No Turning Back

by Rania Abouzeid

  “Is this Turkey?” Mohammad asked.

  “No, we’ve gone back to Saraqeb,” Alaa teased.

  They drove to a line of tall trees, then it was on foot from there with a jumble of schoolbags and backpacks. Coiled razor wire glinted in the moonlight. There were silhouettes ahead with plastic bags that rustled, giving them away and prompting commands shouted in Turkish. The silhouettes recoiled. Ruha and her family watched and waited. A ghost approached the wire. Shots were fired into the air, military camouflage came into view. “It’s blocked,” whispered Maysaara. The family retreated. The pickup truck had gone. Maysaara called a smuggler, and we waited in the dark until he arrived. Seven of us squeezed into the smuggler’s car. “It’s a bad night,” said the smuggler. “The Turks have moods and tonight they’re not blind.”

  “Does this town get shelled too?” Ruha asked. It blurred past. Another point along the border. Shots fired. No way across. It was already past midnight. Back in the smuggler’s car to another jumping-off point that looked promising. The family stepped onto the uneven ground of plowed fields, the ridges and troughs tricky to navigate in complete darkness. Maysaara walked ahead, carrying Tala and several bags. The smuggler lifted Mohammad over his shoulder. Alaa shrieked as we fell into a muddy irrigation ditch. “Shh!” Ruha told her sister as she landed in the ditch too. “Don’t even breathe!” Wet up to our waists and thighs in brown sludge. Manal’s black robe caught on the coiled metal teeth of the line delineating the border. She took it off to free herself. Still kilometers to the Turkish road and a waiting car. Streetlights beckoned along the horizon. “Border guards!” the smuggler said. “Into the cornfield!” Waiting, resting, then moving, the tall stalks hiding our approach. Rustling. Others were there, too. A Syrian man crashed into Alaa. The little girl screamed. Maysaara ran to her. “I’m here, I’m here, we’re almost there,” he whispered. She clamped her hand over her mouth to prevent herself from screaming again, but she couldn’t stop shaking. Nobody moved. Had the border guards heard Alaa? “That’s it, we’re caught,” Ruha whispered. She wanted to go home. She’d had enough of Turkey already. It was too hard to get into. Waiting in the cornfield. The smuggler made calls. A group of people had been caught sneaking a large shipment of hashish into Turkey. That’s why the guards were on higher alert, he said. Maysaara carried both Alaa and Tala. Several Syrian men, strangers, helped with the family’s bags. The cornfield ended and a clearing began. “Run!” the smuggler said, as he stayed behind. Little legs moved as fast as they could. Manal brought up the rear to make sure all her children were in front of her. An old sedan, driven by the smuggler’s partner in Turkey, came into sight. Its engine sputtered, its fumes nauseating. The family bundled into the backseat as it rattled toward Reyhanlı. That was as far as the smuggler would take them. Then, it was a taxi ride to Antakya, to an apartment that housed several injured fighters from Maysaara’s Free Syrian Army unit.

  The two younger children fell asleep immediately. Turkey that first night was a cramped room with two mattresses and a couch. Ruha and Alaa changed out of their mud-caked clothes and collapsed on one of the mattresses. They fell asleep as refugees.

  SULEIMAN

  In the darkness of a Syrian prison cell, time is measured by the meals. Flat Arabic bread and a single communal bowl of labneh, a yoghurt spread, meant another day had begun. Lunch was boiled, gritty cracked wheat (bulgur) without seasoning, served in the same bowl, a few spoons per man. Another morsel of bread and a dozen or so boiled potatoes, shared by the 90 to 120 inmates in the space, meant that the sun had set beyond the prison walls.

  Suleiman felt his strength ebb, his body wilt, even as his wounds slowly healed. He prayed that he wouldn’t be interrogated before he could withstand new blows, but, ten days after his first session, he was summoned again. “Do you really think that the beating you got from us is a real beating?” the jailer said to him. “Do you see this slab?” He pointed to the floor of the corridor outside the cell. “I can remove it now and bury you under it and no one would say anything.”

