The sobya slowly drew out the dampness in the air. Mariam was in her mother’s living room with several of her sisters, nieces, and grandnieces. The women rested on thin mattresses and cushions placed around the perimeter of the room. “Do you know the joke about the genie in the lamp?” one of Mariam’s nieces asked. “A man found a lamp, rubbed it, and summoned its genie. ‘Your wish is my command,’ the genie told the man. ‘Great,’ the man said. ‘I need a bottle of cooking gas.’ The next day, the man rubbed the lamp again, summoning an irate genie. ‘What do you want?’ the genie asked. ‘I’ve run out of diesel,’ the man said. ‘Couldn’t you have waited a few days?’ the genie replied. ‘Now I’ve lost my spot in the queue for the cooking gas!’ ”
Laughter warmed the room. Most of the women had stopped using gas cookers. Firewood was cheaper. Meat was a luxury. Vegetables were more than triple their old price, even after adjusting for currency inflation. Water shortages were common because of the lack of electricity to pump the groundwater. “What can we do except laugh?” one of Mariam’s older sisters said. “Praise be to God. We are better off than many, but there’s no work, no money. I miss greens! I went to the market yesterday, a man was selling okra. I bought a handful just to taste it. That’s all I could afford—650 pounds a kilo! But at least he priced it in pounds. Nobody talks about pounds anymore because it fluctuates so much, it’s all in dollars. Imagine, dollars!”
Another sister lamented the flour shortages. “My granddaughter keeps asking for cake, she’s used to me baking cakes. Where am I going to get flour?” She’d asked a relative in Turkey to send her four kilos. “I don’t care how much it costs,” she said, “and I paid for transportation too.”
The room was dim, lit by a thin LED strip hooked to a car battery that bathed the women in a grayish hue, just enough to see each other. Their nightly gatherings had become a ritual—air strikes permitting—like an informal therapy session. One night, they recounted the new revolution-inspired baby names in town. A couple had called their son Baba Amr, after the neighborhood in Homs where Abu Azzam had fought. An Arab child was named Azadi, a Kurdish/Iranian word for freedom. A baby girl was called Thawra, Arabic for revolution. Two of the younger women, Mariam’s nieces, said their friends were marrying foreign fighters from Jabhat al-Nusra. “Why are they doing this?” one of the younger women asked. “We haven’t run out of Syrian men yet. Bashar is trying his best, but we still have shabab.”
One of Maysaara’s sisters said a foreign fighter told two of her sons to snub out their cigarettes because smoking was a sin. “They just ignored him,” their mother said. One of her sons told the fighter, “Who are you to tell me what to do? You are a guest in my country.”
“They’re fighting here for us,” Mariam said. “I won’t cover my face for anyone, but who else is helping? At this point, I don’t care if the devil intervenes.” It was one of her most commonly used phrases. “We just want to finish this. Enough.”
Mariam’s niece Mayada, a young, strong-willed English-literature major, said that in her heart she wanted an Islamic state, but she recognized that in Syria, a multiethnic and multisectarian society, that was unlikely. An Islamic state would be “more just,” she said. Her Aunt Sarea, who was just a few years older, snickered at her remarks. She wouldn’t live in an Islamic state, Sarea said. Unless that state was modeled on Turkey, it would be an excuse to lock women in their homes.
The women debated the issue for hours. The Quran was clear on the rights of women and minorities, said Mayada. “Clerics will find a thousand Hadiths to counter it,” Sarea replied. In the end, both women agreed that an Islamic state was not the best option—not because Islam doesn’t grant rights to women but because the male clerics who interpret the religion could not be trusted.
Another of Maysaara’s sisters retold the story of how her home and car were damaged when two rockets landed nearby at lunchtime one day. “It felt like the sky was raining fire,” she said. A neighbor’s young daughter died. A displaced family living a few doors down lost a child, while another of its children was left without upper limbs. “I didn’t know where to go,” Maysaara’s sister said. “To the basement? The glass was shattering. To the bathroom? I could hear the yelling outside and the announcements from the mosque, then my daughter called and said, ‘Mama, a barrel has landed on my in-laws’ house.’ I put on my headscarf and ran out to see if I could help. What could I do? Their house was on top of them. People screamed, ‘The Mig is coming!’ I ran back home. Smoke was everywhere. They retrieved my daughter’s in-laws in clumps.”
