by Zahra Hankir
My Skype list started shrinking one name at a time: the little green dots began disappearing, until finally very few were left after seven years of conflict. It was like the tale of the ten little monkeys—and then there were none. A picture of a cake on Skype, however, reminds me of them once every year on their birthdays.
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Abu Bilal Al-Homsi was around twenty-eight when the protests started in his hometown, which came under siege from 2012 to 2014. He took part in the demonstrations, recording what he was witnessing and sharing it with Arab and international media.
We communicated through Skype. He was quiet and had a fair complexion, sleepy eyes, and full cheeks. His reserved personality didn’t stop him from joking around. He often added smiley emojis and kisses to his Skype messages. He once didn’t even hesitate to propose to me. He thought of himself as a Syrian citizen who was fighting for change in his country and defending his neighborhood. He was religiously conservative, but seemed open to the outside world.
He adapted to the siege, sharing pictures of his home in Bab al-Dreib with me. One was of his rooftop plants: tomatoes, lettuce, and eggplants. Even as he became more conservative, he retained his sense of humor. He liked to call me Um el-’Ayoun (literally, “the mother of the eyes,” meaning “the one with the eyes”), sometimes sending me the eyeglasses emoji.
But something happened during the siege. Goals shifted. Religion turned to bigotry. Over time, Abu Bilal committed to his faith wholeheartedly.
In April 2014, Assad forces and rebel groups reached an agreement to evacuate old Homs under UN supervision, allowing the government to take full control of the city. Abu Bilal couldn’t hide his anger at the leaders of the factions who had signed the evacuation agreement, describing the deal as “criminal,” according to Sharia (Islamic law). He decided to stay in the suburbs of northern Homs, pledging allegiance to Daesh. I never thought that he would become a Daesh fighter.
He kept in touch with me through Skype. He wasn’t a foreign fighter, but a national who had decided to join the most extreme and bloody faction in the Syrian war, cheering Daesh’s victory when the group barged into Palmyra in 2015. He was put in charge of “the prisoner file,” and started negotiations for the release of the state’s detainees with the regime.
When Abu Bilal joined Daesh, he asked me for the first time about my sect.
“I’ll give you some lessons about Islam to save you on the day of judgment,” he said soon after he pledged allegiance to the group. He talked with his usual shyness about a Lebanese girl who used to send him pictures dressed in not-so-modest “modern” clothing. He was trying to introduce her to Islam and heaven. “I convinced her to pray and read the Qur’an,” he once said jokingly, in his sharp Homsi sense of humor.
I shocked myself when I agreed to visit his empty home in Bab al-Dreib during a reporting trip a few months after the regime had gained control of old Homs and after he had fled. When I arrived at the house, I took photos of it to send over to him. Water had flooded the home. Abu Bilal searched for his plants in the images, but couldn’t find them; they were gone. The old Bab al-Dreib mosque, which was a few yards from his home, brought memories back to him.
“You took me back to past memories, Hwaidita!” (as he used to call me). “I thought you’d never find your way to my house!”
Abu Bilal went from sending news about besieged old Homs to international news organizations to reporting on Daesh’s victorious battles against the “infidel nation.”
“I am now very happy living the jihad,” he told me. “The Middle East is changing. Islam is stronger. It is the road to heaven. I want the Americans to hit their heads against the wall.”
“Are you scared of us?” he asked me the day after Daesh took Palmyra. “One day, you will come visit us in Palmyra for a reporting trip.”
Over time, the frequency of Abu Bilal’s Skype messages decreased, until finally they stopped altogether, a few months before his suicide mission.
The last things he wrote were exultations of Daesh’s foreign operations, such as the attack on the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015. He called the attack “a blessed operation in retaliation to those who participated in bombing Muslims and in response to the crusade alliance.”
