Two Sisters

by Åsne Seierstad

  A man panted alongside him, another was gaining ground behind. Do not lose control. Do not panic.

  Somebody groaned in the darkness.

  Allahu Akbar!

  A fresh burst of gunfire. Was he running in the right direction?

  Had the girls run through here too?

  * * *

  When he’d heard that the girls had crossed into Syria, he had broken down.

  He had dragged himself back to the hotel, hauled himself past the receptionist behind the glass, and trudged up the stairs to his room on the third floor. Then he had lain down on the bed.

  His mind was whirling. Everything seemed hazy. It grew dark. The sun came up. Then night fell once more.

  He had not called Sara. What would he say?

  He stayed in bed, getting up now and again only to gulp water from the tap. He had failed as a father and as a man.

  When the sun came up for the second time, he began to pull himself together. He talked to himself, an old habit.

  I am not a father if I don’t keep on searching.

  I am not Sadiq if I return home now.

  Then he had called Sara.

  “Don’t go over, yes, go over, no, come home,” she said. And eventually: “Find them.”

  He had then called up Asker and Bærum Police Station.

  “We would strongly advise against that,” was the message.

  Sadiq called Mehmut. “Can you drive me to the border?”

  * * *

  They left at sunset. Thistle and stiff grass grew along the roadside, with fields beyond. It was the end of October. The crops had already been harvested. The earth looked like hard-packed sand.

  The landscape was illuminated in a final glimmer of pink before fading into dim hues of brown and gray. Then darkness fell.

  Mehmut had initially asked him to reconsider.

  “I have to know what’s happened to my daughters. I have to.”

  “Okay. I’ll help you. I have friends there.”

  He rang back and told Sadiq to be ready that same afternoon.

  “I have a friend called Osman,” Mehmut said, when they were in the car. He placed emphasis on the name. “Osman can help you. When he gives his word, you can count on him to the bitter end. Don’t trust anybody else. Remember that.”

  They stopped outside a village by the border.

  There were others skulking around the area. They had arrived by car, by moped, and on buses. Bearded types with Gulf accents. North Africans. Brits. Clean-shaven Turks. And him. The Norwegian. The Somali.

  Hundreds of people crossed no-man’s-land illegally every day. The frontier was fenced, but there were many holes in the fence. Mehmut had driven several jihadists to this spot, including, only recently, three Norwegians, he told Sadiq. Two had traveled together, one was on his own. Sometimes he picked people up at the airport and drove them directly here. Often these tasks would come from Osman. Once again he stressed: “Don’t trust anyone but him. Not there, not here. Osman is expecting you on the other side. He’ll be waiting there, in an olive grove.”

  You could be driven through the border station at Bab al-Hawa and be in Syria in a matter of minutes. But it was expensive—the smuggler wanted money, the driver needed to be paid, the border guard had to be bribed.

  The other option was to run.

  That alternative cost $200. You paid half on the Turkish side and, if you got over, the rest in Syria.

  * * *

  He heard sand being kicked up, voices. Someone was running in the opposite direction, toward him. Out. Away from the war.

  Suddenly he was surrounded by people, flashlights, shadows. He came to a halt, panting, gasping for breath, sweat pouring off him.

  From the light of a beam he could discern trees: crooked, dark branches, the gleam of leaves. There were a group of men in front of him. He could hear and feel their proximity. They had Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders and were wearing flak jackets and balaclavas. Sadiq peered around, at a loss. A flashlight was pointed at him. A hefty man approached.

  Then something was being pulled over his head. He raised his hands to resist and lost his glasses. Someone clutched him by the throat.

  “Calm down!” a voice said. “It’s only a hood!”

  “Keep away from me!” Sadiq shouted.

  “All newcomers have to have one on. I’m Osman,” the voice said calmly. Peering through the hole in his hood, Sadiq could see a broad man in the semidarkness.

