“Who are we going to have a dialogue with?” one of the men asked. “A tank? Our crimes now are possessing USBs and mobile phones. What do we say to the parents of the martyrs? The best solution is a coup, that the army says, ‘Enough blood.’ The other option is we enter the abyss.”
They picked at plates of grapes, figs, and watermelon as they wondered how the revolution would end. Suleiman listened as he organized snippets of video on his computer. One showed homes being shelled by the army. He’d bought it for 5,000 Syrian pounds ($103) from an active-duty soldier. Another was of an emaciated male corpse, a piece of masking tape across his bare chest that said CORPSE #5. There were other grisly videos of bodies, some with missing eyes, lacerations, burns, gunshots.
“An Apache,” Samer Tlass blurted. “A strike on the presidential palace is the solution, because if there is no Western intervention, the regime will not give up. Iran will not allow the regime to give up.”
Another lawyer in the room predicted a long war. “The Syrian people have made the decision to bring down Assad and his regime, and the regime is determined to bring down the people,” he said. “These are the only options. Peaceful solutions are over. I anticipate war—civil and regional.”
“No!” said Merhi, shaking his head. The Syrian people would not be drawn into a deeper conflict, or fall into the trap of sectarianism. His Alawite friends in the loyalist camp, whom he still spoke to, were coming around to the idea that Assad and his generals would probably flee, and they would stay behind. “We have to find a way to live together,” he said.
Suleiman looked up from his laptop. “The revolution must stay peaceful,” he said. He was helping the Khalid bin Walid Battalion with its media work, but that was the extent of any crossover. “Military work is separate from ours,” he said. “The defectors are responsible for protecting the demonstration, but that’s it. We are peaceful. We can’t give Bashar an excuse in front of the international community to suppress this revolution. We’re like the dog from that old joke, remember? That’s why we’re doing this.”
The men nodded, a few smiled. The joke dated back to Lebanon’s civil war in the 1970s and ’80s. It was about a hungry, shabby dog in Lebanon that, tired of the war, escaped to Syria—only to return to Beirut months later, surprising its friends. The dog said it was treated well in Syria, groomed and petted, and fed so much it put on weight. “Then why did you come back?” the other dogs asked.
“Because I want to bark and howl.”
THE TANKS AND the armored personnel carriers in Rastan weren’t actively attacking the townsfolk, although there were frequent rumors and false warnings of another offensive. On September 27, after days of shelling, the tanks in and around Rastan stormed the town. Soldiers fanned out, going door to door apprehending thousands of suspected protesters. Homes were burned and looted. The Khalid bin Walid Battalion countered, but it was overwhelmed and outgunned. The military converted an orphanage built by Suleiman’s grandfather into a base. It was down the street from Suleiman’s home. His parents urged him to leave Syria. He had recently learned that his name was on a leaked list of thousands of wanted, and that three intelligence branches—Air Force Intelligence, Military Security, and Political Security—were looking for him. It would have been easy for Suleiman to slip into Turkey or Lebanon, but he refused to leave Syria. His parents were adamant that he at least leave Rastan. Reluctantly, he agreed.
On September 28, in the darkness before dawn, Suleiman and three friends in the tansiqiya, including Merhi, bundled into his car and, headlights off, moved along back roads and agricultural tracts. Suleiman’s cousin, Samer Tlass, stayed behind. They were still in Rastan’s eastern farmlands when Merhi demanded that Suleiman stop the car. “Khalas, enough. I’m going to stay here!” Merhi said. Even as the wheels still turned, he opened the car door. “Get in the car, for God’s sake!” Suleiman pleaded as he slowed down. Merhi could not be convinced. He said a quick good-bye and disappeared on foot into the farmlands.
Suleiman and the other two activists hid at a relative’s home in an industrial area of Homs, and from there they moved to Hama. The army was in Hama, but Suleiman had a strong network of friends there who offered him refuge. Merhi used a satellite phone to stay in contact with Suleiman. Both Merhi and Maamoun, the mobile-phone repairman, continued filming and sending Suleiman raw footage over phone lines that still worked in the northern part of the town near the Rastan Dam, where they were in hiding, as well as via couriers who, at great personal risk, would sneak through the tightening blockade to deliver the footage. Suleiman edited, polished, and published the clips and disseminated other news about Rastan to the media and larger activist networks. He was his hometown’s megaphone.
