Now that Aleppo is bogged down in a battle in which no one advances, journalists move on quickly from Atmeh. The rest of the country is inaccessible, studded with the regime’s checkpoints, and for many reporters the refugees’ plight is the final story before catching a plane to Mali. A few distracted lines, a few lines because you have to—because of the children. Yet Atmeh speaks of much more than its hardships. More than the cold and hunger. Because in Atmeh, unlike the city’s basements, there are only rural makeshift trenches, there are only refugees now, or corpses, the only Syrians you meet in Syria.
You enter Atmeh from Turkey, from the Turkish border city of Reyhanli. Where every day a new agency sets up its headquarters. In Syria it’s a heyday for the NGOs, since the UN, through the UNHCR (the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees), deals with refugees who cross the border: almost 650,000 in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. And 100,000 more in just the last month. As for those displaced within Syria, no one has any idea how many there are or where they are. The regime does not issue visas to foreign NGOs, so the entire territory is open to Syrians themselves, everything subject to improvisation. Many of them, out of the country for years, have flocked here to set up their associations. That is, to print a business card and rake in donations. “The problem,” explains Adi Atassi, “is that there are no defined roles.” In Cyprus he’s a street artist, and here he is in charge of refugee emergency services for the National Syrian Coalition—an alliance, based in Istanbul, for the coordination of opposition groups against Assad. “If you need anything, you don’t know who to turn to. But the disorganization is intentional. Because Atmeh is a historical junction point for smugglers: this way, in exchange for kickbacks for aid, they can continue to have control over the territory for other types of trafficking. Everybody has an interest in Atmeh being a no-man’s-land. Everybody, unfortunately, but the refugees.”
The National Coalition was established two months ago, in November 2012, replacing the National Council. The latter had been formed to act as a beachhead for Western intervention, as in Libya, to have an alternative government ready for when Assad might fall. But first it became divided on the timeliness of a Western intervention. And then on whether to overthrow Assad with armed force. And later on whether to overthrow Assad at all, or maybe to seek a compromise. And then on a thousand other things. And ultimately the international community, not being able to change the opposition, thought to change its name. Every so often a delegate pops in among the tents, and in preparation for an election distributes a few biscuits to the refugees, like a tourist feeding the pigeons in Piazza San Marco.
The one who dropped by this morning came from Paris and is very concerned about the winter. About the snow. He’s wearing Clarks. Pointing to the suede, he says, “The stain won’t ever come out.”
In Istanbul they’re already planning for the post-Assad period. But first you have to live long enough to get to that time, and in Atmeh you can end up burned to a crisp by an unattended candle. Nine victims. Because the cold here tightens its grip on you day by day. And you have to have seen the beauty of Damascus, of Aleppo, at least once, the elegance of a Syrian home, the carpets, the rose-filled courtyards and pastel painted tiles, the wrought iron lamps—you have to have seen all that, of which nothing remains but photographs on cell phones—to understand Atmeh now, to understand the despair, the reversal, the hopelessness of this regression to the Stone Age, warming yourself around the fire, depleted, wrapped up like beggars in whatever you’ve been able to scavenge, your child shivering, filthy, his hair like stubble, a garbage bag for a diaper, that dull, ashen expression, exhausted, burned-out eyes, the hunger, and not even a toilet, the humiliation of crouching in a field like cattle. They talk to you in trailing phrases, head bowed, like Karim who cuts himself while trying to fashion a can of paint into a stove with his bare hands, a trickle of blood barely oozing through his muddy fingers. All he says is: “I am ashamed.”
At sunset we simply retreat to our tents. Stomachs empty, in the dark, without a word, an average of 10.8 people to a tent, though in this one there are twenty-three of us, lined up like bodies in a morgue, sleeping fully clothed, huddled up in old tattered blankets. With old fears, new hallucinations: a car tears by, racing, and suddenly it’s the shriek of a fighter jet. And it’s an instant, that’s all—just time to look at one another: that’s it. Time that hangs suspended inside you again, waiting for the explosion, again: it’s death at your door.
