by Samar Yazbek
“We got orders to head for the neighbourhood,” he said. “Orders to attack an armed gang there. The orders came directly to us. Agents from the air force mukhabarat station were there with us. Twenty agents and I went. As soon as we entered the neighbourhood we came under fire. There was a small room off to our left, and even though we were sneaking in under cover of darkness they were able to ambush us. I sensed something suspicious going on. It was the third time they had gone to attack the armed gangs, and suddenly we’re caught in an ambush. This always seemed to happen just before Friday. It was Thursday night and we had to be back in Homs by morning to deal with the demonstrators. There was a real battle, a battle of life and death. Every member of the armed gang except for one died. Three of my comrades were killed. Their injuries were all direct hits to the head and chest. Until that moment, the task as far as I was concerned was to get rid of Salafi armed gangs that wanted to kill all Alawites, but several things happened right in front of us. We were sitting ducks for those gangs that always managed to appear and open fire on us wherever we were.”
Even more importantly, he added, his veins bulging out of his neck, “Every time we captured someone from that gang the air force mukhabarat would take him away immediately. Except last time, one of the prisoners was right there in front of me, he was supposedly a member of the gang, but when he fell into the hands of one of the agents who pointed the barrel of his gun at him, he started crying and screaming and blathering. He peed his pants, and when the higher-ranking officer from the air force mukhabarat, whose name I won’t reveal, showed up. He took care of him personally and, as he did, someone escorting the officer, a security agent, shot the prisoner in the head, at which point I became certain of one thing: We were just bait. How that happened, though, I have no idea. It seemed we had fallen into a trap, and after seeing our comrades killed by armed gangs we would be even more aggressive with the demonstrators the following day. The whole thing was very strange, like everything they had told us was a lie. I have no idea who the people going out for demonstrations are. We in the army are completely cut off from the outside world, but I knew for a fact the officer killed that prisoner because he was afraid of what he might say. All these things pushed me to shoot myself the following Wednesday. I waited for the gunfire to come raining down on us as we advanced, and that’s what actually happened. In those moments when life and death were one and the same, while everyone else was distracted, I opened fire. I’ve been home now for a month and a half, and I hope this nightmare will be over before I’m forced to go back into that hell…”
As he says ‘that hell’, something inside of me jolts, because now someone else is uttering the same word I repeat on a daily basis.
Hell…
Hell…
After finishing up his testimony, I continue getting ready to leave.
I’ll leave behind a whole raft of small issues.
I’ll leave behind my anger at all the intellectuals who remain silent in the face of this killing, at their cowardice and fear.
I’ll leave the door in my heart open onto death and open the door of life for my daughter. That’s exactly what I am going to do: walk resolutely towards death. Leaving Syria means death and nothing else. It means shedding my skin, casting away my heart and everything I ever wanted to do.
My mind was hazy as I packed my bags, I must have folded my clothes a thousand times. Throwing away everything behind me, letting my daughter walk her own path, hiding inside the night in order to become whatever I want.
For the first time I really must not become what I don’t want.
To become whatever I want – such a simple phrase, but it can limit one’s life: who among us is actually what we want to be?
Writing these last words I resolve not to return to these pages until I can turn my diaries into a book. I’d never be able to do that in Syria; if I could, I would just stay. I will pack my bags and zip them up, closing along with them so many horrifying secrets I witnessed and that have happened to me. I am afraid for them to be revealed. I am afraid for my family and for my daughter. I know I am panicking, that is an accurate description of what is happening. That’s the way I have been throughout the past few months. I have been alone, and more and more I realize just how very alone I have been, how even some of my friends would be willing to walk over my dead body in order to make their loved ones look better.
I don’t like to talk about heroic deeds. Heroism is an illusion. Sure, I was panicked, but through that panic I learned how to cultivate a dark patch in my heart, a zone no one can reach, one that remains fixed, where not even death can penetrate. All the trials and torments, which I had once thought worthless, would make me a stronger woman; but they weren’t enough to make me the kind of woman who could just calmly go on living while such shameful acts crash down on people all around her. As with every major turning point in my life, and in spite of all my panic, I was positive that if I were to travel back through time I would have done exactly the same thing, even if some serious mistakes that were made from the beginning of the uprising could have been avoided, mistakes that rendered me and what I was doing visible to so many people.
