In the morning, I opened my eyes to the sound of the missiles and felt a deep craving to return to the darkness. I wanted a lifetime of it, like a cave dweller. My feet were on fire from mosquito bites, although I’d learned to sleep covered in a sheet after waking one morning to find my face covered in bites.

I got out of bed and went to the window, which looked out over the house next door, now a bomb site, and towards the hill beyond it, where the shelling was focused. The whispering of two boys came from a corner in the rubble that had been transformed by bombing into a sort of tent. One child looked to be about six and the other one a bit older. Some weeds had grown along the walls and a patch of yellow flowers had popped up. Next to a pile of white plastic bags, the two boys were counting red, green and yellow marbles. The first boy pulled a piece of fabric out of his pocket, unfolded it and they started playing. They were from a neighbouring house. The sky was blue, and small soft clouds quietly drifted by. The sounds of the shelling grew louder. I moved away from the window. When an explosion boomed nearby, I shouted out to Razan to wake up and hide behind the pillar. But I couldn’t stay still myself and after a moment I ran back to the window. The two children were still in the same place, still swapping marbles. Reassured that they were OK, I collapsed onto the bed.

A little later I joined Razan in the kitchen, where she had arranged her utensils in an organised manner. She sealed the packets of coffee and sugar using clothes pegs, and hung clothes over the doors and on the door handles. In one of the kitchen cupboards was a full-length mirror that we used instead of a bathroom mirror.

As we drank coffee together, I opened my small notebook and considered the tasks of the day. For every day I spent in the north of Syria, a month’s worth of work needed to be completed. That’s what I always said. So for me to stay a whole month, I’d need to achieve the work of several months. That was what was supposed to happen, but circumstances didn’t always allow things to go according to plan. The constant bombing crippled life and transformed human beings into hungry and frightened creatures. Today, my tasks included giving the men in the Kafranbel media centre a lesson in broadcasting and visiting the women’s centre, then going to Maarat al-Numan and coming back that night to Kafranbel to continue recording Raed’s story of the revolution.

I thought back to the boys playing outside in the shelling. No one was writing about the local people and their stories of everyday heroism, or about how they would transform the country. And even they were indifferent to the big slogans and buzzwords. These people whose lives I monitored here, I realised, were changing my own. Yes, even here on this small dusty road lined with houses that hadn’t survived the shelling, with weeds growing around the edges. These people were the nameless and the ignored, the ones who rode their motorbikes to go about their daily affairs and who might be killed for the sake of buying three loaves of bread. They lived a bitter daily existence. The shells passed over their heads and planes destroyed their homes and set fire to their orchards and fields. And they woke up each morning grateful to still be alive. They lived between the stone alleyways and under the olive and fig trees. Simply, just as night and day rotate, they grew older and gave birth to children and died, without a murmur. Their lives passed in a flash. No one cared about them. And they weren’t thinking about what they wanted as they sat on their terraces now. Most of the women slept on the ground with their husbands, if they still had a husband, and the children ran and played in small, confined spaces.

During the course of the morning, I passed a displaced family consisting of a man and his wife and five children living in a makeshift shelter. They were discussing how to get two extra litres of mazut. And the woman was asking her husband about where they could buy onions. Their twelve-year-old daughter, the eldest child, was sweeping the terrace and spraying some drops of water over it from a small plastic jug. The father, who was glancing between the sky and his wife and baby daughter, was muttering something I couldn’t hear.

‘Good morning,’ I greeted them.

‘Good morning,’ they replied cheerfully, looking curious. Then I carried on my way.

Hossam was waiting for me in the car. I asked him if I could go and inspect the places that had been shelled and assess the damage to the town. In Kafranbel, as in most villages and towns in the area, there was usually a degree of destruction that people had come to regard as average, incomparable to Maarat al-Numan, where we would be going that afternoon. In the hour and a half we were in Kafranbel, I photographed the areas that had been destroyed: the school and some large water containers. Assad’s aircraft deliberately targeted water containers in order to cut off the supply of drinkable water to the rebellious villages.

As in most cities and villages, the marketplace was a key target for shelling. One afternoon, planes had dropped three barrel bombs on Kafranbel marketplace and town centre, killing thirty-three people within minutes. An ancient mosque had been hit to the right of the square. The bombing was indiscriminate. We passed through the decimated market square, where the people of Kafranbel had erected a stone column decorated with marble and inscribed with the names of the martyrs who had died in the bombing. Yet the market was relatively busy. Hossam said that it was usually quite busy but that fewer people had been going to the market since the beginning of the revolution. Stores, vegetable shops and carts were still as they were. I watched a group of children in front of a vegetable cart. The eldest was fifteen years old. They were shouting and laughing, their voices loud, as they went from cart to cart.

Hossam dropped me off at the media centre, saying he would be gone for an hour but would come back to take me to the women’s centre. In the meantime, Osama and I started our training session on producing radio programmes. The basement used for radio broadcasts consisted of three interlinked rooms, furnished with plastic rugs and some foam cushions. We entered the tiny room used for recording and transmission. It was so small it could barely fit a single person. The equipment and materials were basic. The men were putting together some pilot broadcasts and preparing the equipment they needed to communicate directly with the people. They didn’t have any prior experience in broadcasting, but Osama was keen to produce a talk show with Ezzat and Ahmed that would deal with the daily issues facing families in Kafranbel: difficulties related to humanitarian aid, looting and the violations committed by the military brigades – the most sensitive topic that could be discussed. The young men wanted to open up a dialogue that would allow the general public to discuss their everyday problems freely. As one of them put it, ‘We got rid of Assad’s army and got the jihadist military instead.’

The basement became hot and some of the men went out to monitor the shelling that had started. Shelling by artillery generally caused less damage than barrel bombs, and there was a greater chance of survival. It was the destructive power of the barrel bombs that petrified us; even in the basement we wouldn’t have been safe from them.

After the training session I went with Hossam to the women’s centre. The place was basically another empty, poorly equipped basement that needed to be refurbished from scratch. Oum Khaled was the manager of the centre and her son was one of the activists. A significant portion of women from Idlib province aspired to achieve the revolution’s initial goals of justice, freedom and dignity, through civil society and the local community, and Oum Khaled was one of them. She hadn’t received her secondary school leaving certificate, but she liked to read and believed it would be women who made change happen. She prayed, fasted, drove a car, and ran a hair and beauty salon for women. She was waiting for me with a group of women who were taking a course in embroidery and beading.

Wearing the hijab was traditional here, but for over a year it had been made mandatory by law. In some parts of Aleppo, ISIS actively enforced it. After ISIS seized the city of Raqqa on the banks of the River Euphrates in the north-east, women had to cover their faces and bodies completely in black. The northern area of the country was impoverished just like most of rural Syria, but women here were educated to a certain degree, and capable of engaging in interesting discussion. And they were aware that profound changes were taking place that threatened to drag them into a dark tunnel with no exit, as the jihadist battalions were increasingly taking charge using the power of weapons and money. But, under the constant bombardment, talking about these issues seemed indulgent and a bit meaningless. That’s what the women said as we sipped our coffee on the second floor after inspecting the basement. They wondered aloud what could be done in their difficult circumstances – how to carry on working without coming to harm, or causing harm to their husbands and families, and how to avoid contravening customs and traditions.

‘It’s all very difficult. We have to stick to teaching women sewing and beading work, cutting hair or nursing. No more and no less. And when this war ends we can think of other things,’ one of them told me.

But Oum Khaled had a different opinion. ‘We can teach English and French, and give literacy courses and computer courses,’ she said.

I told them it was essential they had computers and Internet access, and training in psychological support. But most important of all were literacy courses for women. As we were chatting, suddenly a bomb fell nearby. We had been sitting beneath the window but, in the blink of an eye, we ended up piled on top of each other in the middle of the room. Minutes passed as we looked at each other in a daze, until we drowned in a fit of giggles. But I saw that the women’s faces were pale and frightened. Mine must have been too.

It was already 1 p.m. and time to return to the office, in order to go to the front line with Abu Waheed, the commander of the Freedom Martyrs Brigade whom I had got to know during my previous visits. But Hossam was late coming to collect me, there were no phones, and I couldn’t walk alone in the street; the women confirmed that they didn’t go out by themselves these days unless absolutely necessary. Yet, in spite of the chaos that inevitably emerged in war – let alone during the bombing – the women believed it was best to carry on with life the way it was.

‘Yes, I live in a state of war and bombardment, but I want to teach our girls how to live their lives well,’ said Oum Khaled. ‘We all want to get married and have children and build our lives. We don’t want to surrender to death.’

I was amazed by the way she talked. To my mind, Oum Khaled was the living embodiment of the sort of partnerships that could be formed in a local civil society to foster development and knowledge. I had much more faith in this grass roots society than in the political and cultural elites.

The women were curious to know about my personal life and Oum Khaled managed to convince me that it was important for me to have my hair done, so I did. I went with her to a hairdresser who’d opened a salon in her home. The salon was modest and basically equipped, but good enough to produce the most radiant brides in town.

It was the 1st of August and, on the way back to the office with Hossam, I thought to myself that I mustn’t lose hope, because the women around me had such courage and determination. Yet I felt suffocated by the combination of the scorching sun and my black clothes weighing heavily on me. I also felt anxious. Until that moment, I still shivered whenever I heard the sound of an explosion, but now … now I was heading for the first time to the front line.

Abu Waheed was waiting for me and we set off in his car immediately. He hadn’t changed much since I’d last seen him in February, but he was thinner, talked sparingly about battles and seemed in low spirits. He told me he wasn’t receiving enough funds to finance his soldiers.

‘Have we been defeated?’ I asked him.

He looked at me intently. ‘Oh, what can I say?’ he replied. ‘We’ve both succeeded and been defeated. Don’t ever believe that we’ve been defeated. The whole world was against us … everyone.’ His fingers were trembling on the steering wheel though his arms remained rigid, strong and sunburnt.

I asked him about his wife and children.

‘They’re worth more than the world to me,’ he answered.

‘Can I smoke?’

‘No,’ he immediately replied. ‘It’s Ramadan and the Front or ISIS might be around and could suddenly turn up. It’s safer if you don’t.’ I apologised to him for forgetting.

The air was hot and blasted our faces as we passed through the villages. When I’d met him before, Abu Waheed was still dreaming optimistically. ‘Everything is fixable. We’re still trying to realise our dream,’ he’d said then. This time he was mostly silent, so I didn’t try to engage him in a discussion about the outcome of the revolution or on why the jihadist takfiri battalions had come to the fore. I knew what he would say about the funding, and about the men who flowed into Syria every day from various corners of the world to fight under the pretext of defending Islam.

‘We’ll be picking up a fighter on our way,’ he said.

We stopped in Maarzita to collect Abu Khaled. The fair-haired fighter no longer lived in his own home but had brought his wife and her sister’s family to live with him near the front line in a deserted poultry barn, so he could be close to them. He said he couldn’t leave them alone in the open. The poultry barn was situated on a plain completely bare except for some dry patches of grass. Inside the building, the only furnishings were an old plastic rug and a cushion just about wide enough for two people. Bare concrete and stone pillars sectioned off the interior of the barn.

While we were there, I asked Abu Waheed if I could meet Abu Khaled’s wife and her sister. The wife, Oum Fadi, was hugging her two children.

‘They bombed our house, and we spent the winter here. There’s nowhere else to go,’ she told me. ‘When they bombed us, we left all our belongings behind and ran off into the street. There’re eight of us living here, or eleven if you count the men. This poultry barn has been sheltering us for a year.’

The worn-out iron door shook and I started. They laughed.

‘It’s nothing; it’s just a cat,’ they said. I felt embarrassed because I’d thought a shell had exploded.

Oum Fadi’s thirty-seven-year-old sister spoke confidently, but with sorrow. She was dark-skinned and her eyes were frightening: dark, sharp and bloodshot. She stretched out her bare feet and her heels were noticeably cracked. The children with the women were barely clothed, and stared solemnly at their surroundings, their eyes wide and unblinking like many of the other displaced children I’d seen.

When Abu Khaled called out, his wife got up to prepare his combat uniform.

‘Are you going there, too?’ the sister asked me.

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘Do you want similar clothes to the fighters?’

‘Ma’am,’ the husband called from inside, ‘I swear, if you dressed like us it would be better because we’re going to be exposed out there.’

But I declined. I asked her how they survived and she told me that her husband brought the food, they bathed once every two weeks, and they rotated the clothes they had with them. They had barely brought more than the clothes on their backs.

‘In the winter, we use plastic bags to block up the draughts,’ she said. ‘The cold weather is shortening our lifespan. We can’t get firewood any more, because there aren’t enough trees left.’

Her sister Oum Fadi interrupted, ‘We can’t leave our husbands when they’re fighting. We always follow them. I was a doctor’s secretary and I’m good at reading and writing. Now we live like cave people. We move from village to village, dragging our children along. We just about have enough to eat, and our husbands fight. Can you imagine what that’s like?’

She placed her hand in mine as she spoke and stared into my eyes, then squeezed my fingers in her palm. It was painful and her voice started to hiss.

‘Do you really want to tell people what happened to us? Swear that you’ll tell the whole world that the people of the other villages made us leave. The situation isn’t as it seems to you. The people aren’t united! There’s a growing hatred between them now. You see over there?’ She pointed towards the window, which was barely fifty centimetres wide, the metal frame worn and rusty. ‘There’s the front line. We see them and they see us. There’re only three kilometres between them and us. We live here in isolation, penniless. You can hardly call it living. If it weren’t for the fact that I fear God, I would’ve killed myself.

