Sisters of the War

by Rania Abouzeid

  Since the end of World War II, joining the military was an Alawite’s main ticket out of poverty and society’s fringes. Syria’s elite—the wealthier Sunni merchant class and other religious communities—shunned the military as an undesirable career path, a poor man’s job, so Alawites, including Hafez al-Assad, found their place in the security services. Hafez was born into a poor family in a rural village named Qardaha in the province of Latakia, part of a vast area more broadly known as the Sahel. The Sahel extended from two mountain chains near the Turkish border, down to Syria’s coastal areas and the glistening waters of the Mediterranean Sea, including the country’s two main port cities of Latakia and Tartus. The Sahel was Alawite heartland, the only place in the country where the demographics were reversed and sectarian minorities like the Alawites were a majority, not Sunni Muslims. Hafez al-Assad left his village in the Sahel to join the military, becoming a lieutenant who rose to command the air force by 1963. He encouraged other Alawites to enter the security forces, creating a network of uniformed men who were loyal to him, and whom, with time, he would use to grab power in the 1970 coup.

  Talal and his family also traced their origins to the Sahel. They were from the village of Blouta, north of the Assads’ hometown of Qardaha. Talal and his immediate family, his father and brothers, weren’t military men. Like many Alawites, they were poor farmers. They lived off the land in Blouta, toiling in an apple orchard that was their only source of income. Several years of bad weather and poor harvests prompted Talal to leave his mountain home and try his luck in the big city. He moved to Damascus, where he studied and graduated from university in 2000, majoring in library and information studies. He tried and failed to find a civil service job, or any job for that matter, and so for years he sold cosmetics and hair accessories from a bag he carried on his back, going door-to-door, selling supplies to pharmacies and beauty salons and anyone else who was interested. Eventually, he saved enough money to open his small store in Mezzeh 86, and later, with the help of a bank loan, to buy the apartment that would become his family home. Blouta was still an important part of his young family’s life. His wife and daughters often spent time in the village, even attending school there during extended periods, and it remained the go-to place for summer vacations.

  Talal knew the stories about the religious discrimination his parents and grandparents faced, but he didn’t pass them on to his daughters. Nor did he ever recall telling them that they belonged to the same religious sect as the Assads. “I wanted to plant beautiful things in my children so that they would be well-balanced and openhearted,” he said, “not plant hatred and let them think, ‘These other people from a different religion once oppressed my grandparents and my family, so we should respond in kind.’ Never. I never wanted them to think that.”

  Like many Syrians, Talal and his wife believed in a secular Syria. Although Syrian society was diverse—rich in religions and ethnicities, including Kurdish, Arab, Turkoman, and Armenian—above all, it was secular, meaning that religion was secondary to the national identity that all Syrians shared. The country’s official name was the Syrian Arab Republic, a designation that oppressed some non-Arab communities like the Kurds, hundreds of thousands of whom were officially stateless (even Kurds born in Syria were denied citizenship). Still, in Assad’s Syria, it was considered rude to ask a person their religion, an idea reinforced by the ruling Baath Party, which believed religion had no place in the affairs of state. As far as it was concerned, faith was for the mosque or the church or any other place of worship—not the parliament and state institutions.

  So it wasn’t strange that Hanin and Lojayn didn’t know what religion their school friends were. They also didn’t know that their neighborhood in Damascus, Mezzeh 86, wasn’t simply an overcrowded slum. It was considered a loyalist stronghold, a bastion of Assad supporters that was initially built near the Presidential Palace to house the families of Alawite security forces, before it allowed other Alawites like Talal to buy property there. Many men in the neighborhood were part of the security forces and members of the intelligence agencies, the men other Syrians feared, the agents who enforced the Assad regime’s iron-fisted rules. But not all of them. Some were just poor Alawites like Talal who couldn’t afford to live in the other, fancier parts of Damascus.

