It was too late to get a ride to Jisr al-Shughour that night. He remembered that one of his cousins lived in the Qaboun neighborhood of Damascus, so he hailed a micro. It was stopped at a checkpoint manned by men in civilian clothing. They asked for IDs. When they saw Mohammad’s ten-day-old beard and noted that he was from Jisr al-Shughour, they ordered him out. “He’s one of the terrorists! He’s here to make trouble!” he remembered them saying. One of the men had keys to a realtor’s office in a nearby building. Mohammad was hauled in. A mukhabarat officer arrived. Mohammad told him he’d left Palestine Branch about an hour earlier. He pointed to his unlaced shoes and held up his indigo-dyed finger, stained with the ink used to sign his confession. The officer called Palestine Branch, confirmed Mohammad’s story, apologized, and left. Then the others arrived, from three different intelligence agencies.
It was well past midnight before Mohammad was allowed to continue the few kilometers to his cousin’s home in Qaboun. The next morning, he headed to the village outside Jisr al-Shughour. His father told him that Political Security in Latakia was already asking after him. So were other branches. He felt choked and caged, like his old neighbor Abu Ammar. He would not be free until the regime was brought down, but demonstrations would not threaten it; only violence would. He sneaked into southern Turkey along routes he had used with Abu Ammar’s sons, bought a pump-action rifle with money he’d borrowed from his cousin in Qaboun, and then later a Kalashnikov. In the weeks that followed, he worked on the fears of a number of young men who’d participated in protests in the area. He pushed them to carry arms he secured from Turkey. “I wanted to implicate them,” he said years later. “We all knew people who were detained and slept for fifteen years just because they knew somebody who was Brotherhood, so they knew what it meant to be considered involved. By protesting, we had become like the Brotherhood, we felt we would be treated the same. I wanted them to think this so that they would carry weapons later.” Mohammad convinced five men. I knew them all.
ABU AZZAM
In early 2011, before Suleiman filmed a protest, while Mohammad was still imprisoned, Mohammad Daher, better known as Abu Azzam, was a fourth-year Arabic literature student at Homs’s Al-Baath University. At twenty-eight, he was one of the older students in class. His education interrupted by the responsibilities of being an eldest son taking on his late father’s role as breadwinner in a family of six, and eleven “invitations to tea” from the mukhabarat that sometimes led to incarcerations. His first invitation was in high school. He missed exams because he was behind bars and had to repeat the year. He also missed his father’s funeral in 2006. Abu Azzam worked in Lebanon after his father’s death, polishing floor tiles and doing odd jobs at construction sites for $10 a day, but he longed to return to a classroom.
Abu Azzam was from eastern Syria, from the sunburned tribal plains of Tabqa, near Raqqa, a rural man studying in Syria’s third-largest city. He was the first of his family to enter a university, although he came from a line of men and women whose letters were learned in the grand oral tradition of Arabic poetry. He grew up listening to maternal relatives deliver recitals in the rich classical tongue of a language steeped in chameleonic words. He was entranced by the playful sparring of poets at social gatherings, and he longed to be one. He learned the musicality of meter, how to lob puns and jabs in witty prose, and he began writing poetry in the seventh grade, garnering some local acclaim. When he was in his teens, he won a national poetry competition but wasn’t permitted to advance to the pan-Arab (regional) level because he was not a member of the Baath Party. The rebuke was the first of many at recitals. He remembered the winning poem and years later could still recite some of its many verses:
A child, whose soul is caressed by smiles,
and whose tears swell easily in prayer.
My features are as pale as autumn,
I am but a mirror reflecting your faces.
I reside within the jinns’ palaces,
share the same meals.
Love and prayer join us.
I suffer the fever of the fragile,
I suffer the fever of letters.
From within a thousand wheat spears
I receive but a flake.
