Hanin and the two other children were treated for their wounds. Hanin was told that she was in Salma and that the doctor and his staff had removed a bullet from her left buttock. They were very attentive to her and the other captives. One nurse in particular, a woman who told her that she had a daughter named Hanin, was especially kind to her. “She liked me a lot and I liked her,” Hanin said. “She’d bring me food, and bring me whatever I wanted.”
Hanin was soon back in the ambulance. It had been five days since she was shot in that dawn raid. A rebel handed Hanin a cell phone and told her to call her father. She called the landline in Damascus. Her father picked up.
Talal’s heart leapt when he heard Hanin’s voice. It was the first contact he’d had with his family since the raid. Hanin told her father that her siblings and mother were with her, because that’s what one of the rebels told her to say.
“Where are you?” Talal asked his daughter.
“In Aunty’s lap.”
“Which aunty?”
“Aunty Ghada.”
She didn’t have an Aunty Ghada.
A man with a Syrian accent took the phone from Hanin. He told Talal that his wife and other children were dead. “You only have her left,” he said. “If you want her, go to Latakia and tell the head of the Military Security branch (one of the four main intelligence agencies) to negotiate with us. We won’t speak to anyone else.” The men holding the 106 Alawite women and children wanted a prisoner exchange with the regime.
Hanin knew the rebel was lying because Jawa and their baby brother were with her, or at least, they had been until a few days ago. Had something happened to them? Were they killed? Was this rebel telling the truth and she was the only surviving member of her family?
The phone line died. Talal wondered what to do. He was confused and terrified that the rebel’s words might be true—that only Hanin had survived. He contacted relatives and other people from Blouta whose families were kidnapped and shared the rebel’s message about the prisoner swap. Talal, along with other families, tried and failed to get an audience with Latakia’s head of Military Security. They saw his deputy, who brushed off their concerns. They approached other officials. The head of the local Baath Party chapter offered to arm the families.
“He said, ‘We will protect you, we will arm you.’ I said, ‘After what? After the gangs entered the area, killed who they killed, kidnapped who they kidnapped?’ I was shaking, crying, screaming.”
The governor of Latakia asked the families what the armed men wanted. “He was asking me!” Talal said. “If a dog is lost in Europe, they set up an operations room to find it. I told him, ‘Am I supposed to tell you the news?’ ” Talal left the meetings angry and dejected. “They don’t feel with us,” he said. “They’re officials who are just there like a framed photo. We mean nothing to them.”
The only things Talal was sure of were that one of his children, Hanin, was alive, because she’d called him, and that he’d fallen between two fires—rebels who viewed him as an extension of the regime just because he was an Alawite like President Assad, and a regime that didn’t seem interested in helping him. Blouta didn’t receive special government attention because it was Alawite, he said. “Our villages were neglected, poor. We have unemployment, too. I swear to God, I carried a bag on my back for three years and went from pharmacy to pharmacy and to hairdressers selling cosmetics and perfume. I worked as a night guard, as a construction laborer. Why didn’t they [the rebels] think that some of us have problems, too?” He ruled out approaching the Syrian political opposition for help. “It’s impossible,” he said, “because these members of the opposition, whoever they are, are killers and partners in the deaths or kidnappings of our children—without exception.” Talal viewed the opposition the way many fighters on the other side of the Latakia front viewed him. Nuance was lost as each side’s position hardened.
On August 12, 2013, the first images of the Alawite captives were released in a three-minute, eleven-second video uploaded to YouTube. They showed the women and children seated along the perimeter of a roofed outdoor area, in the presence of an armed guard whose face was covered by a balaclava. Talal saw his three youngest children among them but not his wife or eldest daughter, Lojayn. The man on the phone had lied to him. Hanin wasn’t the only survivor. Over the next month, the same captor called Talal four times, demanding a ransom of four million Syrian pounds (about $35,400 at the time). Talal didn’t have that kind of money. He asked about his wife. The captor said she was dead. Talal didn’t believe him. He asked for proof of some kind, a photograph or to know where her body was buried, although he still hoped that the news wasn’t true.
