Maysaara had pulled away from his family. He wanted his children to get used to living without him, in case one day they had to if he were killed. He also stayed away from them because, he said, “Children can make a man weak. They make a man a coward. I try to keep them at a distance from my heart, from my eyes. It is negatively affecting the children, I know it is, but we have a duty. We’re talking about the fate of a country.”
He was still helping to finance a Free Syrian Army group comprised mainly of relatives, as well as smuggling medical supplies and satellite communication devices from Turkey. The devices were illegal in Syria, and medical supplies were needed because hospitals were often targeted in regime air strikes. Maysaara transported the goods in black duffel bags he and his nephews carried on their backs across the mountainous Turkish border into Syria. He would pour the jumble of medical packaging in a heap on the basement floor for Ruha and Alaa, their mother, and Aunts Mariam and Noora to sort through. The women placed like with like, creating piles on the floor: packs of gauze, blood bags, intubation tubes, sachets of hemostatic agents, and other items whose use they didn’t know.
Manal feared what the war was doing to her children. “They are used to the sound of rockets, it doesn’t scare them,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s because they don’t understand the consequences of the sound, that if a rocket lands near us, we would, God forbid, die or be chopped to pieces,” she said. “They don’t understand this.”
Except they did. Alaa had even devised a game around it, one she played in the basement. She explained the rules one day. “I hear what they’re saying about who died. I memorize it as if I’m recording it on paper. I record it in my mind. I count who died, who has lived, who has left.” When asked why, she just shrugged and repeated a word that was her default answer to what was happening around her: “It’s normal.”
Alaa’s other game, the one she played with her older sister when they were allowed aboveground, was collecting shazaya, shrapnel. “Some children collect coins or toys or Barbies; we collect shrapnel instead,” Ruha said. “They are like my toys,” Alaa added. “I like them, they are unusual shapes.”
Alaa displayed the shrapnel on windowsills until Manal scolded her, afraid of the sharp edges and the possibility of explosive residue in the remnants. The sisters gathered the pieces in a plastic bag they hid on the stairwell leading to their flat roof. Another game involved pretending to man a checkpoint and asking passersby for identification. “Are you with the revolution or against it?” a child asked as he stood at his front door. The local version of cops and robbers was now thuwar (revolutionaries) and shabiha (regime thugs). Nobody wanted to be the shabiha. As far as Ruha was concerned, revolutionaries versus regime thugs wasn’t a game: “It was reality, something that happened to us and in front of us.”
Once, she and Alaa were sitting on the stairs when the house behind them was hit by a rocket. “Mama was drinking a glass of water, I could see her inside; she threw it and started running toward us. We were fine, nothing happened to us, but Mama was about to faint. I was worried she might collapse or something.”
“We started thinking of it [bombings] as nothing. Normal,” Alaa said. “It was like a game. A bit of noise.”
But for Ruha, there was one thing that terrified her more than any other: The open-air inner courtyard where she used to play had become her great fear. She’d dash across it, whispering prayers under her breath, certain the sniper a few streets away and the ones she imagined nearby could see her. The family’s rooftop water tank was shot, so she knew her house was within range. She also knew that being a little girl was no protection. The sniper at the old radio communications tower near her cousin Lama’s house had shot another little girl in the back, severing her spinal cord and leaving her paralyzed. Her name was Diana, and Maysaara had helped her get to a hospital in Turkey. Ruha saw a photo of the girl in a hospital bed, so she knew it was true, not just something her parents told her when she complained that she wasn’t allowed to play in the street anymore.
In Saraqeb, there were new neighbors as parks became cemeteries and the dead moved closer to the living because existing graveyards were either full or too far away and dangerous to reach during shelling. A growing number of Syrians displaced by violence in other parts of the country had sought refuge in Saraqeb because it was safer than what they were fleeing. Ruha’s aunt Mariam cleared out her blackened, burned apartment and allowed a displaced family to squat in it.
