A Woman in the Crossfire

by Samar Yazbek

  “We had to come up with ways of staying in touch with the other cities through communications channels that the internet would have provided ordinarily. The human rights activist was the one who put coordination committees in Damascus in touch with the provinces. We managed to find a way of working together in order to come up with a unified political vision. In the end what helped us the most was the revolutionary atmosphere in the Arab world and our democratic vision. There were other groups of young people working on the ground, but because of the communications obstacles and the security crackdown we weren’t able to be in touch with them consistently. They all coordinated with another group and launched another Facebook page, ‘The Union of Local Coordination Committees.’ We collaborate with them. We work together collectively and there are no dividing lines between the two projects. Currently we are working to unify the coordination committees completely all over Syria, under the name, ‘The Federation of Local Coordination Committees’. On the ground we have no disagreements and we are making every effort to convene a meeting within the next ten days in order to come out with a single framework unifying the local coordination committees and the union of coordination committees.”

  29 June 2011

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  My head is swimming with all the political mobilization that is now taking place. Popular committees are revitalizing civil society, new coordination committees are announced, young men and women are getting together to form federations and affinity groups – the kind of political mobilization Syria hasn’t seen for nearly half a century. History will later record these days as exceptional. There is no horizon beckoning me. I am stultified by insomnia and consumed with all the details of the past few months of my life. There is a rift between me and my daughter, a psychological boycott between me and my family – it’s unimaginable just how distant they have become – a break between me and my childhood friends, between me and my entire environment in the village, between me and my sect. I never thought such a day would come.

  My sect is being persecuted for the third time in history. The first time was when the Alawites were subjected to slaughter and massacres. The second time was when the al-Assad regime in Syria was labelled an Alawite regime, which was historically inaccurate. The third time is now, as they are subjected to a misinformation campaign by state media, the security services and some of those who benefit from the regime, by making the Alawites line up behind the regime and defend it. All this despite the fact that they would turn them into human shields if their path ever got too narrow and they had no option in front of them but to kill the people from their own community and force them into a civil war with the other sects. My girlfriend and I were getting ready to visit a young woman who had been arrested. My friend asks me, as usual, “Why are you so depressed?” I look at her with the expression she used to give me for years; she smiles, because she knows that her question is the same thing I would always ask her. We used to sit together for a long time in silence, without speaking. Ever since the uprising broke out we have become even more silent.

  The young woman is an engineer in her thirties. She has been arrested twice, the first time on 16 March when she remained in jail for sixteen days. I find this bit of information odd and tell her I was at the same sit-in but did not see her there. She smiles and says, “Who saw anybody?” We all laugh because she is right. We barely had time to assemble outside the Interior Ministry to demand the release of the prisoners when the security forces pounced and dispersed us with beatings and detentions and stampings. The second time she got arrested was in an ambush the security forces had set up for her. She and a group of young people had been preparing a food convoy to break the army and security siege of Dar‘a. Security agents would arrest anyone who helped the people of Dar‘a, even killing doctors and emergency workers. They seized one of the young men who had been helping her, then called her from his cell phone and pretended to be him. She fell into their trap and the security forces captured her in the middle of the street. She was screaming and people tried to save her but the security forces responded savagely. She managed to shout her name out loud so that people would know who it was being arrested.

  She says: “They wanted me to put my thumbprint on a statement but I refused, and they threatened to go get the lieutenant colonel, who came and demanded that I give my thumbprint, but still I refused. He told me, ‘We have two ways of doing things here: the human way and the animal way. Your choice.’ In that moment I stared back at him with strength and defiance, I didn’t blink. They beat me hard and I screamed loudly. The beating and kicking continued. I didn’t budge so they started beating my face. Then he shouted at me, ‘Down on the ground!’ He wanted me to fall down. I remained standing, and he started pulling my head out from under my hijab, so I said, ‘God alone is sufficient for us, and He is the best disposer of affairs.’ He responded, ‘The Ba‘th Party above all else.’ He punched me square in the face and blood gushed from my nose. Then he started cursing me with filthy, slanderous, vulgar and cheap insults, cursing Dar‘a and its people. When he threatened to rape me I signed the papers finally and then went inside the cell. They brought me out one more time and said, ‘The lieutenant colonel orders you take off your hijab.’ I refused defiantly at first, but eventually took it off. One of them was kind and said, ‘Let her go into solitary. She can take off her hijab there.’ And that’s what happened.

  They left me there overnight. I slept deeply. It was very cold and there wasn’t even a blanket on the ground. They woke me up early the next morning. A female prison guard came and asked why I wouldn’t eat anything, saying that if I didn’t eat the lieutenant colonel was going to torture me. I was scared. She brought an orange and I ate it. Some of them pretended to be nice. They waged all kinds of awful psychological warfare. For example, they would call me by the name of the female prison guard and when I would tell them my real name they wouldn’t listen and just say, ‘No, you’re so-and-so,’ and at that point I feared they were going to keep me hidden forever. I started telling all the prisoners in there with me my real name so that some news might eventually reach my family. I was held there from Monday to Friday, and then they moved me to a better cell. Other prisoners took care of me when they could.