“Do you think your wife is the only one who died?” the captor said. “Many women died.”
* * *
Hanin returned to the grimy house where the detained Alawite women and children were being held. Hanin and Jawa were overwhelmed with relief to see each other. Jawa was surprised by how well Hanin looked and how she’d been treated in the field clinic.
“She was wearing new pajamas, her hair was combed and tied, her nails were cut and painted with polish. They looked after her the way Mama might have looked after her,” said Jawa. It lessened her fear a little. The male doctor and a female nurse later checked on Hanin and the other wounded captives. Jawa thought the man had a kind face. His name, she recalled, was Dr. Rami.
Dr. Rami was a forty-three-year-old Sunni Muslim from Latakia. He didn’t care that the captives were Alawite. As far as he was concerned, he was a doctor and they were wounded, and it was his duty to treat everybody, even if some Syrians were demonizing other Syrians who were different from them. A Syrian-trained physician, Dr. Rami was in the United Kingdom to specialize in pediatrics when the Syrian revolution began in March 2011. He returned to Latakia soon after to check on his elderly parents and never left. He knew his services were needed in Syria more than anywhere else, even if his wife still lived in the United Kingdom.
“I told her I have to do this, and she accepted it,” he said. “Of course without her support I couldn’t have done it—peacefully,” he added, laughing. “Someone has to do it, right?” He spent all his days and nights in the field clinic in Salma.
One day, not long after Hanin had been treated there, a shout came from the rubble-strewn street outside his field clinic. “It’s one of the Alawites! It’s one of the Alawites!” a man yelled. Dr. Rami heard the cry through the sandbagged window of his dark basement office. He ran toward the nine-bed, street-level emergency room. A little girl, one of the Alawite prisoners, was carried in by her captor, a foreign fighter, and carefully set on a sapphire-blue plastic sheet covering a bed.
The child was Talal’s niece, six-year-old Reema. She was back in the clinic less than two weeks after she’d first been treated there with Hanin.
“Uncle, please don’t hurt me!” she said as the doctor reached for her bandaged left foot. Her bloodied dressings were stained brown. She wore clean, three-quarter-length pink leggings and a pink T-shirt. Her hair was short, her brown bangs swept up into a tiny ponytail that sprouted from her head like a mushroom.
“Don’t be scared. We need to change these bandages,” Dr. Rami said.
“Uncle, it hurts a lot,” she cried. “I’m scared.”
A warplane roared overhead before the doctor could reach for a pair of scissors. Rebel antiaircraft fire thundered from several positions around the clinic. The little girl screamed. Her captor, who was unarmed except for a knife, patted her ponytail while another doctor fetched a packet of cookies and offered her one. Reema declined the cookie. An explosion outside. The little girl was now wailing, interspersing her screams with “Uncle! Uncle! Uncle!”
Several of her toes were dark brown. Large sections of skin on the top of her foot had sloughed off, revealing red-raw flesh that bled. Dr. Rami changed her dressing and took aside the young jihadi fighter who had brought her in. A jihadi group of foreign fighters named the Battalion of Emigran
ts was holding the prisoners. “Tell your emir [leader] that I say hello and that this girl needs to go to a hospital because her wounds must be cleaned under general anesthetic,” the doctor said. The foreign fighter nodded, swept up the child, and left.
Dr. Rami was pained to see children—on all sides—paying a price in this grown-ups’ war. He’d treated more children than he could count who’d been wounded in regime air strikes, and he wasn’t happy about the Alawite children being kidnapped and harmed. “Detainees, innocent people, should be treated well,” he said. “These women and children are not enemies; an enemy is whoever is carrying weapons against us and wants to kill us. Children are innocent. These children [the captives] are like our children.”
