Syrian Dust: Reporting from the Heart of the War

by Francesca Borri

  Not a pen, not a sheet of paper. Not a stamp. Not one clerk.

  Were it not for Jabhat al-Nusra, in fact, it would already be over here. And it’s not just a matter of bread. Al Qaeda’s men are a minority, about 5 percent of the combatants, according to estimates, but they are the best trained, the best equipped. They are the ones who decide. In a short time, they’ve captured almost all the military bases in the surrounding area, almost all the artillery batteries. The regime attacks with planes and missiles, while the Free Army’s General Headquarters in Aleppo is now the General Headquarters of Jabhat al-Nusra.

  Not much is known about them, however. They don’t talk to us journalists. Though, by contrast, we talk about nothing but them. With their black balaclavas, Jabhat al-Nusra is the most picturesque subject we could hope for. Some even have a saber, and naturally those are our favorites.

  But the truth is that Aleppo keeps its distance from them, focused only on surviving. Rumor has it that Jabhat al-Nusra promised the Free Army that they will leave once Assad falls, once law has been established. That this is the agreement. “What they mean by law, however, isn’t clear,” Salem tells me, puzzled, having just reopened his fruit and vegetable kiosk. “They deserve respect: without them we would all be dead. But Syria is and must remain a plural, secular country.” Salem has a piece of shrapnel in his arm. A grenade’s handiwork. “They’d stopped me because I had a bottle of liquor. The grenade exploded while they were warning me about how dangerous alcohol is.”

  Down below, beneath the General Headquarters, they have set up a prison.

  But nobody knows anything about the detainees. Who they are, and how many. And why they’re there.

  On what charges they were arrested. If they will stand trial. If they will be executed.

  You ask. All they tell you is: “They are shabia.” Ghosts.

  she arrives at work in the morning, veil and a trace of mascara, and parks in front of the door as if she were going to the office. But it’s the only thing left to her, from her old life, because that’s not the entrance to the high school where she teaches English, but the door to her sniper’s post.

  She’s thirty-six years old, and has had a new name for the last six months: Guevara. Her two children, Wael and Mira, died in an air raid. They were ten and seven. And she enlisted in the Free Army. “They were so terrified by the war. The bloodshed, the explosions. And I tried to reassure them, I kept telling them, I kept saying: I’ll protect you.” She looks at me. “I’m here to avenge them.”

  The unit she fights with, about thirty men, is called Wa’id. The Promise.

  Two years, sixty-five thousand victims, seven hundred thousand refugees. But Guevara receives us warmly. “Welcome!” She slips the pistol into her handbag and offers us coffee on an old couch, as composed as if we were in the kitchen of her home. But we are right on the front line, behind a pile of bricks and sandbags. Two hundred yards farther on, a cordon of white buildings: that’s where Assad’s Aleppo begins. That’s where his snipers start. Where bullets rain down.

  Guevara’s post is across the street. On the third floor. But it’s not as close as it seems: to dodge enemy fire, she leads us through basements, from building to building, between breaches ripped open in the foundations. Then she simply enters, sits down at the window in a living room, the dinnerware still intact behind her and two plants, now withered. She waits for someone to stumble into her crosshairs. She doesn’t show the least bit of emotion. Only when she spots a Snow White blanket from the hallway, in what must have been the children’s room, does she hesitate for a second. “I know what you want to ask me. Whether I ever think about it, about my former life. But for two years you’ve been watching Assad’s carnage, indifferent to it. The real question is this: You who judge me, what alternative have you left me?

  “It’s not as if you find yourself at the front all of a sudden. I’ve always been an activist. But at some point you realize that demonstrations are useless: it’s your megaphone against their tanks. And if we don’t want to be killed, everyone here must help as best he can. Being a sniper, if you ask me, is the best role for a woman, because it’s a matter of concentration and precision, not strength. I know I’m an exception. My girlfriends, at most, volunteer as nurses. But caring for our wounds is not enough. We must stop Assad from wounding us.”

