“For those with open minds, who love learning and value their daughters, it wasn’t unusual,” Mariam said. She returned to Saraqeb after her studies and, in early 2011, she was living with her maternal aunt, Zahida’s older sister, in a three-room apartment Aunt Mariam owned above an underground gym. Mariam taught grades one to four at a local school. Ruha and her sister Alaa loved sleepovers at their aunt Mariam’s because sometimes she’d let them use the gym. “We’d play on everything,” Alaa said. “There were bicycles, and machines that felt like you were climbing, and a treadmill!”
Ruha’s uncle Mohammad, who lived in the family complex with his wife, Noora, was Zahida’s eldest son. He was a sixty-year-old environmental engineer. A slim man who wore glasses, he had a neatly trimmed mustache and salt-and-pepper-colored hair. Uncle Mohammad was the family’s elder statesman, a gentle man whose voice was never raised but always respected.
Ruha’s father, Maysaara, was Zahida’s youngest son, the ninth of her ten children, and her clear favorite. He was thirty-nine and not as serious as his eldest brother. Maysaara was the heart of every family gathering, the one whose amusing stories everybody waited to hear. His laugh was contagious. Charismatic and reliable, Maysaara was always the first to offer help if his siblings needed it. His sisters, Ruha’s aunts, often teased him that he had more shoes than his wife, Manal, and was fussier about his clothes and appearance than she was. His tailored jackets had to be just so, his shirts razor-sharp. He’d laugh at their good-natured teasing but never deny its truth. Maysaara spoiled all his children, but his eldest, Ruha, was especially dear to him. He spoke to the nine-year-old like an adult, and she carried herself with that confidence.
For Ruha, Saraqeb was her entire world because everything she loved was in it—her house, the farm, her school, her friends, and, most importantly, her family. And the heart of the extended family was Grandmother Zahida’s house, at the entrance to the family complex. It was the gathering place for birthdays and holidays, especially Mother’s Day, Ruha’s favorite day of the year, when all seven of her aunts would visit to honor her grandmother. In early 2011, Ruha had no way of knowing and couldn’t imagine that a simple knock on her front door would threaten everything and everyone she loved. But on the morning of May 1, 2011, that’s exactly what happened.
She was asleep in her grandmother’s bedroom. She often slept with her grandmother (she liked her cozy electric blanket) instead of in the coral-pink bedroom she shared with her sister Alaa. There was a knock on the door, loud repeated thumps that sounded angry and urgent. The noise jolted Ruha awake. She sank deeper under the bedcovers. She didn’t want to answer the door. The room, the closest to the front door, was still cloaked in darkness. It was not yet dawn—too early to get up. Ruha heard water splashing in the adjacent bathroom. Her grandmother Zahida was already awake. Zahida was heavyset and moved with difficulty, slowed by illness and age, so she called out to Ruha to see who was making such a racket outside. Half-asleep, the gangly fourth grader rubbed her eyes as she approached the heavy metal door with yellow fiberglass paneling. “Who is there?” Ruha said. Nobody answered, so she cracked it open.
She saw men with guns, wearing military uniforms. They were Syrian security forces. “Where’s your father?” one of the men shouted. Before she could think of an answer, Ruha’s mother, Manal, raced toward her, shielding her eldest daughter behind her back as the armed men stormed into their home. “Where’s your husband? He’s fled, hasn’t he?” Manal told them he wasn’t at home.
Ruha hurried into her grandmother’s living room, just steps from the front door. She was wide awake now, the fear spreading through her body like blood moving through her veins. They’re going to take Baba. I won’t see my father. That’s it, he won’t come back, she thought. She feared they might take her mother, too, the way she was following the men as they slammed closets, looked under beds, and searched every room. Were her siblings still asleep? If they were awake, were they as scared as she was? She felt her heart pounding like a breathless bird trapped in her chest. Grandmother Zahida prayed aloud for her youngest, favorite son: “Dear God, let Maysaara be safe. Dear God, let Maysaara be safe.”
