Sisters of the War

by Rania Abouzeid

  Because of the planes in the air, the teachers had reduced the curriculum and eliminated sports, music, and art classes to minimize the time students spent in schools.

  One day, there were two air strikes while Mariam was teaching. “The children were scared. I told them not to be, that it was a friendly plane and it wouldn’t hit us.” The older children, she said, were the ones who cried and screamed, not the younger ones, “maybe because the [younger ones] were born into this environment, they don’t know anything else.”

  Aunt Mariam was teaching, running a household, and taking care of the business of the farm. Her brother, Ruha’s uncle Mohammad, was ill; in June 2015, he died of stomach cancer. Aunt Mariam rented portions of the family’s vast farmland to people who could grow crops and work it. She scoffed at the idea of leaving Syria, even temporarily. “Leave?” she said. “And go where? I won’t go anywhere! I will die on our land. There is no place that I’d even think of going. Not one!”

  That summer, Maysaara, like hundreds of thousands of Syrians, contemplated risking Turkish waters to reach Europe and a new life. The Syrian war had precipitated what the United Nations called the worst refugee crisis since World War II. Half of Syria’s twenty-three million people had been forced from their homes and displaced either internally or externally, beyond Syria’s borders. Some sought safety with friends and relatives in other parts of Syria, or in wretched camps for the internally displaced, while others, like Ruha’s family, escaped to the neighboring states of Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and even Iraq. Millions of extended families like Ruha’s were now living apart, separated by borders between states or internal borders within Syria that defined communities as either pro- or antigovernment. Conditions in Syria’s neighboring states—which had absorbed millions of Syrians and borne the overwhelming burden of the refugee influx—were difficult for Syrians, and getting worse.

  In Lebanon, there were so many Syrian refugees that, at one point, every fourth person was a Syrian. There were no formal refugee camps in the country, so Syrians had to rent apartments or even the land they pitched their tents on, in a country that was many times more expensive than Syria and had a tortured history with its much larger neighbor.

  For decades, until 2005, Syria had dominated Lebanon, and many Lebanese had not forgotten or forgiven, and they scapegoated Syrian refugees for all of Lebanon’s many woes. Lebanon was a country with poor infrastructure, with daily electricity cuts and water mismanagement, and the addition of more than a million Syrians further strained basic services. The government refused to establish formal refugee camps because it feared that they would become permanent—like the twelve Palestinian refugee camps scattered throughout Lebanon that were established in 1948 and 1967 and still existed.

  Water-starved Jordan, one of the driest countries in the world, was also sharing its scarce resources with more people. It set up camps, including the sprawling Zaatari refugee camp in northwestern Jordan, which in 2013 housed 120,000 of the half million Syrians who’d fled to Jordan. The refugee camp was the second-largest in the world, so massive that it was basically Jordan’s fourth-largest city. It was located in an arid, otherwise forgotten patch of desert that was little more than scorpions and sand before refugees were housed there. For Syrians, used to the greenness of home and Syria’s abundant water, the adjustment to life in an isolated desert camp, with its common toilets and kitchens, disease and overcrowding, was very difficult.

  In Turkey, too, despite its many refugee camps and the free food, education, and shelter the facilities provided, life was becoming harder for Syrians, who found themselves caught in internal Turkish political rivalries, with some Turkish parties supporting the continued presence of Syrians and others demanding they return to their war-torn country. Syrians like Ruha’s family who weren’t in the camps weren’t immune to these pressures and faced the additional economic burden of supporting themselves.

  As for Iraq, it was once again embroiled in war, this time against the extremist ISIS group that was active there as well as in Syria. ISIS had carved out what it called a caliphate, or an Islamic state, in the Syrian city of Raqqa and its surroundings, a territory that extended across the border into Iraq and included the city of Mosul. ISIS imposed its harsh rules on Syrians and Iraqis living in its so-called caliphate. It carried out countless atrocities, destroyed cultural heritage, forced women to be completely covered in a loose black abaya, headscarf, and face veil, and did not permit females to travel, even to the store, without a male guardian who was a close relative. ISIS publicly punished anyone who opposed it or whom it deemed an enemy. The punishments were grisly and included floggings and beheadings. Many Iraqis, especially those in areas that ISIS was trying to push into, were fleeing their country; it wasn’t even safe enough for them, let alone the Syrian refugees who were streaming in, fleeing their own war.