Dr. Rami returned to his small office—or control room, as he called it—and sat on one of the thin mattresses around its perimeter. A 10.5mm handgun in a brown holster was tucked into the space between the mattress and the wall. A TV sat in one corner, near two walkie-talkies set up to interact with the other field clinic in Salma.
“I miss normal life,” said the doctor. “I miss watching a movie.” He reached for a pack of cigarettes. There was an explosion outside that tossed bits of rubble into the room through the glassless window. Two minutes later, another explosion shook the room.
“Emergency!” The call came from the street above. Dr. Rami rushed to intercept the casualty, a Syrian fighter hit by a large piece of shrapnel, his legs barely attached to his torso. The fighter died soon after he arrived.
Throughout the night, men moved in and out of the control room with requests for Dr. Rami—some wanted help finding accommodation for a Free Syrian Army group, others needed stocks to replenish frontline first-aid kits and supplies for a midwife. A father, clutching his daughter’s hand, wanted to have his child vaccinated, but Dr. Rami said vaccines weren’t available in “liberated Syria,” only in regime-held areas where the Health Ministry functioned, and from international aid organizations that dealt only with governments. In “liberated Syria,” as he called it, or rebel-held Syria, hospitals were targets for regime air strikes, not government vaccination programs. A local farmer walked in with a bag of fresh green beans he donated to the clinic.
“Plane in the air!” somebody yelled from the hallway. Ten minutes later, an explosion outside. It didn’t take long for the familiar call to come from the rubble-strewn street: “Emergency!”
Two men lay on the sapphire-blue plastic sheets covering the beds—a Syrian with shrapnel in his left foot and a foreign fighter from Chechnya with two bullets in his right leg. The Chechen had been brought in by several of his countrymen. They were all dressed the same—green skullcaps on their shaved heads, T-shirts, and loose pants so short they rode halfway up their shins. “What brought you here?” one of the Syrian nurses asked the wounded Chechen.
“We came for God’s name,” he replied in formal, stilted Arabic.
Both men were treated and sent to better-supplied clinics farther north, away from the front and closer to Turkey. Dr. Rami returned to his control room. He’d tended to about thirty fighters and almost as many civilians that day.
“You know what we forgot to do today?” said Dr. Rami to a colleague reclining on a thin mattress. “Send the tractor to dig more graves. We’ll need about ten by tomorrow, and then another twenty or thirty.”
The colleague nodded. “Yes, we forgot to do that.”
The doctor lit up another cigarette. “It’s a slow day today, thank God,” he said. Outside, the sounds of explosions continued, near and far.
* * *
By August 19, two weeks after the eleven Alawite villages were captured, the regime regained all of them. Two days later, Talal drove to his hometown of Blouta. He saw burned and ransacked homes, including his own, and a mass grave with human remains. Syrian soldiers in fluorescent-orange vests placed bodies in bags, including two of Talal’s brothers and his father. Talal had no information about his wife and children or what had happened to them. The rebel perpetrators left behind graffiti on schools and homes that identified them. Jabhat al-Nusra will bring victory to the people of Syria was spray-painted on one wall. The raid had been spearheaded by ISIS and a group of mainly foreign fighters named Suqoor el Ezz. Units of the Free Syrian Army were also there, but not in the lead.
Syrian state media reported mass graves in two of the eleven Alawite villages but didn’t specify the number of dead, beyond stating that there were dozens. On October 10, the international organization Human Rights Watch put the figure at 190 killed, most on August 4, including at least 57 women, 18 children, and 14 elderly men, in “incidents that amount to war crimes.”
Talal snapped pictures on his cell phone of his burned home, the rebel graffiti, the mass grave. He shared it with another father, a man named Abdel-Hady, whose family had also been kidnapped from another village, and together the fathers lamented what had happened and what they could possibly do. The rebels “want to place the crimes of the regime on the shoulders of our [Alawite] sect,” Abdel-Hady said. “They say we are still with the regime, that we haven’t split from it. Who is going to defect from the regime and join an opposition that stands under a black Islamic banner? It’s impossible. To be an Alawite to them is to be a germ.”