O, poem, I came to you an invader
with me are my weapons; a quill and ink
And I crossed over
the other poets behind me
I returned alone
for the rest had passed away
I am the poem’s prophet
who preached in my beliefs
what the eraser inscribes
And I am at their throats, a scream
I crossed out all its letters with screams
I am the Euphrates
I came beneath a cloak of two willows
I throw my stick
How hell’s seas and ruins
are suffering beneath their brutal leaders
His mother’s family infused him with its poetic heritage, his father instructed him in religion. Abu Azzam was raised in the Sufi tradition by an ascetic parent who had no interest in what he considered the “pollution of politics.” His father focused on peaceful contemplation and religious texts about prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, and ritual purification. Although Abu Azzam’s father was not a mosque preacher, he ran a small after-school workshop from home for the neighborhood children and his own. By the time Abu Azzam started high school, he said he could not only recite hundreds of Hadiths (sayings of the Prophet Mohammad) but also identify the book and page number for a specific Hadith.
His solid religious instruction, and the fact that one of his uncles was in Sednaya Military Prison after fighting in Iraq, cycled Abu Azzam in and out of mukhabarat branches on suspicion of being a Salafi. He wasn’t—yet. As an adult, Abu Azzam would define himself as a Salafi, but not a Salafi Jihadi whose violence-tainted ideology he despised. He also smoked and shook hands with women, activities from which many Salafis refrained. Apart from that one uncle (a poet Abu Azzam described as “a fanatic,” who was killed in Sednaya), none of his other relatives were Salafis. In fact, they opposed them.
Abu Azzam grew up in a family that resented the authorities, especially his mother’s side—tribal landowners who were stripped of their holdings by the Baath. Abu Azzam had also learned to fear the mukhabarat state. Its interrogations had left his abdomen a mess of linear scars, each between an inch and two inches long, inflicted by razors.
When protests erupted in the southern city of Daraa, Abu Azzam was bedridden, recovering from days-old surgery for a herniated disc he said he had sustained during violent interrogations two months earlier in prison. He was treated in Damascus and returned to Homs, where he watched the televised revolts elsewhere in the Middle East and, like Suleiman, didn’t think they would reach Syria, let alone take root. He didn’t even think the Daraa protest would extend much beyond the city. But he hoped it would.
When the people of Homs took to the streets in March 2011, Abu Azzam joined them. He hobbled “like a toddler,” aided by friends to join protests in Baba Amr, a Sunni working-class neighborhood near his university campus. He enviously watched men jumping and dancing around him. His back injury limited his participation to clapping and chanting.
Abu Azzam was a tank of a man, if that tank were made of something soft. His tanned complexion was dominated by a nose shaped like the flat tip of an arrow. It pointed to full lips framed by a wispy black beard that curled around his jawline. He smiled easily and often—a wide, straight-toothed grin that took up most of his round face. His friends at university nicknamed him “The Sheikh” because of his solid religious education and calm demeanor. It stuck, no matter how many times he told them he wasn’t a preacher. He lived near the university campus, Bedouin-style—no fixed address, rotating among a handful of apartments and rooming with other men from eastern Syria, including Bandar, a floppy-haired jokester whose mother was related to Abu Azzam’s mother.
Bandar was a few years younger and many tim
es louder than Abu Azzam. He was also a fourth-year language major, but he chose English instead of Arabic. As with Abu Azzam’s maternal family, Bandar was from a tribal clan (on his father’s side) that mourned March 8, 1963, as the day the Baath seized power and they lost their land. “We grew up knowing who took it,” he once said. “It was our neighbors. We are all Sunnis in the village, it wasn’t about religion.” He remembered several older people, “when they were close to death,” asking forgiveness from his family for taking their land. Despite his hatred of the regime, Bandar did not join the protests. He didn’t see the point. “Our country is different,” he used to say. “Here, they kill people and nobody asks about it. Forget all this human rights nonsense, it doesn’t apply to us. This regime won’t fall without a war or a foreign invasion.” Abu Azzam paid him no heed. He continued to take to the streets, week after week in Baba Amr, as security forces shot into crowds, cordoned and shelled neighborhoods, raided homes, and held hundreds incommunicado, turning a defiant Homs—a city whose people were renowned for their humor and lightheartedness and for being the butt of jokes—into “the capital of the revolution.”
