Jawa sat in the kitchen of that grimy house, near a basket of cucumbers, her baby brother in her lap. “It’s up to me now,” she told him. “I have to raise you. How am I going to raise you? It’s just you and me now.”
One of the kidnapped women overheard her. She told Jawa that she was a distant relative. “Don’t worry, darling,” the woman said, “you’re not alone. I will help you.”
Ruha’s uncle Mohammad and aunt Noora weren’t home when the artillery crashed into their upper floor on April 25, 2013, the rocket wounding walls and raining rubble into their courtyard fountain. No one was hurt, but days later, elsewhere in Saraqeb, much nastier weapons claimed more than just concrete.
It was a cloudless day, the sky a bright blue, when the chemical weapons tumbled from a helicopter gunship, white smoke trails mapping their paths to three locations. It happened shortly after the noon call to prayer on April 29. A fifty-two-year-old mother, Mariam Khatib, died after one of the tear-gas–type canisters landed in her garden. An autopsy performed in Turkey under United Nations observation “indicated signatures of previous sarin exposure” in her organs. Sarin is an internationally banned, man-made, colorless, odorless, tasteless liquid used as a military chemical weapon, but some countries like Syria still had stockpiles of it. In addition to the dead mother, seven more victims, all foaming at the mouth, with constricted pupils, nausea, and vomiting (symptoms of sarin poisoning), were treated in Saraqeb with atropine. They recovered.
One of the canisters did not explode. It fell intact in a shallow, muddy pond near several homes. Local civilian activists photographed, measured, and weighed it and then informed senior members of the political opposition in exile, who connected them to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), a global monitoring body that worked to ensure that chemical weapons weren’t used in conflict. It was not the first chemical attack in Syria. There had been three previous ones in various parts of the rebel-held north since August 2012, when then–US president Barack Obama warned that the use of chemical weapons in Syria constituted “a red line” that would prompt the US to retaliate against the perpetrators. The Saraqeb chemical attack would also not be the last. In the years to come, Obama’s “red line” would be crossed many times with many more chemical strikes, all believed to have been perpetrated by the Assad regime. The US president’s warnings were ignored, and the US did not act on its threat to retaliate.
The OPCW didn’t conduct an investigation in Saraqeb or take custody of the unexploded weapon. “They said they couldn’t if they didn’t pick it up themselves,” a civil activist from the town said. “What are we supposed to do with it? After months, they told us to hide it in a cave underground and don’t tell anybody that you have a chemical weapon.”
The activist, an economics graduate in his twenties, was left to dispose of weaponized sarin. He had no idea whether or not it was still live and dangerous or how to deal with it. He feared its being discovered by rebel groups and used against other Syrians as much as it leaking its contents. On July 18, in the golden hue of dusk, the young man walked up a hill on the outskirts of his hometown, a desolate place populated with little more than rocky outcrops and scattered olive trees. He put down his smartphone but continued recording as he rummaged through his backpack and pulled out a large plastic jar—the type used for homemade pickles—and a ziplocked bag containing the rusted canister. He put the ziplocked device in the jar and then cushioned it with household sponges—yellow, green, and pink. He placed the jar deep inside a tight crevice at the foot of a rock formation, as deep as his arm allowed him, then he piled stone upon stone to conceal its opening. He couldn’t believe that he had been left alone to handle a chemical weapon, and that nobody—not the OPCW or other international organizations—had helped.
“We thought that if we reveal the existence of the canister, that would end the regime because of Obama’s red line and international laws against chemical weapons use,” he said. “I had hope that the time will come and the proof will be ready, here in the cave, but nobody cared.” To the activist and many like him, Obama’s red line meant nothing. “I was very, very, very shocked—I can’t tell you how much,” he said. “Nobody cared about us or about international laws and forbidden weapons. It made me want to just wait for a [bomb] to fall on me.”
Saraqeb emptied after the chemical attack, but Ruha’s relatives stayed in their home. Aunt Mariam sat in her mother’s living room one day with a younger sister, exchanging the town’s news. It was early May, less than two weeks after the chemical attacks, and the air strikes were as ferocious as ever. One of them had recently killed people and charred their bodies. A man had to be identified by a piece of his shirt. A father lost his wife and four children.
