No Turning Back

by Rania Abouzeid

  SULEIMAN WAS WAITING for me at the bus stop in a navy-blue tracksuit his mother had mailed him from Syria. It was 10:15 p.m. on November 14, 2014. The bus stop was just steps from his temporary home, a single-story hostel he shared with ten other Syrian asylum seekers, all men. The town of Güglingen in Heilbronn, southern Germany, seemed transplanted from a fairy tale, with its half-timbered buildings and steep sloping roofs, pretty fountains, ponds tucked around corners like hidden treasures, and a population of only six thousand.

  Suleiman shared a room with a blond, curly-haired man in his twenties from Daraa, who had worked in a medical field clinic there, and a shy, soft-spoken, forty-something father from Latakia.

  “Look at us,” Suleiman said to his roommates after they introduced themselves. “We’ve become like the Palestinians, we’re displaced everywhere.”

  “No, the Palestinians are better,” replied the man from Latakia. “They kept their keys when they fled. We didn’t bother because we no longer had doors or homes to return to.”

  They were three men from across Syria united in exile, strangers who had become brothers, all yearning for the war’s end so they could go home. They shared the hostel with a group of Assad supporters, a tense arrangement that almost brought the men to blows several times. The two groups, pro- and anti-Assad, tried to avoid each other, especially in the shared kitchen. They were all waiting for permanent resettlement after being granted temporary residency.

  Suleiman’s physical scars were fading, his back still occasionally pained him, but the gashes across it were becoming paler, the white lines that looked like cuts crisscrossing his legs and ankles less prominent.

  “The stories he’s told us,” said his roommate from Daraa. “I was detained too, but I didn’t go through what he did. He still has the scars of his torture, even now.”

  “Everything disappears with time,” Suleiman said, “except the memories. We must keep the memories.”

  EXILE IS ABOUT more than displacement. It is the physical rupture of community, the erasure of memory and identity, an untethering from those who know your family and history. It means having to explain who you are. In Germany, Suleiman was just another foreigner, another refugee, another Syrian, another Arab Muslim, another number. “You are the stranger, you will always feel that humiliation, that pang of indignity,” he said. “Nobody comes here to be nothing. In Syria, I was somebody.”

  He was building a new life in a new tongue, teaching himself German while he waited to be enrolled in a government-sponsored language program. He switched his phone from Arabic to immerse himself in the letters and sounds of this new place. He could already make himself understood to bus drivers and waiters and store clerks, stumbling over certain words but pushing through his embarrassment. He gave himself a year to learn the language well enough to apply for a master’s degree program and get a job. But what he really wanted to do was return to Syria.

  He was homesick for a country he struggled to recognize. How much had changed during his incarceration. He couldn’t fathom how there were now media activists covering battalions instead of protests. “All of those military factions,” he said one day, “there are thousands of them. And this ISIS, I can’t understand what it is. Where did it come from? Where is the revolutionary spirit that was there in the beginning, when we said we want to go out and peacefully raise our voices? I’ve never held a weapon and never want to.”

  “We were naive,” said Suleiman. “From the first day in the revolution, we went out thinking the president would be toppled the next week. The week after that, we said it’s going to happen the next week, and so on, but it turned out to be bigger than that, bigger than all of us. It’s an ugly global game, and everybody seems happy to let it continue.”

  He found comfort in small things that made his exile easier, like cooking Syrian dishes with his roommates, or the day the trio found a Lebanese shopkeeper who stocked cans of hummus and ful, as well as Cafe Najjar coffee, then stumbling upon another store that sold Turkish coffeepots. He didn’t feel as guilty as he used to about being safe, now that his family was reconstituting in Germany. His younger brother had smuggled himself there from Egypt for $5,000, but his asylum application was being processed in a different part of the country. One sister and her family paid smugglers $17,000 to escape Syria. His other sister’s husband had also made a perilous journey by sea from Egypt. He’d done so alone, hoping his wife and children could join him (via plane) through a family-reunification program. Only Suleiman’s parents remained in Syria.

