No Turning Back

by Rania Abouzeid

  TALAL’S MIDDLE DAUGHTER, Jawa, the eight-year-old, felt the responsibility of caring for her wounded older sister, Hanin, as well as her baby brother. She wondered whether she’d ever see her father again, and whether her mother and older sister really were dead, as those girls had told her. Soon after all of the kidnapped Alawite women and children were transported to a dirty two-room house, Hanin was whisked away by their rebel captors. Jawa wasn’t sure where her sister was, or whether she’d return.

  Jawa sat in the kitchen of that grimy house, near a basket of cucumbers, her baby brother in her lap. “It’s up to me now,” she told him. “I have to raise you. How am I going to raise you? It’s just you and me now.” A woman overheard her. She told Jawa that she was a distant relative. “Don’t worry, darling,” the woman said, “you’re not alone. I will help you.”

  Hanin returned days later. She’d received medical treatment. She didn’t know where she’d been taken or who had removed the bullet from her left buttock, just that the doctor and his staff had treated her kindly. Jawa was relieved to see her sister again. “She was wearing new pajamas, her hair was combed and tied, her nails were cut and painted with polish. They looked after her the way Mama might have looked after her,” said Jawa. It lessened her fear a little. The male doctor and a female nurse later checked on Hanin and the other wounded captives. Jawa thought the man had a kind face. His name, she recalled, was Dr. Rami.

  THE SHOUT CAME from the rubble-strewn street outside one of the two field clinics in Salma, the closest to the Latakian front line. “It’s one of the Alawites! It’s one of the Alawites!” a man yelled. The clinic’s director, Dr. Rami Habib, forty-three, hearing the cry through the sandbagged window of his dark basement office, ran toward the nine-bed, street-level emergency room. A little girl, one of the Alawite prisoners, was carried in by her captor, a foreign fighter, and carefully set on a sapphire-blue plastic sheet covering a bed.

  The child was Talal’s niece, a six-year-old named Reema. “Uncle, please don’t hurt me!” said the little girl as the doctor reached for her bandaged left foot. Her bloodied dressings were stained brown. She wore clean, three-quarter-length pink leggings and a pink T-shirt. Her hair was short, her brown bangs swept up into a tiny ponytail that sprouted from her head like a mushroom.

  “Don’t be scared. We need to change these bandages,” Dr. Rami said.

  “Uncle, it hurts a lot,” she cried. “I’m scared.”

  A warplane roared overhead before the doctor could reach for a pair of scissors. Rebel antiaircraft fire thundered from several positions around the clinic. The little girl screamed. Her captor (who was unarmed except for a knife) patted her ponytail while another doctor fetched a packet of biscuits and offered her one. Reema declined the biscuit. An explosion outside. The little girl was now wailing, interspersing her screams with “Uncle! Uncle! Uncle!”

  Several of her toes were dark brown. Large sections of skin on the top of her foot had sluffed off, revealing red-raw flesh that bled. Dr. Rami changed her dressing and took aside the young jihadi fighter who had brought her in. A jihadi group of foreign fighters named the Battalion of Emigrants was holding the prisoners. “Tell your emir that I say hello and that this girl needs to go to a hospital because her wounds must be cleaned under general anesthetic,” the doctor said. The foreign fighter nodded, swept up the child, and left.

  The one-year-old field clinic was in an otherwise-abandoned apartment building. It had four doctors and ten nurses, most of them male, who lived and slept where they worked. There was no running water or electricity in the facility, which relied on diesel-run generators to power medical equipment, including a digital X-ray machine, an ultrasound machine, and a portable ventilator. The clinic, which was funded by US- and UK-based charities, was well stocked, unlike many others that lacked even basics such as anesthesia and bandages. Water came via a pipe that dipped into a spring on higher ground three kilometers away. Months earlier, the six-story building had taken a direct hit—a barrel bomb blew out most of its windows and pancaked the two upper floors, spewing chunks of crushed concrete onto rose bushes below. The pink flowers, however, still bloomed.