  The foreign fighters wore hoods so they would not be identified. They were often smuggled over the border in groups by the same network, so if one were seen and recognized, the others could be found. Sadiq had taken the same route as the jihadists and had to abide by the same rules. He picked up his glasses and squinted through the eyeholes. The man speaking was in his thirties. He was tall, heavyset, with fair skin and a large beard.

  “You’re one of us now,” he said, handing Sadiq an AK-47 and an ammunition belt. “There are twenty-six rounds in the magazine,” he told him.

  Sadiq had not held a weapon for many years. He judged the heft of it in his hand, ran his fingers across it.

  “No, it holds twenty-five,” Sadiq said.

  “Twenty-six.”

  Sadiq pointed the gun in the air and fired off a shot.

  “Are you crazy?” Osman hissed.

  “Had to check if it worked,” Sadiq replied. “And you were right, there were twenty-six bullets, one was already in the chamber.”

  Gunfire crackled between the trees.

  “Out of here! Now!” someone said. They clambered into a light-colored Škoda pickup.

  “What’s going on?” Sadiq asked.

  “It’s not about us,” he was told in reply, as he sat squeezed between fighters in the backseat.

  Not us. Who were we?

  “Man nahnu?” he asked. Who are we?

  “We’re Jabhat al-Nusra.”

  Al-Qaida’s men in Syria.

  * * *

  The truck sped along at a furious pace over the potholed back road, then swerved onto a roundabout and veered off down darkened streets. Shooting could still be heard when the car stopped. Sadiq had switched to soldier mode, an identity he thought was gone. But no, his brain was already programmed, all it needed was to be reactivated. The gunfire took him back to the war that had formed him.

  He reverted to the mind-set of the teenager who has joined the struggle against a dictator. He collected himself. A good soldier needed to remain calm amid chaos.

  He had enlisted in the National Movement without ever having held a weapon. As a boy, he had known no fear. If government soldiers were in front of him, he ran straight at them. After being wounded in a firefight, he was sent to Saudi Arabia for treatment. During his time there they had discovered how poor his eyesight was and given him glasses. He was delighted. But on his return he found he was no longer as brave—because now he could see. On the other hand, his aim was much improved. In time he was placed alongside the marksmen. It was in their ranks that he had learned how to control a pounding heart.

  He was in the zone. He felt at home, among friends, warmed up, fired up almost, and he awaited orders.

  “No, no, not now, there are two other groups fighting, and that,” Osman said, pointing to the machine gun, “is only to defend yourself with, just in case. The war is around us. Everywhere. At all times. Anything can happen.”

  His blood pumped more slowly. No, he was not going to fire.

  Because this is not my war.

  I have come to save my daughters. I’m just a father.

  * * *

  “Ismael, we’re alive Alhamdulillah!”

  Twelve days had passed since they had left.

  “Everything is fine with us,” the sisters wrote on Messenger and apologized for not having been in touch sooner.

  “We have found out that you have reported us missing, which makes it hard to stay in touch. We have so much news to share and would really like to talk more
but it is difficult. You don’t need to worry, we are safe and sound Alhamdulillah. We now have a place to stay and everyone makes us feel very welcome. Everything here is like in Somalia hehe, broken toilets, electricity and water on the blink and zero traffic rules, but Alhamdulillah we are content. Dad, if you are still in Turkey, go home. We are far away and it is of no use to any of you not to be together as a family at this difficult time. Tell Mom we’re so very sorry for the pain you are going through, but stay strong and pray to Allah that everything turns out for the best. Tell Jibril and Isaq that we miss them. Btw they can have the iPad.”

  The message was a declaration of independence and a vindication.

  “We are aware that many people think what we did was wrong but we have spoken to an alim [Islamic legal scholar] down here and he approved of our actions. In order for us to tell you more and stay in touch you need to keep this to yourselves. We never wanted anybody besides our family to know we left, so dearest ones whom we love so much, forgive us and have sabr [patience].”

  Ismael responded right away.

  “Hi. Happy you keep in touch.”

  The girls clarified their message: “Tell Dad to go home! It is not safe for him here!!”

