Our Women on the Ground

by Zahra Hankir

  And yet still I’m self-censoring. I was first kicked out of regime-held Syria for writing about the violations government forces committed during peaceful demonstrations, and then from Syria itself by the rebels who were rebelling against the regime. In both situations, I had to choose between instant freedom and being able to continue my work in Syria, which at the time included helping citizen journalists, training women, and producing stories about life beyond front lines and war. The option between the two was obvious. “Keep quiet so you can go on”: I heard this sort of thing from friends and family every day, before posting on my Facebook page, after deleting the post, before sleeping, and after I woke up (when I always felt particularly depressed, because I’d realize I was turning into a person I couldn’t recognize).

  * * *

  —

  There were, nonetheless, advantages to being a woman journalist. If I wasn’t a woman, I wouldn’t have been invited to the closed segregated women’s community of Idlib. And I certainly wouldn’t have been able to film the women there moving about freely in their houses and as they worked. I was called hurma repeatedly during this time. This Arabic word carries with it multiple insulting connotations: haram, or “forbidden”; a form of weakness; someone who is dependent; a minor; a man’s tool for pleasure; his property; his possession; her gender role; and, finally, the eternal circle that a woman shouldn’t break—fertility and giving birth.

  Because I was given access to these women, I stopped being bothered by the word hurma. Instead, I was choosing to be hurma to be able to capture their stories. I was able to obtain access to a very private gynecological clinic in Aleppo city, which men are not allowed to enter. I went in with my camera, and I was terrified at first. It was a place where women covered themselves up in black from head to toe. And their male relatives could have had me killed for showing their faces on camera (to preserve their “honor,” women should be kept hidden from the public eye).

  While I was at the clinic, a fifteen-year-old girl wearing a black face veil walked in with her mother. She lifted her scarf to reveal the bright, youthful face of a teenager. Her mother then told the doctor that her daughter had been married for six weeks, but wasn’t yet pregnant. She was worried. “What’s wrong with her?” she demanded. The girl started to blush and looked at the floor. Her mother requested a “pregnancy catalyst,” something that would “please” her husband.

  Another woman in her midforties visited the clinic with her pregnant daughter-in-law. She whispered to the doctor, “I want to have a baby, too. If I get pregnant, my husband will sleep in my house more, instead of going to his new, younger wife’s home.”

  These stories aren’t surprising to me, not only because I come from a community where such anxieties are common but also because I have witnessed firsthand that even empowered women activists who challenge the regime, their families, and tradition voluntarily turn into hareem (plural of hurma) after getting married.

  I was disheartened, though, when a very brave Syrian woman citizen journalist—the only female videographer in northern Syria—got engaged to a married man who was already a father. She didn’t mind being a second wife in her early twenties. She wasn’t even bothered that he was dividing the nights between the two of his wives, until his first wife found out about her and then divorced him.

  From this particular story I learned that being a brave and successful woman journalist doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily more of a feminist and less accepting of patriarchy. Her example and all the challenges I’ve faced make me more determined to focus on women in the work that I do. As a consequence of this war, Syrian women are now being stereotyped more than ever: in both local and international media, they’re mostly portrayed as victims and dependents who need to be helped. I want to fight those stereotypes.

  * * *

  —

  It’s been two years since I left that version of Syria, and I’m still struggling to find my voice and my freedom again. I’m a thirty-two-year-old journalist, but I’ve reported freely for only two years of my life, between 2010 and 2012, as the uprising escalated into a brutal civil war. The years 2012 and beyond constitute an awful chapter of my personal and professional experience.

  I have survived extraordinarily painful conflicts—both external and internal—to be the woman I am today. A man would have been able to do it all quite easily, while I and other women have had to fight for our achievements. And I don’t want my daughter to have to do the same.

  To be frank, if I were sent back in time to the age of fifteen, when I had that very first argument about putting on the hijab, I wouldn’t do anything differently. I would choose to recommit all of the sins that have accompanied my being born into the original sin of womanhood. I would still choose to become a journalist, a secularist, and a human rights defender. I would choose to travel along this same path. Every thought I can change or eye I can open to help people see the difficult lives the women in my homeland live—and the inequality they experience—makes this battle a worthy one.

  Transition

  Syria Undone

  Zeina Karam

  January 2011, Syria. The air was thick with cigarette smoke. Men clutching whiskey glasses crowded around the roulette table as the sounds of laughter and coins jingling in slot machines mixed with the soothing voice of the Lebanese singer Fairuz. I was at the newly opened Ocean Club casino in Damascus. Young, smartly dressed Syrians standing around one corner of the bar spoke excitedly about the future.

  No one in that room could have imagined that just over a month later, protests would erupt nationwide and the country would plunge into a catastrophic war that would kill hundreds of thousands of people and send millions of others fleeing, many of them drowning in the Mediterranean before reaching safety in Europe. I would spend the next years covering the conflict, chronicling the slow, agonizing death of a country.

  My life as I knew it would be transformed.

