A copious breakfast, hummus with meat, musahabat with hummus and ful, cheese, labneh, olives … Abu Amar: “Eat a lot, you’re leaving for Tora Bora!” They laughingly suggest we be made to carry shells. Fury is all business: “I have to go see the Free Army, they have to give me some Benjamin Franklins!”
A soldier enters, wearing a balaclava, with a scarf knitted with the colors of free Syria. He deserted three hours ago, he explains. He’s a mulazim, based in Damascus, who came here on leave. He is still in uniform, a camouflage jacket. His brother, a mulazim as well, is in prison for refusing to shoot at demonstrators. He’s afraid for his brother, and that’s why he’s wearing a balaclava. He wants to join the FSA. Quickly, he shows us his face, so we can see it corresponds to his card.
Beneath his balaclava he looks tense, nervous. Shifty eyes. Our host upbraids him: “You’re an officer, you should be brave. Why hide your face? An officer leads, he must show by example.”
Two friends told this officer what happens in the military prisons in the suburbs of Damascus, al-Qabun, and Azzara. Officers are imprisoned there, for speaking out against the regime or for refusing to shoot. They are separated by faith, and there is no intermingling; all faiths are represented, Druze, Alawite, Christian, etc.
He comes from the Air Force, he was based at the military airport in Dumayr, a Damascus suburb. Co-pilot of an MI-8 helicopter. He confirms that helicopters were used against demonstrations, in az-Zabadani, with a 7.62 mm machine gun mounted in the door. At first it was just to frighten people, but later they fired for real.
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11:00 AM. Departure in the rain with Fury and Ibn Pedro. No room inside the cab, so I crouch in the bed of a pickup loaded with crates of ammunition. After we leave al-Qusayr, we shift the ammunition, along with two rocket-launchers, into a slightly larger truck with a new driver. We all pile into the front, me on Ra’id’s lap, next to Ibn Pedro. Fury heads off on his own. Road, then a long muddy path, jolting through fields, where we cross many trucks trying to avoid the checkpoint. Rain and hail alternate with bursts of sunlight. After a few kilometers, another village, we meet another truck, which is transporting medicine stashed in a metal false bottom, and another van. Quicker trip to a third village. On the way, discussion between the driver, Abu ‘Abdallah, and Ra’id on Salafism. Abu ‘Abdallah: “So, have you seen any Salafis here as Bashar says?” – Ra’id: “That depends. What do you mean by Salafis?” – “Exactly. The word means two things. The Muslims of the land of Sham26 follow the path of moderation. To live well, they follow the example of pious ancestors, of a pious man from long ago who lived justly in Islam. That is the original meaning of Salafist. The other meaning, the Takfirist, jihadist, terrorist version, is a creation of the Americans and Israelis. It has nothing to do with us.”
We arrive at a village and park next to a house, where we are welcomed by a woman and a smiling boy with a firm, confident handshake, a real little man. Wait in the reception room. The FSA has spotted Army movements and the way isn’t clear. This could last a while.
Dialogue between Ra’id and Ibn Pedro. Ibn Pedro asks what we’d like to eat when we arrive in Baba ‘Amr, to let them know so things will be ready. Ra’id: “Pork!” – Ibn Pedro: “We’ll slaughter you a Shiite, then.” – Ra’id: “See, you do have a sectarian attitude.” – Ibn Pedro: “It’s true, but they’re the ones who started it. It’s their fault.”
Ibn Pedro says the FSA has prisons in Baba ‘Amr, where they hold some shabbiha. They put them on trial in “good, due form. Those who have killed children are condemned to death.” They have also done prisoner exchanges, especially when the Arab observers arrived.
He personally has seen a case of a shabbiha condemned and executed by firing squad. “He had killed children.” Vague. “He’s also the one who shot at me.” Shows his wound, a bullet in the abdomen. Bullshit, in fact he was shot by a sniper in Insha’at a month and a half ago, and was treated in a secret clinic.
Lively discussion between Ra’id and Ibn Pedro. Ra’id reproaches Ibn Pedro for his exaggerations and distortions. He explains that as journalists, we have to report precise facts, that exaggerations don’t help them, and don’t help their cause.
