No Turning Back

by Rania Abouzeid

  MAY 2016. THE SUN was low in the sky, its golden light soft and warm and diffused. It cast long shadows on the handful of construction workers ending their day. Maysaara watched them climb down from a two-story wooden scaffolding hugging the building’s rectangular shell. His factory was coming together. It had four walls and no roof, its exterior built in the traditional manner, with great blocks of locally sourced white stone, not the cheaper concrete. Saraqeb’s silhouette rose five kilometers in the distance, on the other side of green carpets of shin-high lentil crops and young stalks of wheat. Sprinklers pulsed rhythmically. Deep-orange pomegranate flowers were in bloom. Birds chirped in the quietness when the warplanes weren’t overhead.

  Maysaara walked through his empty factory, proud and excited, explaining where the equipment would go. The machinery would come either from regime-held Hama (through the forty-nine government checkpoints along the route, each one demanding a bribe) or from Turkey, with its raft of paperwork and tight restrictions at the border. It depended on the roads, the planes, and the required bribes, but he wasn’t overly worried about it.

  The construction site was a short drive from the farmhouse, on land the family had owned for generations. Maysaara surveyed its sweep, pointing to the plot in the far distance where a hundred fig trees would soon be rooted, near the olive groves his late father had planted decades earlier. He had bought half a dozen sheep and a puppy his daughter Tala named Molly, after one of her favorite cartoon characters. He had plans to restart the family’s cucumber pickling business, to give young men an alternative to emigrating or joining a battalion to earn $50 a month. And he wanted to buy a horse, recounting a Hadith about how those who treat a horse well are blessed against poverty. He scooped up a handful of earth, let it fall through his fingers. “This,” he said, “is everything. I swear a person doesn’t find himself or feel dignity except in his own land. I lived in Turkey for three years. I lived well, was treated well, but I am still a foreigner there. I mean, the Japanese were hit with nuclear bombs and they stayed in their country and didn’t give up on it! How can we? Look,” he stretched out his arms, “here there is life.” His Syria had shrunk, he knew that. Regime territory and Islamic State were other countries, but his space was enough for him. “Before the revolution, I wasn’t somebody who spent a lot of time on Latakia’s coasts. I will sacrifice seeing the sea. This is my land. This is my area. This is my country.” Wasn’t he afraid to bring his family back? “Life and death are in God’s hands,” he said. “Some people survive being in a building hit by a barrel bomb that others die in. It’s not their time. Nobody knows when their time is up.”

  It was getting dark. The workers had long left. Maysaara drove back to the farmhouse in his red Toyota HiLux pickup truck, the same vehicle in which he’d been shot back in January 2012. It had been idle for years while he decided what to do with it. He patched its forty-eight bullet holes and cleared its bloodstains. He refused to sell it. It was a reminder of what he’d survived and what others, like his friend Abu Rabieh, who had died in the front seat, had lost.

  RUHA’S AUNT MARIAM was up early the next morning, and so were the planes. It was not yet 8 a.m. when the first one roared overhead. Mariam walked into the living room carrying a tray of Turkish coffee. “Good morning,” she said. The bombs tumbled to earth somewhere far enough away not to worry about them. “Who wants coffee?”

  A walkie-talkie set near the window screeched out an alert about another warplane: “Sukhoi 27 is coordinating with Homs, be careful.” Saraqeb, like every town in the rebel-held north, had developed an early warning system to identify threats in the air. Men known as marasid, observers, were tasked with intercepting regime communications between pilots and airbases and relaying that information via walkie-talkies. They latched onto regime frequencies that constantly changed and tried to break the coded language sometimes used to identify targets. More often, the targets were simply stated. The planes had few real predators. If the threat to Saraqeb was direct, and there was time, the alert would boom from the minarets of mosques. The town had five marasid, their task made harder since September 2015, when Russian warplanes joined their Syrian allies in the skies, turning the conflict decisively in Assad’s favor. There were Western planes in the air, too, the rebel backers bombing Islamic State positions in other parts of Syria and the occasional Nusra post, but the Western planes didn’t target the regime. Mariam laughed when I asked how people without transmitters coped. “Even beggars have walkie-talkies these days,” she said.

