Uncle Mohammad was one of about 130 men detained in Saraqeb that day. He was imprisoned in a warehouse with hundreds of others from towns and villages across Idlib Province. There was just one bathroom, which constantly flooded, and not enough room to lie down. The environmental engineer was embarrassed to say that he was stuck near the toilet. He slept while seated, couldn’t stomach the stench to eat, and said he lost twenty kilograms in the thirty-six days he was imprisoned. The security forces insisted he had demonstrated, even though, unlike his brother Maysaara, he had not. “I was one of those who wanted dialogue with the regime,” Uncle Mohammad said after he was released. “If the regime thinks that it can finish off the demonstrations by force, it is delusional, and if the opposition thinks that it can bring down the regime, it is delusional. We need to talk. I believed in that when I went to jail, and when I came out, my brother Maysaara had bought a gun.”
Maysaara had done so reluctantly. “I didn’t want the fall of the regime,” he said. “For five months (until the August 2011 raid in Saraqeb), I didn’t want its fall, just its reform, but its actions forced us to demand it. There was no armed opposition the first time the army entered Saraqeb. Nobody fought it, but after the shabiha, people bought guns with the idea that we wouldn’t let a thug take us or anything we had.”
Maysaara bought guns and ammunition for the men of his family to defend themselves, as well as for his friends and neighbors. That was how a Free Syrian Army battalion was born: a man, his brothers, cousins, nephews, friends, and neighbors armed themselves, and with time started calling themselves a battalion and using other military terms. Many battalions considered themselves part of the Free Syrian Army, while others weren’t interested in being under that umbrella label.
Maysaara was also part of a secret underground network to help military defectors flee. It was as strong and as fragile as a spiderweb. The defectors were shuffled from house to house, car to car, town to town, avoiding security checkpoints by taking back roads. Maysaara became best friends with another man in this network, a businessman named Abu Rabieh, who was from a different part of Idlib Province. Abu Rabieh was gray-haired, clean-shaven, and a decade older than Maysaara. He had the LG electronics franchise in Idlib Province. They became inseparable—a pair of well-off businessmen turned revolutionaries—until one day when the violence caught up to them.
It was January 24, 2012, just before sunset. Maysaara was driving his red Toyota HiLux pickup truck, Abu Rabieh beside him. A box of syrupy sweets slid gently along the back seat. Maysaara had pulled out of a gas station that was out of gas (outside of Damascus, there were growing shortages of many things, including gas). He drove slowly, looking for one of the many roadside fuel sellers who sold gallons of varying quality out of plastic containers. A driver in a three-car convoy stopped him to ask directions.
At the same time, Ruha was in the souq with one of her seven aunts, buying toys for her sister Alaa, who had just had an operation on her legs to correct in-toeing (or pigeon-toeing). Alaa had been terrified of the operation, but it went smoothly. When she woke in her hospital bed, she saw a teddy bear that one of her uncles had bought her. It was bigger than she was, and she wondered how she’d carry it home and where she’d put it. Ruha was debating whether or not to buy Alaa a Barbie. The dolls never lasted more than a week in her home. She didn’t even bother to name them, such was their short life span. They’d break or disappear into the cupboard that Maysaara had built especially for his daughters’ many teddy bears and toys. Suddenly, there was a bolt of sustained gunfire. It frightened Ruha, but her aunt told her it was on the outskirts of town. The little girl returned to examining the toys on display.
Maysaara saw the men’s faces before he was pepper-sprayed. He put the truck in reverse and, temporarily blinded, drove as fast as he could toward Saraqeb as forty-eight bullets pierced the vehicle’s metal skin. Drivers honked at him but swerved out of his way. He felt a burning pain in his back. “Quicker! Quicker! I’m hit, I’m hit!” Abu Rabieh kept saying. Maysaara drove until the gunfire stopped. Eyes burning, he cradled his friend’s head in his lap as Abu Rabieh died in his arms.
Ruha and her aunt walked back to her grandmother’s house, along with an adult male cousin they had seen at the souq. A neighbor stopped the cousin. “How is Maysaara?” he said. “God willing, he hasn’t died, has he?” Ruha’s feet buckled. She collapsed in the street, crying. She was inconsolable. Her cousin carried her to a house that sounded like it was in mourning. Grandmother Zahida was wailing. The old lady said she had felt like a stone was sitting on her chest all day, that something wasn’t right with one of her children.
