Each side in the Syrian conflict was fighting for its survival in an increasingly ugly war that was not only being fought on the battlefronts but also in other arenas. There was the media war, with each side trying to tell its version of the story, as well as the language Syrians on opposite sides started using to describe each other.
Rebels referred to those on Assad’s side as shabiha, or thugs. Assad’s supporters called their opponents, whether armed rebels or peaceful protesters, terrorists. Differences in religion or financial status or political views or where a person lived were highlighted as an excuse to despise those considered “the other side.” It’s harder to hate and harm somebody you can relate to, so the name-calling—far from being harmless—served the dangerous purpose of demonizing Syrians on opposing sides. It classified people as either us or them, friend or foe, worthy or worthless.
The Islamists, in particular, both foreign and Syrian on the rebel side, used derogatory sectarian language to describe Alawites, claiming they were all with Assad, to deepen a religious hatred that was just another means to highlight differences between the two sides. The growing sectarianism and hate-filled language against already-frightened religious minorities like the Christians and the Alawites allowed Assad to claim that he was the protector of Syria’s secular cosmopolitan society. It meant that some Syrians who feared the corruption and violence and injustice of Assad’s rule nonetheless feared the alternative even more, and so they either stuck with Assad or tried to remain neutral.
Although the majority of Syrians being killed were on the rebel side, Assad’s side was also sustaining losses. Posters of the regime’s dead, the men forever frozen in youth, were plastered on walls, store windows, and billboards across Mezzeh 86 and other government-held areas. Their funerals, like funerals everywhere in Syria, were communal affairs. Mezzeh 86 didn’t have a graveyard, and in any case, its inhabitants traced their origins back to their ancestral villages, mainly in and around the Sahel, so the dead were buried high in the hills of Latakia, but not before they were briefly returned to their homes in Mezzeh 86 for one last visit. Each side called its dead martyrs. The arrival of a new regime martyr was often heralded by a burst of gunfire as the flag-draped coffin was carried through the streets. Residents would emerge from their homes and stores to greet the deceased, watching and wailing and sharing in a family’s grief and loss, honoring their sacrifice. “The martyrs would come, weekly and sometimes daily, to our area,” Talal remembered. His daughters didn’t see or hear any funerals (they were usually at school), and he didn’t feel the need to tell them about it.
More men were being drafted into Assad’s war effort, although none of Lojayn or Hanin or Jawa’s school friends had fathers who had newly volunteered for the military or been killed in duty. Jawa remembered hearing something on the news one day about martyrs, but she didn’t understand or ask how they died. “I never watched the news, I preferred cartoons,” she said. “I didn’t know about anything that was happening around us.”
In Syria, it was compulsory for males over eighteen years of age—with the exception of only sons—to serve twenty-one months in the military (the time period increased and decreased during the war, depending on the security situation). It was possible for a young man to delay his military service until after he finished his university studies, so some men purposely failed subjects to postpone donning a uniform. Some paid bribes to avoid conscription, but as the war dragged on, those who evaded service faced imprisonment and forced conscription if and when they were caught. In addition to the uniformed military and plainclothes intelligence agents, new volunteer paramilitary groups emerged in government-held areas. They were known as the “popular committees.” By late 2012, these groups were legitimized by the state as the National Defense Forces, and given salaries. Unlike the military, in which a soldier could not choose where he was geographically stationed, members of the less-disciplined NDF patrolled their own neighborhoods. That was one of the perks of joining the NDF. Anyone could volunteer to join the militias, and in Mezzeh 86, many did. The neighborhood, like Damascus as a whole, was becoming increasingly militarized, with more armed men walking its streets.
Some of those men wore the uniform of the national army, but many of the low-level security and intelligence agents, especially the irregular forces of armed neighborhood watch–like groups, looked like many of the rebels—with their beards, and with mismatched uniforms that were partly military camouflage, partly civilian attire. The only difference was their footwear: dress shoes (often pointy-toed) for the regime men in the city, sneakers or combat boots for the rebels operating in more rugged terrain. Each side—the rebels and the regime—had its war anthems, its martyrs, its narrative, but both shared certain Syrian characteristics, like an infectious lightheartedness and bountiful hospitality—just not toward each other. But the fighting men on both sides did not think they had enough in common to spare their country further misery. They had not yet tired of killing each other, each side continuing to press ahead, certain of an outright military victory rather than a negotiated settlement. In any case, the conflict was no longer just about Syrians, given all the regional and international players on each side of the war.