  And so, in 2014 and 2015, many Syrian refugees in Turkey and elsewhere looked to Europe as a way to escape the pressures they faced in Syria’s neighboring states. More than a million people would eventually arrive in the European Union. Many, many others would drown trying to get there.

  Ruha’s father, Maysaara, considered escaping to Europe. In 2015, he traveled to the Turkish coastal city of Mersin and looked out onto a calm sea, the serenity of the water disguising its bloodlust. Its dangers had been demonstrated many times in refugee boats that capsized, drowning dreams and belching corpses. Many Syrians, entire families, had died trying to cross these same waters to reach Europe.

  Smugglers offered passage in boats that were nothing more than rubber dinghies. The smugglers operated openly, doing business in cafés in Mersin and other Turkish coastal cities. Besides the latest fashions, store mannequins in these coastal towns also displayed bright orange life vests.

  Refugees mapped out their trips and exchanged advice on Facebook pages and WhatsApp groups. They slept in cheap hotels or on the streets, waiting their turn to leave. Maysaara watched a family, not unlike his, haggling with a smuggler. The smuggler insisted he wasn’t like others who overfilled their rubber dinghies, making them unsafe, that he had a conscience. The parents listened and walked away. They couldn’t afford the premium for a conscience. Maysaara stood outside a smuggler’s office one night, wondering what to do. He’d been in Syria twenty days earlier for about a week and said it was worse than ever. His words tumbled out, as if he needed to hear them, to convince himself.

  “There’s no more hope,” he said. “Now it’s clear this isn’t going to end anytime soon. Everybody’s trying to figure out what to do, how to live, where to live, how to survive. It’s gone on for too long. There aren’t many of us left, the ones who started it, who aren’t dead or detained. These new commanders, these new defectors, are something different. They want to tell you about our history! Where were they during that period? There are a million things in my head and I don’t know what to do, which path to take. All the guys are saying that, at the end of the day, we should leave the country. How can we leave? Leave our homes? Leave our lands? Leave it to whom? I’m in Turkey, but I still feel like I’m close to Syria, that I can get to it when I need to. Europe is a different kind of exile. If I lose Syria, I lose everything. If you leave it, you don’t deserve to return. People died for it. We paid in blood. What am I if I leave? What will I become?”

  Maysaara didn’t get on a boat. His memories, heavy and rich and painful and proud, weighed him down. He returned to Antakya, bade farewell to his wife and children, and crossed into Syria alone. He sold a piece of land for enough money to live comfortably in any of Syria’s neighboring states, but that wasn’t his plan. On September 19, 2015, he sent a photo of a pile of metal he’d just bought, and room-size holes dug into cinnamon-colored earth that would soon be filled with concrete. He planned to build a factory to process the land’s bounty in Saraqeb and to provide employment for his community.

  “This is our land and our country,” he said. “Our land is our honor, it is our past and, God willin
g, our future.”

  The Alawite prisoners had been moved again, this time to a ground-level apartment. Their new prison had a little terrace where the children could play and the women could hang laundry. They had been in so many different places. There was their first jail—a dirty two-room house for 106 people, with one blocked toilet that overflowed. They stayed there for a few weeks before being woken at night by the armed rebels.

  “They said, ‘Get up, get up,’ ” Jawa remembered. “They put us in a truck. We were squashed sitting on top of each other. They said, ‘Not a sound, don’t speak. We’re taking you to a better place.’ ”

  They were moved to a clean villa with a large kitchen that had electricity via a generator. The wounded, including Hanin, were kept in a separate room and were the only captives allowed to sleep on the few beds and mattresses in the villa. Jawa and her baby brother, like most of the other prisoners, slept on bare tiles. They stayed there for several months before they were moved again, this time to an empty chicken farm that crawled with bugs that scared Jawa. She was glad to be in their current prison, the apartment with the terrace.

