We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled

by Wendy Pearlman

  The Syrian army focused on al-Qusayr and took it over. A lot of people said that was a turning point. And because it is my hometown, I felt that the revolution had failed. I lost all hope. I stopped listening to the news or following events. When al-Qusayr fell, I felt that I became a refugee.

  Rami, graduate (Yarmouk camp)

  I grew up in the Yarmouk refugee camp. It’s a special place, like the capital of the Palestinian diaspora. It’s called a camp, but it doesn’t look like a camp. It was just a well-developed district in the southern part of Damascus.

  The towns surrounding Yarmouk got involved in the armed conflict, and people from those areas sought refuge in the camp. There was sort of a consensus among armed groups to keep it as a neutral zone.

  Then in July 2012, the intelligence headquarters in Damascus was bombed. It killed two ministers and shook the whole security apparatus. This began a new phase in the life of Damascus. The regime took forces from the coast and deployed them to set up checkpoints inside and outside the capital.

  Meanwhile, the conflict around Yarmouk kept intensifying. Armed groups pushed security forces from parts of the Damascus suburbs, but the regime encircled and besieged them. They needed supplies, and for logistical reasons, their only access was through Yarmouk. With the agreement of the regime, Palestinian factions took up arms to prevent rebel groups from entering the camp. Those groups saw Palestinian factions as defending Assad. There were clashes, and armed groups managed to get inside the camp. They roamed around, filming videos saying that they liberated the camp.

  That day, all of a sudden, there was a mixed shelling of the camp. It targeted the mosque and a school. The noise and casualties were horrifying. Residents realized they’d been dragged into the middle of the conflict. There was shock, paranoia, and fear. Very early the next morning, a mass exodus of people began. The majority of the 150,000 Palestinians living in the camp took their bags and left. I was among them.

  It was the end of the camp as we knew it. People called it the second Nakba.* The Nakba of Yarmouk. Only about 20,000 people remained. They were the most vulnerable.

  Bombardment continued for two weeks. If you tried to leave the camp, a regime sniper would kill you. The siege developed gradually to a complete blockade. The main entrance was blocked with sandbags and concrete. It was collective punishment, like the regime was saying, “You allowed the rebels in. This is what you deserve.” Armed groups in the camp started fighting each other because they had no one else to fight.

  Um Naji, mother (Yarmouk camp)

  We should have left when the blockade was partial, but we never expected it to become complete. At first, the checkpoint would close the area one day, and open the next. And then the checkpoint closed for good. Whoever was inside the camp got stuck inside and whoever was outside got stuck outside.

  I lived under the siege for nine months. We had food stored at home, but time passed and we ate all of it. Armed men or regime agents raided the shops and there was nothing left for civilians. We had money, but there was nothing to buy. Instead, my husband would collect grass and leaves and we’d fry them in olive oil. Later we couldn’t even find grass. My four kids lost weight. They would lie on the floor, without energy even to speak. They were starving to death in front of me, and I couldn’t do anything about it.

  My uncle used connections to get us out. He tried and tried until he got permissions from different intelligence services so that my kids and I could pass through the checkpoint. My husband had to stay behind. We arrived at the checkpoint and at first they refused us. We waited all day and finally they let us through.

  Yousef, former student (rural Hasakah)

  I was arrested in my second year of medical school and spent five months in prison. I was home recovering when ISIS showed up.

  Syria’s oil is located in our areas in the eastern part of the country and ISIS recognized how valuable that is. They took over our village and then moved on to take Deir ez-Zor, which has the largest oil reserves. Regime planes backed them up. They bombed the rebels and people, not ISIS. Now ISIS has all the oil in the area. It has the weapons, the wheat, everything.

  ISIS aren’t aliens, like some people describe them. They’re regular people. They’re an organization like other organizations. There were so many men ready to fight ISIS. Women, too. We could have beaten them, but we didn’t have enough weapons. No one supported us. Instead the U.S.-led Coalition started bombing. Two months ago, twenty-seven people in my village were killed while waiting in line for bread. Coalition planes killed them.

  It’s airstrikes that have destroyed the country. Planes do the most damage, and ISIS doesn’t have planes.

  Hakem, engineer and pharmacist (Deir ez-Zor)

  The FSA took control of our area in Deir ez-Zor. All the hospitals were in regime-controlled areas, so my friend turned his house into a field hospital. I’m a pharmacist and I volunteered there. Once, I helped do a surgery to remove a bullet near a young man’s heart. The electricity was out so we did the whole surgery by the light of our cell phones. The doctor who performed the surgery was a veterinarian.

  When the FSA and Nusra Front were in our area, people complained because of the chaos and lack of security. ISIS claimed to want to establish security and make sure no one broke the law. They entered our area with heavy arms, Hummers, and tanks. They were strong, like a real state. The FSA and Nusra Front didn’t have weapons to stop them. Most of their members just ran away.

  I lived under ISIS rule for a year and a half. ISIS forced us to go out and watch them cut off people’s heads. It was scary for kids at the beginning, but then they got used to it. It became normal to see a dead body hanging in the main square or a body hanging from a tree without a head. They’d keep a body out in public for two or three days, and then throw it away somewhere. ISIS took control of the oil refineries and made it clear that the oil belonged to them. They forced people to pay them taxes. Many people didn’t have enough money, but they had to pay or face punishment.