  Suleiman was relieved to learn that his cousin Samer Tlass had been freed in a prisoner exchange months earlier, on September 11, 2014. Samer had been sentenced to death on seven counts. He fled to Turkey and began campaigning to remember those still languishing in the darkness. Samer set up a Turkey-based NGO and a countrywide network inside Syria to find released detainees and record their testimony, to learn who was incarcerated with them in order to inform their families. “We must save the rest,” Samer once said from southern Turkey. “I refused to be broken by them inside. They’d say, ‘You want a revolution?’ as they hit me, and I’d say, ‘Yes, we want a revolution.’ What more could they do except kill me? I am determined to continue this. I remind myself of our goals, of our cause.”

  Suleiman emerged from his ordeal without bitterness, without regret, and free of hate. He chose to let go of a heavy emotional burden that would only harm him. It was perhaps his greatest act of freedom—to choose how to respond to those who had taken most of his other freedoms. He did not forgive them, but he refused to continue being their victim.

  He had made mistakes, he knew that, and he sometimes thought of them, but not often. He should have been more careful on the phone, with his electronic communications, shouldn’t have assumed he could lead a double life for long, but they were mistakes, not regrets. The woman he’d let go had moved on and was already engaged to be married. “Because I love her, I’m happy for her,” Suleiman said. “May God keep her and make her path easy. Life is like this. I had to go away. The truth is,” he said, “even when I was in prison and now, I don’t regret anything that I did in my life or in the revolution. I am proud of what I did in the revolution. I believed in a cause.”

  His phone beeped one day as we were talking on a park bench. It was his mother wishing him a happy birthday. Suleiman had forgotten the date. “June 17 is my birthday now,” he said. “The day I left prison.” We stopped at a bakery to buy a cake to share with his roommates. “Thank God, I always remembered, I didn’t go mad in there,” Suleiman said as we walked back. “I remembered it all but I don’t live in that darkness. I don’t go back there in my mind.”

  Instead, when he closes his eyes, his dreams transport him to Rastan. It is Ramadan 2011. A balmy summer night. He’s standing on the balcony of the State Security building, opposite Al-Kabir Mosque, filming a sea of faces turned upward, hands clapping in tune to the chants. Mohammad Darwish, the student who first shouted “Freedom!” is leading the chants, as he always did. In Suleiman’s dreams, the protest singer is still alive. Merhi and all of his friends in the tansiqiya are still alive. Suleiman’s house, the stone villa on an incline with a view of the Rastan Dam, has not been destroyed. It is still standing, the trees in its garden heavy with fruit, and his parents are inside, waiting for their son to return home.

  RUHA

  Ruha’s little sister Tala, whose illness was the reason the family fled to Turkey, couldn’t remember Syria. She’d forgotten the warplanes and barrel bombs and mortars that had scared her sick, couldn’t recall details of her home or the harrowing trip across the border. Perhaps that’s why she seemed to her mother the best adjusted of the children. It was late 2014, and they’d been refugees for two years—a long time in the life of a five-year-old. Tala had reverted, physically and emotionally, to being a normal little girl again, one unburdened by memory. Ruha envied her that. Some days Ruha wanted to forget too, other days she clung to the memories, the
good ones, wrapped herself in them like a life jacket. “I can’t forget Syria,” she said, “but I want to forget what I saw in Syria, because it’s ugly. I want to forget especially when Baba was shot. I try very hard, but I can’t.”

  She had a new baby brother, Ibrahim, born that summer, who drew his mother out of her grief. Ruha was twelve now, and, like many girls entering puberty, had taken to wearing a hijab. It was her choice to do so. It made her feel grown-up. She was still attending the Syrian school in Antakya with her sister Alaa. Her brother Mohammad had transferred to an all-boys’ Turkish school nearby. His classmates called him Mehmet, the Turkish form of his name, which his sisters teased him about, but he didn’t mind. He’d laugh along with them. The children were learning Turkish at school, and they took pride in the new words they’d share with me. We’d stand back-to-back to see how much they’d grown, go on walks, and play in parks. Ruha had started contemplating her future. “I’m thinking I want to be a doctor, a pediatrician to help other children. What subjects do I have to take to be a doctor?” she asked. “I want to return to Syria. I want to rebuild my country, take our rights. I think of Syria every day, but it’s getting less. I don’t think about my house as much anymore. I wonder sometimes and I feel guilty that my house is still standing and others aren’t.” Saraqeb, she said, was her life, “my other life, the real one.”