‘We’re dying slowly here, like animals that have been tied to a tree and left to starve to death. Our relatives who stayed behind have died in the bombing. The snakes creep around us day and night. Would you be able to spend one night with us? Impossible! Look at these bags.’ There were three medium-sized bags hanging on a column. ‘These are our clothes. We stuff them into bags so that we can leave quickly at any moment. We’re lost and homeless. See my stomach?’ She rubbed her swollen belly and continued. ‘I’m going to get pregnant every nine months and keep having children so that we don’t become extinct. Our children will regain our rights. We want them to be educated. We want them to fight so that we can return to our homes. We won’t kneel down to Bashar al-Assad. We will never kneel. And we won’t go back.’

She let go of my fingers, which were red from her grip. I could barely breathe. I didn’t want to cry. I bit my lip and the tears fell silently down my face as she looked at me. No one smiled. Two of the children approached me as I moved to get up, and I asked if I could take photos of them. They didn’t smile either.

As I left I waved and promised I’d be back, but I didn’t keep my promise.

‘You won’t come back,’ Oum Fadi said and she was right. I never saw her again.

Abu Waheed, Abu Khaled and I drove in the direction of the town of Haish, which was one of the first battle fronts in Idlib province. We left the small hill behind us with the wretched poultry barn at its summit. Another barn could be seen from afar across the bare plain. The sky started blending into a deep blue, not a cloud in sight. We were heading towards the front line, which at this point was only 700 metres away from the forces of the regime.

‘Are they safe up there on their own?’ I asked.

‘Allah is our protector,’ Abu Khaled replied.

Haish once had a population of 25,000, but it was an intensively bombed area, and had once been bombed continuously for fourteen days. Abu Khaled hadn’t prepared us for the scale of the destruction I saw. The population had disappeared. Around 25,000 people had either fled or been killed or arrested. It was as if the town had never existed. There were no roads or streets, just broken, dusty paths, pitted with craters from bombs and shells, which meandered between the ruins of houses. Everywhere there were collapsed buildings tumbling onto the road. They hadn’t just been destroyed, but pulverised into heaps of stones. Some of the pits and craters were staggeringly huge. Abu Khaled said some houses had been repeatedly pummelled by barrel bombs. Any remaining reinforced concrete pillars stood several storeys high, not crumbled, but twisted. The occasional chinaberry tree still stood, green and tall, shading some of the rubble.

As we entered the combat area from behind, I lowered my head. It was crucial I shouldn’t be spotted from the other side: a woman among the rebels. It was so unusual for women to be on the front lines that, if they spotted me, the opposition would be bound to try to work out who I was, attracting more attention our way and putting us in even greater danger.

‘Can they see us?’ I asked Abu Waheed.

‘We’re trying to go around them,’ he replied.

Only a street and some destroyed houses separated us from the enemy, who were positioned on elevated ground. We stood facing them and both the men lowered their heads too when we got out of the car. Abu Khaled used his body to conceal me, acting like a protective shield from bullets. Behind us was a street littered with huge mounds of rocks, and the small green branches of the chinaberry trees emerged from between the mounds. In every direction, there were heaps of rocks mixed with iron and charred, freshly burnt-out cars. They clearly hadn’t finished bombing this town.

We entered a small and relatively unscathed room, where there was the usual plastic rug on the floor and a few cushions scattered about. Then the fighters streamed in. There were at least ten of them. And shooting began outside.

‘They found out you’re here,’ one of the fighters said.

‘But we were careful and we avoided the street; how did they know?’ I asked.

There were some pictures on the wall. A still life. A photo of a fighter. Another painting of colourful flowers and some nails with a few shirts hanging off them. The room was just about big enough to hold us. Each fighter sat with his legs over his machine gun, entwined as though they were looped in a dance. The weapons were shiny and I could see their muzzles clearly – black muzzles forming a ring around my neck as bullets whistled over the roof above. The men looked at me with a mixture of curiosity and delight.

‘Hey, ma’am, weren’t you frightened? You should’ve dressed like us so that they couldn’t spot you,’ one of them said, a chubby young man of about twenty-six with a lightly tanned complexion and a jovial face, who was holding on to his machine gun.

I smiled at him and explained that I wanted to find out about him and his fellow fighters, who they were and why they’d stayed, whether it was true that the battalions here followed the Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham, and whether ISIS had arrived.

‘Everyone you see now is from Haish and we haven’t left our town,’ the fighter replied. ‘We’re staying here because our houses are destroyed. My name is Fadi and I used to work in Lebanon. When things kicked off here, and I saw on television how people were being killed, I left my job and came back. This is my country and I have to stay. My speciality is mines and RPG grenades.

‘I see this as a Sunni–Shiite war and nothing else. It wasn’t like this at the start, but the Iranian Shiites started interfering and fighting against us – them and Hizbullah. We can hear them speaking Farsi on the radio. There are only a couple of hundred metres between us; they’re now at the front line you passed by. As you can see, Haish has been completely devastated. And we don’t have a media centre like the other towns. They’ve bombarded us with every kind of weapon going: surface-to-surface rockets, barrels, Scud missiles, bombs. There isn’t a single building still standing.’

‘This is a religious war and nothing else,’ another young man added. ‘I’m Sami. I’m twenty-two years old. I used to study at university. Do you see it as being about anything other than religion?’

‘Yes, it’s religious,’ a third young man confirmed, as they took turns talking.

A thin, calm young man spoke next. He looked a bit pale and smiled curtly. ‘I’m Anas,’ he said. ‘I’m twenty-five years old. We started going out on peaceful protests from here, the centre of Haish. We never broached the subject of religion. We just said: “Down with the regime!” but it turned out that the regime were infidels; that’s why we took up arms. Do you know why they’re infidels? We had fifty bombs drop on us in one minute. They’ve used every kind of aircraft but they haven’t managed to enter the town. Eighty-five of their soldiers were killed and still they didn’t manage to enter.

‘Here in this battalion, we’re all sons of Haish, but we aren’t on our own. There’s the Nusra Front and other battalions. But the international community has abandoned us. All we can say is, “There’s no God but God and Mohammed is his Prophet.” Death awaits us and we seek God’s help to defeat the tyrant Bashar.’

The anger was spreading quickly on their faces. ‘The Alawites have killed us and we will kill them,’ another said.

Abu Khaled looked at me with a smile and intervened, saying, ‘These young men are all from poor working families. The regime destroyed their homes and killed their families and made the rest of them here homeless. As you see, they have some feelings of sectarian persecution.’

One of them interrupted him. ‘No, sir, the Alawites and Shiites don’t know God and they’re infidels.’ The rest of the young men repeated similar statements.

The battalion whose fighters I was sitting with called themselves the Haish Commandos. The Nusra Front had refused to meet with us in several locations, and now Abu Waheed wouldn’t even let them know I was here, for fear of reprisals if any of the Nusra fighters found out who I was. The shooting had intensified and Abu Waheed wanted us to leave immediately, but the Haish Commandos were wound up, keen to tell me their problems, about how they’d been neglected and how their city had been abandoned. They needed to start up a media centre but the constant bombing made it a challenge. Their civilian activists had also been killed; only Anas was left and he’d become a fighter.

‘We once tried to ask for help from several villages and several well-known media offices here, but they haven’t helped us. They’ve all deserted us!’ one of them said.

The young men had a point as the town did seem to have been forgotten and neglected, as if it existed outside space and time. And they, with their young, angry faces, inhabited it like the living dead. I wanted to leave; my hands started trembling as they told me stories about how their friends were dying, one by one.

One of them joked, ‘Today’s my turn. I’m going up to the heavens.’

‘No, I swear to God, you won’t go before me,’ another replied, and they laughed.

Abu Waheed became stern. ‘We have to go, guys, the situation is dangerous for the woman.’

I wanted to stay and listen but it would have been dangerous to leave any later and the bombing could have started up at any moment. Snipers on both sides of the front line were still shooting. I didn’t shake the young men’s hands but I wished them well. The men in this area didn’t shake hands with a woman. Most wouldn’t even look into your eyes and would barely greet you.

We crossed the threshold to leave the house, keeping our heads low, with Abu Waheed leading the way. Four of the fighters followed me and Abu Khaled out. A young man I hadn’t spotted clearly, as he’d been sitting in the shadows, spoke up now.

‘But tell the world, ma’am, that we’re dying alone and that the Alawites killed us, and that the day will come when they’ll be killed. We will return the harm in kind, to them and the infidel Shiites, them and their prostitute wives.’

‘Come on, man,’ said Abu Khaled. ‘That kind of talk is very offensive.’

‘No, it’s not,’ the guy replied sharply.

I stared at him. ‘May God protect all you young people, and compensate you,’ I said.

‘Amen, ma’am,’ they responded. ‘May God protect you. We swear it’s been a pleasure having you here. You should’ve stayed to break the fast with us.’

‘Blessed iftar,’ I said, then bowed my head as I headed to the car. I glanced back at them. A bullet flew over our heads.

‘My family are Alawites,’ I said quickly and spontaneously. I got into the car and two of them ran after me and poked their heads through the open car window.

‘Please don’t take offence, ma’am. I swear we didn’t mean you! I swear we don’t hate all Alawites. We owe you and your family our respect.’

I was as silent as stone, listening to the beating of my heart and the sound of the bullets.

‘Don’t be upset. I swear they didn’t mean it,’ said Abu Khaled.

‘I’m not upset,’ I answered quietly. But then the stream of apologies kept coming. Anas, the twenty-five-year-old, leaned into the car, his eyes glistening with tears. ‘I swear, ma’am, we would protect you with our souls. You’re a daughter of this country.’

‘You shouldn’t have said that,’ Abu Waheed whispered. Abu Waheed and Abu Khaled were both angry with me because of what I’d said – and I didn’t know why I had, although someone had to break through this wall of hatred. I felt that keeping silent would have been a betrayal of every innocent Alawite and a betrayal of the soul of the revolution that we’d set out to honour two years earlier.

The young fighters were clearly embarrassed and now they wanted to compete in protecting us, advising us on safer routes we could take. Two of the young men walked ahead of us, beneath the crossfire, as our car crawled behind them. Every few seconds, one of them turned around and looked at me, his eyes apologetic and full of gratitude, and I’d smile back. I wasn’t thinking about the number of bullets whizzing through the gaps between the dilapidated houses. My neck felt tight, or more accurately it felt as though it was being crushed; my throat clicked when I swallowed.

‘No photography here; we don’t allow it,’ Abu Waheed said. The two young men who had been following us quickly overtook our slowly proceeding car and took up their positions with their machine guns. We were on the front line.

‘Let’s wait and see what happens,’ I said, but Abu Waheed refused because the battle was fierce and we had to leave quickly.

Before the car turned round, I waved at them. The four stopped and waved back, still visibly embarrassed. We turned onto a dusty road and Abu Waheed set off at top speed. After a few minutes he looked over at me.

‘I won’t ever take you back to a place like that. What I did was risky, though it was good for you to see how these guys think. But you need to understand that other people might have reacted differently! And you could have been killed.’ I nodded and glanced back through the rear window. Only one thought crossed my mind: were any of my relatives on the other side? My family whom I loved, whom I missed, with whom I’d spent my childhood, and whose beloved faces danced before me in the car window, full of happiness, as we crossed the thresholds of childhood and adolescence. I didn’t wish death on them; I didn’t want them to end up murdered.

I put on my sunglasses because my eyes were welling up. The sun was no longer a strain as it was starting to set, but the time had come for tears. Abu Waheed said that we had been only 300 metres away from the regime’s soldiers. I nodded. I was crying noiselessly, hiding my face behind the headscarf and my wide glasses. It all felt unbearable, as if my heart would explode. I could hear it beating louder and louder, and then I forgot to ask if we could call in at the poultry barn so I could see the women again. I had broken my promise.

Abu Waheed said that the following day we’d go to Khan al-Assal in Aleppo. ‘There was a battle yesterday. Within a few hours, five hundred men were killed on both sides.’

I didn’t turn towards him or ask any more questions. I was just thinking about how so many people could die like that in such a short space of time. I was so lost in thought that I didn’t even notice when Abu Khaled got out of the car until he approached my window to say goodbye. My ears were ringing as I watched the sun disappear beyond the vast plains that stretched into the distance and the hills topped with clusters of mostly burnt-out houses. When I reached the media centre in Kafranbel, I washed my face and sat on the terrace, leaning back against a pillar near an olive tree, totally spent.

The view from where I was sitting was of a small house. Two boys were feeding two lambs in a newly built enclosure. Piles of kindling were lined up against one side. The children came up to the olive tree and playfully threw a stick of firewood at me, which fell in my lap. Looking down I noticed the mat I was sitting on was brown, my favourite colour. The activists were all busy with different tasks: Raed was cooking dinner on the terrace and joking with everyone. He brought out chunks of meat, which he barbecued with some oil, vegetables and a few chili peppers. Hammoud washed the vegetables. Abdullah swept the floor and wiped the mat. Razan washed the dirty dishes she was given. Preparing the iftar was a celebratory ritual that preceded the deadly missiles. Time to rejoice that there were still vegetables and other food to eat, that there was still someone to chop and cook for, friends to eat with and celebrate these small details. The jug of water was washed several times and placed alongside several clean cups. Two fighters came in and joined the work force.

