No Turning Back

by Rania Abouzeid

  Thousands crossed and were housed in an old, disused tobacco factory in Yayladağı in southern Turkey, which became the first Syrian refugee camp there, known as Yayladağı One. Every night around 6 p.m., Turkish soldiers stood near a small clearing in the thick scrub, where the coiled razor wire marking the border was pulled away. They supervised Syrians walking across a two-meter gangplank over a shallow ditch into Turkey and directed them to waiting minivans that took them to the camp. One night, at around 9 p.m., there were still hundreds of people at the unofficial crossing. A grandmother in a black abaya and firmly fixed hijab sat on a rock near the opening. “It’s like in the 80s: they are burning our houses, showering us with bullets,” she said. The old lady had left on the day of Basil al-Masry’s funeral. She started to cry. “How can I go to Turkey and I don’t know where my sons are? They said they would follow us, but we haven’t heard from them. The telephone lines are cut. I don’t know what’s happening.”

  The armed men, including Mohammad’s group, knew what was happening and set the narrative. They had just provoked the first major armed insurrection in the Syrian uprising, an inconvenient truth that played into the regime’s line that it faced armed opponents, not peaceful protesters like Fouad. And so, a story about a mutiny was devised, one I was first to hear.

  I’d spent a rainy night in the Syrian fields with families near the Turkish border. The next morning, a moqadam, Arabic for colonel or lieutenant colonel, sat cross-legged in the damp soil, wearing a borrowed plaid short-sleeved shirt and pale green trousers. He said his name was Hussein Harmoush, and he produced a laminated military ID card. He was the highest-ranking defector to date. A twenty-two-year military veteran, he split from the 11th Armored Division of the Syrian army’s Third Corps. He said he burnt his uniform in disgust, starting with the rank designated on his epaulets, then the rest of it. He struggled to speak. Men gathered to listen. After a long pause and many deep breaths, the moqadam with the thinning salt-and-pepper hair said he defected from Homs on June 3 with thirty of his men and was joined by other defectors who arrived in Jisr al-Shughour after June 5 to defend civilians from loyalist troops. “I feel like I am responsible for the deaths of every single martyr in Syria,” he said. Harmoush began to weep. A man sitting next to him put his arm around him. At least half a dozen other men, most with graying hair and weathered faces, also began to sob. At the time, it seemed like their grief overpowered their pride. Did they know Harmoush was lying?

  The distant wail of an ambulance from over the Syrian hills grew louder. It carried an old man shot in the abdomen and the hand. He walked with difficulty to the opening in the coiled razor wire, and although the crossing was closed until the evening, the Turks let him through. Harmoush followed him in. Within weeks, Harmoush formed the Free Officers’ Movement, which called on the Syrian military to back the people, not the Assad government. It was the precursor to the Free Syrian Army.

  The contrivance about a mutiny worked. There was no mass defection, yet the story was repeated dozens of times by wounded men evacuated to hospitals in the southern Turkish town of Antakya, and by some families in the fields. Some men admitted they’d shot at regime soldiers but insisted there was also a mutiny. Farmers spoke of seeing soldiers shoot other soldiers. Even the regime described men “in stolen military uniforms” shooting its soldiers. Human rights organizations carried the witness testimonies, and I, along with most of the world’s media, reported the claims. “We invented the story about the defections,” Mohammad told me much later, a claim admitted by others. “We made a liar out of Hussein Harmoush. We had to explain how the regime men were killed.”

  On September 15, 2011, a disheveled Harmoush appeared in Syrian custody, paraded on prime-time Syrian state television in a sit-down interview. It was the first sighting of the officer since he disappeared on August 29 from a Turkish refugee camp where he lived with his wife and four children. Harmoush was tricked into returning to Syria by an undercover regime agent posing as a weapons dealer, and detained there. It’s not known what happened to the officer after the interview. In it, he said there was never a band of defectors. “The truth is, it was all an act,” Harmoush told the interviewer. “We said that there were soldiers protecting the people, but it was all a lie, an advertisement.” Few believed him.