  I was in Deir ez-Zor when the Russian planes started attacking and when the Coalition started attacking. I can bring you a list of the civilians who got killed. For some reason, I wrote down all their names.

  Talia, TV correspondent (Aleppo)

  Separating the regime and liberated parts of Aleppo was what was known as the “Death Crossing.” It was a street exposed to four regime snipers who shot indiscriminately. Fifteen thousand people would pass through every day. Of those, twenty would die.

  I was living in the liberated part of Aleppo. My daughter needed to see an eye doctor, so we had to go to the regime-controlled area. They would shoot more intensely just before the crossing closed at four o’clock. We made it back there around 3:45. A group of us had started crossing when they opened fire. We all dropped to the ground. My daughter and I huddled together. The man next to me didn’t get up. He’d been shot. I began to cry and my daughter began reciting the Quran. It took us a half hour to make it to the other side.

  My husband was in Turkey at that time. I was responsible for my mom and children. We didn’t have electricity. Sometimes we could tap into a line to turn on the light or TV. There was no water, so people dug wells. Everyone in the neighborhood would go down and fill up canisters of water daily. You felt like the whole neighborhood was family. We had no heat, but we’d warm ourselves by burning this fuel used in old forms of transportation. It gave off a terrible smell. My son got asthma from that fuel, as well as from the smoke from bombs and burning garbage.

  I remember when they dropped a barrel bomb for the first time. The house shook and all the windows shattered. The bomb struck near my daughter’s school. I left my son with the neighbors and ran to get my daughter. It felt like the longest distance of my life. Every possible scenario entered my mind: maybe I’d find her dead. Maybe I’d see her torn to pieces. Maybe she’d be covered in ash and debris. When I found her, I decided that I wouldn’t let her go to school anymore. Two weeks later, her school w
as bombed and sixteen kids were killed.

  Marcell, activist (Aleppo)

  I’d grown up middle class. When I moved into the liberated areas of Aleppo, I discovered that there were poor people in Syria. I was a woman who didn’t wear a headscarf living alone in an area where no woman was without a headscarf or lives alone. People wondered, “Why is she here? Why didn’t she go to Europe like everyone else?”

  It was the most challenging year of my life. Moving into the liberated areas meant knowing that I was going to die. Accepting that reality changes you a lot. It affects your mentality and all of your choices. You’re always asking yourself if you could kill and you’re always meeting people who are asking themselves the same thing. Like mothers saying, “If they come for my child, then I will . . .”

  Living under bombs, seeing bodies shattered into pieces—no one should see that much death. A barrel bomb can easily collapse a whole building like a cardboard box. You see people who have lost everything and never had much to start with. And then . . . the feelings of guilt. You’d find yourself thinking: Should we have done things differently? Should we have done nothing at all?

  It was a harsh year. Especially with regard to women’s issues. It wasn’t like going to a demonstration for two hours. It became a whole lifestyle. It was the fight with your friends because they don’t want you to go alone in the street. You consider yourself a feminist, and say, “C’mon, do you really need to accompany me to buy a kilo of potatoes?” They say, “This is a situation of war.” And I say, “No, it’s a revolution!”

  If the armed groups called for a rebel meeting, I’d be the only woman there. Everyone was shocked, like, “When we said rebels, we didn’t expect her to come.” I would say, “We’re equals. Let’s talk.”

  ISIS emerged. At first, no one knew who they were. The first time I recognized the problem was when a Jordanian fighter gathered children in the street and said that he’d pay a dollar to every child who threw a rock at me because I wasn’t wearing a headscarf and I was walking with men who weren’t my brothers. Back then, there were few of them and they didn’t have enough power to arrest me directly.

  Not one of the kids threw a rock, but one of their parents came by our house. He said, “Don’t panic, but this is what happened. Our children won’t do this. But we are afraid that others might. It’s not safe.”

  My friends and I changed houses and I went on to change houses another ten times. That became the story of my life: packing, running, packing, sometimes running without even packing.

  Then another ISIS fighter stopped me on the street one day. He said, “You can’t look like that here.” He was from Belgium. To me it was funny. You come here and are going to tell me what to wear? He said, “This is Islamland.”

  I said, “No, this is Syria.”

  Our exchange got tense and I started to yell. FSA fighters came and said, “What do you want from our daughter?” With their intervention, the situation passed.

  Later, ISIS guys stopped me a second time. The third time, they followed me in vans. By then, five or six of my friends had already been kidnapped by ISIS. They were going to kidnap me, too. If that happened, I wouldn’t be brave. I’d be stupid. I thought, “Okay. Let me leave the country for a while and see what happens.” So I left for Turkey, and I was crying like a baby the whole way.

  Haneen, graduate (Daraya)

  The first massacre that I lived through was during Ramadan. I was at my sister’s house and it was too dangerous to go back home because of the snipers. There was a sniper near our house, and anyone on the street would be killed.

