The most dangerous place here is the hospital. You arrive, and it’s the first thing they tell you: if you want to feel safe, stay at the front.
Abandon all rules, ye who enter here. All logic. Aleppo is nothing but explosions these days. Exploding. Everything explodes and topples. And when you venture out in search of water, when you’re hungry, thirsty, there’s nothing but snipers everywhere. Assad’s planes are suddenly strafe bombing, rushing at you in maelstroms of wind—wind, and dust and flesh. But they are so imprecise that they never bomb the front lines: they’d risk hitting the loyalists instead of the rebels.
The unit of the Free Syrian Army in which we’re embedded consists of thirteen men, two in flip-flops, while the others don’t always have two shoes that match. There were seventeen of them, three died trying to recover the body of a fourth man that is still out there, at the end of the street. Their base is a school, and each of them has a Kalashnikov and a knife. In the principal’s office, a child polishes the family silver: two rocket launchers and a rifle. Except for the captain, an officer who left Assad’s troops six months ago, they’re just young kids of seventeen, eighteen. Alaa is studying philosophy, and between shifts he reads Habermas. Deserters are easily recognizable: they stole their camouflage shirts from the barracks. The others wear T-shirts sporting Messi or Che Guevara.
The Syrian Spring has turned into the Syrian War. And the evolution can immediately be perceived in the difference between the Lebanese border and that of Turkey. Beirut is a refuge for the most notorious activists: the ones who started it all in March 2011, demonstration after demonstration, protest after protest. The ones from whom the Free Army, in a sense, seized the revolution. They not only helped us journalists cross the border illegally, but, more importantly, they enabled us to understand their motives and demands. Now the border with Lebanon is inaccessible, however, guarded mile after mile by Hezbollah’s men. Allies of the regime. On the other hand, the border with Turkey has been opened: the rebels control the passport office, a doormat at its entrance portraying Assad. But this new Syria of which they are the self-appointed spokesmen is honestly an unknown. Difficult to discuss politics here. Useless to inquire about UN negotiations, about Islam. About Sunnis and Shiites. For the rebels, the main thing is to have us fork over $300 apiece: the fee they charge for a tour of Aleppo under attack. Journalists are the big business of the day.
Because, in theory, there are four fronts. But the truth is that there is only one front here: it’s the sky. And those who have nothing but bullets to use against the fighter jets haven’t got a chance. Without intervention from the West, as in Libya, the Free Army can’t win. And so, for now, it’s trying not to lose. They’re defending positions in Aleppo, nothing more. They’re not advancing.
On average today, at al-Shifa hospital, there’s been one death every three minutes and thirty-seven seconds. To reassure the population, the rebels drive around in jeeps rigged out with Dushkas, old Soviet machine guns, but a machine gun placebo against a fighter plane has about as much effect as a peashooter. Most importantly, to reassure the world—to convince it that they are deserving of weapons and support—the rebels drag the rest of us to the front, exposing us to invisible loyalist snipers. Two, three of them crouch at the first intersection, a hundred yards away. Then they dash across, upright, blindly spraying rounds with the Kalashnikovs. Up and down. As cameras flash. When they cross back, when they return to our side, they don’t ask if they’ve hit the enemy. They ask: “How did the photo come out?”
Every so often, doubling as stunt men for themselves, they forget to release the safety catch.
Meanwhile everything around is exploding: exploding and collapsing. As soldiers play, children die. There should be civilians and combatants in Aleppo, there should be a front—a here and a there. Instead there are no rules. There’s no asylum. Ambulances are loaded with ammunition, mosques converted into military posts. Refugees in the barracks, explosives in the fire extinguishers, undergraduates at the front working on their dissertations, students at the university bombed while in class. Mines in the parks, corpses among the swings. Rebels wearing loyalist uniforms. Loyalists without uniforms. And this base we’re settled in looks more like an occupied high school than an army unit. It’s one continuous fight. Whose turn to cook, how to capture the next block. What tactic to use. You stole my boots, no, you’re the one who stole my blankets. And it’s only a microcosm of what happens among the various armed groups, and more generally speaking, among the various opposition groups. Because the Free Army should eventually hand over its power to the National Council, that government-in-exile of sorts based in Istanbul, but there is no sole leadership and no sole strategy. Neither among civilians nor the military. And this, more than any arsenal, is Assad’s real strength.
In and out of the classrooms, amid the Kalashnikovs and grenades, there are children running around. Ahmed is six years old. “Today I’ll teach you to be a true Syrian,” the commander tells him. “A free Syrian.” He hands him his Beretta and makes him fire a shot in the air, in these narrow streets flanked with eight-story buildings, their windows already smashed in. Another one shatters. A woman, her hair in a braid, skirt down to her ankles, runs out frightened. The bullet got wedged in her kitchen. She grabs my pen and notebook. “What kind of Syria will ever emerge,” she writes, “from men like these?” And she goes back to her cubbyhole under the stairs.
a hand pulls me to the ground, and the bullet, a few feet overhead, rips into the wall.
I’d wondered where the inhabitants of Aleppo had gone. There are over two million of them, according to the latest census, 2,132,100 they say, and two-thirds seem to be still here, in these rubble-strewn streets besieged by snipers. But the houses, blasted by artillery fire, are empty: a lamp, a curtain, fossils of normal lives dangle in the wind from structures left gaping, torn open by the bombs. Even a cat here, curled up in a chair, appears to be sleeping, but it’s dead.
I’m in a dark hole when I get up, a steep flight of steps in front of me. And there they are, finally, Aleppo’s inhabitants. Dozens of shadowy wraiths shuffle around me, curious; I’m the first soul they’ve run into in two months. A cigarette lighter casts a glow. Nineteen children, clinging tightly to one another, stare at me in silence, lined up against a wall. Frozen. They look at me terrified, then I see why: it’s the helmet. They think I’m one of Assad’s soldiers. They’re lined up against the wall like prisoners awaiting execution.