Damascus, the wondrous capital beloved by Talal’s daughters, increasingly felt like a tired and scared old man, sagging under the weight of new burdens. Thousands of people who had been displaced by fighting in other parts of the country had flooded into the capital. Many were housed in schools that were turned into shelters while those who could afford it lived in hotel rooms at discounted rates. They didn’t have a problem finding a hotel room—the tourists were staying away. The capital had become a city of barricades, choked by concrete checkpoints that snarled traffic. Thigh-high barriers, painted in the state’s two-starred flag, and concrete blast walls blocked key roads leading to government offices, turning the areas into no-go zones. Damascus was a city that had at once expanded due to the human influx but also had shrunk in terms of the number of roads and areas accessible to regular citizens. Things that were not present before were becoming common, like the men of the NDF manning small checkpoints that were often little more than a thin flagpole in the middle of narrow neighborhood streets. The men were armed with Kalashnikov rifles, black walkie-talkies, and often fake bomb detectors that looked like a thin metal antenna, which was supposed to bend like a divining rod when it detected explosives. (In reality the devices didn’t work, and the two British businessmen who invented and sold the wands were sentenced to prison in the United Kingdom for fraud. Nonetheless, the devices were still in use, not just in Syria, but across the Middle East.)
Mezzeh 86, like the rest of Damascus, had also changed. There were new checkpoints at the foot of the hill leading up to the neighborhood, and checkpoints within it. Armed men and soldiers roamed the tight two-way streets. The faces of the dead (as well as images of the president) stared out from every conceivable surface. The increased armed presence and checkpoints didn’t frighten Lojayn, Hanin, and Jawa. “When we used to stop at a checkpoint, we’d start singing or we’d chant, ‘God, Syria, and Bashar, that’s all!’ ” Jawa said. “We weren’t scared.” She and her sisters still didn’t know about the revolution, or the anti-Assad protests, or that there was something called a Free Syrian Army and other, non-FSA Islamist battalions, or what was really happening in the country. Their blissful bubble had not yet burst.
For their father, Talal, the checkpoints were a physical reminder of the deteriorating security situation. “The checkpoints were everywhere. The capital had changed. The general mood had changed. There was fear, concern, anxiety.”
Mezzeh 86 had suffered several mortar attacks, the rockets fired from nearby rebel-held areas on the outskirts of Damascus. One of the mortar rounds landed in the neighborhood by accident. The rebels had aimed at the nearby Presidential Palace but missed their target, hitting Mezzeh 86 and killing three people and wounding seven others. And then, there was the car bomb that sne
aked into the overcrowded neighborhood in the first week of November 2012.
It happened late in the afternoon on a cool winter’s day. Talal was in his store, serving customers, when a boom he said was “stronger than any sound I had ever heard in my life” shook him to his core. The force of the blast dislodged items from the shelves, although later Talal couldn’t be sure if some of the sunglasses and watches scattered across the floor fell because of the blast or the female customers, who in their fright knocked them over. Talal stood frozen in place, unsure of what had just happened: “What is this? Where is it? Is it a rocket or a car bomb or something else?”
Time seemed to slow. His limbs stiffened. He felt as though he was trying to move through molasses. The wailing and crying of the women in his store jolted him back to reality.
“Where are my children!” one of the women screamed. “Are my children or relatives in the street?” Talal opened his front door, still adorned with his daughters’ artwork, and peered into the street. The explosion looked to be several hundred meters (one meter is three feet) up the road, judging by the massive plume of gray smoke rising in the distance, close to his home but far enough from where he was standing to not blow out the glass of his storefront.
It was a chaotic scene: “So much smoke. Screaming. Crying.” The customers were pressing behind him, the terrified women wanting to check on their families. Talal gently ushered them back inside. “There might be a second bomb,” he said. “I know from the news that often a car bomb is followed by another that goes off after people gather at the scene, and it ends up killing more people.”
The explosion had knocked out the electricity and disrupted telephone service. Talal and the women—scared, anxious, confused—waited in the dimness of the store for what seemed like an eternity. About five minutes later, they decided that a second blast was unlikely although they had no way of knowing. It was just a guess, a desperate hope intensified by their rising fears to check on friends and families.
Talal stepped into the street and, together with the women, headed toward the scene of the blast. The car bomb had exploded near a bakery close to Talal’s home. “I felt like I was on another planet, like I’d been transported to some other place,” he said. The street, so familiar, suddenly looked unrecognizable. Thick gray smoke hung in the air. Bursts of bright orange fireballs leapt from the debris. Fire trucks tried to move up the street, but their path was impeded by the piles of gray rubble that minutes earlier had been homes and stores. The private interior of people’s homes, their clothes, dishes, and other items, were strewn in the street, near the twisted metal skeletons of several charred cars. A woman rushed past Talal, asking about her son.
“My son! My son! I don’t know where he is,” she yelled to anyone who would listen.
The sound of gushing water from ruptured pipes spewed a muddy waterfall of muck down the sloping main street. Talal tried with difficulty to navigate the “water mixed with torn tree branches, bits of electricity cables, and chunks of concrete” to reach his home. Broken glass crunched under his feet. He made his way through the crowd of people that had gathered, as residents emerged, dazed and frightened, from their homes and stores, wondering what had happened, who was hurt, and how to help. As he got closer to his house, Talal heard some of his neighbors crying and screaming—their teenage son was badly wounded and covered in bright red blood. He was carried to an ambulance farther down the street.
