‘Yes, Nada was raped,’ she says. ‘But she can never admit it, even to herself.’
Her friend goes to console her. She comes back. ‘She cannot even say the word aloud. When she talks of others and what they endured,’ her friend says, ‘she is talking about what happened to her.’
There are no words to say to her, no more details to extract. What has happened to Nada cannot be undone. What she has seen and heard cannot be forgotten. It cannot be erased.
A few days later, I offered Nada and a friend a ride in my car to a class in Antakya. They were studying English together, taking a course that Nada hopes will eventually get her a job, and maybe a chance at a new life. When her friend talks about this, Nada offers a fleeting smile, and looks, if only for a moment, like any other young woman her age setting out into life – confident, happy, free.
Then something crosses her mind, and her eyes go grey and dead once again.
‘I changed a lot when I was in prison,’ she says quietly. Then she smiles. ‘But you know, even there, I was the revolutionary.’
In between beatings and interrogation sessions, she confronted her jailers. She chastised them for small things, for prisoners’ rights. It gave her a feeling of having some control.
‘I made them get plates for the other prisoners!’ she says proudly. ‘I made them realize we are not just dogs to be kicked and used, but people. I made them put plastic over the broken windows.’ She looks faintly triumphant. ‘Before we had nothing, then we got plates!’
Small victories for a broken spirit.
One afternoon in Antakya, a friend introduced me to Shaheeneez, a thirty-seven-year-old former teacher. She was dressed in black trousers and a long black belted coat, despite the heat. She wanted to meet somewhere anonymous. When she entered the room, a shadow seemed to walk alongside her.
After she sat, Shaheeneez explained that she is very religious. As she talked, I couldn’t help but notice her headscarf, silver rings and watch, her olive, faintly pitted skin, her full nose and defined jawline. She looked strong rather than pretty.
Still, she was nervous and jittery, visibly shaking as she spoke. When I learned that it was only recently that she had got out of a Syrian jail in which she had been held for ‘several months’, I began to understand why.
As she told it, in 2012 she was arrested at the airport on her way to Egypt from her home in Aleppo. She was going to a conference. ‘I think my name was on some kind of list.’ Her actual arrest was probably for political activities, but she is not sure.
After she was taken, the men who arrested her threw her into a state security prison in Damascus. There she was blindfolded and interrogated, often for hours at a time.
‘It confused me,’ she said, trying to explain what it was like to be asked questions with her eyes covered. ‘I heard voices, but could not put the faces to them. It was a tactic, made to scare me more.’
The interrogation exhausted her, but she had no intention of giving away names. She was aware of what they were trying to do to get her to confess. At one point, the interrogators changed their tactics; their voices grew rougher and they began to hit her. One wallop knocked her to the floor. While she was on the ground, they tied her hands together. She remembered how the rope cut into her skin. One of the men hovered over her. Someone tugged at her clothes. She heard a door open, close.
‘That is where they abused . . .’ she stumbled over the word, ‘. . . me.’
She said they kept her on the floor. They partially removed her clothes.
‘They said they would do terrible things if I did not cooperate . . .’ Shaheeneez’s shoulders began to shake under her dark coat.
‘They said rape . . . then I was on the floor… then I felt something hard inside me . . .’
She paused now in this room far from where it actually happened, but she was still trembling, and she moved to the window. She opened it, turned her face towards the sunlight, her back to the room. She seemed to gulp air.
‘They raped me,’ she said. She said it again. Then all the breath went out of her.
Afterwards, Shaheeneez cried for a long time while I sat opposite her. I was unable to say anything that would console her. I laid a hand on her shoulder; she flinched at the touch. The tears rolled off her face onto her collar.
She said she had been seeing a psychiatrist since the violation, but it didn’t help. At the time, she had been in love. She had plans to get married and had a life mapped out in front of her.
Her doctor urged her to tell her fiancé the truth. But when she did, he left her. ‘He said he could not marry me, that he had to find a clean woman,’ she said, adding that it is more than a feeling of being violated, it’s one of being completely ruined.