The house of Umm Bashar was hit right away, at the beginning of August. She should really be called Umm Mahmoud, the mother of Mahmoud, since Bashar, twenty-eight, the firstborn, ended up under a hunk of concrete, his sweatshirt sleeve sticking out, scarlet, in the dust. They had to run away because the bombings, in general, occur in twos—the second is meant for the rescuers. There are thirty-seven people in here. Five men and thirteen women, plus the children ranging in age from one to nine. All they have with them are the clothes they were wearing when they fled. They can’t afford to rent a house, nor do they have fifty dollars for a car to the Turkish border. So they get by down here, a camp stove in the corner and no water, gas, or electricity. Every now and then Omar, twenty-nine, a taxi driver, ventures out in search of food. Across the street there’s a sniper waiting for him. Omar’s brother Shadi, twenty-seven, a mechanic, was killed that way. “I’ll never forget the day I found myself sifting through the vegetables. The sugar, the rice, whatever he had bought. Washing the blood off the potatoes, and cooking them anyway.”
At this point, inside or outside really makes no difference in Aleppo. The entire city is pounded by aircraft, helicopters, and tanks, hammered inch by inch: bombs and blasts, an explosion every few seconds. Thousands have sought refuge underground. “They hand out bread at the cemetery. Only among the dead can you be certain of not being a target,” Omar says. But the truth is that there is no safe haven: since Assad unleashed the use of airpower, survival is a matter of luck. “On the outskirts high-rises protect you from mortar strikes. You go to the first or second floor: maybe only the upper floors will collapse. If a plane hits the building though, you’re left under tons of rubble. In a one-story house, on the other hand”—he means the kind typical of Aleppo, graceful homes with a central courtyard, lemon trees, jasmine vines—“in a one-story house, unless the plane strikes right on top of you, there’s less rubble. Maybe they’ll dig you out. Though there’s still the danger of mortars.”
The truth is that the only safe thing to do in Aleppo is leave.
Except it’s our turn again now. An anti-aircraft machine gun abruptly spits out three shells. And it’s an instant, that’s all. Just time to look at one another and that’s it. An Assad fighter jet starts roaring in our heads, its black shape, through a vent grille, appears, disappears, reappears, levels out, climbs again, nineteen children screaming frantically. These are the cruelest moments, because the mind is still lucid. And as the pilot chooses his target, while maybe it will be you, all you can do is huddle there, your back against a damp wall, and stare at the floor along with everything you’ve left undone in your life, everything you put off, as you look around, now that maybe your number’s up, and even if you had something to say, here among these strangers, anything you could utter, any name, any wish, any regret, whom could you say it to? now? no matter who you miss, no matter who you once loved, surrounded by these dark eyes, the hunger, the mud, this feverish skin, these haggard faces, surrounded by these lives that are not mine, this plane coming back, and they ask you: Are you all right? But the truth is that they don’t even know your name—and all around you, meanwhile, there’s bombing.
Aisha, nine years old, hands me a business card. An address: it’s the shop above. The one the stairs lead up to. “Tariq al-Bab,” she says, “we are in Tariq al-Bab. Write that they should come and get us. Don’t write useless things.” Then she notices my phone, and asks: “Do you have the number for the UN?”
Yet, as battered as the city is by Assad, Aleppo’s underground is wary of the Free Army. “They started a war that they were not prepared to fight,” Afraa, sixteen years old, tells me, that one sentence marked by four explosions. “There they are with flip-flops and ten bullets apiece,” she says, “we will be crushed. They gave Assad exactly what he was looking for: an excuse for violence.” When you ask about the rebels, opinion is almost unanimous in Aleppo: no one knows what their strategy is, or who they really are. And worst of all, what kind of Syria they want. Afraa has taken part in dozens of demonstrations. “But that’s all over now. Now it’s time for arms. We have no place anymore, no voice.” Seventeen words, five explosions. “They take our houses, shoot from our windows. And they don’t care if we have no other place to go. If we are trapped. In two months, we haven’t seen anyone here.” Not an NGO, not the Red Cross. Not a Doctor Without Borders: no one. Another mortar rains down. The crash of shattered glass. Screams. “Besides, they are all so religious, all so conservative. And all Sunnis,” Maryam says. She is Afraa’s best friend, and she too is all in black. But she’s Christian. She points to her veil, and tells me: “It’s my helmet.”
I keep looking at my watch. Waiting for dawn. But I’m the only one; it’s a habit from the old life. Because the only difference between night and day here is that without light the Kalashnikovs are useless. At night, all that remains is the metronome of explosions. The rebels can’t respond to that. At night in Aleppo the war becomes slaughter. You don’t fight, you die and that’s it. Randomly.
They bomb here, they bomb and bomb. That’s all.
fortunately, Abdel Qader al-Saleh is a very busy man and only has ten minutes for the journalists. Because he’s the commander of the rebels in the Aleppo zone, and to show that he is not afraid of Assad or anything else, he arranges for his interviews to take place on the front line, wearing a short-sleeved shirt and holding a glass of tea. “I would say that the situation is positive,” he begins. An explosive burst nearby. “Another two months,” he assures us, “and Aleppo will be liberated.” Another explosion. A building at the end of the street, already buckling, gives way completely. “Maybe three.” The dust covers us. “Another biscuit?” and he pours you more tea.