Ruha hoped her mother was telling the truth and her father wasn’t home. She crept to a window. She was tall enough not to need to stand on tiptoes to see through it. It looked out onto the courtyard. Ruha watched the men in uniform raiding her home, their heavy black boots stomping across the tiled space where she played with her siblings. And then, just as suddenly as they had rushed into her house, the armed security forces stormed out—without Ruha’s father. He wasn’t home.
Maysaara was at a friend’s house, making plans and placards for that week’s demonstration. He was an anti-government protester, one of the many thousands across Syria calling for change and reform. He was on his way home when he saw truckloads of security men entering his street. He spun his car around and called his wife, Manal, then warned one of his brothers, a doctor who did not live in the family complex. It was too late for the doctor.
The dawn raid across Saraqeb on May 1, 2011, snatched thirty-eight people, including four of Ruha’s uncles—three on her mother’s side and her uncle the doctor, on her father’s side. Grandmother Zahida let out a shriek when she learned he’d been taken. “Dear God, my son is gone! They’ve taken him!” she cried. Zahida couldn’t hear very well but somehow always managed to hear anything about her seven daughters and three sons. Ruha usually thought her grandmother’s selective hearing was funny, but there was nothing to laugh about that morning. As news of the raid spread, Ruha’s aunts began gathering around her grandmother, this time not to celebrate a happy occasion like Mother’s Day, but because two of Zahida’s three sons were in danger. For the first time Ruha could remember, her grandmother looked scared. Zahida was in her usual spot in her living room, a faded blue couch that time had molded to her shape. She muttered to herself, as she often did, while she fished through a plastic bag of her daily medications. Uncle Mohammad was on his cell phone, calling everyone in the extended family to make sure they were safe.
Ruha looked at the telephone in her grandmother’s living room. Should she call Baba? She just wanted to know if he was okay. What if he wasn’t in a safe place? What if he answered and somebody heard him and he was caught because of her call? She moved between her grandmother’s kitchen and the living room, where the adults had congregated, carrying water to the women. Her hands shook, but she didn’t spill the liquid. At least her brother and sisters were still asleep. She was grateful that they had not witnessed what she saw.
She was worried about her father and scared about what might happen to her uncles. She’d heard the adults talk about people killed and tortured in prison. If her uncles survived, would she be able to see them in jail, the way she’d visited her maternal grandfather in 2010? She didn’t know why her grandfather was imprisoned in Damascus, just that he looked older and thinner behind bars. She wondered but didn’t ask. The subject made her mother cry.
Her grandfather had been arrested almost a year earlier, on July 27, 2010, after he was overheard complaining about the cost of living and criticizing corruption. He was “invited to coffee” at 9:30 that same night by intelligence agents. Being invited to coffee or tea by the security and intelligence forces usually meant being arrested, but there was no way Ruha’s grandfather could decline the “invitation.” He didn’t return home. The charges against him, filed in a criminal court, included weakening national morale, undermining the state, and—most hurtful to the old man—inciting sectarian strife, meaning religious hatred. He insisted the charges were all made up, that he hadn’t done any of it, but it made no difference to his case. He spent almost a year in prison before he was released on bail from Damascus Central Prison in Adra on June 7, 2011. After attending a court hearing in September, he skipped the next one in November and went into hiding. He was found guilty and, although he wasn’t present for the hearing, faced ten years in prison if he were ev
er caught.
This time, Ruha knew why her uncles were in trouble, and why the security forces wanted her father. It was because they were all serial protesters—and the government didn’t want people protesting. Their hometown of Saraqeb had joined the revolutionary movement early on, and Ruha’s uncles and father had participated in every demonstration since Saraqeb’s first, on March 25, 2011, just ten days into the revolution. It had been a small affair, no more than a few dozen men who walked, faces uncovered, from a mosque partway down the main street, chanting, “No fear after today!”
Ruha remembered how excited her father was when he returned home, how his words tumbled out. “We were all asking him, ‘What did you do? What did you say?’ We—my grandmother, my uncle Mohammad, and our family—were all waiting for him,” Ruha said. Maysaara told her he was doing something to help Syria move forward, to secure people’s rights. She knew that meant he was against the authorities. She had some idea of how “Assad’s Syria” worked because of what had happened to her maternal grandfather.
