* * *
May 2016. The sun was low in the sky, its golden light soft and warm and diffused. It cast long shadows on the handful of construction workers ending their day. Maysaara watched them climb down from a two-story wooden scaffolding hugging the building’s rectangular shell. His factory was coming together. It had four walls and no roof, its exterior built in the traditional manner, with great blocks of locally sourced white stone, not the cheaper concrete. Saraqeb’s silhouette rose five kilometers (three miles) in the distance, on the other side of green carpets of shin-high lentil crops and young stalks of wheat. Sprinklers pulsed rhythmically. Deep-orange pomegranate flowers were in bloom. Birds chirped in the quietness when the warplanes weren’t overhead.
Maysaara walked through his empty factory, proud and excited, explaining where the equipment would go. The machinery would come either from the regime-held city of Hama (through the forty-nine government checkpoints along the route, each one demanding a bribe) or from Turkey, with its raft of paperwork and tight restrictions at the border. It depended on the roads, the planes, and the required bribes, but he wasn’t overly worried about it.
The construction site was a short drive from the farmhouse, on land the family had owned for generations. Maysaara surveyed its sweep, pointing to the plot in the far distance where a hundred fig trees would soon be rooted, near the olive groves his late father had planted decades earlier. He had bought half a dozen sheep and a puppy his daughter Tala named Molly, after one of her favorite cartoon characters. He had plans to restart the family’s cucumber pickling business, to give young men an alternative to emigrating or joining a battalion to earn $50 a month. And he wanted to buy a horse, recounting a Hadith, or saying of the Prophet Mohammad, about how those who treat a horse well are blessed against poverty. He scooped up a handful of earth, let it fall through his fingers. “This,” he said, “is everything. I swear a person doesn’t find himself or feel dignity except in his own land. I lived in Turkey for three years. I lived well, was treated well, but I am still a foreigner there. I mean, the Japanese were hit with nuclear bombs, and they stayed in their country and didn’t give up on it! How can we? Look”—he stretched out his arms—“here, there is life.” His Syria had shrunk, he knew that. Regime territory and areas such as the city of Raqqa, which was now controlled by the extremist group ISIS, were like separate countries, but his space was enough for him. “Before the revolution, I wasn’t somebody who spent a lot of time on Latakia’s coasts. I will sacrifice seeing the sea. This is my land. This is my area. This is my country.”
Wasn’t he afraid to bring his family back? “Life and death are in God’s hands,” he said. “Some people survive being in a building hit by a barrel bomb that others die in. It’s not their time. Nobody knows when their time is up.”
It was getting dark. The workers had long left. Maysaara drove back to the farmhouse in his red Toyota HiLux pickup truck, the same vehicle in which he’d been shot back in January 2012. It had been idle for years while he decided what to do with it. He patched its forty-eight bullet holes and cleared its bloodstains. He refused to sell it. It was a reminder of what he’d survived and what others, like his friend Abu Rabieh, who had died in the front seat, had lost.
Ruha’s aunt Mariam was up early the next morning, and so were the warplanes. It was not yet 8 a.m. when the first one roared overhead. Mariam walked into the living room, carrying a tray of Turkish coffee. “Good morning,” she said. The bombs tumbled to earth somewhere far enough away not to worry about them. “Who wants coffee?”
A walkie-talkie set near the window screeched out an alert about another warplane: “Sukhoi 27 is coordinating with Homs, be careful.” Saraqeb, like every town in the rebel-held north, had developed an early-warning system to identify threats in the air. Men known as marasid, or observers, were tasked with intercepting regime communications between pilots and air bases and relaying that information via walkie-talkies. They latched on to regime frequencies that constantly changed and tried to break the coded language sometimes used to identify targets. More often, the targets were simply stated. The planes had few real predators. If the threat to Saraqeb was direct, and there was time, the alert would boom from the minarets of mosques. The town had five marasid, their task made harder since September 2015, when Russian warplanes joined their Syrian allies in the skies, turning the conflict decisively in Assad’s favor. There were Western planes in the air, too, rebel backers bombing ISIS positions in other parts of Syria and the occasional Jabhat al-Nusra post, but the Western planes didn’t target the Assad regime.