“They say that every night he puts out his children’s pajamas, expecting them to come back,” Aunt Mariam said, “because the corpses were unidentifiable.”
Some of Saraqeb’s families fled into the fields around their town. A charity organization distributed tents to them from a bakery still under construction. Ruha’s uncle Chady, her mother’s twin, was volunteering to help build the bakery. He said the bereaved father turned up there one day, asking for a tent to house a family he no longer had. Nobody had the heart to deny his request.
The shelling, once unpredictable, was now as regular as a television viewing guide. Syrians called it “the nightly schedule.” One night, it began a little after eleven thirty with the screech of incoming artillery crashing near Ruha’s home. A second, then a third strike, each louder and closer, amplified in a night that was black because of the lack of electricity and otherwise nearly silent in a neighborhood emptied of families.
Hiss, whoosh, boom! 11:40 p.m. Another shell. Aunt Noora shrieked and, flashlight in hand, led her fourteen-year-old niece Lama (whose house had been next door to the sniper at the old radio communications tower) out of a darkened living room toward the basement. Uncle Mohammad cracked open the front door in case neighbors who hadn’t fled, especially those without a basement, sought refuge with them, and then he joined his family downstairs. Grandmother Zahida stayed in her bed—as usual.
Another three rockets just minutes apart. What was the target? Like Uncle Mohammad’s house, most of the washed-out, low-slung, flat-roofed concrete homes were already disfigured by earlier attacks. There were no rebel bases among them. Saraqeb’s rebels had been firing Grad rockets at regime forces all afternoon from outside the town’s limits, along a stretch of highway they’d won months earlier. Were the regime’s strikes retaliatory, the family wondered, the word retaliatory suggesting a reaction, implying a starting point. What was the starting point for that night’s barrage? The Grads? The regime’s air and artillery strikes before them? The formation of rebel groups? The decades of corruption and dictatorship that pushed protesters out into the streets?
11:53 p.m. Man-made thunder so close it sounded just above the room. The blast dislodged gray snowflakes from the basement’s unpainted ceiling, which floated down onto Uncle Mohammad and Noora, Aunt Mariam, and Lama.
“Dear God!” screamed Noora, covering her ears with her hands.
A television news report about a faraway battle could send her into a panic and her relatives into a fit of amusement at her expense. They’d sweetly chide her and remind her that even children had adapted to the sounds of war. Noora never did. She leaned against a vertical concrete support beam. The glow of several flashlights illuminated particles of dust suspended in the stuffy airlessness of the room. Insects scurried across its untiled floor. The ceiling was about thirteen feet high, the room some four yards underground, a single doorway for an exit, two narrow slits of sturdy glass just below street level—windows that were too small to crawl out of.
Aunt Mariam silently mouthed prayers. Uncle Mohammad held a black walkie-talkie up to his ear, trying to hear screechy rebel messages to figure out what was happening, but the words were muffled, drowned in static and noise. Noora wailed at every crash
and thud.
“It’s not that bad,” Lama repeated, her voice sturdy but her hands shaking. “Remember that night when we stopped counting at a hundred and fifty [strikes]? It’s not that bad.”
11:55 p.m. Another artillery strike, then mortars and rockets in each of the next two minutes.
“Whose homes are they landing on?” Noora asked. There was no outgoing fire, only incoming—a sound heard with the entire body, not just ears. Limbs and muscles and heart and mind tense as the enraged rocket rushes along its arc. Breaths held. Where will it fall? Passive prey in a basement with only one exit. Luck the only difference between a direct hit and a near miss. The projectile lands. Exhale. Breath shallower, faster. It exploded somewhere else, perhaps on somebody else. Limbs and muscles and heart and mind relax, then tense again. The room echoing and shaking to booms reverberating in chests. The time between shells measured in heartbeats—getting quicker, stronger, melding into a single, terrified throb. Hiss, whoosh, boom!
“Maybe we should leave tomorrow,” said Noora. “I can’t take much more of this! What time should we leave? Five a.m., six a.m.?”
“Don’t worry,” Mohammad said, gently patting his wife’s knee. “Bashar’s pilots sleep in. We’ll have plenty of time.”