“We’re sick of it, we’re so sick of it,” she said. “My grandson, my darling, he hemorrhaged so much when their front door was blown to pieces. We’re scared about his eyes. They’re still pulling out shrapnel from his body. Every day, it seems they find something new, he’s peppered with it. The warplanes just won’t stop! They’re always in the air. Don’t they take breaks?”
SULEIMAN
Suleiman was in one of the most feared detention centers in Syria’s mukhabarat state—Air Force Intelligence in Mezzeh, near Damascus. He was in a communal cell with two of his relatives, Captains Osama Mattar and Ahmad Farzat. The two defectors had been reduced to numbers—1501 and 1502—but Suleiman was still permitted a name. One day, he heard a guard call it. His relatives remained behind as Suleiman was handcuffed and tied to other men, the sons of his chain. The detainees were beaten with thick cables as they were marched, heads bent, eyes to the floor, onto a bus, then driven a short distance to a hangar within the Mezzeh complex. The hangar gate slid open. Suleiman saw hundreds of men squeezed into the space. They sat in six rows.
Suleiman was assigned to line number one. It was a good location, near a wall he could lean against. He couldn’t cross his legs. Knees-to-chest was the only position for sitting, for eating, for sleeping. After the permanent darkness of his cell, the brightness of the hangar’s neon lights hurt his eyes. Suleiman looked around. He recognized prisoners who had bid him farewell in Aleppo—men who had said their good-byes, thinking they were being released. That’s it, he thought. Nobody gets out of here. Transferred maybe, but nobody will get out of here.
Every line had a shawish, a prisoner assigned to organize trips to the bathroom (there was one toilet for the hundreds of men) and to distribute food to his row at mealtimes: a piece of bread per man and a handful of either boiled bulgur or olives, sometimes a lick of jam or the yoghurt spread labneh. The line masters had another duty, too—to provide names every night for predawn beatings. Failure to do so would result in the shawish’s beating—it was either he or the other prisoners. Suleiman’s days were spent in fear of being summoned at night. Still, he sympathized with a shawish whom other men in his line came to hate. It wasn’t the shawish’s fault, he thought, that the regime had turned one of us against us. Suleiman felt alone in the crush of bodies. He wondered about his parents. Where were they and what had he put them through?
Speaking was forbidden, but Suleiman and his neighbors sometimes whispered to each other to pass the time. On the floor around him, he found stiff wire broom bristles and some loose threads. He sharpened the ends of the bristles by rubbing them on the concrete floor. He saved his olive pits, polished them smooth on the concrete, then carefully, slowly pushed the makeshift needles through the soft center of each pit, fashioning them into a string of prayer beads. He’d never been religious before. He attended the mosque every Friday and fasted during the holy month of Ramadan, but that was about it. Now he silently prayed five times a day and recited verses from the Quran that detainees in other cells had taught him. The prayer beads became his talisman, a reminder of a force Suleiman believed stronger than the prison guards and the regime they represented. “Who is your God? Who is your God?” the guards would yell. There were only two acceptable answers—Bashar al-Assad, or you, sidi. They were not Suleiman’s god.
He was down to his boxers, but on a palm-size scrap of soft, thin denim that he had kept from another
cell, he embroidered a wish: Your blessings, Mother, followed by his name and that of his parents. It reminded him that he was not a number or a faceless prisoner, another piece of bruised flesh buried alive. He was Suleiman Tlass Farzat, a Sunni Muslim from Rastan.
The hangar seemed to be a holding pen. There were no interrogations, just the predawn beatings that left some inmates dead. The overcrowding meant there were plenty of bodies each shawish could choose from. Suleiman was summoned only once. It was winter. He stood barefoot in a thin layer of snow as guards lashed him and the other men with silicone rods and thick cables before turning a hose on them. Suleiman bled, and shivered, and prayed for it to end.
MARCH 28, 2013. Just after breakfast, the guards were shouting out names. Suleiman’s heartbeat quickened when he heard the names of several of his former cellmates from Aleppo. He lifted himself off the floor a little, as though it would somehow help him hear better. He closed his eyes and listened: Diaa al-Absi. Ahmad Moaamar al-Zein. Suleiman Tlass Farzat. He jumped to his feet.