  Suleiman was back in the tire. The jailer said Suleiman had forgotten to write that he was an eyewitness. To what, he didn’t know. It didn’t matter. “Whatever you want, sir,” Suleiman said, but the jailer didn’t have any questions. He stopped when he was panting. Suleiman couldn’t walk for a month. He temporarily lost feeling in his right hand. He’d lean on inmates to get to the bathroom. Some guards would allow him to be carried; others would beat men who helped him. He’d crawl. There were two toilet breaks a day. Bathing wasn’t allowed. He thought of all the things he’d taken for granted—fresh air, sunlight, cleanliness, to feel sated, space to lie down, a bathroom. He got used to the smell of men who had soiled themselves, to the heavy heat that made it hard to breathe, to being in close proximity to so many unwashed bodies in an unventilated room that was never cleaned.

  He marveled at the artistic cruelty of his guards. Who thought up these things? To handcuff a man to a pipe running across the ceiling in the corridor and keep him there, suspended above the floor, body weight borne by aching shoulders and wrists until something—his wrists, his shoulders, his mind snapped. One of the inmates was hung upside down for days until his body weight sawed through his ankles, exposing the bone in both legs. He was tossed back into the cell, developed gangrene, and died. So did two other men Suleiman saw.

  Surviving the interrogations was part of the misery, staying human was harder. Learning to fall asleep to the sounds of men wailing. Suleiman spent his days entombed like the other prisoners, sitting in silence, arms wrapped around his knees, shoulder to shoulder in the permanent night, picking lice off his body. He used to be so meticulous. A man who wore labels effortlessly, and not for show. The filth sickened him. He became obsessed with tracking time in the timeless dark. It was his way to stay sane, to maintain a link to a reality the blackness intended to obliterate. He would not give them that. His body was trapped, but his mind was free. He memorized details of his conditions as if he were preparing a report to disseminate. To remember was to resist. Men around him hallucinated. One talked to an imaginary little girl, his daughter. Another went to the bathroom where he sat, unaware that he was in a cell with others. Suleiman sank once, although he didn’t remember it. The other inmates told him what happened. They said he cried, shook uncontrollably, and talked to his mother: Don’t think I’m weakened, Mama! I’m strong. I’m not a coward! I can bear this and everything. Don’t be afraid for me, Mama!

  After sixty days, the door opened before dinner one night. “Suleiman Tlass, I haven’t forgotten about you,” a guard said. Suleiman was thrown into a solitary cell. He counted the 40-centimeter floor tiles. Three by five. After the overcrowding of the communal space, this one felt like a reprieve. At least he could lie down.

  A week later, he was back in the communal cell. The guards would open the door every now and again and order “that dog Abdel-Razzak Tlass’s relative” to approach. He had to stand there and take the beatings. They usually used a thick pipe. Once, he counted thirty hits in a row. A human body can bear so much force, he thought. How am I still alive? How has my head not exploded? Really, the human being is a strange creature.

  He felt singled out. Others weren’t subjected to that routine treatment at the door. He didn’t know that his father had gone to the bank and that the two women in the car had told him what happened. He didn’t know that his mother had crushed his computer under her feet when she heard. He didn’t know that his well-connected uncle, the one with shares in the bank, visited every security branch in Aleppo until he learned where Suleiman was. He didn’t know that same uncle requested a meeting with Major General Adib Salameh, the head of Aleppo’s Air Force Intelligence branch. He didn’t know that his uncle turned up at the meeting with the son of Syria’s grand mufti, the highest regime-affiliated Sunni cleric in the country. He didn’t know that Major General Salameh told his uncle that if it were not for the presence of the mufti’s son, he’d be join
ing his nephew underground. He didn’t know that his uncle soon afterward fled Syria for Egypt, and later Turkey.

  On August 6, 2012, Suleiman heard his name called, along with names of about two dozen others. It was before breakfast. The men were blindfolded, handcuffed, and led onto a bus. The wheels stopped at what sounded like an airport. The handcuffed prisoners were linked by a chain and led up the ramp of a military cargo plane. Suleiman smelled hair burning. A man screamed that his beard was alight. Suleiman felt a thunderbolt of electricity. Others were also being Tasered. The plane was in the air. Somebody vomited on Suleiman’s suit jacket and pants. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. He’d used it to tend his wounds. A soldier kicked him and mocked “the doctor” in a suit. Suleiman tasted blood. The treatment continued until they landed. On the ground, Suleiman and the other “sons of his chain,” in prisoner parlance, were greeted with blasts of water that left Suleiman shivering in the middle of summer. He opened his mouth to try and catch a few drops. He was hungry and thirsty. The water pressure felled men, which pulled on the others in the chain gang. Another bus ride. Suleiman was barefoot. He stepped out onto a loose, pebbly surface. He flinched at gunshots.

