A Woman in the Crossfire

by Samar Yazbek

  “After the massacre, Jableh became a ghost town. Nobody dared leave their house for fear of a sniper’s bullet and most of the inhabitants resorted to replacing the doors on their houses, which had always been wooden and open, with only a cloth curtain separating the inside from the outside. Now most doors were impenetrable black iron out of fear of another massacre like the last one. We had to limit ourselves to night-time demonstrations, some of which were ‘flying’ and some of which were very crowded. Women participated along with us but we reduced the scope of our actions to very narrow limits in order to evade the eyes of the security, which had noticeably infiltrated us in Jableh despite its small size and narrow spaces. The scope of the infiltration was horrible. It was awful; none of us trusted anyone else. That’s the only plausible explanation for the huge number of arrests the city has been subjected to up until now, on all kinds of charges, despite the fact that they had been releasing well-known criminals accused of smuggling and drug use ever since the first spark of the Syrian revolution. Day in, day out Jableh continued to live on rumours and predictions and every day it expected another onslaught, another massacre. To get ready, we all came up with new ways of self-defence, one of which we called ‘the eggplant’, which was like an explosive stick of dynamite that made a booming sound but wouldn’t kill anyone. People say the residents of the al-Dariba neighbourhood evacuated the women and children from their houses for fear of the impending unannounced raids. Now, by going out to demonstrate and calling for the fall of the regime, we were playing our part in a game that was becoming a turf war.”

  I can imagine a turf war in Jableh. It’s a small city and I know those poor alleyways the young man referred to. I want to transmit the news neutrally, but this is hard. I try to imagine the scenes, preoccupied by all the city’s nooks and crannies. I love it now even more. I continue with the young man’s testimony:

  “The first day Jableh started calling out Allahu Akbar from inside the houses, the security and the shabbiha began treating people brutally. The security response was awful and very violent. They targeted everything they could find that moved and the city fell asleep that night to the sounds of gunfire and dynamite until the small hours. Unfortunately it resulted in the martyrdom of the young man, Ahmad al-Attall.

  “The third incursion into the city was on 5 June, 2011. When news started to spread about the arrest of H., who had been wanted for some time by the security forces on the charge of murder and who went by the name of ‘The Prince of Jableh’. There were a lot of stories about the scandal over his propositioning his secretary. Some sympathized with him after the massacre of Jableh, in which the people saw his courage and bravery defending the city and its people, exposing himself to mortal danger on more than one occasion. But before that massacre the people were all disgusted by him and his machismo. They found it strange to see him walking around with his pump action weapons so conspicuously. As rumour of his arrest spread, some guys who were close to him or at least sympathetic hurried off with light weapons, including ‘eggplants’ and hunting rifles. There were only about ten of them, and at 6:30 in the evening they clashed with security forces at the shari‘a school that had been converted into security headquarters. I heard gunfire and the sounds of ‘eggplants’ and this adventurism resulted in death of three of them. Tensions flared high in Jableh into the evening and the security forces and the shabbiha wouldn’t shut up about this failed attempt. They intended to terrorize the Sunni neighbourhoods with the sound of heavy and violent gunfire, which continued throughout the night with the thunderous sounds of Jeeps and Mercedes cruising the streets. Jableh is a small city, more or less cut off from the outside world. Its only trade is with the inhabitants of neighbouring villages. It has no other livelihood. The city is an epicentre of poverty. Education is limited. Most of the representatives from there and the surrounding villages, along with Atef Najib, were able to buy up most of the properties and houses under assumed names that were used as a front. A new class of businessmen appeared – call them the nouveau riche – overshadowing the original and historically well-known merchants, a completely different class known for its tight relationships with people in the regime and for working on its behalf. Now Jableh follows the rules of cat-and-mouse; turf wars to tire out the shabbiha, to distract them so the demonstrators can get out, even if only for a few minutes on Friday to call for the fall of the regime. That’s why they seem so starved for any piece of news, especially since the bounty of the internet is unavailable in Jableh. TV is the only source of news and information.”

  Here ends the story of Jableh, the city Atef Najib hails from; a relative of the president, he is the one responsible for the arrest and torture of the children of Dar‘a. We sons and daughters of that city know the influence of Atef Najib as well as everything else the young men say about his corruption, wealth and tyranny but it never once occurred to me that the oppression and ruination this criminal from my city carried out against the people’s dignity might ignite the Syrian uprising.

  The murderers and I are from the same city.

  Some of their blood flows in mine.

  Some of my relatives are theirs, people who embrace murder and bloodshed. I am weighed down with a heavy burden in the face of all this death.

