“Does this town get shelled, too?” Ruha asked. It blurred past. Another point along the border. Shots fired. No way across. It was already past midnight. Back in the smuggler’s car to another jumping-off point that looked promising. The family stepped onto the uneven ground of plowed fields, the ridges and troughs tricky to navigate in complete darkness. Maysaara walked ahead, carrying Tala and several bags. The smuggler lifted Mohammad over his shoulder. Alaa shrieked as she fell into a muddy irrigation ditch.
“Shh!” Ruha told her sister as she landed in the ditch, too. “Don’t even breathe!”
Wet up to their waists in brown sludge. Manal’s black robe caught on the coiled metal teeth of the barbed razor wire marking the border. She took it off to free herself. Still kilometers to the Turkish road and a waiting car. Streetlights beckoned along the horizon.
“Border guards!” the smuggler said. “Into the cornfield!” The family hid in the adjacent field, waiting, resting, then moving, the tall stalks hiding their approach. Rustling. Others were there, too. A Syrian man crashed into Alaa. The little girl screamed.
Maysaara ran to her. “I’m here, I’m here, we’re almost there,” he whispered. She clamped her hand over her mouth to prevent herself from screaming again, but she couldn’t stop shaking. Nobody moved. Had the border guards heard Alaa?
“That’s it, we’re caught,” Ruha whispered. She wanted to go home. She’d had enough of Turkey already. It was too hard to get into.
Waiting in the cornfield. The smuggler made calls. A group of people had been caught sneaking a large shipment of drugs into Turkey. That’s why the guards were on higher alert, he said, and why they weren’t letting people in. Maysaara carried both Alaa and Tala. Several Syrian men, strangers, helped with the family’s bags. The cornfield ended and a clearing began.
“Run!” the smuggler said as he stayed behind. Little legs moved as fast as they could. Manal brought up the rear to make sure all her children were in front of her. An old sedan, driven by the smuggler’s partner in Turkey, came into sight. Its engine sputtered, its fumes nauseating. The family bundled into the back seat as it rattled toward the nearest Turkish town, Reyhanli. That was as far as the smuggler would take them. Then, it was a taxi ride to the Turkish city of Antakya, to an apartment that housed several injured Free Syrian Army fighters from Saraqeb, who were in Turkey for treatment.
The two younger children fell asleep immediately. Turkey that first night was a cramped room with two mattresses and a couch. Ruha and Alaa changed out of their mud-caked clothes and collapsed on one of the mattresses. They fell asleep as refugees.
Lojayn, Hanin, and Jawa weren’t exactly thrilled to learn that their parents had decided to keep them in Blouta. They all much preferred the hustle and bustle of their neighborhood in Damascus. There wasn’t much to do in the village, or at least much that the trio of city girls wanted to do.
In Blouta, the days seemed to stretch forever, the pace of life slow and repetitive. Hanin was especially bored. There weren’t many children her age to make friends with, and the village school was tiny, nothing like her class in the capital. In Blouta, there were only four students in Hanin’s grade.
“There was nobody to have fun with, to play with, and if I wanted to play somewhere, there weren’t parks or playgrounds, just the fields full of dirt and mud,” she said.
Jawa adapted a little better to Blouta, mainly because several of her cousins in the village were closer to her age. She still preferred Damascus, but she appreciated the beauty of the village, and the rolling hills and deep valleys surrounding it. When she wasn’t in school, she liked to spend her time running through the fields with her cousins. “The scenery was so beautiful,” she said. “I liked playing, eating figs, planting things, and riding my bike.” She and Hanin shared a yellow bike that they kept in the house in Blouta. There was more space to ride it in the village than in their cramped hilly neighborhood back in Damascus. Even Hanin conceded that that was one positive thing about being in Blouta.
Hanin and Lojayn had brought their instruments with them. In the village, with its widely spaced homes, Hanin didn’t have to worry about practicing too loudly and annoying the neighbors, because the closest neighbors weren’t exactly close. “I’d play my keyboard all the time, all day,” she said, “and we also had a lot of toys in the house.”