Maysaara was inspired to join the revolution by a sense of justice, an intolerance for corruption, and a yearning for political freedom in a system that did not allow parties other than the Baath. He and his family lived comfortably, they were financially well off, but a dignified life is about more than having food on the table: “I wanted freedom,” Maysaara said, “and to feel like a citizen with rights in my country.”
Ruha’s uncle, the doctor, spent twenty-one days in prison. He was released, only to be arrested again two weeks later for reasons that weren’t explained to him. He fled the country as soon as he was freed the second time. He wasn’t going to risk a third arrest. Maysaara did not stay away from his family for long. He sneaked home four days after the raid. His children piled on top of him, covered him with kisses. Ruha didn’t want Baba to leave, nor did she want him to stay. She kept glancing at the door. What if the security forces came back? Would he have time to escape? What if they took him? She didn’t know where he had been staying and didn’t want to know. She didn’t ask. The subject made her mother cry. She wished her father would stop protesting, but she kept that in her heart. Maysaara went into hiding after that visit, and Ruha’s life “turned upside down,” as she put it. “Baba used to stay with us all the time, then we didn’t see him anymore. We used to play on the streets, then we started to be afraid we might be shot.”
She was a little girl, but much older than a little girl. “We were fated to learn about things children shouldn’t learn about,” she said. “I know my parents were trying to hide things from us, but they could not. Everything was happening in front of us.”
A revolutionary protest movement was growing in a country that outlawed spontaneous protests. Across Syria, every Friday became a day of demonstrations. The marchers often set out from mosques after the Muslim Friday-afternoon prayers that are the equivalent of Sunday Mass for Christians. The mosques were the launching pads because under Syria’s state of emergency law, they were among the few public places where people were allowed to gather. The spark was usually a person or group of people shouting a slogan like “The people demand the fall of the regime!” or “Death but not humiliation!” and then dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of people (in the mosque and from elsewhere) would join in, marching along a main street. Witty banners and slogans were raised, some daringly mocking Assad and his feared intelligence agents, while others called for freedoms and human rights. Security forces—both uniformed, including the police and army, and intelligence agents in plainclothes, as well as government-affiliated thugs known as shabiha—often waited outside the mosques, armed with sticks, plastic whiplike rods, tear gas, and guns to terrify and prevent people from protesting. The security personnel detained men, women, and even children during demonstrations if they caught them, or they went house to house, searching for those they knew were protesting, like Ruha’s father, Maysaara. They shot into crowds of unarmed demonstrators, killing many. In some parts of Syria, the enraged marchers in turn burned, felled, and destroyed some of the many statues, posters, and billboards of the Assads, both father and son, that were featured prominently in village squares, at the entrances to towns, and in government buildings, and they burned Baath Party offices and vandalized other government property.
The events were filmed and uploaded to the internet for the world to see, by young internet-savvy men and women who emerged as anti-Assad civilian activists. The activists used virtual private networks and, later, satellite phones donated by foreign supporters and smuggled into the country to bypass the government’s strict controls on the internet. They even physically smuggled footage out of the country on USB drives to the neighboring states of Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, from where it was spread far and wide. The shaky amateur videos of protests were often broadcast on news programs around the world.
The opposition activists, who remained anonymous so that the government couldn’t identify and arrest them, became points of contact for journalists who could not get into Syria to see for themselves what was happening. The activists answered media questions and shared footage. It was very difficult for journalists to get a visa to Syria, and those who did were accompanied by government minders who approved every trip or interview a journalist wanted to do, in order to try to control the story. The minders took note of what was said and done by the journalist and all those they interviewed. It made it difficult to get an accurate, unbiased picture of what was going on because some Syrians were too scared of the minders to share what they really thought and felt. (Remember, Ruha’s grandfather was arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison because somebody overheard him complaining about corruption.) Some journalists entered Syria illegally, sneaking across borders to avoid the government minders and to see for themselves what the government didn’t want the world to know—that there was a grassroots revolution in Syria and the Assad regime was trying to crush it.