Actually it’s been twenty days now since his men launched the conclusive offensive for the conquest of Aleppo, after the conclusive offensive in August, and the only difference is that the front lines are now the front zones: there’s fighting everywhere. The city, or more precisely its ruins, is a maze of snipers, hammered by artillery. Until the night before, the rebels claimed they had no more ammunition. So it seems they decided to go for broke, a moment before surrendering, and attack. It’s rumored that they were counting on mass desertion among the regime’s ranks, arranged through some of Assad’s officers—that is, bought from some of Assad’s officers—for thousands of dollars. But after twenty days, no one has advanced here. It’s just a new balance point on a higher level of violence. “But don’t write that no one is advancing,” a doctor at al-Shifa counsels me, holding what look like bloody plaster flakes in his hands. “The numbers of dead are advancing.” I rashly offer to throw the flakes away for him. They turn out to be skull fragments.
The narrow section of the front where we are embedded is an intersection in the old city populated by three interpreters, seven photographers, two journalists, a cat, and four insurgents. Around the corner, a loyalist sniper. The four rebels sit in what must once have been a small shop, engaged for the past hour in a lively discussion of strategy for the capture of Damascus. An elderly woman, meanwhile, with a basket of vegetables, emerges cautiously; she lives across the way. But no one pays any attention. And after a while, resigned, she crosses by herself, mumbling verses from the Koran as prayer. Even Wikipedia recommends what’s called “covering fire.” That’s two dollars a bullet, Fahdi chews me out, “are you crazy?” And he goes back to planning the capture of Damascus. In the afternoon, reinforcements jump down from a jeep in the person of Ayman Haj Jaeed, eighteen years old. Today is his second day at the front. Write this, he tells me: “Assad is at the end of his rope.” He crosses the street at a run waving his Kalashnikov, shooting as fast as he can. “Write, write!” he yells at me from across the street: “Two more months, and Aleppo will be free.” Only he fired to the left. And the sniper was on his right.
The rebels all have similar stories. They’re laborers, engineers, truck drivers. Students. Shopkeepers. They’ve seen Tunisia on television, they’ve seen Egypt, and they too have begun to protest. Demonstration after demonstration. All peaceful. But meanwhile the police went from handcuffs to bullets, and from bullets to tanks. Because the rebels all have similar stories. They all started out that way, peaceful, until a father, a brother, was killed, and they joined the Free Army. “Don’t call it a civil war,” they keep telling you. “We are not Syrians against Syrians, but Syrians against Assad.” And then they ask you: “Why doesn’t the world get involved?” Dollars arrive from other countries, mainly from Qatar and Saudi Arabia, but not weapons. The United States vetoes it: they don’t have confidence in these rebels who lack organization and direction, both military and political. Who lack everything. Their press spokesman here, Mohammed Noor, can’t even tell me approximately how many insurgents there are. And besides that, General Riad al-Assad, the commander in chief of the Free Army, isn’t even in Syria: he’s in Turkey. He communicates with the commanding officer via Skype.
But above all, the Free Army has a hard time winning international support because it is estimated that between eight hundred and two thousand men, 5 percent of the total number according to various research institutions, may be traced back to Islamic fundamentalism. And in fact the battle here began with twin car bombs claimed by an Al Qaeda group. It was February 10, 2012. And one of Aleppo’s most active brigades today, the Ahrar al-Sham, the Free Men of the Levant, is aimed explicitly at forming an Islamic state. It is also one of the most recognizable brigades, whose fighters wear a black band on their foreheads reading: “There is no other God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet.” In the streets under the rebels’ control, it is not uncommon to come across loyalists being dragged by the hair, drenched in blood, bearing the unmistakable signs of beatings and torture. “But Syria will be a democracy,” the rebels assure you. Until a mortar suddenly rains down. “We will respect everyone,” a second mortar, then a third. I dive into the first doorway I can find. Except those inside are all men and I’m not wearing a veil under my helmet. It will be a free and equitable Syria, they keep saying, but for now they leave me outside.
They are Libyans, Iraqis, Chechens, Afghanis. Yet they are not the only foreigners in the Free Army. Because in reality that’s what Aleppo’s inhabitants consider the rebels: foreigners. Aleppo is the economic capital, the Milan of Syria. A wealthy city, with a mixed middle class, Christian and Muslim, Sunni and Shiite, not many differences—a city of industrialists and entrepreneurs, all focused on business. Its contribution has been marginal in the demonstrations of recent months; the war came from outside, when Turkey opened the border and Aleppo, for the rebels, was the first stop on the road. The Free Army here is not like it is farther south, not like in Homs, in Hama, where a young man, a father, defends his own neighborhood, the block his house is on. The rebels here are Syrians from the countryside, poor Syrians, who accuse the people of Aleppo of indifference, cynicism, opportunism. While the latter accuse them of destroying the city without having the slightest thought about the future—except for a future of sharia, moral law, in a country where Sunni Arabs, however, make up only 63 percent of the population. A week ago, three of the rebels ended up at al-Shifa hospital, not wounded by bullets, but by glass bottles. Not hit by snipers, but by irate citizens.
The rebels have no anti-aircraft and the bombing is nonstop. But over Al Jazeera, Riad al-Assad urges them not to worry: the forecasts predict fog and rain for the next few days.
aside from a Widows Brigade whose members are not further identified, apparently operating near Idlib, the only female rebel we have any definite information about is Thwaiba Kanafani. A forty-one-year-old architect with two children, she moved to Aleppo from Toronto, Canada, arriving in flawless makeup and high heels, ready to enlist in the Free Army. “No one suspects a woman,” she explained in dozens of interviews, “so I engage in spying—I’m here undercover,” she posted on Twitter. Complete with photographs.
The delegates of the new National Council, elected this week, to whom the rebels are supposed to someday hand over power stripped from Assad, are all men. “But it’s not true that women do not have a role,” those at the Free Army’s press office inform me. “They too have responsibilities and duties,” Mohammed Noor tells me. “Her, for example”—and he points to a middle-aged woman holding a bucket and rag: “She’s head of the janitorial unit.”
