In my mind, I hold a portrait of Syria, but it is no ordinary image. It shows a dismembered collection of body parts, the head missing and the right arm dangling precariously. Then you notice a few drops of blood slowly dripping from the frame, disappearing as they are absorbed by the dusty soil below. This is the catastrophe that Syrians deal with every day.
I realised something as I passed through Istanbul Ataturk Airport Terminal 1 en route to the city of Antakya, the ancient city of Antioch, twelve miles from the Syrian border: despite the familiarity of the journey, I found I was unsettled by this recurring vision of dismemberment, which seemed to fill every inch of the airport. There, I saw bearded young men with sunglasses everywhere I looked. Some had dyed their curious beards red in honour of the Prophet Mohammed, but had shaved their moustaches. They looked troubled, as though they were in a hurry. I didn’t know if I would see them again, but I kept trying to catch up with them to find out who they were and where they were from. I could tell one was Yemeni and another was Saudi. They all avoided looking at women. I sat down next to them to hear what they were talking about, but they remained silent, waiting like me to board the plane. The airport was bursting with people, all pacing about anxiously, their minds set on salvation. In both Antakya and Istanbul airports, the lost look in the eyes of Syrians betrayed their sense of foreboding, of the imminence of tragedy.
I lifted my small bag onto my back. I was keen to travel light as far as possible when crossing the border, so I chose to make do with a backpack and few clothes. We boarded the plane to Antakya. There were two Yemenis in the seats in front of me and across the aisle were some Syrian men and women. Most of the passengers on the plane were Syrians and other Arabs. My gaze sank into the window at my side, which became my permanent refuge while I travelled. Here was an entire world limited only by a window frame. A universe concentrated within this rectangle of emptiness. All I longed to do was to float, to swim through into boundless, white nothingness. To drift through it, under it, over it, floating ever further from geography, dimensions blurring till a skyscraper was the size of a blade of grass, colours fading in the infinite blindness of outer space, leaving behind all these bearded faces. I would merge into a flowing stream of emptiness, living nowhere, without borders to define me.
The Turkish border town of Reyhanli, which I would be passing through again on this second crossing, is a fifty-minute drive from Antakya, but it is no mere backwater. It has grown into a small city, from a place where peace and quiet reigned before the revolution. A focal point for Syrian and Lebanese tourists, it has long prospered from smuggling between Turkey and Syria. But these days there is no room for peace or quiet, or good old-fashioned trade and smuggling, as the once sleepy town has been turned into a place where every now and then a shell is dropped; where the hustle and bustle has become suffocating overcrowding; where the locals are overwhelmed by invading swarms of Syrian refugees fleeing the bombing – refugees who aren’t counted in the official figures because they live outside the camps. Reyhanli is at once a flourishing place of growth and construction, and a site of ruin and destruction. Here, in this small patch of land adjacent to Syrian territory you’ll find all the parties currently engaged in the conflict. The regime has its own men on the ground, conducting its operations and trying to infiltrate the networks of rebels and activists. It’s no secret: everyone knows you have to tread carefully here.
Small-time traders benefit from this limbo between life and the after-life, turning the business of death into a tradable commodity alongside the artefacts of life. The town teems with the impoverished and destitute searching for scraps, begging in the streets for their daily bread. There has also been a smaller influx of more well-to-do asylum seekers, and here, too, there are those who are loyal to Bashar al-Assad.
In Reyhanli, I met up with my travelling companions, Maysara and a Lebanese journalist called Fida Itani, and we set off together. We were heading to a border village, but our car moved at a snail’s pace through the traffic and crowds. It looked like everything you could possibly want to buy was on sale here, including uniforms for the Free Army, revolutionary banners, trinkets, clothes and household items. Groceries and canned foods were spread out on the pavements, with old men, young men and children – mostly Syrians – hawking their wares at the tops of their voices. In fact, I don’t think we saw a single Turkish seller, only Syrians, and the customers who came away with their arms heavy with bargains were also Syrian.
The Turks grumble about the influx of Syrian refugees, but deep down it is a different story: the cash that comes with them lines Turkish pockets nicely. Many Turks have benefited from the rush of capital flowing in from Syria. They rent out their shops and homes, hike their prices and see a doubling in sales. Here, in Reyhanli, I saw shops bearing the names of Syrian towns and villages written in Arabic script alongside shops with Turkish names, as if a piece of Syria had been uprooted and planted here, like another mauled body part, subsumed into the city’s sewers and muddy irrigation channels. Lost and displaced – just like everything else in this war.
A child stood to the right of our car, no older than ten, his arms laden with goods. Children ran over to flaunt their wares; they must have left school and home and their childhood for good. The lucky ones still lived with their families, but most of them were orphans who had crossed the border and survived here on the streets.
On the pavement on the other side of the road were some men from the Free Army. We didn’t know which battalion, but it looked as though they had just arrived and were waiting for others to join them. Their weapons weren’t on display here, as they are within Syria itself. From their pale faces, shaggy beards and sleep-deprived eyes it was clear that they badly need a few days off for rest and recuperation, and that they were only in the town because there was something they needed to do. A car stopped next to them and a young man got out, or rather they lifted him out of the car. He had lost an arm and a leg. They changed cars, then one of them yelled, ‘Yallah! OK, go! Quick!’
‘I’ll drop you off at the sheep gate,’ said our driver as we headed on to the border.
The border villages are spread over an area of six to ten square kilometres along the Turkish side, and are inhabited by nomadic Bedouin who, until the revolution, lived off smuggling between Turkey and the Syrian city of Idlib as well as raising livestock and growing crops. Today, these villagers, who speak fluent Turkish and Arabic with a Bedouin dialect, are closely involved in smuggling to and from places such as Atma, the village nearest to one of the most important and most desperate of the Syrian refugee camps.
To the south of the border villages are the mountains that divide the two countries, where, with the help of a network of relatives, the Bedouin now operate an industry of human trafficking, smuggling people through the hills. The Bedouin themselves form a physical network of contact points along the border, some standing at the top of the hills, others in the valleys. They know all the gaps in the border, all the openings in the barbed wire, through which you can slip into Syria; and you are accompanied right up until the point of crossing. They have a solid relationship with the Turkish Gendarmerie and communicate by mobile phones or, if they are in line of sight, by shouts and signals agreed in advance. They are lean, dark-skinned, light of foot and quick; they possess a mysterious ability to disappear among the trees, to merge with the land they know so well.
The car had brought us down a tangle of narrow, muddy lanes. The ‘sheep gate’, as this unofficial crossing point was referred to, was a grim hamlet. The houses were bare and behind them were sheep pens. Despite the cold, children were jumping about almost naked. When we got out of the car, a tanned young man was waiting for us. I had expected this crossing to be like last time: an exhausting sprint between two fences, then waiting for the breeze to pick up at nightfall, when it would be time to cross. But Maysara had told me that the place where we crossed before was now under observation so we couldn’t go that way, especially after the recent bombings on the Syrian–Turkish border.
Ahead were some low green hills where we could see cars parked on both sides of the border. Stretching into the distance were queues of people waiting. We had to walk around a hill nearby and on to another location. I put my bag on my back and we set off along the track, rivulets of dirty water impeding our progress. There were three of us accompanied by our guides. We had only gone a short way before a gendarme appeared. We ran.
‘Don’t worry,’ said our trafficker in accented Arabic.
Then a military vehicle appeared from the right and advanced towards us. The trafficker shouted and turned back. We fled after him and retraced our steps back to the lane where we had set out.
‘We’ll go and have a cup of tea at mine, and wait till later to cross,’ the trafficker said.
So we went to his house, back down the muddy alleys, with the stench of decay and animal dung wafting all around us. The Bedouins’ concrete houses resemble their tents: the same colours, the same look of austerity, transience. There were still no women to be seen, only men and children, and no one dawdled.
When we set out again, a few minutes before we reached the border we were joined by the other group that was to cross with us. Of our band of twenty, I was the only woman. Three traffickers accompanied us, and among the men who had just arrived I noticed the Yemeni and the Saudi who had been on my flight from Istanbul to Antakya. They looked ready for action. I moved towards them, keeping a cautious distance away, still hoping to eavesdrop on their conversation. For a moment I wondered about saying something to them, like, ‘What are you doing in my country?’ But I remained silent. The past two years had taught me to keep quiet. Silence is an opportunity to give meaning to the things around us, to watch and reflect. It gives things the chance to express themselves; even if it’s not without ambiguity, silence often creates the space for meaning to emerge.
The Yemeni and Saudi were travelling light, equipped with all they needed for their deaths – which was what they were heading for. As we set off, I tried to catch up with them.
‘Hey, brother, you didn’t tell me you’d brought a woman with you,’ said one of the traffickers, annoyed, as he looked over in our direction. ‘Come over here,’ he said, glancing at me. ‘This way, it’s easier.’
We headed into a small wheat field, our feet tramping over mud and the tender green leaves scattered here and there from the olive trees growing nearby. The older of our traffickers watched me nervously. I had hidden my face and head under a black veil and dark glasses. I picked up my pace and caught up with the group, and as I got closer I started to overtake them all. I found myself getting tired, but I refused to let him blame me for slowing everyone down. I walked quickly and once I’d got ahead, even the older trafficker had to ask me to wait. I stopped where I was, waiting for the others to catch up, and when they did I walked alongside them and looked pointedly at him. I took off my glasses and glared, but since I could clearly keep up, the trafficker didn’t grumble again about there being a woman in the group, which he had expected would spell trouble and slow progress.
Of course, whenever I travelled back to Syria, most men couldn’t resist mentioning the fact that I’m a woman, and that this was no place for a woman. The fighters I was surrounded by this time were tall and thickset, with strong, clear eyes and long beards. They would never turn their heads to look at or say a word to a girl. Yet what many might interpret as signs of manhood and bravery seemed to me like an indifference about life and death. They were searching for the gateway that would lead to the eternal paradise that had been promised them. Rather than be inspired by them, I could only pity them.
We paused a while when we heard gunshots. The border guards were firing bullets into the air; we all knew they were just trying to scare us. One of the traffickers with us had just concluded negotiating with the Turkish Gendarmerie – par for the course, as the gendarmes must have noticed the militants with their obvious fundamentalist appearance. The gendarmes could be harsh if they wanted to, but it wouldn’t usually go beyond a rough beating and almost certainly wouldn’t go as far as directly opening fire. That in itself was reassurance enough for the traffickers and the trafficked alike.
Ahead of us lay a steep incline. We spread out over several paths to tackle it, the olive trees giving us cover. The foreign fighters were further from us now and there were just three of us with one of the traffickers. The climb was hard going and I moved aside, not wanting to get in anyone’s way. I bent my knees, arching my back as I leaned forward, close to the ground as if crawling on all fours. So here we are, I thought, little more than animals. If only we could rely on the instinct for survival and protection of our species that is so strong in other creatures.
Fida Itani, our Lebanese friend, suggested I slow down so I didn’t get tired.
‘Listen,’ I said, my voice trembling, ‘if I don’t keep going, I’ll slip back down into the abyss.’ He laughed.
Then Maysara came over and took my bag for me, and we ran to the top. I didn’t even turn round when I heard shouting behind me. I could hear my heart beating. The air whipped my lungs. The ground was muddy and the soil on the mountain red and fertile. At what we supposed was the summit, the scene was different: the hill culminated in a kind of broad cliff edge with a road winding steeply down between the trees. We saw a car waiting for us, but at that moment a group of Turkish gendarmes emerged from among the olive trees and came towards us. Police patrols were dotted around the area and could appear suddenly out of nowhere. The gendarmes searched our bags and spoke to one of the traffickers.
Their search completed, we crossed the border. It was not clearly demarcated: there was no fence to crawl through or barbed wire to avoid, and the appearance of the gendarmes had been the only hint that this was an international boundary. The points where people were trafficked across the Syrian–Turkish border were usually like this, I discovered, and represented opportunities for moneymaking, especially as the number of jihadist fighters wishing to be smuggled into the country was on the rise.
Here our groups went their separate ways. The fighters began to disappear – there was another group waiting for them. The man accompanying us told me they were off to join the battle, that there was a French guy among them, of Tunisian origin, and that they were most likely heading for Aleppo now. My guide, who insisted on anonymity, told me they would probably go to join Jabhat al-Nusra (the Nusra Front), a new faction made up of young men with long beards. The existence of the Nusra Front hadn’t become public knowledge until recently; early on, they had been an invisible underground movement, and their presence hadn’t been tolerated in the villages.
‘You’ll notice now that they’ve become much more powerful and more widespread,’ said Fida. ‘The next phase is going to be harder, because these groups will have more influence and will emerge in a stronger and more violent form. We’re going to see videos of floggings and beheadings.’
Gunfire rang out again from the border villages and the Salafists vanished into the trees. The files of Syrians had formed meandering threads, like cracks on an old oil painting, with columns heading in various directions. When the sound of bullets rang out we scattered like a herd of frightened animals fleeing from a huntsman.