Raed laughed. ‘In an hour we’ll eat and in an hour we’ll be bombed. But we can’t die without eating a good meal first!’

I remained silent.

‘We’ll continue the Kafranbel story when you get back from the school this evening,’ he said to me.

‘Of course,’ I replied, a little abruptly. I was still feeling bewildered after the trip to Haish. Yet I needed to keep a hold of myself until we came back from the school, and to save a batch of my strength and resilience. The next bomb strike would only last for a few minutes. If we didn’t survive, I wouldn’t need to carry on with my remaining tasks, and if we did survive, we’d go to the children’s school and then continue with the final task: the story of the revolution in Kafranbel. It was as simple as that.

We ate, and we survived the bombing. The missiles dropped exactly five minutes after the sunset call to prayer in the western side of the town, and soon we could breathe again.

It was past ten thirty at night when we returned after finishing our work with the Karama Bus project and the displaced children. We had about two hours to go through the rest of Raed’s story.

‘We’re back. Come on, Shahryar, back to the story,’ I said to him. He laughed at my calling him the name of the king from One Thousand and One Nights.

‘No – we’ve swapped roles: you’re Scheherazade, the storyteller, and I’m the scribe,’ I added. ‘We’d got to June 2012, when the revolutionaries took control of Kafranbel – but the army checkpoints were still in place?’

Raed nodded. ‘Yes, the checkpoints were still there, but the regime’s soldiers couldn’t move past them into the town unless they were in their tanks. On the spur of the moment, on the 6th of August, we decided to embark on a final battle of liberation. The group was led by Fouad al-Homsi, a brave fighter who’d gone out during Ramadan to ambush an army checkpoint on the road to Latakia. He hadn’t succeeded and had returned to Kafranbel. But there’d been an exchange of gunfire between him and the soldiers at the checkpoint, and he’d sent a message saying he and his men were surrounded by army troops. At that point, some men set fire to a load of tyres and shouted, “We’re here to help! We’re here to help!” And so the battle of liberation began and young fighters streamed in to back us up.

‘There were around a thousand of us armed rebels. We fought continuously for five days. We took up defensive positions around the town to barricade the roads. We managed to cut off the army’s food and drink supplies. The fighting carried on non-stop. Then they started bombing us with aircraft. On the seventh day of our struggle for liberation, army helicopters turned up and started bombing us as well. They wanted to rescue the army troops. The aircraft bombing wasn’t as barbaric as it is now. They were only bombing to provide cover for themselves, for military self-defence purposes.

‘But the truly barbaric bombing began on the 8th of August 2012, which was the day that they dropped the first explosive barrel bomb of the Syrian revolution. I had my camera near the checkpoint and photographed everything that took place during the battle. Since then, we’ve been bombed continuously using barrels.

‘On the 9th of August, they bombed us with MiG aircraft, and on the 10th MiGs circled over us intensively, constantly. But between the 8th and the 10th of August, Kafranbel was liberated from the regime. We made the liberation declaration in the mosque. We were proud because Kafranbel became known as “The Liberated”. We thought that we were close to our victory over Assad.

‘Other checkpoints began to be liberated, including those of the villages Hass and Kafrouma. But people started leaving after the army withdrew, because there was daily shelling; the battle was ongoing and the shooting hadn’t stopped. Only the revolutionaries stayed during the liberation and there was at least one massacre in Kafranbel.

‘On the 22nd of August, twenty-six people were martyred in the square where the demonstrations took place and on the 25th of September seventeen people were martyred. On the 17th of October, there were thirteen martyrs and at the end of the month eleven martyrs, and on the 5th of November thirty-two martyrs fell. After the liberation, they bombed us every day, and Kafranbel turned into a ghost town. Its population went down from thirty thousand to about fifteen thousand, and those who stayed would travel to the neighbouring villages during the day and come back at night. In October, Maarat al-Numan was liberated and the families of Haish – which was completely devastated – moved to Kafranbel. These displaced people were dying with us in the massacres.’

Raed fell quiet. I pushed aside my small notebook.

‘Let’s take a break for five minutes and have a cigarette,’ I said.

He smiled. He knew he was being listened to but I’d noticed something strange about his expression. It was the same thing that had appeared in Abu Waheed’s face: grief. Two and a half years of daily killing. First the peaceful civil struggle, then the armed military struggle. And now the religious extremist groups hijacking the revolution. But both of the men, despite their different paths, still had faith that nothing would be solved without the downfall of the Assad regime.

I picked up my notebook. ‘Tell me, oh happy king …’ I said, raising my voice.

Raed straightened up and stretched his legs. He’d been sitting cross-legged for hours. ‘Of course, an important detail is that in June 2012 there were many defections in Kafranbel by officers and soldiers,’ he explained. ‘One thousand soldiers and thirty-five officers left in one mass desertion. The highest-ranking officer would take charge of the battalion – the liberation battle was led by Hassan al-Salloum.

‘The problem was that after the liberation a competition for power emerged among the newly defected officers and the people who’d joined the revolution more recently. When the first military council was formed, made up of officers and five revolutionaries, it was dissolved after only a week. There were disagreements between the Kafranbel battalions and other battalions. One of the top officers, who was rich and had good supplies of weapons, withdrew. As you know, having met him, Lieutenant Colonel Abu al-Majd from the Fursan al-Haqq Battalion stayed. His was the first battalion to participate in the revolution and so it grew, taking on more members – its leaders liberated Kafranbel. Since then, the situation has fallen into chaos as more military battalions have been formed.’

‘Why haven’t the jihadist military battalions taken charge in Kafranbel, the way they have in so many villages?’ I asked.

Raed shook his head. ‘I knew you’d ask that,’ he said cynically. ‘You’re afraid of them.’

‘Yes, I’m scared, but not for me, for the future of the country.’

‘Yes, yes. They did attempt to seize control. Ahrar al-Sham had offered to liberate the checkpoints in September 2011. We declined. We were afraid they would stay in Kafranbel after the liberation. In February 2013, the Nusra Front also offered to participate in the demonstrations but we kept saying no. In my opinion, the locals wanted the Islamists there because they thought they were the only ones who could free them of Assad, because the Islamists had money, weapons and faith. The Free Army had limited financial support and some of them resorted to theft in order to fund themselves. The locals also thought that if the Islamists came in, they would govern them fairly after decades of unjust rule during which they’d only reaped murder and injustice. After all, ever since the era of Assad senior, Hafez, the regime has presented itself as being secular.

‘But after the Islamists entered the liberated areas and started to govern them, people realised that the Islamists weren’t fair rulers either – that they were in fact a carbon copy of the regime. And by Islamists, I mean the al-Qaeda affiliates who want an Islamic caliphate and to impose the restrictive sharia law. Now there is widespread rejection of them and the locals want them to go.’

Once again, I invited Raed to take a short break. ‘Here, have a glass of water, Shahryar,’ I said.

Then I got up and made another pot of tea. I was suddenly full of energy and felt like I could stay up for another twenty-four hours. I was enticed by the idea of recording the testimonies of everyone in the country, from detainees and civil activists to fighters on the front line. I would in turn be the narrator of this tale. I was part of a fragile thread of truth that had been obscured by history.

But there was no absolute truth. The headlines claimed the Assad regime was committing crimes the likes of which had never been known in contemporary history. But then in other stories, we heard of a clandestine conspiracy to exploit the country’s economic and social circumstances, its ethnic and religious makeup, to transform the liberated areas into regions controlled by the jihadist battalions. Facts on the ground were proof that this place was resisting on two fronts, and that the rebels, despite most of them being killed, detained, abducted, or fleeing the country, were still resisting. Their resistance was unique, it was ambiguous and complicated, and the situation was turning bit by bit into a religious war, not unlike many revolutions that have occurred in history.

‘Civil war is part of the reality of war,’ I said as I set out the glasses to pour the tea. ‘Yes, we need time, but the situation is difficult.’

The others were moving inside from the terrace. ‘Please don’t leave until I’ve asked all my questions,’ I said. Razan decided to go home ahead of me while I stayed with Raed and Hammoud.

‘People don’t want the jihadist battalions any more, but isn’t the popular support for the revolution also in serious decline?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ Raed replied, and nodded in his usual way, gesturing at the same time with his hands. ‘Some of the first activists made mistakes that angered people, but the main frustration was directed at the rebel soldiers, because they weren’t able to respond to the constant bombing from Assad’s aircraft. At the beginning of the revolution they had faith in the Free Army and glorified it, but their weapons were so limited. For example, the Free Army attempted many times to storm and liberate Wadi Deif early on. Ten failed attempts. Thousands of people have been martyred as the Free Army has tried to liberate the land, but our lack of antiaircraft weapons has meant we’ve lost it. And there was a lot of talk of betrayals. This made people lose confidence in the Free Army.

‘Then there’s another reason: the regime has its cronies here, and they’ve done everything they can to tarnish the image of the Free Army and fabricate vicious rumours about the rebels, about everyone – the relief workers, the media activists, the armed fighters. The regime’s used rumours as an essential weapon of war to spread terror and division among the people.

‘We are also just entering the third year of the revolution; people are tired and they’re searching for someone to blame for what’s gone wrong. The futility of this unbelievably tough struggle that’s dragged on so long, along with the brutal violence of the regime, and the departure of so many activists and people from Syria … these are all important reasons. The Free Army battalions are fighting day and night without making any gains, families see their children are dying for nothing, the media shows all this footage in vain, and we get barely a quarter of the aid we need, and there’s no water, no electricity, no food … In short, people are exhausted. They’ve had enough.’

‘Is it possible to regain that popular support?’ I asked quickly.

Raed looked at me in surprise but replied just as swiftly, ‘The revolution is still going on. The sons of this second phase of the revolution are working hard in the offices we’ve set up to manage life in our liberated lands – offices for relief, media, finance and statistics. For instance, the statistics office is keeping track of the numbers of people wounded, detained and martyred and documenting what’s going on. Every day, our engineers have documented the destruction so that we can calculate the cost of rebuilding our town.

‘When donations started coming in from the expats of Kafranbel, we decided to establish an organisation to deliver these resources to everyone. The people who were placed in charge of this were those respected by the townspeople for their honesty, integrity and respect. The idea was to set up a dedicated office for relief operations when the financial office could no longer deal with relief issues because of the mass displacement from the villages to Kafranbel – we had fifteen thousand displaced people and they had to be fed. And any battalions that came to help us, we fed too. We opened the relief office with seven people. When the fighting intensified, the displaced people left and the relief centre has since become this media centre. This is how we’ve managed to work alone, without resorting to the experience of others. We’ve generated our ideas ourselves.

‘But things are especially difficult, because now we face a danger that’s greater than we can bear. All these jihadist battalions and the current chaos, which came out of nowhere – this is a serious obstacle we face. As for me, I’ll never give up on our dream. We’ve accumulated a significant amount of experience, which we need to build on. I will never lose hope, but I can’t say it’ll be easy to regain popular support.’ Raed stopped talking for a moment, then concluded, ‘I think that’s enough. There’s nothing more to say.’

I stopped writing and we each lit a cigarette. The sky glittered with stars and I couldn’t utter a single word. Raed was staring at the olive tree by the terrace and nodding to himself. The night’s silence was unusual: there had been no explosions. And the crack in my heart felt as if it were growing and growing, with no end in sight.

The customs and traditions in the provinces have always formed a part of the cultural identity of the people, and where women still suffered from persecution this war cruelly compounded it. Then ISIS, the Nusra Front, Ahrar al-Sham and other extremist jihadist battalions came along, imposing further restrictions to obliterate the role of women. We did – and still do – dream of resistance.

Razan’s home was cosy and intimate. I realised that like all the homes I’d come to know here, it summed up Syria for me, adding to the bitter nostalgia I felt, the homesickness. Each house was significant in its own way: Abu Ibrahim’s house, my main base; the media centres, where we stayed for lengthy periods of time, trapped beneath the shelling; Oum Khaled’s house, Ayouche’s burnt-out apartment – the houses piled up in fragments in my memory, reduced to rubble by the shelling. Yet we kept on going, functioning as if we were living normally. We constantly flirted with death. The shelling never stopped but we still had to brew the coffee calmly on the small gas stove. This cup of coffee was more important than the idea of life and death on the mornings we woke up to shelling. We still had to look after our appearance. Perform our daily ablutions with the tiniest amount of water. We did what we had to do. Life went on with all its mundane details. Razan and I would wait patiently for our minders to pick us up, so we wouldn’t stand out like two foreigners on the streets of Kafranbel.

In January 2011 Razan was arrested for revolutionary activities by a branch of the Political Security in Damascus, on the Syrian border with Jordan. ‘The Free Army was in the heart of Damascus,’ Razan told me, ‘and we were ready for Damascus to fall. The Yarmouk camp was liberated and we used to hold our meetings there.’ She was held initially at Daraa prison, a prisoner of conscience among detainees charged with murder, after which they moved her from one place to another. Every day she was moved to a different prison, until she reached Damascus where they eventually released her without charge. But two months later she was arrested again, detained at a branch of air-force intelligence and then released. However, she had never stopped her work. She’d fled across the border and decided to return to Idlib province to work for the revolution.

