Sisters of the War

by Rania Abouzeid

  * * *

  On Wednesday, June 18, just after lunch, one of those things happened—a single abrupt event that could change everything. It took the form of a bold, unprecedented attack on the heart of the regime in Damascus. By chance, there was electricity and the television was on, so Aunt Mariam heard the breaking news that several senior members of Assad’s inner circle were killed in an explosion during a meeting at the National Security Bureau in the capital. The defense minister, the deputy defense minister (who was also Assad’s brother-in-law), and the head of the president’s crisis management office all died instantly. A fourth official, the director of the National Security Bureau, would later die of his wounds. It was a major blow to the government side. Aunt Mariam let out a shriek and lifted her shaking hands to her cheeks. “Thank God, thank God,” she said. “Does it mean it is nearly over?”

  Across Saraqeb, celebratory gunfire erupted even as some fighters in town warned their comrades not to waste the bullets. “We will need them!”

  To which came the reply, “Not today!”

  The gunfire intermingled with cries of “Allahu Akbar!” or “God is great,” said in gratitude and relief, emanating from the town’s mosques, along with a message to government troops in the four military outposts that was broadcast over a mosque’s loudspeaker: “Your leaders are dead. You are our brothers! Join us! We will open our homes to you.”

  On Arabic satellite television channels, news reports poured in of defections in other parts of Syria, of soldiers and security men switching sides, of government checkpoints overrun by rebels, their booty of tanks, weapons, and ammunition falling into rebel hands. “What is wrong with us? Why haven’t we done anything yet?” asked one of Mariam’s nephews.

  “Is it real? Is it really almost over?” another in the Free Syrian Army asked his aunt. “I’m so sick of guns, bullets, bombs.”

  It wasn’t over. Shortly before eleven that night, a rocket plowed into the street outside the home of a family named the Breks in a different neighborhood in Saraqeb. Minutes later, a house painter appeared outside a base of rebel fighters. He was still in his beige work clothes splattered with dark green and white paint and blood. He fell to his knees, red-faced and sweaty, and opened a bloody white blanket with pale blue stripes. “People! People! Dear God! Somebody, anybody! Look what they have done! Look! Dear God, oh my God!”

  The fighters ran outside. A toddler was wrapped in the blanket. She was wearing a blue T-shirt and white shorts, barefoot, with patches of blood on her pudgy legs. Her head was a squashed blob of flesh, and she no longer had a face. “She’s not the only one!” the painter screamed. He collapsed, deflated, near the child, sweat and tears streaming from him. The young fighters tried to console him with words about God’s will that he didn’t want to hear. They told him to take the child to the town’s hospital—for what, he didn’t know. She was dead.

  At the hospital, the little girl’s mother lay dead on a stretcher, her deep red clothes soaked in blood.

  Young men screamed, “Allahu Akbar!” this time in sorrow and anger. One swept up body bits from the floor. The rocket had killed the little girl, her mother, her brother, two aunts, and another woman from the Brek family, and wounded several others. A child in a long lilac shirt lay on the bloody floor. Her right arm was bandaged and she lay motionless, her eyes open. She looked dead but wasn’t. With great effort, the little girl raised her left hand and made the “V for victory” sign.

  * * *

  The next day, Thursday, July 19, Saraqeb’s rebels had been preparing for what they feared would be an imminent attack by government troops. Syrian state media had laid the groundwork for an offensive, reporting that Saraqeb’s townspeople were asking the regime to free them of “terrorists” nested among them. Then, Wednesday’s strike on Assad’s inner circle reversed the momentum. Rebels across the country suddenly felt they had the upper hand and were on the verge of winning, while Assad’s forces were left reeling, stunned that their enemies had penetrated the heart of Damascus and killed senior Assad officials. Saraqeb’s rebels were buoyed by a sense of invincibility, or perhaps inevitability, that the shaken regime was about to fall. They decided to attack the Kaban Checkpoint, one of four outposts in their town.