  She’s not surprised, really, that women in Aleppo are not at the front line. It’s not just the traditions of Syrian society. Guevara admits: “They all know and respect me here, but I know what they’re saying, that my husband should be the one to defend me.” That’s not the point: the point is the Islamists. More and more of them. And more and more radical. Truthfully, they don’t seem to consider women particularly useful. “But that’s the very reason why it’s important to be here. Fighting. To be able to matter more in tomorrow’s Syria,” Guevara argues. “At first, my comrades were wary. I gained their trust in the field,” she says. “Bullet by bullet.

  “All those who are an example began by being an exception.”

  As she sees it, any Syrian who hasn’t joined the Free Army is a traitor. That includes the rest of her family, who live three hundred yards away: beyond that row of white buildings. Father, mother, and nine brothers and sisters. “Aren’t you ever afraid you’ll hit them?” I ask. Partly because the criteria for distinguishing civilians from enemies don’t seem very exacting. “I shoot those in uniform,” Guevara explains, “and those who seem suspicious to me.” Those who come by at night, for instance, or who pass by several times. “It’s not that I’m certain. But if you choose to remain on the other side, to stay there and watch, you are basically supporting Assad. Silence here doesn’t make you a spectator: it makes you an accomplice. It’s not that I’m unafraid. But when I wake up with a start at night, and I wonder how we ever ended up this way, I just whisper to myself: Mira! Wael! Because in spite of everything, I will remember these days as the best days of my life: as the days I won freedom.”

  She has hit what she calls “the target” twenty-five times. Five died.

  “And when I hit them, I wait. Because after a while, someone comes to recover the body. And I shoot again, without thinking about it. Because my only thought is that promises must be kept.”

  eva, meanwhile, has arrived in Turkey, in Antakya, our base city, less than twenty miles from the border. A slight, gentle lady from Genoa, extremely thin, with long, straight pale hair. Big, frightened eyes. She smokes one cigarette after another, trembling all over. She’s shaking so much that you have to fill her teacup half-full, otherwise it spills on the floor, on her notes, on her datebook, which looks like a seismograph. Because her son said he was coming here on vacation, at Christmas, and instead he went to Syria to fight with Al Qaeda.

  He’s twenty-three years old, his name is Ibrahim. That is, I don’t know his real name: Eva doesn’t speak with journalists. “I don’t want to end up on the front page. Or to have my son discussed on talk shows, by people who are football experts one day, cooking experts the next day, then experts on Syria. An opinion poll to decide if he’s more of a terrorist or more of an idiot. And a showgirl telling me where I’ve failed as a mother.

  “For you, he’s just another young man,” she says, “For you, my son is an exclusive worth thousands of euros.”

  And I don’t know what to say to her.

  Because I’d like to say that it’s not true, and yet it is true. Of course it’s true. Because it would end up on the front page tomorrow: an Italian boy, fully Italian, meaning not second generation, not the son of immigrants, a young Italian, in Syria. At the front. And not someone from a rural village, but someone from Genoa, with a mother like Eva, just like your own mother, someone just like your son, holed up in his room on Facebook, and who knows who in the world he’s in contact with, what he’s thinking, what he’s harboring inside. I’d like to tell her it’s not true, but the truth is that these types o
f things are just what the newspapers are looking for. A European jihadist, a sniper in spike heels. Simplifications, caricatures. Black and white, this is wrong and that’s right, these are rational, those are deranged. All the rest, the context, doesn’t matter to them. Your motivations, what you are, but also how you became that way. The front, but also why you went there. The newspapers don’t care about Syria, they don’t even know where Syria is. The other day one of them asked me: “Will you write me a piece about the clashes amid the ruins of Petra?” and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that Petra is in Jordan. They only want things like these, the child doctor. And the child soldier, possibly drunk.

  And so I don’t know what to say to her.

