by Samar Yazbek
The second time they came to my house there were only two men instead of three. I had stopped writing and I was trying to reorganize these diaries, trying to recall all the details, but they kept escaping me. The two men were exceedingly polite and I thought it strange that they didn’t look anything like the security forces and the shabbiha that had taken me the first time. They calmly knocked on the door and politely asked me to get dressed. I refused and tried to find out what they wanted, but one of them just shook his head and pointed outside. The second confidently stated, “Madame, we’re going to stay here at the door until you get dressed.” He had said ‘Madame’ with a funny accent, it made me want to laugh, and then turned his back. I could see a pistol at his waist, shoved between his belt and his wine-coloured shirt. Flashing the gun spoke more than words, but the other one said, “The boss is waiting for you.”
I knew what was going to happen, but the idea of going back to that shadowy dungeon and seeing the young men’s mutilated bodies terrified me. I wished they would just arrest me and throw me in with the other prisoners so I could be through with this nightmare, but I knew in that moment that they weren’t going to do that. It would be hard for them if it ever got out that there was an opposition in prison consisting of well-known personalities from the Alawite community. In addition to covering up this issue, it was clear that the officer held a personal vendetta against me. Blind rage – I understand the reason for it and I understand the communal loyalty it stems from. I heard from a relative of Hafiz al-Assad that when he seized power after the military coup in 1970, he imported German officers to train his security services based on their expertise. I know that this officer who takes pleasure in torturing me was the apt pupil of one of those German officers at the time. I thought about how smart Hafiz al-Assad was to employ loyalty-building strategies that would turn his sect into loyal killers who would fight to the death for him and his family. It never once occurred to the father president that his entire sect might not always stand with them. Nevertheless, he managed to create an army of murderers among the ranks of his security apparatus. So much of the information I have about that family and other families seems like the stuff of novels and fictional stories; it was all so strange and scandalously mired in injustice.
I had gone out to al-Rawdeh Street with the two security agents when the man put the blindfold over my eyes. As I tried to figure out where we were headed, the car looped around a few times, driving in a circle and returning to the same spot. Just then I told myself we must still be in the al-Jisr al-Abyad neighbourhood; some people had told me that’s where the senior officer’s office was located. But how could this giant prison so crammed with people be right in the middle of downtown Damascus? I thought perhaps I was mistaken and we were heading towards the Kafr Sousseh roundabout, where all the security branches were located, but I couldn’t be certain where I was exactly. The blindfold was tight around my eyes, and the man held my hands and placed them behind my back, politely saying, “Madame, don’t move your hands.”
I was in the same office as the last time but this wasn’t the same senior officer. Even though I didn’t recognize his rank I knew he couldn’t have been as senior because of the harshness in his eyes. Here’s something I noticed in recent years whenever I was summoned by security: the higher ranking the officer, the nicer they would be; the lower their rank, the more brutal. I thought they must have sent me this lower-ranking officer in order to torture me and I was truly indifferent in front of him. I played my game of turning the details into a novel, staring back at him in order to seem more courageous, but the man didn’t do anything. Three other men came in. They were enormous, staring daggers all over me and they threw onto the ground a young man who was completely naked except for underwear splotched with blood. His body resembled the mutilated bodies of those young men I had seen last time, only he was whimpering. The officer told me, ‘This young man says you help him organize demonstrations.’ I looked at the young man and calmly replied, “That’s not true. The demonstrations don’t need organizers. The people go out without any organization.”
The officer drew near me, staring into my eyes, but I didn’t flinch. I stared right back at him. I stubbornly refused to blink. He hissed, ‘I swear to God I’ll flay your skin from off your bones, you bitch.’ He gestured at the men and the enormous guys came over to me. I was like a rag doll in their hands. One of them tore off my jacket and I was left there in a see-through shirt that barely covered my chest. Still staring at me, he said, ‘Well, Madame, what do you say we start getting undressed?’ I didn’t respond. I kept staring at him with the same cruel stare. The truth of the matter is that I was panicking and I started to feel paralysis creeping up from the soles of my feet, into my heart. I tried not to look at the young whimpering man’s body.