The hills were behind us and before us rose olive groves and plains. All around there were signs of drought; even the olive trees planted at the sides of the road looked withered. The houses disappeared as we meandered along twisting roads. There were hardly any signs of life in the landscape; only a few cars passed and in the distance we could see the occasional village.
The city of Binnish was empty. Not crowded with demonstrators like the last time I’d come here. Since then, it had been bombed by al-Assad’s MiG aircraft and abandoned by its residents. Only very few remained. The newly confident Nusra Front had taken over and many people in the city had joined them. The movement now controlled state property, but it had been interfering in people’s lives and had declared wearing trousers a heresy, even for men, promoting instead the ‘Afghan style’ of dress. The military infrastructure had also changed. There were now fewer roadblocks.
‘O God, what else do we have but You?’ Maysara shouted, when we drove past Taftanaz airport. ‘O God, how much life has been lost … how much life has been lost … This is where Amjad Hussain was killed.’
I had known Amjad, a battalion commander in Saraqeb. A young man of twenty-five. He was courteous, and didn’t look you in the eye when he was talking to you; and he was furious about the turn the revolution had taken, the mess it had descended into. He was a conservative Muslim, but he wanted a secular state. He had died in the battle for Taftanaz airport. Many of the young people I’d met previously had since died. We remembered them one by one, as we traversed the villages on the way back to Saraqeb. We passed fields of broad beans and green plains dotted with stone-built villages. The road was muddy and pitted by exploded bombs and shells, making it a challenging drive.
‘Since you were last here, the regime has seized Idlib,’ said Maysara, ‘and it’s become isolated from the surrounding countryside. The battalions are engaged in combat as we speak. There are more thieves in the revolution now than rebels. It’s one family against another. Mercenaries against mercenaries. O God, what else do we have but you?’
The house felt empty without my little enchantress, whose company I’d got so used to. Aala and her siblings had left Saraqeb and were now settled in Antakya, over the border, although Maysara still came back to visit their hometown from time to time. He explained to me that the fear of shells and of indiscriminate death had compelled him to take his immediate family to Turkey. So, this time round, the house would be home to me, Maysara’s sister Ayouche, my hosts Abu Ibrahim and his elegant wife Noura, and the old ladies. Members of the extended family, including two of the sisters and their young children, regularly came and went; the building was busy with different branches of the family and kinsfolk displaced from their homes. Some had had their houses broken into and vandalised, others were in range of the shelling, or fell within the demarcation area, which acted as a buffer zone between the opposing sides. Some houses were located under the gaze of snipers and some had become hideouts for dissidents. A lot of people had opened up their homes in this way to relatives, friends and acquaintances. Ayouche, too, had given up the basement of her apartment building, in which her own flat had been burnt out, to accommodate a displaced family.
The next morning, Ayouche and I set off in her car to visit the family living in the basement under her flat and to see various places in Saraqeb that had been shelled. A police officer was directing the traffic, so an attempt was being made to bring order to the town, though it was difficult and they were struggling. Most of the roads looked very different now, while many had been destroyed completely. The biggest change was the increase in the number of houses that had been damaged or flattened by bombing, and the fact that there were so few people about. The city looked lifeless and deserted. There were construction sites everywhere as they tried to repair buildings that had been hit. On walls, I glimpsed graffitied lines from the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and for the first time I saw written next to them sentences glorifying the militant groups Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham. These two groups, while separate from the Free Army, coexisted rather than cooperated with each other. One of the phrases, in bold letters, read: ‘Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham: our beating hearts.’
These days, police salaries were paid for by the armed battalions. The police ticketed traffic offences and, where possible, the battalions enforced the penalty. Ahrar al-Sham was so deeply entrenched in the social fabric that they even owned a bakery, which was both a source of funding for them and a means of control over people in need of supplies. The Nusra Front held sway over the Sharia Court and its judges and clerics, where the law that was upheld was Islamic religious law. The security forces consisted of several battalions, including Suqoor al-Sham (Falcons of the Levant Brigade), Dera’ al-Jabal (Shield of the Mountain) and the Shuhada Suriya (Martyrs of Syria).
Ayouche said she wouldn’t show me the whole town because the shelling was relentless and it was too dangerous to be out and about in the car. But she still stopped in front of each bombed-out house and told me its story. Houses with no doors, houses without roofs or walls, mountains of piled-up rocks.
‘This is where Abu Mohammed died with his children,’ she told me. ‘And that one,’ she continued, pointing to another house, ‘was where some of our relatives lived. Their young son died. And that house was completely bombed out – the whole family was killed.’
We stopped in front of the house and I took some pictures, then we headed back to the car. Saraqeb looked even worse than I remembered, with signs of destruction all around.
As we arrived at the basement refuge of the displaced family who were being sheltered by Ayouche, we stopped to talk briefly to her neighbours, but then a plane flew overhead and we had to make a run for it. The cellar was a spacious hall, its sides lined with bedding laid out in groups for the children, women and men of the family, each group in a separate corner. The family matriarch was a beautiful woman, curvaceous with reddish brown hair. She was surrounded by her four daughters, two of whom were studying at university. The eldest was married and had her three children with her. Other relatives sat here and there. Most of their possessions had been lost. There was just a rug and a few teacups, and a small cage holding two little birds.
Suddenly the ceiling began to vibrate and we heard a loud noise. We froze in terror. The plane had dropped its bomb on the house next door. It was only a few metres away; we had been talking to the women of that house moments before as they cleaned up after yesterday’s bombardment, washing the floor with water and picking up shards of glass after an explosion that had claimed the life of one of their boys.
After the second bomb, we stayed in the basement, waiting. The bombs were being dropped in the vicinity of a tank parked behind the neighbour’s house, left there by one of the battalion commanders. That was what the regime always did: they bombed civilian homes where the rebels were based, to undermine their popular support. As I asked the mother of the family how they had been forced from their home, I shuddered as the force of the exploding bomb sprinkled peeling paint down on our heads like snowflakes. The other women listened with me as the mother hurtled through her story.
‘The planes have been bombing us since the beginning of the revolution,’ she said. ‘Our village, Amenas, is next to the brick factory, which was turned into a major barracks for the army and their mercenaries, the shabiha. A lot of people from the village were killed when they bombed our neighbour Naasan’s house. A shell hit his olive grove and killed the workers, his wife and son. He was out at the time fetching water and when he got back he found a massacre in his garden.
‘The shabiha raided another family’s olive garden, and they all disappeared. The men of the village found the entire family massacred: the mother, the daughters, the brother, a young boy and a daughter-in-law. Sometimes the shabiha went out in gangs. Once, they caught one of our sons and we found him with his eyes gouged out and his fingers chopped off, but he wasn’t dead. There was another man who they grabbed and sat on a brazier of burning coal. His backside was burnt to a crisp like roasted meat. His wife ran away …
‘I didn’t want to leave our home, but the army entered Mastuma, a neighbouring village, and warned anyone from the Free Army to leave immediately because the shabiha were coming. When they entered Mastuma, they massacred entire families. A mother was weeping for her son because they’d slaughtered him before her eyes, so they killed her too because she was crying!
‘I hid my daughters so they wouldn’t be raped. Then a rocket fell on the house of one of my brothers, and we thought he must have been blown up, but he came out from under the rubble, shouting: “He who gave me my soul shall be the one to take it away!” How I laughed!
‘We paid someone seven thousand five hundred lira to help us get out and we fled in the night. There were long lines of other people fleeing. They were barefoot, some of them half naked, and the shelling didn’t stop.
‘In the night-time, the rebels came to us and brought us food for suhoor, the meal before daybreak, as it was Ramadan. Along the way, one of the women gave birth. We were all homeless, my husband and his eight brothers and sisters – everyone had to go. Then we learned our house had been obliterated. We have nothing left.’
Another deafening noise, another bomb. The woman stopped in mid flow and more flakes of paint trickled down. The basement was damp and full of cracks, and as the building trembled white chunks of plaster fell down on our heads. The birds thrashed about in their cage.
‘They can sense the danger,’ said one of the older daughters, putting her arms around the cage. Then she opened the cage door and took out the two birds, hugging them close to her chest. Ignoring the shelling nearby, she carried on talking instead of her mother.
‘Will you write down everything I tell you?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I promised. ‘I will.’
She was a beautiful young woman, slender, about twenty years old, with bright green eyes and rosy red cheeks. She wore a simple, coloured headscarf. Her fingers were delicate and soft. She stood up. Her siblings huddled around her. Still clutching the birds, she held out a hand above my head.
‘Do you swear by God that you’ll tell the world what I have to say?’ she asked.
‘I swear.’
‘Swear by the thing you hold most dearly deep in your heart.’
I swore quietly, and as her palm came down on my head it felt like a rock might have shattered from the force.
‘Write about the village of Amenas … the place where I was born.’
She told me she loved to draw and write poetry, and retrieved a notebook, which she opened. Then she started to read out her diary, and I began to make notes.
‘This happened on the 5th of January 2013. We heard about the deaths of six girls and a young man and his wife after they’d been kidnapped. On the same day another family was killed – they had gone out for the olive harvest – and they killed a woman and her two sons. And in our village, they kidnapped Abu Amer’s family and started to torture them; then they killed them all in the same way – shooting them in the head. Amer’s wife was nearly nine months pregnant. She gave birth while it was happening. When the men from our family went to look for Abu Amer’s family, they found her and the baby both dead, along with other bodies scattered among the olive trees,’ said the girl with the almond-shaped eyes, staring at me sternly. She glanced down at her notebook, while I waited for her to continue.
‘It was the shabiha who did it, but they were driving cars with “Free Army” written on them. But we know it was the government thugs, the shabiha. Before they left, they sabotaged the land and uprooted trees, they destroyed everything in their path, and took pictures of the corpses and all the destruction they were responsible for. Then they published the images online, saying it was the Free Army who had done it.’ She paused. ‘Shall I carry on?’ she asked me eagerly, but shyly.
‘Yes … please,’ I replied.
Her eyes blazed as she continued: ‘On the 12th of January, at two thirty-five, we were at the village of Qabeen, where some relatives of ours live. Since leaving Amenas, we’d wandered for days without sleep. On the night we left, we heard on the ten o’clock news that they were going to bomb our village and annihilate the revolutionaries. A convoy of tanks and soldiers would be passing through on the way to Taftanaz, the airport blockaded by the rebels. So we left at eleven o’clock the same evening. We were scared. We piled some of our stuff into a small car that had three wheels. When we passed the village of Sarmin, we followed the highway for a long time, but the car’s engine finally gave out, so we had to push it along the road. Stranded in the middle of the road, we went to the next village. We headed to the first house we saw, but they wouldn’t open the door and asked us to leave. Then we went to the second house, and they wouldn’t open up either. When we came to the third house, they welcomed us and said we could spend the night with them, but my mother refused and said she didn’t feel comfortable, and asked my father if my brother could take us to his friends in Kafr Amim. It was past 1 a.m., and all around us dogs were barking. I was terrified. Total darkness and the sound of barking dogs chasing us! At two in the morning, we arrived in Kafr Amim where we went from house to house.’
She didn’t stop talking, ignoring the noise of the shelling, and I didn’t stop writing.
‘On the 13th of February, a month later, we still had no idea where we were going. Every night we slept somewhere new, anywhere to escape the shells and the missiles. With all that moving about I ended up getting to know the surrounding villages like the back of my hand.’
She looked at me, still holding her notebook and clutching the birds against her chest: they both peered down at me.
‘And then?’ I asked.
Next to us, her mother poured tea, muttering all the while, ‘In the name of the Lord … We’ve no power or strength except through God.’
‘On the 15th of February,’ she continued in a cheerful voice, ‘we reached Saraqeb at exactly ten minutes past three. God protect you,’ she said suddenly, looking at Ayouche, ‘and keep you safe like you saved us!’ Then she said, ‘That was the day I was supposed to go to university to sit an exam, but the roads were blocked and it wasn’t safe. I’ve just got two more days to tell you about. It’s fine if you want to miss them – I don’t want to waste your time.’
‘No, I don’t want to leave anything out,’ I said, transfixed by her gaze, her eyes brimming with tears. She opened her notebook again and carried on reading.
‘This is our second day in Saraqeb. The 16th of February. Ayouche came and made a note of what we needed, and then a man came and gave us blankets. We laid them out on the floor. It’s a strange place, with paint peeling off the walls. What hurts most is the broken look in my dad’s eyes, the look of humiliation, and the expressions of gratitude he repeats to everyone who offers us food and bread. We used to live comfortably and had everything we needed, and now we are living on charity and handouts. We’ve become beggars and it’s humiliating. We have a wood burner. The place is cold and damp, but the wood fire does the job. Sometimes our stomachs rumble from hunger, but we don’t beg for food. We’ve agreed to hold our peace. A missile fell at the cemetery near us. My younger brothers were outside playing. We ran to get them and then we all huddled up in a corner. Their faces were frozen, rigid with terror.
