Sisters of the War

by Rania Abouzeid

  Assad’s hard-core rebel opponents, the ones who refused to reconcile with a regime that had spent years trying to kill them, were largely restricted to Idlib Province, where Ruha and her family lived. There had been a mini war between Assad’s opponents that pitted Islamic extremists like ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra against more moderate rebels like the Free Syrian Army. Although they were all technically against Assad, they were also against one another—ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra even fought each other. It was a complicated, messy battlefield with many different players. The extremists of Jabhat al-Nusra had come out on top in the battle for control of rebel-held areas. The group changed its name several times and claimed to have split from Al-Qaeda, but it hadn’t changed its goals, regardless of what it called itself. It still wanted to turn Syria into a conservative Islamic state. It was the main power broker in Idlib Province, trapping many families like Ruha’s between two sides they despised—Assad’s and the Islamic extremists.

  After their return to Syria in 2016, Ruha, Alaa, and their family lived in the farmhouse along with Aunt Mariam. The family complex was still in disrepair, a fact that hurt Ruha’s heart. Despite its poor state, one of Ruha’s aunts nonetheless moved into the family complex, because her home had been bombed and she and her family had nowhere else to go. The farmhouse wasn’t an option—it was barely big enough for Ruha’s immediate family. On Valentine’s Day, 2019, Grandmother Zahida, who was in her nineties, passed away peacefully in her bed. Maysaara continued to work on the farm, employing relatives and other locals, although the factory that he had proudly built was destroyed in a regime air strike. He and his workers were lucky to survive. They had all been in the building just minutes before it was blown up.

  “Everything is gone,” Maysaara said of the piles of twisted metal and rubble that were once his pride and joy. “God alone protected us. How else did we not die?”

  Ruha and Alaa readjusted to life in wartime, which meant living with the constant fear of regime air strikes.

  The simple act of going to school was dangerous. Both sisters were in secondary school now, and their all-girls’ facility was in the heart of Saraqeb, close to the souq. The souq was a frequent target of regime air strikes and people were often killed in the market as they shopped for groceries and other essentials. Sometimes the rockets would land near Ruha and Alaa’s school.

  “We would go to school, but when the shelling started up again, we had to stop going,” Alaa said. The girls studied at home from their textbooks and tried to limit their time in school, although they still attended classes when they could. The one thing they could not do from home was take exams.

  “Baba was very scared and he’d say, ‘Don’t go [to school for exams], I don’t want to lose you. It’s too dangerous,’ ” Ruha said. “We were also scared for Baba, because he would drive us to and from school. Alaa and I were scared that something would happen to him on the road.” Ruha said that, once, after Maysaara dropped his daughters off at school to take their final exams of 2019, “about half an hour later, we heard that there had been shelling on the road, and we later learned that the car in front of Baba was struck, but somehow the rocket didn’t explode. It could have been Baba’s car, or the rocket could have burst into flames. We are very worried that something would happen to Baba because of us, because we made him drive us to school.”

  There were other dangers, too, at school, mainly from the Islamic extremists who were prevalent in Idlib Province. They had returned to Saraqeb, and one of their many bases was not far from the girls’ school. The extremists enforced a dress code and would periodically swoop into the school to see if the students were complying. The girls had to wear long, belted overcoats that extended down to their ankles, or a flowing black abaya. A face veil was also preferred although not obligatory. A coat above the knee was considered “short” and would result in threats of punishments, including an interrogation.

  “Baba didn’t make us dress conservatively, but we started dressing the same as the community we are living in, and it’s become more conservative,” Ruha said. “We still wear pants, but to avoid gossip we dress like them in a long overcoat. We don’t cover our faces. We both told Baba that we’d stop going to school altogether if [the extremists] forced us to cover our faces.”

  Alaa said that “at first I would go in what they consider a short coat, on purpose, just above my knee, because I didn’t want to wear what they wanted me to wear, but then Baba didn’t want me to get into trouble so he bought me a long coat.”

  “It’s like that’s their job now,” Ruha said of the extremists. “Instead of fighting, they want to focus on the length of our coats.”

  The best thing about school was that it enabled the sisters to reconnect with some of their old friends, although many more were gone: They’d either left Syria and become refugees or were displaced elsewhere in the country, or had been killed. Ruha was reunited with her old friend Serene, the one she used to walk to school with, but time and distance had diluted their friendship. Although Ruha and Serene were once again in the same class, both girls had changed, shaped by their different experiences. Ruha and her family had spent several years in Turkey. Serene had stayed in Syria throughout the war and was now an orphan. She had lost most of her family.

  Serene “is very attached to the friends that stayed in Syria with her, not the ones like me who left,” Ruha said. “After her family died, she became very close to the friends who were still around her. I don’t think she accepts the idea of letting anybody else into her life, even somebody like me who she knew before. We talk, our desks are close to each other, but we’re not friends friends. We took different paths in life.”