Ra’id explains what Abu ‘Abdallah said about the Salafis. There are in fact three currents: the Made-in-USA Takfiri-Jihadist current; the Tablighi Jama‘at current [founded in India in 1926], a transnational, non-political current, whose purpose is the spread Islam through Muslim communities, closer to the Muslim Brotherhood; and the movement Tahrir al Uqul, “the freeing of minds,” a non-political, religious, pious, and also elitist current.
Ra’id explains his plans to Ibn Pedro, who offers [in order to let him move more freely around Homs] to have a fake ID card made for him, with the mention Christian. It will take ten days, and is done in Lebanon.
The wait stretches on. Ra’id chatters, shows his photos on his computer. We drink tea. The men pray. Ra’id also shows some PDFs of his publications, quite useful for our credibility. [I am reading Plutarch, the only book I brought with me.] “These things and others like them will, I venture, please readers more for their novelty and curiosity, than they will offend them for their falsity” (Life of Romulus, XVIII). That fits well with Ibn Pedro’s attitude.
The boy is a real big shot. When I ask him the way to the bathroom, he runs in front of me, shoves his mother into a room, and closes the door behind her.
Dialogue between Ra’id and Abu ‘Abdallah, our driver. Abu ‘Abdallah was an electrical engineer, he studied for six years at the engineering university in Damascus. In the 1990s, he was fired from his job at the Homs refinery, because he refused to collude in corrupt practices. Then he left for two years to practice his profession in the Emirates. After that, he returned to Syria and started a company. Now, he helps the FSA with logistics: transporting the wounded, weapons, and journalists.
Abu ‘Abdallah questions us about the position of the French people and government, and Ra’id explains that overall they support the uprising, are aware of and condemn the regime’s atrocities. Abu ‘Abdallah agrees, but says that it doesn’t help much; they don’t see any concrete results. Ra’id explains that diplomatic pressure limits the regime’s repression. “Look at what they did in Hama!” Abu Abdallah: Hama is different, that was an uprising provoked by a political movement, the Brotherhood, supported by Saddam Hussein.27 Today it’s an uprising of the people.
The political movements are running to catch up and climb on to the people’s shoulders. Especially the Brotherhood, the Communists, and the Salafis (the Tahrir kind, Ra’id points out – the other two don’t exist in Syria). He feels that the political parties, for the past two months, have been trying to jump on board the moving train. The Brotherhood is a party, it wants results, political gain. This influences their actions. The Communists too, especially in Jabal az-Zawiya (in Idlib Governorate) and Salamiya (between Homs and Hama, where there are a lot of Ismaelites). The two parties are trying to build up their popular support. But the Syrian people refuse to let the movement be politicized. They accept help wherever it may come from, but it cannot be conditional.
One of the conditions of the Brotherhood, to support the movement, was that coordination be done in their name, and that the slogans come from them – that people demonstrate in their name. The movement refused. Afterwards, if there are elections, the Brotherhood will be free to run. The Syrian people did not rise up in order to demand a particular political option, but as a reaction to oppression and humiliation.
“I belong to the people who had no political consciousness. When I took to the streets, I didn’t want to get rid of Bashar al-Assad. We just wanted a dignified life, to eat and be respected. But even practicing my religion is a problem. If you meet people at the mosque, to educate yourself, you will immediately have problems, you’ll be seen as an Islamist opponent. All the institutions are politicized by the Ba‘athists: schools, universities. The Syrian people is raised like chickens in a hen house: you have the right to eat, to sleep, to lay eggs, that’s it. There’s no room for thought. You live under the regime of the Ba‘ath and Bashar al-Assad is our president for eternity. You can’t imagine any alternative.
“The Syrian regime has no equivalent aside from North Korea. They put it into our heads that we are a great people, that we are fighting for the Arabs, against Israel, against imperialism. But they sold us, they sold the Arabs, the Palestinians, the Golan. The entire elite is abroad, why? They understood. And in Syria it’s forbidden to understand.”
At first, for lack of information, Abu ‘Abdallah was ready to accept anything to get rid of this regime. In the first months, seeing the massacres, he would have accepted a foreign intervention. He had no political consciousness. Today, he views things more objectively. He doesn’t want to replace one evil with another.