A bullet had lodged in Maysaara’s back, another sliced through him near his spine. His bloodied pants, sport jacket, and white striped shirt were returned to his family that night, but it was days before they saw him. It was raining shells when he came home, his family cowering in the cellar. Ruha’s father was carried in by two men. His feet dragged behind him. The father who spoiled his children, who once drove hours just to take them to the circus, who bought their clothes from the highest-end stores, could barely speak. He could not stand. He stayed just long enough to kiss every member of his family and then was whisked away. It wasn’t safe for him to linger.
Ruha was devastated. “I love my father more than I love anyone or anything,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine life without Baba. I wasn’t thinking of anything except hoping that Baba doesn’t die.”
* * *
By the end of 2011, the United Nations reported that some five thousand Syrians had been killed in the revolutionary unrest. The death toll would soon spiral into the hundreds of thousands. The Syrian revolution—and the government crackdown—were very quickly becoming very ugly and violent.
Ruha’s father, Maysaara, spent months in hiding, healing from the gunshot wounds he sustained in the ambush that killed his friend Abu Rabieh. He’d been in the desert flatlands between Idlib and Raqqa under the protection of a tribal sheikh, and then spent eight weeks in Turkey. He returned home to Saraqeb on July 15, 2012. The three-car Free Syrian Army convoy of relatives that escorted him from the Turkish border honked like a wedding procession when it turned into his gently sloping alleyway.
Ruha and her siblings—Alaa, Mohammad, and Tala—waited outside their front door like coiled springs, pouncing on their father as soon as he stepped out of the car. He scooped up his two youngest, one in each arm, and walked into his mother’s living room. Grandmother Zahida was in her usual spot, the faded blue couch. Maysaara knelt before her and kissed her cheeks. She took his bearded face in her hands. “Why have you come back?” she asked.
He laughed. “Is that any way to greet your son?”
“I’m happy to see you, but I’m afraid for you. You should leave.”
Saraqeb had changed in his absence. It was disfigured, broken, scarred after a four-day military assault in March by Assad’s men. Twenty-four civilians had been executed and more than a hundred homes burned by the security forces, including Aunt Mariam’s apartment, in fires that international human rights groups said were deliberately lit. Another eleven homes were destroyed by tank fire and forty-six more were damaged but still livable. In the main souq, the corrugated-metal store shutters were peppered with bullet holes. Some were blown out and twisted into macabre art by the heat and force of explosions. No two looked alike.
On March 27, the Syrian military withdrew from Saraqeb but left behind four military posts in the town. It turned a dairy factory in the northern neighborhood and an olive oil factory in the southern neighborhood into barracks for its men. A checkpoint called Kaban was set up, and snipers were planted at an old radio communications tower. Four Free Syrian Army groups in Saraqeb opposed them, including one Maysaara helped finance, as well as other armed groups.
Not all of Assad’s armed opponents identified as Free Syrian Army. Some were Islamists who wanted Syria to become an Islamic state. Many of those groups had black flags. Some battalions
of the Free Syrian Army were also Islamist but not as extreme or conservative as the non-FSA groups. One non-FSA group called Jabhat al-Nusra was very secretive and strict. In Saraqeb, its small group of fighters kept to themselves and did not easily accept men who wanted to join them. With time, Jabhat al-Nusra would be exposed as Al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria, but in 2012 those ties were hidden and still secret. Al-Qaeda was the group responsible for the 9/11 attacks on the United States in 2001, which destroyed New York City’s iconic Twin Towers buildings, among other targets, and killed almost three thousand people.
International diplomatic efforts tried and failed to stem the bloodshed in Syria. The United Nations appointed former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan as a special envoy to Syria. He devised a six-point peace plan that Assad said he supported. But at the same time, Syrian troops stormed Saraqeb and other towns in Idlib Province. Assad’s words were one thing, the actions of his men on the ground another.
