A Woman in the Crossfire

by Samar Yazbek

  There were shabbiha sniping at the soldiers and one soldier got killed. The army moved in with gunfire and the people started demonstrating in the direction of the army. As usual, the army announced through bullhorns that they wouldn’t harm anyone, that they just wanted to search. The army moved in, searched and arrested about 200 or 300 people. The mothers went out in order to demand the return of their sons and husbands who had been arrested even as the prisoners sat on the buses. Then the security forces sprayed gunfire chaotically. The people said that some of those who were killed were wounded from behind, which means there had to have been snipers. They arrested some of the mothers and children and four women were killed. There were four axes to the assault on Baniyas, from the thermal power station and al-Marqab. Two young men were killed and three were critically wounded. I think they’re dead now, but how can you be sure when the phone lines are all cut, just like the water and the electricity? Even though there was a curfew and random arrests, the women started demonstrating and wouldn’t give in to all the killing and arrests.”

  Silence.

  The young man stops talking. I wait. I don’t push. Today Baniyas is cut off from the outside world, a chunk of earth floating in the void. Today the Syrian authorities will not let delegates from the United Nations enter Dar‘a. State media says they had gone in for hours. I remain silent out of respect for this young man. My hands are tingling from writing so much. I don’t feel good about recording what he has to say so I transcribe everything. But a friend of mine videotapes and records him, and I memorize what the young man says.

  I wanted to say, ‘So, in brief, Baniyas is occupied,’ but I hold back, and everything inside of me retreats into a deep black pit, bigger than the black hole of existence. He does not wait long, apologising and saying we would have to finish up some other time, but I doubt we ever will. All the young men I meet with say the same thing, and then they disappear.

  10 May 2011

  ..............................

  What a strange morning.

  I wake up and touch my skin. I am just an idea, a character in a novel. I drink my coffee and believe that I am only thinking about a woman I’ll write about one day. I am a novel.

  I am living through a more realistic novel than I could ever write. Yesterday evening a few young men and women who went out to demonstrate on al-Hamra Street near my house were arrested. My friends no longer tell me the time and place of the demonstrations because they have lost faith in me and don’t believe my promises that I won’t participate in them anymore, that I’ll be satisfied to watch from afar in order to keep writing. The last women’s demonstration made them worry about me. I received quite a few reprimands. The demonstration passed nearby my house and I could hear the ambulance sirens spinning around the place. From afar I could see people pushing and running. The demonstration started in Arnous Square. When I met up with my writer friend who had participated in the demonstration she reported the following details:

  “We all assembled in Arnous Square. I thought I wasn’t going out into the street because we were all being watched after all. I had been thinking about working in some way other than going out for demonstrations, but I thought it was important for us to go out to demonstrate in the squares and not just inside the mosques. My girlfriend and I went out, we were all over the place, monitoring the presence of security forces. We went and sat on the steps in the square and started singing patriotic anthems. Then young men gathered around us and we all sang for the homeland, for Syria. There were about 150 men and women demonstrators, we videotaped it, we started singing the national anthem, Guardians of the Realm, Peace be upon You, unfurling and holding up high the banners upon which we had written, No to the Siege, No to Violence, We Want a Civil State. Then we started marching with our banners, singing the national anthem and heading towards al- Salihiyyeh. When passed through the middle of al-Salihiyyeh, the people in the market stopped on both sides of the street to gawk at us in amazement and fear and some in sympathy. We stayed there for about seventeen minutes singing Guardians of the Realm Peace be Upon You. Then the violent attack by the security forces began. They surrounded us. When they attacked we all started running, and people fell down on the ground. My girlfriend fell down too. I helped her up, and a man outside the glass storefront of one of the shops hit her. One of the al-Salihiyyeh shopkeepers rushed over and hid her inside his shop. Then a security goon broke into the shop while we were hiding inside. The shopkeeper told him, ‘There are women changing inside.’ The shopkeeper came and showed us a safe route for us to escape. During the demonstration there was a young woman filming and the security forces attacked her and took away her phone. One of the young girls got arrested. They pulled out all the young demonstrators from inside the shops. Then they parked a bus outside the shop and put the young men inside. The people had all started asking what was happening and the security forces told them, ‘Nothing to see here, folks, these people are thieves.’”

  “They brought the young men out of the shops, beating and kicking and shoving them. They were beating them with spite and violence and brutality, and the people watched in silence. The ones who got arrested were: G.N., M.N., A.Q., I.K., I.D., M.T., I.I. I watched with my own eyes as a security agent picked up a thick baton and started hitting I.D. fiercely and violently right on his head. Inside the bus they kept on beating them violently and harshly. We confirmed what happened on video. Afterwards we watched the harmful beating the young men received.

  “Everyone who got detained is still under arrest. The security forces are everywhere, the regime resorts to turning city employees and government workers into private vandals and security agents, deploying them in the streets and squares in order to inform on the people’s movements and assemblies. They’re being threatened with their daily bread, with being fired from their jobs if they refuse to cooperate with the security forces.”

