Syrian Dust: Reporting from the Heart of the War

by Francesca Borri

  With each passing day, everything grows more complicated. More equivocal. The warring groups multiply, the National Coalition is divided—and Abdallah is killed.

  The most diverse rumors are going around. Some say he was killed in a brawl. Some say he was killed for unpaid debts, or for money issues in any case.

  Because journalists are beginning to be big business in Syria. And not only for the $300. The news is no longer hush-hush: Jim Foley has disappeared. After Austin Tice disappeared in August.

  They’ve started kidnapping us. The other morning three French reporters were also seized. But they were quickly released: Abdallah had called the Free Army and provided the names of those who ordered the abduction and those who carried it out.

  A few hours later he was killed.

  It’s pointless to ask the others. Lorenzo, as usual, cuts you off: “I don’t want to get involved,” he says. Because this war is changing, but we too are changing. There are fewer of us every day. The front is stalled, and by now the photos—which are what counts, because the stories, for the newspapers, amount to zero—the photos have all been seen by now, they’re always the same. And the deadline for awards has passed, everything has already been submitted. For the World Press Photo, the Robert Capa Medal. And every day there are fewer of us. Every day someone tells you: “Why stay? There’s nothing to write about. Go to Mali.” Although it’s not true that the war is languishing. The front is stagnant, but all around the front everything is changing. And the war is not the front, it’s all the rest—everything behind the front that generates it. Except that it is infinitely more difficult to analyze. To interpret. It takes time. It takes study, it takes patience. It takes intelligence.

  And it takes individuals like Abdallah.

  None of us went to his funeral.

  I left seven red roses at the spot where he was killed. The Media Center was deserted. Only his brother was there. The Canon still on the table, the sweatshirt. Cigarettes. Silence. There wasn’t any electricity. Only the sound of mortars outside. Not very far away. A blast of dust and smoke from one of them, and I huddled in a corner. The same corner where I’d huddled in October, on a night when Aleppo was an explosion every few seconds, relentless, the dead and wounded everywhere that night, one of those bombings whose sole objective was to leave no one unscathed. And I was there alone. On this same carpet. Too dangerous to reach the others, who were on the other side of the city. Plus it was dark by then. Already curfew. So there I was, alone, staring at the floor and feeling the walls shudder when Abdallah burst through the door. And behind Abdallah, calm as can be, Alessio. He had made his way across the entire city, the entire city through that inferno, at full speed, headlights off, so that I wouldn’t be alone.

  Here, in this same corner.

  With that same poster in front of me, hanging crookedly.

  Listening to the mortars.

  I listen to the mortars as you listen to the sea from the shore, salt and time running through your fingers.

  I listen to the mortars as though they were the most natural thing in the world to me.

  A couple of them explode nearby. A little too close. I should move, I think, but what will that change? What difference will it make? No one will be coming through that door anymore.

  Aleppo? What sense did it make to go back there again? that’s how Lorenzo greeted me when I returned to Antakya. There’s nothing to write about anymore. They are where they were a month ago.

  “I left flowers for Abdallah.”

  He cut me short: “I don’t want to get involved,” he said. “Those are stories I don’t want to get drawn into.”

  But we’re all already drawn into them.

  in his own way, Assad was right. He told us Syria is different.

  Because the Arab Spring was essentially a revolt against regimes that were more focused on the interests of the few in command, and on their Western friends, than on the interests of their own citizens. A revolt that succeeded only in Tunisia and Egypt, of course—the rest is something of a disaster, while at the same time marking the downfall of postcolonialism, of the old geography of formal sovereignties and extensive dependencies. It also swept away the theory that more than any other underpinned it. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall, in a world in which democracy, nation by nation, seemed to be catching on everywhere, the exception was the Middle East. Whose culture, it was argued, was not suited to democracy. It was the theory of Arab exception: a theory now disproved by a thousand Tahrir Squares and, first and foremost in fact, by years of social unrest and labor conflicts. The April 6 movement, an icon of resistance against Mubarak, is named in memory of April 6, 2008, when police fired at striking workers. The Arab Spring did not materialize from Facebook. And it was, essentially, a demand for self-determination. For substantive, not just formal, sovereignty.

  For real power: the power to decide.

  For all to decide: not just a privileged few. And to do so without external interference.

  And it is in this sense that Syria is different and Assad was right. Because to make any predictions, do any analysis, it’s pointless by now to look to Damascus. To question Assad and his objectives. Or the objectives of the opposition. As in the old Middle East, the war in Syria has now become a proxy war. Fought to advance the strategies of others.

  Because it began as freedom against oppression. But it’s becoming Iran against Saudi Arabia, and therefore, they tell you, Sunni Islam against Shia Islam.

  Because Syria, they say, isn’t really that complicated.

  “Trust me,” one of the veteran journalists in Beirut reassured me, one of those who pay you $300 here, while you learn a little more about the craft. “It seems complicated,” he said, “but in thirty years at the front, thirty years in the Middle East, in the end it was all about oil and Islam. Trust me.”

  Except that there are things you encounter just by taking a step back.

  Meaning a step back from the front. Or more precisely, looking at what’s around it.