  23 June 2011

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  Today I meet up with a few young women from the coordination committees. We are going to record a video of Alawite women who are against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Our aim is to affirm national unity among different sects and sectors of Syrian society. The whole thing seems pretty funny to all of us, as we get together in the tiny apartment of a young woman in her early twenties who would go out with the demonstrators. We sit there laughing, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes while we wait for everyone to arrive. We write on placards in order to videotape them – homemade video recordings, a sit-in at home. We are going to post it online because we can’t demonstrate in public. One of the placards reads: We’re in hiding because we’re scared we won’t make it back to our children. All the girlfriends I meet there are eager and excited. I am happier than I could have ever imagined being. Their faces bring me some joy after I have been so tense and nervous all the time. We start filming, doing several takes of reading a statement: We, the women of the Syrian coast, announce our repudiation of the regime’s crimes and that we stand side by side with the people’s uprising. A young man videotapes us and we never stop commenting on how he is alone with us there. Watching the girls, I feel a green sapling sprouting from my heart. I love them all so much. My heartbeats become regular once again. All my negative feelings towards everyone disappear. However much my soul has been liberated from negative feelings, I owe this to the uprising itself.

  When we are finished shooting, we all make our way home cautiously. Before leaving the place I smell the mysterious odour of human bodies. We all notice how much we sweat during the filming; the room was pungent with our odours. Suddenly I remember my mother’s face when we were young, as she would check my sisters and me to make sure we were clean before we could leave the steamy bathroom. These giggling girls exude the smell of family, for a moment it seems to me like the smell of exhaustion, like the smell of a cave. I leave the house in better spirits.

  Night has fallen when I open the door to my house. Today I feel a fleeting happiness. Having met with so many groups in order to coordinate among them, I am thinking about all the actions I want to do with them before my time runs out. Four consecutive meetings in a single day and what a magnificent outcome.

  I place my head on my pillow, satisfied. It takes so little to make me feel happy. I am exasperated by this blind existence. Returning home from a jam-packed day and night of activism and activities, I wonder what murderers think about during the moment in which they shoot unarmed young men in the chest. I think about that moment, which is like oblivion; I think about the thousands of Syrians who go hungry while my stomach is full, of those who are homeless whi
le my home is warm; I think about the prisoners I saw by chance from underneath the blindfold when I went in for questioning the third time. I am not even sure it was questioning; it should be called kidnapping. A different senior officer later tells me, during a phone conversation in which he tries to drag me over to the side of the murderers, that he never knew about the matter of my summons, that the whole thing happened informally and that there was no official order for my detention or anything against me, that the security forces weren’t behind the rumours and articles on the internet or in the leaflets against me that were distributed in the coastal region, that it was my group in the opposition who was mistreating me and maligning my reputation. He will say a lot of things: that I had never been subjected to injustice and that it would be ungrateful of me to deny that, that I was their daughter and that I have to protect them the same way they protect me. I’ll respond to him with a kind of calm that will seem strange to me later on: I don’t have to feel my skin being scorched in order to scream, I have seen and heard enough to want to protect the sect from you. Don’t play with me like that.

  That’s right, on the day of my third kidnapping I saw from underneath the black blindfold how they threw prisoners down on the ground. I thought it was some kind of a courtyard, because light shone in and I could see their backs under a ray of light, as shoes trampled all over them. I saw some of them jump up from where they were when they got hit with a whip. I heard their screams, sharp screams like a whistle that have still not left my ears. For some reason I noticed that the feet stamping on their small young backs were not wearing military boots but cheap athletic shoes. And for a split-second I could see the back of one young man as he tried to get up: he was half-naked and I saw red whip welts on his flesh.

  Today I can clearly remember the third kidnapping. It was different somehow; clearly the senior officer had something personal against me. He wanted to put my eyes out, in his understanding. He wanted me to feel afraid of him, which was something I took care not to do as I had done the last two times. Men used to come, put the blindfold on and take me away but this time I refused to go with them, telling them I wouldn’t go and before the words could even finish coming out of my mouth one of their fists roughly squeezed my elbow. My fingers were tingling. It was nine o’clock in the morning, and my daughter, who usually doesn’t wake up until one o’clock in the afternoon, asked from her bedroom, in an annoyed voice, “What’s up, Mama26?” I told her, “Nothing, Mama. I’m going out with some friends and I’ll be right back.” Then I left with them silently. Every time there was just one concern that would overtake me and make me tremble: What if I didn’t come back? What would happen to my daughter?