‘But I don’t think the interrogators did the actual rape. I think that man who entered the room did.’ She sat on the bed, sweating and shaking. ‘I think it took them less than half an hour. And then, after they untied me and took off my blindfold, I found blood on my legs.’ She did not know whether the ‘hard thing’ was an object they used to penetrate her, or a penis.
She had been a virgin.
Shaheeneez seems as damaged as Nada, but is even less able to cope and continue living. While neither woman will forget what happened, Nada says she wants to move on, to find a new path forward. But Shaheeneez says she cannot forget. The rape, she says, destroyed her life.
‘If I get engaged again,’ she says, ‘I will never tell him.’
A few days later, I was working inside Atma Camp, the largest internally displaced camp in Syria at that time, home to 50,000 displaced and miserable souls. I was searching for a woman called Rana, who was trying to help a group of other Syrian refugee women who had been raped. In technical terms, they are called ‘survivors’.
As far as refugee camps go, Atma was well organized. As far as living goes, it was hellish.
When I found the camp doctor – a young man working in the camp who spoke halting English – and told him what I was investigating, he looked anguished. I had not used the word rape, only ‘sexual violence’.
‘In Syria, the innocent people suffer the most,’ he responded, finally. ‘Do you really find women who have been touched? For us, this is the worst thing to do to the men – because they are our women.’
We climbed down a hill, passing the water stations that had been set up as showers and sinks. Only a dozen water stations for hundreds and hundreds of people.
We then realized that a tiny boy was following us. He looked like an ordinary kid, about the age of my own nine-year-old, hiding his face behind a blue hoodie. He was wearing fake G-star jeans.
But then I saw his face: it was completely burnt. His mouth appeared to be nothing more than a hole and his nose was practically non-existent. His ears were flaps of skin, which had been stretched tight into pink crevasses, across his skull.
I asked him his name. It was Abdullah and he told me he was eleven years old.
Even with the doctor as my guide, I didn’t find the raped women in Atma. They had been moved. But later, I saw Abdullah again, standing in front of a refugee tent. It was his home.
His parents invited me inside; they told me how he was injured at home in the city of Hama last October.
It was a clear day: good weather for bombing. When the bombs came that day, Abdullah was playing on his computer. It was always so difficult to keep the children occupied inside, his mother says. Hearing the crash of bombs, Abdullah – in his fear – ran outside.
He got the full impact of the bomb that landed near his house.
‘I heard the worst thing in the world that day of the bombing,’ the father said. ‘The sound of my own son’s screams of pain.’
He looked at Abdullah, who stared back at him with confusion.
Then he said something that both Nada and Shaheeneez also said to me – the mantra their jailers tormented them with. It is the battle cry of the activists, the first demonstrators in Daraa, filtering down to all the Syrian cities
, the provinces, and villages: We Want Freedom.
Abdullah’s father turned towards his son’s raw face. He asked: ‘So is this freedom?’
3
Ma’loula and Damascus – June–November 2012
I was in Ma’loula, watching the morning prayers of a group of solemn nuns, a quiet and reflective moment, when I heard about the car bombs back in Damascus. Ma’loula is an ancient mountaintop town dug into a cliff, renowned for its spiritual healing qualities and restorative air. It was a place I felt drawn to: something of an oasis of tolerance. The residents were mainly Christian – it is one of the last places where Western Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ, is still spoken – and they vowed at the beginning of the Syrian conflict not to succumb to sectarianism and be dragged into the chaos.
Their determination was all the more remarkable given the town’s location. It lies on the main road at an equal distance between Homs and Damascus. It was a defiant place, but their defiance reflected a bitter history.
Ma’loula was besieged during the Great Syrian Revolt in 1925, when rebel Druze, Christians and Muslims tried to throw off the colonial oppression of France. The history of that insurrection lingers. Many older residents were weaned on stories of women and children hiding in the caves of the three mountains that surround the town, to escape atrocities.