  Eva may spend half an hour with you, then she’ll meet you ten minutes after you’ve said goodbye and won’t remember who you are. She doesn’t remember anything. She’s distraught. So they all avoid her. They think she’s crazy. “I don’t want to get involved,” Lorenzo says. “Let her call the Farnesina,1 the Red Cross. 118. I don’t care,” he says. Lorenzo is the veteran, the one who’s been here the longest. The one who knows the rebels best of all, from one brigade to another: who does what, who’s stationed where. Who’s who. But when he runs into Eva, he crosses the street. But I’m from the South of Italy, and those words, in the South, have a disturbing sound. Those words are not my words. And then I simply think—my father. I think my father would be here just like Eva is, exactly like Eva, with that cup filled halfway and those notes that look like a seismograph. Because he’s the type who waits downstairs until you turn the lights on in the house, in case the elevator should get stuck with you in it, and your cell phone might not work because of a sudden electrical storm. Assuming that you haven’t plunged down the shaft meanwhile, that the doors haven’t opened without the elevator being there: a hypothesis my father never discounts.

  Well, anyway—I think about my father.

  I think: she’s not crazy, she’s normal.

  That maybe she’s the only normal one here.

  And yet I don’t know what to say to her.

  “He was studying at the university, then he dropped out. He was looking for work but couldn’t find a job.” Eva doesn’t tell me anything else, she doesn’t trust me. She only shows me a picture of Ibrahim, in case I should see him in Aleppo. A tall young man, with a beard. Tunic. But honestly, they all look like that. I’d never recognize him.

  And it makes me a little sad really. Because you sense that she’s separated, that she and Ibrahim’s father don’t speak to each other, not even now. At one point she discovers that his father has heard from Ibrahim via Skype, yet she only found out about it three days later. I try to tell her that her son doesn’t have enough experience, that even if he was trained, he certainly wouldn’t be at the front, because the Islamists take the fighting seriously, they don’t lounge around the intersections of the old city in flip-flops. And so, if he’s still alive, it means he’s not at the front. After all, it’s not as if everyone fights. I try to tell her that maybe he’s in logistics. A guard at the ammunition depot. Maybe he’s the one who uploads videos to YouTube. But honestly, in Atmeh, or even on the flight to Antakya, at the airport, they all look like that: tracksuit and duffle bag, but you can tell from the beard, or from a missing ear, that they’re jihadists. All the young guys look alike. The ones who are looking for a job and can’t find one. For months. Years. And there they are, wandering around aimlessly, with this feeling inside of being useless. And a father doesn’t let the mother know he’s heard from him when he disappears for three days. For three months. With this feeling inside of uselessness. If I were to see him, it’s true, I’d never recognize him. He’s identical to a thousand others.

  confirmed, in the end. After three days of yes, maybe. No. But then again.

  They killed Abdallah. Ten yards from the Media Center.

  He was shot from behind.

  Abdallah is Abdallah Yassin. He was thirty years old, and without him, many of us would simply not have written anything here. He’d fought briefly with the rebels. But then he preferred the role of activist. There were six brothers, all of them in the Free Army: two dead, two at the front, and two at the Media Center. Which had been set up by Abdallah. And which was none other than his own home at the beginning. We all cooked in his kitchen, slept and worked on his carpets. Worked for hours, and each time you looked up, he would refill your cup of tea. We all raced through the potholed streets of Aleppo in his white jeep that sported the colors of the revolution.

  But Abdallah was much more than that. Because unlike the others, he wasn’t only concerned about practical things. He could transform a washing machine into a stove. Recharge a battery with an electrical cord and a lemon. But he had set up the Media Center because he was convinced that international support was crucial to defeat Assad. And that to gain international support, Syrians had not only to tell the world about the regime’s crimes, but also to explain their own thinking. To convince the world to trust them. To intervene. Assad’s Syria but also their own Syria. “All I read about are the dead and wounded,” he would say. “The number of bombs today, where, what kind, how many buildings collapsed, how many tons of rubble. Sometimes,” he’d say, “I read, and I think I’m reading the stenographer’s log in a police station, not a newspaper.”

  Then he’d say: “My freedom depends on you.”

  He’d say: “Your iPad is more powerful than my Kalashnikov.”