On October 3, the Khalid bin Walid Battalion announced its withdrawal from Rastan—to safeguard the local population from continuous shelling, according to a statement it released. But it didn’t move far. Abdel-Razzak Tlass and a group of men remained in the fields on the outskirts of town. Despite the crushing military presence and its checkpoints, protests resumed in late October in what some locals took to calling “occupied” Rastan.
In early November, Abdel-Razzak Tlass and most of the Khalid bin Walid Battalion escaped to Baba Amr in Homs, where Tlass became the face of Abu Azzam’s Farouq Battalions. Tlass announced the formation of the Farouq on November 6—just days after he’d left a battered Rastan—in a short video staged to look spontaneous. In the clip, armed men crowded the back of a spotless white pickup truck (they weren’t yet smearing mud on their vehicles to hide from airborne predators) as it crawled down a dead-end alley. Tlass stepped out of the passenger seat to clapping, flag-waving civilians chanting, “God salute the Free Army!” “In the name of God, the most merciful and compassionate,” Tlass began, “we are the Farouq Battalion, part of the Free Syrian Army, created on November 5, 2011, to protect innocent protesters in Baba Amr, and to protect innocent civilians.”
Merhi remained in his hiding place near the Rastan Dam. He often called me from there, usually between 1 and 3 a.m. Sometimes, he just wanted to talk to somebody who lived outside his claustrophobic shelter, to be reminded of what “normal” used to mean. More often, he had other questions: Could I get him weapons? Did I know any suppliers? Could I connect him to anti-Assad Lebanese politicians like Saad Hariri? He stopped asking those questions after I made it clear I was a reporter, not an activist. His queries then changed. Was information getting out? Did the international community understand that people were being killed with no accountability? Perhaps it just didn’t know, he would say. If it did, it would surely act, wouldn’t it? And then one day, his calls stopped.
At 5:30 a.m. on November 24, the military swooped in on Merhi’s hiding place, a farm named Mazraat Tlel in the western fields on the edge of the Rastan Dam. Most of the remaining tansiqiya was sheltering there, along with several defectors. A rebel spotter got word to the men in the farmhouse shortly before the soldiers arrived. Merhi and his friends were trapped between the water and the army. There was one raft. It wasn’t big enough for everyone. Maamoun, the mobile-phone repairman, was one of seven men who first crossed to the other side of the dam. The raft returned, picked up another six men, then headed back. It needed two more trips. Maamoun watched the soldiers on the other bank creep up to the farmhouse. They unleashed two RPGs into an empty room before opening fire. They were there to kill, not to detain. The raft, laden with men, furiously paddled toward Maamoun. Merhi was on the bank near the farmhouse, hiding in the brush. Maamoun heard the muted pings of bullets piercing the liquid’s gleaming surface, along with his friends’ cries. The raft froze in place, halfway across the dam. Merhi was stuck on the other bank. Maamoun looked at him. There was nothing he could do for his friend. The soldiers saw Merhi, too. Maamoun ran away, to the sound of sustained gunfire. He dialed and redialed Suleiman. It was nearly 6 a.m. The call connected while Maamoun was still running. “Suleiman,” he said, “the shabab are dead! I saw them, at least s
even. About twelve of us got away. Everybody we left behind is dead!” The final toll, Maamoun and Suleiman would later learn, was sixteen killed, including a number of defectors.
Suleiman was crushed, split in half. Suleiman the friend wanted to grieve and scream and cry, but Suleiman the activist took over. Like an automaton, he went through the motions of trying to verify the information, then he published an account of the raid and named his dead friends. Merhi was dead. Three brothers from the Tlass family were dead. Mohammad Darwish, the eighteen-year-old who had led Rastan’s chants, who had sparked its first protests, was dead.