He also thinks that France, the United States, the West let the repression continue without intervening in order to keep Syria weak and protect Israeli interests. They don’t want a strong, democratic Syria, with a powerful Army.
A thought earlier, in the truck: the twofold social grid. Faced with the police and security grid of the regime, people put together a counter-grid, made of civilian activists, local worthies, religious figures, and, more and more, militarized forces, the deserters who form the FSA. This counter-grid resists the other one, circumvents it, and, more and more, absorbs it (deserters, informants in the Army or the mukhabarat). When you travel, this grid becomes immediately visible, with changes of vehicles, relays, safe houses, constant telephone interchanges to warn about the evolution of the situation in the field.
You could say that Syrian society has split in two, that two parallel societies in deadly conflict with each other now coexist in the country. Before the revolution, there was of course passive resistance to the regime, but the people remained linked to the overall grid by numerous ties. Now, the second grid has completely broken off from the first, cutting off all ties one by one. Yet the two cannot continue to coexist and the struggle is deadly. One of the two must be defeated, and its components destroyed or reabsorbed by the other.
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2:30 PM. The way is clear. Abu ‘Abdallah and Ibn Pedro leave to check the route, and make sure there aren’t any checkpoints.
3:00 PM. They return: Yallah. We leave the bags, they’ll be brought tonight. Ibn Pedro goes in front in a first pickup with a driver; we follow five minutes behind, with Abu ‘Abdallah. They have a system in case of a flying checkpoint that’s a little hard to understand, since the telephone is down, no network. The first vehicle will go through, then will turn on its warning lights and a motorbike will come back to warn us. But nothing happens. We arrive in a Christian village, dominated by an immense chemical factory. When Abu ‘Abdallah opens the window, a putrid smell invades the compartment: “Look, we’re near a magnificent lake where tourists come, and they put a chemical factory here. Between this factory and the refinery, this region has the highest cancer rate in Syria.” The lake shines in the distance, a thin blue tongue behind the town. Gray clouds cover the horizon, a fine rain begins to fall, the sun shines from below, illuminating the muddy, chaotic landscape dominated by this industrial dinosaur with its immense heaps of yellow powder. We have in fact skirted round the lake by the south, and we’re driving alongside it toward Baba ‘Amr and Homs.
In front of us appears the Damascus–Homs autostrad, elevated here, with a regular stream of traffic in both directions. I took this same highway in 2009, with my family, to go to the Crusaders’ Fortress, a little farther on, along the Tartus road. Just before reaching it we turn left, after greeting a man. Ibn Pedro is waiting for us a little further on in front of a house. We get out, we’ll continue on foot.
The man we greeted joins us. We say farewell to Abu ‘Abdallah, who is leaving us here, and we start off just as the rain stops. The sun shines on the puddles. Ra’id walks in front with the man, toward an underpass below the highway, I follow a little farther back with Ibn Pedro. The passage shouldn’t pose any problems, but it’s better not to be in too large a group. The mud sticks to our boots. Ibn Pedro has me roll up my pants, a solicitous gesture since we really are ankle-deep and he doesn’t want me to get dirty. We enter the underpass; just after it is an Army checkpoint. A soldier sticks his nose out, our friends exchange a few words, the soldier waves us through and we continue. Further on, there are vague industrial installations, crumbling walls made of prefabricated concrete, mud through which we keep wading. The man leaves us and veers left, we continue straight ahead with Ibn Pedro, moving away from the railroad. In front of us, beyond the tracks, there is another checkpoint: it is not “friendly” at all, but in principle, if we have passed the first checkpoint, this one has no reason to shoot at us. I can see the bunker of sandbags, beyond a plowed field through which we make a detour to avoid the sticky mud of the path. The post is 50 meters away, no more. We pass without a problem. Then we walk alongside some houses. A car is waiting for us 300 meters further on, with two fighters inside, an AK up front. We start off quickly. Little by little the urban fabric grows denser, we’re on a road between two-story houses still under construction, there are people, it’s Jobar, a suburb of Homs.