  And then he’d tell you about Syria. He’d tell you about the regime. What life was like. The persecution, the brutality. The fear. The first demonstrations, back then, the clashes. He’d tell you about the rebels. The strategies. The hopes. But also the regrets, the mistakes. And he’d tell you about the Middle East. The context.

  Because Syria is complicated.

  Assad’s first reaction to the Arab Spring, on January 31, 2011, came in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. Ben Ali, in Tunisia, had already fled, and Mubarak, in Cairo, was under siege in Tahrir Square. But there was no hesitancy in his voice, no uncertainty: “Syria is different,” Assad declared. “In Syria it will not happen.” And in his own way, he was right.

  Two years later, he is still in power. Because Syria, certainly, is similar to many of its neighboring countries—to Egypt, to Tunisia. It has 22 million inhabitants, 60 percent under twenty-five years of age, and tens of thousands of college graduates condemned to unemployment by an atrophied economy in a now saturated public sector, a legacy from alignment with the Soviet Union. While privatization in recent years enriched the Assads and their most loyal friends, state resources dried up along with oil reserves. Agriculture, once the source of 25 percent of Syria’s revenue, was decimated by drought. According to estimates by the UN, 10 percent of the population was not only below the poverty line, but also below the line of survival: a dollar a day—one day being the time it took for Assad’s wife, in March 2012, with the war already underway, to spend $450,000 on lamps and sofas. This is why Syria is complicated. Because it’s a regime at the end of the line, like many of its neighboring regimes. Because it should already have fallen.

  It’s not just a matter of military superiority. Of missiles versus bullets.

  The problem is that the Assads, from the time of Bashar’s father, Hafez, who became president in 1970 with the last of a long series of coups, have above all been synonymous with order and stability; in exchange for freedom, of course, in exchange for one policeman for every 153 people. Whereas Lebanon, which is just a few miles from here, with its thousands of religions and its thousands of wars, has always been a warning to everyone. And one of the most ominous. The majority of Syrians, in fact, 75 percent, are Sunni Muslim, but minorities are abundant, and most of all diverse. Christians, Alawites, Kurds—with Christians alone broken down into eleven communities.

  “The specter of Lebanon,” Abdallah used to say: “This is Assad’s real strength.”<
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  But two years and seventy thousand deaths later, Assad’s strength, it’s now clear, lies elsewhere: in the opposition. The Free Army doesn’t have the slightest affiliation with the National Coalition. “What they think doesn’t interest anyone here. And not just because they live in Paris, London, New York. But because they’ve always considered Bashar, who became president in 2000, a young cosmopolitan reformer, held in check by officials inherited from his father along with the country. Someone who wanted to renew Syria, but was hampered by the old guard. And therefore not an enemy, but on the contrary, an ally for a peaceful transition to democracy. They have always sought collaboration. Even now. Compromise. They’ve always favored stability, despite the fact that each of them has a personal history of imprisonment and persecution.”

  Despite the fact that the president here is the commander of the armed forces, the secretary of the Ba’ath—the one and only party—and the chief executive. He appoints the prime minister, the government, the highest-ranking civilian officials, and the highest-ranking military officers. He appoints the judges. “The only real law is the state of emergency. It allows the arrest of anyone suspected of constituting a threat to public order. The only stability in Syria is that of oppression.”

  Because Syria is complicated.

  And now everything is even more complicated than before. All the more blurry. More muddled. A month ago they bombed the university. Which is in the regime’s Aleppo. But still today the dynamics aren’t clear. You can’t figure out who it was. The rebels say it was one of the regime’s jets, of course, while the regime says it was rebel rockets. It says they were aiming at a military academy nearby. It was a day of exams in architecture: eighty-three deaths. But in the video, you hear only two explosions. Then someone tells you it’s a plane, the other says rockets. How can you not even be sure about that? A plane or rockets. A plane over your heads, did you see it or not? That’s what Aleppo is like. That’s what this war is like: confusion. The university is overflowing with the displaced, not just students: thirty thousand people are living there, but no one wants to admit that either. The regime wants to deny that there’s a humanitarian crisis; the rebels want to deny the fact that people from districts they control are taking refuge in districts under Assad’s control.