  ABU AZZAM

  Abu Azzam didn’t know how to use a gun. As a university student in Homs, his conscription was deferred until graduation. Some students would purposely fail in order to delay their service, or (like Suleiman) pay their way out of it. Every man above a certain age in Syria, with the exception of only sons and bribe payers, had military training, so those who had completed their twenty-one-month compulsory stint taught Abu Azzam how to assemble and disassemble a weapon. It wasn’t that hard, he said: “Just aim at the target and shoot.” Although he’d been in the Homs neighborhood of Baba Amr for months, living under regime fire, it wasn’t until August that he pointed a gun at a human silhouette and squeezed the trigger. He didn’t know whether the bullet met flesh. Or perhaps he did and didn’t want to admit it. It was easier that way. He’d tried protesting. It didn’t produce results as far as he was concerned, except dead protesters. He figured these were the regime’s last days anyway. It would soon be over, and the gunman would revert to being an Arabic literature student.

  That same month, Abu Azzam was joined by Bandar’s older brother, Bassem, who was as keen to join the revolution as Bandar wanted to keep it at bay. Bassem had protested every week since he’d returned to Syria in February from Libya, where he worked as a laborer. Like Abu Azzam, Bassem also was a poet. He was outraged by regime reprisals against Baba Amr, and he vowed to join Abu Azzam there. He kept his plans from Bandar. He just turned up one day near his younger brother’s apartment and told him he was entering Baba Amr with or without his help. Bandar called his mother and begged her to lie and tell Bassem she was sick so that he would return home to the east. He did, but Bassem was back in Homs four days later. He was going into Baba Amr, he told his brother, through its checkpoints if he couldn’t skirt them, come what may. “He didn’t know the area, he’d be arrested,” Bandar said. “I wouldn’t let any harm come to him if I could help it, not to my brother. He had a white heart, you know. His mind was made up, so I had to help him.” Bandar sneaked his brother inside. Bassem, it turned out, was pretty good with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. The pair of poets became a team—Bassem manning the RPG and Abu Azzam serving as his assistant, carrying the rockets.

  Baba Amr was besieged that summer, choked by armored personnel carriers, checkpoints, and tanks that cruised its streets, mutilating homes with a randomness that sickened Abu Azzam. “They didn’t care who or what was in the homes, they’d just fire, fire, fire, without even checking,” he said.

  Artillery plowed streets. It sliced open houses, pockmarked walls. Abu Azzam marveled at the mess a single bullet could make. Its often neat, precise entry wound, the splatter of scarlet and crimson and rosy reds at its exit point—if it exited. He stopped squirming at such palettes. His nights were disturbed. The wind howling through empty windowpanes, or a cat creeping on shattered glass, would jolt him awake. He’d inspect his surroundings in the dark—a light would have given away his position. He was surprised how quickly he got used to the sounds of war. At first, he’d flinch at the thunder of shelling and fire that could split open the darkness. What frightened him the most was the tank-mounted Shilka antiaircraft system with its four-barrel guns, each one pounding eight hundred and fifty to a thousand 23mm rounds a minute into bedrooms and kitchens. Then, he said, he stopped feeling anything: “It became almost routine.”

  Abu Azzam and the other armed men in Baba Amr called themselves majmoo’at—groups—using descriptive names that offered practical information. Abu Azzam’s majmoo’at, for instance, was named after a school in its vicinity. Majmoo’at Tayba was near Tayba Patisserie. Every member of Majmoo’at Omari was from the Omari family. They weren’t yet calling the
mselves battalions or brigades. They didn’t see themselves as soldiers, just local men banding together, looking for protection and to protect. They soon ballooned to more than two dozen groups, the smallest just five men, the largest up to eighty-five.

  Abu Azzam’s majmoo’at was tasked with helping others take out a snipers’ nest in Hanadi Tower, a building on Brazil Street in the nearby neighborhood of Insha’at. They moved at night, always at night, when they hoped their chances were better against the sharpshooters. The tower had once been a benign landmark, just a tall building, but urban warfare unspools cities. It defiles their meaning. Shopping strips become fronts, mosques and their minarets targets, and the rooftops of university dorms regime sniper positions.