  Dr. Rami, the doctor from the rebel field clinic in Salma, and his nurses regularly checked on the women and children, supplying them with fresh vegetables, meat, rice, clothes, female sanitary products, and medical attention as required. The Alawite women were given utensils to cook for themselves and the children.

  Their days melted into weeks and months in captivity, until May 7, 2014. The captives were told that about half of them would be released as part of a broader prisoner exchange between the rebels and the regime, tied to a cease-fire deal in the Syrian city of Homs.

  But there was a catch—prisoners from the same family could not all be released. Somebody had to stay behind, the captors said, to pressure the family members in regime-held territories to force Assad to negotiate their release. The more families represented, the better. Hanin and Jawa were told that two members of their family would be released. Their baby brother was definite, but which sister would go and which one would stay?

  “They didn’t care which two of us were released,” Hanin said. She and Jawa argued over which sister should stay, each wanting the other to leave. They didn’t have much time to decide.

  Hanin told her two younger siblings to go.

  “You’re wounded and an asthmatic,” Jawa told Hanin. “You should return to Baba with our brother.”

  “I’m older than you,” Hanin told her sister. “I’ll stay, you go home. Keep your faith in God and take care of our brother.”

  The captors were distributing food to the women and children who were to be released, to know whom to load onto the trucks. Hanin handed her juice and cookies to Jawa. “If I get out, I’ll have access to everything, you have nothing here,” Jawa told her sister. “You drink the juice.”

  Hanin refused, and Jawa and their baby brother, juice in hand, were ushered into waiting trucks. Hanin watched them walk away, relieved that their ordeal would soon be over. “I couldn’t leave one of them behind. Imagine! It’s impossible that I leave my brother or sister and go! I made Jawa leave. I’m older than her, and for sure I can handle more than she can. She is very young and weak, she can’t stay alone. I sent Jawa home.”

  Their father, Talal, like the other relatives of the captives, learned of the prisoner release on May 7, the day it happened. A cousin working in the government hospital in Latakia called him at 1:30 p.m. and told him that the governor had asked to prepare a ward for Alawite hostages on their way who needed to be examined.

  “I just assumed it was another lie,” Talal said. “All I heard was that some of the detainees were being released. I hoped my wife and children were among them.”

  Jawa and her baby brother arrived at the Latakia government hospital that afternoon. The little girl cried at the kindness of hospital staff, who brought her and the other freed prisoners cookies, falafel, shawarma sandwiches, French fries. “They kept telling us we were free, we were safe, we would soon be home,” Jawa said. “I couldn’t believe it, but I worried about Hanin. I wished she had come with us.”

  It was too late for Talal to travel to Latakia and see his children that day. It was already 4 p.m., and the road from Damascus to Latakia was dangerous at night. He’d have to wait until the next morning. The children’s maternal aunt lived in Latakia City, not far from the hospital. The children were discharged into her care.

  “My aunt’s house was full of people,” Jawa recalled. “Aunty couldn’t keep up with serving coffee. So many people were there to check on us. My aunt was crying so much she went hoarse, she couldn’t speak.”

  The next morning, Talal left Damascus at 5 a.m. and was in Latakia by 10 a.m. He ran into his sister-in-law’s house, screaming out the names of his children. He saw two of them. “They seemed as if they had shrunk, like they were years younger,” Talal said. “Jawa was thin. She didn’t know me, her words burned me.”

  Jawa mistook her father for her uncle. “I asked him, ‘Where is my father?’ ” Jawa said. “He was calling out my name, ‘Jawa! Jawa!’ I thought he was my uncle. He seemed very different to me—older, tired.”

  Talal realized that his wife and eldest daughter, Lojayn, were probably dead because they weren’t among the captives—either those released or those still held. His “heart burned” that Hanin was still in captivity. “Hanin is very special to me,” he said. “She has asthma. I used to take her once or twice a month to hospital to have her lungs and sinuses cleared. I imagine her in the dust of battles, of places they are hiding them, the dirt. How is she living there with them?”