The adults, like the children, were trying to figure out the new rules. Assad’s hold over towns like Saraqeb had disintegrated, but its replacement was unclear. Criminals exploited the instability across rebel-held northern Syria, kidnapping people for ransom and carjacking civilian vehicles. In the chaos, every man with a gun was becoming an authority. Ruha’s uncle Mohammad was carjacked twice in one month at fake Free Syrian Army checkpoints. They took his cars at gunpoint. He accepted the loss of his first vehicle (he refused to pay the 400,000 Syrian pounds, about $6,225 in those days, that the criminals demanded), but not the second. Within ten days of its being stolen, Maysaara retrieved the second car, “by force of guns, not kind words,” as Uncle Mohammad put it.
Syria’s revolutionaries wanted to bring down the Baathist regime of Bashar al-Assad but not the Syrian state. They didn’t want a repeat of Iraq’s experience after the US invasion of 2003 and the fall of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. In 2003, Iraq’s new American overlords dissolved the Iraqi army and every state institution, both civilian and security, as part of their sweeping purge of Baath Party members. At the time, Iraq and Syria were ruled by different branches of the Baath Party, but membership in the organization didn’t necessarily mean that a person believed in its politics or was responsible for oppressing other citizens. Membership was often a prerequisite for anything from a government job to a teaching or nursing position to joining a sports club—in other words, nothing more than a box that needed to be ticked on an application. In Iraq, the US-led expulsion of Baath Party members from state institutions left the country without anyone to police it (except the Americans and their allies) or to maintain or repair basic services like electricity and water. The Americans, in dissolving the Iraqi army, made hundreds of thousands of trained soldiers newly unemployed and very angry. Militia violence quickly filled the governance and security void, fueled by anger at the lack of services and jobs and other frustrations of the occupation.
The lessons of post-2003 Iraq loomed large in rebel-held Syria. Revolutionaries wondered how to untangle and dissect the Syrian regime from institutions that over almost fifty years of Assad rule had become a reflection of its corruption and paranoia. Was it enough to remove senior officials and leave the rest? How much of an institution could be hollowed out and replaced without sacrificing people who were competent and knew how to run things for politics? And how to bring the various armed rebel groups under new civilian Syrian opposition control (an impossibility but still a hope)?
Every town in rebel-held Syria struggled with the same questions. Each one had become like an independent island, responsible for its own governance. Communities need rules and laws to function, boundaries that delineate a citizen’s rights and responsibilities, and the consequences of breaching them. It’s difficult to feel safe and secure if nobody is enforcing the law, or worse if there is no law, and criminals can operate without fear of punishment or being held accountable. To avoid such chaos, in rebel areas where the state’s dominance had disappeared, older, more traditional forms of power like religion and tribal authority, once repressed by the Assads, rebounded to fill the governance void. Islamic, or Sharia, courts emerged to try and impose order on lawlessness. The groups of activists known as Local Coordination Committees became the main seeds of budding town and village-level governance systems based on friendships, local reputations, and the size of one’s family or tribe. Islamist battalions that were not part of the Free Syrian Army, like Jabhat al-Nusra, also stepped in to fill the void and
tried to win over civilians by providing social services that often competed with those provided by the LCCs. In Saraqeb, Jabhat al-Nusra occasionally distributed food aid, bread, and free fuel, and it established its own Sharia court to resolve disputes and punish alleged criminals. It slowly, carefully tried to present itself as a better, more efficient alternative to the LCCs. But Jabhat al-Nusra was not simply a powerful group trying to reestablish order for the good of the people. It was an ultraconservative Islamist militia that did not believe in a secular Syria. It believed that Syria should be governed by Jabhat al-Nusra’s strict interpretation of Islamic law, and that God’s laws, not legislation created by people, served as the blueprint for society.
Although the majority of Syrians, about 70 percent of them, were Sunni Muslim, it didn’t mean they were Islamists. Islam is a religion, while Islamism is a political ideology like socialism or capitalism or any other political theory. The two words, Islam and Islamism, sound similar but their meanings are different. Muslims like Ruha’s family prayed daily and celebrated religious holidays, their women dressed modestly and covered their hair, but they were not Islamists. They did not think multiethnic, multireligious Syria should be governed by Islamic law, and especially not the extremist interpretation of groups like Jabhat al-Nusra. They believed in a civil state where religion was a private, personal affair. Ruha’s family supported their town’s Local Coordination Committee, even though it had flaws. To Maysaara and his brother Mohammad, the LCC was still better than the Islamist alternative.
