“There are hundreds who want to harm them, but we won’t let them,” one of the guards said. “We will be judged by Almighty God for how we treat them. This duty was imposed on us, but we must protect them. They must stay in our hands. We can’t just release them without anything in return. There are thousands of our women in Assad’s prisons, and I assure you they are not treated the way these women are. Nobody has touched the Alawites, we don’t even look at them. Our women are raped in prison. We want an exchange, women for women, that’s it.”
The heavy, black-metal gate at the entrance to the church hall was newly installed—the prisoners had been there less than a week. The padlock clicked open. The men stayed outside. The captives sat silently on thin mattresses around the perimeter of the room, twenty women and thirty-four children. They were dressed not in the casual skin-baring fashion of Alawites but in conservative Muslim garb—long robes, headscarves, and niqabs. They hadn’t been permitted calls to their families since September 19, seven months earlier. Their captors no longer saw the usefulness of communications meant to pressure the regime to seek their release.
“We are of no value, it seems,” said a prisoner named Shaza al-Hatab, who served as the group’s spokeswoman. “That was the last we heard, that nobody is responding because we are dogs to the regime.” Behind the padlocked door, the women and children were free to move around in a number of rooms, to cook and use the bathrooms at will. They spent their days sewing, teaching the children, and reading the Quran in a bid to impress their captors.
Hanin was wearing an ankle-length, long-sleeved pink dress and gray headscarf. She was now twelve and a half, almost the same age as Ruha. She sat near her thirteen-year-old cousin Sally—quiet, scared, fidgeting, staring at her hands but wanting to talk. Ruha recounted the night three years earlier when she woke to gunfire and strangers in her home in Blouta, the moment a bullet burned her left buttock while she hid under her parents’ bed. The wound had left a puckered scar. She remembered what the strangers said when they made her mother and eldest sister, Lojayn, stay behind: “They said our army massacred people in [the Syrian rebel town of] Baniyas and that this was in response to that.”
She had heard from those two girls, fellow kidnap victims, who went back into the house, that her mother and sister were dead, but Hanin still wasn’t sure. In every one of the five calls she’d been allowed to make in almost three years, she asked Baba where her mother was. “He kept telling me she was with him,” she said. Hanin was relieved that her two siblings were free, and she wondered when she’d join them. She wasn’t the only child hostage alone without immediate family. There were eleven others, including her cousin Sally, who had sent her three siblings home while she stayed behind. The eleven children were all adopted by women who vowed to care for them until their fate was decided, one way or the other.
“I think about my house, my school, about my siblings,” Hanin said. “I think about my future, which has been completely destroyed. I wanted to be a doctor, but it’s impossible now that I’ll be a doctor.”
“Nothing is impossible,” one of the women told her.
Hanin had a message for her father, Talal, one she struggled to articulate through tears, pausing often: “Baba, I miss you and my siblings. When are we going to be released? Baba, I miss my school. I miss my freedom.” Her voice broke in her throat. “I can’t speak. I’m not able to speak.”
* * *
Talal locked his tiny perfume and cosmetics store in Mezzeh 86, as he did every afternoon for a few hours, crossed the street, and walked up a darkened stairwell to his first-floor apartment. There was no electricity, as usual. He tried to be home before his daughter Jawa and his son arrived from school, but they were already inside when he turned the key. Jawa sat on a mattress in the small lounge, trying to do her English homework by the dim light of an overcast November day.
Talal hadn’t heard Hanin’s voice in more than a year. He wept as he listened to his daughter’s brief taped message. Jawa, dry-eyed and steely, handed her father a tissue. He had knocked on so many doors, he said, heard so many promises from officials who “all sold us pretty words” but seemed to do nothing to free the captives. “They said, ‘Our hearts are with you. Your children are our children. Your honor is our honor.’ We heard it all, and from all of them. Alawites and others, but we saw nothing in practical terms. Nothing.”