  Her father, Maysaara, didn’t tell her that the house in Saraqeb was so damaged it was unlivable. The family members in Syria had moved permanently to the farmhouse. Friends and relatives who had land did the same. Ruha’s Aunt Mariam still visited the old neighborhood from time to time. She didn’t like going there but felt drawn to it. “I go, cry, and come back,” Mariam said. “There’s so much rubble, so many destroyed homes.” Mariam still taught at a local primary school. The schools in Saraqeb also ran in two shifts, because buildings were either destroyed by war or were bases for armed groups, including Nusra. “Four or five schools have started using one school building now,” Mariam said. With planes in the air, the teachers reduced the curriculum and eliminated sports, music, and art classes to minimize the time spent in schools. One day, there were two air strikes while Mariam was teaching. “The children were scared. I told them not to be, that it was a friendly plane and it wouldn’t hit us.” The older children, she said, were the ones who cried and screamed, not the younger ones, “maybe because the [younger ones] were born into this environment, they don’t know anything else.”

  Mariam was teaching, running a household, and taking care of the business of the farm. Her brother, Ruha’s Uncle Mohammad, was ill; in June 2015, he succumbed to stomach cancer. Mariam rented portions of the family’s vast land holdings to people who could farm them. She scoffed at the idea of leaving Syria, even temporarily. “Leave?” she said, “And go where? I won’t go anywhere! I will die on our land. There is no place that I’d even think of going. Not one!”

  That summer, Maysaara, like tens of thousands of Syrians, contemplated risking Turkish waters to reach Europe and a new life. He traveled to Mersin, as Suleiman had, and looked out onto a calm sea, the serenity of the water belying its bloodlust. Its dangers had been demonstrated in refugee boats that capsized, drowning dreams and belching corpses. Smugglers now openly did business in cafés in Turkish coastal cities. Store mannequins displayed bright orange life vests. Refugees mapped out their trips through Facebook pages and WhatsApp groups, slept in cheap hotels or on the streets, waiting their turn to leave. Maysaara watched a family, not unlike his, haggling with a smuggler. The smuggler insisted he wasn’t like others who overfilled their rubber dinghies, that he had a conscience. The parents listened and walked away. They couldn’t afford the premium for a conscience. Maysaara called me very late one night from Mersin. He was outside a smuggler’s office. He’d been in Syria twenty days earlier for about a week and said it was worse than ever. His words tumbled out, as if he needed to hear them, a soliloquy to convince himself.

  “There’s no more hope,” he said. “Now it’s clear this isn’t going to end anytime soon. Everybody’s trying to figure out what to do, how to live, where to live, how to survive. It’s gone on for too long. There aren’t many of us left, the ones who started it, who aren’t dead or detained. These new commanders, these new defectors, are something different. They want to tell you about our history! Where were they during that period? There are a million things in my head and I don’t know what to do, which path to take. All the shabab are saying that, at the end of the day, we should leave the country. How can we leave? Leave our homes? Leave our lands? Leave it to whom? I’m in Turkey, but I still feel like I’m close to Syria, that I can get to it when I need to. Europe is a different kind of exile. If I lose Syria, I lose everything. If you leave it, you don’t deserve to return. People died for it. We paid in blood. What am I if I leave? What will I become?”

  Maysaara didn’t get on a boat. His memories, heavy and rich and painful and proud, weighed him down. He returned to Antakya, bade farewell to his wife and children, and crossed into Syria alone. He sold a piece of land for enough money to live comfortably in any of Syria’s neighboring states, but that wasn’t his plan. On September 19, 2015, he sent me a photo of a pile of metal he’d just bought, and room-size holes dug into cinnamon-colored earth that would soon be filled with concrete. He planned to build a factory to process the land’s bounty in Saraqeb, to provide employment for his community. “This is our land and our country,” he said. “Our land is our honor, it is our past and, God willing, our future.”

