No Turning Back

by Rania Abouzeid

  This time, Ruha knew why her uncles were in trouble, and why the security forces wanted her father. They were all serial protesters. The men had participated in every demonstration since Saraqeb’s first, on March 25, 2011, just ten days into the uprising. It had been a small affair, no more than a few dozen men who walked, faces uncovered, from a mosque partway down the main commercial street, chanting, “No fear after today!” Ruha remembered how excited her father was when he returned home, how his words tumbled out. He was doing something to help Syria move forward, he told her, to secure people’s rights. She knew that meant he was against the authorities.

  She glanced at the landline in her grandmother’s living room. Should she call Baba? She just wanted to know if he was okay. What if he wasn’t in a safe place? What if he answered and somebody heard him and he was caught because of her call? She moved between her grandmother’s kitchen and the living room, where the adults had congregated, carrying water to the women. Her hands shook, but she didn’t spill the liquid. At least her siblings were still asleep. They had been spared what she saw. Grandmother Zahida was in her usual spot, a faded blue couch that time had molded to her shape. She muttered to herself, as she often did, while she fished through a plastic bag of her daily medications. Her eldest son, Ruha’s Uncle Mohammad, a sixty-year-old environmental engineer, was on his cell phone, conducting a family head count. He was the elder statesman of the family, slightly built, bespectacled, and mustachioed with salty hair. A man whose voice was never raised but always respected.

  Ruha’s father, Maysaara, was Zahida’s youngest son, the ninth of her ten children, her favorite. He was first to help if his siblings and their families needed it, the heart of every gathering, the one whose stories everybody waited to hear. His sisters teased him that he had more shoes than his wife and was more fastidious about his appearance than she was. His tailored jackets had to be just so, his shirts razor-sharp. He’d laugh at their ribbing but never deny its truth. He doted on all of his children, but his eldest, Ruha, was especially dear to him. He spoke to the nine-year-old like an adult, and she carried herself with that demeanor. She had her mother’s graceful long limbs (although she was still awkwardly growing into them), her fair skin, quiet poise, and tight curly brown hair, but she had inherited her father’s passion, quick wit, and many of his features. They had the same bold eyebrows framing camel-like brown eyes, thick long lashes, the same full lips, the same feistiness—although that trait surely came from Zahida. Ruha’s grandmother had imparted that attitude to all of her offspring, especially her seven daughters, and their daughters. Her sons and grandsons were colloquially known around town by their mothers’ names, not their fathers’ (as was customary). Maysaara was Maysaara-Zahida. It was a point of pride for the family. So was the fact that all its women were university educated and employed.

  Ruha’s Aunt Mariam was something of a trailblazer in the neighborhood. A single teacher in her fifties, she had studied in Damascus at a time when many families in Saraqeb wouldn’t send their daughters to school in another town, let alone the Syrian capital to live in a dorm. “For those with open minds, who love learning and value their daughters, it wasn’t unusual,” Mariam said. She lived with her maternal aunt, Zahida’s older sister, in a three-room apartment she owned above an underground gym. She taught grades one to four at a local school.

  Aunt Mariam was spirited but far less plucky than her mother or her young niece Ruha. Age may have calcified Zahida’s joints, diminished her hearing, and creased her delicate features, but it hadn’t blunted her tongue or intellect. She was a formidable matriarch, and her home was the heart of the family, the gathering place for birthdays and holidays, especially Mother’s Day, Ruha’s favorite day of the year, when all of her aunts honored her grandmother. That gaiety seemed distant now. The family was once again gathering around her grandmother that morning in May, because two of Zahida’s three sons were in peril. For the first time Ruha could remember, her grandmother looked scared.