A little further on in the middle of a wide avenue, at an intersection, an FSA checkpoint, smiling young men, armed with Kalashnikovs. Ra’id wants to photograph them but Ibn Pedro refuses. Lively discussion, we stop, Ibn Pedro and Ra’id yelling at each other. The problem is that it’s another katiba, and Ibn Pedro doesn’t want any problems. He promises to take us back, with someone in charge probably. We go on. Narrow roads, a mixture of countryside, houses, little hamlets, we pass cars with soldiers, armed men on foot, another FSA checkpoint. They control the whole zone, here it’s the orchards of Jobar and Baba ‘Amr, then the first small buildings of Baba ‘Amr.
The buildings are dotted with impacts, of mortar shells, RPGs, and tank shells. We pass some FSA posts, one next to a fruit and vegetable seller, with his crates lined up behind the soldiers, then in a deserted neighborhood we arrive at an FSA command post, a ground-floor apartment with a wall of sandbags on one side. A dozen soldiers, well armed, are eating a shared meal in mess tins. We leave again, the neighborhood seems empty, the evening light makes the yellow impact-riddled concrete almost beautiful. Finally we park in front of a building and are led into another ground-floor apartment where Hassan and his men are waiting for us.
4:20 PM. Explanations. This part of Baba ‘Amr is called Haqura, it’s the northern side of the neighborhood. All the inhabitants of Haqura have left for surrounding villages, out of 10,000 people only two families are left. Baba ‘Amr might have between 120,000 and 130,000 inhabitants.
The al-Faruk katiba, which defends Baba ‘Amr, numbers 1,500 men in all. The commander of Haqura is muqaddam Hassan. He says he deserted at the very start of the revolt: his house was destroyed during the beginning of the repression in Baba ‘Amr. Earlier, he was posted in Damascus, in the infantry. He didn’t announce his desertion: on the contrary, in order to protect his family the FSA called the Army with his phone and said they had killed him. For the Army he is dead.
His deputy Imad explains he has a relative in the Army, who instead of deserting gives them information. It’s quite common, apparently.
Good mood, we eat sfihas with yogurt in the reception room. Ibn Pedro continues with his teasing about Salafis and whiskey. There are weapons pretty much everywhere: an M16 with a telescopic sight, a 7.62 mm machine gun with a round cartridge clip, an RPG with an Islamic flag knitted around the rocket.
Men come in and out, we drink tea. A boy brings in a 50 kg polyester bag with several Kalashnikovs inside. The officers test the mechanisms and dismantle them.
Bassel, a young man with a dark complexion, in a suit and a good shirt, speaks a little English. Fadi, a boy with a well-groomed beard and an anxious look, shows us the bullet he took in the back when he fled a checkpoint. It came out through his stomach.
Arrival of Muhammad, a young mulazim, with a Belgian sniper rifle, a 7.62 mm Herstal. Range of 800 meters, according to him. He’s the unit specialist.
Arrival of Jeddi (“Grandfather”), one of the guys in charge of information, a friend of Ra’id since November. Laughter, slaps on the back: “No kidding, you’re really here?” Jeddi also knows Manon Loizeau and Sofia Amara. He has several translators who work with him, they could help me. When Ra’id mentions whiskey, he laughingly takes out his pistol and chambers a round: “Whiskey? I’ll kill you!” Everyone laughs. “It’s the new dictatorship.”
Jeddi suggests we leave with him and we get ready. But a dispute breaks out between Jeddi and Ra’id. Jeddi wants to supervise us twenty-four hours a day, while Ra’id wants us to stay and sleep here, with Hassan and his boys. The tone rises. “If you’re not happy, go back to Beirut!” Finally Jeddi gets fed up and leaves. “If that’s how it is, to hell with you.” Ra’id tries to follow him to calm him down, then returns. So we’re staying. Ra’id explains our position to Hassan and Imad. In short, we get acquainted, and since the head of the Baba ‘Amr translation bureau has just left slamming the door, I keep quiet as usual.
Other non-commissioned officers show up, including a redhead in a beige camouflage uniform who shouts in a voice that’s too loud, as if he’s drunk. He leaves, and half a dozen men head to the back of the room to pray. Brief argument about who will lead the prayer. The redhead returns, so he isn’t drunk, and joins the prayer.