  The farmhouse was self-sufficient, with twenty-four-hour electricity courtesy of solar panels, two generators as backup, satellite Internet, and two water wells. Residents who couldn’t afford their own generators or solar panels subscribed to private neighborhood generators that distributed amperes for a monthly fee. Cell-phone reception was still dead. The landlines worked, but only for local calls within a province.

  Mariam didn’t have classes that day. She got behind the wheel of her gray Kia Picanto, said a prayer under her breath, and drove to the market inside Saraqeb. Along the way, she recounted how a member of Jabhat al-Nusra had recently stormed into the school, demanding that religious instruction be expanded and social studies be struck from the curriculum. “We all debated him,” Mariam said, until a compromise was reached: Religious instruction would remain unchanged, social studies would be taught, but all references to the Baath Party, democracy, and socialism would be removed. “We slammed him into the wall with our words until he came out the other end!” Mariam laughed. “We will not be silent to them or anyone anymore.”

  She had never acquiesced to the growing Islamization of her town. She always drove herself, was politely waved through Nusra and Islamic State checkpoints, and never covered her face with a niqab, although many more women in Saraqeb now did. Ruha was right about that.

  The graffitied walls displaying revolutionary slogans around Saraqeb’s cultural center had faded. Shelling had amputated letters and images from the artwork, the missing pieces filled in with bare cinderblocks. A canvas of resistance damaged, repaired, resilient—a reminder of the time of colors before Saraqeb and most of Idlib Province was draped in Islamist black. The most recent revolutionary graffiti was dated 2013.

  Other slogans had come to predominate in Idlib, displayed on billboards that once bore quotidian advertisements for things like restaurants and cooking oil. The billboards were painted black. In handwritten white lettering, they proclaimed that democracy was the religion of the West. Secularism was blasphemy. Democracy led to zinna (unlawful sex), and Shiites were the enemies of Islam. The black billboards were simply signed YOUR BROTHERS THE MUJAHIDEEN, with no group affiliation. They emerged shortly after March 2015, when the provincial capital, Idlib City, fell to an Islamist coalition anchored by Ahrar al-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra. Idlib City was only the second of Syria’s fourteen provincial capitals not under regime control, and, like the other—Raqqa City—Islamists also ruled it, although with a lighter hand. The coalition in Idlib, which called itself the Army of Conquest, imposed new conservative social measures in the city, including a female dress code enforced by roving patrols of the hisbee—the morality police who traveled in minivans with black-tinted windows, accosting people who failed to conform to the new standards. The Army of Conquest decreed that belted overcoats were insufficiently conservative and insisted that women (and even prepubescent girls) wear loose black abayas. It banned brightly colored headscarves; only black, brown, and navy blue were permitted. Men were required to wear beards. But the measures applied only to Idlib City, and by the end of the year, they were watered down due to their unpopularity.

  Mariam stopped at a makeshift stall selling gasoline out of large plastic barrels. The fuel sellers usually offered a choice between nizam or dawla (regime or state)—the gas coming from either Assad-controlled areas or from Islamic State’s oil wells in the east. Regime fuel was cleaner and generally more expensive than Islamic State’s, which tended to be crude
ly refined in makeshift facilities, although both price and quality fluctuated, depending on availability. In any case, the fuel seller was out of both that morning. Mariam continued her chores. “Before, in the beginning, I used to think we have to be frugal, not use too much cooking gas, too much diesel, too much fuel. Now I don’t think like that,” Mariam said. “Now, I don’t care if all of my paycheck is spent. We are in a state of war, who cares about money? Why die with money in your pocket? Why not live as comfortably as we can while we can?”

  In the beginning, as Mariam put it, there was one martyrs’ cemetery in Saraqeb for those killed in the conflict. Five years later, there were three. On another day, at one of the newer cemeteries, the gravedigger was busy shoveling red earth out of a deep hole. He always prepared ahead. The graves were arranged into sixteen rows, each extending at least a hundred meters, each column broken by plain white headstones like rungs on a ladder. Daisies sprouted from the graves. At least twenty belonged to unidentified victims, some placed in the earth just months earlier. The gravedigger explained what happened: “A plane struck, two fuel sellers were hit. Their supplies exploded, killing them and killing people in a Kia Rio that was passing by,” he said. “The bodies were charcoal, there was nothing left for us to identify them. Nobody knows who they were or where they were from or going. We put notices on Facebook, but nobody has asked about them.” Even the cemeteries weren’t safe from the planes, the gravedigger said. Another one in town had been shelled. “The living were martyred and the dead were martyred twice,” he said. “Life is the cheapest thing in Syria now.”