  Assad’s Syria may have been a secular state, but the Assads also cynically manipulated religion to prop up their power when it suited them. They surrounded themselves with trusted members of their own religious sect, elevating them to some of the most powerful positions in the state. But being Alawite wasn’t an automatic ticket to greater benefits or even a guarantee of safety. The Assads detained Alawite opponents, too. The intelligence and security forces would detain anyone who was suspected of being against the regime, regardless of religion or ethnicity or gender or age. It was one of Syria’s many complicated contradictions. Damascus was safe, with little crime, but it was also a place where citizens could be detained by intelligence agents and disappear without a trace. Syria was a secular state where every citizen was supposed to be equal, regardless of religion or ethnicity, but in practice, a religious affiliation, especially if Alawite with pro-Assad politics, could provide certain advantages, and an ethnicity like Kurdish could be a disadvantage. These and many other contradictions created tensions that bubbled just below the surface of what seemed like a calm, secure Syria, contradictions that in 2011 would explode onto the streets, fueled by events elsewhere.

  In early 2011, the Middle East was a very different place than it is today. It was alive with an infectious, grassroots democratic energy that had long been suppressed by dictatorial leaders. For the first time in generations, hundreds of thousands of regular citizens across the Middle East, fed up with the kings, princes, religious clerics, and civilian dictators who had lorded over them for decades, took to the streets to demand change.

  It began in the North African country of Tunisia with the death of one man, Mohammed Bouazizi. He was a poor street vendor in his twenties who spent his days pushing a cart piled with produce along the dusty streets of his hometown. One day in mid-December 2010, a policewoman harassed him while he worked. It wasn’t the first time he’d been bullied or intimidated by the police, but it would be the last. The officer threatened to confiscate Bouazizi’s scales unless he paid a bribe that he couldn’t afford. She slapped him, humiliated him, and threatened his livelihood. Enraged, Bouazizi walked to the local municipality building to complain to officials, but they refused to see him. So Bouazizi, overcome by anger, humiliation, and frustration, did something to get their attention: He set himself on fire in front of the building. The young man was hospitalized and later died from his injuries, but his desperate act ignited the anger and solidarity of hundreds of thousands of Tunisians who shared his frustrations with the corrupt ruling class and its enforcers, including the police. People filled the streets, demanding justice for Bouazizi, and an end to corruption. The demonstrations swelled and spread across the country, quickly forcing Tunisian president Zine el Abidine ben Ali, who had been in power for twenty-three years, to flee to Saudi Arabia in mid-January 2011.

  Like a wildfire, the protests spread to Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and Bahrain. A great awakening was shaking the region. The people of the Middle East, despite living in different countries, shared the same frustrations and lack of freedoms. Many unlocked voices they knew it was safer to silence, overcoming the fear of intelligence agents, prison, beatings, and even death to call for democracy, jobs, human rights, and new leaders who wouldn’t punish them for speaking out. They wanted the same basic rights that people in many other countries, including the United States and those in Europe, already had and perhaps even took for granted. They dared to challenge dictators who expected to stay in power until they died, only to be replaced by their brothers or sons. These rulers who had long treated countries like their own private family businesses were now suddenly facing mass unrest and the fury of their once-cowed people.

 
In Egypt in mid-February, after eighteen days of protests, the country’s longtime president, Hosni Mubarak, resigned. Nervous Arab leaders wondered who would be next to fall. Many sent the army and security forces out against peaceful unarmed protesters. Demonstrators were beaten, arrested, and even shot dead, but the protests continued. In the West, these momentous events were called the Arab Spring, although that’s not what the people of the Middle East initially called them. The chants and protest banners and political graffiti from Tunisia to Bahrain all screamed, “Revolution!”

  The revolutionary wave reached Syria in late February 2011. It began timidly, with small public gatherings, mainly candlelight vigils, in solidarity with protesters in Egypt and Libya. Although the Syrian state had no love for the leaders of Egypt, Libya, and some other Arab countries, it also didn’t want Syrians demonstrating, even against those foreign leaders. Protests, after all, were banned under Syria’s emergency law. More worrying for Damascus, Syrians shared many of the same frustrations being voiced in other Arab capitals—they also wanted jobs, freedoms, and dignity. If protests started in Syria, they would surely test how popular and secure President Bashar al-Assad really was.