“Get your things!” a guard shouted. Suleiman didn’t have any things. He was barefoot in his boxers. The line shawish tossed him a pair of fleecy black pants that had been lying near the wall. They were damp and many sizes too big. An inmate from Hama gave Suleiman the shirt off his back—it was white with blue stripes. Suleiman left behind his underwear. There were men who could use it, he figured. Some were naked. Names were shouted, inmates scuttled toward the hangar gate. Suleiman turned to the man who sat behind him in line number one. His name was Abdel-Kareem Mohammad Mansour, and he was from Qalaat al-Madiq in Hama. Suleiman pressed his prayer beads into his neighbor’s hand, as well as the half-piece of bread he’d saved that morning to stave off hunger pains later in the day. He kept the scrap of denim. The pair embraced. “I’ll pray for you!” Mansour said. “Please find my family!” He repeated his last known address, shouting it out in the mayhem, regardless of the consequences, as Suleiman, holding up his damp pants, rushed toward the hangar gate. It slid open.
“Get out, you animals, and get on the bus!”
Sunlight on his skin. The guards hadn’t bothered to blindfold them. The detainees were driven a few hundred meters back to where Suleiman had been processed on his first night. He walked down a flight of stairs into an office. One of the two mobile phones he had when he was arrested sat on a table, near a clear plastic bag containing his belongings. He signed and fingerprinted a receipt for them. The guard didn’t return his mobile phone. To hell with it, Suleiman thought. He considered asking about his car but decided against that, too. “It wasn’t worth it. I’m being released! They’ve returned my things, don’t upset them now.”
He was ordered to wait near a minivan, to squat like the other detainees while he was handcuffed and blindfolded. He heard vehicles arriving and people alighting, and, after a while, names were called to board buses. Suleiman froze when he heard one: Samer Tlass, his lawyer cousin who had been part of Rastan’s tansiqiya. Suleiman knew Samer had disappeared before he had—Samer vanished on Valentine’s Day 2012 while trying to smuggle flour into Rastan. Starving towns into submission was an overused tactic in Assad’s war, one some of his opponents also employed on a lesser scale. Rastan had been besieged for almost a month, its bakeries low on supplies, when Samer ventured out to try to secure food. Nobody knew what had happened to him. The cousins were both in Air Force Intelligence’s Mezzeh detention center at the same time. Suleiman’s name was called soon after Samer’s. “So he knows I’m here too. We are both being released on the same day, at the same hour, the same minute, and are probably sons of the same chain!”
Suleiman boarded the bus. Was Samer near him? He wanted to whisper his cousin’s name but knew better. Speaking was forbidden. The detainees sat with their heads bowed as a guard walked the aisle. “Who among you is a Sufi?” the guard demanded as the vehicle drove away. None of the detainees responded. “Nobody?” the guard asked. “This week, the Sheikh Mohammad Ramadan Said al-Bouti was martyred by armed terrorists.” Bouti, eighty-four, was a senior pro-regime cleric killed in a bombing on March 21 as he delivered a lecture in a Damascus mosque. A few of the detainees murmured, “May God rest his soul.” Suleiman couldn’t muster that. He hoped the sheikh would rot in Hell. But he was intrigued—what was happening in Syria? How had rebels reached a regime stalwart in Damascus? The bus suddenly swerved to avoid what sounded like artillery. “You see! All the time you spent inside, now you’re out and you are about to die!” the guard laughed. “Tomorrow, don’t go back to your business in terrorism and then come back to us here, because we won’t let you out alive.”
Suleiman stifled a smile. So they really were being released! The bus stopped. The detainees were ordered out, their blindfolds removed, but the handcuffs stayed on. Suleiman looked around him. A sign indicated he was at the Military Police branch in Qaboun, Damascus. He scanned the inmates. His eyes found Samer.
Samer was as shocked to hear Suleiman’s name as Suleiman had been to hear his. He was certain he’d misheard. When was his cousin detained and how? His younger cousin, the one who had always been so well groomed, now stood across from him. “He looked like a ghost,” Samer remembered, “a shadow.”
