Up early to call Ibn Pedro about my departure. We finally reach him around 9:30 AM. He is vague, evasive. “Yes, maybe, I might leave today, I don’t know, I’ll call you back.”
A little later Marcel, the German journalist, calls me. He is stuck in Qusur, the mukhabarat and the Army are fighting on his street with the FSA, they’re firing at his apartment. In Baba ‘Amr, tank shelling.
The corpse of Taha, the boy from yesterday, has been transferred to the National Hospital. To recover him, the father has to sign papers certifying he was killed by a terrorist.
Two women completely in black come to see us. Their house was burned down and they want to testify. They live in the Sabil area. The older one chokes with emotion as she talks. Where they live, they are surrounded by Alawites on one side, Shiites on the other. Some men came around 2:00 AM, shot at the house, threw a grenade against the door, then a can of gas which they shot at, setting fire to the house. Half the house burned down before they managed to put out the fire. They didn’t see the men but they were yelling: “We’ll get you all out of here, you Sunnis!” Think they were Alawites supported by Security. Their neighbors’ house was also attacked. There were seven Sunni families in the street, all have left except these two. It’s been seventeen years that they’ve lived there. Abu Brahim goes to find them an apartment in the neighborhood.
Abu Bakr, Ra’id’s activist friend, is here. He washed a dead man this morning and has come for a shower.
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Noon. We have had several conversations on the phone with Marcel. He is still stuck, the shooting won’t stop. A guy with him went out of the apartment and was killed. Nothing we can do. But Abu Brahim doesn’t think Security will enter the buildings. Too afraid of FSA resistance.
We study our options. Ibn Pedro promises a departure tomorrow. I push for us to move to al-Khalidiya, to at least get past the obstacle of the snipers, now that they’re relatively calm. Impossible to get from al-Khalidiya to Safsafi, clashes between the two sides in al-Warshat. But al-Khalidiya according to Abu Brahim is still accessible. He looks for an apartment for us with electricity and internet.
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1:00 PM. Phone call from Abu Bilal. A second family massacred. It happened the same day as the other one, on Thursday 26, but they weren’t able to reach the bodies until today. They were brought to the Karam al-Zaytun clinic. There is the father, the mother, and four children, some of them with their throats slit. We move.
2:00 PM. Passage to al-Khalidiya without a problem. It’s Abu ‘Umar who brings us, in a Suzuki pickup. There’s shooting in the streets we came by, so we take the back way, across the big “avenue of death.” No shooting, on Cairo Street either, people are crossing on foot. On the way we pass just in front of a checkpoint, twenty meters away, but this one has agreed on a truce with the FSA.
We join Abu Bakr, who’s going to stay with us. Wait in the street as Ra’id speaks to the BBC. The cool air feels good. My cough on the other hand has started up again, worse than ever.
We call Imad. Baba ‘Amr is being shelled by twelve T-72s. The hospital is full, four dead, fifteen wounded. Yesterday there were eight tanks, the FSA destroyed four of them; the Army called in reinforcements, today the FSA destroyed another one. The bombing began the day before yesterday. All the dead in Baba ‘Amr are civilians. Two killed by snipers, the rest by the bombing. The attack is toward Kfar ‘Aaya, where the railroad runs. On the Jobar side it’s calm. Imad says that someone who knows the way can pass. We’ll see.
We call Hassan. He says twenty tanks since yesterday, and that they’re completely powerless, they couldn’t do anything against them.
Outside it just started up violently, after a lull, in Qusur probably. Marcel is still stuck.
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Around 5:00 PM, I go out on foot with Abu Bakr, who is wearing a military jacket over a long imam’s robe and who is looking more and more, with his red beard and his blazing eyes, like a Chechen fighter, and Najah, a young activist, to pick up Marcel who has finally managed to leave Qusur and is near the wooden clock-tower in Khalidiya. There are snipers and he is worried. We run across two streets, find one of his friends and then him; his friends bring us back in a car, a handsome black 4×4, fast and comfortable. Then I go to the internet café. Abu ‘Adnan is there, surfing on his Samsung tablet. I show him the Le Monde pages online, he’s rather pleased with them.
7:30 PM. Return to the house. News from the front: Abu Annas, the leader of the Friday demonstration in Bab Drib, was grievously wounded in the chest by a BTR shell. One of his friends was killed. Baba ‘Amr is calmer.
Discussion with Marcel, who is going to stay with us, about the religious aspect of the uprising, on which he is focusing. He has met several shaykhs. Is trying to clarify the religious dynamics. It’s very complicated, things are never stated clearly. Exchange of information and experiences.
Qusur is in fact a calm neighborhood. Marcel was out of luck. The mukhabarat mounted an operation to attack an FSA apartment, which they surrounded and pounded with RPGs and machine guns. Two FSA soldiers were killed in the apartment, including Abu Amar Masarani, the FSA commander of Qusur. Five others fled and were shot at by snipers in the streets. Marcel, who wasn’t far away, on the fourth floor of a neighboring building, tried to film from the balcony, but they were sniped at from a roof and his friend Muhammad was almost killed. Marcel was stuck for eight hours in the apartment, until the security forces withdrew.
Marcel talks about the Bedouins, who have a strong tradition of blood vengeance, who kidnap and kill in Alawite neighborhoods. “They’re completely out of control,” one guy told him, a revolutionary frightened by these excesses.
Abu Bakr tells us: three Bedouin women were kidnapped in Bayada (there are a lot of Bedouins in Bayada) by the shabbiha, a forty-year-old mother and her two daughters, aged sixteen and twelve. The three were raped, then returned after a month. Kept in an Alawite neighborhood, not in prison, near Sabil according to them. The family wanted to press charges, but that’s of course impossible; and even if the state were functioning, the Bedouins would take revenge. So the relatives of the women kidnapped some men from the area where the women were prisoners, and demanded that their families hand over the rapists, under penalty of death for the captives. As the rapists weren’t handed over, the captives were killed. “That’s how the fitna began,” concludes Abu Bakr. He adds that if that happened to him, he wouldn’t take revenge like that. For him, the Qur’an forbids revenge on a third party. But the Bedouins are uncontrollable. Conflict too between them and the Shiites, and even the Iranians (because one of the girls said she heard Persian).
Marcel: when the Bedouins joined the FSA, they already had weapons for a long time; they’re very active in combat, have had a lot of martyrs. They catch Army soldiers on leave and give them the choice: join the FSA or die.
He cites another case in al-Bayada which was a cause for vengeance: the first week of December, a Bedouin woman, seven months pregnant, leaned out of her door and caught a sniper bullet in the head. Her family avenged itself cruelly on the Alawites.
Marcel is convinced the regime wants a civil war, and is doing everything it can to provoke it.