In six months, we haven’t seen anyone here. Not the UN, not an NGO. Not the Red Cross: no one. Only the Saudis. Who are the main financial backers of the rebels, but who also assist civilians. They come and fund a family. For $300 they buy a bride. “It’s not speculation, it’s generosity,” claims Ismail, forty-one, who has just chosen Layla. In fact, it all takes place in the light of day—or rather, in the shadow of tradition. Layla is fifteen years old. Her father died of leukemia, and she’s here with her mother, eight brothers and sisters, her mother’s parents, aunts and uncles, and assorted cousins. Deciding for her is her mother’s father. And he decides unilaterally. “Layla knows that I know what is best for her,” he says brusquely. Layla’s consent is not necessary. Nor her opinion. She looks at me, while her sisters, around her, shorten her dress, try on makeup. She looks at me and doesn’t say anything. “I would have liked her to study,” her mother whispers. “But with this $300 her brothers and sisters will survive.”
Then she says: “It’s true that it’s a tradition. I was thirteen, my husband thirty-one.”
Then she looks at the ground, and murmurs: “But it’s a male tradition. Write that down.”
Mahmoud Najjar is twenty-four years old, with a degree in English Language and Literature; the stamp of his old life can be seen on his jacket, tailor-made shirt, and Diesel jeans. “The majority of Syrians were opposed to reacting to Assad’s violence with violence. It was inevitable: it would only destroy the country and any international solidarity. The Free Army has dragged us into a war that it is incapable of fighting. It has reduced us to beggars,” he says. “And that’s not the end of it.” Because in reality the Free Army, with its twenty-year-olds and their Kalashnikovs and flip-flops, their tinfoil and fertilizer grenades, is now the rear guard compared to those who have stepped up as the special forces of the revolution: the Islamists of Jabhat al-Nusra. The Support Front. Branded as terrorists by the United States, they are mainly foreigners, like the Iraqi who commands the unit guarding the refugees in Atmeh. And who will not speak with a female journalist, only men, and possibly only non-Western men. “In the liberated areas, the transitional government consists of Islamic courts in which someone pulls out the Koran and calls his own will justice,” Mahmoud says.
The jihadists are the ones who enter through Atmeh. That’s why international NGOs are not allowed to operate here. They don’t want anyone inconveniently looking around.
And that’s why the Syrians are increasingly fed up, tired of both Assad and the rebels.
The National Coalition, in all this, comes to blows over the formation of a government in exile. Its sixty-three members are all long-time dissidents of the regime, who have been living abroad for a lifetime. To be interviewed, they don’t even leave a Turkish phone number, but one that’s French, American, British. They’re nothing more than foreigners by now. Them too. Like those who are fighting this war and those who have come back to make a profit. “They’re interested in Syria,” Mahmoud says, “not in the Syrians.”
The only one who doggedly persists in dealing with the Syrians is Bashar al-Assad. He even bombed Atmeh. And thirteen thousand people made a dash for the border, screaming, terrified. Pressed against the barbed wire. One on top of another, cornered with no way out, hunted down to the last, even as they were: barefoot, starving, ankle-deep in mud. Hunted down just like that, even four-year-old children.
it sounds like a plane approaching, and—it’s just an instant—they all lo
ok at each other, words stuck in their throats. But it’s only a gate sliding closed. An ax splitting wood is a Kalashnikov’s burst, the clack of a woman’s high heels on cement the abrupt shot of a sniper. We may seem normal in Aleppo, but fear is a disease that is eating us up inside.
Seven months since the start of the battle, only one thing hasn’t changed here: Assad’s fighter jets are so imprecise that they still never bomb the front lines. Earlier their favorite target was al-Shifa hospital. Now that all that’s left of its walls is dust, all that remains of its doctors is a framed photo and flowers, the most dangerous places are the bread lines. There are only women and children this morning. About two hundred of them milling in front of a mosque vie for a handful of cartons with a little oil, rice, chickpeas. Some sugar. They’re missing fingers, ears; those beaten eyes on you, haggard and emaciated, a tattered sweater and little else against the sting of winter’s biting wind, skin parched, worn, on the bones, on the jutting shoulder blades and cheekbones, taut like wax. The mothers see you, a foreigner, and try to leave their child in your arms. “Take him with you,” they tell you, “save him.”