2012
_______
ABU AZZAM
JANUARY 2012
The poets, Abu Azzam and his relative Bassem, were stationed near a mosque in Baba Amr, in a sliver of territory the Farouq Battalions called Lira Plaza. Its name came from a discount one-lira (dollar) store in it. Regime solders were based in a school across the street. Homs, the opposition’s “capital of the revolution,” was cleaved into pro- and anti-Assad neighborhoods, streets, and street corners. Its government-controlled parts were still the old country: rubble free, with working Internet and electricity, cafés and restaurants along tree-lined boulevards, portraits of the president. There were tanks there, too, mainly outside security and intelligence buildings, but their guns were at rest. Lira stores there were still just lira stores.
Baba Amr was Syria’s first rebel stronghold. Three square kilometers of defiance, the pride of a revolution that declared it would kneel only to God. Tank treads gnawed alleyways cratered by artillery. Gunmen in tracksuits stood guard behind eye-high stacks of sandbags or piles of broken cinderblocks. Words, some crossed out, clashed on walls sliced by shrapnel.
THE LIONS OF ASSAD PASSED HERE.
LEAVE, LEAVE, LEAVE, LEAVE YOU DOG!
YOU MUST GO AWAY, MUST NOW! [in English]
THE FAROUQ WAS HERE.
That January, there was a bread crisis in Baba Amr. Regime soldiers wouldn’t allow flour in. No bread for five days. Clapping women and children walked along a rain-soaked street: “O God, your people are defenseless,” they chanted. “O Arabs, do you feel with us? Dear God, quicken your salvation.”
Syrians described their movement as an orphaned revolution —weak, leaderless, abandoned by an international community learning Syrian geography with each new atrocity. They asked why the mere threat of a massacre in Libya’s rebel-held Benghazi rallied an international coalition, when in Syria, actual massacres didn’t. Despair can sharpen religiosity. Blood and desperation and trauma can radicalize it. On January 22, Baba Amr’s besieged protesters marched in the streets and demanded the declaration of jihad. The next day, by coincidence, Jabhat al-Nusra announced its presence in Syria and the world heard the first digitally altered words of its leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani: “The voices rose, calling for the people of jihad, so the only thing for us to do was to answer the call.”
Others heard the call, too, or claimed to. There were Arab League monitors in Syria that January to study a peace proposal. They had been to Baba Amr once before, in December 2011, and returned the following month. Baba Amr’s women broke through cordons of fear and Syrian government minders to reach the Arab officials. “We want the detainees, brother, we want the detainees!” one woman pleaded. “Yesterday they took six from our street. We want the detainees!” A mother of five ran out of fingers counting the mukhabarat branches she’d approached looking for her husband. “We were all in the kitchen, trying to stay warm near the stove, when they took him. Please, brother, they’re returning our men as corpses. If he’s dead, alive, I just want to know.” Within weeks, the Arab League suspended its mission. Syria was too dangerous for peace. The regime’s tanks and armored personnel carriers came out of hiding. Metallic rain resumed.
Abu Azzam had acclimatized to his new world. The student poet who didn’t know how to use a gun was now confident enough to offer tactical suggestions during meetings, but he felt negligent on another front. Abu Azzam, the eldest son, had abdicated the responsibilities of his old life. He was in Baba Amr protecting other families and wondering about his own. Were his mother and siblings safe? Were they being punished by the mukhabarat for his actions—the way Bandar feared his family would be if he participated in protests? One day, Abu Azzam found a working landline in an abandoned apartment and called his mother. He wanted to hear her voice but feared what she might say, that she’d cry or beg him to leave or question his decision. She did none of that. She told him she was proud of him. “She lifted my spirits a lot,” said Abu Azzam. “She is a strong person and I took strength from her.”
His brothers-in-arms, like his classmates, took to calling him “The Sheikh,” and, like his classmates, they ignored his protestations that he wasn’t one. Anyone who knew the Quran the way he did, who could offer advice based on its passages, was clearly worthy of the title. And besides, they’d joke, he looked like a sheikh with his long, curly beard. “Who has time to shave?” he would counter. “Your beards aren’t shorter! Have you seen yourselves?” In the bleakest hours, when they were hungry and cold and grieving yet another friend, Abu Azzam recounted tales his father taught him about historic Islamic conquests against unjust rulers, or recited his poetry. Bassem contributed verses of his own, like one he titled “Down with the Regime.”
The magi’s reign has ended
the old face has been smashed
Syria has risen
it has returned to us [. . . .]