In some ways, being in Blouta felt like an extended summer vacation, except that their father, Talal, wasn’t with them. The girls missed him and wished he’d join them instead of staying in Damascus. He’d drive up from Damascus at least once a month to spend a few days with his family, but he couldn’t afford to stay more than that. His daughters always complained when he said he needed to leave, but he never told them the truth about why he had to return to the capital—that business was bad and money was becoming a problem.
“I used to make gross 20,000 Syrian pounds [about $400 before the war], now it’s about 3,000 [$50],” Talal once said. His family’s apple orchard in the village, a source of additional income, was now off-limits because it was very close to a village called Doreen that was controlled by armed Syrian rebels. Entering the orchard meant risking being shot by the rebels. “We can’t go there, we can’t benefit from our orchard,” Talal said. “That would have helped us financially, but now earnings from our land are nonexistent, so there’s no income.”
The deteriorating economic and security situation drove more of Talal’s neighbors in Mezzeh 86 to volunteer to join the NDF and other security forces, just for a paycheck, but Talal said he couldn’t do that. “I didn’t want to volunteer and become a killer, but we are in a state of war. There is not a family that doesn’t have somebody who is either a soldier or working in the capital or a volunteer militiaman these days [to make money]. Who is staying in the villages? The young and the old, and a few men who work in the fields, but most men aren’t there. There’s nobody in Blouta except a few old men, women, and children.”
The anti-Assad rebels had already taken many of the towns and villages in the Latakian countryside in the patch of territory that extended from the Turkish border all the way to the village of Doreen. Doreen and a nearby town called Salma were the two closest rebel areas bordering regime-held territory in Latakia. Both rebel villages weren’t far from Blouta.
The rebels knew that if Assad lost the chunk of territory known as the Sahel, he lost the war just as surely as if he lost the capital, Damascus, because it formed his support base, so the rebels had strong motivation to push deeper into Latakia. Blouta was part of the Sahel, and so, too, was Assad’s hometown of Qardaha.
Hanin and Jawa could hear and see the planes flying over their village on their way to rebel areas. They would cheer when the metallic birds streaked across the sky, not realizing they were warplanes on deadly missions. “We didn’t know that they were going to bomb other Syrians,” Hanin said.
Most of the villages in the Sahel were majority Alawite, not Sunni Muslim like the rest of Syria, and Lojayn, Hanin, and Jawa sometimes heard some of the adults in Blouta whisper fears about what might happen to them as Alawites if the Sunni rebels, especially the ultraconservative religious ones who were saying ugly things about Alawites, tried to enter the Sahel. But other adults, including Talal and his wife, Awatif, weren’t worried. They had faith in the Syrian security forces stationed on hilltops around Blouta to protect them. “I didn’t have any inkling,” Talal said, “not even one in a million, that anything would happen to my family up there.”
He was wrong.
In Turkey, there was no gunfire or nighttime shelling. No snipers real or imagined for Ruha to fear. She could play in the street again outside her temporary home, a fourth-floor walk-up the family shared with wounded Free Syrian Army relatives from Saraqeb. In Turkey, the parks were still playgrounds, not new cemeteries. Ruha hadn’t been on a swing or a slide for almost two years. Her mother, Manal, would sit on a bench and watch her children laugh and run and play without fear of something falling
from the sky and exploding. Fifteen days came and went. Ruha’s baby sister, Tala, had pending medical appointments, but away from the war, the toddler’s strange hormonal condition seemed to be slowly clearing up on its own. Turkey’s playgrounds were nice, but they weren’t home. Ruha kept asking Baba when they would return to Saraqeb. She cried when she learned they were staying. “We came to treat Tala,” Manal told her eldest daughter, “but now the warplanes are as permanent as the birds in the air. We can’t take you back to that. We have to try and keep you safe.”