  The battle began at 6 p.m. The first regime tank shell landed on the home of an Assad supporter—a good omen, the rebels said. Their smugness turned to laughter when a man drove the white fire truck to put out a blaze near his home. “He’s not from the fire department,” a rebel said. “It’s self-service.”

  Then, an almighty boom that sounded like a thousand cars backfiring. Rebels responded with tracer fire, the graceful arcs of red bullets reaching toward the clouds like a string of broken pearls, falling well short of the helicopter gunship circling overhead, arrogant in its altitude. Mortars crashed into concrete without any warning until seconds before impact. Shells exploded in residential streets. The helicopter gunship unleashed its rockets with a whoosh. The electricity was out, but an hour into the battle, several young civilian activists fired up a generator, hooked up an internet connection, and called nearby Free Syrian Army units via Skype, asking for help. They needed men and ammunition. “Listen, brother, the power is out here, so the line might cut. We need rocket-propelled grenades—two, three, as many as you have. Brother, it’s a very difficult situation now! Mortars, tanks, and there’s a helicopter, too. Whoever can come, come!”

  Armed men on motorbikes roared through empty streets. Most families, including Ruha’s, hid in their homes. A crowd stood outside Saraqeb’s Hassan Hospital, waiting to receive the wounded. Men shouted for stretchers as cars disgorged bloodied passengers. There weren’t enough stretchers, so armed locals, many in mismatched military attire and civilian clothing, carried in their wounded colleagues, or their neighbors. A man died on the street outside. His bright red blood formed a thick pool in a dip in the asphalt, as the sad, angry, frantic crowd around him cried out, “Allahu Akbar!”

  “Tell the people that there is no more room here!” a man yelled from the hospital steps. “Send them to Shifa [Hospital]” elsewhere in town. The cars kept coming. Broken bodies were carried in, others were carried out, mainly the dead. Grown men cried openly. The hospital floor was a mess of bloody footprints. The foyer was bursting with armed men trying to find out who was hurt, who was dead, even as the few remaining doctors shouted at them to get out to ease the overcrowding. Women asked about their sons.

  A man hobbled in, unaccompanied, looking as though he’d been dipped in black soot. Two children—a little girl, her head bandaged, and her younger brother, also wrapped in white gauze—walked out of the hospital, both covered in a fine concrete dust. Their tears had mixed with the dust, creating pasty streams from their eyes to their jawlines. Within two minutes, more than a dozen people were carried in. There weren’t enough gurneys, so they lay on the bloody white floor tiles.

  A woman in a striped burgundy-and-navy floor-length, long-sleeved dress made her way up the few broad steps to the hospital entrance. “Where is Saddam?” she screamed to anyone, to everyone. She turned from one man to the other with the same question: “Where is Saddam? I have lost his father today, I cannot lose him, too! I want my son!” She could barely stand. She seized on a tall, middle-aged fighter with graying hair named Khaled, who wore a black ammunition vest and a Kalashnikov across his back. “Where is he?” she yelled. She grabbed him by his black vest. Khaled did not respond, could not even look at her. She slapped him across the face. “Where is my son?” Khaled turned away from the mother. Twenty minutes later, Saddam’s mother ran out. “He’s dead! He’s dead!” she shouted. “My boy is dead!” She crumpled on the street outside the hospital, next to the pool of blood formed by the man who had died there earlier. But the following day, Saddam’s mother would learn that her son was alive: A bullet had grazed his head, covering him in blood and leaving him unconscious, but he had survived.

  “Empty the area, empty the area! Three tanks a
re moving toward us now!” The crowd outside the hospital scattered. Two teenage boys stood rooted in place, waiting with an empty orange stretcher.

  Back at a Free Syrian Army outpost at a school, armed fighters trickled in from the front and the hospitals. The Kaban Checkpoint was destroyed and the fifteen or so soldiers manning it all killed. “Nobody expected this kind of retaliation,” a young fighter said. “They knew where we were; why didn’t they come after us instead of the families? They are cowards.”