Today in the land of truth
a tangible truth in a tangible life
we are entering the future clear-eyed
demanding that history testify and that our grandchildren know
that Muslims, rightly named, spoke and acted
Those who knew, who know, that if they spoke they would die, acted.
When the head of the group in Lira Plaza was killed in a firefight, Bassem and the other men asked Abu Azzam to take his place, and Abu Azzam the commander was born. He wondered how it had come to this. “I took to the streets as part of a revolution, I didn’t think one day I’d become a commander,” he said. “I didn’t start this to be one. Nobody thought it would last long, or that we would get to the point of even taking up arms. We just want to end this.”
His group now included a small number of defectors who had switched sides in Baba Amr. Abu Azzam was proudest of them because, he said, “their defections delivered a message that our goal wasn’t to kill. We treated them as our brothers, and they started fighting with us. They were heroes.” He remembered calling the father of one defector, a sniper from Daraa they nicknamed “Agile,” to inform him that his son had died fighting alongside the rebels. “God have mercy on his soul,” Abu Azzam recalled the father saying, “I am proud of him. I have another son who will stand in his brother’s place if you want me to send him to you.”
Baba Amr’s sons were the Farouq and the Farouq were its sons, regardless of where they came from. The blood had made them brothers. Suleiman’s relative, the defector Abdel-Razzak Tlass, was a military commander in the Farouq. He was often described as the battalion’s leader, although in reality there were four: Tlass plus the three civilians who’d been on that Skype call in August 2011—the lawyer Abu Sayyeh, the realtor Abu Hashem, and the sheikh Amjad Bitar. Opposition media activists pushed the idea that the Farouq and the broader Free Syrian Army were largely comprised of defectors, but they were mainly armed civilians.
Abu Azzam thought the attempt to create an equivalency, even a lopsided one, was wrong. “We are a civilian revolution, not a revolution of defected soldiers against their colleagues,” he said. “There is oppression, and there are people coming out against the oppression. It is a revolution against a dictator.”
Abu Azzam never fought alongside Abdel-Razzak Tlass. They were in different sectors, but, like many Syrians in the opposition, he viewed the young, handsome, charismatic officer with the hefty name as a hero. Tlass’s impassioned speeches, broadc
ast widely on Gulf satellite channels, drew in donations to the Farouq from across the Arab world. (By the summer, Tlass would be felled by a cybersex scandal.)
The Farouq’s local leaders in Baba Amr were all civilians. The former cigarette smuggler, Ahmad Da’bool, procured weapons from Iraq (via the eastern desert) and Lebanon (the easier, shorter route across shallow streams and orchards). His younger brother, Mahmoud, and a man named Ammar al-Buqai (nicknamed il-Gider, “the able”) smuggled ammunition from Lebanon, transporting it in batches small enough to hide in their cars. Sheikh Amjad Bitar provided the bulk of the funding, but the Farouq also had an international financier—Saad Hariri, head of the Lebanese Future Movement, via his messenger Okab Sakr, the young Shiite Lebanese politician who was also slipping wads of euros to the media platform SNN.
The Farouq representative assigned to meet Sakr had never heard of him. He had to Google him before their first meeting in late 2011 in a hotel in Istanbul. “I had a lot of questions about him,” the representative said. “Like why do you want to help us? What do you want? Do you want us to hold a banner in your name? He said no. We have a history with this regime and we want to support you. If this revolution succeeds, we all succeed, and if it doesn’t, we are all affected.”
The Future Movement’s Lebanese political rivals, the pro-Assad Shiite militant group Hizballah, had made the same calculation: If Assad fell, their group would be sandwiched between a hostile Israel and a predominantly Sunni and less-friendly Syrian neighbor. The two Lebanese parties extended their political dispute across the border into Syria. The Iranian-backed Hizballah sent its men to fight alongside Assad. The Saudi-backed billionaire head of the Future Movement, Saad Hariri, sent his money to the Farouq via Okab Sakr. “There wasn’t an envelope that would hold the amounts we were getting, it was in bags,” the Farouq representative said. It was never less than $50,000 a day, for months, as Baba Amr morphed into Syria’s Stalingrad.
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