  On Saturday they transported us to political security, where there were young men walking around with shackles on their hands binding them to one another. Their crime was delivering food to besieged Dar‘a. When we went inside the political security branch they took our stuff and insulted us, the security agents were rough and vulgar, whereas the officers were nicer. I was sent into a solitary cell. It was filthy and crawling with cockroaches but I was too tired to feel anything and fell asleep with all the bugs.

  They woke me up in the afternoon and took me to the office of a major who was nice. He tried talking to me about the opposition even though I told him I wasn’t in the opposition. He apologized for my being in jail and said he wished there didn’t have to be any female prisoners at all. He told me I had to eat, that I should not refuse food, because in the evening I was going to open my Facebook page for them. In the evening I opened my Facebook page.

  I would go out into the prison courtyard without eating anything, but some agents from the political security were sympathetic towards me and one of them gave me an orange. I couldn’t eat the filthy prison food. One of them was an Alawite from the coast, he was very nice and brought his own food and forced me to eat. We had human conversations and one time he told me, ‘You put yourself in this situation.’ I told him, ‘So have you.’ When I told him I felt lonely in there, he said he did too.

  “Then a different kind of pressure started. They wanted to take my statement again and started interrogating me. There was an officer who was constantly screaming, he seemed very angry and impolite. I would answer him curtly. The whole time they kept bringing others and comparing what I said with what they had said, they talked about treason and a food convoy that was headed for Dar�
��a, but I insisted I was only trying to provide humanitarian assistance. On that day I cried from the cold. I was hurting from the cold and they took my statement again in which I affirmed to them that I hadn’t intended to be in touch with the media and that all I wanted was to deliver humanitarian assistance and put out a statement about the siege of Dar‘a.

  The next day they took me to the Palais de Justice, but the case didn’t stop there and we went to the lodging house in Kafr Sousseh, which was where unclaimed foreign workers, Filipinas and Ethiopians and others were taken. It was inhuman, and I couldn’t believe such a place existed in Syria. The people’s circumstances were horrendous; the conditions were harsh, some female servants had been there for a year or even two because they couldn’t find anyone to cover their travel costs. One of the servants was silent; she wouldn’t talk and looked like a frightened animal; she was feral. A woman in the next room wanted to kill herself; in another room there was a woman who had lost her mind. One servant told me about the horrifying things the people she used to work for would do, awful things I can’t even talk about. Another woman approached me. I had a sandwich and she asked me for half so I gave it to her. She then broke that half in half and gave it to another woman, who broke that into even smaller pieces and started handing them out to the other women. There were more than 30 women in a single cell. The room was small and we were crammed on top of each other.

  The next day we went to the Palais de Justice, where the judge questioned me while I was bound in chains along with the other young people, like common criminals. As we waited for a while in the dock at the Palais de Justice, I noticed my brother was locked up there as well. He shouted my name and I shouted back his. We saw each other before we were both taken away. I don’t know anything more about him.”

  This story was told to me by a woman, an engineer from an educated and wealthy family, her body was slender, her skin was as soft as a baby’s, her voice only barely came out and she was always laughing. After she had finished her story I couldn’t believe such a delicate young woman had ever been in prison. When I said goodbye to her I felt like I was suffocating. After we left, I asked my friend who was driving the car to pull over so I could go on alone. She stopped the car and I got out. The sun was blazing and I felt like I was about to collapse in the middle of the street. I decided I had to stop meeting female and male prisoners, and that I needed to be alone for a few days. My soul was clenched. A taxi pulled up and as I got in I thought about how many people were fated to die between morning and afternoon in this land. I was getting ready to leave the country and I was more than a little afraid of not being able to return.

  In the evening I attended a mourning ceremony. How could I walk through those neighbourhoods? How was I able to confront the madness all around me? I would avoid looking directly into people’s eyes, I was afraid of eyes. I wasn’t afraid of talking, only eyes confounded me.

  The house where I went to pay my respects was right in front of me and the mother of the young martyr was standing at the end of the hallway that leads directly to the front door. There were three of us and I wanted to avoid any confrontation. I didn’t want to look into that mother’s eyes. I didn’t want to cry either. Who ever said that language isn’t impotent? I didn’t dare look into her eyes, and even though I wanted to tell her, We are all your children, I kept silent. As a mother I understand just how ridiculous it would have been for me to say something like that. I remained silent and sat there for a while. The silence was solemn until a woman got up and started talking about the martyr. The women all ululated and I felt a knot in my heart. The women all talked about the martyr and another woman commented on it all. They were all talking about him as if he were still alive. I had spent my days listening to the stories of prisoners and meeting with people who had just got out of jail, following the news of bloodshed and people who were killed, running through the streets from place to place. My blood was turning into vapour, it really felt like my skin was a cover for continuous evaporation. Trying to look that silent, dignified mother in the face, I could see red rings around her eyes. Suddenly my daughter’s face appeared right there in front of me. As the mother turned to stare right back at me, I gazed into her eyes. It was only a moment, no more than a fleeting second, but it was enough for us to share that piercing sadness. Round crystal balls scattered in an existential void out in front of me, that lovesickness nobody will ever know, but which I noticed in the eyes of that 50-year-old mother. I felt like my throat was about to cave in, like I was a cloud of fumes set to explode.