  At 9 p.m., the Hassan Hospital was still receiving the wounded. A young girl no older than four or five was carried in by her father, followed by an older woman on a stretcher, and a middle-aged man. “Get out!” the doctor told an armed man who had followed them in, sobbing like a child. “She is my aunty, this is my uncle,” the man said, pointing to the middle-aged couple, who were bleeding onto the floor.

  The little girl begged for her mother. A nurse searched for a pair of scissors to cut away her blood-soaked pink T-shirt. “Don’t be scared, my darling,” the male doctor told her. The child had shrapnel in her bloodied left eye and at least two small pieces lodged in the left side of her neck, which was spurting blood. Her short black hair was in two ponytails tied with pink bands.

  The base of the child’s head was cut. The hospital generator hummed and sputtered and shut down three times within twenty minutes. The doctor paused, waiting for the electricity to come back on before he resumed stitching the scalp at the base of the little girl’s skull. There was no anesthetic.

  By 10 p.m., the death toll was twenty-five. It would climb to thirty-five. Nobody counted the wounded. The armed men outside the hospital were angry, hyped up, ready to head back and fight, but in Ruha’s home, her family questioned whether the attack on the checkpoint had been worth it. “Too high a price,” Aunt Mariam said, shaking her head. “So much blood. Too much blood.”

  The mortars and whistling rockets continued well into the night. At 12:04 a.m., one of the town’s mosques broadcast a message. This time, it wasn’t directed at the government troops surrounding Saraqeb, urging them to defect. It was for the townsfolk. “People of Saraqeb, there is a wounded twelve-year-old boy in the hospital. We don’t know whose son he is.”

  * * *

  The next day, Friday, July 20, another single, abrupt event occurred, the kind that could upend everything, this one also relayed in a news flash, this time just before midday. The Russian ambassador to France had declared that Assad was ready to leave office “in an orderly way.” Celebratory gunfire erupted in Saraqeb, just as it had two days earlier.

  Families cooped up in their homes, including Ruha’s, breathed in the streets. Neighbors congratulated each other. “Thank God, it’s over,” an old man in a red-and-white-checkered headdress said to himself. Women cheered and clapped. Teenage girls threw rice on fighters as they paraded through the streets. Young children dodged between vehicles to pick up spent cartridges and to gather candy tossed into the crowd. A parade snaked around town, avoiding neighborhoods with active snipers before returning to the main street near the souq. Women sprayed the crowd with water from garden hoses, providing relief from a searing midday sun.

  Before an hour was up, there would be whispers that perhaps the news wasn’t true, that the Syrian Information Ministry had denied the comments by the Russian ambassador. Some would murmur it, but nobody, it seemed, wanted to broadcast it openly in the crowd. The war-weary people of Saraqeb needed something to celebrate.

  A man named Basil, who was a member of Maysaara’s Free Syrian Army unit, leaned on the wall of his post along the main street, puffing on a cigarette. He rested his Kalashnikov on the ground and watched the celebration. “I am crazy with happiness!” said the twenty-nine-year-old. “You know, I only picked up this gun because I was sick of hearing something called ‘peaceful’ while our people were being killed. I felt it was impossible to beat Bashar peacefully. Weapons were the tool, but our strength came from our community.” He was a welder before he became a fighter. He said he didn’t like guns, but he wasn’t ready to let go of his just yet. “My gun will stay with me until we are certain that he [Assad] is gone,” he said. “After that, I have two options—either I keep my weapon for my son so that he won’t need to beg for a gun like his father did, or I will wait and see what becomes of this army. I will hand in my gun to the army—not Bashar’s army, but the army of the Syrian Arab Republic, and I hope to never carry a gun against a Syrian again.”

  After forty minutes or so, the gathering thinned. Residents headed to the mosques for Friday prayers. Reality reasserted itself as people realized the news about Assad’s imminent departure wasn’t true. The war wasn’t over. Shelling resumed in the near distance, the familiar background noise of life in wartime.