Razan remained one of the most prominent faces of the revolution and still dreamed of its success, in spite of what was taking place. I saw things differently. It seemed to me that the revolution had entered a ruinous phase and that much of what was happening now was being planned outside Syria with little regard for the revolution that we’d dreamed of. But still, as far as I was concerned, to abandon working on the revolution from within was out of the question.

That morning our colleague Abu Tareq arrived, and waited for me to join him at the end of the dirt path that led to the street from Razan’s house. In his forties, Abu Tareq had only stayed in education until the end of secondary school, but had become a relatively affluent man, owning a tailoring workshop and another specialising in mosaics and marble. He had participated in the peaceful demonstrations from the first day of the uprising and enjoyed a good reputation among the locals, who described him as someone you could trust. He proved worthy of their praise, remaining loyal to the revolution and to the people – not that loyalty got you anywhere in these desperate days. Now, he was a military sector commander, with thousands of fighters under his command, and still dreamed of a united Syria, although he said that when Bashar fell, he would put down his weapons and return to his true vocation.

He wanted a civil state, a secular state. ‘It’s impossible to apply Islamic sharia in Syrian society,’ he stressed to me. ‘This goes against the nature of our society.’ In his opinion, what was happening now was first and foremost a war being waged by the oppressed against a tyrant regime: he didn’t want to hear anything about sects and religions. Even though he prayed and fasted and was committed to his religion, he would say, ‘It’s not the same. We want to build our country, we don’t want to ruin it.’

We were to go to Maarat al-Numan that day, which was in an even worse state than I remembered from my previous visits: it was completely devastated. Situated on the front line, the city had been exposed to violent bombardment every day for the past three months. What was left for them to bomb in this ancient historical city that now lay in utter ruins?

The man we were going to meet was an influential leader, an emir, of the militant Ahrar al-Sham movement. Through talking to him, I hoped to understand the way the movement thought. We passed through the danger zone outside town, which I now knew well as I had been to the vegetable market there with Raed to stock up before iftar. I lowered my head and held my breath for a few minutes as we passed the sniper district, where the regime’s soldiers faced onto the road. Just minutes before we entered Maarat al-Numan, a missile fell, causing a powerful explosion. We didn’t stop and continued driving straight ahead.

A problem that had become increasingly obvious in daily life was that an authoritarian power of a different kind had entered the scene and was starting to form a serious obstacle to any civil activism or any attempt to rebuild the shattered society. As we drove through the ruined streets, I thought that a good strategy to sustain a positive relationship between women in Syria and the outside world would be to start with small steps that didn’t provoke jihadist battalions such as Ahrar al-Sham. But any interaction between the genders was now prohibited. The matter had been turned into law, and going outside unveiled had become absolutely unthinkable. Any woman without a veil was liable to prosecution and any activist, male or female, risked abduction, murder or arrest. Nevertheless, I refused to despair. I was determined to conduct this interview with the emir of Ahrar al-Sham, although I had decided that I wouldn’t reveal my true identity to him.

On the way we passed the site of the latest explosion. A missile had landed near a school that was under the supervision of the Smile of Hope charity. The shell had pierced one of the walls and part of the roof had collapsed onto the brightly painted chairs and desks. It seemed incredible to imagine that such cheerful colours could exist amid the destruction. The school was an old building encircled by trees, with cheerfully decorated walls. Amidst the rubble I spotted some of the children’s artwork – paintings and sketches drawn in soft, delicate lines.

In front of the school entrance sat an old man, lifting his hands up to the sky. Smoke and dust still filled the air. I learned that the old man’s son had been hit in the barrage and had died instantly.

‘It was a rocket,’ said a young man standing nearby.

Rubbish was piled up everywhere, as well as mounds of rubble. Between the destroyed school and the office of the emir of Ahrar al-Sham, the devastation seemed more and more obvious. Litter filled the empty streets and every now and then we’d glimpse a sign of life.

We found Abu Ahmed, the emir of the Ahrar al-Sham movement, sitting in an office which resembled that of a senior civil servant, except that weapons were propped up against the sofa, a cluster of machine guns was lined up behind him, and armed militants stood guard outside. The seats and the sofa in his office were upholstered with black leather. There was a wooden desk, clean and gleaming. Blond with a long, bushy beard, the emir was thirty-eight years old and came originally from one of the villages near Maarat al-Numan. He was of average height and heavyset. After working as a tiler in Lebanon, he had returned to Syria in August 2011, immediately joining the military movement. He hadn’t participated in the peaceful demonstrations and had no connection to the civil society movement as, according to him, none of that interested him. Instead, he had enrolled in a military group consisting of fifteen people. Across the way from his office was a stream of families coming to receive humanitarian aid from both the Smile of Hope organisation and Ahrar al-Sham.

The emir didn’t ask who I was and spoke to me without looking at my face. Abu Tareq had told him I was writing a book and wanted to see him, and because the emir respected and trusted him he had agreed to be interviewed. He started with basic information and smiled as he addressed Abu Tareq, as if to ease the discomfort of my presence. I asked him to tell me whatever he wanted about himself and about the Ahrar al-Sham movement. I knew that the group were keen to promote themselves so I thought it would be a good way to urge him to talk. The group was an essential part of the armed Islamic resistance and an active player in the north. At my question, he pointedly turned his head and continued to direct the conversation to Abu Tareq. Then, without any greeting, a fighter marched in and interrupted us briefly to tell the emir he’d left three machine guns by the sofa.

I looked down at my blank page. I was nervous, aware that the sound of shelling was close by and that we were at the intersection of a number of combat zones. I couldn’t quite come to terms with the fact that I was sitting in the company of an emir of one of the jihadist groups, that I was interviewing him and that – outwardly – I was completely calm. I smiled and tried to draw him out of his reticence. It was midday and I started to feel tense, hot and suffocated. My throat was dry and I suddenly started sweating, but Abu Ahmed finally began to talk and so I started to write.

‘I joined the military movement to bring down the regime of Bashar al-Assad and to replace it with God’s law in this country,’ he told us. ‘We have lived under the injustice and criminality of Hafez al-Assad and his son for over forty-four years. Long enough. They used to interrogate me just because I read the books of Abu Tamima and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah. It happened several times, even though some of my family supported the regime. This is an infidel regime. And what I am doing now is jihad for the sake of God.

‘Our group came together for the first time in August 2011. We had just three rifles and one car between us – now we have forty cars and forty tonnes of explosives. We joined forces with Abu al-Baraa, one of the five men who set up the Ahrar al-Sham movement. People said Abu al-Baraa was a takfiri, and urged us to disassociate ourselves from him, but we didn’t. I was the sixth to join Ahrar al-Sham, so I’m one of the founders and I got to know the other founding emirs well.’

Abu al-Baraa had also been the name of the person who’d made threats against activists when Manhal had gone to the Sharia Court to seek justice for Martin, although I couldn’t be sure it was the same man.

The emir continued, ‘We discussed whether we should kill soldiers and decided that if they had defected, we wouldn’t kill them, but if they died during the fighting, then it wouldn’t be counted against us as a sin and that their deaths would be deemed halal, lawful. We planted IEDs in the paths of security patrols. But when the army entered in early 2012, the situation changed. We didn’t expect the army to come in and kill us and shell civilians. When the shelling began, it was an operation of annihilation, so we stepped up our strategy accordingly.

‘So we stayed, Abu al-Baraa and I, carrying out operations involving detonating IEDs. We would travel about in a Saba car and we’d change the vehicle’s colour every two weeks. We became famous for detonating cars and now I’m the Emir of Maarat al-Numan and we have a battalion consisting of one thousand jihadist brothers.’

‘But what does the word “emir” mean here?’ I asked. ‘Why are you called emirs, the leaders of Ahrar al-Sham, the Nusra Front and ISIS?’ The title was not traditional in Syria or in the Levant as a whole, and I wanted to know why it was gaining ground.

He stole a glance at me, nodded and replied, ‘The emir appoints the military leader and plans the operations, and then there’s a legislative official like a judge. In the battalion, we have an advisory body called the Shura Council, but often more weight is given to the emir’s decision.’

‘Then what’s the difference between you and Hafez al-Assad and his son, if it’s your opinion that carries the weight?’

‘It’s nothing to do with me; this is the law. The emir has double the votes,’ he answered quietly.

I didn’t argue and let him carry on, as I glanced over at the barrels of the machine guns propped next to him.

‘The emir is a political leader too,’ he explained. ‘But our main task is the military operations. We have many jihadist brothers volunteering among the fighters. We don’t care about money, but it helps us to recruit those who adhere to the true creed. We don’t offer wages.’

I interrupted. ‘But I heard that your fighters receive wages and that you have charities and businesses,’ I said. ‘And this is no secret to anyone.’

He looked me in the eye for the first time and replied in the same measured manner, ‘These are what we call “fighters’ provisions”, and they are payments for their family and their own expenses. As for the charities, they’re there to help people.’

‘And the businesses?’

He cut across me sharply, ‘At the beginning, there were difficulties but we began to win weapons from the spoils of each battle. We did quite well from the army. These were resources stolen from Muslims and they must be returned to Muslims. I bought a number of water tankers here, in Maarat al-Numan, to transport drinking water to people from a well. There’s no water or electricity here, and our investment projects have been set up to help the people. We have a long journey ahead and if you support the cause of God, He will help you.

‘We have some people with us who work independently of the revolution and we have non-Syrian jihadis who are loyal to us. We also have many Syrians from the Muslim Brotherhood who emigrated and whose children grew up in exile. They’ve returned to fight with us. Overall, ninety-eight per cent of us are Syrians. There were three from Chechnya but they were originally Syrians whose parents emigrated at the beginning of the sixties.’

Abu Tareq intervened from time to time to contribute a remark or to explain something that wasn’t clear. I tried to appear as calm as possible but the atmosphere was becoming increasingly suffocating. Outside, the shelling had quietened down and, for a moment, the world appeared almost peaceful. I rarely experienced quiet like this in the middle of the day. But the smell of leather was making me feel tight in the chest.

‘What form would you like the emerging state to take?’ I asked.

Now the emir looked me directly in the eyes. ‘What we want is the downfall of the tyrant,’ he replied.

I repeated the question and he answered with total seriousness, ‘Naturally, we want an Islamic emirate. We will have an emir of the believers and a Shura Council.’ Then he fell quiet.

‘And then?’ I prompted.

‘And then …’ he replied, ‘there will be laws to protect the sects and the non-Muslims, the Nasara – the Christians. It will be unlawful for women to go out without a hijab. Appearing unveiled shall be prohibited; that’s the most important thing.’

Abu Tareq had been watching me while I noted down what Abu Ahmed was saying, stealing glances at him as I did so. But when the emir came to the end of this last sentence, Abu Tareq threw me a warning look.

I forced a smile, and Abu Ahmed continued, ‘The Alawites can’t stay in Syria. Christians will be treated the same way the Nasara are treated in Islam, and we declare publicly that we shall reinstate the caliphate of the rightly guided caliphs, the Rashidun.’

‘And the Alawites who supported the revolution, and the Druze?’ Abu Tareq asked.

‘There were only a few Alawites who supported the revolution. Let them leave and we’ll fight the Alawites and the Kurds until the last drop of blood.’ I was surprised at his mention of the Kurds here, as the Kurds were an ethnic group, not a religious one, and I couldn’t understand why there should be any hatred for them. But I carried on writing without saying a word.

‘We have twenty-five brothers in the Shura Council,’ the emir said. ‘We do not recognise the so-called parliament and we will not follow the path of the Muslim Brotherhood, with whom we do not agree.’

I felt drops of sweat trickling down my neck from behind my ears, dripping down to my chest, then my stomach. My fingers were trembling. Any inappropriate movement or reaction to the conversation at this point could prove fatal. I focused hard on the letters of the words I was writing: I was first and foremost a writer and a journalist who had to finish her interview, note it all down, and then get out of there – that was my immediate priority. I needed to push aside that other Alawite woman who was breathing heavily, sweating and trembling – from fear and rage. She could wait till later.

The emir of the Ahrar al-Sham movement continued, ‘We and the Nusra Front are broadly in agreement on Islamic doctrine. We disagree on certain issues, but they are courageous men.’

‘What’s the name of the emir of the whole Ahrar al-Sham movement now?’ I asked.

He answered proudly, ‘Our elder and emir is Hassan Abboud Abu Abdullah. He was a prisoner who was released in the first months of the revolution. We have important religious elites and from the beginning, back in May 2011, we’ve worked to include them among us. We were earnest in our work, which was covert initially; we didn’t announce the establishment of our group until the end of the year. We are now part of the Syrian Islamic Front. We used to be four factions, which then united to form the Ahrar al-Sham movement. These four were the Islamic al-Fajr movement, Jamaat al-Talia al-Islamiya, Ahrar al-Sham and al-Iman Fighting Brigades.’

‘Don’t you find it strange that the regime released Sheikh Hassan Abboud at that time specifically?’ He looked at me in surprise, so I added, ‘The timing of the outbreak of an uprising against al-Assad?’

‘No, I don’t find that strange.’

I asked him about ISIS and what their position was towards them.

‘The brothers of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria are present here in Maarat,’ he replied. ‘They have joined us in the fighting and a large proportion of them are immigrants who wish to fight the Nusayri sect, the Alawites that is.’

‘We’re late and we have to go,’ Abu Tareq said suddenly. I nodded. Soon, I thought, we’ll finish soon. Abu Ahmed laughed.

