Syrian Dust: Reporting from the Heart of the War

by Francesca Borri

  Copyright © 2015 by Francesca Borri

  English translation © 2016 by Anne Milano Appel

  First Seven Stories Press edition March 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Seven Stories Press

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  New York, NY 10013

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Borri, Francesca, author.

  Syrian dust : reporting from the heart of the battle for Aleppo / Francesca Borri ; translated by Anne Milano Appel.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-60980-661-3 (paperback)

  1. Borri, Francesca. 2. Syria--History--Civil War, 2011---Personal narratives, Italian. 3. Women war correspondents--Italy--Biography. 4. Women war correspondents--Syria--Biography. I. Appel, Anne Milano, translator. II. Title.

  DS98.72.B67A3 2016

  956.9104’2--dc23

  2015025053

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  Book design by Jon Gilbert

  Printed in the U.S A

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Stanley Greene

  “Shut your eyes and see.”

  —james joyce

  CONTENTS

  AUTUMN 2012

  WINTER 2013

  SPRING 2013

  SUMMER 2013

  AUTUMN 2013

  JOURNEY TO THE END OF ALEPPO

  AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  About the Translator

  About Seven Stories Press

  AUTUMN 2012

  The most dangerous place here is the hospital. You arrive, and it’s the first thing they tell you: if you want to feel safe, stay at the front.

  Abandon all rules, ye who enter here. All logic. Aleppo is nothing but explosions these days. Exploding. Everything explodes and topples. And when you venture out in search of water, when you’re hungry, thirsty, there’s nothing but snipers everywhere. Assad’s planes are suddenly strafe bombing, rushing at you in maelstroms of wind—wind, and dust and flesh. But they are so imprecise that they never bomb the front lines: they’d risk hitting the loyalists instead of the rebels.

  The unit of the Free Syrian Army in which we’re embedded consists of thirteen men, two in flip-flops, while the others don’t always have two shoes that match. There were seventeen of them, three died trying to recover the body of a fourth man that is still out there, at the end of the street. Their base is a school, and each of them has a Kalashnikov and a knife. In the principal’s office, a child polishes the family silver: two rocket launchers and a rifle. Except for the captain, an officer who left Assad’s troops six months ago, they’re just young kids of seventeen, eighteen. Alaa is studying philosophy, and between shifts he reads Habermas. Deserters are easily recognizable: they stole their camouflage shirts from the barracks. The others wear T-shirts sporting Messi or Che Guevara.

  The Syrian Spring has turned into the Syrian War. And the evolution can immediately be perceived in the difference between the Lebanese border and that of Turkey. Beirut is a refuge for the most notorious activists: the ones who started it all in March 2011, demonstration after demonstration, protest after protest. The ones from whom the Free Army, in a sense, seized the revolution. They not only helped us journalists cross the border illegally, but, more importantly, they enabled us to understand their motives and demands. Now the border with Lebanon is inaccessible, however, guarded mile after mile by Hezbollah’s men. Allies of the regime. On the other hand, the border with Turkey has been opened: the rebels control the passport office, a doormat at its entrance portraying Assad. But this new Syria of which they are the self-appointed spokesmen is honestly an unknown. Difficult to discuss politics here. Useless to inquire about UN negotiations, about Islam. About Sunnis and Shiites. For the rebels, the main thing is to have us fork over $300 apiece: the fee they charge for a tour of Aleppo under attack. Journalists are the big business of the day.

  Because, in theory, there are four fronts. But the truth is that there is only one front here: it’s the sky. And those who have nothing but bullets to use against the fighter jets haven’t got a chance. Without intervention from the West, as in Libya, the Free Army can’t win. And so, for now, it’s trying not to lose. They’re defending positions in Aleppo, nothing more. They’re not advancing.