Mona and Ghofran are sisters, twenty-three and nineteen years old. We’re at the front, machine guns hammering a sniper’s nest across the street, sandbags, blood-soaked mud, a house in flames—a mortar has just exploded—and two black niqabs emerge through the dust like a hallucination. “You see?” Wahed, the interpreter, says to me, satisfied: “It’s not true that women are kept shut up in the house.” Actually, it’s the first time that Mona and Ghofran have ventured out in two months: they’ve run out of money, and they have a sick father. In the meantime, three chairs and three glasses of tea appear—in the middle of the street, amid the bullets. “And then you write that we don’t respect women,” Wahed says. And he hands me a biscuit. Mona and Ghofran have no idea what’s happening in Aleppo, they don’t have electricity. They have no television and no telephone. They want to get across the city and reach an uncle to ask him for a loan. “We have nothing, I’m sorry, not even a lira,” Wahed apologizes. Meanwhile he has my $300 daily fee in his pocket. Plus Giulio’s $300, and Javier’s $300, Zac’s $300. “You don’t need to interview me to understand,” Mona says. “Assad is a criminal, no one doubts that. Look around you.” All around, in fact, there is nothing but rubble. Remains of houses, remnants of walls. Among the tangled sheets of metal, a dog: in his teeth, a tibia bone. “We’ve taken part in dozens and dozens of demonstrations. But now, with the war, women are excluded from the revolution. Sure we have a role: being among the dead.”
Osman al-Haj Osman, a surgeon at al-Shifa, the only hospital that’s still active, is frustrated. “The female doctors and nurses have all gone. They’re afraid. And we are forced to do triple shifts.” Because, it’s true, there are five doctors here, all men. But of the nineteen nurses, nine are women. “When the revolution began, I had just graduated,” says Zahra, twenty-four years old. “This is my internship.” Amid the thousands of mortars that have struck al-Shifa, she’s been wounded three times. “I keep telling myself that I’m here for the freedom of my people. But I know full well that even if Assad were to fall, for me freedom would still have to be won. I prevented an amputation for my father, who didn’t want me to go to university. I rolled up my sleeves so I wouldn’t infect his arm, and I sewed him back up, with everything vibrating from the explosions, all around, with a corpse beside us, and with my father protesting: ‘Cover yourself!’”
Because the air in Aleppo is dense with gunpowder and testosterone. “The men claim we don’t have courage, that we are too emotional,” adds Bahia, she too twenty-four years old, she too wounded three times. She too still here. “But I’m not so sure that lack of feeling, in some cases, is a sign of rationality. Passing your time at the front in flip-flops and repeating that you’re protected by God: it doesn’t seem so normal to me. The only way not to be afraid is not to think. Which is, however, also the best way to ensure that this war will never end. And so true courage, in Aleppo, is not to get used to it. To be afraid: to think.” In Raqqa, a city to the east, toward Iraq, it was the women who offered themselves as human shields. Against the rebels, though: they asked them to spare the city. But general Riad al-Assad was adamant: “It is necessary that we liberate you,” he said.
Meanwhile, at the entrance to the hospital, a car dumps a body. That’s how bystanders mowed down by snipers arrive. Picked up in the street and unloaded here in front by a car that races off, since al-Shifa is under constant artillery fire. At times, the body is hit by mortars even before it’s dragged inside. “And it disintegrates, literally,” Bahia says. “Dust. Dust amid dust. All of Aleppo, by now, is a monument to unknown citizens.”
After twenty months, 35,000 victims, and 450,000 refugees, the map of Syria is appalling. The Free Army controls the area of Idlib, to the north, and little else. Some pockets in Aleppo, pockets along the road to Damascus. Pockets infested with snipers, however, and flattened by Assad’s bombings, hour after hour. “And on Syria’s ruins, they will plant the flag of fundamentalism,” Bahia accuses. She is a believer and practitioner who wears the veil. “But my Islam is not their Islam,” she explains. “Fundamentalism? What fundamentalism!” Osman interrupts her. “We are all doctors here, all equal: men and women alike.” His father was a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. The whole family was forced into exile. Osman grew up in Saudi Arabia, and came to Syria for the first time three months ago. Every night he goes back to sleep in Azaz, on the border with Turkey. The first city to come under the authority of the rebels, and more specifically of its imam, as its self-proclaimed spiritual and political guide. “It’s up to you to participate, it’s up to you to earn a place,” Osman says. “You are free to do anything. Even to perform surgery.”
“Even to govern?” Bahia snaps back.
“Even to govern.”
“Even to fight?”
“Even to fight, of course.” And everyone around laughs.
The screech of brakes. A car spits out a black bag on the asphalt, and takes off again, tires squealing. Two eyes stand out, white, against a niqab, pupils upturned. It’s Mona’s body.
in any case, people must have heard that there’s a war around here, they must have gotten one of those text messages from Save the Children, “A Euro for Syria,” because we’re back in Turkey, and in Kilis, on the border, everything is booked. Hotels, restaurants: all famous journalists.
I got Jason Alison, from New Zealand television. This is how it works: they appear at breakfast one morning, and in addition to the assorted drivers and interpreters and hairdressers, they hire one of us freelancers as a guide. They pay your $300 and all expenses, and besides that you learn a little about the craft. Because Jason is New Zealand’s leading war correspondent. He has thirty years of experience, and for me, thirty years old, period, he’s a gold mine. Except that he’s an expert on Africa, especially Rwanda, he’s an expert on Rwanda and the Balkans, and he’s only been to the Middle East once, on vacation. And he bought a carpet, a carpet and a teapot, and so the first question he asked me was whether I could summarize who is opposed to whom and for what reasons. And I must have involuntarily given him a somewhat puzzled look, or astonished, or appalled, because he hastened to tell me that of course he knew where we were, we were in the midst of a civil war, Syrians against Syrians. Then he said: “Sunnis against Shiites,” and added: “The Shiites are the ones who follow Ali, right? That has to be explained, that they are the followers of Ali, otherwise my viewers will be confused.” And he made a note in his notebook: Check on Ali.
