TWENTY

THE WHITE-BEARDED LEADER INSPECTED MY phone. He signaled to his soldiers to take me to a building with cracked walls, partially damaged on all sides.

The building, battered as it was, was yet a wonder in this landscape of apocalypse that unfolded for the whole journey I made by foot from Aleppo’s Ferdous neighborhood to the traffic circle of Hawooz. Since the war, most of the neighborhoods of Aleppo’s Old City had become inaccessible. Charred vehicles blockaded central streets. Trips that before the war had taken minutes had become seven-hour marathons, requiring dozens of miles in detours through dozens of checkpoints, each controlled by a different warring group. Regime snipers positioned atop the Citadel’s crenellated towers could survey huge areas of the city. Bodies caught in their crossfire might remain unburied in the streets for weeks or months. People drove with lights off in the dark, lest a helicopter hovering in the sky claim a target. My eyes had roamed through a universe of ruins on this journey. I snapped pictures all along the way, until, spotting my camera, some rebels grew suspicious and took me into custody. Now the two fighters led me toward the basement of the enormous building block. The moment I entered, fear began to intrude upon me. I was at their mercy.

For soldiers on this earth, torturing an unarmed detainee was a relief. It did not matter if the soldiers were fighting in the name of faith or of patriotism. Their primary allegiance was to their own self-assurance, to ridding themselves of feelings of fear and self-pity. Sadism appeared to be their favorite treat, triggered by their helpless prey, then used as a tool to enliven their moods, relieve their pressures, or assert their feelings of authority. But the fighters who had detained me, young fellows around my age, didn’t intimidate me the most. The building itself did.

The Security Institution was a subdivision of the rebel group al-Jabha al-Shamiya and had been created by one of their leaders, Mudar al-Najjar, to exert control over the entire group. I was taken downstairs, to a basement of dirt-stained ceramic walls and dusty tubes attached to the ceiling. The place had been a hospital in the remote past. Since my very first visit to Aleppo, I had been transfixed by that concrete building—disturbing to the eye, for it was firm and the neighborhood around it was flimsy. That was fifteen years earlier. Back then, no one had expected a war, for everyone thought that Israel wouldn’t launch a war and that the Assads were our eternal leaders.

In 2006, Aleppo had celebrated being chosen the capital of Islamic culture, but nine years later, its only culture was class war. Al-Shahba, as its residents like to call it, was burdened by a devastating struggle. It had long been proud of its status as one of the world’s oldest cities, inhabited continuously for thousands of years. But beneath that vanity hid a bleaker state of being. The UNESCO World Heritage Old City that had indulged and charmed visitors for millennia was sandwiched—less romantically—between West Aleppo (organized, increasingly modern, and generous to the wealthy) and the wretched East, deep in the mire of poverty. Only the Citadel separated them, reminding them that Aleppo was more than its present, that both sides were temporary visitors in the span of history.

I was in Aleppo, and the occasion was in part another act of secret journalism, but also a chance to wander through my own past. Aleppo: the wellspring of my teenage dreams, and dwelling place of my college years. The city of dust and love. The city of love on dust.

Every step through the Security Institution was a torment. I had no excuse to justify taking pictures, no cover story about what business required my presence in Aleppo. We wandered the basement, our footsteps echoing through the desolate halls, until, at last, the fighters brought me to a stop before a closed door. A sign above the handle read: “The Fourth Investigative Judge.” The door had once been white but had long since molded into the shade and texture of rotting cheese. I rested my head against the cobwebbed wall beside it when a shudder shot through me. This place, I realized, had been controlled by ISIS in the recent past. This was the same set where, perhaps two years prior, the American journalist James Foley and others—many of whom were Syrian activists—had been dragged and tortured. The group holding me was one of the many that had kicked ISIS out of Aleppo last January.

After a while, the rebels’ white-bearded leader followed us downstairs, then opened the door to the room, entered, and told me to wait outside. I turned to the fighter on my left, a young guy in a light gray flat cap. “What’s going to happen?” I asked, smiling with a drained face. He shrugged his shoulders and returned the smile. His smile pacified me, irrationally.

The leader opened the door again and told me to come in, then left. Inside the small room sat two men; one, white-haired and clearly the “judge,” sat behind a desk at the back of the room, studying a file. The other, a dark, powerfully built man in military fatigues, relaxed on the couch. The opposition channel Halab Today played on the tiny TV, with the volume muted. The powerfully built man ordered me to sit beside him on the couch, then started to interrogate me with dozens of questions, most of them not particularly smart. What inflamed his enthusiasm, of course, was my ID with the cursed word Raqqa on it. ISIS’s Raqqa. “Raqqa! Welcome, welcome!” he exclaimed. A smile danced around his mouth—he seemed jovial, but the steadiness of his mood was not something I could trust. “What are you doing here? And why were you taking pictures of our headquarters?”

