The Morning They Came for Us

by Janine di Giovanni

  It stank of burnt rubber. Skeletons of charred cars remained. No one had been hurt, which was fortunate. The explosion was caused by ‘sticky bombs’ – handmade bombs taped to the bottom of a car, which had been parked just across from the Justice Courts at the height of the rush hour.

  ‘Real amateur hour,’ one UN official said to me later. ‘The bombers didn’t know what they were doing – it’s just a scare tactic to make the people hate the opposition.’

  For a while, it worked. People blamed the opposition and ‘foreign interventionists’ for the explosions. Crowds of people gathered, angry that their city was quickly falling victim to the devastation that was spreading across the country.

  ‘Our only friend is Russia!’ one well-dressed man shouted near the bombsite, his face contorted with rage. ‘These are foreigners that are exploding our country! Syria is for Syrians!’

  It was a common belief that the bombs and the chaos that were spreading throughout the country were widely being caused by a ‘third element’. This was especially true in Damascus, which had long been an Assad stronghold. People refused to believe that the opposition could rule their country without turning it into a Salafist kingdom, an Islamic caliphate where women were not allowed out of the house and Christians were locked up and sold as slaves.

  This was nearly a year before we even began to hear about ISIS, the Islamic State.

  A crowd gathered around us. People were getting agitated from the heat, from the uncertain future, from the violence that had just ripped through their streets. My driver wanted to go.

  After we had returned to the hotel, I watched the end of the pool party in the dying light of the day, and against the faint dusk I could still see the grey, acrid smoke plumes curling in the air, a warning sign of darker days to come.

  ‘Look at what happened in Tunisia, look at what happened in Libya, look at the results of Egypt,’ said Ahmed, a wealthy seventeen-year-old in a pink Lacoste shirt, faded jeans and Nikes. He was agitated and passionate: he wanted to talk to someone who was not Syrian and he did not often have the chance. ‘Listen to me! Everyone thinks we are the bad guys, that Assad is a monster. But there is another side to the story.’

  Ahmed was giving me a ride home from a dinner party in Damascus – his mother had asked him to take me. ‘He has some solid ideas on politics,’ she said. ‘He expresses what all of us think.’ So Ahmed got the car keys and drove me through the winding streets, back to my hotel.

  Ahmed was from a wealthy family and went to a good school in Damascus, where he lived in a comfortable villa with his family. He was leaving shortly to do his military service in the Syrian Army, then to study at an American university.

  The dinner that night had included Ahmed’s mother, his grandmother, his aunts and his cousin – all of whom are highly educated, multilingual and the holders of several passports. It’s a common thread with the elite in Damascus – to be bi-national, to have a second passport, a way out. When I pointed out that this might be the reason that they supported Assad – because if it all went wrong, they had a place to flee – Ahmed’s mother looked at me darkly. ‘We had years of French occupation, coups, years of Ba’athists,’ she said. ‘Now we do not want the years of Islamists.’

  After dinner, we sat on the balcony amongst flowering jasmine plants, smoking apple-flavoured shisha. Ahmed sat in a wicker chair. ‘I am one hundred per cent behind the government – not that I believe everything Assad is doing is right,’ he said, ‘but because the time is not right for change and it should not be imposed by the West.’

  ‘Syria is geopolitically important,’ he added. ‘People want to get their hands on it. And why should we take democracy lessons from Saudi Arabia, which arms the opposition?’ Saudi Arabia, he reminded me, ‘did not let women drive’.

  The party did not break up until after midnight, and we went out into the street. There was no curfew. People were still out on the streets, walking home from dinners or from visits with family. We passed a bank of floodlights on a street corner: a commercial was being filmed in the middle of a country that had just declared civil war.

  ‘Life goes on,’ Ahmed said.

  There was a crowd of people watching the shoot, and a few actors were waiting for their call. I saw an actress named Dima, whom I had met at the hotel the day before while she was dressing up in Gucci and Christian Louboutin heels for a magazine photo shoot. The shoes, she pointed out, were a brand that was a favourite of the President’s wife, Asma al-Assad.