‘As you wish,’ he said.

I put another question to him. ‘How do you imagine the situation after Bashar falls?’

‘There will be major conflicts. Wars between various factions. I don’t give much thought to what will happen after he falls. With God Almighty’s permission I will be a martyr. I was wounded with six injuries in a battle, and since the last injury I have only joined in one battle.’

‘Is it true that there are now “emirs of war”?’

‘Yes, there are,’ he replied. ‘That’s the way it is with war.’

‘Does this mean that Syria as a national entity is no longer acceptable to you?’ I ask.

‘What do you mean?’ he answered, surprised.

‘I mean that you want an Islamic state – and that means a complete collapse for Syria?’

‘No, we’re just raising the banner of Islam. Syria will stay as it is, but Islamic. The Alawites will leave.’

‘They number more than two million people. And what about the Christians and the other sects?’ I asked.

‘They can leave Syria, convert to Islam or pay jizya, the tax that will be levied on them.’

‘And anyone who doesn’t leave?’ I ask.

‘They would meet their fate.’

‘Murder?’ I ask.

‘That is their just reward,’ he answered, annoyed now.

‘And the women and children?’

‘They can leave,’ he answered.

‘And the Druze and the Ismailites – what will you do with them?’ I asked him loudly.

‘If they return to Islam then they are welcome, and if they don’t, then they’ll be judged as infidels. We invite them to the faith, but the Alawites are apostates and must be killed.’

I laughed in an attempt to conceal my nerves. ‘But the women and the children … the women, what’s their sin?’

‘The women give birth to children, the children become men and the men kill us!’ he answered.

Abu Tareq stood up. ‘God keep you, ma’am, please – we must go!’ He was looking at me hard and I understood that I was no longer allowed to talk. Although I acted as though I were completely calm, as I stood up my legs were shaking.

‘But this isn’t a merciful religion, and this isn’t God’s will,’ I said to Abu Ahmed. ‘This is absolute evil. It doesn’t differ from the evil of Bashar al-Assad.’

Abu Ahmed simply nodded. ‘Leave the matters of war to the men, sister.’

As we were leaving, he mentioned plans to teach the children of Maarat al-Numan tahfiz, the art of memorising the verses of the Quran.

‘I heard that you’re interested in education,’ he said.

‘Very much so, Abu Ahmed,’ I replied. ‘This is the most important thing.’

‘We want to open a school to teach our children to memorise the Quran,’ he said.

‘May God reward you with goodness, but the Quran is for people’s faith, and education is for people’s minds, and we need to develop the human mind. Leave God for the heart,’ I said.

He shook his head indignantly.

At that moment, I would have revealed my identity if Abu Tareq hadn’t silenced me with a glare. We set off quickly in the car. Abu Tareq was left speechless, and for a while neither of us spoke. Once we’d left Maarat al-Numan, I unclenched my fist and wrote down the date in bold ink on the palm of my hand: 4 August.

The transceiver suddenly shrieked into action, and Abu Tareq started to talk to his fighters. He reeled off a lot of numbers and asked about the requirements of the various sections, then told them that he’d see them after iftar. Another voice boomed from the transceiver and the numbers were repeated. I asked him if we could pass by the front line and he said we were already in the proximity, but that we wouldn’t go up to the top of the hill at the end of the street.

I noticed there seemed to be cats everywhere in the streets. Thin cats and fat cats, strangely plump and swollen. The kind of devastation I’d seen elsewhere could be seen all about us, but here perhaps even more ruinous, merging into a hideous, all-encompassing mass. As we approached the front line, we left the bulk of destruction behind us; the final stage in the formation of these grotesque surroundings was combustion. Everything had gone up in flames; all that remained were iron rods, concrete and rock. A process of purification as the dirt turned to ashes.

There was not a trace of a single house here. Abu Tareq, seven of whose friends had been martyred since the start of the conflict, seemed lost in his own thoughts as he asked me not to get out of the car. ‘We can’t stay more than a few minutes,’ he added. He had barely finished his sentence when the shooting started to get louder from the other side of the front line, and he spun the steering wheel, turning us back in our tracks.

That night was intense. After breaking the fast – with the customary synchronous bombing – we visited a school in the village of al-Dara with the Karama Bus collective, then returned to the centre to talk with a group of rebels and fighters, including a man who had come from Denmark on the trail of Martin Söder, and who was looking for any clues to his location. He wanted to see me in particular to ask about what had happened.

I had tried to forget that my presence had become known and that it was therefore dangerous for me to remain in Syria. An element of stubbornness made me want to stay on for a while longer as I couldn’t surrender easily to the idea that the areas we called ‘liberated’ had now become forbidden to me, and posed no less of a threat for a woman such as myself than Assad’s regime did. In fact, the threat here was definitely worse. Abu al-Majd, the genial Fursan al-Haqq Brigade commander, had told me that I did not need to be afraid where I was, because they were protecting me well. I did feel safe with them, but I also knew it wasn’t completely secure. And yet I wanted to complete my work with the women and children.

We stayed up late and by the time I got back to Razan’s house, the women were already tucked in and fast asleep. But the noise of children laughing and shouting downstairs interrupted the sounds of distant explosions. It was the sixth day of my stay in the house without electricity or water, and with only rare access to the Internet. We didn’t use the generators except when absolutely necessary, in order to save fuel. I couldn’t help thinking about those women who had come to the northern regions of the country to work as volunteers in medical relief and in nutrition, having left their homes in America, Europe and areas that had submitted to Assad’s forces. Were they in the same danger?

I dropped down onto the nearest available mattress on the floor, and was soon dead to the world. I slept until half past nine in the morning.

That morning we were due to meet Abu Hassan, an emir of the Nusra Front (not to be confused with Abu Hassan of the Kafranbel media centre). I had been trying to meet a representative of the Front for over six months and hadn’t yet succeeded. Reaching this emir would be difficult as he was located in a combat zone close to the front line. Despite the fact that he’d been wounded in the leg in the last battle he’d fought in, he insisted on being stationed close to the anti-aircraft weapons. Abu Tareq would therefore be taking me to the village of al-Bara, an ancient historical site, for our meeting. Ibrahim al-Aseel, the volunteer at the centre who gave the rebels media training, would be coming with us.

When I got into the car I wrote the date on my palm: 5 August. I knew the ink would be wiped off by the end of the day and all that would be left would be a blue smudge at the bottom of my palm. But I felt that this latest trip had covered such a long period, I had to do whatever I could to kick-start my memory, which was starting to falter. Each day, I’d write the date at the top of the page in my notebook, but this way I’d also be able to check what day it was simply by glancing at my open hand. I regretted that I hadn’t done this from the beginning of this trip, as the black hole in my memory was growing. In fact, two holes were expanding: one in my heart and one in my mind.

On the way to al-Bara, Abu Tareq called three people on the transceiver to finalise the details for the meeting. There had been overwhelming destruction in the village itself. On the transceiver we could hear fighters swearing and cursing. A large battle had taken place between the battalions of the Free Army and ISIS, and Abu Tareq talked us through the events in detail.

‘ISIS have hijacked the revolution! We can’t just let them get away with what they’re trying to do,’ he said. Then he added, ‘And yet it’s an impossible choice: either we focus on fighting Assad’s army or we fight the extremist battalions and the mercenaries who’ve muscled in on the revolution and corrupted it. We’re worn out from the sky with the planes, the barrel bombs and the missiles, and from the ground by these Islamist battalions. People are drained.’

The journey to meet the emir was like a voyage in search of hidden treasure. We followed the orders of one of the fighters affiliated to the media centre who was from the Nusra Front, and seemed to take all kinds of circuitous routes before we finally reached the right place. Our quest took us into the heart of al-Bara and out of it again, bringing us eventually to the edge of the village. All the while, the shelling was continuous. This village had been destroyed like so many others.

We pulled up by the side of the road. Over an hour later a car stopped near us and two young men got out. Abu Tareq disappeared with them for some time, then returned and we followed him. We crossed an olive grove and went over a small hill. There was nobody about, apart from a car that drove past with fighters sitting in the boot, young men carrying a black banner reading ‘There is no God but God’. They disappeared along a track that branched off in the middle of the olive groves.

It was already midday by the time we arrived and the media representative from the Nusra Front told us we were late. He asked to take our pictures before conducting the interview but I refused: this was a method used by al-Qaeda when meeting journalists and media professionals; they kept the images on file in case they might prove useful one day. But he didn’t insist – perhaps because I was only a woman. Later, I told myself, as we set off in the car after the interview, I would tell him my real name but without mentioning anything else about myself. I felt the need to belong to this place and a need to identify myself openly within it, as if this amounted to part of my freedom. Even though I was aware of the risks, my despair over what was happening increased my desire to make a declaration about who I was. Sometimes waves of anger overpowered me, especially whenever we were stopped at an ISIS checkpoint where all its members were foreigners – from Tunisia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Chechnya. We were just another bunch of Syrians to them, and this made me feel a pang of rage that would propel my objection to the tip of my tongue whenever they asked, ‘Who’s the woman?’ But one of my companions would always answer for me: ‘my aunt’ or ‘my mother’ or ‘my sister’. This time, I managed to control myself until the very last moment.

We walked across another olive grove until we reached an ancient Roman mausoleum. The architecture was exquisite but it had been struck by a missile. Inside, many stones had been looted and there were only a few remaining. At the far end lay only rubble – the remnants of aerial bombardment. This burial ground was nearly two thousand years old, but the Nusra Front was now using it as a meeting place.

‘Who’s been looting this place?’ I asked the media representative.

‘We don’t know,’ he replied. ‘There’ve been thefts by both sides. That’s what happens in war.’

A man came forward from the olive trees. He was of a squarish build, average height and portly, with dark skin. He wore a grey robe and walked leaning on a cane, one leg raised slightly above the ground. This, I discovered, was the local emir of the Nusra Front in al-Bara who went by the name Abu Hassan. I had heard quite a bit about him beforehand and knew that, while people’s opinions of him differed, in general he was well liked. He had once worked as a building contractor in Beirut, and also in the Chouf mountains, Jezzine and Deir al-Qamar. He had constructed, repaired and renovated houses in Lebanon for seventeen years.

‘Whenever I came back to Syria, and came here to al-Bara, they would arrest me and interrogate me, and accuse me of being a Salafist,’ he said. ‘Once they held me for seven days before releasing me. But I wasn’t interested in politics. We used to only work on contracts with very wealthy clients in Lebanon. My brother was jailed for four years; they released him in May.’

‘In the third month of the revolution?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he answered.

This testimony concurred with something I had been hearing regularly, and that I’d hinted at during my interview with Abu Ahmed the day before: that Salafists and Islamists were released by the regime during the months of April, May and June 2011. It started to make the repeated claims seem true – that peaceful activists were being tortured, killed and exiled at the same time as these fundamentalist Islamists were being released.

Abu Hassan continued, ‘I was being followed. So I went to Beirut four years ago to get a copy of my entry in the public register to use as a form of identification. When events began to unfold in Daraa in March 2011, at the very start of the revolution, I came back and found that the people had decided to protest against Assad’s regime. We held peaceful demonstrations in Jisr al-Shughour, al-Bara and Jabal Zawiya. We didn’t carry weapons until June 2011, when they began to shoot at us indiscriminately and started to storm our homes.

‘We didn’t originally intend to clash with the army – we thought that what had happened in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya would be the same in Syria. Our goals were limited to dealing with the mukhabarat, the internal security forces. We regarded the military as our national army and we didn’t expect them to bomb and kill us. But after the massacre in May 2011 at the town of al-Mastouma near Idlib, where many civilians were killed, we decided to fight. At that time I only had a hunting rifle, which I took out for weddings and for hunting. We are simple people, as you can see, certainly not famous. But in the revolution we made a name for ourselves.

‘The army invaded Jabal Zawiya on the 29th of June and we responded with a simple weapon: the Kalashnikov. When one of the army snipers killed a woman from the Halaq family – a widow – the villagers were incensed and we attacked an army checkpoint. So they shelled our village from their BMP armoured vehicles. We initially thought the army was coming into the village to separate us from the mukhabarat, but it turned out that they’d come to support the security forces in suppressing our rebellion. We were amazed to see tanks entering the village. This was an occupation. That’s why we – the men – left our homes, while the women and children stayed. And we decided to fight. We were five men facing them.

‘This is what it was like in all the villages and towns. It became a public confrontation between the local families on the one hand, and between the army and the mukhabarat on the other. Every village armed some of its men to defend their homes and their honour. That’s how the revolution began. The justice of our cause gave us faith in our victory and we decided to raid the army checkpoint in al-Bara and seize their weapons, because we didn’t possess sufficient funds or arms of our own. We raided the police stations and the branches of the Ba’ath Party and took their weapons, as well as raiding the military recruitment branches and getting their weapons.

‘Of course, there were informants among us and we were relatively weak, but we moved on to raiding checkpoints in Jabal Zawiya. We didn’t kill members of the mukhabarat at the beginning. We used to release them, but that changed later. I travelled between Idlib, Hama and Aleppo to fight. Each PKM machine-gun bullet was expensive – a thousand liras. We didn’t have any money and the regime was getting more and more brutal. Every day there were massacres, killings, bombing raids and arrests. We bought weapons with our savings and the profits from the olive season. And we would help each other and begin to get closer as a community, and the dream of victory seemed near. Things changed later.’