Mariam laughed when asked how people without transmitters coped. “Even beggars have walkie-talkies these days,” she said.
The farmhouse was self-sufficient, with twenty-four-hour electricity courtesy of solar panels, two generators as backup, satellite internet, and two water wells. Residents who couldn’t afford their own generators or solar panels subscribed to private neighborhood generators that distributed electricity for a monthly fee. Cell phone reception was still dead. The landlines worked, but only for local calls within the province.
Aunt Mariam didn’t have classes that day. She got behind the wheel of her gray Kia Picanto, said a prayer under her breath, and drove to the market inside Saraqeb. Along the way, she recounted how a member of Jabhat al-Nusra had recently stormed into the school, demanding that religious instruction be expanded and social studies be struck from the curriculum.
“We all debated him,” Mariam said, until a compromise was reached: Religious instruction would remain unchanged, social studies would be taught, but all references to the Baath Party, democracy, and socialism would be removed. “We slammed him into the wall with our words until he came out the other end!” Mariam laughed. “We will not be silent to them or anyone anymore.”
She had never accepted the growing Islamization of her town. She always drove herself, was politely waved through Islamist checkpoints, and never covered her face with a niqab, although many more women in Saraqeb now did. Ruha was right about that.
“Before, in the beginning, I used to think we have to be frugal, not use too much cooking gas, too much diesel, too much fuel. Now I don’t think like that,” Mariam said. “Now I don’t care if all of my paycheck is spent. We are in a state of war, who cares about money? Why die with money in your pocket? Why not live as comfortably as we can while we can?”
In the beginning, as Aunt Mariam put it, there was one martyrs’ cemetery in Saraqeb for those killed in the conflict. Five years later, there were three. On another day, at one of the newer cemeteries, the gravedigger was busy shoveling red earth out of a deep hole. He always prepared ahead. The graves were arranged into sixteen rows, each row extending at least a hundred meters (just over a hundred yards), each column broken by plain white headstones, like rungs on a ladder. Daisies sprouted from the graves. At least twenty belonged to unidentified victims, some placed in the earth just months earlier. The gravedigger explained what happened: “A plane struck, two fuel sellers were hit. Their supplies exploded, killing them and killing people in a Kia Rio that was passing by,” he said. “The bodies were charcoal, there was nothing left for us to identify them. Nobody knows who they were or where they were from or going. We put notices on Facebook, but nobody has asked about them.” Even the cemeteries weren’t safe from the planes, the gravedigger said. Another one in town had been shelled. “The living were martyred and the dead were martyred twice,” he said. “Life is the cheapest thing in Syria now.”
* * *
Aunt Mariam’s eldest sister needed cooking pots. Hers were riddled with shrapnel. Mariam offered to take her first to the family complex in the center of Saraqeb to see if there were any left behind, before she bought new ones. The sisters drove around piles of rubble and twisted metal, Mariam cataloguing the lives lost at each gray mound. Four. Fourteen. Twenty-two. Six.
“This was a little store,” she said, pointing to a concrete skeleton, the missile’s entry point cl
ear. On a surviving column was a message spray-painted in red: Here there was life. Two men died there.
Mariam turned into their old street. Her sister waited in the car: “I don’t want to see it,” she said. “It hurts my heart.” Mariam fumbled with the keys to the heavy metal door, its yellow fiberglass paneling long since blown out. It was the same door a once-nine-year-old Ruha opened to security forces back in 2011, the first time they invaded to look for her father.
Mariam’s footsteps echoed in the emptiness. The windows, all glassless, were filled in with cinder blocks. Doors blown off hinges, window frames blown out, too. The wind whistled through holes in several walls. A warplane overhead. Washed dishes gathered dust in the kitchen rack. A bottle of olive oil and spice jars on the bench. The inner courtyard, where Ruha and her siblings once played, where Mariam and her sisters would gather in the evenings, was strewn with rubble. In a coral-pink bedroom, dolls and teddy bears waited for two little girls who’d outgrown them. A fourth-grade social studies textbook lay on a bed. Colorful socks in a drawer. A pink desk with two chairs.