‘The 19th of February. I found a sparrow and a nest, and there was a tiny chick that had just hatched. We’re keeping them in a cage in the middle of the room. The bird looks after its chick by feeding it food into its little beak. A bomb falls nearby and the sparrows flutter about nervously in their cage. The mother bird’s wings bash against the sides of the cage as she flies about, and then she hops back to her chick, but neither of them calms down until the bombing stops.
‘My older brothers have gone, they’ve disappeared. I should have been at university today, but I’m trapped here with my family. I called my friend and asked her to bring me the notes from the lectures I’ve missed. We’ve got our car with three wheels, and my father took me to get the lecture notes, but the car broke down again, we arrived too late and my friend had already left. I sat down on the steps and cried and cried. I was determined to keep up and carry on submitting my work. But it’s impossible. We went back to the shelter and sat here in silence all evening.’
She stopped reading. Her voice was getting hoarse.
‘That’s enough,’ she said, grabbing my hand. ‘If we die now, the world will know our story, won’t they?’
‘Yes, they will,’ I answered, without hesitating or trying to console her.
We left the girl and her family, and went up to Ayouche’s burnt-out flat on the second floor. The walls were charred black. A shell had fallen on the house and set fire to it. She started picking things up and telling me what they were. All I could see were unidentifiable black objects of various shapes, but she was able to explain confidently, ‘This is part of my sofa, and this is a coffee cup, this is the side of my wardrobe …’ When we heard a third shell go off, she said, ‘We had better head back. That’s enough for today.’
We went back out through the cellar. If I were writing a novel, I told myself, that girl would definitely be one of the heroines. I’d describe her flame-coloured hair and the delicate little wings flapping furiously in her heart, and the look in her eyes. And explain how, whenever one of her little brothers or sisters flops onto her in a heap, trying to hug her and lure her away from this inquisitive visitor who interrupts their day even more than the shelling, she just wraps her arms round them, squeezing them along with the birds tucked under her cardigan.
But this wasn’t a novel, this was real life, and she held her little brothers and sisters tight, never taking her eyes off them, protecting them like her little wounded sparrows.
The media centre of Saraqeb was located in the middle of the market, which was the focus of Assad’s bombing campaign. From the hubbub in the crowded market you would have had no idea at first sight what was happening, but for the decrepit buildings and the massive holes in the streets, the footprints of shells and bombs. Here, missiles fall and people die. An hour later, people go back to their everyday lives, and to procuring the essentials, the food and drink they need to survive. But I found it terrifying, this relationship with death, and how it had become such an integral part of the way of life.
I told the men working there that they should move their office because the location was so risky, and the most important thing was to stay alive. The men in the media centre included activists who doubled as photographers, combatants and aid workers; and journalists who were constantly coming and going. The occasional foreign journalist passed through, but the influx of journalists from other Arab countries hadn’t really begun and wouldn’t until the province of Idlib was fully liberated. There were only Syrian journalists here at this moment. The office building was in tatters – one of the walls had been destroyed four months earlier.
Back in August 2012, when we had travelled through the surrounding area the villages had not been fully liberated, so we had had to skirt around them using back roads and lanes to avoid the regime’s military roadblocks. Even Saraqeb itself wasn’t completely liberated in those days. Now, in February 2013, we could move around quite freely on the ground, but the sky was still held captive. The rebels said that if they had anti-aircraft missiles, victory would be theirs.
‘The revolution is not about fighting or war,’ a newspaper editor told me. He worked on the Zaytoun newspaper, the Olive, a publication founded following Saraqeb’s liberation from the regime. ‘We want to nurture the human side, but we don’t have the resources,’ he said. ‘The constant bombardment makes it hard to get around. We have started the civil society activities associated with revolution, but we are faced with serious difficulties. The biggest challenges are not financial backing and continuous bombardment; no, the most dangerous thing is the way the takfiris, the Islamic extremists, are edging their way in and starting to control people’s lives and interfere in their business.’ By civil activities, he was referring to their repeated attempts to set up enterprises such as graffiti workshops, cultural newspapers, magazines for children, training workshops, privately run community schools and educational courses.
The editor was clearly exhausted, as were the young men around him, who were all zealously toiling away. They were downloading pictures, confirming headcounts of casualties and martyrs, liaising with humanitarian organisations on the phone, letting them know how people were doing, the conditions they were living in. They kept meticulous records of attacks by the regime: how many missiles, what kind, shape and size. Later in the war, some of these men would prepare a dossier on the chemical shells that fell on Saraqeb, which they sent to several government agencies around the world. Sadly their sense of hope and optimism was undermined, because everything they had worked on came to nothing and the world seemed content to leave them to fight on alone.
Abu Waheed, a married man in his mid-forties who was now a battalion commander in the Free Army, came to get me in his pickup: we were due to head out to some villages to visit displaced people with Manhal, the brother-in-law who had accompanied me to the border hospital on my first crossing, and my guide Mohammed. The sounds of missiles were distant, giving us hope that our share of death would stay at arm’s length today.
As we drove from the marketplace, I noticed there weren’t any women on the streets. I had seen just one woman, with her husband, wearing the face-covering khimar veil. This was the first time I’d seen the khimar in Saraqeb; usually women just wore a headscarf that covered only the hair.
We called in at the battalion headquarters where my companions talked to one of the militants. It turned out we were heading to see a mounted gun they’d constructed, a kind of cannon, and that Abu Waheed was driving the pickup because he wanted to transport it somewhere.
The road out of town was clear, lined on both sides with groves of small cypress trees, and with children selling vegetables and fuel. They had various barrels and containers with the words ‘black diesel’ or ‘red diesel’ scrawled on them. The prices varied but both kinds were cheap and of poor quality, producing noxious fumes when burnt. We eventually stopped next to a group of boys selling fuel on the Aleppo–Damascus highway: ten boys lined up as though on military parade, standing to attention behind containers of unrefined diesel, known as mazut, and petrol canisters. Most children no longer went to school because of the constant bombardment. The surprising thing was that there were schoolteachers who continued to receive their salaries from the Syrian government.
The sun was out, but there was still a cool chill in the air as we stood at the roadside, haggling over the price of petrol. When Manhal asked the price of a canister, a boy said, ‘Two thousand five hundred and fifty lira.’ A year ago, it would have been just 270 lira.
‘The February sun …’ Abu Waheed said, looking up at the sky. He turned to me. ‘Ma’am, we want justice for our people. But we don’t want other countries interfering in our affairs. We’d be better off if they left us to face Bashar alone, without interfering. Their interference only works in his favour. As you’ve seen, we haven’t got rid of that thorn yet. I used to be well off, I was a building contractor and I had studied law. I actually wanted to study at the Institute of Drama. It didn’t work out, but I’ve always been interested in theatre and TV drama. I guess I’m a bit of an aficionado of the arts.’ He laughed.
We drove on through the village of Khan al-Sabal, where there was a large quarry. There had once been a large regime checkpoint here, which the rebel fighters had liberated. The people of Khan al-Sabal had returned to their village after Assad’s forces were expelled. We pulled up at what was now the Free Army checkpoint. There were no cars besides our pickup and an open-topped truck with three combatants armed with machine guns sitting in the back.
When we arrived at the village of Jerada, I exclaimed in surprise, ‘Oh, the whole village is made of stone!’ There were huge Roman mausoleums thousands of years old and towering columns crowned with intricately sculpted capitals. This was just one of the many Roman sites scattered around the Jabal Zawiya region and, as I looked around, I was reminded of how most of the jihadist groups are blind to the significance of these ruins; looting is part of their ideology. For them, civilisation begins with Islam.
The village of Jerada is in the province of Maarat al-Numan, a place name linked to the Arabic word for poppies, shaqa’iq nu’man, and these scarlet flowers could be seen peeping out amid the clutter of Roman stones. A carpet of red spread far beyond the ruins, opening up to the village of Rawiha in the distance. Stone houses were interspersed among the Roman tombs, like mini palaces. Most of the stones had been looted, my companions informed me.
After another military checkpoint, we saw a woman with three children, and I learned that the people here scraped a living from raising sheep and growing olives. The soil was red and littered with large rocks. Then we reached the other side of Ariha, near to where the regime had bombed the brick factory in Amenas to smithereens. In the village of Sarja, the red soil disappeared, giving way to pebbly desert. Various battalions had set up roadblocks here and the manifestations of power and control were clearly visible. This was certainly the case in Deir Simbel, a village associated with Jamal Maarouf, leader of the Syrian Martyrs’ Brigade. Here we saw a tank and passed through various military checkpoints, including those of the Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham.
As an officer in the Free Army, Abu Waheed still believed that the foreign mujahideen would return to their homeland as soon as the regime had fallen. I didn’t agree with him. ‘Time will tell.’ That was all he said.
‘But they don’t have a homeland,’ I said. ‘Their home is their faith.’
We were let through the checkpoint without any hassle because the soldiers knew Abu Waheed; you could only travel around safely if accompanied by someone from a well-known battalion. Ahead of us was a truck carrying tents for refugees, and the road was lined with houses that had been completely destroyed; yet almond trees and olive trees still grew in the wreckage.
We arrived in Rabia, a village whose cavernous underground Roman tombs had become shelters for refugees. We stopped so that I could meet the women and find out what conditions were like for those living in the caves. The Roman site was surrounded by olive groves, but many of the trees had been cut down or burnt. A lot of displaced people had resorted to felling trees to use as fuel. Some of the olive trees had been burnt by shells, but several remained around the caves, which were inhabited by some thirty families. There were six or seven caves, each one accessible through a deep, dark hole, where worn-down, dusty steps led to a cavern beneath the ground.
A girl aged about sixteen, wearing a hijab, a headscarf covering the head and chest, was sitting at the entrance to one of the caves. She had lost both her legs when she had been hit by a shell. One had been cut off at the thigh, the other at the knee. Her eyes were nevertheless serene. She said she was teaching her sisters and brothers to draw but they had hardly anything to draw with. The girl explained she would need several operations because her wounds had become infected and she was likely to succumb to blood poisoning. Yet she appeared indifferent watching us descend into the cave where her mother and siblings lived. She tilted her head and went back to drawing lines in the soil.
Inside the cave dwelling we met the girl’s family. The mother, Oum Mostafa, was the second wife of a man who had five other children with his first wife, and who lived with her in the cave opposite. The family was originally from the village of Kafruma.
There was no natural light in the cave. Day and night, they filled an empty medicine bottle with oil and dipped a wick into it, which they lit. This makeshift lamp gave off pungent fumes and didn’t burn satisfactorily. The children closed in around me and stared inquisitively, hovering around the candles we had brought with us. Their ages ranged between three and fifteen, and I talked with them about what they were doing while they were off school, during these seemingly never-ending holidays. The mother told me that her husband had pilfered the aid intended for her children and given it to his other wife. She held a baby in her arms, and her belly was swollen with another. This would be her ninth: she had eight children living with her in a cave with a dirt floor and rainwater leaking in. She and her children hardly ate one meal a day. All the children were barefoot and poorly clothed. Their faces were pale, crusty with dirt and snot, their eyes blue or deep bluish-black, their skin dry and chapped, and their naked toes seeped blood and pus. In the bitter cold their swollen stomachs protruded like small hills.
The woman’s middle daughter had been deafened by a shell landing near her, but she took care of her sister with the amputated legs. When the older girl eased herself down the steps to join us, the deaf child held her hand tightly, and it struck me that despite the darkness, their faces seemed to glow with astonishing beauty. All this beauty amidst such hideous misery.
As we were leaving, I told Abu Waheed about Abu Mostafa stealing his wife’s aid money. He laughed. I could not laugh.
In the other caves things were no better. Scores of people lost in the dark bowels of the earth, like animals digging their own graves as they sense the end approaching. Yet up on the surface, everything felt normal. In front of one of the caves the kids had made a hole, which they were using as a target for a yellow ball that darted about between their feet in the dirt. This was the only sign of the humans living underground, with their ragged clothes, their hunger and the squalor in which they slept that passed its smell on to them. I could barely stand. It was an unparalleled vision of hell. Not merely a purgatory through which homeless wanderers passed, this was surely a cursed place created by the devil himself.
We got back into the car in silence. Further along, we came to an area of tombs studded with dark crevasses. Here, too, dozens of families were sheltering in the caves. Directly ahead we saw some houses that had been razed to the ground. Total annihilation. It was as though a time machine had turned the clock back to the Stone Age.
The sky was bright blue and the sun burnt even more brightly as we drove through the village of Hass during an aerial bombardment. The Nusra Front Brigades had been here but had moved on. After Hass, we reached al-Hamidiya, a village that looked like little more than a group of towering cypress trees.
