A road journey through the conflict
‘We found him six days later, abandoned in the forest. He disappeared on 24 March 2012, the day the army invaded Saraqeb.
‘His body hadn’t been discarded carelessly; it was wrapped into a bundle. There was a terrible smell in the air, but no clear bloodstains. It was the deep wound on his throat that was obvious. He had been slaughtered like an animal, it seemed. His clothes were in place, coated in a layer of dust. From a distance his body looked like a piece of fabric abandoned randomly, but this cloth carried the body of a young man from the Aboud family, the first to be martyred on the day of the invasion. We thought he had been arrested like so many others, but in fact he had been killed. In our hearts the young man had lived another six days. Perhaps that was enough. I am certain that the boy was attacked unjustifiably; he had left his gun at home that day, gone out and vanished. Had he been armed, he would not have surrendered so easily – but they double-crossed him. The wound on his throat had been made from behind, and our martyr happened to be wearing new clothes when his blood began to soak into the dust.
‘After the first invasion, on the Saturday, the army retreated. This was a tactic; a small military presence remained and, the following Tuesday, they returned to attack the towns of Taftanaz and Jarjanaz, and to force the entire region of Idlib to surrender once more. In Jarjanaz they torched seventy houses, in Saraqeb a hundred. The tanks came in and soldiers invaded the houses in great swathes. By the time they had left, Saraqeb was a heap of rubble. We lost the best of our young men that day. Sa’ad Bareesh had been injured earlier when shrapnel became lodged in his hand and leg. He had been at his sister’s house when they raided it and tore it to pieces. They took his sister’s son, Idi al-Omar, from her arms and dragged them both into the street. Sa’ad was screaming, but they paid no attention. The soldiers pulled them through the streets until they were out of sight. The sister started to scream, following them down the street. They threw her to the ground and vanished. That’s when we heard gunfire. She started running again, then fell to her knees and continued to crawl toward where the shots were coming from.
‘We found the two young men – her brother and son – dumped on the ground beside a wall. They had been shot in the head, and all over their bodies. Even in the wounds on the brother’s leg and hand, a bullet had ruptured the flesh. A short while later the very same woman allowed another group of soldiers into her home, who had come looking for her second son. The soldiers were hungry, so she cooked them something to eat. When one of them started to shout abuse, she cursed him in return and said: “You are in my home, eating my food, and you dare to shout at me?” The soldier fell silent, and instructed his companions not to harm the woman; yet they still seized her teenage son when they left. The soldier who had shouted at the woman seemed pained by her tears as she begged them to hand back her son, yet he remained silent. Her son would be returned to her dead, and this soldier seemed to know not only that they would kill him, but that he was the second of her sons to be killed.
‘Nevertheless, the young men did not surrender. They did not cower before the army’s great numbers, the continued bombardment and the constant slaughter; they stayed to protect their homes until they were out of ammunition. Six of the fighters remained and found themselves surrounded, without ammunition. The army invaded the well-fortified house and set fire to the basement. They were about to kill the owner of the house, an elderly man, when his wife knelt at their feet and pleaded: “I beg you, my sons, don’t kill him. I am on my knees, please let him go. He’s just an old man; he’s got nothing to do with this.” They didn’t kill the man, but they did beat him severely before throwing him into the street. The soldiers took the six men, aged between twenty and thirty, and forced them to stand against a wall. Then they opened fire. In the space of a few minutes, all had fallen to the ground, their bodies spread across it in an overlapping sprawl. In silence, the soldiers departed.
‘The next day, the soldiers patrolled the streets. They stopped Muhammad Aboud in the middle of the road and opened fire on him. Then they seized his brother. This was the same day they killed Muhammad Bareesh, known by the nickname “Muhammad Haaf”.1 The soldiers hadn’t had the courage to confront him head-on; Muhammad was well-known for his strength and fearlessness, as the leader of a very popular faction in Saraqeb. From an aircraft hovering above, soldiers launched a machine-gun assault against him. Meanwhile, on the ground, a heavy infantry combat vehicle supported the aircraft, spraying bullets in every direction. After they killed him and made certain that he was dead, the soldiers drew closer, dancing and shouting for joy.