The officer told me, ‘He also says he’s your boyfriend!’ I started to tremble, but I kept staring back at him in the same way. My eyes started to burn. In reality, I was already very shaky even before I came. I was having bizarre spells. I would be wracked by crying fits in the middle of the night, as the images of dead bodies broadcast on television seeped into my dreams, cackling. My daughter with her throat slit from ear to ear and bathed in strange colours flickered in front of my eyes as I awoke. Every bit of news was about murder. It was enough to shake me deep down inside. The sight of a tank would send a tremor through my nerves, the sight of a military roadblock and those truncheons and human masses pouncing on people and beating them.
I couldn’t take it, and so when he stripped me half-naked from the waist up, my body started to convulse. I gathered that the colour of my face had drained to blue, and I felt my teeth start to chatter. I continued staring at him. My body was beyond the nonnegotiable red line; I had such a direct and clear relationship with it that I hadn’t even known about prior to that moment. I am the master of my self, the owner of my body, my body is made for love alone and only love can make it obey, anything else and it will be a silent, unmovable stone. As those two men held me and squeezed my back, the thought of my body being violated made me shudder. He stared into my eyes. At this point I detached from my game of imagination; it was too much for me to go on playing. I could hear the beating of my own heart, and I felt like there were ropes entangling my head. He drew closer to me and I was ready to bite him if he came any closer. He nodded at the two men and, as one of them got closer, I screamed. I felt as though a sharp knife had cleaved my head in two. It was only a few moments, the two men backed away, and I simply fell down on top of that young whimpering man’s body. I crashed into him and he let out a loud yelp I won’t forget as long as I live. It was the last thing I heard before my head split in two and I blacked out.
When I came to, the senior officer was there and the officer who had initially received me was gone. I was lying on a couch, fully dressed, and I could smell blood. When I was finally able to see myself clearly in the mirror, later on at home, I would discover the young man’s blood all over my neck. The senior officer said, ‘See how harsh they can be with a delicate girl like you!’ He glared at me scornfully. I shut my eyes, my headache was killing me and it still felt like there was a knife splitting my head in two. He said, ‘Let your admirers come and see what a tough girl you are!’ Then he let out a resounding laugh.
I was groggy. I didn’t know what was happening but he suddenly picked me up. The earth was spinning all around me and I fell down again. Then I heard him shouting at them to take me home. His shoes passed right by my eyes as I lay there on the ground. I’ll never forget that moment. It’s seared in my mind. His shoes were shiny and hip, but they were flat. I noticed the curvature of his feet as his shoes clipped the tip of my nose on his way out. At that moment I closed my eyes and wept.
I recall that hellish visit as I get ready to move home. My daughter is upset. I was aware of how difficult this was for her, but returning to her grandfather’s house was out of the question. The Alawites who treated me like a traitor would never l
eave her alone, and in Baniyas, where her father lives, the situation was even worse. The Syrian security forces and its websites were urging people to kill me for the crime of inciting people to kill a sniper, this would only expose her to greater hardships. I didn’t say anything about her anger, I tried to make things easier for her but my body was wornout, to the point that while I was packing my bags to go home, I started chronically passing out. This wasn’t easy for me to deal with, especially since my mother was sick and I couldn’t visit to see if she was all right. I shut off my phone and used a new one so they wouldn’t be able to find me. I had cut all my connections, but that was impossible for my daughter. My plan was to go into hiding and work with the young men and women until the regime fell. That was impossible with her around. There was no way to hide when she was with me, and there was no way for me to just leave her to an uncertain destiny. I was at the point of no return but I could not go forward; I was standing there like a silent stone. The idea of leaving the country was the spitting image of my own death. Even though the idea persisted and would soon become a reality, just thinking I was ever going to leave Damascus made me anxious.