Now I can say, along with so many others:
Fire scalds. Fire purifies. Fire either reduces you to ash or burnishes you. In the days to come I expect to live in ashes or else to see my shiny new mirror.
Notes
1 Bouthaina Shaaban is a political and media adviser to President Bashar al-Assad who became one of the chief mouthpieces of the regime during the uprising. Shaaban was the recipient of emails from a New York-based public relations guru who advised al-Assad on effective ways to handle his upcoming December 2011 interview with Barbara Walters that were subsequently hacked and leaked to the media.
2 The largest market in Syria, the Souk al-Hamidiyyeh in Damascus dates to the late Ottoman period and is named after Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909).
3 Derived from the Arabic word for ghost, the term shabbiha (s. shabih) is a Syrian colloquialism that refers to 1) thugs or henchmen who are considered the regime’s staunchest defenders and most terrifying manifestations, willing to defend the interests and reputation of the regime against opposition by any means of violence and intimidation; and 2) organized crime syndicates that operate with relative impunity throughout the country, but particularly the “Alawite territory” of the northwest.
4 Bashar al-Assad (b. 1965) is the second child of Aniseh (n.e Makhlouf) and Hafiz al-Assad and the current President of the Syrian Arab Republic. His older brother Bassel (b. 1962) was the heir apparent to the presidency, but when he died in a tragic car accident in 1994 Bashar immediately cut short his ophthalmology post-graduate training in London and returned to Syria in order to be groomed for military and public service; after Hafiz al-Assad died on 10 June 2000, he acceded to the presidency in July.
5 “J’envoyais au diable les palmes des martyrs, les rayons de l’art, l’orgueil des inventeurs, l’ardeur des pillards; je retournais à l’Orient et à la sagesse première et éternelle.” Rimbaud, A Season in Hell/Une saison en enfer & The Drunken Boat/Le bateau ivre trans. Louise Varèse (New York: New Directions, 2011 [1945]), 70–71. Reprinted with permission.
6 Known as Nusayris, after the eponymous founder of this esoteric Shiite sect, Abu Shu‘ayb Muhammad ibn Nusayr al-‘Abdi al-Bakri al-Numayri a.k.a Muhammad Ibn Nusayr (died circa 874), until the French Mandate period (1920–1946), the Alawites (also Alawis/Alaouites) are a heterodox offshoot of Shiite Islam, presently constituting approximately 10–12% of the Syrian population. The community in Syria was historically concentrated in the mountainous and coastal regions of the northwest.
7 Saadallah al-Jabiri (1893–1947) was a political notable from Aleppo who co-founded the National Bloc and twice served as Prime Minister of Syria, appointed for the first time by President Shukri al-Quwwatli in 1943. He remained involved in elite Syrian politics until his death in 1947.
8 Shukri al-Quwwatli (189
2–1967) was a nationalist politician from Damascus and the first President of Syrian Arab Republic (1943–1949); he became President of Syria again in 1955 and retired from public office in 1958.
9 Kafr Qasim is a Palestinian village located just inside the Green Line in Israel that was placed under Israeli military government along with all Palestinian citizens of Israel from 1949–1966. On 29 October 1956, amid Israeli military maneuvers during the Suez crisis, Israeli border police acting under the command of the Israeli Defense Forces carried out a military strike that killed nearly fifty innocent civilians. The massacre is now officially commemorated as such in Israel. Lebanese filmmaker Burhan Alaouie directed Kafr Qasim (1974), a feature film based on the Kafr Qasim massacre.
10 Hafiz al-Assad (1930–2000) was born into an Alawite family in the village of Qardaha in the province of Latakia. After a military career that included flying in the air force and serving as Minister of Defense in Ba‘thist administrations following the 8 March 1963 revolution, Hafiz and a faction of supporters seized power through a “correctionist movement” in November 1970. Over the following three decades, he consolidated power in the executive branch and dramatically expanded the size of the armed forces and the security apparatus. He died in 2000 and is buried in a mausoleum in Qardaha, along with his son Bassel (d. 1994).