  “So these are the ones to be executed?”

  “Yes.”

  He was more angry than scared. Why didn’t they execute us in Aleppo? Why torment us and bring us here? Then a calm numbness. He saw his parents waiting for him at the dinner table, his sisters in the garden of his home in Rastan, sitting under the fruit trees. Suleiman surrendered, whispering the declaration of his faith as the chain gang was walked several hundred meters. He waited for a bullet. It didn’t come. Suleiman and the sons of his chain were directed downstairs, where their blindfolds were removed. They were in a corridor at Air Force Intelligence in Mezzeh, near Damascus, one of the most notorious of Syria’s many dungeons. The bureaucracy of torture dictated that Suleiman sign a typed pledge. The paper read as follows: “I, the detainee Suleiman Tlass Farzat, declare that I will not interact with detainees or give them my telephone number or address, nor take from them their telephone numbers or addresses, or any spoken or written message, and I will inform the head of the prison if any detainee attempts to give me his telephone number or any message to pass along. I bear full responsibility for any breach of this.”

  Suleiman signed the document and inked his fingerprint. It smudged. He was taken to solitary cell 10. There were a dozen men inside, in a space that measured 1.2 meters by two. They numbered themselves. The first six stood while the other six sat, knees to chest. They were all protesters. The routine here was similar, although breakfast included a few olives, and the cell was allowed one three-liter bottle of water a day—250 milliliters per man. Here, the men weren’t taken out in twos and threes to the bathroom, as in Aleppo. The entire cell had until a guard’s count of ten to be done. There were only two toilets.

  The days became months spent in hunger, boredom, filth, and fear—fear of another beating, fear of disease, fear of being forgotten. An inmate from Abu Duhoor in Idlib Province developed a fever and died one day. Another succumbed after an interrogation. Suleiman and the others knocked on the cell door and waited for the guards to remove the corpse. Skin became occupied by scabies and lice. Diarrhea could kill a man. Most of the inmates were down to their underwear—they’d used their clothes to clean themselves. Only one man was released alive. He was from Hama and—pledge be damned—memorized the details of his cellmates’ last known addresses, telephone numbers, whatever details he could to find their families and tell them where their sons, brothers, and fathers were buried alive. He contacted Suleiman’s father, who went to see him in Hama. Suleiman’s father paid security agents, politicians, local officials, people who claimed to be mediators for information about his son. He paid and got nothing in return.

  Suleiman prayed to hear the guards call his name, even if it was just for another beating. It might mean that in some way his case was moving forward. Six months later, on December 9, 2012, the door opened and Suleiman’s name was called. He was walked to a larger communal cell containing at least a hundred men. The door closed. He felt a gentle tap on the neck. He spun around to see two of his relatives, Osama Mattar and Ahmad Farzat, both defectors with the rank of captain. Like a child, Suleiman threw himself into their arms. He was no longer alone.

  ABU AZZAM

  Abu Azzam set his delicate hourglass teacup on the coffee table in front of him. 10:34 p.m. Another heart-piercing screech of incoming artillery. He didn’t react beyond eyeing the sweet tea. It rippled but did not spill, as a blunted boom crashed into a field beyond a glassless window. Fresh vertical thunderclouds rose from another shallow crater outside. The strikes were getting closer in time and space. Three in ten minutes. Then another three in less than half that. Abu Azzam and a handful of his men watched and listened from the Farouq’s ground-floor headquarters in a semidestroyed building. It was once a border police station, its two upper floors now partially collapsed and pancaked on top of the room where the men sat. It was early October, and they were at the Tal Abyad border post, opposite the Turkish town of Akçakale. The Farouq had won it less than two weeks earlier, on September 19, with a smattering of other groups—two, seven, eight, or seventeen—everyone rushed to claim credit. Abu Azzam had moved east, pushing toward Tal Abyad soon after the murder of the Islamist Firas al-Absi at Bab al-Hawa, leaving that post under the command of his deputy, Thaer al-Waqqas. Four of the seven main crossings on the Turkey–Syria border were now in rebel hands. The Farouq controlled two of these—Bab al-Hawa and Tal Abyad—where Abu Azzam was also in charge.