“Who is counting?” Lama asked. “How many is that now? It’s not that bad. It’s not that bad.”
Aunt Mariam tried to lighten the mood. “One of my friends has a new washing machine,” she said, laughing so hard she could barely get the words out. “She calls it auto eed, auto ijir [a hand-and-foot automatic]”—that is, she was washing by hand. Even Noora laughed.
12:05 a.m. A few moments of quiet, then the sound of a car outside. The family listened for the wail of ambulances. There were none. “Thanks be to God,” Noora said.
12:17 a.m. The few neighbors still around ventured outside, calling out to one another to make sure everyone was accounted for. Uncle Mohammad yelled back that they were fine. On that night, the strikes tore through empty houses, not flesh and blood.
The family did not escape the next morning. They couldn’t leave Zahida behind, and she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—travel. The next afternoon, at 1:30 p.m., just as a lunch of peas and rice, mint and cucumber salad was being laid out, a warplane screamed overhead. The women prayed loudly, Lama put her shaking hands up to her temples. The jet passed without dropping its bombs. But later that evening, the familiar nightly schedule got under way—a little earlier this time, at 11:11 p.m. The family once again scurried to the basement, accompanied by the hiss, whoosh, and boom of things exploding around them.
“Why isn’t anyone helping us?” Noora screamed. “Why doesn’t anyone care?”
* * *
Saraqeb was hit with twenty-two barrel bombs one day in July. The bombs were improvised explosives packed into water heaters or barrels full of metallic fragments and dropped from Assad’s helicopter gunships. They were crude, unguided weapons that fell wherever gravity and the wind took them. One of the barrels exploded at the foot of Ruha’s street, demolishing the home of her best friend, Serene, the young Assad supporter Ruha used to walk to school with. Serene’s grandfather had invited his children and their children to lunch. Serene was the only survivor. She lost an eye in an attack that claimed fourteen of her relatives. Ruha, far to the north in Turkey, cried for her best friend. The barrel bomb did not respect childhood or even politics. It didn’t care that Serene’s family members were secretly Assad supporters.
After that attack, Maysaara rushed to Saraqeb and insisted that the family vacate to their farmhouse on the outskirts of town. His mother, Zahida, complained but did not deny her favorite son’s request. Maysaara and Uncle Mohammad began building extra rooms and bathrooms in the farmhouse. The family complex was abandoned.
Ruha’s parents enrolled their children in school that September, in an overcrowded Syrian-run facility in the Turkish border town of Antakya that offered Arabic-language instruction and Turkish lessons. They could no longer ignore a hard truth—Assad was not about to fall and they were not going home anytime soon.
Ruha cried on the first day of school, but then, she did that every year. “Honestly, it doesn’t matter how old I get,” she said. “It’s a habit.” She was almost twelve and happy to be with Syrians her own age. “Now,” she said, “I have somebody to talk to, to empty my heart to. To take out my frustration.”
The school ran in two shifts, morning and afternoon. The older girls, Ruha and Alaa, didn’t get home until 7 p.m.; their younger brother, Mohammad, had the earlier shift. Little Tala, who had recovered from her hormonal disorder, started kindergarten. Manal was happy to see her children regain a sense of normalcy that eluded her. Although still living “a half-life” in two worlds, she was relieved the family in Syria moved to the farmhouse and proud that her twin brother, Chady, was helping build a bakery. She followed news of its construction as closely as she oversaw her children’s homework assignments.
In early October, Maysaara surprised Manal and their children with a trip to Syria to celebrate the Muslim Eid al-Adha holiday. Ruha was ecstatic. She shopped for days, picking out gifts for her cousins. They returned home to Saraqeb on October 12. The next day, Uncle Chady was killed in an air strike on the bakery. He was thirty years old. His twin sister was inconsolable. A shy, soft-spoken woman, Manal retreated deeper into herself. Ruha was devastated. “I wanted to see Uncle Chady before he was buried,” she said. “They wouldn’t let me. I wasn’t allowed to go and sit in condolences, either. What do they want to protect me from? This thinking is wrong. A child should learn everything, not be told to go to the next room when adults talk. No! We need to know about the situation we are living in, to understand what is happening, to not be frightened by it.”