Baba Amr, in particular, was targeted for reprisal. The regime considered it a terrorist haven. Abu Azzam remembered hearing gunfire from a home where he was staying, a few hundred meters away from Baba Amr across the railroad tracks. “People were being shot and I was sitting there listening to them die,” he said. “I couldn’t accept it. I was no better than those being killed, so I decided to go inside [to the Baba Amr neighborhood] and do whatever I could.” He recalled something his father taught him as a child, the words of an ancient Sufi master: Whoever stays silent about the truth is a mute devil. It cemented his decision.
He moved to Baba Amr in April and stayed with a group of men who talked of arming to protect themselves and demonstrators, especially after the so-called Clock Tower Massacre on April 19, 2011. The day before that incident, a sea of protesters gathered around Clock Tower Square after a mass funeral for fourteen demonstrators. They renamed it “Freedom Square” and vowed to remain until Assad fell. It was the first organized attempted sit-in, but the regime would not cede a public space and allow a Syrian version of Egypt’s Tahrir Square or Tunisia’s Avenue Bourguiba. Between 2 and 3 a.m., government forces killed and detained an unknown number of people and then hosed down the square as though nothing had happened. Grainy video from that night showed people running from the Clock Tower and the deafening sound of sustained gunfire. “Fuck you and your president!” screamed a young man within view of the soldiers. Others held up spent cartridges as proof the soldiers were firing live rounds. It was a turning point in the struggle for Homs, although years later some of the men present that night would admit that claims of a massacre were exaggerated, even fabricated, by rebel activists to garner sympathy.
After the incident, a bald tobacco trader from Baba Amr named Ahmad Da’bool, who smuggled cigarettes from Iraq, added a few rifles to his inventory, donating them to young men in his neighborhood in early May. There weren’t enough to go around. Abu Azzam, as an outsider, wasn’t offered one. He volunteered to cook for the small group of armed men and do their laundry. Bandar, meanwhile, focused on the three subjects he needed to graduate. He feared retribution if he participated—not against himself, but his family. “Our regime doesn’t arrest one person,” he said. “It punishes his entire family.”
One of Abu Azzam’s friends, a protester snatched from Clock Tower Square, was returned to his family a disfigured corpse, his face burnt, his body marked with gaping wounds. Abu Azzam was horrified—he had never seen such injuries. He decided he would not let that happen to him or to anyone he knew, if he could help it. He went home to Tabqa to check on his family and to buy a gun. “In my heart, I returned to say good-bye to them,” he said. On Friday, April 22, the day Syria’s revolutionaries dubbed their nationwide protests “Great Friday,” in honor of Easter, Abu Azzam was detained near his hometown. At least seventy-five demonstrators were killed across Syria that day, making it the bloodiest to date. With time, triple-digit daily death tolls would become the norm. The tanks rolled into Homs while Abu Azzam was behind bars.
On May 29, 2011, soon after he was released from prison, the poet bought a Chinese Type 56 Kalashnikov and slipped back into Baba Amr. He would not leave it again until he was forced to do so. Abu Azzam would become a commander in an army of young men who hadn’t wanted to be soldiers, in a group that would call itself the Farouq Battalions. It would be among the strongest in an emerging franchise outfit known as the Free Syrian Army.
RUHA
The knocking was angry and urgent. Ruha sunk deeper under the bedcovers in her grandmother’s room. The nine-year-old didn’t want to answer the door. She heard water splashing in the adjacent bathroom. Her grandmother, Zahida, was performing ablutions before dawn prayers. Ruha often slept with her (she liked her electric blanket) instead of in the coral-pink bedroom she shared with her eight-year-old sister, Alaa, in another part of the family complex. Zahida, a widow, was heavyset and moved with difficulty, slowed by illness and her eight decades. She asked Ruha to see who was making a racket outside. Half asleep, the gangly fourth grader rubbed her eyes as she approached the heavy metal door with yellow fiberglass paneling. “Who is there?” Nobody answered, so she cracked it open.