His cameraman, a certain Mark, is also here to learn the craft. He’s twenty-seven years old, and this is his first trip outside of New Zealand. He even bought a Lonely Planet guidebook. He showed up in a bulletproof vest and Bermuda shorts. That’s how he arrived in Aleppo: in shorts.
But they’re a gold mine, those veterans, so I keep quiet and listen, and try to learn. Because it may not seem so, but here everything is questionable. For example: the flak jacket. The word Press. Because journalists, it’s true, shouldn’t be a target. On the contrary. But since they killed the Japanese reporter Mika Yamamoto in August, aiming specifically at her, not a stray bullet, well—maybe it’s better to take off your press tag. Only many of us are in favor of it because of the insurance: if you don’t have the tag—if you look like a civilian and they shoot you—the insurance has a clause by which they won’t pay you. I think it’s Paragraph 22. And so we talked for two hours and sixteen minutes today, and after retracing all the conflicts of the last twenty years, in particular the theory and practice of the Hutus and Tutsis, we finally decided to consult one of the combatants at random about the tag. Who emphatically advised us: “Definitely. Use it. Always.” Then he asked: “What does press mean?”
The second thing I learned is that I should not say “regime” when I’m talking about the Assad regime, because if I do I’m not being neutral and not respecting everyone’s views. I should say “the Damascus government”—even though, truthfully, it’s the government of Damascus that’s pounding us, and it’s not that I don’t want to respect the opinions of others, but I would also like to respect international law sometimes. And as far as international law goes, I’m afraid the government of Damascus is a regime. In any case, the third thing I learned is that you have to go searching among the dead to find interesting stories. The dead and the wounded, and possibly women and children, because otherwise the viewers won’t identify and they’ll change the channel. And it’s honestly not clear to me why a New Zealander should identify with a Syrian woman with seven children, only one arm, and a husband in Al Qaeda, but anyway: Jason has thirty years of experience. And so we roam around all day looking for the dead and wounded, and my role, specifically, is to ask Khaled, who is the interpreter, and for whom I translate from English to English, that is, from Jason’s native speaker’s English to an English that is understandable, things like: I need a mutilated orphan. Or: I’m missing a child hit by a sniper in school. And of course: a boy soldier, possibly drunk—“There were some in Sierra Leone, there were some in Chad,” Jason protested yesterday, threatening to fire Khaled, “You can’t tell me there aren’t any here.”
And so, in search of what we call “real life,” and what the editorial and cutting room staff call “a little color,” we spend hours and hours at al-Shifa, because the regime, that is, the government of Damascus, is always there, doggedly trying to demolish it. Grenades, bombs, mortars. Whatever. Casualties arrive every minute at al-Shifa. All torn up, all dust and blood, tatters of flesh, relatives around them screaming desperately, fainting, beating their heads against the walls, bodies on the ground, among them one or two still breathing, amputated hands, limbs that someone carried here so that they might be reattached, only now no one remembers who they belong to. And in the middle of it all, as always, these young kids in white coats: because everyone has to help as best he can in Aleppo, even children. Mohamed Asaf is twelve years old, Yussef Mohammed is eleven. They are on duty from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. They disinfect, bandage, suture. They console. They extract shards, inject morphine. Sometimes you go in at five in the morning and they’re still there, among the decapitated bodies, a leg on a stretcher, some fingers on a chair. But they’re still there, mopping the floor in the light of dawn, when even the last of the dying dies, like when you walk through a deserted city, and people are washing the sidewalk in front of shops that are still closed, early in the morning, and the pavement, outside, is all water and soapsuds. Mohamed and Yussef mop the floor like that, in that same silence of a spent day that is already beginning again, the pavement all water and blood.
And I honestly wonder: What’s the point? At night, when I’m there watching the New Zealand news broadcast, and all I see are dead bodies, bodies and grief, despairing mothers, and maybe it’s Syria, maybe Iraq, maybe it’s another war, I couldn’t say: all I see are dead bodies. And I wonder. I think of Cassese—since our feature today was called “The Failure of Aleppo.” Cassese was my professor of international law. He was also president of the Hague Tribunal, the tribunal for former Yugoslavia, and he always talked about the BBC, about the time the Serbs seized six UN trucks and the BBC explained that the distribution of humanitarian aid in Bosnia was blocked by the collapse of law and order. And Cassese would say: “Have you ever seen a truck blocked by a failure?” “Verbs,” he said, “have a subject. Actions have responsibilities.”
Actually another story aired tonight, because the production editors noticed a couple of bullets whizzing by: a sniper. And so the news tonight was us—the attack on a New Zealand television crew—even though we hadn’t even heard the bullets. And even though the death count here today was 137. There was bombing at some point, we ran into a basement, there wasn’t one free inch of space. A man saw the TV camera and said to me, “Your life is more important than mine,” and he gave me his spot. He went outside. Amid the mortars, gunfire, choppers, and all the rest, he gave me his place, explaining: “So the world will know.”
to his companions he is simply Qannaas, the Sniper. A sharpshooter who, in February, decided to desert and joined the Free Army. No one knows his real name. He comes from a military family, from a town near Damascus, and his uncle is still a general in the service of Assad. His brothers, cousins: they’re all high-ranking officers. And all of them, except his parents, think he is dead. Qannaas prefers it that way—partly because he really is a little dead.