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6:00 PM. We go out with Imad. Dark streets, very few cars or lights. We pass an intersection where there had been an Army checkpoint. The FSA surrounded it and cut off its supplies, then negotiated its pullout. We drive up a long avenue. There is another checkpoint at the end, but it’s been vulnerable ever since the other one was evacuated, and they don’t shoot out of fear of FSA reprisals.
Visit to the underground clinic in Baba ‘Amr. At the entrance, stretchers, several people, women too. A long hallway divided by a curtain, with rooms along it. One serves as a pharmacy, the cupboards are full of medicines, there are some supplies on a table, with a heater balanced on top of it, blankets, on the floor lies a female anatomy mannequin, with all its organs and half the skull exposed, in one corner there are also two Kalashnikovs and a bulletproof vest. We are served tea and I talk with a doctor, Dr. Abu ‘Abdu, who speaks a little English. He was a general practitioner at the national hospital, but resigned at the beginning of the events. “Our work has improved since March. We have a pool of doctors. Our work is better now.” He refuses to be photographed: if he is identified by Security his family would be threatened.
He explains: in the beginning, doctors worked house to house. Then they found this place, but there was neither equipment nor pharmacy. Little by little people brought contributions. They received medicine from Lebanon, and also from pharmacies in town.
They can do surgery here. Difficult to know at what level. They have surgeons, ketamine too. But they lack drains, surgical kits. Also, some doctors live in other parts of town, and can’t come when the Army cuts off Baba ‘Amr. Sometimes they have cases that require major surgery, but the specialist can’t come.
They also sometimes send doctors and supplies further away, to Rastan and Telbisi.
The number of wounded varies. Some days it’s three or five, wounded by snipers. If the Army shells, it can be a hundred or 150 cases. They don’t keep any statistics. Three months ago the Army made an incursion, and they found an X-ray of a patient’s chest with his name on it. The name was transmitted to the mukhabarat.
The people of Baba ‘Amr can’t go to the hospital because of the mukhabarat, and they can’t go to private clinics, they’re too poor. At the hospital, the mukhabarat arrest people, or at the very least prevent them from being treated if they learn they’re from Baba ‘Amr.
The discussion turns political. Abu ‘Abdu: “Homs is a big city in the middle of Syria, surrounded by Shiite and Alawite villages. And the government distributed weapons to these villages to fight the revolution. That’s when the problems began, because then the demonstrators were no longer just against the government, they were against the Shiites and Alawites. That caused huge conflicts. Now, if they catch you and you’re from Baba ‘Amr, they kill you.”
He shows me a video, set to music, found on YouTube apparently, in which we see two young men – one from al-Khalidiya, the other from Baba ‘Amr – caught in Al-Zahra by some shabbiha and decapitated alive, with a knife. Ultra-graphic film, a huge gush of blood when the knife slices. The killers put both heads on the ground and plant the knife next to them. The second head, on the ground, is still quivering, from the blood probably. “You see this? How can we stop when they do this?” Abu ‘Abdu says he knows the two boys, but he can’t give me their names because their families don’t know how they died.
“In the beginning, the shabbiha came with clubs, shouting ‘Bashar, Bashar!’ Then they came with weapons. The government says there is a problem between faiths, but it’s the government that created this problem. The government is ready to kill people on both sides to intensify the conflict. Then Alawites come to the center of town, they kidnap women, they fuck our daughters and they film it. They put the videos on the web to say: ‘See, we fuck Sunni girls.’ For us this is very heavy, as Arab and Muslim people.”
The doctor’s face, as he speaks, is constantly agitated by tics.
He offers to introduce me to a woman prisoner who helped the shabbiha capture girls and rape them. She was an Alawite prostitute. They captured her in a taxi, an officer and three of his aides fled (the story is a little confused), and the girl told them everything.
A virulent argument breaks out between Ra’id and a bearded soldier, obtuse and aggressive, with a large band around his thick hair. The bearded man, Abu Bari, doesn’t want to show us the girl. Says it doesn’t serve any purpose. They already showed her to other media and it never got out. Ra’id, again, shouts. It’s tiring to shout all day long.