‘Zaheer Aboud, who was captured that day, was released after three months of torture. A few days after his release, he was shot by a sniper while walking through Saraqeb.’
The army had secured a temporary victory. ‘We were shooting Kalashnikovs and they were fighting back with tanks and planes. But, as I say, the victory is only temporary; they have won the battle, but not the war …’
This was the end of the young rebel leader’s account of the first invasion of Saraqeb.
The sun was blazing down, so intense that it was impossible to cry. Everyone spoke with granite-like solemnity; a brief sigh was enough to occupy the whole space. We were driving in two cars across the northern countryside to Aleppo, Idlib and Hama. Over the course of our journey, we stopped at several checkpoints and bases belonging to armed groups. It was as though we had uncovered Syria’s true identity after all this time: a country made of earth, blood and fire, where explosions never ceased. There was dust everywhere, and flames still flickered in the distance. The villages were eerily silent, like ghost towns. We saw only a few people, and the sound of circling aircraft filled the air. The shelling had happened at some distance from where we were. ‘It might not seem like it now, but a rocket could fall on us at any moment,’ the young man said.
I was on the verge of crying. The deserted road, the silent villages, passing through the armed checkpoints in the midday sun, the dust in my eyes; it was almost enough to bring me to tears. But then I noticed something moving. At the other end of a wide field, jets of water were spraying the crops. Life was still going on, despite everything else! On the horizon, a girl no older than fifteen came into view. My heart pounded as I looked toward the sky. Could she be the target of an airborne sniper? The girl was playing in the sprinklers, dousing her head with water. She took off her headscarf and dampened it too, using it to wipe her face. A collection of domed mud houses appeared and a small truck passed us by. In the back of the truck a group of young veiled girls stood squeezed together, each carrying a hoe. A small number of older women stood next to them. The truck stopped and the girls got off, heading for the field. This place couldn’t possibly become the jihadis’ pasture when the agricultural lifestyle made it necessary for women to work in the place of men.
Tired villages bathed in sun and poverty. Every name had a peculiar ring to it, and a surprising meaning: Riyaan, Louf, M’israni, Qatra, Kaff Amim, Qatma.2 Other villages, too, fought a two-pronged battle against the threat of death by poverty and the chance that death might fall directly from above instead. The women and girls climbed down from the wagon and headed in the direction of the field. Their veils left only their eyes uncovered, protecting their faces completely from the midday sun. These women did the same work as men, yet still faced oppression in various forms.
In the distance we spotted what looked like a small hill. It was the ancient kingdom of Ebla, in the village of Tell Mardikh, where civilisation has flourished since the third millennium BC. A young man in the village told us several rockets had fallen, but that there had been no casualties. Luckily for the ancient ruins, the missiles had landed on the outskirts.
The sun glared down and all signs of life vanished once more, except for the few small flocks of birds that traversed the silence. We needed to visit several groups belonging to the resistance battalions; the young men needed provisions, and there was the problem of an abduction that they hoped the leader of one of the tribes would help them to resolve. At midday we arrived at the base belonging to the Liberators of the Tribes Brigade. There were two groups of us in two separate cars. The men began negotiations to buy a host of weapons, as they no longer had enough artillery to defend themselves. I was left to watch. The bullets glistened in the sunlight as the men tossed them between their hands, scattering them like lentil seeds. There wasn’t a huge amount, barely enough to defend those few houses. But it would have to suffice for the rebels to regain possession, and all the better if a deal could be struck at a lower price, as they hadn’t the money to pay in full.
Grimacing in the sunlight, we entered a building where four young men were expecting us. Their weapons amounted to no more than Kalashnikovs and their base had no landline or Internet connection. There weren’t many mobile telephones either; reception had been cut off across the region. The fighters occupied just two rooms with a small collection of rudimentary firearms. They were fighting against tanks and planes, and yet had proven themselves capable of defeating heavily armed battalions on the ground, forcing them to retreat. Meanwhile the sky was a great Grim Reaper, haunting from above.