‘How did they change?’ I asked.

‘It’s a long story,’ he replied, ‘but the most important thing is that we didn’t have any weapons, we were exhausted and most of our men had been killed. A year ago, I decided to join the Nusra Front, and a lot of the defected officers joined up too. But before that, we created the Martyrs of Jabal Zawiya Battalion. And we met some fighters who would go on to form what later became known as the Ahrar al-Sham movement. At that time, July 2011, there weren’t the weapons coming from abroad.’

‘It sounds like you were a number of armed gangs going round attacking checkpoints, taking their weapons and fighting the regime with them?’ I asked.

‘Exactly.’ He continued, ‘The wealthy people in the village told us to buy anti-aircraft weapons and said they’d give us the money for them but we couldn’t get hold of any – and, anyway, the problem wasn’t with the financing. No one wanted to sell us anti-aircraft weapons. We had a hundred martyrs in our village.

‘I got to know a couple of young men, one of whom had been a friend of my brother in prison. They introduced themselves as being from the Nusra Front in the Idlib province. At that time the Nusra Front had no presence in Jabal Zawiya and was limited to Idlib. But they wanted me to join them. So I joined them and, together, we became one force.’

‘And ISIS? What’s your relationship with that organisation?’

Abu Hassan didn’t reply directly. ‘ISIS isn’t present on the front line,’ he said. ‘It’s in the background. They all used to belong to the Nusra Front. They’re foreigners; most of them aren’t Syrian. We are a religion of tolerance; we will be merciful with people of other religions. Omar, may God be pleased with him, was merciful. But we want to call people to Islam, and we want to kill Bashar al-Assad.’

‘Omar was the first of the mujtahids – the early scholars who interpreted the sharia law?’ I clarified. ‘And you’re takfiris? You outlaw people as infidels?’

He stole a sweeping glance from my head to my feet, as if he’d just discovered something, and with a wide smile he replied, ‘Compared to the others I’m a moderate, miss! What you hear me say doesn’t appeal to many people here. The takfiris here slaughter and whip people. They have infiltrated some of our groups. I want an Islamic religion that embraces the whole world, but through missionary work.

‘In the Nusra Front we want a Shura Council instead of a parliament. We don’t accept the coexistence of Christians among us, the Nasara. We call them to the religion of Islam. Whoever wishes to enter Islam may do so, and whoever doesn’t, will pay a jizya tax. We have a “Muslim Treasury” to administrate economic matters. There’s no place for Alawites among us.’

As I concentrated on writing my notes, I knew that Abu Tareq and Ibrahim were both keeping an eye on me. They joined in the conversation at times, sometimes addressing me, sometimes Abu Hassan. But right now, I knew Abu Tareq was praying that nobody would touch on anything linked to the awkward subject of my identity.

He continued, ‘After the past two and a half years, I can tell you that this is a Sunni–Alawite war, and it will be a long war that will last at least a decade.’

He looked at me and stopped talking. The other six men started to chime in with their opinions, joking and laughing, while I listened.

‘They burnt fifty-three men with acid in the village of Bileen,’ said one man. ‘Just like that! And for what? We’ll burn them. We know the whole world wants Bashar al-Assad and that he won’t fall, not because he’s strong, but because he’s backed by Iran, Russia, America and China. But we won’t stop fighting him. But when he does eventually fall, I’ll leave all of this and go back to my job as a building contractor. I have an olive grove and children waiting for me along with my wife.’

I let the man talk as he went on, ‘I went into an Alawite village and I didn’t kill the women or the children. I’m against killing. Islam is a religion of tolerance and there is no compulsion in religion. But this will change as time passes. I am a moderate, but my voice and the voice of others like me will not be heeded if the situation carries on like this – and I think it will. That’s why I predict a black future. And who will pay the price? Not Bashar al-Assad. The Alawites are the ones who will pay the price. They’re infidels and have no religion.’

‘You’re wrong – they’re not infidels,’ I replied quickly, glancing at Abu Tareq to make him understand that I wouldn’t cross the line.

‘How do you know?’ said Abu Hassan. ‘I know them more than you.’

‘I know them a little!’ I replied. ‘But, Abu Hassan, it seems that the Syrian people don’t know each other.’

The conversation moved on to our surroundings. The headstone of a grave nearby was triangular where a shell had struck it, but the area had been targeted arbitrarily, as the olive grove was not a combat zone. One of the men said the graves had been bombed for the sake of looting. A heavyset and fair-haired man who had joined the conversation halfway through, and who was from the Jamal Maarouf Battalion, denied this. However, the young man insisted, ‘We can’t stay silent about this any more. Antiquities have been stolen, but it isn’t only Bashar’s army and his shabiha who’ve been doing it.’

‘They’re all doing it to buy arms,’ another man added.

Beneath us, the ground was stirring with miniature battles quite detached from our own: armies of ants marched under our feet.

‘And why are you here?’ Abu Hassan asked me. ‘This book of yours – what use will it serve?’

‘I’m planning to publish my discussions with people about the revolution. I think these interviews will give a voice to the voiceless.’

‘Will they believe you?’

‘That’s not important,’ I answered curtly.

He looked at me with curiosity. ‘Are you from Damascus?’

‘What do you think?’ I said.

‘I don’t know, your accent is mixed,’ he replied.

‘I’m from everywhere,’ I answered.

He smiled and added, ‘But it’s brave of you to come here to us.’

‘And what about you, aren’t you brave?’

He laughed. ‘I’m a man and this is natural.’

‘And I’m a woman and this is natural,’ I replied, and he stopped laughing.

We left the fighters even though they insisted on offering us hospitality. As we drove off, Abu Hassan said quietly that he would never kill a child or a woman, no matter what the situation cost him. But he also knew that these kinds of things would happen as time passed. And I knew he was a brave man.

‘You can tell how brave a man is from his eyes,’ I told Abu Tareq when he asked me what I thought of him.

I have to confess that the revolution was teaching me patience and the art of listening. We’d swapped roles, these male fighters and I: it was their turn to do the storytelling. I, in turn, would play with the narrative and turn the world on its head. I could carry on with life because I needed their lives; I needed to turn their experiences into words. I hoped that their narrated stories would repair all this ruin. In the worst case, at least my testimony would remain as proof, evidence of what had happened, so that it wouldn’t all be lost to the wind. And so now it was the turn of the emirs Abu Hassan and Abu Ahmed to adopt the voice of Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights – like Raed had when he told me about the liberation of Kafranbel – and I would be Shahryar, the one who voraciously consumed her tales. But I would be a dual-gendered Shahryar, with a dual role: I would listen, then go back and assume the identity of Scheherazade as I passed on the narrative in turn. Sometimes I’d appear as the one and sometimes as the other; sometimes I would listen and sometimes I would create the story. If it hadn’t been for this process – of relaying these stories – I would have stopped returning to Syria, and remained cocooned in my exile. But my claim to this experience was nevertheless a kind of aesthetic fraud, an ugly fraud which I can only hope to redeem through my desire to compose and narrate, and to convey the truth about what was happening. Conveying that truth now is one of the rights of those victims who died for the Syrians’ dream of freedom and justice.

I had to go back to Saraqeb. I had been conflicted about the idea of completely leaving the town behind, which I was being driven out of whether I liked it or not. Renting a house in Saraqeb or Kafranbel had become impossible, and staying in Syria to try to live a normal life would have been utter madness. Forcing the rebels to bear the responsibility of my protection, and of accompanying me wherever I wanted to go, had become a burden on them, even allowing for the fact that everyone has the right to practise their own form of madness. I thought about how many people knew I was in Saraqeb. But by now it was the middle of August and my work with the women had to be completed.

On the way from Kafranbel to Saraqeb with Manhal and Mohammed, I continuously photographed the houses, the trees and the sky; and the people moving about these plains, the azure colour of the sky and the pale faces of the children who lined the streets, selling everything you could imagine. At the gates of Saraqeb, the shelling was ongoing and intense. This was normal here. Kafranbel was a relatively safe place, compared with the hell that Saraqeb was facing.

When we arrived at the house, we went immediately down to the basement, where Noura and Abu Ibrahim were already sitting. That night, I didn’t sleep. I stayed in my clothes until four in the morning, and eventually went to lie down in the room upstairs with the two old women and Ayouche. I don’t know why. When I finally managed to fall asleep for an hour, the shelling was loud enough to wake me up. I was itching furiously from the mosquito bites that covered me, even on my eyelids.

My body felt heavy, as though I could no longer move, but I craved a good scrub. While washing was a problem here, there was just enough water to wipe off the dirt of the last two days. Noura stayed at my side to comfort me, standing near the door to the bathroom. Although the shelling wasn’t close, it was continuous. I washed quickly and we made our way to the large family room, which we had to cross the courtyard to reach. A missile dropped nearby as we crossed the courtyard, but we drank our coffee calmly outside with the two old ladies, and I smoked a cigarette. For me, smoking a cigarette in the open air was a dream come true, having resisted the temptation during the daytime in Kafranbel because of Ramadan and the risk of being spotted by the Islamist militants. I felt a flash of sadness because I would be leaving in a few days.

Today was also going to be long, with a tour planned of the women’s houses. Nothing much had changed, save the way people were dying and the little they left behind. The same daily details kept repeating themselves: stories giving birth to more stories; evil seeking revenge over evil; the trudging trails of the homeless; and the vacant expression that filled people’s faces under the severity of the daily shelling, along with the permanent ashen tinge to their eyes. The look in people’s eyes was not new, yet one emotion was plastered to their pupils: horror. Daily routines carried on, with the faces of beautiful widows hidden from the sun, wrapped in each other’s arms, creating life out of loss, packing the bags of another death. Nothing increased except the scale of the hatred that mushroomed with the toxins dropped by bomber jets from the sky.

There was nothing new. The same challenges of buying a kilo of vegetables, the same arduous and treacherous journey from the house to the market. A temporary journey to a delayed death and a never-ending cat-and-mouse game with the MiG planes. And nothing changed in the tours I made of the women’s homes and my work with them. Graves were dug and filled in. Bodies were discovered dumped in the valleys and in the hills. Religious shrines were destroyed by the takfiri battalions, and new camps for ISIS were built in their place.

And yet, for all this, resistance still coursed through people’s veins. There were still soldiers who wouldn’t accept being conditionally dependent on the whim of the most powerful countries, refusing to become their pawns. Soldiers, civilian activists and pacifists were being rounded up by ISIS and executed; Syrian media professionals and foreigners were being abducted, killed or held for ransom; and whoever was left was murdered by Assad’s aircraft. Fighters in their early twenties were forced to sell their furniture and eat wild plants in an effort to defend their homes.

Here meanings merged. Nothing was clear. Battalions tussled with battalions; the conflict was devouring the revolution. The religious extremist military, with all its factions, had turned into a ferocious many-headed beast. I saw children aged no older than sixteen carrying weapons and disappearing at night among the dark alleys. Gangs of thieves took on the grand names of imaginary battalions, and degenerated into shabiha thugs. This was a country in name only, sliced up into areas controlled by rival military brigades, all of them submitting to the absolute power of a murderous sky. But here we carried on with life, regardless. Families plodded on, eking out a living under the lethal sky, among the barbarism of the extremist battalions.

I was going to pack my small bag and leave them soon to head back over the border into exile. We knew – my companions and I – that we weren’t partners in death. This partnership we’d formed between us was temporary, and they didn’t want me to die. As I was getting ready to leave them, one of the women urged me to stay safe. ‘Don’t die here,’ she warned me. ‘Stay suspended between us and the outside world. Be our tightrope, Samar.’ I had been watching the women prepare a lavish buffet to bid me farewell, and I looked at her in astonishment. How did this woman, who was over sixty and illiterate, understand me so well? I felt like a rope suspended in space, without beginning or end, and with nowhere for me to settle. Uncoiled, with no solid identity, apart from my language.

A few days before I left, I was still drowning in the detail of death. I had been struck by insomnia and had barely shut my eyes during the last four days of August, which was why I’d discovered the life that went on at night-time, when the streets buzzed with energy once the sky had quietened down a little. It was night that allowed people to leave their homes to prepare for another day. It was at night that I accompanied activists as they cleaned up piles of rubbish on Saraqeb’s streets. During the strange and magical night, we witnessed people cleanse their city of the litter to reduce the likelihood of deadly illnesses and epidemics. We passed in the car from one street to another, our headlights switched off for fear of passing planes, travelling between missiles and cluster bombs, to hide in people’s homes. We hid in houses opened up for the mourning of dead children, and where young people slept on light bedding, their limbs severed. Then we’d leave and carry on with the cleaning.

Saraqeb’s children didn’t sleep at night either. They stood in front of the doors to their houses; and I saw them watching the volunteers as they cleared rubbish into a dilapidated car with only three wheels fully functioning, shrapnel having struck its fourth wheel, but which still did the job and grunted along. The smell was revolting and everything that was collected was immediately burnt.

The following day, I carried on moving between the women’s homes in the same way as before; nothing more. A daily repetition of the same scene. A place exposed to death. It was only chance that selected the lucky few who would escape this futile game.