Saraqeb’s LCC had all sorts of problems, including the corruption of some of its members, and feuds between a handful of the town’s key families. The LCC relied on donations, mainly from Syrians in the diaspora, to fund its activities, but the money was inconsistent. One month, it was ten million Syrian pounds. The month before that, only one million. It was hard to plan services and food aid with such irregular funding.
A restructuring of Saraqeb’s LCC was proposed. The body’s nine elected positions would increase to forty-five, to include representatives from all of the main families—to spread the responsibility and accountability and to expand the body’s activities. On a warm summer night, Maysaara and Uncle Mohammad hosted a meeting in their cellar to discuss the new plan. Current and former members of the LCC, the town’s notables, and Free Syrian Army fighters were in attendance. But the meeting soon exposed some of the many cracks within the opposition, like the rift between an older generation that was used to being respected and in control, and young people who blamed their elders for not having challenged the Assads earlier. Ruha’s uncle Mohammad opened the meeting by saying he resented being told what to do by younger members of the LCC in a society where elders make decisions.
“What did your generation do for us against the regime?” one of the younger men asked. “We fought it, you didn’t. You can’t tell us what to do now! How many people over forty-five are involved in the revolution?”
Not many, Uncle Mohammad said, because they had family responsibilities. “It’s not like we told Maysaara not to get involved. We are three brothers. If something happens to us all, what happens to the family?”
“If everybody thinks, ‘I have family responsibilities,’ nobody would have moved,” the young man countered.
“That’s our problem!” another man said. “We argue with each other more than work together. Look at the Islamists and their discipline! I don’t blame people for thinking they are cleaner than we are.”
“The longer it takes, the more extremists there will be,” Uncle Mohammad said. “There weren’t armed foreigners in Syria before, now there are. If only Bashar [al-Assad] had introduced reforms, it would have been okay. I’m a democrat, a believer, I pray five times a day, but I’ll drink whiskey or beer,” he said, meaning that although he was religious, he bent the rules a bit (by drinking alcohol) and was open-minded. “These extremist groups can’t dominate Syrian society. We are the majority; our way of thinking will prevail.”
“When we finish with Bashar, we may need to get rid of them,” a former LCC member said of the non-FSA Islamist groups. “Even if the regime falls, the harder battle will be forming a new country. We will sacrifice a lot more to create a new country than we will to bring down the regime.”
“I don’t accept, even now, that Syrians are killing each other,” Maysaara said quietly.
“Didn’t I tell you that you’re not suited to be a military commander?” his brother teased.
Maysaara nodded. “We want a new Syria,” he said. “They’ve tried to kill me many times. I hope I’ll get to see it.”
* * *
Ruha and her sister Alaa may have seemed to their mother a little too unafraid, but their baby sister, three-year-old Tala, wasn’t. She was sick with a strange hormonal imbalance that one of the few doctors left in town said was precipitated by fear. Tala was literally scared sick by the war. The toddler needed to see a specialist, but there weren’t any nearby—they had either escaped or been killed. There were endocrinologists in government-held areas, but crossing from rebel- to regime-held Syria, especially for somebody like Maysaara, who was wanted by the government, was even more dangerous and difficult than crossing an official border between states. Turkey was an easier option, but how to get there? Idlib Province, where they lived, bordered Turkey. There were four ways a Syrian could enter Turkey: with a passport, medically evacuated if he or she was bleeding and in an ambulance, approaching border guards and being sent directly to a refugee camp, or illegally smuggled in. Ruha’s family didn’t have passports. Maysaara said he couldn’t bear to put his wife and children in a refugee camp, to see his family living on handouts in tents. They really had only one option—to smuggle themselves across the border. Maysaara told his older daughters to pack for two weeks.