‘So many of the battalion commanders and peaceful activists have been killed or arrested,’ said Abu Waheed. ‘The best men have fallen.’ He gave a touching eulogy for each and every one of them. I was taken aback by the small details he recalled as he reeled off these men’s names, their ages and their experiences. He narrated the stories of their deaths, while from afar the cypress trees seemed to loom so high that the clouds were ensnared in their foliage. I nodded, my eyes fixed on the road and my ears full of the sound of the sky raining shells.
In Taqla, a poor farming village, the landscape changed somewhat. The village name derived from the Aramaic and referred to Saint Taqla. Here were rolling hills and valleys teeming with olive trees. We stopped at the quarters of the Freedom Martyrs Brigade, Abu Waheed’s battalion. I couldn’t wait any longer. I was burning with curiosity to see the gun they’d built. It had been made from the remains of a government tank and put together using the most primitive tools. Now it sat amid the olive trees, its black muzzle pointing up to the sky, mounted on huge wheels also salvaged from battlefield debris. We walked around it. I slipped my hand up and into the round black opening: a source of death.
‘This is nothing compared with the arsenal the regime gets from Iran,’ Abu Waheed explained. ‘We will fight, we have no choice: we either die or we fight. The young men in the Freedom Martyrs are all villagers who have rallied together to protect their community. They are ordinary people. In other groups, you’ll see things are different because of their funding and the supply of arms they get. Our mission is to fight for our country, and our battle against Assad is a battle for our country. We don’t know who the other groups are or how they ended up here on our soil!’
At the start of the revolution the sight of a tank would make my hands tremble in panic; now here I was, stroking my fingers across the muzzle of a tank’s gun. I thought for a moment about how an entire novel could be written about the life cycle of this one gun, from its initial component parts through to the finished product. Here it was, lounging in the olive groves in the hills, enjoying a brief honeymoon before being launched into action. It hadn’t cost them anything; it was pieced together from donated parts and the salvaged remnants of war. They couldn’t have bought it. They didn’t have the money.
‘This gun has a shelling range of fourteen kilometres,’ Abu Waheed told me, ‘and we use Google to set the distance. We make some of the parts here. We’ve set up a special weapons workshop, but we’ve barely got the materials for things like this. I’ve put everything I have into the revolution. I had a state-funded business worth fifty million lira – I gave it all up. They’ve bombed us, killed us and killed our children, they’ve displaced our people, and we will kill them. All we’re doing is defending ourselves. We’re not attacking them. We pick up their conversations, I hear what they talk about in their planes: they want to kill us, every single one of us!’
‘I hate seeing a machine of death become the most important thing people live for,’ I replied. ‘It’s not right.’
Abu Waheed was silent. Nobody else said a word. But I told myself, ‘Remember that what is just might not be what is right.’
We continued our conversation at Abu Waheed’s home. His wife invited us to eat with the family, including his children and his mother. There was no water and the electricity had been cut off, but they treated us to an abundant spread. In fact, everywhere we found ourselves as guests, our hosts would go out of their way to offer the best hospitality they could. I was sure the food was often all they had, and yet there was no hesitation; it was put on the table.
As we sat down to the delicious meal, immersing ourselves in our hosts’ generosity, Abu Waheed continued, ‘When the regime falls we’ll throw down our weapons. I don’t sleep at home, ever. I’m a fighter, and I’m needed on the front line. But we want to live as human beings after this is over; we want to raise our children and give them an education. Can you believe that a government and a state could bomb its own people? I’ll never understand this for as long as I live!’ Abu Waheed’s anger welled up, as the words poured from his mouth. He stopped eating.
‘Look at the cracks in the ceiling. A shell fell right by my house, missing my family by just a few metres. Our fate is entirely in the hands of God. But where can we go? We even have to buy water to drink! Can you believe that every month I need four thousand lira just to buy water for my children? I left my well behind on my farm, it’s there for the people to use … We’ll share life and death together.
‘One thing you need to know,’ he added, ‘is that each region now has its own administration, and every village looks after itself. Everything has been turned upside down, as if every little community has become a state in itself.’
‘This is the devastation that follows tyranny,’ I suggested.
‘We’ve entered a strange time. Think about what Islam says about the spoils of war. The Islamists have issued fatwas that have justified looting and have given the battalions the green light to go ahead. For example, the people of the village of Kafrouma started picking battles for the sake of looting, not for the sake of revolution. A gun is worth millions, so you’re a winner if you can get your hands on one, which means battles end up being started just for the sake of the spoils! And another thing, our village had a population of five thousand, and now there are twenty-five thousand displaced people. We can’t talk about one Syria now in the same way as before; everything has changed.’
It was morning and the bombing back in Saraqeb was less intense, so there was time to sit down with the old ladies and reminisce about Aala and her siblings. The elderly aunt sat next to her sister, the matriarch of the extended family. They seemed almost immortal. Their eyes scanned me and my eyes scanned them. Between us was a kind of tacit collusion, the same kind of understanding I had with Aala. It seemed the entire family had a passion for storytelling. They didn’t want me to set off for Maarat al-Numan that day, but I promised them that when I got back we’d stay up and chat, on the condition that the aunt told me about her youth in the 1940s, before the military coups, when the Syrians were still building a modern state. It had occurred to me that we were now at a similar transitional point in history, and that the country was once again on the threshold of a great transformation, which first entailed degradation and regression in all areas of life. We were going back to square one in order to rebuild life from absolutely nothing.
Before leaving town, we stopped at the information office in the marketplace to pick up various publications printed by civil society activists, including a magazine for children and two newspapers: the Al-Sham (the Levant) and several editions of Al-Zaytoun (the Olive). These sketched the plans for the state the activists hoped to build in the liberated areas, in spite of the bombing: completing this revolution was going to be no easy task. Mohammed, Manhal and I were to distribute newspapers in the villages that we passed through. With us were Fida Itani, the journalist who had crossed the border with me, and two young activists from the city of Maarat al-Numan, who were to be our guides that day. They were from Basmat Amal (The Smile of Hope), a humanitarian aid organisation that had set up a first-aid and medical centre and which administrated various humanitarian projects. They were the kind of revolutionaries who had turned their hands to civilian work.
To reach Maarat al-Numan, we had to drive a ten-kilometre stretch along the front line. This was the site of an ongoing exchange of fire between the regime and the battalions. Assad’s planes were constantly dropping bombs, and there were snipers a kilometre away. The sky was clear and sunny, which meant the planes would be out bombing villages, but the villagers knew the routine and the bombers’ favourite times of day for bombing. Even the children knew the various types of missiles and shells; they also knew the modus operandi of the snipers.
‘There are several snipers operating on the road we’ll be driving along,’ Mohammed warned me. A man had been shot on it only two days previously, right before their eyes, but we had no choice other than to go that way. The blossom was out on the trees, and the ground was speckled with pink and yellow petals. Ahead of us was a checkpoint belonging to Bayariq al-Shamal (the Banners of the North Brigade). When Mohammed and Manhal asked if we could pass, the response of the armed guard was telling: ‘Well, I wouldn’t if I were you – if you value your life.’ He sat down on a rock, placed his machine gun in his lap and stared at us with a look of resignation.
We bowed our heads as Manhal drove off at an incredible speed. I heard gunshots and didn’t move an inch, even when at last they burst into laughter, shouting, ‘We did it! We survived!’ Eventually I raised my head and for a moment I imagined I had dozed off into a nightmare. Perhaps my descriptions of these images of destruction are getting repetitive, but what I saw in Maarat al-Numan was truly shocking. On the road in front of us was a white pickup truck, badly damaged by shelling but carrying a mother and her four daughters in the back. The oldest of the girls was about ten. All four daughters were veiled and their mother was shrouded in black.
All around, entire buildings had twisted to the ground. They hadn’t been blasted apart in the usual way, but rather the iron and concrete seemed to have melted into liquid right before my eyes, curving and bending. A four-storey building drooped so that its roof was touching the pavement, unfurling like a theatre curtain. And beneath it disappeared a mass of human bodies. Buildings leaned in to touch each other, they bowed down to sleep, amid the huge piles of rubble that filled the city. Maarat al-Numan had been completely decimated, the men told me. As it was on the front line it was the target of ceaseless bombing: it literally never stopped.
At that very moment I heard another shell explode. Right in front of us. We swerved into an alleyway. This road was also pitted with craters and potholes from the explosions. Shopfronts quaked with the impact, metal shards flying through the air. The clamour, the noise, was terrific; and it went on and on.
A woman and her daughter were walking up ahead, which seemed odd as I rarely saw women walking outside. The market was a wreck. Boys ran this way and that, and a woman fled into an alleyway. We were approaching the Great Mosque, one of the city’s ancient monuments – or at least it had been once. It had been razed to the ground. The minaret of the mosque had been hit and beneath it lay piles of rocks and glass. I learned that the site had been cleared, but then it had been bombed again, as the regime was targeting the minarets in particular.
The Great Mosque dates back to the pre-Christian era. First a pagan temple, it was later converted into a church and then a cathedral. It still had ornamental engravings and capitals atop great columns bearing symbols of Christian and pre-monotheistic religions. The Islamic library was also devastated: copies of the Quran and other books had been flung in all directions, burnt and in tatters.
We got out of the car and walked into the courtyard of the mosque. As we headed towards the prayer room, which had been ravaged by a shell, we heard the roar of a plane and dashed for cover.
‘After a bomb landed here, we uncovered an ancient market,’ one of the men from the town told me. ‘We went down the hole and saw the entrance. They say it dates back to the pre-Christian era. There are doors and the remains of shops.’
It was a sight of utter devastation: dangling electrical wires intertwined with jagged metal poles and splintered shreds of wood. Concrete walls lay in heaps, forming a homogenous block of many strata, layered up like sheets of pastry in a croissant. I took countless photographs, saving each image with a title. Seeing the effort I was making as I tried to work out the range of each shell, the men urged me to wait, because later on they’d show me the damage at the front line.
Back on the street, in front of the mosque just before the entrance to the market, an old man stood and gestured to me. ‘Look! Look!’ he shouted, pointing at the remnants of the minaret. ‘That’s Bashar’s reforms for you … We didn’t do a thing … We just asked for a few rights … That’s all we wanted, let God be our witness … Just look …’ He started to cry. One of the young men took his arm and walked with him for a little while. The old man had lost three of his children when the market was bombed. And now he just stood here, weeping.
The wall of the market bore the words, ‘We stand defiant despite the blockade.’
Before we left the city, we were able to glimpse the Maarat al-Numan Museum, which used to house one of the most important mosaic collections in the Middle East. The museum is located in the former Khan Murad Pasha, a sixteenth-century Ottoman caravanserai, or inn, for passing travellers and pilgrims from Istanbul to Damascus. It became the city museum in 1978 and had four wings, each housing a particular archaeological or historical period. A former reading room housed a collection of rare books, and an archive of 2,400 square metres of mosaic murals – no one knows what has happened to them. An impressive 1,600 square metres of mosaic used to be on display, a prime example of Syria’s artistic heritage that stretches back to the Akkadian era. Only fragments of these murals remained on the walls when I visited.
By the entrance of the museum, I came across a statue of the poet and feted son of the city Abu al-Ala al-Ma’arri – decapitated. This was clearly the work of one of the takfiri militant groups – Islamic extremists who accuse others of being apostates. I asked the others to wait while I took a picture of the headless statue. Later they told me that a shell had fallen on it, but the marks on the stone suggested otherwise.
‘They stole the head and sold it,’ someone told me, while others claimed the head had been severed by shrapnel. Someone else said the Nusra Front had cut off the statue’s head because the poet was an infidel, and someone else, annoyed, replied, ‘At least they cut the heads off statues and not human beings like Bashar does!’
‘The next stage is going to be very violent,’ Fida warned. ‘Jihadist groups will resort to intimidating people by cutting off heads and mutilating corpses, because this is part of their propaganda.’
While we’d been touring the countryside around Idlib, I’d started to realise that the story that was reaching the outside world was very confused. The reality was that jihadist military groups were beginning to control certain areas, and were forcibly taking over various administrative posts from ordinary civilians. The problem lay with the takfiri groups coming into the country from abroad. Everywhere I went, despite warnings from everyone about the danger, people scrambled to protect me from harm and to keep me away from the takfiris, but these groups had already achieved a form of occupation in the areas liberated from the Bashar regime. This wasn’t happening in any random or chaotic fashion; it was an orderly, well-planned operation to divide up the liberated north as spoils among jihadist incomers; but this didn’t mean that the Free Army battalions were just standing by watching them. Many of these battalions were holding steadfast to the initial spirit of the revolution, although fault lines were certainly starting to show.