  MARIAM’S ELDEST SISTER needed cooking pots. Hers were riddled with shrapnel. Mariam offered to take her first to the family complex in the center of Saraqeb to see if there were any left behind before she bought new ones. The sisters drove around piles of rubble and twisted metal, Mariam cataloguing the lives lost at each gray mound. Four. Fourteen. Twenty-two. Six. “This was a little store,” she said, pointing to a concrete skeleton, the missile’s entry point clear. On a surviving column was a message spray-painted in red: HERE THERE WAS LIFE. Two men died there.

  Mariam turned into their old street. Her sister waited in the car: “I don’t want to see it,” she said. “It hurts my heart.” Mariam fumbled with the keys to the heavy metal door, its yellow fiberglass paneling long since blown out. It was the same door a once-nine-year-old Ruha opened to security forces back in 2011, the first time they invaded to look for her father.

  Mariam’s footsteps echoed in the emptiness. The windows, all glassless, were filled in with cinderblocks. Doors blown off hinges, window frames, too. The wind whistled through holes in several walls. A warplane overhead. Washed dishes gathered dust in the kitchen rack. A bottle of olive oil and spice jars on the bench. The inner courtyard, where Ruha and her siblings once played, where Mariam and her sisters would gather in the evenings, was strewn with rubble. In a coral-pink bedroom, dolls and teddy bears waited for two little girls who’d outgrown them. A fourth-grade social studies textbook lay on a bed. Colorful socks in a drawer. Mariam didn’t find any pots. “I feel numb when I come here. I say to myself, ‘Don’t get upset, the whole country has been destroyed.’ At least we’re all okay, but I always feel tired after coming here, physically worn out.”

  The old family complex empty. Life had relocated. Ruha’s extended family now gathered at the farmhouse every week, turning every Friday into Mother’s Day. The matriarch, Ruha’s grandmother, Zahida, was frailer, her body confined to a wheelchair but her mind still formidable, the anchor of the family. She expected updates on the crops, the price of lentils, the currency fluctuations, how her thirty-five grandchildren were faring, and what was happening in town. She sat on a couch one Friday afternoon—a new couch, not the faded blue one that had molded to her shape. Mariam was in the kitchen preparing lunch with a few of her sisters. The smell of fried onions and bay leaves and spices. She made kibbe, a labor-intensive dish of finely ground meat and bulgur, cinnamon and allspice, fashioned into palm-size, football-shaped croquettes, each one stuffed with minced meat, onions, garlic, and spices. It was a festive food, served in times of celebration. She hadn’t made it in five years. “Why should you die wishing you’d eaten something?” Mariam said. That was reason enough to prepare it.

  A male relative walked into the kitchen and joked that Jabhat al-Nusra wouldn’t approve of the gender mixing. They laughed and mocked the black billboards and their Islamist messages. “They just make people hate them more,” a sister said. “Did you all hear about what Abu Stayf did?” Maysaara asked. The lines outside bakeries were gender-segregated, with armed Nusra guards supervising the distribution. The bakeries were also targets for Assad’s warplanes, so women tended to stay away. The men’s line was always longer. Abu Stayf, a local man, had wrapped his face in a scarf and stood near a female friend in the shorter line. The Nusra fighter on duty, a foreigner, approached the woman suspiciously, asked her who was standing next to her but wouldn’t look directly at her. “This is my sister, but she’s hairy,” the woman said, referring to Abu Stayf. The Nusra fighter took her word for it and simply asked, “How many loaves?” when the pair got to the front of the line. Abu Stayf walked away, bread in hand, to applause and chants of Abu Stayf! Abu Stayf! “He turned around and made a V-for-victory sign!” Maysaara said, chuckling.