  Assad didn’t seem worried (at least publicly) and wasn’t sorry to see the end of the Tunisian and Egyptian presidents. He blamed them for their own downfall, warning that this was the fate of any leader who didn’t listen to his people. Assad believed he was different, and that Syria was different, because, among other things, Assad was much younger than other Arab leaders, who seemed ancient and out of touch with their majority-youth populations. In 2011, Assad was only forty-five. He was a president who seemed less stuffy and stern than other Arab leaders, who acted like pharaohs. It wasn’t unusual for Assad to stroll through places like Souq al-Hamidieh with his children, stopping for ice cream like Talal’s family. Assad made a point of driving his own car instead of being chauffeur driven. He casually dined in some of Damascus’s best restaurants with his glamorous wife, Asma. He seemed personally approachable and likable, even if the system he headed was ruthless. At least, that was his carefully crafted image.

  But things were about to change in Syria, sparked in an unlikely place, by unlikely people—a group of youths in the southern city of Daraa, near the Jordanian border. In late February, anti-regime graffiti suddenly appeared on the walls of a number of schools in Daraa. It said, It’s your turn, doctor, referring to Assad’s training as an eye doctor, and Let the regime fall, a modification of a protest chant that had spread across the Middle East and brought down dictators—“The people demand the fall of the regime.” The security forces arrested some two dozen young men and teenagers whom they blamed for the graffiti. The Daraa children, as they came to be known in the media, weren’t really children, and many had nothing to do with the writing on the walls, but their treatment in some of Syria’s worst prisons and news of their torture in detention (real and embellished) sparked protests for their release in their hometown. Those protests soon spread throughout Syria, christening Daraa the birthplace of the Syrian revolution.

  On March 15, 2011, the date widely considered the start of the Syrian revolution, in defiance of the emergency law, there were small demonstrations in several parts of the country, including in Daraa in the south, the city of Hasaka in the northeast, Deir Ezzor near Iraq in the east, Hama in central Syria, and even in Damascus near Souq al-Hamidieh. Amateur video captured that day in the souq showed people, no more than several dozen, clapping and walking, including a woman in a white headscarf. “Peacefully, peacefully,” they chanted, as well as “God, Syria, freedom, that’s all!” modifying the more common “God, Syria, Bashar, that’s all!” (or Hafez, back in the day).

  Talal’s wife, Awatif, and daughters were in Blouta that day. Talal was often in Souq al-Hamidieh (he bought his cosmetic supplies from there), but he wasn’t near the market on March 15, 2011, and so he didn’t witness the protest. He later watched it on the internet, but he didn’t think much of it. The gathering was small, and Syria was a security state with a powerful military. “It barely registered with me,” Talal said. “It didn’t mean anything.” Lojayn, Hanin, and Jawa didn’t see the footage and didn’t know about the revolutionary movements unseating dictators elsewhere in the Middle East. They didn’t follow current affairs or watch the news. They were too young, and it simply didn’t interest them. The news broadcasts were full of stories about events happening elsewhere to other people; it wasn’t part of their world and it didn’t affect them.

  It wouldn’t stay that way for long.

  In another part of Syria, hundreds of kilometers to the north of Damascus, in the agricultural heartland of Idlib Province bordering Turkey, another group of sisters would soon have a very personal understanding of the revolutionary movement spreading across Syria—and the Assad regime’s response to it.

  Nine-year-old Ruha was the eldest of four children. She had two sisters, eight-year-old Alaa and two-year-old Tala, and a brother named Mohammad, who was five. They lived in Saraqeb, their hometown of forty thousand people, about four hours’ drive from Damascus. Ruha and Alaa weren’t city girls like Lojayn, Hanin, and Jawa. Their family owned and farmed great stretches of flat cinnamon-colored earth that extended like a carpet beyond the concrete clusters of their hometown. They planted fields of wheat that Ruha was sure continued forever. The little girl loved the farm, especially cucumber season. She liked plucking the small ones that her family pickled and sold.