  The doctor Osama was imprisoned for twenty-one days. He was released, rearrested two weeks later, and fled the country soon afterward. Maysaara could not stay away long. He sneaked home four days later. His children piled on top of him, covered him with kisses. Ruha; Alaa, a sensitive and highly intelligent third grader with anime-like brown eyes and the same tight curls as her older sister; Mohammad, the only son, who was as sinewy as his father; and Tala, the little china doll. Ruha didn’t want Baba to leave, nor did she want him to stay. She kept glancing at the door. What if the security forces came back? Would he have time to escape? What if they took him? She didn’t know where he had been staying and didn’t want to know. She didn’t ask. The subject made her mother cry. She wished her father would stop protesting, but she kept that in her heart. Maysaara went into hiding after that visit, and Ruha’s life “turned upside down,” as she put it. “Baba used to stay with us all the time, then we didn’t see him anymore. We used to play on the streets, then we started to be afraid we might be shot.”

  She was a little girl, but much older than a little girl. “We were fated to learn about things children shouldn’t learn about,” she said. “I know my parents were trying to hide things from us, but they could not. Everything was happening in front of us.”

  SULEIMAN

  Suleiman’s hometown of Rastan was spared direct retaliation for the felling of the statue of Hafez al-Assad, but names were taken. Nobody knew how many, or who was on the lists at checkpoints leading into the cities of Homs and Hama, but dozens of men who were near the statue that day disappeared. Suleiman still worked at the insurance office in Hama, but he changed his route to avoid three new checkpoints, while every week he continued to document the protests.

  April 29 was a grim and overcast Friday. After prayers, a man with a megaphone suggested blocking the M5 highway to protest what had become a four-day siege of Daraa. Rastan’s men and women marched in the thousands that day. They threaded through streets, their voices rising to the people watching from balconies who showered them with rice and flower petals. “No to the authorities! No to control!” one group chanted, right fists jabbing into the air, as others behind them clapped and repeated a phrase that had brought down dictators: “The people demand the fall of the regime!” Several carloads of protesters from Talbiseh joined Rastan’s demonstration.

  The route wound past the town’s multistory Military Security branch. It looked empty—just a few guards, all locals, standing inside its black metal sliding gate. The branch overlooked a stretch of the M5 that sliced between two hills in a shallow valley. For an hour or so, the protesters sat on the asphalt carpet, eyes toward an impromptu stage, an amplifier and a microphone set up in the back of a Suzuki pickup truck. Dozens of men queued near the vehicle, waiting to clamber onto it and publicly quit the Baath Party to applause. Then, suddenly, a man pushed in line and grabbed the microphone. “Shabab, guys, there are tanks on the bridge!”

  A line of armored personnel carriers, dispatched from the army’s engineering battalion adjacent to the Rastan Dam, rumbled over a bridge a kilometer north of the gathering. Through his camera lens, Suleiman watched the distant pixelated dots slowly come into focus. He was on the incline above the highway, near the Military Security branch. He saw men below walking toward the oncoming armored vehicles. “Where are you going?” he screamed down to them. “Come back!” others shouted, their voices drowned out by the din of motorbikes buzzing up and down the highway. Tires somehow materialized and were set ablaze, their noxious smoke darkening an already overcast day.

  The small group of men reached the armored vehicles and borrowed a chant that had served Egyptian protesters well: “The army and the people are one hand!” Several soldiers emerged from their metal cocoons and were carried on the shoulders of these sons and fathers of military men. A soldier held his Kalashnikov above his head, nonthreateningly, as protesters kissed him on both cheeks. Another joined the chants of “God salute the army!” The men stayed on
the armored vehicles like a welcoming procession, thinking the soldiers had defected, as they slowly rattled along the highway toward the crowd.

  The quick pop! pop! of two shots, followed by an abrupt single volley of gunfire. Suleiman hit the ground. A bullet whizzed past his ear so close he heard it whistle, its sound caught on camera. On his stomach, still filming. Yellow wildflowers obstructed the center of his frame, but he was too afraid to move. He saw the men on the highway start to retreat, slowly at first, and then they ran from the armored personnel carriers.

  Pop! Pop! Pop! Shots cracked every few seconds. Panicked cries tried to locate the source of the gunfire. The Military Security branch was what most voices said, so that’s where the enraged crowd headed—toward the gunfire instead of away from it. A teenager collapsed in front of Suleiman, his white T-shirt soaked with his blood, as a man on a motorbike scooped him up.