Talal tried to process the scene: “My house looked so strange, the scene was otherworldly. All the doors had been blown off their hinges, the windows all shattered by the force of the explosion. All around me, there were people screaming, crying, others trying to light the scene with their mobile phones because the electricity was out. Everybody looked lost. I felt as if I was transported back to some earlier century; it was dark, and frightening, I was terrified, and this dirty water was rushing down the street. I was in a state of hysteria.” The only thing that calmed him, that somewhat soothed his mind, was the fact that his wife and children were still in Blouta. “All I could think of was thank God they are not here, thank God they weren’t in the house when this happened; they may have died in the explosion, or been scared to death.”
The November car bomb in Mezzeh 86 killed eleven people and wounded dozens of others. In addition to his teenage neighbor, another of Talal’s friends, a nurse, was wounded and lost her leg. A jeweler he knew, a man in his early seventies, was killed immediately. Talal cried for his friends and worried about how the news would reach his family. “I knew that my wife always kept the television on to follow the news, especially at that time when things were getting worse. Her eyes were always on the news, and reports of rockets landing in Damascus. After I saw the destruction of the house, I tried to call but the cell phone network was cut.”
Panic set in. He didn’t want his wife, Awatif, and his children to hear about the explosion, about the dead and the wounded, in breaking news reports on television and wonder if he had been killed or hurt. He hurried on foot to a friend’s house in another neighborhood, all the while dialing Awatif’s number until it finally connected. His wife hadn’t yet seen the news.
“There’s been an explosion in Mezzeh 86,” he told her, “but don’t worry, I’m okay. The blast was near the bakery, but there isn’t a lot of damage, just a few broken windows in our house.”
He kept the true extent of destruction from her. “I didn’t want to frighten her, so I downplayed the damage. I didn’t want her to worry, or to increase her fear.”
Hanin heard about the blast from her mother. She burst out crying when she realized that her neighborhood had been targeted. The explosion made the nightly news, but the sisters didn’t want to watch the footage. They couldn’t stand to see their neighborhood in such a sorry state.
“When I heard what had happened, I was very afraid for Baba,” Hanin said. “It was the first time I’d heard about an explosion in Syria. I was afraid for my country and what was happening, but I didn’t understand or know the details. After the explosion, the only thing I was concerned about was checking on Baba. I’d call him every day and ask him, ‘Did something happen today? Are you okay?’ The only thing I cared about was checking on Baba. I didn’t know or try to find out about what was happening in Syria, just in my house and to my family.”
Talal walked back to a Mezzeh 86 that felt gray and downcast. The initial shock of residents soon turned to anger and outrage. Some of those gathered around the bomb site began shouting slogans in defiance and pledging their allegiance to President Bashar al-Assad. A chant rose along with the smoke of the still-smoldering wreckage: “With our souls and with our blood, we will sacrifice for you, Bashar!” Talal feared that the car bomb was just the beginning and that there was more trouble ahead. The war, which until then had felt as if it was happening elsewhere despite the occasional rocket attacks on Mezzeh 86, had now penetrated the heart of his neighborhood. He made a decision—his family would not return to Damascus. They would stay in Blouta. The village, he thought, has to be safer.
Ruha didn’t like being stuck in the cellar, with its thick stone walls and arched ceiling, the oldest part of their family complex, but she hated the basement more. At least the room they called the cellar was aboveground. The basement was the family’s new go-to refuge when Assad’s warplanes screamed overhead and things crashed around them. That was most days now, and more than a few nights. On the worst nights, the family slept down there, in a space crowded with neighbors, aunts, and cousins. There was little safety beyond the illusion of it, only solidarity in numbers. The women of the family had swept the dusty space clean, pushed its knickknacks against a wall, and placed a pile of thin mattresses in the center of its uneven concrete floor. The men had installed a toilet and a kitchenette. Ruha’s grandmother Zahida, proud and stubborn, refused to “cower like a rat” in the basement. If she was going to die, she’d often say, she’d die in her bed or on her faded blue couch.
Ruha wished she
could stay with her grandmother, but she wasn’t allowed to. She wasn’t good at sitting still, not for hours that ran into days. She felt suffocated in the airless underground room. “What if it is shelled and we are stuck under rubble?” she asked one day. “At least outside or aboveground we might have a chance to get out, to get away or something, but underground? And under rubble underground? We’ll die for sure. Isn’t that true?”
Ruha’s sister Alaa didn’t mind the basement as much. She was calmer and more solitary by nature, but the sudden change in atmospherics would frighten her. “The air, something happens to it, I feel like I am dying,” she said. She was too young to know that explosions could suck the air out of a room but not too young to feel it.
The girls had learned the vocabulary of war, new words like katiba (battalion), qannas (sniper), hawen (mortar), shazaya (shrapnel). They knew the sounds that accompanied some of the words and how to tell them apart. They fashioned new games from the new words. They made paper planes, pretend planes to shoot down the real ones above them, to imagine they weren’t powerless and stuck in an underground space their parents pretended was safe.
Their mother would hush them, promise them sweets if they were quiet. War or no war, Manal didn’t want her girls thought of as ill-behaved. She was more or less raising the children on her own.
Sisters of the War Page 7