Back in 2013, a senior presidential adviser had even publicly claimed that the captured Alawites were all dead, the real victims of an August 21, 2013, chemical attack against the rebel town of Ghouta, an attack the adviser insisted was perpetrated by rebels, not the regime. Talal had followed the news of Christian nuns held hostage by Jabhat al-Nusra and exchanged for Nusra prisoners, of Russians and Iranians swapped for hundreds of opposition fighters. “What about our children from the Latakian countryside?” he said. “Why is it just our case that is in the shadows, that nobody wants to talk about?”
Some of the Alawite families had discussed kidnapping Sunni women and children from Salma and Doreen to force a swap. Talal rejected the idea. “I won’t make another family cry,” he said, “and I won’t seek revenge for my murdered wife and daughter. I hope there is an international resolution to the Syrian crisis; otherwise we will continue living like this, in a cycle of killing and kidnapping. Syria must return to what it was.”
If only the men holding his daughter wanted money, he said, he’d try to raise it, but they were asking for something he couldn’t do—he couldn’t free prisoners. “Why should our women and children pay the price for their victims? We are not responsible for whatever happened to them. We are victims, too. We’re not living in paradise over here because we’re Alawites,” he said. “Our villages are poor. I was in eighth grade before my village got electricity. Municipal water came only in 2010. I’m not saying things were great before, I am neither with the regime nor the opposition, but there had to be a thousand solutions instead of arms, to kill a fellow human just because he’s with the regime or opposition.”
If he could sell his house in his hometown of Blouta, he would, he said. He hated going to the village, seeing where his wife and eldest daughter were killed. He felt helpless. A widower struggling with the loss of his wife and daughter while trying to raise traumatized children who woke at night screaming. “They’re here now and I still have nightmares that they’re detained,” he said, “that they’re being kidnapped. They have nightmares, too. They still do.”
The teachers at their school knew what had happened to Jawa and her brother, and were careful to treat them kindly. The first month they were released, they received psychological therapy from a charity organization. “Jawa talks about what happened to her all the time. Every day she repeats the same stories. I let her talk, let her empty her heart, I want her to let it out, maybe it will help her.”
Talal kept Hanin’s clothes in her closet, her school report cards within easy reach. Hanin’s purple slippers were by the door with everyone else’s. “Sometimes he just sits and stares at Hanin’s slippers for hours,” Jawa said. She had turned back to her English homework. The assignment was to recall a special day. She wondered what to write about, then decided on a family trip to the Latakian coast in 2009. A picnic lunch, shells from the shore, sand in her shoes, games in the water. “We were all together. My parents, siblings, cousins. That’s what made it a special day.”
“We need to forgive each other,” Talal said. “That’s the only solution to end this. I forgive because nothing will bring back my wife and my daughter Lojayn. Let them know I forgive them, maybe it will help the killers and criminals remember their humanity. Are they able to wash the hate that they have for me out of their hearts? We were neighbors. I used to go to Doreen and Salma whenever I wanted. I have friends from there. How did they suddenly become killers and kidnappers?”
* * *
Hanin had heard the promises before. The words were always the same, repeated every few weeks or so by a small group of ci
vilians who recently started bringing the prisoners food and other supplies: “You’ll be released soon,” they’d say, or “Freedom is near.” Hanin didn’t believe them. It was easier that way. It hurt less to have no expectations than to get your hopes up only to see them crushed.
The group was not part of Dr. Rami’s team. Its members told the captives that they were working to free detainees. Hanin didn’t believe that, either. If they really were working to free detainees, she figured, why was she still detained? The group had visited Hanin and the other prisoners several times since late 2016. The Alawite prisoners referred to the men as “the organization.” Their identities were unclear beyond that they were pro-opposition. Even the few Alawite activists who were aware of the prisoners’ plight and were working with Talal and the other families weren’t sure who these pro-opposition people were, beyond their wanting to negotiate a prisoner swap. There were many different groups on the rebel side, both civilian and armed, who claimed to have the Alawite captives or access to them, although most were frauds with no connection whatsoever. These frauds were just trying to squeeze money out of parents like Talal, their lies and false claims an added source of stress for families desperate for news of their detained loved ones.