  On average today, at al-Shifa hospital, there’s been one death every three minutes and thirty-seven seconds. To reassure the population, the rebels drive around in jeeps rigged out with Dushkas, old Soviet machine guns, but a machine gun placebo against a fighter plane has about as much effect as a peashooter. Most importantly, to reassure the world—to convince it that they are deserving of weapons and support—the rebels drag the rest of us to the front, exposing us to invisible loyalist snipers. Two, three of them crouch at the first intersection, a hundred yards away. Then they dash across, upright, blindly spraying rounds with the Kalashnikovs. Up and down. As cameras flash. When they cross back, when they return to our side, they don’t ask if they’ve hit the enemy. They ask: “How did the photo come out?”

  Every so often, doubling as stunt men for themselves, they forget to release the safety catch.

  Meanwhile everything around is exploding: exploding and collapsing. As soldiers play, children die. There should be civilians and combatants in Aleppo, there should be a front—a here and a there. Instead there are no rules. There’s no asylum. Ambulances are loaded with ammunition, mosques converted into military posts. Refugees in the barracks, explosives in the fire extinguishers, undergraduates at the front working on their dissertations, students at the university bombed while in class. Mines in the parks, corpses among the swings. Rebels wearing loyalist uniforms. Loyalists without uniforms. And this base we’re settled in looks more like an occupied high school than an army unit. It’s one continuous fight. Whose turn to cook, how to capture the next block. What tactic to use. You stole my boots, no, you’re the one who stole my blankets. And it’s only a microcosm of what happens among the various armed groups, and more generally speaking, among the various opposition groups. Because the Free Army should eventually hand over its power to the National Council, that government-in-exile of sorts based in Istanbul, but there is no sole leadership and no sole strategy. Neither among civilians nor the military. And this, more than any arsenal, is Assad’s real strength.

  In and out of the classrooms, amid the Kalashnikovs and grenades, there are children running around. Ahmed is six years old. “Today I’ll teach you to be a true Syrian,” the commander tells him. “A free Syrian.” He hands him his Beretta and makes him fire a shot in the air, in these narrow streets flanked with eight-story buildings, their windows already smashed in. Another one shatters. A woman, her hair in a braid, skirt down to her ankles, runs out frightened. The bullet got wedged in her kitchen. She grabs my pen and notebook. “What kind of Syria will ever emerge,” she writes, “from men like these?” And she goes back to her cubbyhole under the stairs.

  a hand pulls me to the ground, and the bullet, a few feet overhead, rips into the wall.

  I’d wondere
d where the inhabitants of Aleppo had gone. There are over two million of them, according to the latest census, 2,132,100 they say, and two-thirds seem to be still here, in these rubble-strewn streets besieged by snipers. But the houses, blasted by artillery fire, are empty: a lamp, a curtain, fossils of normal lives dangle in the wind from structures left gaping, torn open by the bombs. Even a cat here, curled up in a chair, appears to be sleeping, but it’s dead.

  I’m in a dark hole when I get up, a steep flight of steps in front of me. And there they are, finally, Aleppo’s inhabitants. Dozens of shadowy wraiths shuffle around me, curious; I’m the first soul they’ve run into in two months. A cigarette lighter casts a glow. Nineteen children, clinging tightly to one another, stare at me in silence, lined up against a wall. Frozen. They look at me terrified, then I see why: it’s the helmet. They think I’m one of Assad’s soldiers. They’re lined up against the wall like prisoners awaiting execution.

  The house of Umm Bashar was hit right away, at the beginning of August. She should really be called Umm Mahmoud, the mother of Mahmoud, since Bashar, twenty-eight, the firstborn, ended up under a hunk of concrete, his sweatshirt sleeve sticking out, scarlet, in the dust. They had to run away because the bombings, in general, occur in twos—the second is meant for the rescuers. There are thirty-seven people in here. Five men and thirteen women, plus the children ranging in age from one to nine. All they have with them are the clothes they were wearing when they fled. They can’t afford to rent a house, nor do they have fifty dollars for a car to the Turkish border. So they get by down here, a camp stove in the corner and no water, gas, or electricity. Every now and then Omar, twenty-nine, a taxi driver, ventures out in search of food. Across the street there’s a sniper waiting for him. Omar’s brother Shadi, twenty-seven, a mechanic, was killed that way. “I’ll never forget the day I found myself sifting through the vegetables. The sugar, the rice, whatever he had bought. Washing the blood off the potatoes, and cooking them anyway.”