The young man sitting beside the group’s leader apologised for the state of the place. There was a table and several chairs, and the room was filled with harsh sunlight. The soldiers’ faces had tanned a dark brown. On my next visit, I would find that the base had been successfully targeted. But this time, before the raid, we were in a hurry to get to the Ammar al-Muwali tribe, to meet with one of its leaders. There I would discover for myself their poverty, dignity and courage. I would hear many stories, the last of which concerned ways to protect the grain stores from being pillaged so that the people would not starve. We discussed, with a group of young men together with the leader of the tribe, the importance of establishing a civil state and a united Syria where the only sectarian belief is freedom. Towards the end of the meeting I witnessed the men discuss how to resolve the matter of the abduction. The details of this meeting would have to be examined thoroughly in order for me and many other educated Syrians like me to understand the meanings of tolerance, altruism and dialogue – three simple words that capture everything the young men said, and which merit my repeating the particulars in full one day.
Despite the unusual discoveries we made in those remote country villages, the words of one soldier would not leave my mind. He was a defector from the army, whom I met at that same base. When we stopped the car, away from the sight of weapons, his story was still there, ingrained in my mind, along with the glint I thought I had noticed in his dull gaze.
‘He was my friend … We grew up together. The last two years, we’d been together the whole time. He was always at my side. We were in Homs, wrecking this neighbourhood. They’d told us there had been armed terrorist attacks. We went into this house and destroyed everything in it and an officer started yelling at us and swearing. He wanted one of us to rape this girl. The family was hiding in one of the rooms, and the officer ordered us to prepare ourselves. He scrutinised each of our faces in turn, and then he stopped and hit Muhammad hard on the back. He was ordered to enter the room. My friend was from the coast too, from a village close to where the officer was from, in al-Ghab. Muhammad was terrified and backed away, so the officer started insulting him and calling him a “woman”.
‘Muhammad crouched on the ground, bent down to the officer’s feet, then started kissing his boots and pleading with him. He cried: “Please, Sir, please, by God, I can’t do it. Please don’t make me.” The officer kicked him once, then started really going for it. He grabbed him by the crotch and said: “I’m going to cut this off, you woman!” My friend started to cry – you should have known Muhammad, he never cried, he was a really brave guy. But I saw him cry like a child, at the top of his voice. His mouth was covered in snot and saliva and he was begging the officer not to make him go through with it. He was my friend; we’d shared all sorts of secrets. I knew he had a girlfriend; he was a good-looking guy.
‘The officer put his hand on Muhammad’s crotch and said: “You want me to teach you how to do it, hey, woman? You want me to show you how?” Then Muhammad kicked him and pounced on him. He was a strong guy, strong enough to floor the officer. Muhammad started beating him, then stopped and threw down his gun. The officer got up off the ground immediately and opened fire at Muhammad. He killed him.
‘I saw all of this with my own eyes. You know which part of Muhammad’s body he chose to fire at?’ The young man fell silent for a few moments then indicated his crotch, without any sign of embarrassment. ‘Here. And when the officer ordered our other friend to go in and rape the girl, the guy went in without saying a word. We heard her scream. We heard her mother scream and her brothers and sister scream, because they were all crowded together in another room. Their father was a defector. He’d been killed two days before. This was in Rif Homs, and in some parts of Homs itself. That was the day I decided to defect.’
The youth stood still, holding his gun. ‘But I’m telling you, not a day goes by without me seeing Muhammad in my sleep. I’ve got his letters to the girl he was in love with. I’m keeping them safe. If I’m still alive, I’ll get the letters to her. On Muhammad’s precious soul, I’ll get them to her, even if they slaughter me.
‘… If I’m still alive,’ the young man echoed. In the gruelling midday sun, the distant thunder of missiles echoed too.
Translated from the Arabic by Emily Danby