Mariam didn’t find any pots. “I feel numb when I come here. I say to myself, ‘Don’t get upset, the whole country has been destroyed.’ At least we’re all okay, but I always feel tired after coming here, physically worn out.”
The old family complex was empty. Life had relocated. Ruha’s extended family now gathered at the farmhouse each week, turning every Friday into Mother’s Day. The matriarch, Ruha’s grandmother Zahida, was frailer, her body confined to a wheelchair but her mind still formidable, the anchor of the family. She expected updates on the crops, the price of lentils, the currency fluctuations, how her thirty-five grandchildren were faring, and what was happening in town.
She sat on a couch one Friday afternoon—a new couch, not the faded blue one that had molded to her shape. Mariam was in the kitchen, preparing lunch with a few of her sisters. The smell of fried onions and bay leaves and spices hung in the air. She made kibbe, a labor-intensive dish of finely ground meat and bulgur, cinnamon, and allspice, fashioned into palm-size, football-shaped croquettes, each one stuffed with minced meat, onions, garlic, and spices. It was a festive food, served in times of celebration. She hadn’t made it in five years.
“Why should you die wishing you’d eaten something?” Mariam said. That was reason enough to prepare it.
A male relative walked into the kitchen and joked that Jabhat al-Nusra wouldn’t approve of the gender mixing. Islamists preferred that men and women were separated. The family laughed and mocked the Islamist messages.
“They just make people hate them more,” a sister said.
“Did you all hear about what Abu Stayf did?” Maysaara asked. The lines outside bakeries were gender-segregated, with armed Nusra guards supervising the distribution. The bakeries were also targets for Assad’s warplanes, so women tended to stay away. The men’s line was always longer. Abu Stayf, a local man, had wrapped his face in a scarf and stood near a female friend in the shorter line. The Nusra fighter on duty, a foreigner, approached the woman suspiciously, asked her who was standing next to her but wouldn’t look directly at her. “This is my sister, but she’s hairy,” the woman said, referring to Abu Stayf. The Nusra fighter took her word for it and simply asked, “How many loaves?” when the pair got to the front of the line. Abu Stayf walked away, bread in hand, to applause and chants of Abu Stayf! Abu Stayf! “He turned around and made a V-for-victory sign!” Maysaara said, chuckling.
One of Ruha’s aunts talked about her detained son. A former prisoner from Saraqeb had been released recently and was expected home soon. Ruha’s aunt wondered whether he’d seen her boy behind bars. She was dealing with a middleman who claimed he could release her son, but he demanded tens of thousands of dollars in advance without providing proof of life.
“If he’d only give us something to believe [her son] Abdullah was alive, we’d sell land to raise the money,” Ruha’s aunt said. Abdullah had been detained on April 21, 2012.
His mother, aunts, cousins, and grandmother remembered him fondly that afternoon, recalled his laugh, and argued about whether he had one dimple or two. “You wonder what they are doing to him, what they’ve done. God help him,” Aunt Mariam whispered. “The mothers of the detained have it much harder than the mothers of the martyrs. My friends, mothers of martyrs, at least they know what happened to their children.”
* * *
In early July 2016, Ruha and her family returned home. Maysaara met them on the Syrian side of the border and escorted them to a farmhouse full of relatives waiting for them. Despite her earlier misgivings, Ruha was glad to be back, glad to be reunited with family, and pleased to know she didn’t have to dress as conservatively as she had feared.
She started school, made new friends. She was a ninth grader now. “Everything has changed,” she said of her hometown, “or maybe I’d forgotten the details. It’s like I am seeing it for the first time. I wasn’t expecting this destruction.” She was upset that her home in the grand old family complex was too damaged and dangerous to live in. She also was surprised by how much she’d acclimatized to Turkey, how easily she’d forgotten the fear of life in wartime. “If I want to go to the souq, I have to think about whether it’s worth it, think about the warplanes, and make it a quick trip. Even in school, when I’m in school and a plane passes, I’m terrified. Everybody is. The teachers freak out.”
In Turkey, she said, “I felt the exile, the distance, but I also felt safe. I’m happy here with my family, but I got used to safety. Inshallah [God willing] the future is better. Inshallah we stay united and the fear disappears, because I don’t want to have to feel like I need to choose between living with family and being safe. Why can’t we have both in Syria? Nobody wants to have to leave their country just to feel secure.”