  Dr. Rami returned to his small office—or control room, as he called it—and sat on one of the thin mattresses around its perimeter. A 10.5mm handgun in a brown holster was tucked into the space between the mattress and the wall. A TV sat in one corner, near two walkie-talkies set up to interact with the other field clinic in Salma. “I miss normal life,” said the doctor. “I miss watching a movie.” He reached for a pack of Red Gauloises cigarettes. There was an explosion outside that tossed bits of rubble into the room through the glassless window. Two minutes later, another explosion shook the room.

  “As-haf! [Emergency!]” The call came from the street above. Dr. Rami rushed to intercept the casualty, a Syrian fighter hit by a large piece of shrapnel, his legs barely attached to his torso. The fighter didn’t live long.

  Throughout the night, men moved in and out of the control room with requests for Dr. Rami—seeking help finding accommodations for an FSA group, stocks to replenish frontline first-aid kits, supplies for a midwife. A father, clutching his daughter’s hand, wanted to have his child vaccinated, but Dr. Rami said vaccines weren’t available in “liberated Syria,” only in regime-held areas where the Health Ministry functioned, and from international aid organizations that only dealt with governments. In “liberated Syria,” hospitals were targets for regime air strikes, not government vaccination programs. A local farmer walked in with a bag of fresh green beans he donated to the clinic. “Plane in the air!” yelled somebody from the hallway. Ten minutes later, an explosion outside. It didn’t take long for the call to come again from the rubble-strewn street: “Emergency!”

  Two men lay on the sapphire-blue plastic sheets covering the beds—a Syrian with shrapnel in his left foot and a Chechen with two bullets in his right leg. The Chechen had been brought in by several of his countrymen. They were all dressed the same—green skullcaps on their shaved heads, T-shirts, and loose pants so short they rode halfway up their shins. “What brought you here?” one of the Syrian nurses asked the wounded Chechen.

  “We came for God’s name,” he replied in formal, stilted Arabic.

  Both men were treated and sent to better-supplied clinics farther north, away from the front and closer to Turkey. Dr. Rami returned to his control room. He’d tended to about thirty fighters and almost as many civilians that day.

  “You know what we forgot to do today?” said Dr. Rami to a colleague reclining on a thin mattress. “Send the tractor to dig more graves. We’ll need about ten by tomorrow, and then another twenty or thirty.”

  The colleague nodded. “Yes, we forgot to do that.”

  The doctor lit up another cigarette. “It’s a slow day today, thank God,” he said. Outside, the sounds of explosions continued, near and far.

  BY AUGUST 19, two weeks after the eleven Alawite villages were captured, the regime regained all of them. Two days later, Talal drove to his hometown of Blouta. He saw burned and ransacked homes (including his own) and a mass grave with human remains scooped into a yellow bulldozer. Syrian soldiers in fluorescent orange vests placed bodies in bags, including two of Talal’s brothers and his father. Talal had no information about his wife and children or what had happened to them. The rebel perpetrators left behind graffiti on schools and homes. GOD IS GREAT, SUQOOR EL EZZ was spray painted on one wall. JABHAT AL-NUSRA WILL BRING VICTORY TO THE PEOPLE OF SYRIA was written elsewhere.

  Syrian state media reported mass graves in two of the eleven Alawite villages but didn’t specify the number of dead, beyond stating there were dozens. On October 10, Human Rights Watch put the figure at 190 killed, most on August 4, including at least fifty-seven women, eighteen children, and fourteen elderly men, in “incidents that amount to war crimes.”

  “I was there,” an Islamist foreign fighter I have known for years told me later. “There were people there who said, ‘C
ome and see what Daesh [the Arabic acronym for ISIS] has done.’ I walked into a room, a small room. It was full of men they had killed. They were fighting-age men, I wasn’t sad for them, it’s war. But when they showed us another house, my hair—not just on the back of my neck, but on my head—stood up. I was embarrassed to consider myself a human, and [realize] that other humans could do that. They had gathered women and girls in this room, from the ages of what looked like six or seven to the elderly. It was odd. There were only very young or old, there weren’t any young women. They’d killed them all, and piled them on top of each other. There is no religion, no morals, no ideology that could accept that. That’s what Daesh did, and in the name of Islam. It made me sick.”