  The officer was harassing me. I panicked even more when he mentioned my daughter and nauseating things in the same breath. Just thinking about it makes me want to throw up. If time allowed me to see that man again, I wouldn’t think twice about killing him. That’s another thing I’ll never forgive them for. They made me know what it feels like to think about ending someone else’s life. It was only in those moments, but on my way home I would start shaking just at the thought of killing him one day. I tried to feel the desire to kill in those moments when he was harassing me. I also decided I was going to leave the country no matter what the consequences. I started having flashbacks to things the al-Assad clan and their relatives would do to young girls. My memory takes me back to the late eighties when we were young college students in Latakia and how afraid we all were of speeding black cars and the men who drove them. We all knew they belonged to the shabbiha of the al-Assad family, if not one of them personally. We girls felt indescribable horror after the death of one of our college friends, a very beautiful young woman who people say had been harassed by one of Jamil al-Assad’s27 sons. She stopped coming to university when he began stalking her, but we were all shocked by the news of her death. Her cold corpse was discarded after she had been raped and disfigured. The incident passed but we were all terrified and spent days afterward without leaving our houses. Any young woman who refused the sexual advance of an interested boy from the al-Assad clan could wind up with the same fate. The more I thought about this and my young daughter, the more I thought about how I was going to kill him before I ever let him insult my dignity.

  Now I remember all the details as I catch up on what has happened today and write down what the murderers did: six hundred Syrian refugees are on the move towards the Turkish border from fear of a military action. Armoured cars are deployed five hundred metres from the border. Syrian forces have moved into the village of Manbij after invading the village of Khirbet al-Jouz. Five students are killed at Damascus University; wounded students are still at al-Muwasat hospital. There is a general strike in several districts of Homs and Hama, in Dar‘a and al-Ma‘damiya, in Dayr al-Zur and Latakia; in al-Qamishli dozens of shops go on strike. They also go on strike at the central prison in al-Hassakeh. Syrian television broadcasts the funeral of 26 martyrs from the army and the security forces. I feel some consolation; what is happening to me is nothing compared to the crimes against thee people. O, gloomy feelings that live within a human being are what make me rise up. We always feel consoled when we see misfortunes that are greater than our own. That’s a fact of life, but a gloomy one.

  24 June 2011

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  The Fall of Regime Legitimacy Friday

  Fifteen people dead, most of them in the suburbs of Damascus, the Union of Syrian Revolution Coordination Committees announces them in Barzeh and al-Kisweh as well as in Homs and Hama. Tens of thousands pour out into the streets in Homs, Aleppo, Dayr al-Zur, Damascus, al-Qamishli and Dar‘a. A banner in al-Zabadani appears on television, which reads, Germs and Rats of the World, Unite! making fun of Bashar al-Assad who described the demonstrators as germs in one of his speeches. The zone of protests expands and grows as the people announce their rejection of Bashar al-Assad’s speech. The will was strong, the will for regime change. No Legitimacy for Anyone who kills the People; No to Dialogue with Murderers – those are the slogans held up by the demonstrators.

  In Dayr al-Zur the demonstrators come out chanting for freedom and championing the other Syrian cities. They recite poems and sing songs. The popular protest movement is reaching a fever pitch and the demonstrations are spreading. I start to think that the army is going to carry out a military strike against Dayr al-Zur, as had taken place in Dar‘a and in Baniyas. I think about this city from my childhood. I had lived with my family in al-Tabqa, a city on the Euphrates. I know what the Euphrates looks like. That river bathed my soul. I know al-Raqqa and Dayr al-Zur and I remember the bends of the river that connects the cities through which the river flows. They sparked in me an inchoate longing for a lost joy. That’s why I am afraid for Dayr al-Zur, which I know is not going to give in to the brutality of the regime as it rises up and its people shout to demand their freedom.

  One hundred and one days. European sanctions expand as far as Tehran, sanctions and new pressures on the regime but I doubt they are going to have any effect. Today four representatives are added to the sanctions list: Dhu al-Himma Shalish, Riyad Shalish and two businessmen who were partners with Maher al-Assad. And four companies: two that were owned by Rami Makhlouf, the Hamsho International Group and the Military Housing Establishment.

  The new dividing line within the opposition movement regards the call for a dialogue session. The regime approves of such a meeting, as it wants to announce, Yes, that’s right, we have an opposition here, and it says whatever it wants. The people we are fighting are those armed gangs. I know from the start that those behind this meeting have the best intentions; the disagreement I have with my friend who sent me an invitation to this meeting is over tactics and timing. I tell him the regime wants to exploit certain names in the opposition in order to forward their interests. He says that he wants to pursue the most peaceful way possible to democratic transition in Syria. I think he’s scared, the famous fear among the minorities.
So I do not participate in the meeting. I was sure that the so-called reforms Bashar al-Assad had talked about are fake, nothing but a façade and an opportunity to kill some time in order to go behind the back of the protest movement and pounce upon the demonstrators with an iron fist. I am also upset by the phone conversations this friend of mine had with Bouthaina Shaaban and Faruq al-Shar‘a.