  * * *

  —

  I think of my life in terms of before and after the Syria war—the latter generally referring to the time when my work overtook almost every other aspect of it. As the war intensified, I became entirely consumed with its coverage, constantly distracted by updates and breaking news. The question of whether I, or we, were doing enough to convey the tragedy in Syria to the rest of the world tormented me.

  At night when I can’t sleep, my thoughts are often filled with Syria. Sometimes it’s images of babies twitching and gasping for breath. Other times it’s a beheading. Sometimes my brain is kept awake simply trying to connect the dots and make sense of whatever dizzying events we had covered that day.

  As a Lebanese, covering the war in neighboring Syria was a deeply personal experience—not only because I had lived through my own country’s civil war but also because, unlike many of the foreign correspondents covering Syria who had never been to the country before the war, I had been visiting Syria ever since I was a little girl.

  My connection to Syria began when I was about ten years old, when my mother drove my sister and me three hours from Beirut to Damascus to visit my aunt, who lived there at the time. One of my earliest memories of Syria is packing the car at my aunt’s request with bread, Kleenex, and toilet paper, which were among the basic commodities constantly in shortage in the country. “Bring as much as you can,” she told us, knowing that the security guards at the Syrian border would help themselves to some of it—in addition to any cigarette boxes our driver had on hand—as their baksheesh, or “tip.” It was the 1980s, and Syria, under Hafez al-Assad, was a drab, socialist-style police state, isolated and economically troubled.

  I was filled with a mix of fear and anticipation as we left Beirut, driving through the Lebanese mountains into the Syrian capital. Even as a child, I understood enough to know that I was stepping into a place completely different from home, a place where people spoke in hushed tones and where one had to be car
eful about what was said. Assad’s portrait was plastered everywhere—at the immigration hall on the border, on the wall behind the cash register at the grocer’s, on buildings, and on car windshields.

  I remember walking down the old, covered souk called Hamidieh, taking in the smell of soaps, spices, and perfumes and watching, transfixed, as people walked up and down the maze of narrow alleys and cobblestone streets. I also recall strolling by the Citadel of Damascus, a large medieval palace locally known as Qalaat Dimashq, and buying Damascene sweets from a nearby seller who insisted on knowing whether we were from east or west Beirut, as if that would immediately determine our religion and political affiliation.

  Later, as a university student, I visited Syria a few more times. Syria then was an occupying force in Lebanon with some thirty-five thousand troops stationed in the country. There was—particularly among my Lebanese Christian friends—deep-seated hatred for Syria. They told me I was crazy to go there, even crazier for liking it. I told them they were being narrow-minded, and then, inevitably, we’d argue. I had my own conflicting feelings about Syria, but I couldn’t understand why they were unable to separate the country’s politics from its people—why they couldn’t differentiate between the Syrian soldier at a checkpoint in Lebanon and the potential kindness of an ordinary Syrian in Damascus.

  On those trips to Syria, I was able to discover more of the country’s rich cultural heritage, visiting sites like the ancient Christian town of Maaloula, the Roman ruins of Palmyra, and the Krak des Chevaliers Crusader castle. Those memories would come back to haunt me years later as the country plunged into war and those places became etched in blood.

  * * *

  —

  Within a short time after I started working at the Associated Press in 1996, I expressed an interest in going to Syria and spending time learning about its people and politics. I couldn’t wait to step into the country as a reporter and write its stories. It became my beat, taking me to new places like Aleppo, Latakia, and Homs. I felt lucky, and my ties to the country grew stronger as I soaked in its rich history and culture and made new friends.

  In June 2000, less than three weeks after Israel pulled out of south Lebanon following an eighteen-year occupation, I was on my way back from the area where UN experts were demarcating the border with Israel when my boss called from the Beirut bureau. “There are reports that Hafez al-Assad has died. Don’t come back to the office, drive straight to Damascus. We’ll send your clothes later,” he said. It was the end of an era. One of the Arab world’s most enduring dictators, known for his aloof, iron-fisted ruling style and his transformation of Syria into a regional powerhouse, was dead at sixty-nine.

  You could have almost heard a pin drop at the border crossing when I got there two hours later, one of the first journalists to arrive in Syria. Inside one of the rooms at the immigration building, I caught a glimpse of a man covering his face, and realized he was weeping silently. “Tyattamna (We have been orphaned),” said the young security guard searching our car when my taxi driver offered his condolences. Although he was hated by many, Assad, having ruled Syria for thirty years, was the only leader many had ever known. A Syria without him seemed unthinkable.

  I was apprehensive, thinking about what the next hours would bring. Would there be violence, perhaps a coup? Syria had had a long history of military coups until Assad, then an air force general, seized power in 1970. It was a well-known fact that his son, Bashar, who trained in London as an eye doctor before he was recalled home in 1994, was being groomed for the post, but would that play out in a peaceful transition?

  Within hours, however, new posters showing the late president with his son, Bashar, appeared on car windshields in Damascus, along with black ribbons tied to car radio antennas. “Dr. Bashar is now our hope,” a woman told me on the street that night, where convoys of Syrians were honking their horns in a show of support and allegiance to the younger Assad. Among the new generation, there was some hope that he would loosen the shackles and inject new energy into the country.