  My girlfriend’s testimony and her description of what happened stops here. I get nervous thinking about the strange and interlocking threads of my life, the strange fate that put me directly on the front line of an explosive situation, and about the madness my life had become from the moment I turned fourteen. The funny thing is that I have always thought I inhabit a unique space, and I have no desire to change it or to incline towards one side or the other. My perspective approximates the sarcasm of fate, or of death making fun of life. I am in a funny situation, one that drowns in its own blackness. If only the Syrian security services had known that I am related to Osama Bin Laden before they started calling me names and fabricating stories about me on different websites. Maybe they could have used that against me. I laugh as I sip my coffee, thinking about Najwa Ghanem, my mother’s relative, Osama Bin Laden’s first wife and mother of his beloved boys. I knew Najwa when I was a child. Thinking about the death of Bin Laden and about the mukhabarat file that had been fabricated about me, I laugh.

  Decades ago Osama Bin Laden’s father married a woman of intoxicating beauty named Alia Ghanem. This young lady had a brother, and it was he who married my mother’s cousin, Nabiha, with whom he had two daughters and three sons, the oldest of which was Najwa, who would later marry her young cousin Osama Bin Laden, who in turn would become a famous figure in modern political history. I spent some distant days of my childhood at Najwa’s family’s home, where I saw her children. Once I went with my aunt to visit the chalet in Latakia where she was staying. I was just a little girl then but I still have vivid memories about that family who went to live in Latakia, where they still reside. Najwa enjoyed protection from the Syrian security apparatus and Fawwaz al-Assad18 himself, who lived near the villa where she and her children resided.

  Now here I am in my house, suspended up on the rooftop opposite al-Hamra Street, living in anxiety and fear, clinging to my daughter out of concern for her because of the threats that I receive over email and on the phone. Despite the fact that I adhere to strict silence, I am scared. I am the daughter of a well-known Alawite family
, a family that supports the regime absolutely and that now considers me a traitor and a shame upon them, to the point that some members of the family announced on Facebook that in Jableh I am no longer considered one of them, publicly disowning me. That wasn’t their first public statement. According to their social mores, my leaving home when I was sixteen caused multiple scandals. I had consecrated myself to the promise of a mysterious freedom in life. I never cared what they thought about me. But my nuclear family had always mattered to me. Despite my perpetual disagreement with them, I had always been connected to my mother, father and siblings in an emotional sense, in such a way that made the situation all the more tragic and painful.

  The mere mention of those days – my mother’s crying eyes – causes me to break down in hysterical tears. Just thinking about how the regime has turned the Alawites into its own human shield sends me into a bottomless pit of sorrow. Sometimes it seems as though everything that is happening in Syria, everything within its four walls, is happening against me.

  In everything that happened I am the big loser. Among my family and my childhood friends, amidst all that is right and true, I am a dead woman, yet still present somehow. My life has irrevocably split in two all at once. I am alone. My life has become the most realistic novel. I’ll write all about it one day if I manage to survive. Then I will be the one preserving secrets about the Makhloufs, the Assads, and all the Alawite families who strayed from their religious path in order to decimate the Alawite sect.

  About a week ago I wrote on my Facebook page: Our grandfather, Aziz Bek Hawwash, was the leader who refused the establishment of the Etat des Alaouites19 by demanding that France safeguard the unity of Syria. My grandfather on my mother’s side, Uthman, fought in the resistance against the Ottomans, and the people of the mountain and the coast know of his many acts of heroism. My grandfather Ibrahim Salih Yazbek gave all his possessions and land to the peasants. That was before the land reforms of the sixties. That’s right, I’m the granddaughter of those men, the granddaughter of al-Makzun al-Sinjari20, of al-Khasibi21, of Ikhwan al-Safa22 and al-Mutanabbi23. You all are the grandchildren of truth, you are not the grandchildren of a mistake.

  That comment shook things up even more with my family and with the security forces, who had been deleting most of the comments I wrote. For a second time they announced they disowned me, the heretical traitor. It wasn’t only my family. A number of families in the village announced they disowned me. Once again I started receiving threatening letters and obscene phone calls. The senior security officer summoned me again. In that comment I wanted to mention one more time who the true luminary Alawites were, as I had done when I wrote before about how Imam Ali bin Abu Talib chose truth over power and paid for it with his life.

  I was sending a message to the Alawite Ba‘thists and security agents who were handing out leaflets about me in Jableh and the surrounding villages to stir people up to kill me and get rid of me. I was also sending messages through interviews and meetings with some Alawite clerics, but that was in vain. The situation was only getting worse.

  I arrived at the first meeting with the senior officer on the verge of collapse, because the two men who had accompanied me from home in a white car had blindfolded me, which was something that confused me. I hadn’t thought of telling anyone. My daughter was still in the village. At that point, I thought my detention was sure to come soon, and that it would last a long time.