In fact, Abu Bari is not a soldier but, as I would learn later, a civilian, the one in charge of this clinic. Later, we would have problems with him, and despite all the interventions of FSA officers he would categorically forbid us from setting foot in the structure again.
In the next room, well heated by radiators, two wounded are recuperating, in the care of two nurses, veiled but in green hospital uniforms. They let me photograph them after covering their faces with pieces of cloth. The first one received mortar shrapnel in the abdomen, legs, and shoulders, in Brazil Street in Insha’at, four days ago. He was operated on at the national hospital and then transferred here. The second one took sniper bullets in the chest and arm, this morning, as he was buying bread, also in Brazil Street. He was operated on in another clandestine center in Baba ‘Amr.
While I visit the wounded, Ra’id and Abu Bari continue to argue in the hallway. Then finally Abu Bari joins me and uncovers the girl, who was just next to me, hidden under a blanket. She wears a black scarf and a long blue dress. Ra’id and I get permission to speak with her alone, without witnesses to influence her, in the pharmacy.
This woman’s story turned out to be completely incoherent, which no doubt explains why the other journalists who collected her testimony couldn’t use it. Her use of a very dialectical Arabic didn’t make the interview any easier. There is certainly a basis of truth in this story, for several other people told us about it, and confirmed the name of the mukhabarat non-commissioned officer responsible, a certain Abu ‘Ali Mundhir. The woman also gave us the names of young women kidnapped and raped by Mundhir; we tried to find them, but in vain, and I don’t see any sense in writing their names down here, or the name of our witness. Here’s what we could gather from her story, which she told with a sly little smile, throwing us flirting, sideways, coquettish glances under her scarf. She comes from a little village on the road to Palmyra, and she is illiterate, since where she comes from girls don’t learn how to read. At the age of fifteen, she got married and came to live in Homs. Two years ago, she got divorced, that’s when she began working as an “artist,” as they say, in Hama and in her home town. Here, the story loses all consistency: denunciation by the husband, arrest, torture, medical examinations, no need to go into details.
It’s in prison that she supposedly met Mundhir, a prison guard. When she was freed, she returned to her village, then two months later returned to Homs. Mundhir then supposedly re-contacted her on her cellphone. He asked her to serve as bait to capture two young sisters he wanted to exchange for some young Alawite men detained by the FSA. The details of the kidnapping aren’t really of interest. The girl says she wasn’t present at the rapes, but a woman from Aleppo who saw everything told her about them.
In the first room, near the entrance, two wounded have just arrived. We try to go in but some men refuse to let us see them: “There are rules.” Mukhabarat reflexes? Paranoia is keen. They throw us out. “I don’t want to see my photo on the TV!” shouts a young man who joins us near the car, with a smile. To see these wounded we need the permission of the military commander. Arguments start up again, it’s endless. Abu Khattab, one of the doctors, finally explains to us that they’re captured soldiers. “When it’s us, the regime kills us! Whereas we take care of our prisoners!” – “Precisely,” replies Ra’id, “so show them to us!” Impossible, we need permission from the Military Council. When Ra’id snaps at Abu Khattab, “Your methods are the regime’s methods!” he is very upset. The situation is tense, there’s a lot of shouting.
Afterward, Imad brings us to another medical center, smaller than Abu Bari’s, but clean and orderly, set up in an apartment. No doctors, just two male nurses. They just have a few surgical supplies and can only carry out first aid. If it’s a serious wound, they have to refer the patient elsewhere. Abu Bari’s center is of the same level. Now, they are in the process of setting up a small clinic for Baba ‘Amr, better equipped, capable of performing operations.
We would visit this new clinic a few days later. In my notes, the three clinics remain numbered in the order in which we visited them: the first is Abu Bari’s medical center, the second this one, opened as we will learn by Imad and his friends, and the third is the clinic properly speaking, also set up by Imad’s group with the support of the FSA.