Today I sit down to transcribe some testimonies I recorded from my friends, as I try to postpone carrying out my decision to leave Syria.
Stories from Latakia
“On the day of the 26 March massacre in Latakia, my brother and I were coming back at night from the shop where we work. We have to pass through the al-Saliba neighbourhood to get home. Some guys at a checkpoint told us to turn around because there was a demonstration up ahead. We couldn’t tell if they were from the army or military security because they all wear the same clothes more or less. The demonstration wasn’t that far away from us, but at night and from that distance nothing seemed clear. We changed our course as they told us to do, but my brother and I were curious and tried to get closer, hanging out on a street corner not too far from the demonstration. The demonstrators weren’t carrying any weapons. They were chanting, Peaceful! Peaceful! and calling for freedom. The army and the security forces asked the demonstrators to go back, they pushed them away five hundred metres or so. There was a huge army presence and along with the security forces, they formed two continuous roadblocks. When the demonstrators had backed away a little bit, the row of army personnel was suddenly forced down on the ground, twenty soldiers in all, while the second row remained standing. We were stunned to see heavy gunfire directed at the demonstrators, as if they were game and the soldiers were at a shooting range. I saw more than 50 demonstrators get hit. Some were killed and others were wounded; I couldn’t tell which were which. They took the wounded away in trucks and took the dead to some unknown location. They couldn’t see my brother or I. We were in the darkness at the corner. If they had seen us they would have killed us. The cars that took away the dead were Suzukis, and they sped off fast. Then the fire trucks came and their fire cannons sprayed around where the killing had taken place, clearing away the blood. Within an hour the street was back to normal. It seemed weird that the gunfire would be direct, at close range, and aimed at the head and chest.”
I finish transcribing the incident and think about how the demonstrators had been betrayed. Betrayal was the cornerstone of the Syrian regime’s dealings with its own people. They asked them to back away 500 metres while the murderers were protected by a first row of security forces and then they opened fire. How shameful. How despicable to kill unarmed and peaceful people in such a cowardly manner. As I transcribed the stories about the uprising, I also draw strength from them.
Story #2
“During the first demonstrations in Latakia, Alawites came out alongside Sunnis. At the Umar Ibn Khattab Mosque on Antakya Street, there were hundreds of us committed to nonviolent demonstrations and we refused to let even a single demonstrator carry a rock. We chanted, Peacefully, Peacefully, No Alawites and No Sunnis! Some figures from the Alawite community were in the lead and at the Shaykh Daher statue we were met by the shabbiha who started cursing us and pelting us with rocks. Up until that point there had not been any direct contact. During that time somebody informed a group in the al-Saliba neighbourhood and in al-Skantouri that the Alawites were killing Sunnis. I think it was one of the shabbiha, or one of their helpers in al-Saliba. At that point, a group of thugs from the al-Saliba and al-Skantouri neighbourhoods showed up and ransacked the stores. There was heavy gunfire. Four people died, and for your information, neither the police nor the security forces ever came near the people, who continued chanting, Freedom, Freedom, until some giants with bulging muscles showed up. We all knew they were shabbiha and that they were the ones who opened fire. That was before the four demonstrators were killed, when the al-Saliba and al-Skantouri group took out their knives and started stabbing the police with them. I saw with my own eyes how those knives scraped off flesh.
“The sectarian tension seemed very high in Baniyas, Jableh and Latakia. The shabbiha would stir things up by going to Sunni neighbourhoods and shouting sectarian slurs as they passed through. They found willing ears among some people while others responded in kind with sectarian slogans of their own, which all took place while the men from al-Skantouri and the Palestinian camp of al-Ramel and the al-Saliba neighbourhood would use their knives to attack anyone they saw, without distinguishing between security forces and demonstrators. I can assure you that the situation was not sectarian at the beginning of the protest movement, because I saw with my own eyes a man named Ayyub from the Alawite community stand up to address the demonstrators, ‘I’m an Alawite and I’m participating in the demonstrations. I’m against the regime; they forced me from my home for many years. We are a single nation.’”