  In an interview with Asma for US Vogue entitled ‘A Rose in the Desert’, the journalist Joan Juliet Buck praised the beauty and philanthropy of Asma al-Assad, wife of the dictator. The piece had unwisely been published in the magazine’s March 2011 ‘Power’ issue, just as the Arab Spring was erupting in the Middle East. It caused a storm of criticism and was pulled off Vogue’s website in May 2011, as it became clear how many people the government was willing to kill to remain in power.

  Buck later said she had been pressured not to mention politics to the Assads. In other words, reading between the lines, she was not to counter the glowing references to Asma’s beauty with the fact that her husband’s father’s regime had killed thousands of people in three weeks to wipe out Muslim extremists (in the Hama massacre in 1982). And that Asma’s husband was now basically doing the same.

  Like Asma, Dima wanted to be in Vogue. She was sitting in a chair near the window being made up when I first saw her: like Asma, she was stunning: alluring eyes and strong bone structure. Dima saw me and smiled, motioned for me to come in: she spoke good English and wanted news of the world.

  ‘Not of war,’ she said. ‘Please don’t talk of war. Talk of the world. What’s happening out there? I want to go to New York, to California . . .’ She wanted to hear about Kanye West and Kim Kardashian; about films showing in cinemas where there was no war; about music and magazines and dresses.

  That night with Ahmed, Dima spotted me in the car, and called me over. ‘Do you want to come and watch?’ she asked. ‘We just started filming.’

  Behind her, looming slightly, were two burly men in leather jackets. One of them motioned for her to come back after she talked to me, and she obeyed, head bent. She looked solemn as they spoke. Then she approached our car again. She was no longer friendly.

  ‘Maybe you’d better go,’ she said. ‘It’s late. I’ll call you tomorrow. We can drink coffee or something.’

  ‘Who are those men? Your bodyguards?’

  She looked at them to make sure they were not listening, and then cupped her hands around my ear, as if telling a little girl a secret. She shook her head.

  ‘They are Shabiha,’ she said. ‘Just go home.’

  Damascus has two faces.

  There are the opposition activists who are working day and night on their computers, and sometimes in the streets, to bring down Assad. These are the ones who meet me in secret, the ones who disappear from their offices one day, like Mazen Darwish, a lawyer who founded a group promoting free expression, or Razan Zeitouneh, another human rights activist. These are the ones who risk going to jail for up to forty-five days’ detention (same as the old French mandate administrative detention law, being held without charges) and the ones who simply seem to have no fear. Even peaceful protesters have been thrown in jail simply for demonstrating, without their families being told of their whereabouts.

  By 2015, it was difficult to calculate the number of missing and detained in Syria after four years of conflict. But Bassam al-Ahmad from the Violations Documentation Center told me: ‘Those we can document by name, we believe to be 36,000 held by the regime, and around 1,200 by ISIS. But if we are talking about estimated figures, we are sure that the numbers are bigger.’ The Syrian Organization for Human Rights gave a higher figure.

  The President of the International Federation of Human Rights, Karim Lahidji, told me the conditions for detainees, especially the political prisoners, are terrible: ‘In the jails of the regime, torture and
abuse are the norm. The overwhelming majority are arbitrarily detained.’

  ‘I have worked in many countries where torture has been a significant problem, but, quite frankly, I struggle to remember a place where torture has been so widespread and systematic,’ said Ole Solvang from Human Rights Watch. ‘The Syrian government is running a virtual archipelago of torture centres scattered around the country.’

  The other face of Syria was not an archipelago of torture. This was Damascus, party time: people drinking champagne in Narenj, the fancy Damascus restaurant, or getting married in tight sparkly dresses with low-cut backs and holding elaborate parties at Le Jardin Restaurant with Druze musicians, or filmmakers doing high-end commercials with actors who were not in prison.