  Days passed. Finally we decided to try to go back home. We took the narrow back roads so the sniper wouldn’t see us. We walked close to the walls and then hurried from one wall to another. After we got home, the missiles and rockets began. We needed a safe place to hide, so we again left to find shelter underground. The sniper was still there. It was easier for the sniper to see us as a group, so we ran by his position one at a time.

  We found shelter in a basement. It had little windows onto street level, so we saw when the security forces came and then tanks followed. From underground, we could hear people yelling. Somehow we got hold of someone who talked to someone who talked to someone else who said that they were capturing people they found underground.

  We were terrified. We told ourselves that whatever was going to happen was going to happen, and it would be better to die above ground than below ground. So we waited until night and again ran home as fast as we could. Back home, all the food had gone bad because it was summer and there was no electricity. We ate moldy bread, because there was no alternative. We hid anything of value, like phones and jewelry and pictures. We buried things in places that the security forces wouldn’t think to search.

  Security forces reached our street and executed six young men. We were in a state of terror. Then the forces left to go to another neighborhood. We had no way of knowing if they’d return or when.

  We didn’t go out for many days. Finally, the date came for my exam at the university. I went to take it. I was so scared that the security forces would stop me along the way. I don’t even know why I went to take the exam. I just knew that we needed to keep living our lives.

  The second massacre was the chemical weapons attack. Things were getting bad again, and my sister was worried about her kids. She wanted to move somewhere else, so we left with her. We thought we’d stay away only two or three days.

  That next day, the regime launched chemical weapons. They hit very close to our house. My uncle and cousin were killed. It was like poison that burned their bodies from the inside. No one knew it was chemical weapons at that time. They had no scars, no wounds, no signs of anything, nothing at all. They were just dead.

  Sham, relief worker (Douma)

  Rockets would fall all over Douma. They might land on the street, on a building, on the market. I lived through buildings falling before my eyes. I lived through corpses. I lived through rockets that would explode children into a million pieces. Sometimes we’d clean up body parts with our own hands. There wouldn’t be a whole body to pick up. Just a hand or a leg or a head.

  We were a Red Crescent emergency response team, wearing uniforms and riding in an emergency vehicle. The army wasn’t supposed to bother the Red Crescent. But some days they’d scare us with their guns. Some days they’d take the injured person right out of our ambulance. We couldn’t dare open our mouths.

  Once, soldiers detained my friend’s team. They lined them against the wall, and shot my friend in the head. We followed him to the hospital and waited. When a person came and told us he was dead, I immediately fainted. Another friend carried me away and a third friend treated me. The two of them were later killed, too. I’m telling you; all my friends have been killed.

  When the intelligence officers arrested my husband, Munir, for the third time I sobbed to them, “God bless you, please don’t take him. I’m so tired, I can’t take it anymore.” The officer said, “Everything is fine. We’ll keep him for only an hour.”

  That hour lasted a year and one month. For the first five months, I didn’t know if he was alive or dead. You know that phrase, “to disappear into thin air”? It was like the Bermuda Triangle; he disappeared and that was it. Every lawyer told me, “We’ll get him out.” But they were just lying so I would keep paying them.

  At the end of May, my mobile rang and it was an unknown number. I was in such a terrible state of mind that I had my brother pick up the phone. I couldn’t bring myself to talk to anyone. Then I heard my brother mention Munir’s name. I nearly lost my mind and grabbed the phone. Munir had been transferred to a different prison branch and managed to call me.

  That August was the chemical weapons attack. People will tell you that this was their version of Doomsday. In the streets you saw people frozen in their cars, suffocated to death. My colleagues told me this was the first time they picked up corpses and there was no blood. I got news that the gas had spr
ead to the prison. I was so scared for Munir that I thought I would die. It turned out that the stench of the gas did reach them and the prisoners started coughing. They didn’t know what was happening.

  Obama made his announcement about the red line. People celebrated, because they thought this would finally be the end of the regime. We thought, “At last, he’ll be ousted!” We got so excited—only to be disappointed again.

  Meanwhile, someone connected to the regime told me that if I paid enough, he’d get Munir out of prison. The catch was that we’d have to leave the country immediately. So Munir was released. We stayed in Syria for another month and a half and then left.

  Everything we’ve experienced has killed us. We check the news every second. This person is still alive; this person was killed. Believe me, if the world had helped us from the beginning, we never would have reached this point. Some think that we’re religious fundamentalists. But nobody forces me to fast during Ramadan. Here I am smoking a cigarette. Munir is fasting, but in the morning he wakes up and makes me coffee. I swear, in Syria nobody used to ask whether you’re Muslim or Christian. We had no idea what religion our friends were.

  But none of that matters anymore. If I died this second, I wouldn’t care. Because I’ve reached a point in my life where I hate everything. I am disgusted by humanity. We’re basically the living dead. Sometimes I joke to Munir that someone should gather all of us Syrians in one place and kill us so we can be done with this whole thing already. Then we’ll all go to heaven and leave Bashar al-Assad to rule over an empty country.

  Part VII

  Flight

  Talia, TV correspondent (Aleppo)