The Christians are largely from the Greek Catholic and Antiochian Orthodox offshoots; the Muslims are Sunnis. But most people would not classify themselves by religion, preferring to say simply, ‘I am from Ma’loula.’
That morning, I had awoken early in Damascus and drove with my friend, Maryam, a Sunni from Damascus, to Ma’loula, about an hour away. We left our car, and began to walk up and down the streets. There was serenity in the shaded courtyards edged with olive and poplar trees that calmed me after the chaos and noise of Damascus. Maryam described how she had come as a small girl, and watched the nuns go about their daily tasks in a quiet and humble way, making apricot jam, or polishing the candlesticks in the chapel.
Maryam had a friend, the Sunni imam of the town, Mahmoud Diab. She knocked at his door with some hesitation and asked if we could come inside for tea, and to talk to him. He opened the door, asking us to put on our headscarves, and led us to chairs under the flowering trees. Even in his courtyard, there was still a fading poster of Assad attached to the wall. ‘Do you still support him?’ I asked.
Diab looked surprised. ‘Of course,’ he said.
We sat quietly for a few moments waiting for our tea. He pointed out the sounds of the birds. I asked him how Ma’loula remained so peaceful.
‘Early on in this war, I met with the main religious leaders in the community: the bishop and the mother superior of the main convent,’ Diab said. ‘We decided that even if the mountains around us were exploding with fighting, we would not go to war.’
Diab had not been born and raised in Ma’loula, but was educated here, married here. He was, at that time, also in the Syrian Parliament. He was a Sunni, he said, but that did not mean he wanted his city to be torn to bits.
‘It’s a sectarian war, in politics it’s another name,’ he said with a shrug. ‘But the fact is, there is no war here in Ma’loula. Here, we all know each other.’
Tolerance had been a tradition in Ma’loula since St Takla – the daughter of a pagan prince, an early disciple of St Paul, and possibly even his wife – had fled to these mountains in the first century AD. She was escaping from soldiers sent by her father, who threatened to kill her for her religious beliefs.
The legends – and the old people – say Takla was exhausted and finding her way blocked by the sharp, rocky sides of a mountain, she fell on her knees in desperate prayer. The mountains parted. ‘Ma’loula’ means ‘entrance’ in Aramaic.
‘Here in these mountains are all different people, different religions. But we decided adamantly that Ma’loula would not be destroyed,’ Diab said.
At the ancient shrine of St Takla, Christian nuns – true believers in the Assad government – lived isolated, quiet lives, devoted to God and country. They slept in small, spotlessly clean chambers and passed their time working, praying and tending to the needs of the sick. They also ran an orphanage.
The convent was silent except for constant, shrill birdsong and the sound of nuns scurrying up and down marble stairs with large glass jars of the golden-coloured fruit, which they made and sold. They would dry the apricots in boxes in the courtyard, and the scent of the hot fruit was as heavy as the incense in the chapel.
The convent is one of forty holy sites in Ma’loula, which before the war was a place where Muslims and Christians prayed to cure infertility or other ailments, and drank water from the crack in the rock that St Takla is said to have parted with her prayers.
But religion is not an issue, said Mother Sayaf, a Greek Catholic who has lived in this convent for thirty years. She spoke to me in a quiet, completely darkened room – shuttered from the fierce light – and one of the younger nuns brought glasses of iced water on a lacquered tray. She said the air was so fresh that Ma’loula was a place where doctors sent sick people to recuperate.
‘We had an Iraqi Muslim man who was badly wounded, who came here to be healed,’ she said, meaning they would treat someone regardless of religion. At the same time, she made no secret of her devotion to Assad. Two years later, when the jihadists entered Ma’loula, her devotion to the regime would be tested.
I returned several times to Ma’loula to visit the monastery and the nuns. When I last went, in November 2012, as people fled embattled Homs, Damascus and Aleppo to seek refuge with relatives overseas or in the few still peaceful parts of Syria, people were returning to Ma’loula as a sort of safe haven.