  MOHAMMAD SAID THAT Suqoor el Ezz, which headed the offensive’s operations room along with ISIS, had been tasked with kidnapping the Alawite women and children. “I saw some being detained and I saw others killed,” he said. He was unapologetic about the killings, describing them as “one crime against hundreds of thousands of crimes committed by the regime.” The Alawites, he said, “are happy that Bashar is killing us, so they needed to feel something, to feel that their stance, if not with Bashar, but not against him, was part of the crime. They had to be made to feel that. We didn’t lose anything,” he said after the regime regained the villages. “We killed everything in them, took everything from them, burned everything in them. We gave them a taste of what we experience.”

  SULEIMAN

  Suleiman had survived the worst of the many dungeons belonging to Air Force Intelligence, but he was still behind bars, in Damascus Central Prison in Adra, on the outskirts of the capital. He started a diary in the child’s notebook he’d bought months earlier. He titled each entry, “Tired of the Journey,” then dated and signed it. He inked his first words on June 18, 2013.

  Tired of the Journey

  18-6-2013

  Another day passes. I’m sitting on my bed now, drinking warm coffee as bitter as my days, watching a silent challenge, a dull challenge between two friends playing chess. They don’t seem to tire or bore of this game. . . . I’ve spent so much time in so many military and civilian prisons. But hope never vanishes. I almost never feel bored of the hope of what is to come. . . . Without hope and optimism I wouldn’t have survived until this moment. And still, the chess game continues in front of me and the only chess stone left is the king. Will it end soon, I wonder? Or will he hold the ground and stay in this game that I watch every day, hoping that when tomorrow comes, I will be out of here.

  There was a second entry that day, after Suleiman met a prisoner named Ragheed al-Tutari, a fifty-eight-year-old former pilot arrested in 1981 for trying to defect. Tutari was one of Syria’s longest-held prisoners of conscience. A quiet man, he had spent more than three decades behind bars, shuffled among Tadmor, Sednaya, and Adra prisons. He liked to draw portraits to pass the time. Suleiman asked him to do a drawing, but not of what he looked like now. He handed Tutari a passport photo his mother had included in a care package. When Tutari spoke, his conversation was about his plans for the future after he was released. “People died because of the psychological pressure, but this man has given me the ability to look forward for fifty years if I have to!” Suleiman wrote after meeting Tutari.

  Tired of the Journey

  18-6-2013

  Optimism is our fuel! It is life. You have to taste its bitter and sweet, but till when I wonder? Will I enjoy its sweetness before time and age betray me? Till when will I be chained here? Till when will our freedom be chained? . . . . O God, I’m so surprised that I’m still alive! How have I survived until now? . . . . I had so many moments when I felt nothing. I felt I’d reached a point where I became numb, senseless, to the degree of despair and the point of depression and not feeling that I’m alive.

  Three days later, Ragheed al-Tutari gave Suleiman a black-and-white portrait of a handsome, clean-shaven man in a suit and tie, a hint of a smile on full lips, his short hair slicked back. The dedication said: “This is a drawing by Ragheed Ahmad al-Tutari, born in Anawat, Damascus in 1955, a former pilot and a prisoner since November 24, 1981 until the present day. This is dedicated to my brother, Suleiman Tlass Farzat.”

  AFTER TWO MORE prison visits from his mother, Suleiman asked her not to come. The road from Homs, where his parents now lived in a relative’s home, was full of checkpoints. His father never saw him behind bars. The old man said he could not bear it. Suleiman’s parents sent him money via couriers. Suleiman wrote poetry in his diary, quizzed himself on general knowledge, quoted famous personalities, including Gandhi, Che Guevara, Shakespeare, Plato, and Henry Kissinger. He drew pictures of the woman with whom he was on a date on March 15, 2011, in a café in Homs, the day the Syrian revolution began. She was the only other person, apart from his parents, to whom he spoke in the three-minute phone calls he was allowed every two weeks. He drew her image in color portraits that filled pages, with brown wavy hair and red lips, almond-shaped eyes staring out from the lined paper.