  March 2016. Maysaara hadn’t seen his wife and children for more than seven months. He was in Syria and they were in southern Turkey—the days of moving easily between the two countries now as distant as the idea of peace. Sneaking into Turkey was no longer simply a tough hike with the fear of a Turkish jail or deportation to Syria. The once-porous border had tightened since mid-2014, when Turkey, under international pressure to trap the extremists of ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria’s killing fields, began erecting a concrete barrier of blast walls topped with coiled razor wire, placing it well inside Syrian territory. Some stretches of the border were monitored with thermal cameras. The Turks were shooting dead anyone trying to get across—fighters and refugee families alike—although they sometimes held fire and instead detained and deported those they caught. It wasn’t as hard to get into Syria as it was to get out, but the shoot-to-kill policy meant risking death.

  Maysaara wanted his family with him. His youngest, Ibrahim, had forgotten him. He called every male relative Baba. Manal feared returning to a Syria that was no better than the one she’d fled, but she didn’t want her children growing up without their father. They were going back that summer. Manal walked around her living room one day in March, wondering how to pack up her “half-life” and what dangers were awaiting her and her family. Two families she knew of, sixteen people, were recently obliterated in a farmhouse.

  “There is no safe place in Syria, even our farmhouse is not safe,” Manal said. “What can I do except try to calm the children and tell them not to be afraid? This is the Syrian woman’s burden—caught between worrying about our men and [worrying about] our children.”

  Her eldest, Ruha, who had pined for Syria, was now a teenager who suddenly didn’t want to return. “We are children of now, not children of before,” she said one day. She got along with everybody in her school, even though she knew not all of the girls were with the opposition and that some supported Assad. “We joke about it, nobody takes it seriously. We don’t really talk about it; the problems aren’t our problems, they are with the adults,” she said.

  Friends and rap music and hairstyles and fashion were displacing thoughts of Saraqeb. She dearly missed her father, but beyond that, she was accustomed to freedoms in Turkey she didn’t think she could carry across the border.

  Her classes that year were during the school’s morning sh
ift. Her afternoons, when she didn’t have homework and it wasn’t raining, were spent in a park with a diverse group of girls: There was the Chechen born in Turkey whose father was fighting in Syria, a Turk whose mother owned a stationery store across from the park, and a Syrian who always arrived after 4:30 p.m., the end of her day at a sewing factory. Her family needed her wages more than her education. The girls didn’t share a language—just a few Turkish words here, Arabic there, lots of sign language and laughter.

  Ruha sat on a bench with her sister Alaa one day, waiting for her friends to arrive. She discreetly pointed to a Syrian woman, in a long, belted overcoat and a face veil, pushing a child on a swing. “Look at my clothes and look at the Syrians here, look how they’re dressed,” she said. Ruha was in skinny jeans, a long sweater, and a headscarf, common attire for a Muslim Syrian girl, but she expected to have to dress like the woman in the park if she went back to Saraqeb. She had heard her relatives talking about how it was more conservative now because of the influence of the Islamists. “I have a lot of freedom here,” she said. “If I go to Syria, that freedom will be imprisoned. I’ll have to wear a coat down to my ankles like that woman. I can’t do that.”

  She was growing up. She didn’t want to burden her parents with her concerns. “The family used to sit together at mealtime, talk about our day, but now I feel like everybody is in a different universe,” she said. “Now, whatever happens to me, I don’t have the courage to tell Baba, to ask him anything. I know he has other things to worry about. I don’t tell Mama, either. I prefer to speak to others my age. That’s why I come here. We haven’t seen Baba in more than seven months. That’s wrong. When we were in Syria, in the war, Baba wasn’t with us much, but we used to see him occasionally. Even if I saw him for an hour, I felt like that hour was worth the entire world and everything in it. Now …” She couldn’t finish her sentence.