‘It’s my country,’ said Antonella, a Syrian-American who left Los Angeles and Miami three years ago to return to her birthplace and start a café. She sat down inside her café – no electricity – and showed me maps. She reminded me Ma’loula was a UNESCO-protected heritage site, which she felt would somehow exclude them from being blown to bits.
Antonella had a chance to leave when the war started and fighting was close to Ma’loula, but refused. ‘I want to be here,’ she said. Her business, however, was suffering; money was a problem and she had an elderly mother she needed to support.
Ma’loula did look different in the past, she said. ‘There were fifty tour buses a day here when I first came back,’ she said. Her café, which was empty the day I sat with her, was once full. She wasn’t sure how she was going to get through the next winter.
The previous year, when there was fighting in Yabroud, a strategically located town near the Lebanese border and just across the mountain, Antonella finally realized her country was at war and people were dying. ‘That depressed me,’ she says. ‘The truth is, even if Ma’loula is quiet now, no one knows where this is going.’
But she still stoically supported Assad. ‘The rebels have destroyed our country,’ she said. There was no other alternative.
Her brother Adnan, who had also come back from America, sat down and began to talk about the economy. Because of sanctions and the fact that transit has been halted across borders – trucks couldn’t move because of fighting in certain areas – food costs were skyrocketing. Foreign tourists had stopped coming. People bought only what was necessary. Small businesses, like Antonella’s, were dying.
‘This is the beginning of World War III,’ predicted Adnan. ‘It is starting in Syria, but it will engulf the region. This is a proxy war.’
I wandered back up the hill to say goodbye to Diab, the imam. I wanted to ask him one more question. Can a town renowned for its tolerance resist the centrifugal pressures of a vicious, sectarian civil war?
‘Everyone is a Christian and everyone is Muslim,’ he answered diplomatically, not really answering the question. He refused to break down the percentage of Muslims. ‘It does not matter,’ he insisted. ‘The situation here will not deteriorate. It’s the opposite. People support each other.’<
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‘If we become Salafist,’ he said, referring to the fundamentalist strain of Islam that has taken on a new prominence in the Arab Spring, ‘we lose all of this ethnic mix, and that is tragic. Everyone has to be like them. There is no room for anyone else.’
On 4 September 2013, a Jordanian suicide bomber exploded a truck at a Syrian Army checkpoint at the entrance to Ma’loula. Rebels then attacked the checkpoint – the explosion was assumed to have been a signal – killing eight soldiers and taking control of several sections of the historical town. The Syrian Army led a counter-attack two days later, regaining control of the town, but continuing to battle against jihadists in the surrounding area. But the rebels, having received reinforcements, once again took the town, allegedly burning down some churches and harassing the town’s Christian residents. According to some sources, nearly the entire population of this diverse town had fled, leaving only about fifty people inside its limits. The army eventually conquered the rebels and secured Ma’loula on 15 September, and many residents returned, but they still lived in fear of further attack.
In late November, opposition forces again attacked Ma’loula, this time kidnapping twelve nuns from the monastery in order to ransom the women in exchange for their own prisoners of war. On 14 April 2014, the Syrian Army, with the help of Hezbollah, once more took control of Ma’loula.
Recalling the events, sixty-two-year-old Adnan Nasrallah said: ‘I saw people wearing al-Nusra headbands who started shooting at crosses.’ One of them ‘put a pistol to the head of my neighbour and forced him to convert to Islam by obliging him to repeat “there is no God but God”. Afterwards they joked, “He’s one of ours now”.’
In late February 2015, Christians in Ma’loula prayed for their fellow Christians, hundreds of whom had been kidnapped and murdered by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
On the road back to Damascus that afternoon in 2012, long before the Salafists arrived, we saw the first signs of war getting closer to Ma’loula. As we approached Damascus, smoke rose, curling into the skyline. A car bomb. The sun bore down on the car, in contrast to the cool convent with its sense of hushed protection. The traffic was stalled for miles at the roadblocks, so we left our car by the side of the road and walked to the bombsite.
The Morning They Came for Us Page 4