In July 2017, Saraqeb’s sons and daughters, including Ruha’s family, protested against the armed Islamists with the black flags in their hometown, peacefully driving them out of Saraqeb, although few expected them to stay away. The revolutionary flag fluttered from vacated Islamist outposts, and for the first time in years, a new revolutionary slogan appeared on Saraqeb’s walls: Say to those who try to destroy us that the beauty of our souls cannot be defeated—Saraqeb 2017.
The ambulance was smeared with mud to make it harder for warplanes to see. It bounced along potholed Idlib roads rendered almost impassable by shelling. Dr. Rami was in the front seat, scanning the skies through a bullet-fractured windshield. His field clinic in Salma had been destroyed in Russian air strikes that had helped the regime win back most of Latakia Province as well as other areas.
In September 2015, the Russian Air Force joined its Syrian counterpart in the skies over Syria, and together their warplanes bombed villages in Latakia until they emptied of residents, the survivors fleeing toward the Turkish border. Entire villages in Latakia were displaced and reconstituted in clusters near the Turkish border. The temporary towns were a patchwork of thousands of tents, some canvas, others simply sheets of plastic or burlap bags sewn together, their occupants hoping the air strikes that drove them from home wouldn’t hunt them so close to Turkey’s blast walls. Dr. Rami had evacuated as much medical equipment as he could carry. He was personally financing the building of two hangars to serve as a new hospital as well as a hundred adjacent greenhouse-shaped homes, each seven meters by four meters (about 23 by 13 feet), to shelter some of the displaced. Until the hospital was functional, his team of fifteen (down from twenty-six) spent their days moving from camp to camp in the three ambulances they still had, treating patients as best they could. Dr. Rami’s new hospital, however, would never open. On November 8, 2016, when it was almost ready, its two operating rooms fully tiled, a regime air strike destroyed it all, including the homes he was building. Cockpit-view footage of the strike was broadcast on Syrian state television, lauding the destruction of “a terrorist military camp” belonging to foreign fighters. Except, it wasn’t a camp; it was a hospital.
But on April 25, 2016, as the mud-caked ambulance climbed higher into Idlib’s green hills, that destruction was yet to come. Dull thuds, several per minute, rumbled like distant thunder. The sound of shelling elsewhere. The ambulance turned into the narrow streets of the once-majority-Christian village of Ghassaniyeh, an area draped in the black flags of an Islamist fighting group. The destination was a village church, its crosses removed by the foreign Islamists. The building now served as a prison for the fifty-four remaining Alawite captives, including Talal’s daughter Hanin, now almost three years into their ordeal.
Dr. Rami still periodically checked on the women and children. He was embarrassed by their continued detention. “This is a nightmare. I have nightmares about this,” he said. “It’s a stain on the revolution, a catastrophe. This crisis is a deep wound, but what I know is that even deep wounds heal.”
A unit of the Free Syrian Army called the First Coastal Division guarded the hostages in place of foreign Islamists. The group was not involved in their kidnapping, which had been the work of non-FSA conservative Islamist battalions. A pair of armed guards sat in the church’s courtyard, drinking yerba mate from a blackened teapot. They worked twenty-four-hour shifts and were frustrated with their “babysitting” duty.
Jabhat al-Nusra and its allies were still the decision makers. “Their expenses, their security, nobody is helping us,” one of the guards said. “Our job isn’t to stand here over hostages. We are supposed to be on a front line fighting the enemy, not having guys occupied with this.”
His colleague complained that the captives didn’t seem to be as valuable as had been hoped. “They’re not asking about them,” he said, referring to the regime. “They won’t negotiate for them. We are surprised.”
The women and children had been moved at least six times to escape shelling and other rebel militias trying to steal them. The rebels were so fragmented that they competed for everything, and the prospect of dozens of Alawite prisoners who could potentially be exchanged with the regime, or ransomed, was an attractive prize. The rebels posted outside Hanin’s makeshift prison weren’t there just to make sure she and the other captives didn’t escape: They were mainly there to make sure other rebels didn’t take them to try and swap them or, worse, kill them.
Sisters of the War Page 14