He was amused when I answered that it didn’t look like a headquarters at all. Of course, I had known that it was the headquarters for al-Jabha al-Shamiya. Everyone knew. The judge remained silent and bent over his file, but I could feel his attention on us.

Suddenly, I grew ludicrously relaxed. My interrogator’s close-cropped hair and three-day-old stubble gave him a thuggish appearance, but beneath that, he seemed terribly ordinary, like someone I could negotiate with. “You’re Daesh, aren’t you?” he demanded, using the insulting acronym for ISIS. To be accused of being Daesh struck me as absurd. More questions came at me in a surreal stream. “Did they send you here to do some mission?”

“I am a journalist and I am taking pictures to capture life in rebel-held Aleppo for a…European magazine called Vanity Fair,” I explained with a smile.

“European” somehow was less galling than “American.” I assumed that these rebels, just like the majority of the population of Syria, if not of the whole Middle East, would bear negative attitudes toward the United States and all things American. Not to mention the revolutionaries’ disappointment that the American intervention in Syria had not even attempted to stop Assad.

The interrogator scrolled up and down my phone’s camera roll, examining every photo and seeking captions for all those he felt needed explanation. He occasionally added his own captions in a teasing way, too wholesome to be intended as insult, even when he laughed at my “weird taste” in saving pictures of Halabi cats that the artist had requested as a reference. Every now and then, he directed an unserious threat toward me, until I told him finally, with a broad smile and a nervous tone: “You don’t look too scary to someone like me who has lived under ISIS.” Taking my jibe as a compliment—which was what I expected—he smiled proudly and basked in what he likely felt was an acknowledgment of the goodness that he, and not ISIS, possessed. This prompted him to seek more praise. “If Daesh caught you taking photos, what would they do to you?” he asked. Without a second of reflection, I replied: “They’d hang me, on charges of spying.” The exact answer he wanted to hear. However, it further stoked his appetite to restore his group’s prestige. “Are you insane?” he growled. “Do you know how many people have been brought here, whom no one has heard from since?!” Indeed, I had heard of the many people who had disappeared precisely in the spot where we now sat. I said nothing but gave him a solemn look.

The interrogator passed me a long cigarette from his pack of Gitanes and poured me a cup of tea. A moment of silence passed. The judge, seated silent behind the table all the while, finally, angrily, broke out: “Aleppo is a jungle. Be careful.”

He unmuted Halab Today. The channel had just aired footage of the aftermath of a barrel bombing on the Kallasah neighborhood, just a few miles from here. The judge then fired off the trinity of questions that turned me mute myself: “Do you think your photos are going to make a difference? Can’t the world see these scenes? Do you think they care?” Zombielike, people appeared from the white dust carrying bodies, most likely dead. I didn’t then know if my photos would make any difference, and I still don’t know, years later, what they have achieved. They might have changed one person’s opinion—just one wouldn’t be bad at all. But maybe I myself didn’t care—or didn’t care about what my work did for other people, the people outside of the war or the ones in it. Since I had arrived in Aleppo, most of the time I had grown too tired to care. It’s exhausting to care at all and very exhausting to care for four continuous years. Not a single day had passed in those four years without a horrific scene, like the one unfolding on Halab Today, occurring somewhere in Syria. If I cared about anything—if I was still human that Aleppo summer—I cared about immortal art and immortal words. The interrogator and his friend seemed to have completely missed the point of what I was doing. I was doing it, with all the risk it involved, knowing that something of me would live on. I wasn’t going by any other assumption anymore.

I had a few more lies to tell before they would release me. I promised to never go back to Raqqa and to leave journalism. In his concluding lecture to me, the judge called the latter “useless” and the former an “insanity.” I guessed from his accent that he was from Aleppo’s southern countryside, an area that had witnessed indescribable massacres, carried out and championed by the regime and its foreign paramilitary allies. They burned down whole houses with the inhabitants inside and threw locals, still screaming, into deep wells the victims had once dug in their former lives. In the 1970s, from one of these small, clay-built villages, my parents had moved to Raqqa. It was to villages like these that my great-great-grandfather had once fled, where he lived in a cave in the empty mountains. There, he had escaped seferberlik—the military conscription the Ottomans forced on Syrians, who were then sent to fight in countries they had never seen, to save an ailing empire that had reigned over their region for four centuries. My great-grandfather refused to fight a war that wasn’t his.

That summer, a year and a half remained in the story of rebel Aleppo. In January 2017, the regime and its militias would forcibly reunite the city—their way cleared by Russian air strikes—and thousands of those who had stayed in the east would flee on green buses to Idlib. Perhaps they would never return.

Finally, the judge dismissed me with a wave of the hand, and I ascended the stairs and went out of the building and into the still-living city. The sun set. I walked back to my friend’s apartment in Ferdous and lit the dusty argilleh he had left in the kitchen. The power was off, and the coals glowed livid in the darkness. The sky was split by an epiphany of bombs. And the memories of the past Aleppo knocked on my door.