  Ruha and her family didn’t live on the farm. Their home was a short drive away in the heart of Saraqeb. They weren’t rich but nor were they poor; they were upper middle class, financially much better off than Lojayn, Hanin, and Jawa, who didn’t even have their own bedroom. The sisters in Saraqeb, by contrast, had plenty of space. They lived in a huge family complex that was nothing like a regular house. It was more like four apartments—all spread out on the ground floor—centered around a large rectangular, open-air courtyard in the middle that connected all the living spaces. It even had a basement. It was so large that Ruha’s family shared the space with her paternal grandmother, Zahida (a widow in her eighties), as well as Ruha’s uncle Mohammad and his wife, Noora.

  Big, traditional Syrian homes like Ruha’s, built in the old style, often had an interior tiled courtyard, like a secret, private outdoor space that was invisible from the street. The courtyard was the focal point of Ruha’s home; it was where she played with her siblings and where her mother, grandmother Zahida, and aunts sat and drank coffee. Unlike the girls in Mezzeh 86, who were Alawites, Ruha’s family were Sunni Muslims, and all the women wore headscarves. But in the courtyard, the ladies could move around freely without covering their hair if they wanted to, enjoying the sun on their skin in total privacy, knowing that the neighbors could not see them.

  Ruha’s grandmother Zahida lived in a three-room section near the entrance. Ruha, her parents, and her siblings lived in an apartment to the right of the courtyard, while her uncle Mohammad and aunt Noora lived to the left. Uncle Mohammad’s section even had its own smaller outdoor space, a courtyard within the courtyard. It had a beautiful marble-and-stone fountain that the family often gathered around at night, in evenings perfumed by the surrounding jasmine and rosebushes, lemon and orange trees, and grapevines that stretched overhead in a leafy canopy. The fourth, oldest part of the family complex was a lounge reserved for visitors and overnight guests. The family called it the cellar because it had thick stone walls and a high, arched ceiling that looked like an upside-down V. The cellar was so old that nobody in Ruha’s family could remember which generation built it.

  Ruha and Alaa shared a coral-pink bedroom stuffed with teddy bears and dolls. You could tell they were sisters just by looking at them. They had the same tight, dark brown curls that sometimes frizzed (inherited from their mother, Manal), the same large anime-like brown eyes. But Alaa was calmer by nature. Sensitive and highly imaginative, she could entertain herself for hours, whereas Ruha got bored easily. The si
sters sometimes played pranks on their brother, Mohammad (who looked like a photocopy of their trim and slender father, Maysaara), but it wouldn’t take long before their little brother joined in the game. Tala, the youngest child, was as cute and precious as a little china doll, with big brown eyes, porcelain-white skin, and curly, dark brown hair.

  Ruha had her mother’s graceful long limbs (although she was still awkwardly growing into them), her fair skin, and quiet poise, but she had inherited her father’s passion, quick wit, and many of his features. They had the same bold eyebrows framing camel-like brown eyes, thick long lashes, the same full lips, and the same feistiness—although that trait surely came from Grandmother Zahida. Zahida had imparted the attitude to all of her ten children—especially her seven daughters and their daughters. Age may have stiffened Zahida’s joints, reduced her hearing, and etched fine wrinkles on her still-delicate face, but it hadn’t blunted her tongue or intellect. She was the formidable matriarch of a large family, a proud woman who was especially proud that all of her daughters and adult granddaughters were university educated and employed.

  Ruha’s aunt Mariam, in particular, was something of a trailblazer in the neighborhood. A single teacher in her fifties, she had studied in Damascus at a time when many families in Saraqeb wouldn’t send their daughters to school in a nearby town, let alone to the Syrian capital four hours away. Aunt Mariam had lived in a student dorm in Damascus.