In January 2016, an explosion shook the Al-Zahraa area in the heart of Homs, which had an Alawite majority. It was a suicide attack carried out by none other than Abu Bilal Al-Homsi. He killed more than thirty citizens and wounded about a hundred others.
Abu Bilal, the man whom I had been chatting with for months, had become the “Knight of Martyrs,” according to Daesh. Ever since, his green icon on Skype has been permanently shut off.
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While I met some of my sources online, I knew others in real life, too. Abu Al-Majd, who was a twenty-year-old officer in the state’s military police when we first met, was one of these contacts.
When Anne Barnard was named the Beirut bureau chief of the New York Times in 2013, our Syria reporting entered a new, challenging era—one that entailed meeting with and interviewing people living in government-controlled areas. Anne took the lead and I followed in her footsteps.
I went on a reporting trip to Palmyra with Anne the following year, just before Daesh’s attack on the area. This particular expedition was one of the most bizarre trips we’d ever taken. Security forces accompanied us to monitor our movements, as well as the interviews we were conducting. A local sheikh, Ahmad Dagher (known as Abu Ali), was with us every minute of the visit. He complained when we stayed in the city of ruins longer than expected. People at the souk looked at us from afar. Clearly, they found it odd that a group of foreigners was visiting the city considering the security situation, despite the fact that prior to 2011, Palmyra had been a major tourist attraction. Some seemed anxious about the security vehicles that had been trailing us. They tried to avoid talking to us, or answering our questions. Only the children were excited to see us. Dozens of them walked with us in groups, and they didn’t leave until late at night.
We conducted a lengthy interview with one of the clan’s sheikhs, known as Sheikh Faisal Al-Katran, at his house. When we left, we were met by an army of people, military as well as civilians; it appeared that they had been waiting for us. It was a dark night and there were no streetlights. Suddenly, a voice from the middle of the crowd asked for my phone number. I shouted it out, even though I didn’t know whose voice it was.
Months later, I received a message from an unfamiliar Syrian number.
“Hello, this is Abu Al-Majd. Do you remember me?”
The name didn’t ring any bells.
“I’m the voice who asked you for your number that night.”
Abu Al-Majd had been part of our security escort. He was one of the first members of the Syrian military who dared to speak to me and, in turn, to an American newspaper. It wasn’t easy to establish a line of communication with members of the military. I was excited.
The man was twenty, but when I spoke to him via Skype, his soft features made him appear even younger, and he behaved like a teenager.
“I loved the jeans you were wearing,” he said when we started our correspondence, which lasted through May 2015, nearly a year in total. “When you gave me your number that night, dozens of people in the crowd wrote it down.”
Abu Al-Majd messaged me almost daily, either by WhatsApp or on Facebook. He talked about everything: his service in Palmyra, his holidays in Old Damascus, his love of music, his love for his cousin, his romantic escapades, and even his salary and experiences as a soldier. His favorite movie was Behind Enemy Lines, he once told me, because it reminded him of his own story. He spoke nostalgically about his life before the conflict and about his house, which had been destroyed in Yarmouk.
Palmyra was a form of exile to him. He spent hours at checkp
oints, at the front line with the enemy—Daesh. There was no electricity, and no television; he was completely cut off from the outside world. He considered himself “dead, a dead human being.”
“The city has a negative effect on me,” he often said. “It’s arid; there’s nothing but tents, palm trees, and clan chiefs.”
His mood fluctuated as events changed.
Sometimes he’d seem happy, and would send me love songs by the Lebanese singer Wael Kfoury. Other times, when he was feeling morose, he’d send me depressing messages about how low his salary was—the equivalent of one hundred dollars a month. He’d talk about his long shifts, and share with me the nightmares he had about Daesh capturing him or ambushing his group. He was only truly happy when he was reunited with his mother during the holiday season in Damascus, he said.
One of Abu Al-Majd’s nightmares came true when Daesh attacked the Shaer mountains along the outskirts of Homs in 2014. He lost a number of his companions in that ambush.