And there are many children at the demonstration in Bustan al-Qasr as well. The river that bisects the neighborhood and marks the border between rebel-held Aleppo and the regime’s Aleppo spewed out dozens of corpses a few days ago, each with a bullet hole in the neck, wrists bound, mouths taped shut. All civilians, all returning from this side. The youngest was fourteen years old. The Aleppo across the river, the regime’s Aleppo, is also the well-off Aleppo of the bourgeoisie. Where you can still buy things. And so, from here, people cross over by the hundreds every day. Over there they sell TV sets, clothes. Whatever you want. And when they have nothing left, they sell fish, at a price that’s sky-high, given that the riverbanks are rife with snipers.
If they find you in Assad’s Aleppo—if you are a male old enough to fight and they find you—you disappear.
The Free Army expects half the city to march today. Instead there are only about a hundred kids. Popular resistance no longer exists. No more activists. The city is worn out. They don’t even have gas. The van with the megaphone is pushed by hand.
The woman in front of me has sallow skin, and a name that she repeats three times but that I don’t understand, because she has no teeth. She’s a widow, and has two daughters in their twenties. And I can’t figure out what she has on her feet either, something strange. Like pieces of cloth, only it’s not cloth, it’s fur. She sees me looking at her and says to me: “Cat fur.” It’s from the strays they dine on. Because they’ve fled to the industrial area of Sheik Najjar, to a house that’s under construction, four pillars and a cement roof with walls of jute fiber, and the only one working is one of the daughters. In a still functioning factory, near here, that produces snack foods. But with her salary they can only buy a package of bread each per week. Little more than a slice a day. The rest is rainwater. And cat meat. “But one night we heard three men arguing heatedly. Then a shot.” The corpse is still there, three hundred yards away. A stain in the grass. “And now the cats are eating its body.”
She looks at us. She asks: “But eating rats is dangerous, don’t you think?”
Not even the guy from the Free Army who is with me has ever come across such a thing. He takes off his scarf, his jacket, his cap, he rummages through his pockets looking for coins, he’s even about to take off his shoes. But the woman says harshly: “I don’t want anything from you. It’s your fault.”
The Free Army entered Aleppo in August 2012, counting on a general uprising. “But not only were they under the illusion that they could win a war with a handful of bullets. They think they own the city. Houses, shops: whatever they want, they go in and take,” Marwan, an attorney, tells me. “They’re no better than Assad’s soldiers.” He has a cut on his eyebrow, a black eye. Yesterday, at a checkpoint, he tried to protect his wallet and phone. “And worst of all, if they hadn’t used schools and hospitals as their bases,” says his brother Radwan, an engineer who now teaches mathematics, “Assad would not have had an excuse to bomb everything.” Along with some friends, Radwan has set up a school in an apartment. We are in Mashad, three hundred yards from the front. The only light in the classroom is an LED tube, the kind you use to decorate the balcony at Christmas time. Hearing the rumble of mortars, the children don’t even turn around. Only when there’s a hail of bullets do they start dickering: “It’s a Dushka,” says Ahmed, six years old. “No it’s a short-barreled Kalashnikov,” says Omar, six years old as well. “Hear it? It’s lighter than a Dragunov.”
Some have turned to teaching math, others have become doctors. Many of the wounded are treated in private apartments, without electricity, by the light of cell phones or cigarette lighters, a carpet for an operating table, a cutter for a scalpel.
Because in seven months, still no one has been seen here.
Not the United Nations, not an NGO. Not the Red Cross: no one.
After a night of below-zero temperatures, the windows without glass so that they won’t shatter in case of an explosion, being in Aleppo means washing yourself with melted snow at dawn, sharing two apples among nine people, and feeling fortunate that you’re still alive. The only activity is trying to warm up. It’s freezing: bitter cold. So cold that you’re purplish, your skin rubbed raw by frost. The Syrians have cut down every tree, every shrub; we scour the ground searching for anything that can burn and give us a blaze, one second of warmth, old tires, old slippers. Although, truthfully, nothing here is more frightening than the sun: bad weather is the only anti-aircraft protection.