“Nobody dies before their time,” Ruha replied. Submitting to God’s will was a ready-made phrase intrinsic to her Muslim faith and her best argument for going back. It didn’t work on her parents. She’d cry when she spoke over Skype with her aunt Mariam, her grandmother Zahida, Uncle Mohammad and his wife, Noora. Her father, Maysaara, had bought the relatives in Saraqeb a satellite internet device. It was their only connection to the world outside their war zone. Their landline coverage did not extend beyond the limits of Idlib Province, disconnecting them from the rest of Syria, and the regular internet had been cut for years.
Mother’s Day 2013 was difficult for Ruha. It was usually her favorite day of the year. “We’d make sweets, give my grandmother gifts, we’d all play,” she remembered. “I love my grandmother. I know that I’m spoiled, that she spoiled me. When will I see her again?”
The sisters often reminisced about their family in Syria. “Each one of us had a favorite uncle,” Ruha once said. “Mine was Ayham, Alaa’s was Manhal.”
“And I had them all!” little Tala replied.
In Turkey, all the children developed a new habit. At bedtime now, the lights had to stay on. They feared being in the kind of pitch-black of that cornfield the night they sneaked across the border. Ruha and her siblings spent their days watching cartoons on an old laptop, or with crayons and coloring books. They made friends with the Turkish children in their building. They couldn’t converse, but somehow they understood one another the way children often do. Maysaara didn’t enroll them in school. “How can I put my children in school, as if life is normal, when there are children in Syria who can’t go to school?” he said. “My children are no better than those in Syria.” It was his form of survivor’s guilt.
Ruha was happy not to be in school, but the apartment was cramped with the recuperating Free Syrian Army fighters. The young men were often edgy, impatient to heal and return to the battlefield. “These guys bore me,” Ruha would say. “They sit in front of their computers all day, following the news.”
Her mother recognized that the young fighters were “emotionally very tired,” as she put it. She didn’t want her children disturbing them, so she sometimes confined Ruha and her siblings all day to one of the apartment’s two bedrooms. “The children cannot speak, yell, cry, run; some of the guys get agitated,” Manal said. “I try to keep them quiet, but this is a form of pressure on the children.” For Ruha, it was suffocating, like being stuck in the basement back in Syria but without the fear. She wasn’t good at sitting still.
They were refugees now, but business-class refugees because they had money. They weren’t forced to live in a tent or a converted shipping container in one of Turkey’s many refugee camps, unable to come and go without Turkish permission, reliant on food handouts and communal bathrooms, and surrounded by strangers from other parts of Syria. They didn’t have to work like other Syrian children, selling packs of tissues or bottles of water or begging in Turkey’s streets. They weren’t reduced to a pair of hands in a sweatshop factory, paid a few dollars to toil from morning till night, six days a week.
Ruha’s parents had enough savings to afford rent and food in Turkey, but Maysaara was always away as though at work, busy helping other families, with little time for his own. Manal was again raising the children alone. When Maysaara wasn’t sneaking into Syria—which was often—to bring in medical supplies, communication equipment such as satellite internet, and donations from wealthy members of Saraqeb’s diaspora, he was visiting his hometown’s wounded in Turkey’s hospitals.
One day he was busy sourcing a large quantity of flour and trying to figure out how to get it across the Turkish border. “The people need bread,” he said. “The bakeries have all been hit [by warplanes]. The women will bake, but they need flour.” He called representatives of the Syrian political opposition in exile, the so-called leaders who claimed to represent Assad’s opponents, and pleaded for money or their help with the Turkish border authorities. “Our political opposition is like, what can I call them? They don’t care, they don’t ask!” he said. “They’re too busy at their conferences! They want to go to Doha and other world capitals, they should go to hell! There’s a war and people are focusing on conferences, on YouTube videos advertising themselves. What about the people inside?” After several days, with the help of Turkish friends, he managed to get a truckload of flour over the border, paid for by donations from Syrians in the diaspora. The political opposition did not help him.