He has short black hair, a beard, and he’s twenty-one years old; he’s a skinny guy, with a stare that’s both intense and inexpressive as he waits in steely silence, motionless, for hours, finger on the trigger, eyes on the gun-sight. He calmly picks off anyone who steps in front of him. A clean hit, short and sweet, not so much as a twitch afterward. Only a cough. Eyes again on the viewfinder. He only gets irritable when he talks about the war. Because the war, he says, is changing. “Many aren’t here to overthrow Assad, but to acquire fame, notoriety. A reputation. To have power when the war is over.” And he’s not the only one in Aleppo who thinks that. Many tell you that the war will continue once Assad falls. They say that if Assad falls, fighting will begin between secularists and Islamists, or between Sunnis and Shiites. Muslims and Christians. Or, more simply, between the various armed groups: purely over control of territory. Purely for power. “But Syria will not become like Somalia,” Qannaas says. “Worse, we will have a Somalia in every province.” The war is now unrecognizable, he says. Then he takes a breath. A deep one. “By now, we are unrecognizable.”
It all started with peaceful demonstrations. In March 2011, when dozens, hundreds, then thousands of Syrians took to the streets demanding political and economic reforms. Liberty and dignity. They didn’t even want to overthrow Assad at the beginning. They just wanted reforms. But Assad responded with violence. Immediately. He said it was an American conspiracy. That the demonstrations weren’t genuine. He claimed that they were filmed in a studio. That it was a set of Al Jazeera in Qatar. And he reacted with growing violence. And in July 2011, in the wake of Libya, the Free Army appeared, proposing to serve as a frame of reference for a transition to democracy, and hoping to convince the West to intervene. Only something went wrong—basically because Gaddafi had no one anymore. He had no more allies, only business associates for his oil, only buyers, while Assad had Iran and Russia. And most importantly, of course, Assad didn’t have oil. But all in all, things did not go as the rebels expected, no one intervened, and now here they are making catapults from street signs and explosives out of ammonium nitrate from plant fertilizer and tinfoil, like pages out of the Junior Woodchucks manual. Increasingly forgotten with each passing day, increasingly on their own, they scavenge for resources as best they can, and in particular wherever they can, namely outside of Syria, from nations or private citizens. They do it, naturally, by promising loyalty to their patrons in tomorrow’s Syria. “But all they buy is our temporary gratitude,” Qannaas points out. And ultimately Syria becomes more entangled with each passing day here, because not only do the weapons increase, but also the objectives for which they are used.
In part because the rebel advance has meanwhile ceased, and by now can no longer be measured by cities, or even neighborhoods, but by blocks, as the war hibernates in a war of position: a war fought by men like Qannaas, guys fifty yards away, facing each other, trading insults all the time, sometimes shooting, sometimes chatting, when they discover that they know each other. In the end that’s how it is in the Middle East, they’re all relatives and cousins, and you’re there for your piece on the Sunnis and Shiites while they’re fighting over Real Madrid and Barcelona.
Qannaas studies the walls, considers the best spot in which to station himself, and between one place and another pours some food for a fish that is still swimming in its glass bowl. Today he’s on duty in the old city. Where the rebels are fighting from these elegant houses, lined with books, the curtains embroidered. Chandeliers, velvet sofas, and them. Coming from the countryside, they always feel somewhat in awe amid all that inlaid furniture, the hand-painted tiles. They’re afraid of breaking something, they move around timidly, uncertainly, here where everything, all around, is exploding—exploding and collapsing. The owners of this apartment must have fled in a hurry. They left everything. The fish, toothpaste on the brush. Half their dinner still on their plates. In the other room there’s some artillery and a corpse, purplish; two other snipers carefully pack up all the ceramics, the silverware, a painting, while a third sniper, on guard duty, stands barefoot at the door so he won’t ruin the carpet.
Of the thirty-four he’s killed so far, Qannaas simply says: “They were shabia.” In Arabic that means “ghosts,” slang for Assad’s plainclothes militia. They have plagued the Syrians for years, and today shabia is the most frequently heard word in Aleppo. You get the impression that even your wife’s lover has become a shabia, or the boss who hassled you, the customer who has never paid his debt. Or those you’ve killed though you’re not sure why. Like Mohammed, Qannaas’s closest friend.
“We went to school together. We grew up together. His mother is like a mother to me.” And together they enlisted in the call-up. Mohammed was the only one who knew that Qannaas wasn’t really dead. “I told him to desert, and he replied: ‘Not yet, it’s too soon.’ I told him that I would help him. That I would hide him. But he kept saying: ‘No, not yet.’ He was afraid that what happened to my family might happen to his.” That is, interrogations. Threats. Ostracism, neighbors not talking to you anymore. “My family was spared the worst,” says Qannaas, “only because they are all officers of Assad—and because everyone thinks I am dead: really dead.”
Mohammed was stationed at the Shatt checkpoint, and Qannaas had warned him: that checkpoint was their next target. “But he didn’t listen to me. There were three of us. We killed a colonel, a soldier, and Mohammed. I don’t know which of the three I killed,” he says. “All I know is that we had enemies in front of us. And they ordered me to shoot.”
He takes a deep breath. Being a sniper in Syria is the job that’s most in demand. And the highest-paid. “We’ll be able to buy ourselves a house when it’s over,” he says. “If there are any houses still standing.” It’s the highest-paid job because it’s the most difficult job. No, not because you have to be precise, he says. “Because you see your victim.”
the first strike exploded unnoticed, as did the second, covered up by the screams of a young boy, his leg torn off, as a doctor closed it up just like that, without anesthesia, using a kitchen knife for a scalpel. But the third hurtled down on the other side of the sidewalk, crashing into three bodies waiting to be identified. The fourth demolished a wing of the building across from us, the fifth a wing of the building beside us, as we realized that al-Shifa was again under attack.