In late March 2011, two weeks into the turmoil, President Bashar al-Assad made his first public remarks about the unrest, in a speech to the Syrian Parliament that every Syrian waited to hear. Assad had earlier sent a high-ranking delegation to Daraa, birthplace of the revolution, to deliver his condolences to the families of protesters killed by security forces. The local governor in Daraa (who happened to be Assad’s cousin) was fired for his handling of the crisis, and the detained youths accused of writing anti-regime graffiti on school walls were released from prison.
Many Syrians, including Talal and Maysaara, hoped and expected that the president would announce reforms, like lifting the emergency law and allowing more freedoms, but instead, Assad blamed foreign conspirators and satellite television channels for encouraging the unrest. What was happening in Syria, President Assad claimed, was an attempt to sow religious hatred among the country’s many diverse communities, not a call for reform. He admitted that “not all demonstrators are conspirators” and that “mistakes” had been made in Daraa, where at least sixty people had been killed in two weeks of protests, but he didn’t apologize for the killings. Assad said the footage of demonstrations broadcast across the world were “lies, lies and lies that they eventually believe is the truth.” He vowed that he would not “fall like a domino,” like other Arab leaders being toppled by their people.
Talal was disappointed by what he heard. “It was a letdown. I had hopes that things would change, that the president’s speech would change things, but it didn’t. Everything—the state institutions and the way the state operated, the fear of the intelligence agencies—remained. Nothing changed.” His daughters didn’t watch the news or the president’s speech. They continued to live in a happy bubble, unaware that a revolution was spreading across Syria.
The revolution was leaderless at the national level, although local protest leaders emerged in towns and villages, men and women who tried to organize routes for protests in their areas, who wrote the banners, like Ruha’s father, Maysaara, who helped with the filming and dissemination
of information, and who served as lookouts to warn others if security forces were mobilizing nearby. These local protest leaders and activists soon coalesced into groups called Local Coordination Committees, or LCCs, which often included members of prominent families in a particular area. Many towns, like Saraqeb, that were involved in the protest movement had LCCs, even if not everybody in the town supported the revolution. Sometimes the identities of the members of the LCCs were kept secret, to avoid regime retribution.
The protesters wanted an end to the emergency law and to corruption, in favor of freedom of the press and a system that allowed political parties other than the Baath Party, as well as justice and information about disappeared loved ones. They wanted economic reforms and jobs. Some wanted revenge against a system that had harmed them and their families. The Syrian state saw the protests as an existential threat to the power of Bashar al-Assad and the decades-old system of governance that his father had built. It tried to crush the peaceful movement with brute force. Security forces arrested and beat back protesters, sometimes shooting them dead. Towns like Daraa in southern Syria, home of the youth arrested (and later released) for anti-regime graffiti, the birthplace of the revolution, were punished with weeks-long sieges in which security forces did not allow any person (or anything like food) in or out of the besieged area. In the years to come, this tactic of “starve or submit” to Assad’s rule would become extreme, resulting in some Syrians dying of starvation.
The regime crackdown intensified throughout 2011, pushing the death toll higher. By the summer, some soldiers and security personnel risked their lives to defect, breaking away from their units to join—and protect—protesters. It wasn’t easy to defect. Security men caught trying to escape were punished, sometimes even killed, and their families were also threatened. Some of the defectors fled across Syria’s northern border into neighboring Turkey, but many more tried to return to their hometowns. In some towns and villages, defectors banded together, forming armed lookouts during protests and firing back at their former colleagues if they threatened demonstrators. The same civilian activists who filmed protests also recorded defectors as they announced that they had broken away from Assad’s security forces, in a bid to encourage others to do the same. The videos followed a format: A defector would announce his name, rank, and unit, stating what part of the country he had been stationed in; then he’d hold up his laminated military ID card to prove his identity.
Sisters of the War Page 3