  One of Ruha’s aunts talked about her detained son. A former prisoner from Saraqeb had been released recently and was expected home soon. Ruha’s aunt wondered whether he’d seen her boy behind bars. She was dealing with a middleman who claimed he could release her son, but he demanded tens of thousands of dollars in advance without providing proof of life. “If he’d only give us something to believe Abdullah was alive, we’d sell land to raise the money,” Ruha’s aunt said. Abdullah had been detained on April 21, 2012. His mother, aunts, cousins, and grandmother remembered him fondly that afternoon, recalled his laugh, argued about whether he had one dimple or two. “You wonder what they are doing to him, what they’ve done. God help him,” Mariam whispered. “The mothers of the detained have it much harder than the mothers of the martyrs. My friends, mothers of martyrs, at least they know what happened to their children.”

  IN EARLY JULY 2016, Ruha and her family returned home. Her father met them on the Syrian side of the border and escorted them to a farmhouse full of relatives waiting for them. Despite her earlier misgivings, Ruha was glad to be back, glad to be reunited with family, and pleased to know she didn’t have to dress as conservatively as she had feared. She started school, made new friends. She was a ninth-grader now. “Everything has changed,” she said of her hometown, “or maybe I’d forgotten the details. It’s like I am seeing it for the first time. I wasn’t expecting this destruction.” She was upset that her home in the grand old family complex was too damaged and dangerous to live in. She also was surprised by how much she’d acclimatized to Turkey, how easily she’d forgotten the fear of life in wartime. “If I want to go to the souq, I have to think about whether it’s worth it, think about the planes, and make it a quick trip. Even in school, when I’m in school and a plane passes, I’m terrified. Everybody is. The teachers freak out.”

  In Turkey, she said, “I felt the exile, the distance, but I also felt safe. I’m happy here with my family, but I got used to safety. Inshallah the future is better. Inshallah we stay united and the fear disappears, because I don’t want to have to feel like I need to choose between living with family and being safe. Why can’t we have both in Syria? Nobody wants to have to leave their country just to feel secure.”

  In July 2017, Saraqeb’s sons and daughters, including Ruha’s family, protested against the armed Islamists with the black flags in their hometown, peacefully driving them out of Saraqeb, although few expected them to stay away. The revolutionary flag fluttered from vacated Islamist outposts, and for the first time in years, a new revolutionary slogan appeared on Saraqeb’s walls near other, earlier faded hopes: SAY TO THOSE WHO TRY TO DESTROY US THAT TH
E BEAUTY OF OUR SOULS CANNOT BE DEFEATED—SARAQEB 2017.

  MOHAMMAD

  April 2016. Mohammad was no longer a Nusra emir. He resigned his duties in Idlib and focused on what had become a harder task—bringing in muhajireen, a job he did halfheartedly. When he wasn’t in a safe house on either side of the border, he spent time with his wife and children in southern Turkey, focusing on what his wife called “jihad of the family.” He hadn’t lived with them for years. Mohammad was disillusioned and disappointed with Jabhat al-Nusra. It was a failure, he said, that was losing men and influence to Islamic State. Ad-Dawla had better recruitment and stronger media outreach, more money. Like many Nusra members, Mohammad considered reconciliation with Islamic State an impossibility—a truce was the best scenario short of defeating the group. Their dispute wasn’t just about personalities or pledges of loyalty. It was ideological, even though they both shared the same goal and referenced the same teachings. “We are as far apart as the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda,” Mohammad said, “even though the origin is the same—[the writings of] Sayyid Qutb. We want an Islamic state too, but only after we’ve liberated Syria and start liberating Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan can we establish a caliphate. How can you declare a caliphate when you’re still just basically in Raqqa and have one city out of fourteen [provincial capitals] in Syria? We must move in stages. You can’t climb a staircase in a single step.”

  He was rejecting muhajireen who exhibited what he called “Daeshy tendencies” and ignoring most requests. He had pulled away. “Look,” he said, holding out his phone, “today more than ten contacted me, they want to come in. I haven’t responded to them yet.” He scrolled through dozens of WhatsApp messages. A Saudi living in Idlib City wanted his two brothers in the kingdom to join him. He’d used Mohammad before. An Algerian provided tazkiya for a countryman waiting at the Turkish border. “Blessings be upon you, brother. Abu Saad sent me to you,” another message read. It was a Syrian sheikh who wanted five of his students to join him. Mohammad put away his phone. “The good ones aren’t coming to Nusra,” he said. “Daesh now dominates the Salafi Jihadi movement because Nusra and other jihadi groups are failures—administrative and financial failures with a weak leadership circle.”