  The shelling had kept Tal Abyad’s two pale-gray sliding metal gates locked, but it was an easy four-minute walk from Turkey into Syria through flat, sun-scorched terrain alongside the post’s high wall. REVOLUTION UNTIL VICTORY was spray-painted in English along a concrete divider in the middle of the closed border post. Abu Azzam’s old roommate, Bandar, and I crossed in a night dark enough to move unseen, in an artillery storm fierce enough for the Turks to perhaps think few would try to sneak across. Bandar was on his way back from Turkey to regime-controlled Raqqa City, where he lived with relatives.

  Abu Azzam and Bandar had not seen each other since Bassem, Bandar’s brother, was killed in Baba Amr. The pair forcefully embraced in the Farouq’s headquarters—Abu Azzam in a navy blue Adidas tracksuit, Bandar in a crisp white galabiya. A long, tearful, silent hug. The ground shook again. Another round of incoming, this one audible only in the flash before it exploded on impact. The farther a shell from the observer, the louder it whistled through the air. Death by artillery was often silent. Several of the Farouq men in the room rose and scurried to the basement. Abu Azzam stayed put. He sank into a gaudy armchair, its fabric a mix of the same sandy browns and beiges and pale greens as the landscape outside. “It’s normal, normal,” he said of the strikes. “It’s their way of saying, ‘Welcome!’ ” He took another sip of tea. The shelling, he said, was from a regime position, “17,850 meters away—to be exact.”

  THE FAROUQ WAS at the height of its power. A source of rebel envy and pride. The group had expanded nationwide, with units operating from Daraa in the south near Jordan all the way up to the northern region bordering Turkey. It claimed to be a force of some twenty thousand. Its fighters dressed like a professional army. Its sharp multimedia arm produced slick videos of the Farouq’s exploits in clips that opened with its anthem. Most other FSA and non-FSA battalions and brigades also had press officers, logos, and flags, but the Farouq had the sheen of emerging from Baba Amr, symbol of the revolution’s first liberated (and lost) territory. The Farouq’s detractors weren’t sure about its ideology—was it Salafi, so-called moderate Islamist, or secular? Its men were a mix of all of those things. But mainly, it was the Farouq’s growing clout that most concerned its critics, and its control of the border posts.

  In a home on the outskirts of Raqqa City, a group of local rebel commanders discussed how to take control of Tal Abyad from t
he Farouq just weeks after it fell. “The border posts are like gold,” one of the men said. “If somebody wants to send you weapons and [the Farouq] control all the border posts, can they do it except under the Farouq’s conditions? How will you get weapons in? Does anyone cement their door closed?”

  A single fan whirred, blowing warm air around a room full of agitated, chain-smoking rebels who accused the Farouq of smuggling diesel fuel, cement, and hashish across the Turkish frontier. “The Farouq has great people who made sacrifices,” one commander said. “There are many clean Farouq, but tell me, why did the Farouq leave Homs and come to the Turkish border? They’re interested in money, in the smuggling, not the fighting anymore.” It was an accusation repeated more than once by more than one man in more than one meeting.

  ON SEPTEMBER 29, 2012, a new FSA command structure was announced, and some within it quickly angled to take on the Farouq. The Joint Command for the Revolution’s Military Councils was a Qatari-influenced, defector-heavy, publicly announced body that replaced the covert Istanbul Room. The Joint Command, as it was known, was tasked with overseeing the Free Syrian Army’s fourteen provincial military councils.

  The Joint Command was based just inside Syria in Atmeh, in a school near an olive grove. It was led by a barrel-chested, gray-bearded defector from Rastan named General Mithqal Ibtaysh, who had split from the military just three months earlier. He sat behind a glass-topped desk in the principal’s office, while FSA commanders and the heads of military councils waited like anxious students to see him. The Joint Command had promised salaries—$150 a month per fighter—and the principal’s office was bustling with men signing up to get paid. They didn’t know it then, but it would be a one-off payment.

  The general gestured to his colleague, a mustachioed, bespectacled man who introduced himself as General Doctor Engineer Salim Idris, a defector from Al-Qusayr, in the Homs countryside, who left his regime post in July 2012. General Idris produced a spreadsheet of armed groups under the Joint Command’s wing, boasting of how many factions were joining them. “I was personally requested at a meeting with the crown prince of Qatar, I met him two weeks ago,” said his colleague General Ibtaysh. “All he asked for is unity. Qatar has blessed this move.”