“I am certain that Syrians can live together again,” Talal replied. “I know men from Salma, I know that not all of them are happy with the armed rebel groups. Anybody who clings to the idea of Syria as one nation, not a Syria of sects, is in danger of death—not just us, the Alawites, but the Christians and moderate Sunnis, too.”
“There are shabiha, Alawites, who have committed crimes against Sunnis for being Sunnis,” Abdel-Hady said, “and they have also harassed us because we are against them. The extremists in the opposition have also harassed moderate Sunni civilians who do not agree with them, as well as us. So the issue is political, it’s about interests. We understand this, we want the regime to leave but will its removal guarantee us our safety? I have my doubts. I want the regime, the head of the regime, to fall, but not the Syrian state. I don’t want the institutions of the state to crumble.”
It was a view that many Syrians on the rebel side, including Ruha’s family, understood and agreed with.
Ruha’s little sister Tala, whose illness was the reason the family fled to Turkey, couldn’t remember Syria. She’d forgotten the warplanes and barrel bombs and mortars that had scared her sick, couldn’t recall details of her home or the harrowing trip across the border. Perhaps that’s why she seemed to her mother the best adjusted of the children. It was late 2014, and they’d been refugees for two years—a long time in the life of a five-year-old. Tala had reverted, physically and emotionally, to being a normal little girl again, one unburdened by memory.
Ruha envied her that. Some days she wanted to forget, too; other days she clung to the memories, the good ones, wrapped herself in them like a life jacket. “I can’t forget Syria,” Ruha said, “but I want to forget what I saw in Syria, because it’s ugly. I want to forget especially when Baba was shot. I try very hard, but I can’t. The past was difficult. No matter how much I try, I can’t forget.”
She had a new baby brother, Ibrahim, born that summer, who drew his mother out of her grief. Ruha was twelve now, and like many Muslim girls entering puberty, she had taken to wearing a headscarf. It was her choice to do so. It made her feel grown up.
She was still attending the Syrian school in Antakya with her sister Alaa. Her brother Mohammad had transferred to an all-boys’ Turkish school nearby. His classmates called him Mehmet, the Turkish version of his name, which his sisters teased him about, but he didn’t mind. He’d laugh along with them. The children were learning Turkish at school, and they took pride in the new words they’d memorized. “Now at school,” Alaa said one day, “we are studying history and geography. In history we are talking about things that happened a long time ago.”
“When we study history and geography,” Ruha replied, “I tell the teacher, ‘Why are
you telling us about things that happened so far in the past? We are living history now. Isn’t that enough?’ ”
Ruha preferred to look forward, not back. She had started contemplating her future. “I’m thinking I want to be a doctor, a pediatrician to help other children. What subjects do I have to take to be a doctor?” she asked. “I want to return to Syria. I want to rebuild my country, take our rights. I think of Syria every day, but it’s getting less. I don’t think about my house as much anymore. I wonder sometimes and I feel guilty that my house is still standing and others aren’t.” Saraqeb, she said, was her life, “my other life, the real one.”
Her father, Maysaara, didn’t tell her that the house in Saraqeb was so damaged it was unlivable. Their family in Syria had moved permanently to the farmhouse. Friends and relatives who had land around town did the same.
Ruha’s aunt Mariam still visited the old neighborhood from time to time. She didn’t like going there but felt drawn to it. “I go, cry, and come back,” Mariam said. “There’s so much rubble, so many destroyed homes.” Aunt Mariam still taught at a local primary school. The schools in Saraqeb also ran in two shifts, because buildings were either destroyed by war or were bases for armed groups, including Jabhat al-Nusra, the Al-Qaeda affiliate.
“Four or five schools have started using one school building now,” Aunt Mariam said.
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