  In Damascus, by 2019, the concrete security checkpoints that once choked the city’s streets, blocking off key roads and creating traffic jams, had been removed. Victory looked like roads open to traffic in a more confident Syrian capital, one where the threat of car bombs and other attacks had diminished as the regime stamped its authority on the former rebel-held territories circling Damascus. But victory also looked like long walls plastered with the photos of thousands of dead soldiers and security men, a visual reminder of the sacrifices on the regime side.

  After years of a vicious war, Assad’s Syria and its Baathist system were still intact, as were the many intelligence and security agencies. The prisons were full to bursting with Assad’s opponents. So, too, were the graveyards. Although rubble was being cleared from some war-ravaged neighborhoods and cities, many more were still wastelands. Millions of Syrians were unable to return home because they no longer had homes to return to, or because they feared being arrested and disappeared by the regime. The economy was crippled by war and international sanctions against the Assad regime. The Syrian pound was weak and unstable. Inflation was rampant, driving up the cost of goods and services, which only made the gas and fuel shortages worse. Talal often waited hours in line to refill his car’s gas tank. Sometimes, he said, the lines were so long that drivers would park their cars at the gas station overnight, in the order they arrived, to resume their place in the queue the next morning.

  Life was harder, but for Hanin and Jawa, the hardships were minor inconveniences compared to what they’d survived. They were alive and reunited with their father after years of captivity. They were home again, and that was all that mattered. The summer after Hanin was released, in 2017, she and her sister Jawa went to summer camp. They enjoyed the break and felt like regular girls again, playing with other young people their age, having fun and enjoying the summer.

  The girls enrolled in school in Damascus, not in their old primary school (they were too old for that despite the fact that they’d missed years of schooling) but a new high school. With a lot of work and the help of sympathetic teachers and tutors who condensed lessons, they soon caught up to years of missed lessons. Hanin returned to playing the piano. She said the instrument soothed her. As a tribute to her dead sister, Lojayn, Hanin also began studying the violin. Jawa fina
lly chose an instrument—the piano—and began lessons.

  Their home in the village of Blouta, the place that was supposed to be a haven but instead became their hell, remains a painful memory for the sisters. They have visited it several times. The property is in ruins. “It looked so different,” Jawa said the first time she went back after her kidnapping, while Hanin was still kept prisoner. “I just wanted to see my house again, the place I used to sleep and eat and play and read, but when I saw it, I cried. I was too scared to go in alone. I went in with my cousins. I wanted to go in case I found something, a memento.”

  She found her sister Lojayn’s broken violin. Its strings were missing, its neck snapped. The instrument lay on its case, surrounded by shards of broken glass, a strewn pack of playing cards, and other household items. Jawa gave the broken violin to her father. She saw other things, too, that were painful reminders of what had happened that night, like the red Adidas jacket, she said, “that I had been wearing that same day before they took us.” She found her shell collection and took it home with her to Mezzeh 86.

  Hanin, too, returned to the house in Blouta after she was released. She saw her electronic keyboard tossed outside, its synthesizer smashed as if it had been stepped on, several of its black and white keys missing. “I don’t like the village and I’m not happy there,” Hanin said. “I don’t like going there at all. It’s where my mother and sister died. Many of my family members were killed in the village.” Blouta, she said, “just isn’t the same anymore. It will never be the same to me.”

  Sometimes, Hanin says, she sinks into dark thoughts about what happened to her and her family. “I always think about why my mother and sister and my uncles and other relatives died.” She doesn’t have a good answer. She doesn’t understand why and how a Syrian could kill another Syrian, including women and children, because they were perceived to be “on the other side.” She still wonders about what could make a person hate another person to that degree, and how she and her family were caught in their country’s savage war. “I didn’t know that there were armed men who would come and kill civilians, farmers, that they would enter villages and homes and kill people,” she said.

  There were armed men on the regime side, too, who did the same thing but on a bigger scale, using the war machinery of a state. They killed civilians, farmers, and others. They also entered villages and homes and killed people perceived to be “on the other side” or they obliterated them from the skies in air strikes. Ruha’s family and her hometown of Saraqeb experienced that, as did every area with an anti-Assad rebel presence.

  In the summer of 2019, after a protracted lull, the regime air strikes in Idlib picked up again. Assad’s forces were pushing into the province, although it wasn’t yet an all-out offensive. Maysaara sent his wife, Manal, and their children to Turkey, while he stayed behind in Syria. He and Manal wondered what to do. Should the family try to settle in Turkey or should they all return to Syria? What if they were trapped in Syria and the fighting got worse? What if they went to Turkey and could not return home? And what about their extended family?

  Ruha and her siblings were once again refugees, once again living in limbo, once again separated from their extended family and their father by borders and conflict. In summer 2019, they spent the Muslim Eid al-Adha holiday apart. Baba was stuck in Syria, and Ruha and her mother and siblings were in Turkey. Ruha hoped Baba would soon join them in the safety of Turkey. She was relieved to be away from the Syrian war zone. She remembered the many times her family struggled to try to find safety where there was none.