By May 2015, Abu Al-Majd increasingly felt the enemy advancing toward Palmyra, and his distress grew by the day. He hated Palmyra, he hated Damascus, and he even hated himself. “I don’t know who is against whom in Syria,” he told me repeatedly, referring to the state of complete and utter loss that the country was enduring.
He was proud to be a soldier serving his country. To his mind, the concepts of the “opposition” and regime “supporters” were illusions. There were two sides—with the state, or with terrorism—but he didn’t hide his sarcasm regarding how the state treated its foot soldiers.
“We get everything here,” he said once, with sarcasm and ridicule. “We even pay for bread! What a shame.” He resented those who lived happily while he was deprived. He even wished his life were like mine. “Try to enjoy your life as much as you can,” he told me. “You’ll regret every moment you lived which you did not enjoy.”
Abu Al-Majd was coming of age. He continued messaging me via WhatsApp and Facebook, either by sending me photos—in which he was evidently trying to make himself look cool—or by sending me his favorite songs. He sometimes sent me voice messages containing the sounds of his battalion exchanging fire with Daesh.
He felt certain that we’d never properly meet. “We’re in two different countries,” he once said. “Only these messages bring us together.”
Between March and May 2015, there were signs that the end was nearing.
On May 13, 2015, Daesh started executing people in Sukhna, located some forty-five miles from Palmyra. At the time, Abu Al-Majd was on leave in Damascus. More than seventy military men, most of whom were his friends, were either killed or slaughtered when Daesh suddenly attacked their police center in the area.
Daesh was edging closer and closer to Palmyra. Abu Al-Majd’s morale was at its worst. He could’ve been one of those whose throats were cut.
He used to send me pictures of the dead bodies of his friends. He once sent me a picture of his friend, the daughter of an officer, whose throat had been slit. She was beautiful, he had told me.
He decided to never go back to Palmyra.
“No one can force me to [go back],” he told me on May 14. “I’m not a coward, but I am a human being and I have the right to be scared. Right?”
A day later, Abu Al-Majd was instructed to move from Damascus to Homs city, where the situation was less dangerous. He seemed somewhat relieved, but his relief didn’t last long. The feeling that he’d imminently be sent to Palmyra occupied his thoughts.
“I feel lonely, but if I was ordered to go to Palmyra, I’d go,” he said in one of his last messages to me. “I have no choice. I’m not happy at all. Quite honestly, I’m headed toward suicide,” he told me.
The following day, what he had predicted did indeed happen: the order from the army headquarters to head to Palmyra arrived. The evening of May 17 was the first and last time Abu Al-Majd ever called me.
“I’m in Homs; tomorrow I’m heading to Palmyra,” he said. His voice was weary, and he asked me to refrain from asking any more questions. He told me they would leave Homs for Palmyra in the morning by bus.
That day, Abu Al-Majd had seen a fortune-teller; she had read his cup of Turkish coffee. As she was reading the cup, he recounted, her voice changed suddenly, and she started mumbling.
She told him he had many enemies. She spoke about his suffering, and said that although he was now in a desert, he would soon move with four others to a “safe green place.”
The fortune-teller scared Abu Al-Majd, but he wanted to know more, so he decided to see her the following day before setting off to Palmyra.
The instructions he received from his senior commanders were clear: if he didn’t go, he’d be “punished.” He knew he was marching toward death.
“I wish I won’t wake up tomorrow,” he said. He repeated what a friend of his had posted on Facebook:
Alas, a country whose heroes die in graves and [whose] thieves live in mansions.
On May 18, Abu Al-Majd left Homs in a military vehicle, but the road was riddled with land mines, so they headed back to the city. But fate had other plans.
The following day, he sent me two pictures via WhatsApp. One of them was of him smoking sheesha in his green fatigues. The other was of him posing. With the pictures came a short message:
I took these pictures on purpose. They might be my last. We are moving to Palmyra shortly.
