happened, they’d come after him and his loved ones.
It was the middle of the night. Abdullah stumbled down the road, walking for many hours, until a vehicle appeared. The plainclothes civilian inside took pity on him and drove him close to Kobani. When Rehanna saw him, she screamed.
“Shush,” he whispered. Abdullah was so traumatized that he didn’t dare tell anyone what had happened, except for close family. He was deeply scarred but relieved to be alive and back home with his family. He got antibiotics from a doctor, but he couldn’t afford a dentist. His remaining broken teeth were useless; he often swallowed his food whole. His mouth was a festering wound, and the abscesses were hard to clear up. He lost so much weight that he looked like a skeleton.
Still, Abdullah’s mind remained entirely preoccupied with finding work to put food on his family’s table. He would never commute from Sham to Kobani again. So he decided to leave his wife and son and go to Turkey.
At first, Abdullah worked in Turkish towns near the border with Syria, doing whatever jobs he could find, like working at a warehouse and unloading produce from trucks. His body was still weak and his mouth was in a terrible state, but he tried his best to send money home to his family. He wasn’t the only one facing challenges: there were many Syrians looking for work and many employers looking to exploit them. The typical wage was $7.50 per day. When Abdullah could no longer find work in the border towns, he went to Istanbul, a one-day’s journey by bus fro
m the border. There he picked up odd jobs in construction, sharing the rent on one room with ten other men, most of them Kurdish refugees who were also commuting between northern Syria and their jobs in Turkey. Abdullah tried to return home at least once every few months, and whenever any of the other refugees returned to Kobani, he sent money and food and whatever else he could scrape together for his family.
By March of 2013, the overall registered Syrian refugee count had reached 1.1 million. (That’s equivalent to the entire population of Sham when I was a girl.) But that number is likely an underestimate. If Syrians didn’t have a valid passport to enter another country legally, or they didn’t cross through official borders, which was typical at the border with Turkey, they weren’t counted. The refugee camps in Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, and Kurdistan had taken in over four hundred thousand Syrians. The camps offered basic survival, but many could not keep up with the steady flow of new arrivals. Some camps had inadequate sanitation and health care and were teaming with diseases and deadly parasites. The camp refugees also suffered from the invisible wounds of psychological trauma, from the stresses of living through warfare, to the indignities and humiliation that comes with being displaced. Registered refugees couldn’t work; their movements in and out of the camps were restricted or disallowed altogether.
Meanwhile, life for my sisters Hivron and Shireen and my aged father in Damascus was even more unpredictable and fraught with danger. In the spring of 2013, the deadly terrorists with the long beards gave themselves a name: ISIS. The faction had already infiltrated many rebel groups, and they now claimed ownership of towns and cities in northern Syria, striking at their enemies throughout the country.
“So many people have fled to Sham that we don’t know who our neighbours are anymore,” my family told me when I called home.