  Once, she said, during a particularly intense round of air strikes, her family huddled under an olive tree near their farmhouse because, she said, “we figured that was the safest place. If a rocket or bomb fell there, it would land in soft dirt, not hard concrete. If anything, we’d be covered in dirt, not trapped under the concrete ruins of our farmhouse. Staying in the house is usually more dangerous. These years that we were in Syria were spent in fear. Constant fear,” Ruha said. “It’s like we were just sitting there waiting for death, wondering where it would come from—the skies, or a rocket or a tank shell or something else. That’s it.” In Turkey, Ruha said, “we can relax, we don’t have to worry about such things. We can focus on studying, not wondering if Baba is going to die on the way home after he drops us off at school. We want to get a good education. We want to focus on our studies, to not lose the opportunity for a better future, to make something of ourselves. Nothing is for free. Everything comes at a cost and the cost of continuing our education in peace is that we can’t do that in our country, near our families and in Saraqeb.”

  Her sister Alaa was less enthusiastic about being back in Turkey. Although she said she was also “very tired” of the worries of living in a war zone, she was deeply attached to Saraqeb and her extended family there, and didn’t want to face the stigma of being a stranger in a foreign land. “I don’t really want to be in Turkey,” she said. “I don’t want to be called a refugee.”

  For Ruha, exile was a bitter but realistic fact that she had accepted. “We know that the regime isn’t going anywhere anymore and that there’s nothing we can do about it,” she said. “Syria is gone. The regime will take back everything, if not now, later. They will retake everything. I often get into arguments with Baba over this. I tell him, ‘Enough, Baba. Sell everything in Saraqeb. At the end of the day, we will all have to flee, the regime will retake everything.’ He refuses to sell, and he gets angry at me.”

  “And so do I!” Alaa said. “It’s our hometown. We can’t cut all ties to it. It’s where our roots are.”

  “The regime will retake all of Idlib,” Ruha replied. “Should we wait for them at home, for them to come and take Baba or worse?”

  The two groups of sisters—Hanin and Jawa, and Ruha and Alaa—had survived horrors that many adults cannot even imagine. After all their trials and tribulations, Jawa said she is simply happy to once again have “a normal life” with her family. She doesn’t dwell on the past. Hanin, too, prefers to look to the future. “I’ve put everything behind my back, and I’m thinking about my future, I’m working toward having a better future,” Hanin said. She isn’t yet sure what she wants to be when she grows up, “perhaps a doctor or an engineer,” but she is determined that whatever she chooses, “I want to be and study something exceptional.”

  Hanin—who as a prisoner in 2016 once 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”—is not only back in school but in 2019 attained the highest marks in her grade to finish first among her peers. Her experiences, she says, have taught her one key thing about life and about herself: “For certain,” Hanin said, “there is nothing that is impossible anymore.”

  For Ruha, the issue of “what she wants to be when she grows up” is too far in the future to contemplate. Her more immediate concern is to reunite her family and that Baba Maysaara will join them in Turkey. Alaa hopes for the same, as well as a sense of stability. “We don’t know if we are going to stay here and live in Turkey, or if we will go back to Saraqeb,” Alaa said. “It depends on the situation. Once we know what country we will be in, then we can start thinking about hopes and dreams and what we want to do with our lives.”

  After years of war and exile, Ruha said the biggest lesson she has learned is “to live one day at a time because nobody knows what tomorrow might bring …

  “Perhaps nobody can understand what we’ve experienced unless they lived it,” Ruha said, reflecting on all the years that have passed since those first protests in Syria in 2011. “Maybe people will read our story and not believe it, but it happened to us. What I know for sure is that we have to live. We want to live. We can’t let the past, and thinking about what we lost, hold us back. Our lives can’t stop at a particular point. We must go on and we will.”

  This is a book of firsthand reporting, investigated over six years and countless trips ins
ide Syria. I am a journalist who has reported for many years from across the Middle East and South Asia. In early 2011, I covered the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt and then made my way in late February to Syria, where I witnessed one of the earliest protests in the capital. It was a small gathering of some two hundred people outside the Libyan embassy in Damascus, held in solidarity with Libyan protesters who at the time were trying to bring down their own regime. The protest was violently dispersed by Assad’s forces.

  Since that day, I have focused almost exclusively on the Syria story. In the summer of 2011, I learned that I was blacklisted by the Syrian regime, but not as a journalist. Instead, I was branded a spy for several foreign states, placed on the wanted lists of three of the four main intelligence agencies in Damascus, and banned from entering the country. This forced me to focus on the rebel side by illegally trekking across the Turkish border into northern Syria, although I still managed a few trips to government-held areas.

  I knew and could describe many of the smuggling routes into Syria from Turkey because I had taken them. I am one of those journalists who wanted to see for herself what was happening in Syria, without government minders, and I did not want to rely on social media posts to try to understand what was happening on the rebel side. There is no substitute for reporting from a place and witnessing events yourself.

  I attended demonstrations in various towns and cities, spent time with Free Syrian Army fighters on numerous front lines across the country, interviewed Jabhat al-Nusra commanders, civil activists, families caught in the middle of it all, and many refugees scattered across Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and in Europe.