  At this point, inside or outside really makes no difference in Aleppo. The entire city is pounded by aircraft, helicopters, and tanks, hammered inch by inch: bombs and blasts, an explosion every few seconds. Thousands have sought refuge underground. “They hand out bread at the cemetery. Only among the dead can you be certain of not being a target,” Omar says. But the truth is that there is no safe haven: since Assad unleashed the use of airpower, survival is a matter of luck. “On the outskirts high-rises protect you from mortar strikes. You go to the first or second floor: maybe only the upper floors will collapse. If a plane hits the building though, you’re left under tons of rubble. In a one-story house, on the other hand”—he means the kind typical of Aleppo, graceful homes with a central courtyard, lemon trees, jasmine vines—“in a one-story house, unless the plane strikes right on top of you, there’s less rubble. Maybe they’ll dig you out. Though there’s still the danger of mortars.”

  The truth is that the only safe thing to do in Aleppo is leave.

  Except it’s our turn again now. An anti-aircraft machine gun abruptly spits out three shells. And it’s an instant, that’s all. Just time to look at one another and that’s it. An Assad fighter jet starts roaring in our heads, its black shape, through a vent grille, appears, disappears, reappears, levels out, climbs again, nineteen children screaming frantically. These are the cruelest moments, because the mind is still lucid. And as the pilot chooses his target, while maybe it will be you, all you can do is huddle there, your back against a damp wall, and stare at the floor along with everything you’ve left undone in your life, everything you put off, as you look around, now that maybe your number’s up, and even if you had something to say, here among these strangers, anything you could utter, any name, any wish, any regret, whom could you say it to? now? no matter who you miss, no matter who you once loved, surrounded by these dark eyes, the hunger, the mud, this feverish skin, these haggard faces, surrounded by these lives that are not mine, this plane coming back, and they ask you: Are you all right? But the truth is that they don’t even know your name—and all around you, meanwhile, there’s bombing.

  Aisha, nine years old, hands me a business card. An address: it’s the shop above. The one the stairs lead up to. “Tariq al-Bab,” she says, “we are in Tariq al-Bab. Write that they should come and get us. Don’t write useless things.” Then she notices my phone, and asks: “Do you have the number for the UN?”

  Yet, as battered as the city is by Assad, Aleppo’s underground is wary of the Free Army. “They started a war that they were not prepared to fight,” Afraa, sixteen years old, tells me, that one sentence marked by four explosions. “There they are with flip-flops and ten bullets apiece,” she says, “we will be crushed. They gave Assad exactly what he was looking for: an excuse for violence.” When you ask about the rebels, opinion is almost unanimous in Aleppo: no one knows what their strategy is, or who they really are. And worst of all, what kind of Syria they want. Afraa has taken part in dozens of demonstrations. “But that’s all over now. Now it’s time for arms. We have no place anymore, no voice.” Seventeen words, five explosions. “They take our houses, shoot from our windows. And they don’t care if we have no other place to go. If we are trapped. In two months, we haven’t seen anyone here.” Not an NGO, not the Red Cross. Not a Doctor Without Borders: no one. Another mortar rains down. The crash of shattered glass. Screams. “Besides, they are all so religious, all so conservative. And all Sunnis,” Maryam says. She is Afraa’s best friend, and she too is all in black. But she’s Christian. She points to her veil, and tells me: “It’s my helmet.”