Ruha’s parents turned their apartment into a halfway home for anyone from Saraqeb who needed a place to stay—for those who had accompanied wounded loved ones to Turkish hospitals, or recent refugees unsure how to navigate their new life in a new country with a new language. Ruha took heart from the visits. “It makes me feel like I am a little closer to home,” she said, “even if the people visiting us from Saraqeb aren’t related to us.” For her mother, the guests and their stories had the opposite effect. They compounded her survivor’s guilt. “We are physically here but mentally there, worried about family and friends,” she said. “This is not normal life. It is not normal to live alone in isolation, away from your family and community, to live in limbo. We are living a half-life, permanently unsettled, unstable, temporary.” It affected all of her decisions—from whether or not to buy furniture (“What for? We’re going back soon”) to how her children spent their days (“They’ll go to school in Syria. We will return”).
It was the knowing what was happening in Syria, the not knowing, the wondering. Air strikes on Saraqeb meant people would be wounded, some of whom would try and make it to Turkey. Maysaara was often told of impending arrivals by activists in his hometown. He’d rush to the border to meet the injured and accompany them in the ambulance, or he’d wait for them in the hospitals. It wasn’t unusual to see people staying in their apartment who were discharged from Turkish care but still too weak to cross the border back to Syria. Manal would cook for everyone. One day, Ruha walked into the living room to see a man with a ghastly lower-leg wound lying on the couch as her father changed his bloody bandages and cleaned the injury. She didn’t look away. “If, God forbid, you are wounded,” the man told Maysaara, “I will not let anyone clean your wounds except me.”
“Brother,” another man in the living room said, “the line in front of you is long.”
Ruha was eleven now, and she understood why her father was rarely home, and why he seemed preoccupied when he was. “Baba has to do it,” she said. “He has to help. Do you think that the people who left their studies and their country wanted to? What does your country, your home, your street mean to you? That’s what it means to me. Would you like to leave the home you grew up in? Your family? Who wants to leave those things? If we knew we wouldn’t die if we stayed in our home, we wouldn’t have left Syria.”
* * *
Aunt Mariam rattled a small canister of diesel. It was almost empty. She’d been waiting all winter for free supplies promised to the townsfolk by either the Islamist Jabhat al-Nusra or Saraqeb’s Local Coordination Committee, both groups competing to provide services and win the hearts and minds of locals. Mariam couldn’t be sure and didn’t much care which group had made the pledge. She just needed heating fuel. It cost 150 Syrian pounds a liter, as much as 200 pounds in some places—it used to be 25. She poured the thick liquid into the sobya heater by flashlight. There was no electricity, as usual. It came for only two hours a day now, shortening the already-abbrevi
ated winter light. Ruha’s grandmother Zahida had gone to bed soon after sunset, as she often did that winter. There was no point freezing in the dark.
The sobya slowly drew out the dampness from the air. Mariam was in her mother’s living room with several of her sisters, nieces, and grandnieces. The women rested on thin mattresses and cushions placed around the perimeter of the room. “Do you know the joke about the genie in the lamp?” one of Mariam’s nieces asked. “A man found a lamp, rubbed it, and summoned its genie. ‘Your wish is my command,’ the genie told the man. ‘Great,’ the man said. ‘I need a bottle of cooking gas.’ The next day, the man rubbed the lamp again, summoning an irate genie. ‘What do you want?’ the genie asked. ‘I’ve run out of diesel,’ the man said. ‘Couldn’t you have waited a few days?’ the genie replied. ‘Now I’ve lost my spot in the queue for the cooking gas!’ ”
Laughter warmed the room. Most of the women had stopped using gas cookers. Firewood was cheaper. Meat was a luxury. Vegetables were more than triple their old price, even after adjusting for currency inflation. The Syrian pound had plunged in value and was so unstable that the currency rate changed daily, sometimes even hourly. Water shortages were common because of the lack of electricity to pump the groundwater. “What can we do except laugh?” one of Mariam’s older sisters said. “Praise be to God. We are better off than many, but there’s no work, no money. I miss greens! I went to the market yesterday, a man was selling okra. I bought a handful just to taste it. That’s all I could afford—six hundred fifty pounds a kilo! But at least he priced it in pounds. Nobody talks about pounds anymore because it fluctuates so much; it’s all in dollars. Imagine, dollars!”
Sisters of the War Page 9