  ALTHOUGH MAYSAARA DID NOT head to Europe, Saleh did, the Nusra insider and Jolani confidant. He was sick of the infighting between Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State. “I have a passport,” he told me one day that summer. “I want to leave everything behind.” He landed somewhere in Europe, where he wouldn’t say. “I don’t have any ties to my previous life,” he said. “I hope you understand me.” I asked if he’d left with the approval of his big brother—our code name for Jolani—or if he’d escaped: “Yes, everything is fine,” he replied. “One day, I will see you and explain.”

  ABU AZZAM

  Abu Azzam had married, a union arranged by his formidable mother, his “chief of staff,” as he still called her. His bride, Alaa, was from his hometown of Tabqa, the daughter of family friends, although the couple didn’t know each other before they married. That wasn’t unusual in parts of Syria. Alaa was nineteen, petite, with fair skin and fine, mousy-blonde hair that cascaded past her slender waist. She hadn’t planned to marry early, at least not before her twenty-fifth birthday, when she imagined she’d have a university degree and some independence.

  If a heart attack hadn’t killed her father, she figured she’d still be living at home in Tabqa, in the villa she shared with her parents, an older brother, and two younger sisters. But Baba was gone and Mama had to contend with the Islamic State suitors from the base next door asking for her hand. Her mother was running out of excuses for turning them away.

  As occurred elsewhere in the north, Islamic State wrested Tabqa and other territory from the Free Syrian Army and other groups that had won it from the regime. It imposed its female dress code and threatened to punish men whose mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters didn’t follow the rules. Alaa couldn’t stand wearing the face veil—or, more precisely, couldn’t stand being forced to wear it. If she was going to don the niqab, it had to be her choice. She’d already had several run-ins with the hisbee, or morality police, roving the streets. “Look at you, are these clothes? You’re in a bellydancing outfit,” a Syrian member of the hisbee once told her. Only her face was showing. The Syrian said he’d detain Alaa’s father or husband because of her transgression. She told him she had neither. He called her a loose woman, then called for backup. A group of IS muhajireen, mainly Saudis, arrived. They were kinder to Alaa than the Syrian had been. They apologized for his offensive language and let her go. “I was never insulted by a muhajir, only by the Syrians of ad-Dawla,” said Alaa. “The Syri
ans were hypocrites. Did they think we didn’t know their women, how they used to dress and act before, and now, suddenly these same men were enforcers of dress codes and virtue? The muhajireen were more honorable.”

  Alaa befriended a French Moroccan muhajira who had moved to Tabqa with her French Moroccan husband after Islamic State evacuated from Latakia. She introduced Alaa to other women in Islamic State who cemented her view that the foreigners in the group were better than the Syrians. But that didn’t mean she wanted to marry one. Her mother feared her daughter’s feistiness would land her only son in Islamic State detention. Alaa felt the pressure on her mother. “I wanted to get out of the environment I was in, and Mama couldn’t keep saying no to Islamic State proposals, so I agreed to marry Abu Azzam.” He was Syrian and a local. She knew his family. They were good people.

  The groom could not travel to Syria, so the bride went to him. She’d never crossed the Turkish border before. They wedded in September 2014. Ironically, the union landed Alaa’s brother in an Islamic State prison anyway. Alaa had married a former commander in the Farouq, a man Islamic State decreed an apostate. “My brother came here to Turkey after I married to check on me; on his way back, he was imprisoned because ad-Dawla suspected he was collaborating with my husband.” She learned that her brother would be released if she divorced, returned to IS-held territory, and married an Islamic State fighter. “I can’t accept that he’s suffering because of me,” Alaa said. “I feel like I’ve fallen between two fires, my husband and my brother.”

  Abu Azzam felt as guilty as his wife for his brother-in-law’s troubles, and he knew she was homesick. At mealtimes, he fed her by hand before he ate. He joked that she was his interior minister, usually the most powerful cabinet position in any Arab government. He kept his problems from her to avoid putting any further burden on her. He was still shuffling between one feckless military council in exile to another, hoping to rekindle a revolution he said was now “coals under the ashes.”