“We’re going to Turkey! We’re going to Turkey!” Ruha shouted as the sisters hugged and jumped in their coral-pink bedroom. They’d never been to another country. Ruha put more hair clips and bracelets than clothes in her purple backpack. Alaa picked two of her favorite outfits and a selection of T-shirts and shorts. She folded them neatly into her pink schoolbag and then stood in front of the closet full of teddy bears. “Which one should I take?” she asked Ruha.
“What for? We’ll be back soon.”
Alaa nodded and shut the closet door. Their brother, Mohammad, was just as excited as they were. His sisters laughed when he walked into their bedroom with his blue schoolbag and showed them what he’d packed. “He’s put his dirty clothes in there!” Ruha said.
“It’s my bag, I can take whatever I want!” he answered.
“Fine. Get in trouble,” Alaa said, but neither of the sisters told on him.
The house was full of aunts and cousins who saw the family off, but it didn’t feel like Mother’s Day to Ruha. “When will I see them again?” she asked. “Do you think we’ll leave before the nighttime shelling?”
Maysaara pulled away from the curb a little after 8 p.m. Ruha cried and waved to her aunts and cousins standing outside their front door, until they faded from view. A pickup truck mounted with a 14.5mm antiaircraft gun moved ahead of Maysaara for protection, and also because one of its two passengers, Maysaara’s nephew, was going to drive the family sedan back home.
Young boys cheered, “God salute the Free Army!” as the truck passed.
“We’re the Free Army?” Alaa giggled.
Little Mohammad fell asleep in the back seat. Tala clapped to revolutionary songs playing through a USB device.
Paradise, paradise, paradise.
Our homeland is paradise!
Beloved homeland, your soil is sweet,
even your fire is paradise.
They passed towns that looked deserted, saw garbage as proof of life. In one place, children too young to remember parks and swings and slides climbed miniature hills of rubble where nothing grew, their little hands and shoes coated in a fine gray dust. Streets of disemboweled apartments, barely an exterior door or w
indow untouched by weaponry. A bedroom wall peeled open like a dollhouse, revealing its private interior. The mirror of an almond-colored dresser dusty but not cracked. In another town, a field of stalls—vegetables in purples and oranges and reds and greens. Shoes of different sizes in neat rows along the pavement. “Look, it’s normal life,” Alaa said. “Is this an opposition [town], too?”
They wove between ribbons of asphalt and dirt roads to stay on rebel-held tracts. They entered an olive grove. Maysaara slammed on the brakes and turned off the headlights. He’d noticed tank treads in the soft earth. The question was, regime or rebel? The pickup truck had detoured. They were alone. Ruha prayed quietly. “I’m scared,” she whispered. Regime or rebel treads? Were there government forces nearby? Maysaara relayed the question over a walkie-talkie to Free Syrian Army units in the vicinity. The answer was inconclusive. There were two routes out, a voice crackled—a shorter one laced with army snipers or a much longer one with a few checkpoints to skirt. Both were dangerous. Maysaara wondered what to do.
“Baba,” Ruha whispered, “do we want the easier road or the safer one? Take the safer one. We don’t want to be caught and beaten.”
Without a word, Maysaara and Manal turned and looked at their ten-year-old and then at each other. “As you wish, madam,” said Maysaara. He took the longer route. The pickup truck was waiting for them near the Turkish border. Mohammad woke as the family piled into its back seat.
“Is this Turkey?” Mohammad asked.
“No, we’ve gone back to Saraqeb,” Alaa teased.
They drove to a line of tall trees; then it was on foot from there with a jumble of schoolbags and backpacks. Coiled razor wire glinted in the moonlight. There were silhouetted individuals ahead with plastic bags that rustled, giving them away and prompting commands from the border guards, shouted in Turkish. The silhouettes recoiled. Ruha and her family watched and waited. Somebody approached the wire. Shots were fired into the air, military camouflage came into view. “It’s blocked,” whispered Maysaara. The family retreated. The pickup truck had gone. Maysaara called a smuggler, and the family waited in the dark until he arrived. They all squeezed into the smuggler’s car. “It’s a bad night,” said the smuggler. “The Turks have moods and tonight they’re not blind.”
Sisters of the War Page 8