11 The mukhabarat (also istikhbarat) are the intelligence services or secret police. In Syria, the mukhabarat are divided into upwards of fifteen divisions, each under a separate personalized command. Under Hafiz al-Assad, the security apparatus ballooned into a force as numerous and more powerful than the national armed forces; manpower estimates are sketchy, but range to as many as several hundred thousand.
12 Rifaat al-Assad (b. 1937) is the younger brother of former Syrian president Hafiz al-Assad and currently resides outside of the country. In addition to heading up the internal security forces and the “Defense Brigades” (saraya al-difa‘), he is most infamous for being one of the commanding generals who oversaw the Syrian military operation against the city of Hama in February 1982 that led to the decimation of the city and the death of more than 15,000–20,000 people.
13The Ba‘th (lit. resurrection or renaissance) party is formally known as the Arab Ba‘th Socialist Party (Hizb al-ba‘th al-‘arabi al-ishtiraki) and was founded in 1947 by Michel ‘Aflaq and Salah al-Din Baytar, two schoolteachers at the renowned Tajhiz secondary school in Damascus who had studied at the Sorbonne in Paris during the 1930s. Inspired by Romantic European nationalism and pan-Arab nationalism, from the early 1960s the guiding ideological principles of the party have been Arab unity, liberty and socialism.
14 Maher al-Assad (b. 1967) is the younger brother of Bashar al- Assad, head of the Republican Guard and commander of the Fourth Armored Division of the Syrian army.
15 The Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) is a state media organization.
16 A maternal cousin to Bashar al-Assad, Hafiz Makhlouf (b. 1975) is a colonel in the Syrian army, a senior officer at the General Security Directorate and the brother of Syrian telecom mogul Rami Makhlouf.
17Syrian Vice-President until 2005, Abd al-Halim Khaddam (b. 1932) was forced out of the government and into exile, from where he has been attempting to direct various groups in opposition to the current regime.
18 Fawwaz al-Assad (b.1962) is the son of Hafiz al-Assad’s younger brother Jamil al-Assad (1933–2004). The European Union placed sanctions on him in 2011 due to his suspected involvement in organizing and providing material support to the shabbiha in Syria.
19 Between the end of World War I and 1922, the Alawite territory in northwestern Syria was ruled under an autonomous administration. Attached to French Mandate Syria in 1922, the French renamed the territory L’Etat des Alaouites (The Alawite State) in 1925 and then the Gouvernement de Lattakia in 1930 before the province was formally incorporated into Syria.
20 Abu Muhammad ibn Yusuf al-Makzun al-Sinjari (d. 1240) is a minor Alawite folk hero who is said to have traveled from Iraq to Syria in the early 13th century in order to help unify the sect against local Kurdish rivals.
21 al-Husayn ibn Hamdan al-Khasibi (died circa 957–969) was a traditionist – i.e. a muhaddith, or transmitter of traditions or sayings of the Prophet Muhammad – as well as the main transmitter of Nusayri tradition after the death of the eponymous founder of the Nusayriyya, Muhammad ibn Nusayr (died circa 874); the Nusayris were labeled extremist Shiites (ghulat) who would come to be known as the ‘Alawiyya or the Alawites under French Mandate rule (1920–1946).
22 The Ikhwan al-Safa (Brethren of Purity) are authors of an eponymous 13th century collection of letters that is an important medieval literary source and thought to have been penned by adherents to Isma‘ilism, another esoteric Shiite variant. Their inclusion in Alawite sacred history may be attributable to the erroneous conflation of Isma‘ilism and Nusayriyya/‘Alawiyya by Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) in a well-known yet highly controversial and sectarian fatwa (non-binding opinion) against the Nusayris.
23 Born in the town of Kufa (present-day Iraq), Abu al-Tayyib Ahmad ibn al-Husayn al-Mutanabbi (d. 965) is perhaps the most acclaimed Arab poet of all time.
24 Al-Nakba (lit. the catastrophe) Day commemorates the Palestinian catastrophe of dispossession that accompanied and resulted from the establishment of the state of Israel on 15 May 1948, and the ensuing conflict that led to the dispersion of some 700,000 Palestinians. On 15 May 2011, thousands of Palestinians and Syrians attempted to hop over fences near Majdal Shams in the northern Golan Heights and several people were killed when Israeli forces opened fire.