The museum door was blocked by diesel barrels and to the side of it was written in large, clear letters: Maarat Martyrs Brigade. The museum had been taken over as the brigade’s headquarters. In the colonnaded courtyard, oil cans and drums of diesel were stacked up next to the mosaics. A rabbit sat peacefully beneath the arches. The only thing this strange scene was missing to capture the insanity of it all was the bloody remains of a young man crushed beneath a minaret. The rabbit didn’t move. He sat there quietly, nibbling at the grass in the cracks between the paving, and no one approached him.
We were shown around by Group Commander Salaheddine, a combatant who was friendly enough, though his face wore a stern, distant look. He told me they had collected up the remains of pottery plates, crockery and broken glass, and were storing them for safekeeping in one of the side rooms.
The two young activists who had travelled with us fell silent, as though uncomfortable with this conversation. When the armed resistance started, some of these young men tended to sympathise with the Nusra Front. I didn’t argue with them about it, but I couldn’t deny my unequivocal hostility to this militant ‘front’.
Broken columns and capitals lay strewn randomly on the ground, along with carved pieces of limestone dating back to the second century AD. Any paintings that still hung on the walls had been pierced by bullets and shrapnel. Assad’s army had set fire to the books when they entered Maarat al-Numan and destroyed the museum, while the breathtakingly beautiful sculpted Roman sarcophagi remained untouched, resistant to looting because of their sheer size. The reading room was devastated: the books were burnt even before the bombing, and what remained of them was smothered in dust. I brushed away the dirt to reveal some of the titles: Uncovering Enigmas by Zamkhashari, The Universal Orbit of the Radiant Astronomical Body by Abdul Rahman Al-Ahmad and several editions of The Archaeological Annals of the Arabs; also The Encyclopaedia of the Oceans and Exegesis of Pride in Razi’s 138th edition, from the Eastern Metropolitan Press. So many books, so many in tatters.
‘We are busy with the war,’ said the commander. ‘We can’t preserve it all.’
We heard a shell explode. It was very close.
Many statues had disappeared from the museum courtyard, stolen. Almost the entire contents of the glassware room had been looted. The doors of the basalt tombs were still in situ, and occupying pride of place in the heart of one room was a complete mosaic panel depicting the blessed grapevine, discovered in the village of Mazakia and dating back to 2000 BC.
I sat down under a lemon tree in the courtyard. My head was spinning; I needed a moment to take in this colossal destruction, this ruthless sabotage of history. Before me I read the words, ‘There is no god but Allah. Maarat Martyrs Brigade.’
Another shell fell.
‘They’re pelting the city at random,’ said the commander.
He took us to the place where horses were tethered in the days of the old caravanserai. Every single artefact had been looted. All we could see were broken chunks of Roman capitals strewn messily around the yard and one fragment that remained on the wall. The commander walked over to an armoured vehicle stranded in this courtyard at the heart of the museum. It gave off a burnt smell, reeking of oil and petrol.
‘We won it as booty from a military convoy when we hit Wadi Deif,’ said the military commander. He continued, in an earnest tone, ‘Listen, sister, we were at the front line, the Free Army, and when we came back they told us that the Nusra Front had chopped off the head of the statue of al-Ma’arri, because they say statues are haram. I know you’re going to ask me about it.’
Outside the museum, on the way to the city prison, we heard the voices of women and children echoing from within the distorted ruins of a building. Amid the concrete beaten to powder by shelling, among the twisted iron, the wreckage, the disembodied parts, there in an almost entirely ravaged house, in some of the rooms that were still standing, people were living inside the destruction. If I were to read this scene in a book I wouldn’t believe it.
Men were picking up shattered glass by the windows. ‘A shell fell here yesterday,’ they said. ‘Today shells have fallen on the other side.’
‘We’re going over there now,’ said the commander.
I looked up. A young boy was pulling some clothes out of a wardrobe that stood against a wall in a room on the second floor. Miraculously, the colourful clothes seemed to be clean and not covered with dust. They were pouring out of the wardrobe as if strung on a long washing line. The boy was trying to reach the sleeve of one of the shirts when his mother shouted from inside the house. The wardrobe toppled over and with it came the entire wall. The boy ran. I screamed and shut my eyes. My scream was more of a wail, the only way I could keep my brain from exploding. When I opened my eyes, I expected to see the boy’s body crushed beneath the wall. But he was standing there staring at me – a look of both surprise and ridicule! If it weren’t for the noise of the collapsing wall making me close my eyes, I’m sure I’d have seen him fly up above the scene on two wings – that was the only explanation for his survival.
Salaheddine, the group commander, led us to the prison and the municipal administration building. I could see that the public records and archives had all been lost to fire. The offices were abandoned, their ceilings collapsed under the bombardment. The commander tried to explain what had happened here: they had liberated the municipal building from the forces of the regime and broken into the prison, but Assad’s forces and their staff had fled. They’d captured a number of Assad’s soldiers. Two of them joined their battalion, twelve of them were sentenced to death by the Sharia Court, while two were acquitted and went back to their families.
‘There were two from Raqqa, one guy from the coast, one from the cities of Al-Bab and Deir Ezzor. But we killed twelve soldiers,’ Salaheddine told me, going on to explain their respect for the law.
‘It happens in war,’ I replied.
‘This isn’t war,’ he said.
‘It’s a war between your people and Bashar al-Assad,’ I replied straight away.
‘Isn’t it your war?’ he asked.
‘Yes, it’s my war too, but in my own way. I have my pen. I’m a writer and journalist.’
‘Do you want to hold a gun?’ he asked with a smile.
‘No, although the guys have tried to teach me how to hold one,’ I told him. ‘I was going to carry a gun to protect myself, but then I thought about it long and hard, and changed my mind. I decided I wouldn’t carry anything. Touring around these places is dangerous enough without a gun, but I’ve nothing to be afraid of when I’m with these guys: they accompany me everywhere and do everything they can to protect me.’
We entered a long, dank and dirty basement. The group commander was a straightforward kind of fellow; he had worked in construction before the revolution and had never imagined he would take up arms, but he said he was forced to. Yet, in spite of the chaos, Salaheddine was trying to enforce the law. He watched me dispassionately. He seemed preoccupied and worried. I would certainly say he was brave.
‘This prison was empty when we liberated it,’ he said, leading us along a dark corridor lined with prison cells. ‘They’d taken the prisoners with them!’
Small cells lined both sides of the passageway, with phrases inscribed high up on the walls. ‘Oh time, you are treacherous’ read one. Another read ‘Abu Rodi, the rose – you are my life, my fate, my choice’. A verse of poetry was inscribed on the wall of a particularly squalid cell: ‘Can an age in which you live wrong me, And can wolves devour me when you are a lion?’ The prisoners’ charred possessions – trousers and shirts, underpants – lay strewn across the floor and there was a distinct smell of burning. Soot stained the ceiling. It looked like the prison had gone up in smoke very recently.
‘They bombed the place after we liberated it, and they set fire to the prison and the municipal building,’ the commander said. I stopped at a cell that seemed less covered in soot. The clothes on the floor were torn, but for a moment I imagined they were clean; the articles that had belonged to this cell’s occupant seemed fairly tidily arranged, although someone had clearly been rifling through them: a shoe, a ripped bedding mat, a few spoons. Next to a pair of black trousers were a few pieces of paper, some charred and some dusty with soot. I picked them up and tried to brush the dust off, but they crumbled to ashes in my hands.
The word ‘Allah’ was engraved on every wall, and wherever we went the ground was spattered with dried blood, which looked like a layer of wax. Many feet had trampled through it, and I couldn’t wipe it off my shoes. I tried to avoid stepping on it – the smell was suffocating, a stench of decomposing bodies – but we couldn’t avoid treading on the broken glass. We could only just see by the weak light bulb hanging at the end of the corridor. When we went out into the daylight, the sun was blinding. I stumbled and tripped over onto the ground, where my nose hit a crusty spot of blood. I felt as though I had swallowed a corpse, but got up immediately, not wanting the others to see me in such a state, and ran to catch up with them.
‘The guys will take you to the front line in another part of town,’ said the group commander. ‘Be careful.’
We went on towards the front line. A large bannister was swinging in the air like something in a scene from a science fiction film. It completed a full rotation in the air as it tumbled from the fourth floor of a gutted house, crashing with a thunderous, deafening noise into the rubble below. This concrete building had been drawn and quartered, ripped apart at the seams; it was split into sections like a ripe fruit. On the second floor you could see a bedroom, on the third you could see pots and pans precariously lined up on the shelves in the kitchen, next to that a bathroom where lingerie still hung drying, red like a young bride’s, the colour faded with dust. The first floor had been opened up to reveal a large bed, with a child’s small wooden cot at its side. Children’s toys, pyjamas on a peg, an embroidered bedspread, once golden but now faded to black. Human life and its most intimate details had been turned inside out, exposed to the world. A shell had literally divided this house in half. The other half of the building had crumbled into rubble.
One of the men with us told me, ‘It was pounded by shell after shell. The eastern district of the city was completely deserted, there wasn’t a trace of life here after the famous battle to liberate Maarat al-Numan in the autumn last year. The shelling didn’t stop for a second after we liberated it. We cleared the area, got the people out, while they were raining shells down on us from the sky.’
The population of Maarat al-Numan was originally 120,000 people. For a while, there was not a single living soul here. The residents fled and sought refuge elsewhere, or were left without shelter. Eventually some of them returned. They preferred death in their own homes to hunger and homelessness.
Another airstrike started and we darted into a side alley, taking cover from the falling missiles. A woman passed by dragging a bag of firewood, and behind her trailed three children also carrying wood, and three other women dressed in black. The electricity had been cut off, and the water too, so people had to rely on drawing water from wells.
We arrived at the Hamza bin Abdul Muttalib mosque to find it was completely devastated, its dome flattened to the ground. Everything was so surreal and strange on this elevated plateau, beyond which the plains extended into the distance.
‘This is the front line, so we have to be careful,’ said Alaa as we clambered between fractured chunks of stone and concrete, as though embarking on a rocky mountain ascent to reach the dome of the great mosque. With its elegant engravings, the dome remained a thing of great beauty, like an ornate decorative dish. But the men wouldn’t let us climb to the top, right up to the dome, because the bombing started up again. A rocket landed which didn’t explode, so they planned to take it to the battalion to reuse.
‘This happens sometimes,’ one of them explained. ‘They fire a missile at us that doesn’t go off, so we fire it back at them. We’re just seven hundred metres from the front line now.’
The front line consisted of a cluster of cypress trees. We squatted down in the rubble of the mosque’s dome. We wouldn’t go any further, the men decided. We were scurrying back down, when all of a sudden we saw a small boy. What was he doing here? Should I shout? This six-year-old boy was selling diesel, and he was dragging three worn-down car tyres into his cart to prop up a small fuel can. We walked past him. No one said a word as we went back to the car. We reached Maarat al-Numan town square, where the Martyrs of Maarat Battalion headquarters was positioned on the right-hand side.
We could still hear the missiles, though we were moving further away now. I was in a daze, as our car navigated through this scene of utter destruction. The car pulled up outside the offices of the Smile of Hope organisation.
‘They’ve been battering Saraqeb,’ Mohammed shouted angrily, as a message came through on the transceiver in the car. ‘Let’s get online quickly … we might need to go back.’ Mohammed was the most dedicated young person I’d ever met when it came to demonstrating his loyalty to his hometown. The thought of leaving Saraqeb was impossible for him. On one occasion, when I insisted he should leave the city to have an operation on his eye, after losing his vision as the result of a blow to the head, he flatly refused to go. He said he knew that things were not as they once had been, that the revolution had deviated from its path, but he would not abandon his people to their fate. As the only treatment he could get was abroad, and he refused to go, Mohammed had been left with sight in just one eye.
Now the car had barely stopped before he leapt out, dashing into the building. The people who worked there were all locals: men, women and children. A doctor was distributing medicines in a large vaulted room, helped by a female assistant and surrounded by a cluster of young men who rushed over to meet us. They were extremely welcoming, generously offering us refreshments.
A young man came in laden with bags of bread, which was being stored in the office so that it could be distributed to people who could not leave their homes because of the intensity of the shelling. The bread had been sourced by the Smile of Hope charity under tremendously difficult circumstances, but this was just one of the many ways in which they were trying to help people living under bombardment.
‘We’ve got a bread crisis,’ confirmed the doctor on duty. ‘The people are hungry but there’s no bread. There’s no fuel and the electricity is often cut off. So is the water. Imagine how hard it is to get by for those of us who’ve survived this far! In the last fortnight, the refugees who left Maarat al-Numan have been returning. Between ten and fifteen thousand displaced people have come back out of the hundred and twenty thousand who fled originally. A large number of them are wounded, including children. We have anaesthetics and we have a field hospital with three operating rooms.’ These operating rooms were very simple units with the bare minimum of equipment to remove bullets and shrapnel and stitch up wounds.