The man’s testimony ends here, and I know deep down what these words mean, because this was one of scores of testimonies that I collected about the participation of some ordinary Alawites at the beginning of the protest movement and how they were brutally repressed by the regime and its supporters.
Story #3
My neighbour, a volunteer in the security forces, told me about this incident.
He says: “During the siege of Jisr al-Shughur, the bombardment was violent, things got all confused and I no longer knew what I was supposed to do. Suddenly I was all alone amidst the rubble and I started running, trying to hide my identity. I was sure that if the people captured me they were going to kill me. I believed the armed gangs actually existed and that they wanted to slaughter and kill us all. I entered one of the alleyways and tried to disappear down one of the paths. I saw a man and I hid who I was from him, but the man knew I wasn’t from around there. He had a beard and dust all over him, and he was holding a bag in his hand. I later discovered that he was delivering some food to his family. I stood there before him, weaponless. I was wounded in the foot and limping. The man approached me and asked, ‘Are you with security?’ I said yes, and waited there to die. He calmly said, ‘Come with me.’ I followed him inside his house. There was a spare room where he cleaned my wounds, put on some bandages and then looked at me, saying, ‘We aren’t animals, and I know you’re not a killer.’ He left the room and came back a little later with another man. The two of them talked amongst themselves, saying that if I stayed there people might take revenge on me, that even though it was unlikely, I wouldn’t be safe there. ‘What do you think about crossing the border pretending to be my cousin?’ I was speechless as he handed me his ID and said, ‘Use this to cross over until things are safe for you, you can send it back to me later.’ I didn’t know what to say. First he saves me and now he wants me to save myself while he stays behind in Jisr al- Shughur. He told me he’d join up with me in a few days, and he gave me his phone number so I could call him. They took me to a secure location but I never crossed the border. I gave him back his cousin’s ID and thanked him. When I got home to Latakia, they asked me what had happened to me, and I told them simply that I blacked out and suddenly found myself someplace I didn’t recognize.”
The man in the story left his
house and disappeared. His neighbours no longer see him. The neighbours say he was killed but I know he’s hiding out for fear that the security forces are going to kill him. He told me as much:
“I won’t participate anymore in what’s happening, those people were kind to me and saved my life, despite the fact that the man who gave me his cousin’s ID was with the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Story #4
“A man from the military security in Latakia came and told the Alawites in the al-Hammam neighbourhood near Basnada that the Sunnis had attacked their daughters at the Qaninas School, and so the people rose up and attacked the school, frightened and in a panic. There was a big commotion as tens of cars showed up and surrounded the school. The people took sticks and savagely attacked the school. The girls screamed and the teaching staff fled, but not a single Sunni was inside the school. After hours of recrimination and shouting and beating with sticks between the people and the teachers, the people came back with their daughters, and one of the girls’ relatives came back after taking his daughter home, his blood still boiling in anger, and told the security agent who had been in touch with the group of shabbiha at the entrance to the neighbourhood, ‘It isn’t true, there was no reason to frighten the people.’ The security forces and the shabbiha surrounded him and shouted at the man, ‘Go home before I have all of you arrested!’”
Story #5
“A citizen of Latakia was coming home from his fiancée’s house when he got stopped by a military checkpoint and told to get out of the taxi. Although he swore to them on his highest honour that he hadn’t taken part in any demonstration, they became furious with him, beat him violently and cursed him anyway, telling him, ‘You don’t love the president, you dog!’ He replied angrily, ‘I don’t love injustice, but I swear to God that I was just going to my fiancée’s house.’ They threw him down on the ground and stamped on him. They beat him in middle of the street and then arrested him. In prison they tortured him violently until he confessed to them what they wanted him to say. He is still incarcerated today.”