Blasts of plaster flakes, shrapnel, and glass, the dust rising like a tide, dense, filling the air, and this rumbling, louder and louder, closer and closer—like a vise, the artillery gradually closing in around you. The mortar is a rudimentary weapon that doesn’t allow you to calculate distance. You can only choose the direction. Then someone, close to the target, says by radio: farther east, farther west. Someone who is close, at this moment, and who is watching you. But in Aleppo an artillery attack is also a hail of bullets. Fired into the air, fired at the ground. Fired everywhere and anywhere. And completely pointless: the mortar launcher is miles away. But the purpose is to convince us that we are protected by the Free Army. And so, in addition to dodging mortar shells, you also have to dodge the rebels, who have been taught how to shoot, though no one explained when.
Alaaeddin, the driver, yanks me away, shoves me into the car on top of three other journalists and takes off, breaks squealing. In a panic, because it makes more sense to take refuge in a basement, behind a wall, to flatten yourself on the ground, anything, at this moment, except to be out here on the street as the road suddenly disappears behind a curtain of dust. And in the midst of it this car, blind, zigzagging drunkenly. An explosion to the right, an explosion to the left, while we, inside, retreat under our helmets and watch our death play out on the windshield, like at the movies, as everything around us topples, collapses, and burns. Only the snipers are left. A car in front of us swerves. Then another, a man rolls out and is struck in the head. Once, twice, there on the asphalt, the bullets drilling into him; with each bullet the body jerks, twitches, shudders, and Alaaeddin drives faster and faster, more and more disoriented, until a helicopter appears and he turns left, then right, down narrower passageways, the chopper descends, closer and closer, choosing its target as Alaaeddin slams a parked car, goes right again, then straight, bangs into another car, makes a left, another left, a right, a left, and screeches to a halt: we’re back at al-Shifa again. “Shit,” he says. And squeals off. We reach the Turkish border, thirty-seven miles, without a word. Blood from al-Shifa on our boots.
Alaaeddin stops just before the passport control. He says: “I’ll buy some water.” We get out too, amid swarms of children hoping for a coin, a biscuit. A shot, in the distance. We unfasten our helmets. Another shot. The border is a camp by now. A third shot, a fourth. There are already 140,000 refugees in Turkey; the border is closed. Another shot, then another, a burst of Kalashnikov fire—and we realize we are under attack. Alaaeddin yanks me away again, hurls me into the car, and we turn back. We head toward Azaz, which is the first city the rebels captured: it’s under their complete control. We’re safe there. Amid the remains of a mosque, the charred husks of the regime’s tanks, pictures of the battle in the park at town hall. The war in Azaz is already a museum piece. Meanwhile, we have no news of Aleppo. Nor of Narciso, who is still at al-Shifa. The only news we get is from the wounded on their way to Turkey. The old city, they say, is in flames. Giulio stayed back there. So did Javier. You can hear the echo of explosions. Aleppo is on the horizon, to our right, the deep orange of sunset scored with black and red—it looks like lava. Another conclusive offensive must have begun. Alaaeddin stops near the pharmacy. He says again: “I’ll buy some water.”
We get out too. Helmets on the hood.
A man gives us bread.
For a week we had only tea, in Aleppo. He gives us bread and oranges.
We gaze at the sunset, to our right.
Alessio is also over there.
When a plane, suddenly, rips the air.
And as always, there’s no place to take shelter, no basement, no wall, nothing. Nothing. Nothing. The bomb hits a house three hundred yards away. “It’s over, if only for today,” Wahed says. And he runs off to help the wounded. Another explosion: another bomb.
On the same house.
What can I write? Plato has already written it all. Only the dead have seen the end of war.
they raised funds for stray dogs. To build a kindergarten in the Congo, a well in Ethiopia, to rebuild a church in Haiti. To save the wolf and the bear from extinction, and the blue-fin tuna as well, to finance cancer research, stem cell research, for a hundred polio vaccines for a hundred children in Afghanistan. To plant a tree in Nigeria. They told me: Berlin has heart. It’s receptive and liberal. I left some small change for the dog people. The woman asked me: “Where are you from?” I said: “From Syria.” “Oh,” she said. “Syria.” She said: “Syria must be lovely. But it’s a little difficult now, isn’t it?” she asked. Indeed—you could say that, ma’am. Sixty thousand deaths, four hundred thousand refugees, oh yes: Syria is a bit difficult at the moment. A missile can come along and incinerate you. Blood in the streets, bits of brain and guts, yes ma’am. A sniper might pick you off. “Oh,” she said. “I never imagined.” Then she said: “Just think how many stray dogs there must be.”
And then she said to the guy next to her, the plant-a-tree guy: “Do you know she’s come from Syria?” “Oh,” the tree guy said. “I adore couscous. Have you ever tried it made with fish?” Then he questioned: “But you’re not Syrian?” “No,” I said. “I’m a journalist.” “And you’re in Syria?” “In Aleppo.” “Oh,” he said. “Aleppo.” He said: “Awesome.” That’s just what he said: “Awesome.” I told him: “Every now and then someone dies.” He said: “Better one day as a lion than a hundred days as a sheep.”
A week ago, while I was waiting for the commander at the school that serves as the rebels’ base, as I was putting my notes in order, there were two children chasing each other around from one classroom to another. At a certain point I turned and one of them, who must have been around six years old, was standing in front of me with a .22 caliber pointed at me. The safety off. He was playing. My one hundred days as a sheep.
I am in Berlin for a prize. The UNICEF Photo of the Year Award. Which for 2012 obviously goes to a photograph of Syria, because what could be more dramatic than Syria this year? Even though, truthfully, neither UNICEF nor the UN have ever been seen in Aleppo, and the only thing they organized for this war was Kofi Annan’s special mission: an attempt at negotiations, which began in February and was shelved in July. If you look for news of it on the Internet, the only remaining trace is how much it cost: $7,923,200. $3,022,300 went to salaries.