Scores of men slept here; they formed rescue parties and teams who documented the bomb sites and recorded the number of casualties. Many houses in the city were more or less devastated, they said, with barely anything left to show for them. Well over a thousand houses had been completely destroyed.
A few young men had returned from the rescue point for the wounded they had set up at al-Hamidiya on the front line. ‘Al-Assad’s planes dropped twenty-eight bombs in one day,’ one of them told me, pouring me a second cup of tea. ‘It was like that for a while, but the bombing eased off a bit when two of their planes were shot down.’ The men laughed. They crowded around us, whispering and watching me carefully. But they seemed confident and relaxed, eager to speak and share their stories. I asked the men about the circumstances for the women in the area and wondered if I could meet some of them. I told them about the work of the project I was involved in, setting up centres specifically for women. They said they were keen to help the wives of martyrs. We stayed chatting for over an hour, which really tested the patience of Mohammed, who was pacing back and forth nervously, desperate to get back to Saraqeb.
‘They’re hitting us with Scud missiles,’ said a man who had just joined us. ‘It’s no surprise. We achieved victory on the ground, so now the cowards are battering us from a distance.’
‘Maarat is the front line, the line of engagement with the regime,’ said another young man in his twenties. ‘We will not leave our land, even if we die. If we had anti-aircraft guns, al-Assad would have fallen long ago.’ This was the same phrase I had heard repeated endlessly by locals – insurgents, activists, and women and children. It was what everyone said, without exception. They knew that they had managed to liberate the land, but then the air-force planes razed the liberated zones to the ground.
All around us we heard the din of shooting and shelling, as we carried on talking. We were led by a few children to another room, the computer room by the looks of it. Opposite the door was a table piled high with the bags of bread. This room was buzzing with people and a couple of dozen of us sat down in a circle.
Another young man came in, who stood still and turned to me as he declared, ‘The Nusra Front is the best group that’s fighting.’ Some of the men grumbled in disagreement but they let him finish speaking. ‘To start with they were mostly foreigners, but a lot of Syrians have joined them, and they have actually got arms.’
‘What about the Chechens who joined up recently!’ another joined in. ‘What have they brought with them?’
‘They’re our brothers in Islam,’ said another, ‘and they’re fighting against the infidels.’ I listened to them but then tried to steer the conversation back to the women and children, and education, and what we would do if the situation dragged on like this for years.
‘I support Ahrar al-Sham,’ one guy said, interrupting, ‘because they don’t steal like the other brigades.’
‘Of course, because they’ve already stolen enough,’ retorted another. ‘Allah doesn’t miss a thing!’
Mohammed stopped at the door and raised his voice. ‘We need to set off for Saraqeb,’ he said, targeting me with a beseeching look.
As we left Maarat al-Numan the shelling began to increase.
‘Even the sky is betraying us!’ I shouted at the top of my voice.
On the way back, I kept thinking about the family house and Noura and Ayouche and the old ladies, and the warmth that awaited me in their company. They must have been worrying about me.
‘It doesn’t sound good,’ said Mohammed. ‘We need to head straight to where the shells are falling, because there are people trapped under the rubble.’
Mohammed drove at an insane speed. We kept quiet, aware of how anxious he was. He muttered to himself the whole journey and we colluded with him in silence. Arriving in Saraqeb, we saw that olive trees had been blown apart by shelling, uprooted from the soil and hurled against the wall of a house. Blocking the road were parts of a tractor that had been ripped to shreds. We turned off onto another road. The scene was horrific. We got out and ran as fast as we could to the bomb site.
‘They’re digging the graves,’ one guy shouted. ‘Let’s get them buried before sunset.’
A three-storey house had fallen after being pounded by numerous shells. One girl had survived, though she’d lost her mother and brother, and now we were searching for her four-year-old sister. Dozens of young men were clambering over the ruins of the building, which the shell had reduced to a mountain of rubble, and a bulldozer was brought over to drag away the collapsed roof.
The girl’s father was sitting on the pavement. His dusty face stared straight ahead, and you would have thought he was a statue were it not for his cigarette. His face was white, and his hair and clothes were covered in dust. He had been out when the shells landed, when his house was brought crashing down in a heap of debris. He had pulled out the bodies of his wife and his son, while his little four-year-old girl remained to be found.
I helped search for her, oblivious to the fact that I was the only woman among dozens of men. I had been warned about this two days previously by the neighbours, some women who said I shouldn’t let myself be seen among the men during the shelling, or when out searching for the dead, because this would bring me unwanted attention.
When I thought I had touched a soft, delicate hand under the rubble and a tuft of hair, I screamed. The men noticed me and a young man of no more than twenty came over, a black headband stretched across his forehead with the words ‘There is no god but Allah’. He shouted to his friend, ‘Get this woman out of here – this is no place for her among the men. God Almighty forgive us.’ I would have listened if I hadn’t noticed that he wasn’t Syrian, but instead I just stared defiantly into his eyes. His accent was foreign. I stayed where I was. I glared at him again; he was one of the ISIS fighters from abroad. Why should I go back while he was still carrying on? At that moment, my minders’ car pulled up. One of them jumped out and waved to me to get in quickly.
‘They still haven’t pulled her free,’ I told them as I got in the car. ‘They’re going to carry on digging.’ Mohammed emerged from the ruins carrying a toy plastic duck. His voice was hoarse; his lips were moving but I couldn’t hear him. As he held the toy, we heard a strange sound. He pressed it and it made a quacking sound.
‘This burns my heart. Here we are looking for her under these rocks and all I’ve found is this duck – it’s hers.’ He went off for a moment, alone.
The bombardment of Saraqeb never stopped. It was a militarily strategic town for the regime, so they wanted to keep it in a state of instability. The people of Saraqeb would bury their martyrs by sunrise: any later and, without power to keep them cool, the bodies would decay. Previously Martyrs’ Cemetery had been a garden, and it would be tended as a garden again in the future, each grave planted with a small rose tree.
Every individual buried in the cemetery was a resident of Saraqeb, and among them was Amjad Hussain, a militant I met the first time I was here, and who had been killed in the fight for Taftanaz airport. I tried to keep the image of his youthful face alive in my memory. We had talked for hours and hours at the beginning of the revolution. His presence summarised everything the Syrians have done for their revolution, their struggle for dignity and freedom, but for some mysterious reason when I first met him I had sensed he was ready to die. He was uniquely brave and pure of heart. And his fearlessness had worried me. Now his grave lay before me.
‘Hello, Amjad,’ I said, treading softly on the soil. I could hear his voice in my head so clearly, and the voices of so many young people who had died like him.
On my left, two men were digging new graves. Beside these pits, dug side by side, was a young seedling, its roots wrapped in a damp cloth. But the sky was not merciful; it wasn’t going to let them rest in peace. We heard the bombing, far from the cemetery, and the men carried on with their work. The graveyard was a long way out of town and after the revolution a new mass cemetery was created for the martyrs. The revolution changed the way Syrians buried their dead. The courtyards of their homes became burial grounds and their public parks were turned into cemeteries. They buried bodies among the trees, leaving simple grave markers. In some places they might dig a long trench, a mass grave for dozens of martyrs. Sometimes, a family would turn the scrap of land behind their house into a graveyard for their children. When houses in the city were bombed, they searched for the nearest vacant spot to bury the dead.
Cemeteries began to live among the people, another everyday part of life like the shops and the streets that wind between the houses. Massacre after massacre pitted the soil with craters filled with the bodies of Syrians.
‘This cemetery is very organised and tidy,’ I said aloud, to no one in particular. One of the gravediggers replied from inside the hole, from where he was tossing out soil, ‘They were all in the prime of youth.’ I didn’t reply. We wandered among the graves, while Fida Itani took photograph after photograph; later on in his pictures I noticed the sun setting behind us. A large sun sinking behind the tombstones and the shadows of me and Mohammed and the others as we turned this way and that between the grave markers. The town had disappeared, reduced to black silhouettes, and we were so tired we staggered, on the verge of collapse. The body is the most honest gauge of exhaustion.
But the light and air and the soil didn’t care: we were already dead and decaying as far as they were concerned. Death was so straightforward here, so close and intimate, it lingered even closer than the breath we breathed. I remembered what one woman I worked with on a household management project in Saraqeb had whispered to me about her husband before he died. They had had two children and their relationship had changed so much. ‘So much death … it brings with it so much love.’
‘This cemetery is where we can breathe a sigh of relief,’ I heard one of the men say, as he hurled earth from the hole he was standing in. ‘We’re expanding it and knocking down the wall, so that our boys can sleep in peace under the soil!’ I looked at him in amazement, while Mohammed and some other young men walked around the cemetery as comfortably as though it were their home.
‘All this soil, this dust is from the flesh of our children,’ one man said, barely finishing his sentence before we heard the roar of falling shells. We ran. When we reached a side street, the shell exploded as it hit the next house. The sky was filled with dust as night fell.
In those moments, as bodies were being extricated from the rubble, and others were disintegrating, yet more human beings were being turned into corpses. Where do you even start trying to comprehend this spiralling cycle of endless massacre?
The people did all they could to defend themselves against the bombardment. It became clear that the target of the attack was a school that had been turned into the headquarters of the Ahrar al-Sham Brigades. As we gathered round another bomb site, I listened to a conversation between two militants and tried to make sense of what was going on in the battle of Wadi Deif, the Deif Valley, which lies to the east of Maarat al-Numan.
‘The battle for Wadi Deif could have ended long ago,’ said the younger one, as they searched through the rubble. ‘The battalions that are getting financial support are the ones who are extending the life of the battle, so they can take advantage of it.’ The older militant disagreed and started to describe the clashes at Abu al-Duhur air base between Free Army leader Maher al-Naimi and the Martyrs of Syria Battalion. The younger one spat on the ground, tutting. ‘And this is what we went out and started a revolution for? For the poor to be taken advantage of? For people to die for the sake of a little money? And who’s paying the price now? Those same poor people!’ Then, angrily, he climbed the mountainous pile of rubble.
All was still again, except for the screams from the neighbouring houses.
My companions and I drove away from the city centre, the target of the bombing. We headed out of town, to get as far away as possible, and eventually we stopped at the house of some friends. They were sitting by candlelight, but no sooner had we said hello than the preparations began for dinner. I had still been hoping to visit some of the local women that day, especially one of the widows who wanted to open a workshop for woollen goods. But the idea seemed impossible now. It had been a long day and the people whose house we had suddenly descended on insisted we couldn’t leave without staying for dinner. My family hostess, Noura, called the house phone. I was amazed: how did she know where I was? She said she was worried about me.
‘I’m not worth worrying about any more than anyone else,’ I said.
‘No, Samar! By God, you’re worth so much more! And you’re under our protection.’ Her words made me choke as I struggled to swallow the food put before me that night. For all the generosity with which it was offered, it went down as awkwardly as a knife in my throat.
I would have thought it useless to record these events, which often seem to mirror each other and repeat themselves, if it weren’t for my conversations with Noura each morning.
Originally from Damascus, Noura was the heart of my small family in Saraqeb, although I couldn’t have put my finger on the exact source of the sunshine and warmth that surrounded them all and which made me think of coming back each time. At first, I had been tempted to leave France to settle in the north of Syria and to search for a house in Saraqeb or Kafranbel, but the situation was getting worse every day. I’d started to feel that my movements were a burden on my hosts – the rebels and all the families I knew – who were so concerned for my safety and went out of their way to protect me. There was always that warm welcome, an overwhelming hospitality that gradually started to taste of obligation, day after day.
Each morning, Noura and I used to sip our coffee together on the steps of the basement shelter, where we would enjoy a temporary peace of mind and then the conversation would turn to my favourite types of food. Noura’s husband and Maysara’s older brother, Abu Ibrahim, was an engineer who’d studied in Bulgaria and was now involved in land management and agriculture. Noura had fallen in love with him when he was in the capital visiting his sister. Like his younger brothers, he’d participated in the peaceful demonstrations but had been jailed at the beginning of the revolution before being released. Yet he never tired of helping with the revolution or with local families in need, and Noura was the same.
She was ‘perfect’ Noura, as the Damascenes would say; she always did everything just right, with a touch of style. During the shelling, she’d prepare a tray with glasses of water, laying out some small pieces of sweet pastry and the gold-rimmed coffee cups. When I went out on my day trips with the men, she’d stand outside the door of the house and raise her head to the sky in supplication. ‘O God, protect her and protect her heart and mind. O God, return them safely,’ she’d say, then wave me off. I always waited for her prayer.
But Noura was afraid of the shelling, and never got used to it. Whenever she heard the sound of a shell, she would stand there trembling and was quick to panic. Her nervous reaction would encourage me to stay calm each time, until this calmness became a part of me.
Noura hadn’t come to the front door with me this particular morning, as the shelling was ongoing. After another busy day, we were now heading on to the town of Kafranbel, a forty-minute drive away, to see Razan, a female activist who had decided to come back and work in the liberated areas. Razan was a petite woman in her early thirties, who had been detained twice in Assad’s jails. These days, she worked in medical relief and at documenting events. She was particularly good at bringing people together, and I wanted to talk to her about a schools project.