  Foreign journalists descended on Damascus to cover Hafez al-Assad’s funeral, which was to be the largest in Syria’s modern history. Among those journalists was the man who would, years later, become my husband.

  He was a press photographer who also worked at the AP, although I hadn’t met him yet. Our editors had assigned us a story about the late president’s exiled brother, Rifaat al-Assad; there were reports that he might return to Syria to challenge Bashar’s claim to leadership, and we were to investigate whether he still had any following in the country. Together, the photographer and I set off for Qardaha, the Assad family hometown about 125 miles northwest of Damascus, where Hafez al-Assad was to be buried.

  As a European, my future husband was not familiar with the sensitivities of the subject, so he followed my lead as I set out nervously to interview people in Rifaat’s hometown, knowing that mere mention of his name could get us in trouble. We must have approached more than two dozen people, out of whom only two agreed to talk to us; our quest eventually attracted a crowd of government informers who tagged along, listening in to our conversations. As soon as we finished our interviews, we fled the scene as fast as we could and headed back to the hotel. After struggling for hours to find a satellite phone signal, we finally climbed up to the roof to file the story.

  My husband and I married ten years later, in 2010. To this day, we remember with fondness the panic over that story that bonded us, including the red-faced, angry hotel manager who came racing up the stairs after hearing about the two journalists on the roof. I guess it set the tone for the conflict that would take over our lives many years later.

  * * *

  —

  Over the next several days, the Syrian parliament cleared the way for Bashar al-Assad to assume the presidency, amending the constitution to lower the minimum age for presidents from forty to thirty-four—Bashar’s age at the time. The move was seen by critics as an outrageous break with constitutional laws and one that reinforced the perception that Syria somehow belonged to the Assad family.

  A new chapter in Syria’s history was beginning.

  While he continued with his father’s political repression, Assad pursued economic liberalization, transforming the country’s climate within the next decade. The more time I spent in Damascus, the more it felt like home, and indeed, some people pointed to the “Lebanonization” of Syria at that time. The Damascus I left before the war was a place buzzing with opportunity. As foreign banks and universities proliferated, young Lebanese executives took up key positions in Syria—an unthinkable prospect only a few years back—and the city was brimming with tourists crowding cafés, pubs, and shopping malls. Beautiful historic houses converted into boutique hotels mushroomed across the old city, catering to wealthy visitors and the expanding rich crowd.

  The inauguration of the Ocean Club casino on Christmas Eve in 2010, the first in Damascus since the 1970s, was a major sign of Syria’s new openness. Patrons from Syria’s privileged elite and middle classes, along with some Arab tourists, flocked to the building near the airport, despite opposition from conservative lawmakers and other critics. It was a far cry from the rigid, closed Damascus of my childhood.

  * * *

  —

  Outside, the world was also changing. A fruit seller in Tunisia called Mohamed Bouazizi had set himself on fire in an act of desperation on December 17, 2010, killing himself and setting off a revolution that caught swiftly across the region in what came to be known as the Arab Spring.

  Still, when protests broke out in Dara’a, a city in southern Syria, in March 2011, I was deeply skeptical that they would amount to anything significant. I was in Cairo covering the aftermath of the uprising in Egypt and assisting our regional bureau with coverage of the war in Libya. An Egyptian colleague burst excitedly into the newsroom to announce that the Arab Spring had arrived in Syria.

  “Nah, I d
on’t think so,” I replied coolly.

  In part, my disbelief was rooted in a failed protest only a few weeks earlier. I had gone to Damascus in anticipation of a Day of Rage that activists had been organizing on social media networks against Assad’s rule. But the rain-soaked city’s streets were deserted, and except for the plainclothes security agents stationed protectively in key areas and on street corners, not a single person had showed up. It was largely due to fear and intimidation, of course, but many people also felt wary of rocking the boat after having seen Libya, and to a lesser extent Egypt, descend into chaos following their own uprisings.

  There was also the paradox of Assad himself. As one longtime Syria observer told me early on in the uprising, many Syrians did not necessarily hate Bashar. In fact, many Syrian youth loved him; they were convinced he was an instrument of change, held back by an old guard reluctant to yield ground. A few days later, as the demonstrations in Dara’a escalated, I flew back from Cairo to Beirut and took a taxi to Damascus, still somewhat skeptical that the seemingly snowballing protests were anything like those that had brought down longtime dictators in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya.

  Any skepticism soon vanished, however, after I reached the drought-parched south along with a few other local and foreign journalists. Syrian forces were reportedly using water cannons, batons, and gunfire to beat back protesters in Dara’a who were defiantly marching and shouting slogans against corruption, calling for more political freedom. Checkpoints throughout the city were manned by soldiers in camouflage uniforms and plainclothes security agents with rifles. Antiterrorism police wearing dark blue uniforms were also out on the streets. An ambulance was parked on the side of a road leading to the old city, its windshield smashed. A burst of semiautomatic gunfire echoed in the old center.