  That evening, Aunt Mariam sat outside the family’s front door, watching her three nieces—Ruha, Alaa, and Tala—play in their street. It was one of the few times the girls were allowed outside. The past three days had been difficult, a roller coaster of hope and fear and feeling caged inside. The little girls crouched in their starting positions, each placing one leg in front of the other, ready to pounce on the count of three. “One, two, three!” Aunt Mariam called, and the sisters raced, giggling, to the top of their sloping narrow lane before turning around and sprinting back toward their aunt.

  The night was near pitch-black, the day’s heat trapped in the air. The electricity was out, as usual, so the family moved outdoors into a timid breeze. Mariam thought about the Brek family, who had suffered the rocket attack days earlier, as she watched her nieces play. “They were sitting here just like us,” she said. The Brek family had been drinking tea outside their front door when a rocket fell near them. “It’s frightening what we have gotten used to. Death will find us if it wants to, if God wills it, but we are changing, becoming harder as human beings.” Mariam wondered when what she called “zero hour” would arrive.

  “What does that mean?” Ruha asked her.

  “It means when we’ve run out of time, when [diplomacy] and [UN Special Envoy] Annan’s initiative and all the demonstrations mean nothing. When our fate will be decided,” Mariam replied.

  Ruha nodded. She had understood.

  The Syrian conflict was quickly drawing in foreigners on all sides—both individuals and states. Some foreigners were compelled to enter Syria and fight alongside the rebels, driven to action by the shaky amateur videos of Muslim women and children dying and begging for help. Others had different motives—they were Islamists who wanted to turn a cosmopolitan country into a conservative Islamic state. For some, religion was an afterthought, for men searching for purpose, power, adventure, or refuge from trouble back home. Some of the foreign fighters were criminals in their home countries, and Syria was a convenient escape, a cause they could claim was selfless while in reality they just wanted the power and influence that come with carrying a gun. The foreign fighters came to Syria from all over the world, from other parts of the Middle East as well as from Europe, Asia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Some spoke Arabic and/or had Muslim or Arab backgrounds, but many others did not. Syrians in rebel-held areas, forever hospitable and increasingly desperate, accepted these foreigners, but not necessarily their ideas—especially those with conservative religious agendas.

  The easiest way for foreign fighters to get into rebel-held parts of northern Syria was through Turkey. The Turkish-Syrian frontier was about 822 kilometers (or about 511 miles) long, and varied in terrain from soaring mountains to flat plains. There were smuggling routes across it that predated the war, previously used to ferry cigarettes, livestock, and other commodities between the two countries. Many were so well known they had names—the barrel, the fishery, the olives—that described something of their location or topography. They varied in length, difficulty, and terrain. There were goat tracks etched into pine-covered slopes, grassy clearings with no tree cover (you had to sprint through those sections). Routes through foliage so thick it could whip you i
n the face if you weren’t careful. Steep climbs that tested footing on loose stones and dirt. Streams crossed by walking over fallen logs or climbing trees.

  In mid-2012, after rebels snatched a number of official border posts from the Syrian regime, it became easier to travel between Turkey and Syria. Sometimes a person could openly walk through the formal crossings—even without a passport if it was a one-way trip into Syria. But other times, mainly for those headed in the opposite direction, Turkish border guards shooed Syrians back, or unleashed dogs on them, preventing them from entering Turkey. Some guards expected bribes. It was a matter of luck and the guards on duty, although in general the border was open. It was partly a humanitarian gesture to allow the thousands of Syrians escaping the war to cross into the safety of Turkey, and partly political, because the Turkish leadership at the time was against Bashar al-Assad and supported the rebels.

  There were other countries, too, that in 2012 stepped up their assistance to the rebel side. The Saudis and the Qataris, along with some of their Gulf Arab allies, including the United Arab Emirates, provided weapons, ammunition, and money to their chosen rebel battalions. The United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States were also on the rebel side. There were private donors, organizations, and rich individuals like Muslim sheikhs in the Gulf or wealthy Syrians in the diaspora who financed some rebel groups. On the other side of the war, Bashar al-Assad relied on his Iranian and Russian allies who sent military advisers and in the years to come would become more actively involved in the fighting, as well as the Lebanese group Hizballah, which would soon send its disciplined fighters into battle alongside Assad’s men.