  There was a camaraderie in Baba Amr born of overwhelming danger. It was the “happiest time” of Abu Azzam’s life. His group shared chores and pooled their money (he had 12,000 Syrian pounds, about $240). Civilians welcomed them, fed them, and offered them moral support, even as the armed men reciprocated when they could. “All of Baba Amr felt like one family,” Abu Azzam said. “I felt like the warrior poets I’d read about [in Arab lore and Islamic history]. I was doing something I totally believed in, not because I was carrying a weapon but because I was convinced that I was working against a tyrannical government that was killing all these people. My duty was to stand with the people who were my family and my friends’ families. We entered this mess and couldn’t get out of it, but I was happy.” The closeness of death made him feel more alive for cheating it.

  Soon, families who had anywhere else to go fled. As the siege tightened, food became scarce, foraging for it more lethal. The men of Abu Azzam’s unit fasted, eating once a day to ration their supplies. They scrounged for food in abandoned apartments. Pasta and onions, with their long shelf life, were prized finds. So too was a copy of Sun Tzu’s Art of War, which Abu Azzam stumbled across in a living room. It became his indispensable guide to this new world of soldiers and weapons, with its rawness, its lack of protective layers, its upturning of order. Parents buried children. Vegetable stalls were military targets. A pair of poets had become warriors, just like their Arab and Islamic ancestors, men of words and weapons. Abu Azzam got used to burying men with whom he’d had breakfast that morning, men whose real names he often didn’t know. They were all using pseudonyms—Abu this and Abu that—afraid there might be informers among them who would retaliate against their families. Abu Azzam would catch himself wondering whether he’d die before his friends did, and how many more of them he would bury. Would he see his hometown of Tabqa again? How quickly life could drain from a man, pooling in a puddle, only to be mopped up and thrown out like dirty water. “We were crying all the time, seeing shabab die, but we could not stop,” Abu Azzam said. “What was happening would not let us stop. It made us more insistent to fight.”

  Adrenaline and faith took over at the sharp crack of bullets. He was not fighting for Islam, but inspired by it. “If God has written that I will die at a certain hour, I won’t die a minute before,” he told himself. Religion was a refuge, a means to quiet the fear and panic of combat. A way to order chaos, to believe that whatever happened on this street, in this neighborhood, this city, this country, this life and the turn it had taken, was not the end. If Abu Azzam survived, he survived. If he died, he believed he’d die a martyr, so he’d “win either way.” He stopped worrying about whether he could kill a man. He focused instead on making it harder for men to kill him. Move. Don’t stay put. Aim. Shoot. Move. Don’t stay put. The enemy wore the uniform of his national army. Some were conscripts, obliged to serve. He knew that. One of his two brothers, the middle one, was a conscripted soldier with Brigade 112 in Nawa, in Daraa Province. Abu Azzam knew that soldiers could not easily defect without fear of retaliation against their families, or being detained or killed in the attempt. They had to figure out how and where to flee, and it was the same for their families. For some, it was easier to remain in their posts and feed the opposition intelligence. (Abu Azzam’s brother later defected.) But nuance and hesitation and thinking are inconvenient on a front line where there is only one rule—shoot or be shot, and do it quickly. The enemy in Abu Azzam’s crosshairs was “a person killing children and women in the president’s name, not a Syrian,” he said. “I could not see him as a Syrian.”

  BANDAR WATCHED the tanks crushing Baba Amr from his nearby apartment. He heard the same sounds of war from the guilt of safety. His brother Bassem had stopped taking his calls (the landlines still worked). If Bassem wouldn’t come out of Baba Amr, Bandar decided, he was going in. He cleared his phone of images of demonstrations and snippets of revolutionary songs (they were enough to get a person detained). He uploaded pictures of Bashar al-Assad in case he was stopped and searched by soldiers, and stole over a wall into the shattered neighborhood.

  Bassem had been in Baba Amr for a month. “He looked weaker and slimmer, he looked strange,” Bandar said. “I asked him to leave. I told him Mother wanted to see him, but he didn’t listen. He told me I’d lied to him once before about our mother. He was happy doing what he was doing.” After less than thirty minutes, Bandar left, but he was so haunted by the changes in his brother’s appearance that he tried again ten days later. This time, his brother didn’t even speak to him. “He just looked at me. He wasn’t angry, he loved me, but I kept telling him to leave. I mean, they were about twenty guys! What could they do? A demonstration was more effective because at least large numbers demonstrated.”