  ‘This is how I see it: We don’t want our world to change. I’m still jogging and swimming every day,’ Rida, a well-off, sixty-four-year-old businessman said one afternoon over lunch. ‘This is not a war. Our regime is strong. Seventy per cent are fully supporting Assad.’

  ‘You don’t want your world to change, but for some people, it has changed without their consent,’ I said. ‘They are getting bombed or tortured or shot at.’

  ‘This is the bias of the press,’ he retorted.

  His wife, Maria, who wore a headscarf and went to the Opera nearly every week, agreed. ‘When the FSA [the Free Syrian Army] comes and tells people to close their shops and protest against the government, they burn them down if the people refuse,’ she said. ‘This is why I am supporting the government.’

  ‘Are you frightened?’ I asked. ‘Will your world change?’

  ‘Not at all,’ says Rida. ‘Last week we had a party of twenty people on our balcony. We were all relaxing and smoking the shisha. We heard gun shots in the background – but it seemed a long way off.’

  During the years I spent in Syria, I twice went to the opera house, which is said to be the second-grandest in the Middle East. Once I went with Maria and Rida. The second time I went to meet the director. She did not want me to use her name.

  ‘I do not want to give the impression that we are like the Titanic – the orchestra plays on while the ship sinks,’ she said. We were sitting in her office and she motioned overhead with a hand gesture then put her finger to her lips, meaning that the room was probably bugged, although I am not sure what music has to do with state security.

  I told her that there was a cellist who played Albinoni’s ‘Adagio’ over and over in the ruins of the National Library of Sarajevo during the siege from 1992 to 1995. She mentioned the Russian musicians playing during the siege of Leningrad, with the performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 7 broadcast over loudspeakers, much to the anger of the Germans besieging them.

  ‘Music and art in times like these fuel the soul,’ she said. ‘It gives people hope.’ To get to the concerts, people had to pass checkpoints at night, a time when it is not necessarily safe to go out.

  She told me that, unlike Rida and Maria, she was scared. ‘People are leaving, people are packing up and going to Europe or Lebanon.’ In the summer heat, she shivered. ‘This is my country! How can I go?’

  It was not long after our meeting that I heard she too had fled, leaving her prestigious job and the second-best opera house in the Middle East and moving to Paris.

  But one morning, while she was still in Syria, she invited me to see the Children’s Orchestra practising. They were led by a visiting British conductor. She was proud that he had come ‘in these times’.

  Some of the musicians were very young – around eight, with tiny hands holding their instruments. But others looked like teenage kids from anywhere else – Brazilian surfing bracelets, baggy jeans, long flowing hair. They practised a powerful song of innocence, ‘Evening Prayer’ from Humperdinck’s fairy-tale opera Hansel and Gretel.

  When at night I go to sleep

  Fourteen angels watch do keep

  Two my head are guarding

  Two my feet are guarding

  Two are on my right hand

  Two are on my left hand

  Two who warmly cover,

  Two who o’er me hover

  Two to whom ’tis given

  To guide my steps to heaven

  Sleeping softly, then it seems

  Heaven enters in my dreams;

  Angels hover round me,

  Whisp’ring they have found me;

  Two are sweetly singing

  Two are garlands bringing,

  Strewing me with roses

  As my soul reposes,

  God will not forsake me

  When dawn at last will wake me.

  I sat for a good while watching the fresh, young faces intently reading the musical scores and holding their instruments with something akin to first love. I wondered what this room would look like if I returned exactly this time a year later. How many of these boys would be sent for mandatory military service? How many would flee the country? I tried not to ask myself if any would no longer be living.

  They begin to play again, at the urging of the conductor. As I watched and listened, I grew emotional and I thought of the words that I had often sung to my son when he was a tiny baby in his crib. It is a song of protection, of reassurance, of love. But I could already feel that no one was protecting Syria, there were no angels, and that perhaps God had forsaken them.