Hanin had grown used to the organization’s empty promises; they were yet another part of her monotonous reality. She and her cousin Sally were starting to think they might never see their families again, until one winter morning in early February 2017, when Hanin woke to the sound of the padlock on the heavy black-metal gate breaking open. Several men rushed into the church that served as Hanin’s prison.
“Hurry up! Get dressed!” they shouted. “Quickly, quickly!” They were from the organization.
Hanin threw on her clothes and, still half-asleep, rushed toward the entrance. She ran outside into the vast church courtyard, feeling the early morning chill on her face. The three rebel guards suddenly woke up. The men from the organization outnumbered the rebels, but unlike the rebels, they were unarmed.
Pop! Pop! Pop! Gunshots fired into the air. “Nobody leaves!” one of the rebels yelled.
“Leave!” one of the men from the organization shouted. Hanin and two other children had reached a waiting minivan. She was about to step into it when she froze, confused about whose orders to follow. One wrong move and she feared she might be shot—again. The rebels were angry and clearly hadn’t expected this early-morning rescue operation. They pointed their guns at the prisoners streaming out of the church, forcing them back indoors. Hanin, too, was led back inside, and the men from the organization were angrily told to leave.
Hanin burst into tears. So, too, did many of the women and children. They had come so close to being rescued. If only the guards hadn’t woken up, the prisoners might be free of this place. If only they had moved faster, or quieter, or, or, or … but none of it changed their reality. Hanin and the other fifty-three prisoners were still being held in the church.
Later that night, the prisoners were ordered into waiting minivans, this time by their rebel captors. They drove a short distance before being led into a small, stuffy underground basement. Another move, another prison, but they didn’t stay in this one long. The guards were replaced with other men whom Hanin and her fellow captives had never seen before. The trio they had come to know must have been punished for falling asleep on the job, Hanin figured, but she didn’t care what happened to them. That was not her concern.
The basement wasn’t really big enough for fifty-four women and children, but they were squeezed into the space nonetheless. Somehow, Hanin managed to fall asleep, only to once again be jolted awake by the sounds of people moving around her and orders being yelled. Some of the prisoners were being told to leave the basement. The space started to empty until only fifteen people, including Hanin and her cousin Sally, remained inside. Where had the others been taken? Were they released or had they met an uglier fate? The rebels hadn’t mentioned a prisoner swap. So many questions without answers, only fears that grew stronger with every passing minute.
After some time, how much time it was difficult to tell, Hanin heard the sound of a key turning in a lock. An armed man was in the basement, telling the captives to get out. Another minivan. It was dark outside. When the wheels stopped, the small group was led upstairs to a new location. The first batch of prisoners, who had been moved earlier, was already inside.
The next morning, Hanin and the other captives were surprised to see the familiar faces of the same people from the organization standing outside their new prison. This time, the unarmed men from the organization didn’t seem to be in a rush and the new armed guards outside were working with them, not against them. “They told us we were going to be released,” Hanin said. “ ‘Get ready. The minivans are ready for you. They’re waiting outside.’ I didn’t believe it. Was it true?” Or was it yet another empty promise, a desperate hope that would soon be dashed like all the others? There was only one way to find out.
Hanin and the other captives rushed outside and into the waiting minivans. Nobody stopped them, and nobody fired into the air. “We were so happy!” she said. They drove to a village near the Turkish border called Ain al-Bayda, where they were told to wait in a house. It was a regular house belonging to a family with children, not another makeshift prison. Hanin and the other prisoners were no longer in the custody of the armed rebels but with the mysterious people of the unknown organization. They didn’t know what sort of deal had been worked out among the anti-Assad factions and didn’t much care for the details. The main thing was that this time the promise of freedom seemed real.