  Bandar was too frightened to stay. The shelling and gunfire were relentless, although his brother hardly seemed to notice. “I told him this issue is bigger than you and me, we can’t change anything,” Bandar said. Bassem listened, calm and unmoved. “He didn’t say a word to me,” Bandar said. “Not a single word.”

  SULEIMAN

  The three motorbikes twisted around sharp turns, bumping over potholes as Suleiman and the other riders navigated the alleyways of Rastan with their lights off. They plowed into the inky fields beyond their town, bouncing over uneven earth, toward a farmhouse where Abdel-Razzak Tlass and other defectors were hiding. As soon as they passed populated areas, they unsheathed Kalashnikovs wrapped in sacks and towels. Suleiman was unarmed. They continued in the dark to avoid detection by Syrian security forces encircling the town, and informers inside it. “Make sure your safety is off,” the lead driver told the others. It was 10:40 p.m. on a breezeless night in August, the holy month of Ramadan. The safe house was still forty minutes away.

  Rastan had become a parking lot for tanks and armored vehicles, with eighteen checkpoints. Its three-story sports center was repurposed into a military base. Two tanks idled at the stump where the statue of Hafez al-Assad once stood. “The tanks are always in the streets,” Suleiman once said as he drove past them. “I think if they want to get a pack of cigarettes, they take the tank to the store.”

  Suleiman was still helping organize and film the demonstrations, and disseminating information through his Twitter handle @rastancoor, and his YouTube channel, Rastanfree, but he was also moving between the defectors’ safe house and the town—transporting food, money, and phone credits to the men in hiding.

  The safe house was a two-room dwelling in an orchard. It sheltered eight defectors, mainly first lieutenants in their twenties who still wore their uniforms. They called themselves the Khalid bin Walid Battalion, named for a famed commander buried in Homs whose Islamic army conquered Syria in the seventh century. They were the first group to publicly declare themselves a katiba, or battalion. They sat in a semicircle on plastic chairs in a room. Each man produced a laminated military ID and stated his name, age, unit, and the place from which he’d defected. Like Abdel-Razzak Tlass, most had been stationed in Daraa, but some had served in Damascus, Aleppo, and even Quneitra, near the Golan Heights. They wanted to be heard. They wanted to make it clear that soldiers were blinkered. Their only source of information—beyond what they could see—was Syrian state television, with its talk of ar
med terrorist gangs, foreign conspirators, and Salafi Islamist instigators. It didn’t cover peaceful protests, except pro-Assad rallies. Satellite television was forbidden to soldiers.

  The men all spoke of the difficulty of defecting, of seeing colleagues killed or imprisoned for trying, or for refusing to shoot into crowds. It was one reason why there were never mass defections of entire units. The men wouldn’t say whether they’d killed people. They aimed at legs, or above heads, they said. Lieutenant Ibrahim Ayoub, a wiry officer with two yellow stars on each slender shoulder, said he had witnessed the rapes of both men and women. “I imagined a soldier doing those things to my family in Rastan,” he said. He defected on July 6. They all said they saw soldiers loot homes and senior officers—whom they named—kill detainees. “If we went into a house looking for somebody and the person wasn’t there, we’d ransack it, ruin it, shoot it, burn it, demolish it,” one of the officers said. “They’d take everything, even a phone charger, even the taps.”

  The Khalid bin Walid Battalion wanted to be the seed of an army of defectors. The young officers didn’t want armed civilians like Abu Azzam and Bassem with them, fearing the chaos of men not used to a chain of command. They were disappointed with senior officers who had fled to Turkey, like Hussein Harmoush, who had led the Free Officers’ Movement until he was detained, and Riad al-Asaad, a colonel who defected on July 4, 2011, and established the Free Syrian Army on July 29. (In September, Harmoush’s group was folded into the Free Syrian Army.) “What is the point of being overseas?” asked Lieutenant Amjad Hamid, the Khalid bin Walid’s leader. “We need them here in Syria.” In Rastan, the men of the Khalid bin Walid made and followed their own orders. “We have no communication with officers outside Syria,” said one of the eight. “We are officers. We are supposed to protect our people here.”