  I arrived in a strange place, perhaps it was in al-Mezzeh, I could not be sure, but I found myself in a big office with the senior officer. He scowled at me, looking me up and down in disgust, as if he were staring at a squashed bug or a disintegrating corpse. Then he drew closer, grabbed me by the wrist, crushing my hands and burning my skin and suddenly he slapped me in the face, knocking me to the ground. Then he spat on me. Cunt, he said. My eyes were shut and I could hear a loud ringing in my ears from the blow. I felt like I was losing my balance, like I was convulsing. I didn’t get up. I didn’t even try. He shouted at me to get up but I really couldn’t, my body was frail. I lost my balance. What a joke, a single slap could make me fall down. He shouted, Get up! I didn’t move. I threw my head back, closed my eyes and thought to myself, I’m not getting up, let him do what he wants. The knife that I carried around in my purse was under my bra, the same small switchblade, and I thought about how if he or anybody else tried to insult me, I wouldn’t hesitate to plunge the knife into his heart. Up until that moment I had been thinking I was going to be detained for a long time. I knew their anger at me went beyond every kind of anger. I heard the sound of footsteps, and I felt his hand reach out and pick me up. I didn’t exactly feel how he sat me down in the chair, but my head fell, and when I straightened myself out, the spinning in my head stopped. He laughed, “Well well well, what a hero, you went down with just one slap.” I opened my eyes. I didn’t cry. I wanted to cry, the slap was an insult, but I wouldn’t let him see my tears. I stared back at him. After running his finger along my cheek, he said, “Isn’t it awful when such an angelic face gets hit.”

  He slapped me a second time. Then he returned to his seat and launched into a long tirade about ties of blood and kinship, about family and about betrayal, the same claptrap I had been hearing for years, about my betrayal and the shame I had brought upon all those around me. When he stopped talking I was staring at his palm and his fingers that I felt had left marks on my cheek, red marks that would turn blue in a day or two.

  “What’s wrong, cat got your tongue?” he asked. “Your long tongue should be torn out.” And he hit me again; the slap was lighter this time. I stood up and pulled out my knife, brandishing it in his face and I told him that if he continued beating me I would plunge this knife into my heart, and that I wouldn’t let him or anybody else insult my dignity. He stood up, stupefied, staring at the black knife, and backed away from me a couple of steps. I flicked the switch, the blade swung out and I touched it against the centre of my heart, which I could hear beating.

  A heavy silence. He was staring in shock. He drew near me again and I backed away a step, saying, “Don’t come any closer.”

  He stopped. He was staring in astonishment and I stared back at him without blinking.

  “What do you want?!” I shouted.

  “We’re worried about you,” he said. “You’re being duped by Salafi Islamists if you believe what they’re saying.”

  “I don’t believe anyone,” I said. “I went out into the streets time after time and I didn’t see any Salafis. I saw how you kill ordinary people and arrest them and beat them.”

  “No,” he said, “those are Salafis.”

  “They weren’t Salafis,” I told him. “You and I both know that.”

  “If you keep on writing,” he said, “I’ll make you disappear from the face of the earth.”

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “Not just you, but your daughter as well.”

  In that moment, my heart stopped beating.

  Sitting down behind his desk, he said, “Put the knife down, you lunatic. We’re honourable people. We don’t harm our own blood. We’re not like you traitors. You’re a black mark upon all Alawites.”

  “I don’t want anything to do with you and other Alawites like you on the outside.”

  “All right, what do you have to do then?” I didn’t respond, and he said, “Go on Syrian TV and we’ll agree on what you’re going to say.” Before he could finish, I shouted, “I won’t do it, not even if you kill with me with your bare hands.” Staring him in the eyes, my sharp tone infuriating him, I said, “Save your breath. I won’t do it. Just leave me alone.”

  “YOU LEAVE US ALONE!” he bellowed.

  I was silent.

  “And those articles in al-Quds al-Arabi, on Facebook, your activities with the people, the demonstrations?”

  “What can I say, I’m inclined towards the truth,” I said.

  He let out a resounding laugh and looked at me with pity.

  I put my kni
fe away. I knew he wasn’t going to harm me, not this time anyway. Later on, when I started compiling testimonies of male and female prisoners, I would learn that they had spoiled me. His phone rang. He stepped out and didn’t talk in front of me. He came back after a few minutes. I was sad and afraid.

  “This is your last warning,” he said. “From now on, you’re aligned with the enemy.”

  “I’m not aligned with anyone,” I said. “I’m aligned with the truth.”

  He laughed disdainfully and said, “By God, I’d let the people spit on you in the street. I’d let your friends in the opposition spit on you, let you flop around like a fish out of water before even thinking of arresting you. Go on, get out of here.”

  Two humongous men came into the room. They were standing there at the ready, dressed in civilian clothes. One of them to the right and the other to the left. The senior officer pointed at me and the two men stood me up. They weren’t violent. They held me like an object that was easy to move. As they lifted me up from the chair by my shoulders, I didn’t resist. I stood up. I found what was happening strange. Were they finally going to arrest me and put an end to this nightmare? Even that would be better than this madness. The officer looked at me scornfully and I looked back at him, trying to judge what was about to happen. I was trying to divine the future from their eyes, from the movement of their bodies and their behaviour. He remained impassive, staring at a fixed point in that cavernous room. The two men placed a blindfold over my eyes, or that’s what I assumed because darkness suddenly blanketed my world.