Everyone is always looking up at the sky in Aleppo. As the mind quickly considers the options. Wherever you need to go, whatever you have to do, whatever the place, you try to assess the probability that it may be bombed. You try to reason it out. You think maybe a neighborhood that has never been bombed is better. Because you think that maybe it isn’t a target, that maybe the regime doesn’t care about it. Then you think, maybe not. Maybe, on the other hand, it’s more likely to be bombed now, since it has never been bombed before, right? And so you choose a neighborhood that’s already been bombed. But then you recall those that have been bombed two, three, five times, and you find yourself making these calculations, these assumptions, that throw you into a spin. Maybe one that’s been bombed twice is better than one that’s been bombed six times, or maybe the one bombed six times is better, because how many more missiles can hit it? What’s the probability? And no matter what you think, the truth is that it’s best not to think. Because you think that maybe a market is safe, because a slaughter at a market would remind the world of Sarajevo; it would be going too far, even for Assad. But maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe attacking a market would suit Assad, just because it’s going too far: because it would convince Aleppo to surrender. Like with the gas: because in August Obama said the use of gas was the red line. He said that if Assad used gas he would intervene, and now you never know if you’re safe or maybe not, if someone from the rebel forces will use gas to force Obama to step in and . . . you realize that everything is unpredictable, that you can’t even be prudent, you can’t even minimize the danger, because a bread line is as dangerous as the front; you realize that one option is as good as another, because everything is a target; you realize that nothing makes any sense, that maybe one minute you’re alive, then maybe not, incinerated by a missile that you won’t hear coming, and you’re completely alone, completely vulnerable, in this city, this life your reasoning doesn’t have the slightest influence over, the slightest grasp, completely adrift, hostage to things you don’t understand, and maybe in a minute it will all be over, just like that, by a fluke, after centuries of science and the Enlightenment, strategies, logic, books, studies, Bacon and Galileo; and where do you go now? after man went to the moon, after physics, chemistry, which path do you take? which is safer? after they told you that everything had an explanation, a formula, a cause and e
ffect, after we can manipulate nature, after DNA, after Kant, and now it all ends like this, by a fluke, and there’s no logic, there’s nothing to hold onto, and as I write, maybe I’ll die, maybe not.
Incinerated by a missile that I won’t hear coming.
Anyway, Aleppo, in theory, has a government now.
The mayor’s name is Jalal al-Khanji, age sixty-seven; he’s an engineer, and he presides over the new Revolutionary Council, elected by the city’s notables. His office is in a bank on the outskirts, and he has one priority: bread. A package, eight slices, used to cost fifteen lire; today it costs two hundred. Almost three dollars. To provide essential services, namely waste management, electricity, water, and, in particular, bread, Aleppo requires about $10 million per month. In all, they’ve received $1.3 million, essentially private donations, with just pennies from the National Coalition, to which Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia just added a check for $900 million.
“The majority of the funding goes to finance the political activities of the opposition. But food and medicine are not just humanitarian aids in Aleppo: they’re political. More important than a thousand meetings in Istanbul, a thousand conferences,” the mayor says. “Because otherwise families here would have no other choice but to turn to the Islamic brigades. From them, bread is never lacking.”
Jalal al-Khanji’s office is completely empty.
Not a pen, not a sheet of paper. Not a stamp. Not one clerk.
Were it not for Jabhat al-Nusra, in fact, it would already be over here. And it’s not just a matter of bread. Al Qaeda’s men are a minority, about 5 percent of the combatants, according to estimates, but they are the best trained, the best equipped. They are the ones who decide. In a short time, they’ve captured almost all the military bases in the surrounding area, almost all the artillery batteries. The regime attacks with planes and missiles, while the Free Army’s General Headquarters in Aleppo is now the General Headquarters of Jabhat al-Nusra.
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