  The guards outside the Military Security branch had fled. Stones were hurled at the building, shattering windows. A handful of men, provoked to a frenzy by the gunfire, ripped the heavy metal sliding gate from its railing and tossed it askew like scrap paper. Suleiman crossed the street to get a broader view. He saw a man on the upper floor of the branch open a window and start shooting. From another window, the rat-a-tat-tat of machine-gun fire cut down unarmed men and boys. Suleiman threw himself behind the wall of a house, his heart pounding against its patio floor. He’d driven his mother’s older Peugeot 405 that day. It was parked against the wall of the branch. There was no way he could reach it now. Screams and curses and gunfire. He peered around the corner of the house, saw men collapse, saw others on motorbikes braving bullets to rescue them, saw men who’d fetched their guns and returned. They climbed onto the flat rooftops of adjacent buildings, apartment blocks that were taller than the Military Security branch. From their rooftops, the small group of armed men heaved brightly colored gas canisters, the kind found in every Syrian kitchen, onto the grounds of the branch below, igniting the gas by shooting the canisters in midair. Others hurled traditional Molotov cocktails.

  Suleiman had to get away. One of his aunts lived nearby, in the direction away from the branch, so he sped on foot toward her home. He passed people peering from their front gates, imploring him to tell them what was happening. He ignored them. He was trying to process what he’d witnessed. “They were cut down! They were in the beginning of their lives, young men like flowers, every youth had a story, a family, had parents who worked hard to raise him, had a life!” He was sure the regime men inside the Military Security branch would not survive the wrath of Rastan’s sons, because “there were now martyrs. There was blood.”

  At the time, there were some in town, including one of Suleiman’s uncles, who were trying to reconcile protesters with the regime. They urged them to present written demands to local authorities instead of voicing them in the streets. Across Syria, Baath Party officials made efforts at the town level to open dialogue with protesters, but many distrusted the regime. Suleiman was certain the Rastan reconciliation initiative, never strong to begin with, was now dead. It took him about ten minutes to reach his aunt’s house. He borrowed a car and rushed home, opened his laptop, and uploaded his footage. The acoustic obituaries soon began, echoing from Rastan’s minarets. Gunfire continued intermittently throughout the night.

  By sunrise on April 30, Rastan had been “liberated” from government control at a cost of twenty-six dead—twenty from Rastan, six from Talbiseh, and many multiples of those numbers wounded. Loyalists in the Political Security and State Security branches, as well as those in the Baath Party office, withdrew without a shot during the altercation at the Military Security branch. For Suleiman and many others, time was now marked as either before or after the bloodshed at the Military Security branch. “After that day,” he said, “there was no turning back at all. Ever.”

  The toll of the night’s fighting on the government side was unclear. Three armored personnel carriers entered the grounds of the Military Security branch and evacuated an unknown number of dead and living. Suleiman didn’t see them. He arrived at the branch around 7 a.m., after they’d left. His mother’s Peugeot 405 had taken four bullets in its metalwork, and its windows were shattered.

  Smoke poured through the blown-out windows of the branch. Orange flames leapt from its roof. The scorched carcasses of at least four vehicles lay in its grounds. Suleiman covered his mouth and nose with the collar of his shirt and, smartphone recording, stepped into the building’s hazy interior. It was the first time he’d been inside. Glass crunched under his feet. People were leafing through documents that survived the flames, mainly intelligence reports, shouting out the names of those surveilled. Papers were carried outside and burned in the courtyard.

  A similar scene played out at the Political Security branch, a two-story white villa that was still smoldering by the time Suleiman reached it. BASHAR THE DOG was freshly spray-painted along its wall and on a green dumpster, near a framed portrait of the president thrown into the street.

  In all three of Rastan’s intelligence branches, Suleiman found reports on his late grandfather, uncles, and father but not on himself—just the heads of the families. Meticulous accounts of the men’s movements, who their friends were, cafés they frequented, what they owned, and other elements of their daily life. Suleiman took the papers home.