Ruha and her family fled their home during those four days of terror. Her mother and siblings, grandmother, and Uncle Mohammad and Aunt Noora escaped to their farm on the outskirts of Saraqeb, living in its cramped supply room alongside a tractor and other farm equipment, until it was safe to return to the family complex. Ruha’s aunt Mariam stayed in town with one of her sisters. She couldn’t sleep most nights, terrified by what she described as “ghoulish” cries and the sound of storefronts being smashed and properties looted.
Aunt Mariam lost everything in the fire. Her white plastic chairs and kitchen table melted into smooth, hard puddles. She couldn’t tell whether the heaps of ash were once her clothes, cushions, quilts, or books. Her ceiling fans drooped like wilted flowers. She remembered thinking they looked beautiful. She walked out of her home with a partially melted coin collection in a metal box. That was all she kept. Her neighbors weren’t allowed to put out the fire, although one tossed a hose from his kitchen window through hers. “One of my neighbors asked the security forces, ‘Why are you burning the home of an old lady [Zahida’s sister] and her niece?’ They said, ‘You don’t know anything. Terrorists visit her home.’ They were talking about my nephews and brothers and brothers-in-law.” As far as the government was concerned, anybody who was against it, even peaceful protesters, were terrorists.
Aunt Mariam suspected that a neighbor’s son had informed security forces about her family visits. She’d tutored him in the ninth grade. “I am not annoyed or upset,” she said. “God compensates the oppressed. I forgive them. If it will stop here, I swear I do. Let them burn the house, we’ll build something better, as long as nothing happens to any of us. We are two single women who had never protested and they burned our house. If they did that to us, what is going to happen to Syria?” Aunt Mariam and her frail aunt, Zahida’s older sister, moved in with her mother, Zahida.
Ruha wore one of her best dresses—pink with yellow polka dots—the day Baba came home, but she quickly changed into the new Turkish clothes Maysaara had bought his children. She didn’t even pause to take off the tags. The house was full of aunts and cousins. It felt like Mother’s Day. For the first time, Ruha was relieved, not afraid, that Baba was home. “I wasn’t scared because I saw that he was carrying a gun, he could defend himself a little bit,” she said. “Before, he had nothing except his voice.”
She knew that her father was part of something called the Free Syrian Army. She’d heard the adults talk about it. She had worried that his injuries might have permanently disabled him, but he looked the same, except for the Kalashnikov rifle that never left his side, the green ammunition vest he wore over his shirt, and the grenade he carried at all times, even during meals and when he played with his children. “I’d rather die a thousand deaths than be captured by them,” he’d say. It was a common sentiment. He meant he’d rather kill himself with the grenade than be caught and imprisoned by Assad’s forces. Everyone knew that prisoners were often tortured, sometimes to death, and that many of those who entered Assad’s dungeons never came out, their families not knowing where they were or even if they were alive.
Maysaara may have looked the same as before, but the killing of his friend Abu Rabieh hadn’t merely changed him—he said it destroyed him. “It is like a piece of shrapnel lodged in my heart,” he said. “I wanted them all dead.”
* * *
Saraqeb had changed and so had its people, in ways big and small, visible and invisible. The violence wounded and hardened hearts, as it did Maysaara’s. It divided and destroyed communities, with people questioning whose side their friends and family were on—the revolution’s or the regime’s? Some of yesterday’s neighbors were becoming today’s enemies.
Even simple tasks like going to the souq to buy groceries were now life-and-death decisions. In Syria, markets were frequently the targets of government air strikes, and rebels also sometimes fired mortars and other artillery into civilian government-held areas. But only one side—Assad’s—had warplanes and helicopter gunships and all the military might of a state. People were often killed in regime air strikes on bakeries as they waited in line for bread (there were growing shortages). Ruha’s family, like every family in Syria, was forced to adjust to this new reality. So many people were dying in Syria’s war that death was no longer shocking or unexpected—surviving it was. It wasn’t unusual for a hundred or more people to die in a single day in violence across the country. Mourning periods, usually weeks, months, or even years long, depending on a person’s relationship to the deceased, became shortened. Otherwise, as Aunt Mariam said, much of Saraqeb would be permanently draped in black. The town’s Free Syrian Army fighters called ahead to the gravedigger before they went on a mission. Some paid his fee of 2,500 Syrian pounds in advance so their families wouldn’t have to. Government snipers were stationed near the graveyard, hunting the bereaved, making funerals a dangerous affair. To avoid the snipers, townsfolk often buried the dead at night, hastily and with little ritual.