  I keep looking at my watch. Waiting for dawn. But I’m the only one; it’s a habit from the old life. Because the only difference between night and day here is that without light the Kalashnikovs are useless. At night, all that remains is the metronome of explosions. The rebels can’t respond to that. At night in Aleppo the war becomes slaughter. You don’t fight, you die and that’s it. Randomly.

  They bomb here, they bomb and bomb. That’s all.

  fortunately, Abdel Qader al-Saleh is a very busy man and only has ten minutes for the journalists. Because he’s the commander of the rebels in the Aleppo zone, and to show that he is not afraid of Assad or anything else, he arranges for his interviews to take place on the front line, wearing a short-sleeved shirt and holding a glass of tea. “I would say that the situation is positive,” he begins. An explosive burst nearby. “Another two months,” he assures us, “and Aleppo will be liberated.” Another explosion. A building at the end of the street, already buckling, gives way completely. “Maybe three.” The dust covers us. “Another biscuit?” and he pours you more tea.

  Actually it’s been twenty days now since his men launched the conclusive offensive for the conquest of Aleppo, after the conclusive offensive in August, and the only difference is that the front lines are now the front zones: there’s fighting everywhere. The city, or more precisely its ruins, is a maze of snipers, hammered by artillery. Until the night before, the rebels claimed they had no more ammunition. So it seems they decided to go for broke, a moment before surrendering, and attack. It’s rumored that they were counting on mass desertion among the regime’s ranks, arranged through some of Assad’s officers—that is, bought from some of Assad’s officers—for thousands of dollars. But after twenty days, no one has advanced here. It’s just a new balance point on a higher level of violence. “But don’t write that no one is advancing,” a doctor at al-Shifa counsels me, holding what look like bloody plaster flakes in his hands. “The numbers of dead are advancing.” I rashly offer to throw the flakes away for him. They turn out to be skull fragments.

  The narrow section of the front where we are embedded is an intersection in the old city populated by three interpreters, seven photographers, two journalists, a cat, and four insurgents. Around the corner, a loyalist sniper. The four rebels sit in what must once have been a small shop, engaged for the past hour in a lively discussion of strategy f
or the capture of Damascus. An elderly woman, meanwhile, with a basket of vegetables, emerges cautiously; she lives across the way. But no one pays any attention. And after a while, resigned, she crosses by herself, mumbling verses from the Koran as prayer. Even Wikipedia recommends what’s called “covering fire.” That’s two dollars a bullet, Fahdi chews me out, “are you crazy?” And he goes back to planning the capture of Damascus. In the afternoon, reinforcements jump down from a jeep in the person of Ayman Haj Jaeed, eighteen years old. Today is his second day at the front. Write this, he tells me: “Assad is at the end of his rope.” He crosses the street at a run waving his Kalashnikov, shooting as fast as he can. “Write, write!” he yells at me from across the street: “Two more months, and Aleppo will be free.” Only he fired to the left. And the sniper was on his right.

  The rebels all have similar stories. They’re laborers, engineers, truck drivers. Students. Shopkeepers. They’ve seen Tunisia on television, they’ve seen Egypt, and they too have begun to protest. Demonstration after demonstration. All peaceful. But meanwhile the police went from handcuffs to bullets, and from bullets to tanks. Because the rebels all have similar stories. They all started out that way, peaceful, until a father, a brother, was killed, and they joined the Free Army. “Don’t call it a civil war,” they keep telling you. “We are not Syrians against Syrians, but Syrians against Assad.” And then they ask you: “Why doesn’t the world get involved?” Dollars arrive from other countries, mainly from Qatar and Saudi Arabia, but not weapons. The United States vetoes it: they don’t have confidence in these rebels who lack organization and direction, both military and political. Who lack everything. Their press spokesman here, Mohammed Noor, can’t even tell me approximately how many insurgents there are. And besides that, General Riad al-Assad, the commander in chief of the Free Army, isn’t even in Syria: he’s in Turkey. He communicates with the commanding officer via Skype.