It was dangerous to stay in Syria, Ruha knew that, but she still threw a tantrum a week later when Maysaara said they were leaving. “When I came back from Syria after that Eid, I started wishing to die,” Ruha said. “I didn’t want to live in Turkey. I’d rather live in Syria, even if I might die. At least I’d be in my home with my grandmother and family. We die when God wants us to, at a time of his choosing, isn’t that right? So what do we think we are running from?”
Back in Turkey, Ruha voluntarily did more of the housework, quieted her siblings, helped cook. Her mother was numbed by grief. “I felt like my siblings’ mother after Uncle Chady died,” Ruha said.
Maysaara stayed home more. He took Manal and the children on day trips to the beach, to the mountains, to the mall as often as he could, but none of it seemed to draw his wife out of her deep sadness. Manal struggled with a grief made heavier by its invisibility.
“In the beginning, they used to say the names of the martyrs,” she said, “then the martyrs became numbers. The day Chady died, his name was not mentioned. He was a number, one of thirty-six people who died in Syria that day. Nobody is talking about us as people. On top of the oppression and the war, we are also dehumanized. We are people.”
By mid-2013, the United Nations stopped counting Syria’s dead due to the difficulty and danger of verifying information. Estimates put the death toll at well over half a million people. Syria had become a conflict where the dead were not merely nameless, reduced to casualty figures—now they were not even numbers.
Hanin had been separated from her siblings, whisked away by her rebel captors along with two other wounded children, including her six-year-old cousin Reema, whose foot was bleeding profusely. It was dark and the ten-year-old couldn’t see where she was going. The pickup truck mounted with a 12.5mm antiaircraft gun in the back bounced over bumpy mountain roads.
Hanin’s mind was a jumble. What had happened to her mother and Lojayn? Were they really dead? Were Jawa and her baby brother in danger of being harmed?
She remembered what the armed men who burst into her home had said: “Don’t be afraid, we don’t kill women and children and the elderly.” But then, when they were all squeezed into their neighbor’s house that terrible
night, she heard whispers that one of her uncles in Blouta had been killed. She couldn’t get the horrible sound of that night’s gunfire out of her head. Were some of her family members killed in that hail of bullets?
It was all so sudden. One minute she was asleep in bed, the next minute she was living a nightmare she couldn’t have even imagined. She was terrified in that pickup truck driven by armed rebels, unsure of where they were taking her and what would happen when they arrived. They’re saying they don’t kill the elderly or women and children, but they’ve killed my uncle, an old man, she thought. Why did they kill him? Will they kill us, too?
The pickup truck stopped, and Hanin and the two other children were transferred into a waiting ambulance. The ambulance was a relief to see: “I felt better because I realized they were going to treat us, not kill us. They won’t kill any of us.”
The ambulance stopped, the doors opened, and a man gently carried Hanin out of the vehicle and into what looked like a partially destroyed residential building surrounded by rubble. It was a medical field clinic.
Makeshift field clinics, many in secret locations, had sprung up across rebel-held northern Syria. Their locations weren’t widely advertised (although locals knew where they were) because hospitals and medical facilities were often targeted in regime air strikes. The field clinics were usually poorly stocked, with limited equipment and staff. Destroying a hospital and killing health workers had broad ramifications for local communities—it made it harder for people to survive, not just the wounded but others, with conditions such as diabetes, who required constant care, or children who needed vaccinations.
The field clinic Hanin was brought into was a year old. It was in an otherwise abandoned apartment building in the rebel-held town of Salma. It had four doctors and ten nurses, most of them male, who lived and slept where they worked. There was no running water or electricity in the facility, which relied on diesel-run generators to power medical equipment, including a digital X-ray machine, an ultrasound machine, and a portable ventilator. The clinic, which was funded by US- and UK-based charities, was well stocked, unlike many others that lacked even basics such as anesthesia and bandages. Water came via a pipe that dipped into a spring on higher ground three kilometers away. Months earlier, the six-story building had taken a direct hit—a barrel bomb blew out most of its windows and pancaked the two upper floors, spewing chunks of crushed concrete onto rosebushes below. The pink flowers, however, still bloomed.
Sisters of the War Page 11