Every aspect of life was harder and more dangerous. There were now daily power cuts, sometimes for nine hours, sometimes for two. Nobody knew when the electricity would go out or, more important, when it would come back on. Ruha’s family switched from an electric burner to a gas stove, although the gas cylinders that once cost 275 pounds were now 3,000. Bread remained at its prewar price, but the fresh produce in the market—onions, potatoes, beans, and cucumbers harvested in the fields nearby—were inflated by a factor of at least three. The family could still afford what it didn’t grow. Others couldn’t. Cell phone and internet coverage had been out since October 2011, but the landlines still worked. The boom of artillery fire was the new background noise. Doors were kept open so they wouldn’t blow off their hinges from the force of the blasts, windows were left slightly ajar to not shatter against each other. Syrians in rebel-held areas developed a new relationship to the sky. They prayed for rain and gray stormy clouds because Assad’s warplanes usually didn’t fly in bad weather. After every attack on the town, Ruha’s uncle Mohammad would conduct a family head count by phone to check on everyone and try to locate the strikes.
One of Maysaara’s nieces and her teenage daughter, Lama, lived in Saraqeb’s closest house to the old radio communications tower and its resident sniper. “He’s our new neighbor,” Lama joked. The sniper had shattered their windows. They repaired them with fiberglass. He shot that, too. Lama would crawl through the bedroom she shared with her single mother, certain the man with the gun could see them. He’d shot seven bullets into their bedroom door. One night, he kept firing at the thin electrical wire that attached their home to the grid until he snapped it. “I think he was bored,” Lama said. After a direct rocket strike smashed a door and crushed a wall of their home, mother and daughter moved out and into the family complex with Grandmother Zahida, Uncle Mohammad and Aunt Noora, Ruha and her family, as well as Aunt Mariam and Zahida’s older sister. It was getting crowded.
Aunt Mariam lived in fear of men storming their home. She took shorter showers in case she was caught
naked or inappropriately dressed. Like her sisters and nieces, she began sleeping fully clothed, including in a headscarf, in case she had to quickly flee because of a bombing or a raid. But not everything changed. One afternoon, Aunt Mariam and the other women of the family sat in the inner courtyard of the family complex, joking and laughing. They picked the leaves off bundles of a green plant called molokhia used to make a viscous stew. The molokhia stalks were spread out on blankets in front of them. Ruha and Alaa helped, too. The leaves were left to dry for days before being stored for the winter mouni, or supplies, in a small room near the laundry. The men watched from the adjoining cellar. “Why are they bothering?” Maysaara asked. “Will we live till the winter?” One of his brothers-in-law said he no longer allowed his family to gather in the same space when the bombing intensified. He scattered his children in different rooms so that if a bomb fell, somebody, he figured, might survive.
Life in wartime meant feeling hypertense all the time, knowing that a single abrupt event—a knock on the door from the security forces, an artillery shell, or a sniper’s bullet—could change everything and destroy families. It was a roller coaster of emotions, from brief moments of gleeful normality when things seemed almost as they were before the war, to terrifying fear when the planes and helicopter gunships took to the skies, to boredom because, as Alaa said, she and her siblings “weren’t allowed out of the house anymore in case there was shelling or shooting,” and she wanted to play outside. Now ten years old, Ruha had started to think of herself as too old to play. She passed the time, she said, by “painting my nails, listening to music, dancing, singing, and most of all, fixing each other’s hair.” But for now, she helped pick the leaves off the molokhia stalks with her female relatives. Her mother, Manal, stepped away from the courtyard and into the kitchen to do the dishes. Her eldest daughter followed her, just as a bullet hit the outer kitchen wall. Manal shuddered. “It’s just a sniper,” Ruha told her mother. She knew it meant one shot, not a fusillade. “Mama is so scared of bullets,” Ruha said, smirking. She was embarrassed that her mother had flinched.
Sisters of the War Page 5