The family whose home Hanin and the others were staying in made a huge lunch for the fifty-four captives. For the first time in years, Hanin and the others were treated like guests, not prisoners. That evening, they were driven along winding mountain roads, from Ain al-Bayda down to the informal border between rebel-held Syria and the parts of the country still controlled by the government.
It was early morning, the sun shaking off the shadows of its slumber, when the minivans reached their destination. It was February 8, 2017. Hanin could see waiting for them in the no-man’s-land between the two warring sides a row of Red Crescent vehicles. (The Red Crescent is the same independent humanitarian organization as the Red Cross. The only difference is the name; in Muslim countries, the group uses the Islamic symbol of the crescent instead of the Christian cross.) Hanin could barely contain her excitement. After so many false promises, this one was real! The prisoners were transferred into the custody of the Red Crescent and driven to a hotel in government-controlled territory somewhere in Latakia.
Hanin had been freed in a prisoner exchange. The fifty-four Alawite captives were swapped for fifty-five Sunni women being held by the regime. Hanin called her father, Talal, on his landline in Damascus. For the first time in years, she spoke to him not as a prisoner begging to be released but as a girl talking to her baba.
Talal drove straight up from Damascus to Latakia but wasn’t allowed to see Hanin. The former prisoners were not yet to be released into the custody of their families. There was somebody else they had to see. The next day, Hanin and the other women and children met President Assad and his wife, Asma. The people from the organization had brought them all new clothes. Hanin was pleased to be rid of the drab outfit she’d been forced to wear in captivity. She tore off the headscarf and, for the first time in years, allowed her brown hair to flow to her waist. She listened, dressed in gray pants and a sky-blue sweatshirt, as Assad welcomed them home, kissed and greeted every person. “There wasn’t a day that passed when people weren’t looking for you,” he told them. Assad said he knew what the women and children had suffered in captivity: “You lived in a warped society, without any humanity whatsoever. For three years you lived with people who know nothing of decency, of education, of civilization.”
Soon after, Hanin and the other women and children were reunited with their families. Talal, Jawa, and her baby brother waited to gree
t Hanin. “When I saw him, Baba was crying and I was crying. I couldn’t stop the tears,” Hanin said. They drove home to Mezzeh 86, to an apartment bursting with friends and neighbors who welcomed Hanin home. Days later, Talal posted photos on Facebook of Hanin playing with her siblings in a park, and penned these words:
Good morning
You have returned Hanin and language betrays me
The letters celebrate a wild ibex accosting its hunter
I cannot write anything except I am born again seeing you
Good morning to friends and enemies, you are my brothers
Good morning, Hanin
There was no morning before you or after you.
By 2019, the outcome of the Syrian war was clear, even though the conflict had not yet ended. Assad had won. The Syrian president, with the help of his Russian, Iranian, and Lebanese Hizballah allies, had taken back control of most of Syria. Nobody really knew exactly how many Syrians had been killed in years of war. Millions were displaced, either internally, living in dismal makeshift camps scattered throughout the country, or beyond Syria’s borders. The war had unraveled the state. It had divided Syria into a patchwork of pro- and anti-Assad areas and, in the process, reduced entire villages, towns, and cities to rubble.
The extremist ISIS group, which in earlier years had set up what it called a caliphate (or an Islamic state) in eastern Syria (as well as parts of Iraq), was militarily defeated. An assortment of groups—including a Western-led coalition and its fighter pilots, Iraqi security forces, Syrian rebel fighters, and Assad soldiers—had driven ISIS out of its territory. Everybody, it seemed, even those on opposite sides of the Syrian war, had battled the extremists. Kurdish-led Syrian forces took control of the parts of eastern Syria that ISIS had previously ruled, and although they were against Assad, some elements were open to speaking with him and possibly returning to the government’s fold. In October 2019, Kurdish forces were driven out by Turkish-backed fighters. Assad, for his part, vowed to retake every inch of Syria.
Sisters of the War Page 15