  Maria Saadeh’s last name translates from the Arabic as ‘happiness’. She lives in Star Square, in the old French mandate section of Damascus, in an old 1920s building that she helped to renovate. A restoration architect by training, educated in Syria and France, she had recently been elected, without any experience, as the only Christian independent female parliamentarian.

  The Christians are anxious. On Sundays during my stay, I go to their churches – Eastern Christian or Orthodox – and watch them kneel and pray. I smell the intense aroma of beeswax, and see fear on their faces. It reminds me of being at mass in Mosul (which would be overrun by ISIS forces on 10 June 2014, causing its Christian population to scatter) before the American invasion in 2003. Fear, mixed with faith. Trembling hands clutching rosary beads, prayers invoking protection and peace. Some of the parishioners in Damascus approached me after mass and tried to ask questions about what would happen to them. Will we be wiped out? Do other Christians think of us? Where will we go? Will the United States save us?

  The Christian minority fears that if a new government – perhaps a Muslim fundamentalist one – gets in and takes over, they will be cleared out of Syria in the same way the Armenians were driven out of Turkey or massacred in 1915.

  ‘Alawites to the coffin, Christians to Beirut,’ is one of the chants of more radical opposition members.

  But Maria seemed confident for the moment. She was not going to Beirut. She sat on her roof terrace in an expansive top-floor apartment, her two small children, Perla and Roland, peeking through the windows, a Filipina maid serving tea. It could have been an ordinary day of peacetime – except that, earlier that day, there had been another car bomb.

  Maria was tall, blonde, multilingual. Her husband was in the contracting business. She was someone who had benefited from the regime, even if she said she has felt as if she was in a minority, even if she said that while she was studying she was passed over in favour of Alawite students despite her better grades.

  She was pro-government, but she wanted change. Just not yet, she said. ‘We’re not ready.’

  She also refused to believe that the government had tortured, maimed and killed civilians. When I listed the atrocities one by one she stopped me, putting down her cup of tea. There was an angelic smile on her face.

  ‘Do you think our president could put down his own people?’ she asked me incredulously. ‘Gas his own people? Kill his own people? This is the work of foreign fighters. They want to change our culture.’

  Earlier in the week, I had gone to a private Saturday night piano and violin concert where the director of the opera house performed Bach, Gluck and Beethoven. She wore an el
egant long dress, and the concert was held in Art House, a boutique hotel built on the site of an old mill that has water streaming over glass panels in parts of the floor.

  It would not have been out of place in the Hamptons or Newport. The audience was a mix of women in spiked heels and strapless black evening gowns and bohemian men in sandals and chinos, sitting with their well-behaved children.

  When everyone was seated, we were asked to stand and pay homage to the ‘war dead’ with a minute of silence. Everyone, even the children, remained quiet and pensive. Afterwards, the director and the pianist received a standing ovation. Then everyone in the audience filed out to an open-air restaurant and began sipping the chilled champagne that was served. I overheard several people talking in hushed voices about what had happened around the city that day: explosions and intense fighting near the suburbs.

  ‘A toast to the symphony,’ said one man, holding his glass of champagne aloft. Then he paused.

  ‘And another toast that we will live through the next few years.’

  It is easy to be cynical towards your government when they send you to fight a war and you come back with one leg and other parts of your body removed.

  One scalding summer morning, a Saturday in June 2012, I drove to Barzeh, which is a toehold of the opposition inside Damascus. In Barzeh, there are frequent protests, and the government soldiers respond with arrests, shootings and killings. But Barzeh is also where the government-run Tishreen military hospital cares for wounded soldiers and takes care of the dead.

  That June morning, there was a funeral for soldiers who had been killed fighting for Assad. I broke away from the hospital minder – a woman in her forties wearing high heels and a military uniform – assigned to follow me and make sure that I was seeing what they wanted me to see, and managed to find the room where they were preparing the dead. No one noticed me as soldiers and hospital staff loaded the mangled bodies – disfigured and broken by car bombs, IEDs, bullets and shrapnel – into simple wooden coffins. They were then secured with nails before being draped with Syrian flags.