The UN also sponsored this award and the prize went to Alessio. Alessio Romenzi. Someone who, typical of our generation, repaired broken-down refrigerators in a provincial life as sung by the 883; then he left Italy, and in two years found himself on the cover of Time. Alessio is blond, fair-skinned, frugal, shy, and introverted, a man of few words. A person who, if he has something to say, will send you a photo from his iPhone. “But then at night,” says Andrea Bernardi, a cameraman who has been in Syria for months, also at the front, “you hear him talking in his sleep about bloodshed and battles.” And Andrea is another one like that: he talks about everything, but never about the war. “Because they tell me I’m nuts, that it makes no sense,” he says. “That if I need the adrenaline rush, I can parachute instead. And it’s no use explaining that not only does someone have to be a witness to all this, but that I’m not a thrill-seeker. I don’t defy death: in Syria, in Iraq, in Libya, when everything might be over in a second, nothing is more powerful than life.”
Well anyway, I’m here partly because I got an infection in Aleppo, and I’ve had a fever for a month now. And partly because these photos were the images that made the world aware of Syria: and me too. It was February 2012, and Alessio had covertly crept into Homs through the water pipes, while the city was under siege. And he took these photographs that, when you look at them all together, one after the other, make you see clearly what Syria is today. And not only Syria; you realize what freedom is, and dignity, and courage. Yet that’s not the reason why I was so moved, the reason I bought a ticket for Beirut and decided to write about Syria. The real reason, actually, is that Alessio is someone who had worked all his life, whereas I’d spent years studying for one degree, then a Master’s, then another degree, and yet I’d never understood Syria. I’d never understood a thing until I saw those photos in front of me. On the contrary. Everything I’d studied proved to be completely unfounded. Completely useless. Beginning with Kosovo, where I started out, which was supposed to be a humanitarian war, right? A just war. A war of the left. It began as a war to defend the Albanians from the Serbs, but when I got there, the problem was to defend the Serbs from the Albanians—somewhat like the peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, which had been presented to me in thirty different courses as a peacekeeping mission par excellence. The perfect operation, just the kind you should carry out, should you become secretary of the United Nations someday. You should do the very same thing, they told you: it’s so perfect, in fact, that it’s been thirty years and it’s still in place. And Lebanon too: still on the brink of collapse.
And basically I would like to be able to write like that, and above all to live like that: like Alessio’s photos. With that immediacy, that naturalness—that depth. And I came to Berlin. Philip Roth was once asked to name the most important book he’d ever read. And he replied If This Is a Man by Primo Levi. Because after reading it, he said, no one can ever say he hadn’t been to Auschwitz. Not that he hadn’t known about Auschwitz. No, that he hadn’t been there. The power of that book—it’s the power that certain photos have. They grab you and take you there.
Only I’m at this strange ceremony now. In the midst of this reception with wines that cost as much as it does to feed twenty families, or to pay for twenty cars to the Turkish border, and to tell the truth, it makes an impression. Because there’s this photo at the entrance, the photo that won the award, and there it is, life-size, and it’s the picture of a little child. A little girl dressed so that she looks like a doll, one of those porcelain dolls: all embroidery, a pleated skirt, a flower in her hair. And I was there when it was taken, because it was taken at al-Shifa. Her father is beside her and the little girl is holding her father’s hand. And she has this look of fear, but more than fear, bewilderment, this questioning look, and it’s directed at all of us, all of us here in front of her, this look as if to say: I don’t understand why this is happening. And plainly the picture is beautiful. And yet—it has a strange effect. And not just because of what was around her, outside the picture, forgotten now, because children aren’t frightened in Aleppo, they’re torn apart. The real photos never end up in the newspapers, so as not to be insensitive, so as not to offend people’s sensibilities, and you don’t even submit them, you keep them for yourself, the real photos, along with your ghosts, along with the words you say only at night; but no, it’s not just because of that. It has a strange effect because after this it’s time to take pictures—photos for the press releases, time to take photos with the photo—and there they all are with those stemmed wineglasses, those patent leather shoes, those ties, all so elegant, those smiles, and they have this photograph in front of them, life-size, this little girl, yet nobody tells them: She’s dead, see? Because, meanwhile, on November 22 al-Shifa was blown away, and everyone was killed. The doctors, the nurses. All of them. The patients, Osman, Zahra Bahia, everyone, and the little girl, the little girl too, there’s been no further word. She was the doctor’s daughter, that little girl with the flower in her hair, and they are all dead, blown to bits, strewn everywhere, and they are all covered with maggots now, putrefied, rotted, food for the rats, all still under there, the little girl too, where did she end up? And that’s what Aleppo is like, outside the picture, that’s how it is, where nobody cares about these little dolls in the rubble, these rag doll bodies amid the worms, the rats.
A dog occasionally unearths a bone.
An American approached me. An official of something or other. “It’s a tragedy,” he said. “A real tragedy.” And he stared at the photo. He said: “It’s a real tragedy. A tragedy that’s difficult to deal with, so many aspects, that ancestral hatred, and Islam, a tragedy. Problematic.” I said: “Yes.” He said: “Difficult. Unfortunately, it’s a time of crisis. How can we intervene effectively? We don’t have the resources,” he said. He said: “The wars multiply, resources shrink. In some offices we no longer even have paper for the printers.”
Then he said: “It’s just a tragedy.”
And he poured me some wine. He studied the glass against the light. A Cabernet. He said: “It’s a red that’s unmistakable.” “Yes,” I said. “Unmistakable.”
Like the snow on the ground in front of al-Shifa.