  Tired of the Journey

  9-9-2013

  Happiness and Hope

  Come and join me like the moon in the sky

  Come and stir my life like the moon lights the darkest nights

  Come and replenish my life that has been barren for so long

  Rain on my life, love and passing. Help me to forget the days of misery

  Come and embrace me like a mother welcoming her children

  Let us plant the seeds of our love to flourish into green leaves

  Let us fill our life with joy, continue a hope that never vanishes

  Fly high with me to spread our love story everywhere

  Let us draw our dream and live together with love and loyalty.

  On the opposite page, with a different colored pen, several undated lines:

  Prison is the life of the dead

  The cemetery of the living

  Recognizing friends and gloating enemies

  It was the last entry in the book.

  DAMASCUS

  The gray pebbles at the Air Force Intelligence detention center in Mezzeh squeaked under my feet. I saw their color—unlike Suleiman, who had stood there barefoot and blindfolded on August 6, 2012, waiting for a bullet that never came. It was December 2013 and Damascus temporarily suspended my three arrest warrants (including one from Air Force Intelligence), to show me what it billed as something special.

  Brigadier General Abdel-Salam Fajr Mahmoud, director of the investigative branch, stepped out from behind his first-floor desk, a short, gray-haired, mustachioed man in a white shirt, navy-blue pants, and parka. On the wall behind him were large portraits of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad, separated by a fake apple tree with red and yellow plastic fruit. The brigadier general was a Sunni from Idlib Province, from a rebel-held town named Binnish, which he hadn’t seen since the uprising began. “In government areas, there are people from Idlib and other rebel zones,” he said, “but can a loyalist dare to live in rebel areas?”

  In 2012, the European Union sanctioned the general for being a “person responsible for the violent repression against the civilian population in Syria.” In late 2016, the United States would name him one of thirteen Syrian officials responsible for torture, among other things.

  Over two hours and three power cuts, seated in a black leather armchair in his office, the brigadier general expounded on who was in his forty-two cells and why. The prisoners were “Free Army and jihadists, extremist Islamists,” he said, “including many foreigners who don’t even know the places they are fighting in,” as well as “old detainees from Al-Qaeda and its affiliates who were in Syrian jails, some of them were released in 2011.” More than ten thousand prisoners had passed through his facility since the “ahdass,” or events of 2011, as he called them.

  “In the beginning of the events, there was action to get citizens into the streets by devilish means,” the brigadier general said, like the promise of cash handouts. Protesters like Suleiman were duped int
o gathering in front of government offices to collect money, “and next thing you knew, banners were raised and the gathering was filmed and sent to TV channels as if it were a protest. There were people known as the tansiqiya who would wait for people to leave the mosques on Fridays, then they would appear carrying banners that they would film. This became clear during our interrogations. It is the truth and we have evidence. Foreign supporters, financial and otherwise, pushed Syrians to do this. We know this from confessions.”

  Prerevolution Syria had problems, he admitted, including political issues, but the state responded to calls for reform within weeks. The regime did quickly institute a host of new measures in early 2011—backpedaling on a decision to trim state subsidies, announcing a 72 percent increase in heating-fuel assistance for two million public-sector employees, raising public-sector wages, and issuing small cash payments to 420,000 of Syria’s poorest families. It granted citizenship to thousands of stateless Kurds living in Syria, ended the state of emergency (replacing it with a law just as severe), and freed some detainees.

  The general insisted that the security forces were attacked by protesters, not the opposite. “The orders were that no security man could disperse a protest with a single bullet. We used to—I swear to God—a soldier or security man before being dispatched to a protest was checked from head to toe, and anybody found with even a knife would be penalized, and this is the truth, until we caught some people in these gatherings, protesters, who were killing our people.”