  “Dad is not planning to come home,” Ismael replied. “He says he would rather die down there.”

  “We are not anywhere he can get to us and no one knows who we are apart from the people we have told. Handing money over to people who claim they can help him is not going to make him find us.”

  “Do you want to speak to Mom?” Ismael asked, sitting in his room. “She thinks what you have done is wrong and she wants Leila to come home.”

  “We cannot talk on the phone at the moment.”

  “Are you planning on coming back?”

  There was no answer.

  “Mom says both of you promised never to leave her!” Ismael continued.

  The sisters logged off.

  * * *

  Sadiq lay sleeping in Osman’s backyard.

  The previous night he had been led through a blue door, across a courtyard, toward a small lean-to by the wall. He had fallen asleep instantly on a narrow bed.

  At the crack of dawn he was awoken by a husky voice: “Abu Ismael, Abu Ismael…”

  He looked around. An old man was looking in at him.

  “Will you join me for tea?”

  Abu Ismael was the name Mehmut had given the smugglers. It meant Ismael’s father. In the Arab world, it was common to be known by the name of your firstborn son.

  The only thing Abu Ismael wanted at that moment was to continue sleeping. He had finally been in a heavy, dreamless slumber. But he could not refuse, so he got up to drink tea with Osman’s father—Abu Omar, after his eldest son.

  The old man rolled two cigarettes, gave one to Sadiq, and lit up both. It was his own homegrown tobacco.

  “Osman has good contacts, he can help you,” the older man said, clearing his throat.

  Sadiq began to cough. He assuaged the pungent taste with strong, sweet tea.

  Each time they were finished smoking, Abu Omar set about rolling two more. And so it continued.

  Eventually he heard a door opening and a sink being filled with water. The rest of the household was stirring. Now they would head out and find his daughters. According to the smugglers in Hatay, they had most likely been driven precisely to where Sadiq now found himself—in Atmeh.

  Osman joined them around ten. In daylight, Sadiq could see he had light brown freckles and an auburn beard, a typical northern Syrian.

  A platter of eggs, olives, cheese, and zatar, a purée made from fresh thyme, sesame seeds, sumac, and oil, was carried in by Osman’s younger brothers. Warm bread and more tea were also brought in.

  It was time to negotiate. Sadiq had to pay for a car, men, and the rent of the Kalashnikov. He needed two minders, the price was $10 a day plus expenses per man. He would get the Kalashnikov for $20 a day. Without people to guard him, he could not go outside. Because Sadiq too could fetch a price. There were criminal gangs among the ranks of the militias, who kidnapped foreigners and handed them over to Assad or the Islamists. If you were alive, Osman told him, they would throw you in a cell and demand $5,000 from your family or government for your release; if you were dead, they would ask for only $2,000. In that case, you would be placed in a freezer, your corpse stacked on top of others, until they received payment for you.

  “Hence the guards,” Osman said. “But you need to be on the lookout too, keep an eye on everything going on, these are troubled times.” He sighed. “But you’re safe here in Atmeh. Everybody knows us here.”

  His father, a retired colonel from Assad’s air force, looked at his son in silence. Then shook his head.

  “No one is safe in Syria.”

  The land of fear, the country was called. For many Syrians fear had become a part of themselves; it was impossible to separate from it. Present in every breath they took and every beat of their hearts; lodged in their minds and in their stomachs. It lay deep in their souls. And the older you became, the more afraid you were.

  Typically, it had been the young who had gone into the streets to demonstrate when the protests against the dictatorships in the Arab world broke out. Older people had been more skeptical. Disobedience would be punished as it always had been. They did not possess the fearlessness of the young. They had seen too much.