Suleiman stared back at Samer. His older cousin was thinner, his skin sallow, his hair long and matted, his beard thick and unkempt. Suleiman just wanted to embrace him but dared not move. For the second time in his incarceration, Suleiman cried. He could see that Samer, too, was crying.
TWO DAYS LATER, the cousins and some of the other men were crowded into a windowless vehicle the guards called “the meat-fridge truck.” It barreled through the land of the living before stopping at Damascus Central Prison in Adra, northeast of the capital. The facility was better known simply as Adra. It was the place where Ruha’s grandfather had once been incarcerated, and where she had visited him. Suleiman and Samer were not being released.
They spilled out of the truck and were ordered to strip naked before entering the prison. Suleiman was glad to be rid of the oversize fleecy black pants he had struggled to hold up. He was handed a black-and-white-striped prison uniform and sent straight to the barber. His lice-infested locks tumbled around him. A guard gave him a bar of soap and led him to a communal bathroom. Suleiman hadn’t showered in almost a year. It had been just as long since he could go to the toilet without sharing the seat with other men and having until a guard’s count of ten to be done. He felt like a caveman emerging from a filthy hole. He turned the tap. Hot water! It cascaded over his scars and infections. He tried to scrub and scald what defiled him, but he feared he was hallucinating. Had he lost his mind? Was he still in a dark, dank cell, acting out like some of the men he had seen?
He was led along clean, wide, and well-lighted corridors to an office where he was registered, fingerprinted, and photographed. The mugshot on his laminated prison ID showed a man whose once-cherubic face was hollowed thin, expressionless sunken eyes rimmed by dark circles. He was assigned to cell 608. Samer was in 704.
Cell 608 was clean and bright, with two rows of beds facing each other. The beds were assigned by the prisoners according to a seniority based on time spent in the cell. Suleiman was directed to a patch on the floor, but he didn’t mind. At least he could lie down and even stretch out his body. Adra was part of the civilian prison system, a place for the sentenced and those awaiting trial—unlike the mukhabarat dungeons Suleiman had just left, with their violent interrogations and harsh conditions. To Suleiman, Adra felt “like being pulled out of Hell and entering Heaven,” he would later write. In Adra, detainees could walk between the cells. There was even a common area with stalls selling clothing, footwear, food, and other items. The prison had natural light and electricity in the cells. Inmates were allowed to converse, and to use the bathroom. Suleiman still had the 2,300 Syrian pounds from when he’d been arrested. The currency had devalued so much that the amount only bought him two tubes of toothpaste—one for him and one for Samer. He couldn’t afford a
toothbrush or slippers or underwear. A new friend, a cellmate from Rastan whom Suleiman didn’t know back home, bought those items for him. The man had been detained in the army’s October 1, 2011, raid on their hometown.
In Adra, prisoners were allowed family visits once a week and a three-minute phone call every fortnight. Each prisoner had a designated visitors’ day—Suleiman’s was Wednesday. His new friend from Rastan was expecting his mother the next day, a Sunday. Suleiman asked if the friend’s mother would contact his family. He scribbled four telephone numbers on a scrap of paper—his mother’s, an aunt’s, and numbers for two uncles. (He didn’t know one uncle had been murdered by regime thugs and the other had fled Syria.)
The following Wednesday, Suleiman was called to the visitors’ hall. He sprinted through the corridors, scanning the noisy crowd on the other side of the metal mesh until he saw his mother and aunt. He couldn’t stop the tears. Couldn’t find the words. The reunion seemed to last mere moments. A bell sounded. They had barely talked. Suleiman took the patch of cloth he’d embroidered in the hangar and pushed it through a hole in the wire mesh to his mother. She held it to her heart as a guard walked Suleiman back to his cell. His mother had brought him a care package—they were permitted in Adra—with clothes, a blanket, bedsheets, a towel, 25,000 Syrian pounds, and the earplugs and eye mask he once needed to sleep. He tossed the mask—he never wanted to see another blindfold. In cell 608, his cash provided its own form of seniority. He “rented” a bed from a cellmate for 3,000 pounds a week, paid back his new friend from Rastan, gave Samer a portion of the money, and purchased an exercise book and pen. It was a child’s notebook, pink with a green border, with a sad blue elephant on its cover holding multicolored balloons. It took Suleiman months to find the nerve to write.
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