  That afternoon, a funeral tent was erected outside Al-Kabir Mosque, where the dead were to be mourned collectively. The fathers or closest male relatives of the deceased sat in a row of white plastic chairs, portraits of Bashar al-Assad at their feet. The event morphed into a rally, a pattern replicated across Syria. A few chants or speeches turned a funeral into a political gathering, one the state would violently suppress, resulting in new deaths, new funerals, new demonstrations. But Rastan was free of security forces. It could voice its pain and anger without fear of immediate reprisal. Mourners took turns at the microphone, highlighting divisions within the opposition that would later fracture it. A young man in a tan leather jacket implored those around him to “purify” their spirits and return to God to take on “this infidel party.”

  Najati Tayyara, a prominent human rights activist and intellectual, pleaded with the men to stay peaceful, to not fall into what he warned was a regime trap to portray its opponents as violent. “Syria is for everybody,” he said. “Religion is for God and the homeland is for all!” The mourners got to their feet, applauding and repeating the secular statement with fervor.

  Almost two weeks later, on May 12, regime agents snatched Tayyara from the streets of Homs. He was released on January 17, 2012, and fled to Jordan the following month. He became a member of the Syrian National Coalition, a political body of exiles formed in late 2011 that would be widely despised by those still inside Syria for its petty bickering, ineffectiveness, and corruption. Tayyara’s voice, like that of many others in exile, did not travel far across the border. Syrians were deaf to those claiming to represent them from the safety of elsewhere. Inside, other voices prevailed.

  FOR A MONTH, from April 29 to May 29, Rastan was untethered from the state, a “liberated” island free of the regime’s uniformed men (but not its informers). Suleiman settled into a double life. During the day he was a wealthy, law-abiding citizen from a prominent family who managed an insurance office in Hama. After hours, he was an opposition activist using the pseudonym “Rastan Free.” He was enmeshed in two parallel activist groups: one on the ground, the other in cyberspace. The virtual network was masked in anonymity, with fake names and Facebook accounts, a place where messages were always typed, never spoken. Voices could identify and incriminate.

  For Suleiman, the heart of that matrix was the Shaam News Network, or SNN. The network never contacted him, never sought to verify his footage or to ask him how he obtained it or what happened before or after the snippets he filmed. It simply took what he uploaded and posted it. It was at his initiative that he dug out SNN’s Skype address one day and typed a short message: “Hel
lo, I’m filming from Rastan.” A typed response followed, instructing him to upload his footage to YouTube and then paste the link in a Skype chat. It was easier than what he’d been doing—sending videos as e-mail attachments. SNN didn’t ask who he was (he feared their knowing), and he didn’t know who they were or where (it didn’t matter to him). They were simply people distributing footage he wanted seen. And besides, none of the other media outlets responded to him.

  THE PERSON RECEIVING Suleiman’s Skype queries was a man named Bilal Attar. A Syrian exile in his thirties from Hama, Attar set up the SNN platform on February 22, 2011, with a childhood friend, Abulhassan Abazeed, an exile from Daraa. Both men were from Muslim Brotherhood families who had fled the crackdown in the 1980s to settle in Jordan, where Abazeed and Attar grew up together. The pair relocated to Yemen as adults. In 2011, before the start of the Syrian uprising, Abulhassan Abazeed was an IT manager at an information technology consulting firm based in Sanaa. Bilal Attar, an accountant, had moved from Sanaa to Brussels, Belgium, where he applied for asylum. The pair created a Facebook page and a YouTube channel to post links to media reports about Syria, including old television interviews with Syrian opposition figures in exile.

  There were several other anti-Assad Facebook pages in early 2011. “The Syrian Revolution 2011” was the most prominent, the site that had called for “days of rage” in February. “The Syrian Revolution 2011” was run by eight people, including Bilal Attar’s brother. “The truth is, we all knew each other,” said Attar, years later in Istanbul. “We were wary of infiltrations by regime elements, and of trusting people we didn’t know who claimed to be revolutionaries. We were the sons of the Brotherhood but not Brotherhood. In fact, we didn’t like them.”