It was night by the time we entered town, where Razan and the others were waiting for us at the media office. The banners and posters produced by the office had been seen by people all over the world, and the centre opened its doors to anyone who wanted to communicate with countries outside Syria. However, the phone lines had been cut and there was no Internet access, except via the mobile equipment they had gone to great lengths to procure, which was just about capable of transmitting what was happening to the outside world.
The office itself was situated in a bare, desolate house where the activists and fighters huddled around an old mazut heater in a large central room. Chairs were placed around the edges of the room, with a computer in front of each one. The floor was a mess and some famous paintings by Ahmed Jallal, a local artist, were lying in a heap on a broken chair by the door. The other two rooms were empty but for some plastic rugs on the floor and a few cushions to sit on. This is what most of the media centres I visited in the small towns in Idlib province were like: stark and austere, both in the furnishing and in the way daily activities were conducted.
Sitting cross-legged around the heater on this occasion, trying to use it to make a pot of tea, were my guides Mohammed and Manhal, battalion commander Abu Waheed, our journalist friend Fida, a leading activist called Raed Fares, Razan, Hammoud and Khaled al-Eissa – both of whom I would come to know well – and me. Ahmed Jallal came through to join us. With us were three other activists who were working on laptops balanced on their knees, indifferent to what was going on around them; they stayed for about an hour then left.
I tried to focus; it was easy to believe I was in a movie about the Industrial Revolution or a historical novel because, at first glance, the scene seemed like the romantic cliché of popular revolutions we read about in history books. I despaired that the outside world didn’t want to see the truth of what was happening. They wanted to see us as groups of savages who they could not bring themselves to describe as intelligent: they wanted to dismiss everything as religious extremism. And this meant that governments and people around the world could be content to let this dangerous savagery continue to play out between the rival parties.
I realised I lived between two worlds: one when I entered Syria and another when I left. I gave lectures in many cities around the world trying to explain the truth of what was taking place in Syria and trying to understand how other people saw us. I’d find myself tumbling into a deep and futile pit of emptiness that nothing could rescue me from except the prospect of returning to Syria. Then I’d come back here and live with the revolutionaries and the ordinary civilians, and be struck by a sense of despondency and anger at the great injustice that had fallen on us as a people and a cause.
The media centre guys were eager to talk to us. Raed Fares described the chaos that unfurled after the army forces left, explaining how the battalions and the armaments pouring in helped the Nusra Front become more organised and emerge well-stocked with equipment, money and weapons. Who was financing them and supplying the weapons? We didn’t know. The situation in Saraqeb was different, Raed said, glancing at Manhal. Ahrar al-Sham was bolstered by money and weapons and they had started to interfere in people’s lives. The Nusra Front hadn’t yet become as heavy-handed in terms of meddling in people’s private affairs as would be the case on my subsequent visit.
A large man, with broad shoulders, Raed had originally been a student of medicine before leaving his studies to work in Lebanon. In 2005, he’d decided to return to Syria to open an estate agency, and now he was committed to the revolution, heart and soul. He was a leading campaigner in the earliest days of the uprising, and a driving force behind satirical posters, banners and videos that had become revolutionary icons reproduced worldwide. I asked him about the idea of an Islamic state, and he admitted that there were people who wanted to build an Islamic caliphate as a response to the excessive violence of the regime; people felt safe with the Nusra Front and their piety, because while their only option was death, according to the Front at least they would be blessed in the life hereafter. The population had developed from a Sufic to a Salafist mentality. For me and many others, Sufism represented moderation in Islam, whereas Salafism represented militancy and religious extremism, with the transformation of religion from a social entity into a political one. The Salafists were counting on their children and young people to carry out their work in the future.
‘But this is also dangerous!’ I said. The others agreed with me. This change of mentality in the population would very probably lead to the negation of civilian life, as the popular movement evolved into religious extremism and religion took control of the legal system and the state. A secular state would then become an impossibility.
‘We started the revolution and it’s being transferred to them,’ added Ahmed, the painter. As we sipped our tea, I tried to keep track of the different sounds of the shelling.
‘This change in mentality shows sheer ignorance of religion and Islam,’ added Raed, directing his words to me. ‘Ignorance is the basis of extremism.’
But Manhal didn’t agree that these were the only reasons. He argued that issues related to how Syrian society had been formed, with its family and tribal affiliations, also played a role. He pointed to what had happened in Binnish, where a dispute between two families was the reason why the Nusra Front had been able to take control of the city. And when Taftanaz was destroyed, the families of Binnish and the town of Haish just stood by watching. The damage ran deep.
‘There’s no culture of working together for the sake of civil society or a culture of citizenship,’ I said. ‘That’s why regional disputes and rivalries between blocs and groups erupt. It’s a direct consequence of totalitarianism. At this rate, we’re facing the total disintegration of a society.’
Raed wasn’t optimistic, but he wasn’t pessimistic. ‘We can only continue what we started,’ he replied.
‘The civilian aspect of the revolution has been neglected,’ Manhal added.
Raed looked at me as he nodded sorrowfully and raised his voice to say, ‘Yes, we made mistakes but how could we not make mistakes? We had a huge job to do, to help the people and the refugees, and our homes were being demolished over our heads.’
As we talked, Razan and the others had been preparing dinner. There were no limits to the generosity and hospitality of families in the Idlib countryside. We gathered round and started to eat the food they laid out on the floor, dipping our bread into it and alternating sips of hot tea with adding to the never-ending conversation.
Raed was a little irritable but the others listened as he aired his views. He continued, ‘We’re struggling to cope with the relief work. There’s a crisis of confidence among people, and everyone distrusts each other, including the emergency relief workers. Hunger has had its impact. There needs to be more transparency so people can start to see what’s going on in this revolution. We want a radio station that we can use to talk to the people of Kafranbel and to establish a sense of nationalism. We’re asking the National Council and the Coalition for help with that too! Especially since the Nusra Front has started to interfere with the distribution of bread and mazut, as they have done in Aleppo and Deir Ezzor. There will be catastrophic results.’ The National Coalition of Syria, based outside the country, was aimed at representing the political opposition to the Assad regime and had already been recognised by many countries of the world.
I was starting to feel suffocated in the cramped room as I watched my companions passing around plates and laughing, discussing what needed to be done amid all the destruction and death falling from the sky. However, when Abu al-Majd came in, the mood lifted and everyone relaxed.
A good-natured man in his mid-fifties, Abu al-Majd wasn’t a political activist or a media professional, but a defected lieutenant colonel from Assad’s army, who had become the commander of the Fursan al-Haqq Brigade (The Knights of Justice), which was allied with the Free Army. He carried his laptop with him and had a permanent smile on his face. I scrutinised his thin features to see whether he had the look of a military leader, but he didn’t come across like one at all. I’d find out over the coming days and months what it meant to be a military commander with such a highly satirical spirit.
He limped over to join us, sat down and opened his laptop. I learned later that he had been wounded in his last battle, and had recently returned from treatment in Turkey. ‘Salaam, guys,’ he said. ‘I’m here to use the Internet to find out what’s happening in the world.’
‘You haven’t been to a demonstration?’ Raed was quick to ask.
Abu al-Majd laughed. ‘I’m a soldier; what would I do at a peaceful demonstration? Isn’t that what you write on Facebook?’ Facebook was very new to Abu al-Majd, and he mentioned it purely as a joke, although it was used by some of the younger activists. He smiled at us. ‘Who are your guests?’ Raed introduced us by our first names and jobs.
A man leaned across to whisper in his ear, and Abu al-Majd looked at me. ‘We’re all the sons of one country. May God give you, good people, a long life. Welcome, sister.’
I discovered that Abu al-Majd hadn’t teamed up with any side that was offering financial support; he wasn’t with any extremist Islamist battalions, and he didn’t rely on the money flowing out of the Gulf from capital owned by wealthy businessmen. His battalion was stony broke, he explained.
‘We have one thousand nine hundred fighters in the brigade, but only two hundred and twenty of them are working and fighting. The rest are at home. We don’t have weapons and there’s no internal or external support. Some basic aid comes from the families of Kafranbel. It just about keeps us going. The wolf doesn’t die, neither do the sheep!’ He was clearly happy to be alive.
He looked at me closely. ‘Do you want to go and see a battle? There’s one raging on the front line as we speak.’
‘Of course,’ I answered, but my companions objected loudly.
Abu al-Majd laughed. ‘Don’t you think I’d protect her with my soul and the souls of my soldiers?’
‘Yes, you’ll protect her,’ one of the others replied, ‘but a missile will tear you both apart on the front line. And then only God in the sky will protect the two of you.’ Now we all laughed.
‘We could be shelled here, too,’ Abu al-Majd noted.
I asked him to tell me his story so I could record it as a testimony. He closed his laptop.
‘You’re going to write about me?’ he asked calmly.
‘Yes, tell me your story,’ I urged him. He gave a troubled smile and nodded. While the others went back to their work, Abu al-Majd stretched out his legs and leaned back against the wall.
‘I was a lieutenant colonel in the Syrian Army serving in aircraft engineering at Deir Ezzor airport, but I deserted in the first month of the uprising. At the beginning of June 2011 we hatched a plan to seize the airport, but when Assad’s group found out about the plot they jailed me. Although they couldn’t prove I was one of the plotters, I was in al-Mazza prison for a year. Some of the officers who were with me got seven-year sentences.
‘While I was in prison they tortured me, but I didn’t confess. They used the “ghost technique” on me for four days, where you’re handcuffed and strung up by your wrists. They electrocuted me.’ He laughed. His fine features made him look more like a writer or artist as he continued, ‘They would never have released me if I’d confessed. After I was released, I went straight to the headquarters and they reinstated me into service. I knew what the mukhabarat wanted, the intelligence services. All they wanted from me was to return a stolen plane from Jordan to Syria. I deceived them into thinking I would talk to the pilot who’d defected, taking his plane with him, and convince him to return.
‘Instead, I and a group of officers established an operations room and started to liberate Deir Ezzor. We crossed the Euphrates on three boats transporting ammunition. In July, I came to Kafranbel and set about liberating army checkpoints. Do you think it was those foreign extremists who liberated our villages? No. We liberated them and then they came to us. We liberated them with our blood and the blood of our children. When they asked for help in Haish, we went to them too, but then the regime bombed Haish with their warplanes.’
A fighter came through and, refusing to sit down, told Abu al-Majd he had to see off some combatants who were heading to the front line.
‘Tell this lady about the defectors in the battalion,’ Abu al-Majd instructed the fighter, who looked at him in surprise. He added, ‘The sister is an Alawite.’
‘Why did you say that?’ I asked him, angrily. I was shocked that he had revealed this about me, putting me at risk. Not only was I unused to having my identity discussed in the context of religion, but I had expected him to keep it a secret because of the sectarian tension.
But he answered excitedly, ‘So the kid knows we’re all one people.’ Nevertheless, I was fuming.
Someone nearby scoffed and shook his head. ‘We aren’t one people, and her presence doesn’t change a thing!’
The fighter spoke up: ‘I had defectors with me from every sect: Druze, Christians and Alawites. Some of them are still fighting along with us, but there have been problems. I mean, some people are afraid of them.’
‘The Nusra Front wants an Islamic caliphate,’ Abu al-Majd said, interrupting, ‘and this is impossible in Syria. It’s very difficult. This is a revolution of all the Syrians.’ He addressed me as he spoke, and stood up. ‘We’re on our own,’ he continued. ‘The world has abandoned us and Hizbullah is fighting with Assad against us. We have no way of knowing what will happen.’
The fighter opened the door, letting in a cold breeze.
‘Where are you going?’ I asked.
The young man had half disappeared behind the door, but came back through and replied, ‘We’re going to liberate a checkpoint that has eleven soldiers and a tank.’
Abu al-Majd turned to leave with him. He said goodbye to me without shaking hands, simply placing his hand on his chest. ‘We’ll meet again, if we live, God willing.’
I stood up too as the others bade him farewell. ‘Go safely. God protect you,’ they said.
‘Abu al-Majd is one of our best officers,’ Raed told me after he had left. ‘Not all of them are like him. Some bring the corruption of their military past with them when they come here. All in all, in Kafranbel we have four brigades, thirty battalions and ten senior officers. But not all of the battalions here are made up of military men, there are some civilian ones. While the military men are more disciplined, they aren’t necessarily honest – mind you, nor are the civilian ones. Some of the military men tried to repeat the methods of Assad’s army, replicating their corruption and oppression of the people, but we wouldn’t allow them. At least until now. Our security battalion as well, some of them were part of the state security apparatus before they defected and brought with them the same old ways of controlling and bullying people. And now we have a revolutionary military council. We’re trying to organise ourselves, but people aren’t happy because they no longer trust anyone and they’ve started to lose faith in us.’