After that, Abu Al-Majd’s messages stopped for good. I tried to reach him via WhatsApp before his final journey, but he didn’t reply.
Days passed. I followed the stages of Daesh entering Palmyra closely, and its impromptu executions of both civilians and the military, often documented in their press releases. But there was no news of Abu Al-Majd.
Before we were disconnected, Abu Al-Majd had introduced me to his cousin, whom he had intended to marry. I tried to get in touch with her. It was she who finally gave me the news, via a message on WhatsApp:
Abu Al-Majd’s throat was slit by Daesh, days after he arrived in Palmyra.
The news was shocking. Death is death, but the manner in which Abu Al-Majd had been killed came as a shock nonetheless.
After a long search on Facebook, during which I contacted many people in Abu Al-Majd’s network, one of his friends agreed to reveal exactly what had happened to him.
According to the friend, on May 19, sixty soldiers and policemen, along with one officer, headed by bus to Palmyra’s military airport. Abu Al-Majd begged the driver to head back, but it was too late. The men were dropped off at the airbase, while the driver and the officer drove back to Homs. Within hours, Daesh fighters raided the airport, killing anyone they could find.
Abu Al-Majd managed to flee along with some of his friends, finding refuge in the home of a local family who had agreed to host him and allowed him to communicate with his family intermittently.
He was petrified, and his father told him to read the Qur’an. Prayers failed him.
Four days into his stay, Abu Al-Majd decided to leave the home, telling his parents that he didn’t want to further endanger the family that had taken him in. He disguised himself in a woman’s abaya and wandered into Palmyra’s souk, which at the time was teeming with Daesh fighters. It was time for midday prayer, and since Daesh required men to drop everything they were doing to go to the mosque, his only choice was to make his way there to avoid arousing suspicion.
When he entered the mosque, he uncovered his face for the first time. A civilian recognized him and asked if he was Abu Al-Majd, to which he replied, “Yes, but I haven’t done anything.” The man was an informant. He wasn’t convinced of Abu Al-Majd’s innocence, so he called a Daesh fighter.
As if he’d already assumed his own fate, Abu Al-Majd handed over a letter to a civilian, asking him to deliver it to his mother, so she would know that he had died in martyrdom.
Later t
hat same day, Abu Al-Majd’s throat was slit by Daesh fighters in front of the mosque. According to eyewitnesses, his body was left in the streets for several days. It was the same street through which he had escorted me and my colleagues during our visit to the city a year earlier.
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When I learned of Abu Al-Majd’s death, I wondered if Abu Bilal had documented it, as he reported on Daesh’s victories. The answer isn’t certain. What is certain, however, is that both men overlapped in Homs in 2015. While one chose death voluntarily, the other was forced into it.
These stories won’t be the last.
Following Lebanon’s fifteen-year civil war, which erupted in 1975, and theoretically ended in 1990 after various Lebanese political parties signed a peace accord, people claimed to have resumed their normal lives. But there was always a big question mark following the word “normal.”
I could never figure out what they meant by “normal.”
Today, seven years after the beginning of the Syrian war, despite all that has happened, some people speak enthusiastically about how the situation in the country has started to improve.
An acquaintance of mine who lives in Beirut, for example, always tells me with conviction whenever I return from my reporting trips to Syria that things are “back to normal” in Damascus.
His comment takes me back to that scene in the Syrian TV show between the two female detainees.
With a skeptical smile on my face, I reply, “What normal?”
TRANSLATED FROM ARABIC BY MARIAM ANTAR
On a Belated Encounter with Gender
Lina Attalah
Amid the gloom of your imminent departure, you brought a big smile to my face when you remembered who I was and the media I had helped create. In the throes of your delirium, your pain, and your struggle to catch every breath as your organs failed you, you pointed at me while talking to your nurse and said to him, “You know who this little girl is? She’s a journalist. She founded a newspaper.”