  For decades, Syrians had lived under the Assad family. When Hafez was born in 1930, his father had already been given the nickname al-Asad—“the Lion”—for his early opposition to French rule, and later to the Syrian authorities. Hafez was brought up in a poor village inhabited by the Alawite minority, leaving at the age of nine to become the first of his family to be educated beyond primary school. He sought out milieus where Alawites were accepted, developing an early hatred for the Muslim Brotherhood, whose members in Syria came from affluent, conservative families. At sixteen, he joined the Baath Party, whose motto was “unity, liberty, socialism,” and began networking. He made friends among poor Sunni Muslims and Christians, united in their opposition to the bourgeoisie who ruled the country. The army and the party were good career paths for ambitious young men of modest means. Hafez rose quickly through the ranks at the military academy in Homs, which offered free room and board, a grant, and pilot training.

  Hafez al-Assad was in his midthirties in 1966, when the Baath Party staged a successful coup, in the wake of which he was appointed minister of defense. Following a fierce power struggle between the military and civilian wings of the party, the former proved victorious, and in 1970 Hafez al-Assad seized all power in a new coup. He demonstrated particular brutality against religious opposition; Islamists were tortured and killed.

  There had been clashes between the regime and Islamists from the beginning of the 1960s. Over the course of the ’70s, the Muslim Brotherhood abandoned peaceful opposition and adopted guerrilla tactics. Representatives of the regime were killed in a series of car bomb attacks. One morning the duty officer at the military academy in Aleppo called all the Alawite cadets to a meeting, whereupon the unarmed young men were massacred by the officer and his accomplices. The following year, in 1980, Assad narrowly avoided a similar fate in a grenade attack, when one of his bodyguards sacrificed himself in the blast. The president’s revenge was merciless. Members of the Brotherhood were executed by the hundreds, the organization was banned, and membership was punishable by death.

  The attacks on the military and local Baathist Party supporters continued. In early 1982, Islamists declared the Sunni-dominated city of Hama “liberated.” The regime decided to crush opposition once and for all. In the space of a few weeks, the army, under the leadership of Hafez’s brother Rifaat, razed the city to the ground. Twenty, perhaps thirty thousand people were slaughtered, but no exact figures and no pictures of the killings exist. Only afterward did rumors about what had happened leak out.

  Assad and his clique ruled, but Sunnis, Shias, Christians, Islamists,
Kurds, and Druse all formed the apparatus of power, sharing privileges as well as guilt. The tactical alliance with the Sunni middle class in Damascus and Aleppo was of particular importance. The Alawites, who made up scarcely 11 percent of the population and were regarded by dogmatic Sunni Muslims as infidels, had never previously held political power. Avoiding favoritism toward any of the main religious groups was the strategy, and in so doing Assad created a relatively secular state.

  Islamists ended up in cells and torture chambers. Intellectuals laid down their pens, their voices silenced. Because people want to live.

  Their hope lay in the Lion’s successors loosening the grip.

  Hafez’s firstborn son, Bassel, was groomed to take over the throne. One January morning in 1994, he crashed his sports car at a roundabout on his way to Damascus Airport and was killed instantly. Consequently, his brother Bashar, studying ophthalmology in London, had to undertake an intensive course in military training and political instruction. There were many who doubted Bashar was strong enough to carry on the regime.

  When Hafez died of a heart attack in 2000, the intellectuals, as well as the Islamists, saw a glimmer of hope. The young eye doctor opened the door for a debate that would never have been tolerated under his father—the Damascus Spring. In the absence of a free media, the discussions were carried out in the salons—muntadayat—of private houses. These discussions resulted in a demand for reforms. The Statement of 99 was a manifesto drawn up by ninety-nine Syrian intellectuals demanding political diversity and a state governed by the rule of law that would allow freedom of expression and the right to organize. In January 2001, the Statement of 1,000 went even further, demanding democracy and a multiparty system.

  Then came the Damascus Winter. Pressure from the army and the old guard in the Baath Party led to a reverse in the thaw, and leaders of the reform movement were jailed.

  All other parties were to remain banned. Homage was to be shown to the new president. His image was hung on walls and lampposts, in bazaars, in offices, schools, and hospitals. Everywhere you turned, Bashar al-Assad looked down upon you, just as the face of his father before him, the old pilot, once had. The only update from his father’s time was that the young Assad posed in sunglasses à la Top Gun.