Raed stopped talking, at which point Ahmed excused himself, saying he was going to see his fiancée. This prompted a chorus of teasing and jibes, and Razan and I waited till it had calmed down before discussing the schools project. At that point, I still hoped we could complete this revolution with the tools at our disposal, despite all the challenges.
My last day in Syria, in sunny February. As I looked through the car window at a green plain rising to a plateau covered in dense olive groves, I felt anxious because the moment of my departure always filled me with the most intense feelings of exile. This time, I would be travelling over the border at another unofficial crossing point. Mohammed and a young man called Abdullah were waiting in the car with me. I had first met Abdullah a few months earlier, in the hospital in Reyhanli, and would get to know him better on my third trip back.
A group of Turkish soldiers were on patrol. They were pacing back and forth, throwing indifferent glances towards the columns of Syrians approaching the border on the other side. Some Syrians sat beneath the trees, looking through the fence. Some stopped directly in front of the Turkish soldiers, while yet others moved back and forth, almost as if mimicking the patrol’s own movements. Cars of every shape and type lined both sides of the road at this sheep gate. Entire families stood around waiting, laden with their few worldly belongings. Now and then, from the olive groves on both sides of the border, gunfire would ring out.
Abdullah, who had been crippled for life after being wounded in battle, kept laughing. He was worried about his fiancée, saying he didn’t want to make her a widow before her time. ‘I live with death,’ he explained. ‘My leg was wounded but I’m still a fighter. I don’t want to stop fighting Bashar al-Assad but I don’t want to make the girl a victim too.’
Children were running about between the cars, hawking their wares. Aged between five and fifteen, the children seemed to be selling just about everything you could think of: gas lighters, bread, sunglasses, cold juice, fizzy drinks, coffee and tea. People would start arriving here in the morning and then wait until night-time to cross, to be smuggled through. Some didn’t have enough money to pay the smugglers so they’d wait for nightfall and then try to creep through by themselves. But this would irritate the smugglers, who didn’t want to lose any profits, so they’d report these penniless refugees.
Once, the smugglers had sent an old man and his son back, and there had been nothing for the old man to do but stay there by the divide separating the two countries for several nights until he had become extremely ill from the bitterly cold weather. After trying in vain to escape the shelling, which had demolished his house, he had ended up being transferred to a Turkish hospital – and that was how he’d eventually managed to enter Turkey.
For me, the last two days had been exhausting: I was shattered not so much from the tours we’d made of women’s houses in Jabal Zawiya, and from constantly having to flee the shelling, but because of events during the last twenty-four hours, which I had spent in the village of Ayn Larouz with Abu Waheed, meeting a group of fighters. Our hosts had been Maan, a battalion commander, and his cousin Mostafa, a lawyer and activist who had stayed in the village to carry out relief work as well as development and media activities. We had met in a house that consisted of two small rooms separated by a yard, with one room being for the men and the other for the women. The surrounding countryside was shelled while we were there, but we weren’t too worried as the neighbouring village of Baylon seemed to be the target.
During my meeting with Maan and Mostafa, I wanted to come to a decision about an aspect of the women’s projects I was involved in. During this second trip to Syria, I had started to draw up plans for working with women in rural Idlib – an area that would be a challenge to break into. This wasn’t due to the particular circumstances of the women there, but because of the general situation in the Syrian countryside, where, over the past decades, there had been a serious decline not only on an economic level, but socially and culturally as well. Women were the first to pay the price in this war, and the situation was starting to seem even more dangerous for them with the infiltration of the extremist militant groups – strangers to Syrian society – and their attempts to enforce a very different way of life.
With Mostafa in particular, I discussed how we could create sustainable centres for civilians, particularly for groups focusing on women and children, to help resist the radicalisation of society through education and economic empowerment. Every new women’s centre could potentially become a self-managing organisation.
‘We won’t be able to if the regime doesn’t stop bombing the liberated areas,’ he said, repeating a sentiment I had heard so many times: ‘We pushed Assad out on the ground but he’s made a comeback in the sky.’
His battalion commander cousin, Maan, had brought with him ten fighters, two of whom were from Suwayda, a Druze city in the south-west close to the border with Jordan. The fighters boasted about having Druze and Alawite men in their ranks. One of the Druze fighters said that he hadn’t wanted to kill anyone but he was an officer who had defected. He said that now he could only be on the side of the truth. But this combination of men wasn’t the situation in every battalion I met; only a few battalions would allow fighters from religious minorities to join them.
Mostafa’s wife served food but didn’t sit down. During the meal, I had to go and sit in the women’s room across the courtyard for a while too, then return to the men’s room afterwards. The customs here didn’t allow for men and women to sit and eat together. As I helped her prepare the food, I discovered that the wife had been studying law but stopped when the conflict began. Together, we agreed on a schedule of visits I would make to the women of the village.
The trees were in blossom and I went out onto the plateau, where the two small rooms stood like separate little houses. The sky was clear, the sounds of the explosions distant and there was no smoke on the horizon. The fighters inside were talking about the divisions between the battalions and, on the other side of the plateau, a woman was rocking a small blue cot, tucking in her baby with a thick blanket. Beyond the plateau stood a rocky mountain, punctuated by olive trees. Further down the plateau, a few stone houses were scattered here and there between the olive groves, and they hadn’t been shelled. The voices of the fighters indoors were getting louder.
Mostafa came out to bring me a glass of tea. ‘How beautiful our country is. Don’t worry, we’ll rebuild it,’ he said, before leaving me to my thoughts.
Hearing his words, I fell quiet. I was occasionally struck by muteness and, sometimes when this happened, could stay for days without speaking to a soul. Right now, I couldn’t move my tongue.
Instead, I listened to the men talking in the room behind me, the sounds of their voices drifting through the walls and the window. The conversation went on for a long time about the Nusra Front and its media network called al-Manara al-Bayda (The White Minaret), which the Front used to broadcast their suicide operations and killing sprees.
‘Don’t believe that this huge financial network and the arrival of all these mujahideen have come about by accident. Something like that doesn’t happen by accident! And there’s nothing random or accidental about our impoverishment and our lack of weapons,’ Maan noted, before making one last remark, ‘but we won’t despair.’
When they lowered their voices, I sensed the conversation had turned to me because soon afterwards Maan shouted out, ‘Miss Samar, do you need anything?’
I found the words to reply, ‘No, thank you.’
When I went back to the men’s room, the talk had moved on to the transportation of fuel and getting electricity to the shelled villages where power and water supplies had been cut off. One of the fighters was criticising the fact that, whereas a lot of the schools had been closed and turned into accommodation for displaced people, many of them had been transformed into military bases, and Abu Waheed urged them to find another solution. As we sat there, more fighters streamed into Mostafa’s house while others left because there wasn’t room for everyone. They began to talk about the National Council, the Coalition and the official political opposition, and how votes were being bought, all to the benefit of those holding the purse strings.
I sat in the corner, listening. These fighters were men whose ages ranged between seventeen and fifty, some of whom had received a university education and others who could barely read and write. All of them had abandoned everything else they had in life to focus on combat and civil work in the revolution. They were trying to save the liberated areas from future ruin. A fighter from Jarjanaz explained that the situation there was no better than in Jabal Zawiya, where I’d seen the Roman ruins, but that fault lines had started to emerge between the regions, which would become more distinct in the future if things carried on in the same way.
‘Financial aid that is unaccounted for can breed corruption,’ I suggested. They agreed with me, but said that financial backing was always conditional on loyalty. Generally, there was a lot of turning a blind eye.
‘That’s the nature of revolutions,’ I told them.
‘But the dangerous thing,’ Maan added, ‘is that there’s no longer any trust between the military and civilian groups. There’s no trust on any level.’
I went outside again to smoke a cigarette. The conversation indoors was becoming increasingly tense. Three gunmen passed by at the lower end of the plateau. Two planes appeared in the sky relatively close to us, but everything seemed normal.
An old man appeared beside me. ‘Yesterday they bombed our house with a MiG plane,’ he said. Then he asked, ‘Whose daughter are you, my dear?’
‘I’m not from here, uncle,’ I replied, and repeated, ‘I’m not from here.’
The old man walked down the slope towards the armed men and asked them if the planes were about to drop a bomb.
‘No, I picked up their radio frequency and heard them saying they’re going to Aleppo,’ one of them said.
The sound of a violent explosion echoed from the village of Baylon. We would find out that evening that it had killed thirteen people.
The old man tutted, scowling at the three fighters. ‘You said it wouldn’t bomb us … Right, it won’t bomb us … Huh, you reckon?’ He kicked the ground as he muttered scornfully, ‘Our house is gone, the mother of my children is gone, the children are gone, everything’s gone, O God.’ He raised his hands to the sky and shouted, ‘O God!’ Then he carried on trudging down to the foot of the hill.
I always felt a strange light feeling whenever there was bombing. A sense of emptiness fixed me to the spot as I watched the old man’s retreating back.
I recalled the old man as Mohammed and I approached the border, having left Abdullah in the car. Many elderly people like the old man were lined up in front of me, waiting for an opportunity to cross. As I walked, I tried to remember what the thermal balloons looked like that were dropped before the missiles. When they were launched, the balloons burnt at very high temperatures and gave off a strong flash of light and radiation, with the intention of repelling any attacks when the rockets themselves were fired. But I had never learned much about them or the different types of rockets or shells.
A group of children started to grab on to the hem of my black abaya, the ankle-length robe covering me. They were urging me to buy something. One of the children walked up to the woman behind me and tried to get her attention in the same way. He looked like a small thief, angry about being left alone like this. I turned my head away because the mere prospect of buying something from him would only encourage dozens of other children to approach us. These boys had shot up like grass all along the streets of the deserted villages, where the bombing never stopped. Besides selling petrol and mazut at the roadside, they crept around the demolished houses, searching for anything to sell, and they’d hover near the military battalions, waiting to join in the fighting. They slept on the ground in the olive groves. Everywhere overflowed with them, as if they had all been suddenly abandoned and had never been anyone’s children. They were the children of chance, living in the hope that an opportunity would come their way, which would uproot them from the ground and toss them into a more welcoming world than this one.
Together, Mohammed and I walked past the queues until we ended up not far from the Turkish soldiers stationed on the other side, where various nationalities were sneaking across. And to think the Turks had been saying lately that they had increased their monitoring of fugitives from Syria because of bombings near the border. The Bedouin trafficker who was to lead me to the other side would be waiting for me at the top of the hill looking down on these Turkish soldiers.
‘Why don’t we hide in the groves? Will the journey take long?’ I asked Mohammed.
He reassured me that the soldiers only ever fired towards the sky. ‘I know, but it’s strange that they allow all these fighters to cross into Syria,’ I replied.
In the distance, I saw the trafficker walk down the hill towards us and peer between the olive trees. With a nod, he signalled to me to cross the border. I was terrified. As soon as I got closer to exile I started trembling. Mohammed couldn’t go any further with me. The sky was still blue and the sun harsh, but the biting cold refreshed me.
I was carrying my small backpack. Although I’d only brought a few clothes with me, Noura had weighed down my bag with presents – a woollen scarf she’d knitted for me and a small beaded purse for my daughter. The women of the family had also rustled up whatever gifts they could. Now I tossed my clothes out onto the path, keeping their presents, before hoisting the bag back onto my shoulders.
I moved further away from Mohammed. I was afraid he’d die while I was gone, as I worried whenever I said goodbye to any of the men. He remained where he was while the trafficker met me and signalled that we had to set off right away. Thin as a stick of cane, with a gold tooth, the man spoke rapidly as he walked ahead, making me run after him. A Turkish soldier shouted so I froze. The trafficker stopped and lowered his head, gesturing for me to follow. He led me around the base of the hill where I could see the crowds of people surreptitiously fleeing across the border. They were mostly poor, young and male. Among them was a woman covered completely in black. The smuggler signalled with his hand for me to keep up, and I climbed up the slope after him as quickly as I could. I stumbled.
‘Please, carry my bag for me,’ I asked. The smuggler looked annoyed and didn’t move from where he was standing.
‘I’ll give you whatever money you want,’ I said. He glanced down at the border and I followed his gaze. Mohammed and Abdullah were both standing below, looking up at us. In the distance they seemed like two poplar trees. If they knew how rude this fellow was, they would’ve given him a good beating, I was sure. The smuggler reluctantly came back and picked up the bag, complaining and cursing his luck. I didn’t have the strength to move again until I noticed that the crowds of fleeing people had started to rise up the hill and I suddenly found myself alone. I started sprinting. There was an excruciating pain in my ankle. I’d sprained it. I limped on to the brow of the hill, where I turned and waved, before going down the other side.
This was Turkey; Syria was behind us. I turned again and promised aloud, ‘I’ll be back soon.’