As I headed towards the border on the day of my departure, under the glare of the hot sun, I was unemotional. I observed my surroundings and did what I had to do as if driven by animal instinct, finishing my tasks with a professionalism that required two skills: speed and accuracy. Nothing else held any importance. There was no time for sadness. No time for crying. No time for thinking or contemplating. Staying here had disrupted my ability to think. The most we could dream of was to wake up in the morning and discover we weren’t buried beneath rubble, or that we had avoided having our heads cut off at the hands of ISIS. So, for that reason, the journey to the border was like a casual day trip, despite us being crammed into the car, despite the heat, and despite the need to stop several times to take cover from mortar shells.

I was quiet and no longer thought about whether I would live or die. I watched the olive groves pass by, and looked at the people on the roads. I understood how death toughens up friendships in the absence of all reason, sense and conscious thought. Here, we realised that slaughter such as this – the very violence that the earth breathed – was the only thing capable of making a decisive break with the history that had preceded it. I was now in the middle of a profound transformation. I knew it; I was touching it and breathing it.

We had to meet one more fighter so I could record his testimony and that was all I focused on. I didn’t look into the eyes of the two beautiful young men with amputated limbs who we passed on the roadside, as I usually did. I was engulfed by the intensity of pain and the need to suppress it. What I had to do was separate it from my blood. As though it were a ring of fire I had to avoid. I wouldn’t watch the groups of men nearby as I waited next to the car for the fighter to arrive. He was on time. His would be the final testimony I would record.

I had collected over fifty interviews with fighters but this clean-shaven man’s story was different. He was referred to respectfully as ‘Hajji’ and came from the al-Raml Palestinian refugee camp in the port of Latakia, my home city and the heartland of Syria’s Alawite population. Latakia was as different and distant socially and culturally from a rural town such as Saraqeb as two stars in two separate galaxies. The son of a taxi driver, the Hajji had been born in al-Raml in 1978, and had attended school in the refugee camp up until he was about eleven years old. Then he had worked at the port. Now he was the commander of the Ahrar Latakia (Free Men of Latakia) Battalion and spent his life on the move, living between the Turkish–Syrian border and Syria’s coastal mountainous region, north of Latakia.

I met him at the border and introduced myself. He welcomed me warmly. He was a friend of Maysara’s and seemed eager to tell his story. He felt we had now entered a phase of sectarian conflict that would last for the next twenty years, and still Assad’s family wouldn’t lose. The losers would be the rest of the Alawites, he argued, because the crimes committed by Assad’s lot would be committed against the Alawites in turn. There was certainly nothing I could say to persuade him otherwise. He spoke confidently and resolutely, his voice weighed down with hatred and sadness as he recounted his story.

‘I used to work at the port as a day labourer,’ he said. ‘Then Jamil Assad and the Assad family seized control of the port and made us their slaves. I hate the regime and the Alawite sect; they’ve done nothing but humiliate us. The sons of Munther Assad and Jamil Assad treated Latakia like their own private fiefdom. They thought the whole of Syria was their farm and we were their workhorses, but in Latakia things were particularly harsh and unjust. We’d hear them – the shabiha, the Assad family’s thugs, their cronies and sidekicks – we’d hear them constantly cursing us as “Sunni pigs”. You’re a daughter of Latakia, you know what it’s like. For example, the daughter of an officer is untouchable – she could roll even the strongest man’s nose in the dirt.

‘Between 2003 and 2005, we discovered they were building ten Hussainias in Latakia – congregation halls for Shiite commemoration festivals – and it felt like our religion was in danger because we were seeing this Shiite bloc emerging. For me, it was a matter of doctrine: Sunni or Shiite. That was when we started to meet up and decided that it was unacceptable, something had to be done. I even thought about planning a bomb attack after I saw a sign in Arabic saying “Farsi Language School” in al-Ziraa, which is a Sunni neighbourhood. And they’d already started building Shiite mosques in the Alawite villages – the Iranians were building them. We stayed quiet about that for years. Despite the fact that our religious identity was being suppressed and derided.

‘We knew that the Syrian regime had been sending extremists and jihadis to Iraq since the days of Hafez al-Assad, and that our Sunni sheikhs had a good relationship with the regime and were even a part of it. But we didn’t want to become extremists, or be part of the regime, so when the Tunisian, Egyptian and Libyan revolutions started, we young people met up and conferred about what we would do.

‘Meanwhile, Daraa was on fire with the uprising and there was a massacre. That Friday, at the Mohajireen mosque in the Palestinian al-Raml neighbourhood, we decided to perform a prayer for the souls of the departed. Following it, an enthusiastic demonstration started spontaneously and we marched right up to the door of the security detachment. But they started beating us, so we fought back and set fire to the headquarters. The march continued until it reached the Khaled bin Waleed mosque, then the Saliba neighbourhood.

‘Afterwards, we felt like we owned the world. We were able, for the first time, to say: “God, Syria, freedom and nothing else.” The next Friday, there were marches from several mosques and twenty thousand protestors came out onto the streets. The army fired at us and around fifteen people were killed; the number of wounded casualties was huge.

‘Before the revolution, there were already weapons kicking around in the Palestinian al-Raml district. There were drug dealers, extreme poverty and unemployment. We went underground, covertly planning our next step, organising demos. From the third week, we carried weapons in secret, just in case. They were intended for self-defence and we didn’t use them to start with. But after the massacre at Bin al-Alby Square in the Saliba neighbourhood we started carrying guns more openly. That day, we’d agreed to demonstrate peacefully, marching from several mosques to a sit-in on the square. Women and children were carrying the Quran and chanting, “We’ll protest until the fall of the regime.” After the night prayer, at around eleven thirty, I heard that the army had surrounded the demonstration so I went straight there. People were chanting, “The army and the people are one,” and “Peaceful, peaceful, peaceful.” The army ordered them to disperse and they refused, so the army fired at them, intensively – live ammunition. Two hundred people, including women and children, were slaughtered that day. I was a witness. The bodies piled up on top of each other. Anyone standing on the balconies of the buildings nearby, who saw what had happened, was killed too.

‘A sixteen-year-old girl grabbed a colonel by the chest, so he ordered a soldier to kill her. When the soldier refused to kill her, the colonel shot the soldier and then shot her.

‘At exactly eleven forty-five at night, a fleet of cars arrived and carried off the corpses and within minutes fire engines had washed the whole area and there was no sign left that anything had taken place. That was on the 17th of April 2011. We decided that day that armed resistance was the only solution. We started to get hold of weapons, Kalashnikov rifles and machine guns, and began to go out on marches with them to defend the protestors. We used them as well to stop army forces and mukhabarat officers from entering our camp, the Palestinian district. We held out for six months this way.

‘But we were weak and there were informers everywhere. We no longer had enough weapons and they were firing at us continuously. I was travelling about on a motorbike, sleeping half an hour a day. I was completely exhausted. And I never slept in the same place twice or went back to somewhere I’d stayed previously. After surviving three assassination attempts, I learned to be careful.’

The Hajji didn’t stop. He was angry, stern and different somehow from many of the fighters whose testimonies I recorded: he clearly loved life. He wanted to live. He admitted he didn’t want to marry so that he could remain free, and he smiled; but he was still angry as he continued his story.

‘In the camp, people were helping each other out, sharing aid donations, but there were problems. A lot of people were taking drugs, so we banned drug-taking. Looting became widespread so we posted watchmen between the houses to provide security. I asked everyone to open up their homes to each other and we continued to protest and to prevent the army from entering the quarter. We started a shift rota for guarding the entrances and exits of the camp, even from the direction of the coast. And every Friday, we would come out of the mosques and march. We were more than ten thousand people out protesting.

‘We established an independent state in the Palestinian al-Raml neighbourhood and were able to run our own affairs for six months, and we set up our first military council. That was in the fourth month of the revolution. I was a field commander. I had experience with munitions because I’ve been using them for years and I’m a bit of an aficionado.

‘The situation wasn’t good in the al-Sakantoury neighbourhood either. Like us, most of the boys were uneducated and unemployed, or manual labourers and taxi drivers. A skirmish erupted between their district and ours. We only had dynamite whereas they had gunboats and Dushka machine guns. They attacked us. After that, we handed out weapons to people for free. Some of our young guys were keen to attack them too, but I stopped them because we didn’t have the capacity and I thought we should wait until someone sent us support. To be honest, I was waiting for the Free Army and for the other regions to help us, but neither happened. I felt like we’d been tricked and left on our own. We had three thousand five hundred bullets, ten rifles and a machine gun, and we decided we would resist until we die, that we wouldn’t surrender.’

The Hajji sighed. He was chain-smoking and clearly trying to gauge my reaction to what he was saying. I carried on writing, ignoring his glances.

‘Our plan was to meet any attack head on. We were relying on a purely defensive strategy to stave off the army for as long as possible, since we were just a neighbourhood in a city in a country controlled by the army. We distributed our fighters so that they could keep a lookout in the alleys they lived in. That was our mistake. We lost control over them. They didn’t follow the orders they’d been given and started to shoot at soldiers and tanks.

‘We were able to resist from dawn until the afternoon of the following day, helped by the nature of the alleyways in the camp. The army’s boats shelled us from the sea and tanks shelled us from the coast, and they attacked the camp and reached the taxi rank. They came in with armoured personnel carriers and posted snipers on the roofs and between the buildings. We killed forty-five of their men and they killed thirteen of ours. We rounded up the women and children in Ein Tamra Street to evacuate the camp. My mother and sister were among them. We attacked the army checkpoint so we could accompany them out. We didn’t sleep or eat for four days. We resisted and fought, but when the army reached the al-Sakantoury neighbourhood next to us, thousands of people fled. We stayed in deserted buildings and building sites. We had to keep moving about, hiding in the houses.

‘During this time they arrested forty-five young men in the Raml neighbourhood, but we got away. We escaped across the Turkish border to the Yelda refugee camp. I had six hundred men with me who I was responsible for and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have any money to give them. I was lost, so I went to Antakya where I received a second shock when I realised that others had staked a claim to the leadership of the military and civil campaign instead of me. This revolution has been one long string of betrayals, lies and backstabbing.

‘I met with countless officers and presented my battle plans to them. I received various amounts of money for weapons and was careful not to launch into anything before getting assurances that the supply lines would stay open. The suppliers promised to bring us weapons by sea but I said no. I knew that would be impossible.

‘I asked everyone for help and I didn’t get any, and I felt like the burden of responsibility was getting harder to bear. The whole world was letting us down and the fighters and battle commanders were seized with despair. We couldn’t find anything to eat and we barely slept. I rallied the fighters who had come to Turkey with me and told them that whoever wanted to go and fight on any front line was free to go because I didn’t have the weapons. At the beginning of 2012, I returned to the battlefield in the Mount Kurd region and stayed there until the battle of Mount Doreen in July.

‘We were in the heart of the mountains. Every day we planned a new attack on a checkpoint or security detachment and we would steal cars because we didn’t have any money. I ordered my men to kill the driver if he was an Alawite. Some people opposed me and were angered by my commands. I can’t help bearing a grudge! I had a very bitter experience of Alawites when I worked in the port.’

He stopped talking. I knew that he was watching me to see my reaction. I didn’t lift my head, gripping the pen in my hand.

‘And then what happened?’ I asked.

He didn’t answer. Several minutes of silence passed. I lifted my head and stared right at him. He was looking at me unblinking. I continued to look at him fixedly.

‘Carry on,’ I insisted, and he continued talking to me with the same intense look.

‘Before the planes started to bomb us, the battles were straightforward and we were advancing. But things changed after the aircraft began bombing us. This happened from the al-Hafa battle onwards, and after the battle of Doreen I had no ammunition left and we were on our own under the bombardment. I left the guys in the mountains and returned to Turkey, where I secured money and weapons before returning to the battlefield. I smuggled the weapons from the Kurdish mountains to the Turkmen mountains in the province of Latakia.

‘The first battle there was on Jebel 45, a peak in the range, and the second was in Nab al-Murr at the Kessab border crossing. We entered an Alawite village, Bayt Uthman, which was more or less deserted. There were only a few young men left so we killed them. We took the chickens to eat and our men stole whatever food they could find for the battalion. They burnt down some of the houses and left the rest. After a while, Jebel 45 was sold out by one of the battalions. We were shocked when the army returned to Jebel 45, which the regime had used as an observation point in the past. There were more betrayals. The front lines were being sold out as soon as they were liberated. People were trading during battles, right at the front line, trading with our blood. We became dejected, we started to lose confidence and we no longer knew who was a traitor and who we could trust. Whoever could bolster the coastal battle with weapons controlled the fate of the fighting. This was around the time of the battle of al-Zaeniya. We besieged Regiment 135 for two hours and killed a lot of them.’

‘You talk about killing so easily and cheerfully. Are you a murderer?’ I asked.

‘Yes, I’ve murdered people,’ he said, looking at me angrily. ‘I’m defending our rights. But I won’t kill you.’

‘Maybe not, because we’re on the Turkish border. You’re being careful. If we were elsewhere in Syria you would have killed me!’

‘I won’t kill you,’ he replied. ‘With the torture that’s ahead, I feel pity for you. Killing you would be mercy! You’re in an unenviable situation and you’re cut off from reality. What’s happening here is nothing but a religious war!’

I stared into his eyes once again. I wanted to see him as he spoke about me.

‘Yes,’ he added, ‘I feel sorry for you and I hope you’ll stay far away from this vile war. I know of an Alawite soldier who defected and later committed suicide in a battalion of the Free Army.’

‘Did he commit suicide or was he killed?’ I asked him.