She saw a wall of guns and military camouflage. Her gaze fell on two men in civilian clothing, the informers—fasafees or awayniyeh, as they were called—their identities concealed behind balaclavas. “Where’s your father?” one of them shouted. Before she could answer, her mother, Manal, raced toward her, shielding her eldest daughter behind her back as the column of men stormed into their home. “Where’s your husband? He’s fled, hasn’t he?”
Manal told them he wasn’t there. Ruha retreated to her grandmother’s living room, steps from the front door. Ruha was from an upper-middle-class family in Saraqeb, a town of forty thousand in Idlib Province’s agricultural heartland. The family owned and farmed great swaths of flat, cinnamon-colored earth that unfurled beyond the concrete clusters of their hometown. They planted fields of wheat that Ruha was sure continued forever. The little girl loved the farm, especially cucumber season. She liked plucking the small ones the family pickled onsite and sold commercially.
She crept to a window. She was tall enough not to need to stand on tiptoes to see through it. It looked onto the rectangular open-air inner courtyard that anchored her family’s residential complex. She watched the uniforms infiltrate her home, their heavy black boots stomping across the tiled courtyard where she played with her sister Alaa, five-year-old brother Mohammad, and two-year-old sister Tala. She lived in the kind of traditional Levantine residence built for extended families with money. It had a basement and four wings—more like separate apartments—radiating from the courtyard. Her grandmother lived in a three-room section at the front of the complex. Ruha, her parents, and her siblings were to the right. To the left, a gate led to the home of her eldest paternal uncle, Mohammad, and his wife, Noora. It had its own smaller outdoor enclosure, a courtyard within the courtyard, a marble and stone fountain at its heart, climbing jasmine and rose bushes, citrus trees, and grapevines. The fourth and oldest living space was a communal lounge the family called “the cellar” because of its vaulted arched ceiling and thick stone walls. Nobody could remember which generation built it.
Ruha hoped her mother was telling the truth and her father was not home. She was wide awake now, her heart like a breathless bird trapped in her chest. “They’re going to take Baba. I won’t see my father. That’s it, he won’t come back.” She feared they might take her mother, too, the way she was shadowing the men as they slammed closets, looked under beds, and rummaged through every room. Were her siblings still asleep? If they were awake, were they as scared as she was? Her grandmother prayed aloud for her youngest, favorite son: “Dear God, let Maysaara be safe. Dear God, let Maysaara be safe.”
The light of day changed, the
storm of military camouflage dissipated. Ruha’s father, Maysaara, thirty-nine, was at a friend’s house, making plans and placards for that week’s protest. He was on his way home when he saw truckloads of security men entering his street. He spun his car around and called his wife Manal, then warned his brother Osama, a doctor who did not live in the family complex. It was too late for Osama.
The dawn raid across Saraqeb on May 1, 2011, netted thirty-eight people, including four of Ruha’s uncles—three on her mother’s side and her paternal uncle Osama. Her grandmother let out a shriek when she learned he’d been taken. Zahida was hard of hearing but somehow always managed to hear anything about her seven daughters and three sons. Ruha usually chuckled at her grandmother’s selective auditory perception, but there was nothing to laugh about that morning.
The little girl’s fears shifted to her uncles. She’d heard the adults talk about people killed and tortured in detention. If her uncles survived, would she be able to see them in prison, the way she’d visited her maternal grandfather in 2010? She didn’t know why her grandfather was jailed in Damascus, just that he looked older and thinner behind bars. She wondered but didn’t ask. The subject made her mother cry.
Her grandfather was arrested on July 27, 2010, after he was overheard complaining about the cost of living and criticizing corruption. He was “invited to coffee” at 9:30 that night by one of the security branches. He didn’t return home. The charges against him, filed in a criminal court, included weakening national morale, undermining the state, and—most hurtful to the old man, an avowed secularist—inciting sectarian strife. He was released on bail from Damascus Central Prison in Adra on June 7, 2011. After attending the next court hearing in September, he skipped the following one in November and went into hiding. He was sentenced in absentia to ten years.
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