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10:20 AM. Return to Hassan’s apartment. The men are seated around the stove and recounting their exploits. I drink whiskey, and it doesn’t seem to bother anyone. The mood is much calmer than at Abu Bari’s clinic. Ra’id explains that the activists have created an Information Bureau, and that all the journalists have to go through it, through this Jeddi he had got so angry with earlier. The line of the Bureau is clear, you can photograph anything peaceful – demonstrations, humanitarian aid, suffering of civilians and so on – but much less anything military, the FSA and its actions.
Bassam, one of the soldiers, tells us about an attack that took place three days ago. Some forty soldiers wanted to desert, but they were detained by the security forces who imprisoned them in what Bassam calls the “tower,” a big building on Brazil Street. The soldiers, who were going to be executed, were held on the ninth floor; the security forces were entrenched on the eighth. Bassam, with two of his friends, attacked the tower with an RPG, firing three rockets at the eighth floor and killing some mukhabarat. Then they negotiated: release the deserters, or we kill you all. The forty men, along with two civilians, were allowed to leave.
Afterwards, Bassam recites a poem in classical Arabic. A wonderful music, rhythmic, emphatic, hammered out, beautiful to listen to even though I don’t understand a word. Ra’id knew an officer who recited poems every day, they flowed from his mouth like water. But he is dead.
Bassam has a fine face, narrow, pointed, with a well-groomed beard and keen eyes, and a band around his slightly balding head. The face of a Chechen boyevik from the good old days. He is not a deserter, but a civilian who took up arms. Single, in his thirties, and he’s not from here, he’s from the countryside around Aleppo. Seeing the regime’s crimes – the rapes, the murders, etc. – he decided a month ago to come from Aleppo to Baba ‘Amr to join the FSA. He has a nephew who is at university here, who was part of the coordination committee of another city, and who introduced him to the FSA. Afterward, they saw how he behaved in combat.
Before, he was a journalist; magazines still solicit his work.
“Here, in Baba ‘Amr, you’re in a state within a state. It’s the safest neighborhood in Syria. The people go out at night, they’re not afraid of snipers. Al-Assad’s tanks will pass over our bodies before they reach you.
“We fight for our religion, for our women, for our land, and lastly to save our skin. As for them, they’re only fighting to save their skin.”
He denies that the conflict, on their side, has a sectarian dimension: “We don’t kill any human being on the basis of religion. ‘He who kills a soul not in legitimate self-defense, it’s as if he killed all of humanity,’ says the Qur’an.”
He talks to me about their organization. Baba ‘Amr is commanded by a Majlis al-‘Askari, a Military Council, headed by ‘Abd ar-Razzaq Tlass and a dozen other officers. Bassam is under their orders. The Council tries to inculcate a certain code of conduct, a certain ethos in the men. They come from the Army, where extreme practices were drilled into them: they’re ready to do anything, to kill anyone. The Military Council tries to give them some moral training. In the Army, also, the soldiers are used to addressing people aggressively, rudely. The Military Council is trying to change these habits, so that the FSA soldiers have good relations with civilians. He gives me examples of correct behavior: when they capture officers, they don’t mistreat them, but talk with them, and ask them, “Why are you killing us?”
Midnight. Ra’id shows his work, which seems to be received with appreciation. In the hallway, the soldiers are still dismantling, cleaning, oiling their weapons. Another Belgian 5.56 mm, handled by a chubby-faced soldier in a camouflage uniform with a beard and a white keffiyeh around his neck. These weapons are purchases, brought from Lebanon.
They teach me a phrase: Ash-sha‘ab yurid isqat an-nizam, “The people want the fall of the regime.”
Before we go to bed, one of the young men runs a vacuum cleaner through the room. Touching thoughtfulness.
It’s funny, after so many years, to sleep again in a room full of young fighters and Kalashnikovs.
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26 Syria.
27 The destruction in February 1982 of the city of Hama by the forces of Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father – destruction that caused between 10,000 and 35,000 deaths according to the available estimates – represented the peak of the repression of an armed uprising launched, after a long campaign of assassinations of Alawite officials, by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. After Hama, the Brotherhood party was banned, its members executed, and the survivors sought refuge abroad. Today they form the largest faction of the Syrian National Council (SNC), the main representative organ of the opposition.