25 baltajiyyeh is derived from an Ottoman Turkish term for “axewielder” that refers to hired thugs; it is more commonly used in Egypt and North Africa.
26 It is common in many Mediterranean cultures for intimate family members to address each other reciprocally by the same term, so a mother (Mama) will call her son or daughter “Mama” and a father (Baba) will call his son or daughter “Baba.”
27 Jamil al-Assad (1933–2004) was the third brother after Hafiz and Rifaat, who played a somewhat lesser role in politics.
28 Free Virgin Women (al-hara’ir) is a term that is derived from the same root as the Arabic word for freedom. The term does not appear in the Qur’an and is rarely cited in compendiums of hadith (Prophetic sayings), including the following attested by Ibn Maja (d. 887) in chapter 8 of his Kitab al-nikah (Book of Marriage): “Whosoever wishes to meet God in purity should marry a free virgin woman.” However, the term appears commonly in Islamic legal and juristic writing (my thanks to Michael Cook for clarifying this). Since the outbreak of the Syrian uprising a women’s group loosely affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood has emerged, calling themselves al-Hara’ir.
29 Ibrahim al-Qashoush was a poet and singer from Hama who wrote and performed a number of important protest songs during the first few months of the revolution. His throat was slit and his body was dumped into the Orontes River in Hama on 4 July 2011.
30 The Day of Return (yawm al-‘awda) is another name for al- Nakba Day, emphasizing the persistent Palestinian collective and individual rights of return to their homes and their land.
Translator’s Afterword
When the first buds of the ‘Arab spring’ sprouted in Syria, there were many skeptics regarding the prospect for the country to experience peaceful political transformation. Meanwhile, ordinary Syrians rejected the baseless notion that they were somehow incapable or unworthy of the same mobilization, hopefulness and sense of possibility that was sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa. Although sporadic protests took place throughout Syria in January and February 2011, including at least one instance of a man setting himself on fire in al-Qamishli – most likely a direct echo of the iconic Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi – it was only after several attempts to organize collective “days of rage” demonstrations in February that mass mobilizations were successfully carried out simultaneously in multiple Syrian cities on 15 March 2011.
Over the
ensuing months – the first four of which Samar Yazbek evocatively documents in her riveting diaries – the Syrian people sprang into action. During these heady early days, young and old Syrian men and women from across the political spectrum demanded the rights to life, liberty and dignity, building upon previously-existing civil society institutions but also, almost miraculously, organizing themselves into new kinds of affinity groups and associations, which eventually took the form of the local coordination committees. Many activists dared to dream big, envisioning their “Syria of tomorrow” – a post-authoritarian Syria where fear of arbitrary harassment, arrest or worse would melt into the stuff of memory, and some version of direct democracy might become possible.
Syria had been ruled by a single-party regime held together by durable interlocking alliances between the army, the Ba‘th Party, the state bureaucracy and – increasingly since 16 November 1970, when a clique surrounding then Defense Minister Hafiz al-Assad seized power in a relatively bloodless coup d’état or “correctionist movement” – a substantial paramilitary force encompassing some fifteen separate divisions of the security apparatus.
In the wake of his brother Bassel’s untimely death in a car accident in 1994, Bashar al-Assad, an ophthalmologist then pursuing post-graduate training in London, returned to Syria. Shortly after the death of Hafiz al-Assad on 10 June 2000, Bashar somewhat awkwardly and hesitantly inherited the reins of power. Many Syrians hoped this would be a meaningful turning point in the country’s political history as well as in the spheres of economy, society and culture. To a certain extent, this proved to be the case. During the first several years under Bashar al-Assad, Syria witnessed substantial economic growth, apparent political liberalization and gradual cultural opening. However, the so-called Damascus Spring of 2000– 2001 and further attempts to unify forces in the political opposition through the Damascus Declaration in late 2005 were effectively stamped out as Syria found itself traversing more and more unstable local and regional circumstances. Despite occasional proposals to shake things up including the unveiling of a five-year plan based on the principle of a Social Market Economy in 2005 and other minor adjustments, by the late 2000s it became increasingly clear that the regime would only ever condone political and economic transformation in Syria in the guise of gradual reform managed from above.