  I ran out of the gathering, out into the street. My girlfriend caught up with me and asked, “What’s the matter?” At that point I burst into tears, crying out loud. I could hear the sound of my own crying, which I never heard from the cool and collected mother. The voice of the bereaved mother who had lost her son a few days ago in last Friday’s demonstration sprang from my throat. I knew, my entire being was certain, that she would be able to guess why a panicked woman like me might have run out of there. I sat down sobbing. She must have known that I saw my daughter’s face in her son’s. The rules were for us not to stay at mourning ceremonies for more than five minutes as a precaution against raids by the security forces, who broke up such occasions on a regular basis. Thus my girlfriend took my hand and turned me around. As we walked down the street, she told me, “I think you need a nice long rest.” I had heard so many stories about sons dying in front of their fathers, about a young man’s head rolling down dead in front of his family and siblings, his blood and guts going everywhere and his brains spilling out of his head that was separated from his body as his skull came to rest between his legs. Women whose children were killed right in front of them. Houses ruined and demolished and burned as their owners watched. And most important of all, I had heard women tell unending stories about how Syrians had been helping one another, as if they were one big family, against the practices of the security forces and the shabbiha. Stories I will come back to one day.

  30 June 2011

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  This morning I sit down to write up what I recorded about Hama, while I wait for the coming afternoon, which has become like a curfew in Damascus. A young woman from Hama told me the story of a female doctor. A man brought seven bodies to the morgue in order to store them there until they could be buried. This doctor said the man seemed half-crazy as he tried to convince her there was nowhere else to store the bodies until the burial. Thinking he was deranged, she told him she only had enough space for two bodies, which was the truth. The man left, and the doctor would later find out he was telling the truth and that there were dead people without anyone to bury them or to protect them until they could be buried.

  I write down the testimony of a journalist who stayed in Hama for a few days. He was in hiding and we met in his safe house:

  “As soon as I arrived in the city I saw twenty thousand demonstrators chanting, Peaceful, Peaceful, No Salafis and No Infiltrators, We are all Syrians, chanting for freedom, We’re Muslims, We’re Alawites, We’re Christians. I saw women riding in a big car that trailed behind a demonstration. My girlfriend was at the demonstration with me, and we saw women demonstrating everywhere, out on the balconies and in the streets, every particle in the air was demonstrating in Hama. It was obvious we weren’t from around there. Someone came up and asked if I spoke Arabic. They thought I was a foreigner. We were afraid of getting arrested so we walked right in the middle of everything. At the head of every group there was a small truck with a loudspeaker. We climbed up on the Suzuki and started filming. The people were cooperative and nice to us. We were really afraid of the security forces. We didn’t know at the time that Hama was a city that had been liberated from them. That was the first time in my life I felt such feelings, the feeling of freedom. After filming for about half an hour, we wanted to leave. It was just my girlfriend and I. Starting to leave, we grew more certain that we were about to be arrested. I held my friend’s hand as we
walked in a group and got in a taxi. We told the driver, ‘Take us anywhere.’ He took us to the al-Hadir neighbourhood, near the Umar Ibn al-Khattab Mosque. Our friends came to pick us up.

  “The next day we met with the doctor and did a television interview with her. She told me how she was treated when they arrested her and put her in with the whores, insulting and cursing her and how the people guarded the al-Hawrani hospital by forming a human shield around the building so that the security forces couldn’t get in and take away the wounded. Then we met a woman whose husband and son were killed in 1982. She wouldn’t let us film her, so we only recorded her voice.

  She said, ‘In 1982 I was at home with my husband. I didn’t know what was happening inside the city. Everyone was a prisoner in their homes. On 2 February the security forces invaded my home. My husband was holding a radio, listening to the news. He wanted the whole world to know what was happening in Hama. The security forces used the radio to beat my husband over the head until they killed him right there in front of me. My son was twelve. The officer said, ‘Kill him.’ I threw myself at the officer’s feet, begging him to let my son live. On the officer’s jacket pocket I could see the words, ‘Death Squad’. They killed my son in front of me and I stayed in the house with my two small daughters and my youngest son. The officer and the security forces stayed for about two weeks. Every two hours they would raid the house with a new patrol, not just my house but everyone’s. They would beat people up in their own homes. The electricity was disconnected and there was no water. People were starving.