‘He definitely committed suicide. That was early on. I’ll tell you the story of something that happened to me at Mount Arbaeen in Idlib province, seeing as you like stories. I took fifteen men with me to the Foronloq Forest region. We’d found out about the regime army’s movements in the area. There was a cliff ahead of us. We reached a large open area at the heart of the range, between three peaks. Shellfire was pouring down on us like rain from every direction, so we hid between some rocks. I told the guys to follow me, and we screamed at the soldiers, “Defect, soldiers, defect! We are your brothers.” Their only reply was to curse us, then both sides started to exchange insults. I shouted at them to surrender because we’d cut them off, and when they just swore at us we shot at them. You wouldn’t believe how exasperated I was because we were Syrians killing Syrians. But what else could we do?

‘We withdrew, but they managed to encircle us and began shooting with Dushkas and sending over mortar bombs. Somehow we managed to get out of there and survive. We thought we were going to die. That battle stays with me more than any other, because we were close enough to hear each other.

‘During the battle of al-Zaeniya, we didn’t leave a single man alive. There were corpses strewn ahead of us as far as the eye could see. We left the bodies out in the open, where some of them were ripped to shreds by wild dogs before the army could get there with their trucks to collect the corpses.

‘After al-Zaeniya, my battalion’s headquarters was in the Turkmen mountains and we followed the command of the 10th Brigade, which was under the central command of the Free Army. I stayed in the trenches in one of the deserted Alawite villages, which we controlled for three weeks. Three other battalions joined mine and we advanced by fourteen kilometres into the regime-controlled area. After three months I asked for some support from central command. I was within range of the regime, facing continuous shelling and exposure to snipers. It was suicide for us to be in that situation and yet no one else agreed to advance with us. The other battalions stayed in the nearby village of Kandasiya. When I felt that my men and I risked being sold out and left to die, I informed the military council that I was going to withdraw, and I did. After that my debts piled up, so I sold the mortar and the Russian weapons in order to repay them. I went back to the central command headquarters and placed myself under their authority. My battalion is now called the Ahrar Latakia Battalion. I only go to the front line with them when I’m ordered to. We’re now based near Mashqita, fifteen kilometres away from the city.’

‘But you don’t think the fighting on the coast is a genuine battle?’

‘No, it’s not genuine,’ he answered. ‘I think the foreign countries want the Syrians to fight among themselves – that’s why they made us turn on each other and then ran. I learned about this from a professor who was fighting with us. That’s why I’m now more depressed than ever because so much Syrian blood will be shed for nothing.

‘Another strange thing is that ISIS is present on the coastal front but not on the other front lines. There’re more than five hundred and fifty of their fighters in that area, and they’re just watching now. I don’t know what they’ll do next! Ahrar al-Sham also have a presence and we, the sons of Latakia who want a national Syrian state, are being driven out! And what’s even stranger is that ISIS are the ones killing off members of the Free Army now. They’re doing that instead of fighting the regime. A while ago, they came with Grad rockets and wanted to attack a populated Alawite village. I refused, but they’ll do it one day and may even bomb Latakia. I told them to beat it. The ISIS fighters were Tunisian, Libyan and Saudi Arabian. Things have occasionally got a bit nasty between us – I’ve got into a fight with them once or twice.’

‘Hajji, what will you do after the fall of the regime?’ I asked. He laughed until he was red in the face, then looked at me with a sly expression.

‘It won’t fall any time soon,’ he said. ‘We have a long journey ahead. We need twenty years for the war to end and I don’t know what will happen after that. But I’m certain I won’t survive till then, which is a shame, because I love life. But I’m always in the front line. I’m as good as dead. If there was someone to lead us properly then our prospects would look much better.’

The meeting with the Hajji, the last of the fighters whose testimony I recorded, drained the last reserves of my concentration. The absurdity and the pain of what was happening seemed to cloak me in a haze of nothingness as I walked along, taking my final steps towards the border crossing.

Yet all the contradictions, stacked up in my mind and around me, failed to shake me out of the animal simplicity of my movements, as I was towed along by the queues of people shuffling forward like livestock, mere shadows of themselves. Here, the flow of life and acceleration of death had brought these two opposites hurtling towards each other on a collision course. Always in such close proximity, it had become difficult to distinguish between life and death in this swollen river of shuffling souls fleeing from bombs to a misery awaiting them of asylum, poverty, homelessness. A contrasting queue on the other side of the border flowed in the opposite direction, a stream of fighters surging to meet death as the bridge to eternity in their presumed paradise. Arms brokers, arms traffickers, human traffickers, human arms laden with weapons of death. Here was the point where these two streams crossed. I watched them as I moved forward in my daze.

At this final border crossing, I was surrounded once more by the swarming crowds of terrified humans desperate to escape. Wounded fighters and representatives of humanitarian organisations. Reporters of broadcasting networks, foreign journalists. Victims with missing limbs hopping among multitudes of women and children. Yet the mass of people trudged forward without any sense of curiosity, like extras in a film being goaded on by the director, their eyes staring straight ahead. Anxious but erratic. Giddy from the heat of the sun. This same scene had repeated again and again at each crossing point I’d used to steal in and out of the country. Hordes of people departing as if it was the Day of Judgement.

Atma camp was much the same. The number of barefoot children had increased since I’d last passed through, as had the density of scattered tents and armed checkpoints, mostly manned by jihadis and ISIS soldiers. Until that time, the end of August 2013, ISIS had maintained a cordial relationship with the other jihadist factions like the Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham. Later, the situation would change: ISIS would enter into a war with them and it would become clear that its campaign had no boundaries; it was an organisation dead set on establishing a future state.

The penultimate checkpoint that stopped us belonged to ISIS too. Four young men brandished their guns, pointing them into the air, standing to attention with their legs apart, ready for action. Two of them were completely masked and the other pair revealed only half of their faces. They weren’t Syrian. I remained as calm as I could when I saw them, staring at a fixed point in front of me on the road, and I paid little attention to what they wanted or what they asked my companions. Their accents were strange and I didn’t understand what they were saying. I only noticed how arrogant and confident they seemed, how loudly they shouted. They moved as though they were the lords and masters of the place, and signalled with their hands, allowing us to pass.

The final checkpoint at the entrance to Atma camp was manned by Ansar al-Islam fighters. The role of guarding the camp was now being shared out among the armed battalions. On both sides of the border there were trucks packed with wooden boxes that contained weapons. A shipment was being carefully offloaded from one of the trucks as we passed. This was happening in broad daylight on the border, in plain view of all the crowds of old men, women, children … and traders, smugglers, regime henchmen and journalists. At the edge of the olive grove on the Turkish side, young men of different nationalities were sitting under the sun. They were fighters waiting for their turn to enter the country and join the fray. They also weren’t Syrian.

My friends accompanied me right up to the border – the same point we had come through at the beginning of my trip. Maysara joined me in the queue, where we became part of one of those human columns, straight out of a Goya painting. It took over an hour for us to pass the crossing point. Next to me, a beautiful girl was being swept along by the people surrounding her. She was around fourteen years old, give or take a year, and her mother was at her side. The girl, whose name was Fatima – a common name for girls here – told me she was leaving Atma camp to get married. Her father had been killed in the bombing, and she was the eldest of six sisters. I asked her about her future husband and what he did for a living. She said he lived in Turkey but was Jordanian by nationality and that she would live in Antakya because he worked in trade between Amman and Turkey. I didn’t try to find out how old the man was, not wanting to embarrass her. When Fatima asked me what I was doing there, I told her a white lie – that I was from Jabal Zawiya. She became silent and paid me no attention after that.

But I saw Fatima again later as I was crossing to the other side, where a hire car was waiting for her. She was met by a man who was in his early sixties or maybe even older. His forehead was marked with the zebiba, the sign of the devout – a hard patch of skin on the forehead from touching the ground during prayer, and he wore a white abaya gown. I was near enough to call out to her.

‘Your husband?’ I asked. The husband seemed to recoil into himself.

‘Hmm,’ Fatima replied in a small voice, stealing a glimpse at me before turning her back.

Sweat was dripping from the official who was recording people’s names. I was still dressed in my black clothes, covered from head to toe. The long line of women, men and children stretched out behind me, an uncountable number of people waiting for their turn under the heat of the sun, not one of them with any identification papers. Behind me, a woman was carrying a baby in her arms, trying to calm him by singing gently. I turned to her. The baby’s arms were wrapped in white gauze from his shoulders to the tips of his fingers. I lowered my gaze and stared down as the official recorded my fake name, the one I would depart with. Just then, I remembered the first time I’d travelled under a pseudonym, when I’d fled my family home in 1987 at the age of sixteen and a half, and I laughed. I have borne many names in my short life as I’ve travelled back and forth from my exile.

The official looked up, annoyed by my laughter. ‘Let us laugh with you,’ he said. But he glanced only briefly at my face before I went through, passing over it like every other face he’d seen.

I myself didn’t know why I was laughing. It was a habit I’d picked up from the young fighters: I would start laughing whenever I felt suffocated. I laughed even more loudly.

‘You wouldn’t laugh. If I told you, you wouldn’t laugh!’ I said to myself.

Then I stepped forward and looked over to the opposite side where I would soon be in Turkey.

My companions were still there on the Syrian side, standing back from the crowds, watching me through the line of people. As I left, I tried not to prolong the moment of parting; one wave was enough. They waved back. At my side, Maysara didn’t utter a word as my tears fell. I would probably never see these young men again. I waved once more.

‘I feel like a cartoon character crying these buckets of tears,’ I said.

Maysara quietly signalled to me to follow him. I turned my head for the last time now; I had to be as steady as possible as I crossed to the other side. The men watched me until I finally disappeared from their sight.

After seeing the child bride leave with her new husband, old enough to be her grandfather, I was seized by one thought: the thought of my dear little enchantress Aala, Maysara’s middle daughter. I started planning the stories I would tell her when I reached the family’s flat in Antakya, and how I would describe the house in Saraqeb to her and what we had done in her absence – Noura and I, her aunt Ayouche, and the two old ladies. I plotted how I’d act out those stories, perform them for her, the story of each character in this book. I pondered how I would tell this little survivor the tales of her neighbours and relatives, since they were all relatives of a kind in Saraqeb. I tried to organise the details in my mind before I reached their new home. I needed to reach some sort of ending with Aala, who would one day grow up and tell the story of her own escape and of living in asylum. Or maybe she wouldn’t tell anyone, but would attempt to forget it and not try to uncover anything about her childhood.

The car drove us alongside the border, where Syria lay to our left. Now I was the enemy and my blood ran hot with revenge against all the murderers. I was a fragmented, fissured being who had uprooted herself and adapted to growing in new soil, only to uproot herself once again. I was both seeking an identity and escaping from an identity. Someone who lived in airport lounges and on train platforms, driven out, driven far from this place. The impossibility of staying shook me violently out of my dream of returning. Now, though, I tried to make myself accept once and for all that I was leaving for exile. I was leaving behind me this land drenched in ruin, soiled with secrets and conspiracies, sacked by marauding takfiri militants. The lands that the Syrians had liberated with their blood, the villages and towns of the north, were occupied once again. This was no longer liberated land, nor was it even Syrian. Our dreams of revolution had been hijacked. The powerful countries of the world now played out their own battles in this space, moving their armed battalions like pawns, financing and stocking imaginary front lines. In full public view, the border from Turkey gaped wide open to all kinds of fighters, and to weapons streaming in from a number of sides. Who were the people financing ISIS? Who were the people financing the Nusra Front? Who was assassinating the commanders of the Free Army? Who was killing the journalists and pacifist activists? What was causing this abduction of the revolution, this transformation of it into a religious war? These questions hung in the air.

As for me, I would reach Paris within the next two days, and this scene before my eyes would fade. Our car would disappear into Turkish territory and we would go, Maysara and I, back to their house, where Aala would be waiting for me with her rich store of tales, which would not end until I left Antakya airport on a flight to Istanbul. In turn, I would give her news of her neighbours, of the young rebels, and I would lie a great deal. I wouldn’t tell her about the bodies of her friends, the children who died. I would say an elegant, neat farewell and promise her that I’d be back in a few months’ time.

In my previous book, A Woman in the Crossfire, I dipped into the first layer of hell, with my account of the beginning of the revolution and its first four months. This second testimony had dragged me in even further, into a deeper abyss. And now, as I resurfaced into exile once again, I found not much had changed. This still didn’t feel like a real exile. It hadn’t altered its state to accommodate the full-on commotion of the accelerated events I’d experienced. Exile perhaps wasn’t even the right word: it needed redefining, I needed to go back to its root meaning. For this exile crammed full of the fleeting images of social media was no longer what exile had meant in its original sense. Modern technology had transformed the whole concept into something completely different. Even in exile, people today were no longer cut off with such finality from their places of origin. Instead, those places remained present and accessible in so much as it was still possible to interact online with those left behind and communicate about events as they happened. In this respect, exile no longer entailed such an intense sense of loss of identity as it had before the emergence of the Internet.

And so the border disappeared behind us. I found myself imagining that if the physical mass that is me could be broken up somehow into atoms floating in space, leaving me as free as a soft sheet swaying in the breeze, it would be wonderful. I would be content to seep from physicality into nothingness. And then, in that moment, I remembered that we had reached the end of August, that I might never return, that my country was occupied and the sky was occupied, and I became motionless, heavy as a marble statue. I stared hard, unblinking, back at the void of the border.