  Like Loubna Mrie. Not only is she an activist where everyone is supposed to be a terrorist. Not only is she a woman where there should only be men. But she is an Alawite, here where this war is supposed to be Sunnis against Shiites.

  She is the one who continues Abdallah’s work.

  “The war is changing, it’s true. But it is not true that we are Syrians against Syrians, Sunnis against Shiites. We are Syrians against Assad. Because even when we talk about Islam, we never talk only about Islam. Assad has Iran’s support for Shiite solidarity, of course, but mainly because it is through Syrian territory that Hezbollah, in Lebanon, receives arms from Iran, and in the interests of Iran keeps pressure on Israel. Then too, in addition to Iran, Assad has Russia at his side, and Russia is not Shiite. But Russia has its last Mediterranean naval base in Syria, in Tartus, and only through Syria can it still have a say in the Middle East. And even more importantly than Tartus, Putin stands with Assad because he knows that every revolt for freedom, even the most distant, is a spark that can ignite Russia. As far as Putin is concerned, no one should intervene in Syria because no one should intervene in Chechnya.”

  She looks younger than twenty-two. She has long, brown, curly hair, gentle features, and a sweet gaze. You could meet her outside of any high school: the same backpack, the same striped shirt, the same dreams. She could be on her way to march against cuts in education. Because Loubna has that look: the intense gaze of certain sixteen-year-olds who stare at you, unblinking. They seem fragile, but they’re staring at you because they won’t budge.

  She comes from Latakia, in Assad’s home province. She comes from a family of officers in the security forces. Like her mother, Loubna immediately sided against the regime. But for her and her mother, the regime coincided with the male members of the family. They had been warned: another demonstration, and you will be killed. And when, in August, a
video in which Loubna explained the objectives of the revolution ended up on YouTube, her mother disappeared. Executed. By men carrying out her father’s orders.

  Promises are kept.

  “I cried for three days, devastated by feelings of guilt. Then I thought: my mother would not want to see me here crying. And I came back to gather medicine for Homs.”

  “No one called me. Not my grandmother, my aunts: nobody. Not my friends. For fear of retaliation. That was the worst part of it. The isolation. There I was leafing through the phonebook, looking for someone to talk to, and—and I had no one anymore. In Latakia they are all with Assad because on television Assad repeats twenty times a day that Syria is overrun with terrorists, Islamic fundamentalists paid by the Israelis to cut our throats. He claims he’s protecting the minorities. Democracy. Yet he killed my mother. And he will kill me if he finds me. Here it doesn’t matter if you are Christian, Sunni, Buddhist. The truth is that this regime, if you are against it, will kill you.”

  The Alawites, a Shiite minority to which the Assad family belongs, make up about 12 percent of the population. We don’t know much about them, because they practice an esoteric cult, whose sacred texts are not public, and which are revealed only in part, and only to males. The cult is syncretic, with many elements of Christianity and Sunni Islam. For this reason they have long been stigmatized as heretics, and persecuted. Alawites, in Arabic, means “followers of Ali,” the son of Muhammad: whom, in fact, the Alawites worship more than the Prophet.

  “After September 11 everything came down to Islam. Economic, social, and political factors disappeared from any analysis of the Middle East: it all stemmed from religion. The Arab Spring was able to fracture the equation Arab equals Muslim. In Tunisia and Egypt they saw Tunisians and Egyptians, not Muslims and Christians. Here, however, everyone uses religion, the specter of a denominational war, for their own objectives—largely secular. But it makes no sense to define the regime as Shiite, even though the Assads are Shiite and the military leaders are Shiite: because state ownership of the means of production has enabled the Assads to create patronage networks that have benefited the middle class, which is predominantly Sunni. This is nothing but a regime of predators, and the opposition is composed entirely of the poor and the excluded. Shiites, Sunnis, and Christians alike. Everyone focuses on religion. But to understand Syria, Abdallah was right: Marx is more useful than the Koran.”

  So Assad was right. Syria is different.

  There’s only one point, I said to Abdallah, on which Syria does not appear to be different: Europe, as usual, is absent. The priority for us is the economy: save Greece, save Spain—but not Syria. And yet it emerged today that, during the war in Libya, France bought Gaddafi’s satellite coordinates from Assad, in order to eliminate Gaddafi before he talked about his highly placed friends overseas. And paid for it with the pledge to keep silent.

  The pledge not to intervene.

  Syria really is different.

  The only time when Europe clearly chose sides.

  “but what’s the objective?” I ask, crawling into the kind of trench I’ve only seen in history books, the mud ankle-deep. They point to a kind of depository, two hundred yards ahead. A lopsided cement cube. “To capture that.” “And what then?” I ask foolishly. “To capture that one,” and they point to another depository, another cement box. Another three hundred yards farther on. “And then the one on the right”: another twenty yards. All the way to Damascus, 250 miles.

  The Aleppo airport is on the eastern edge of the city, and within it a military airport and Brigade 80, besieged by dozens of jihadists who came here to reinforce the revolution, arriving from Tunisia, from Libya, from Afghanistan, from Chechnya—and from various European outposts. On the fronts where Al Qaeda is fighting, the most commonly spoken language is not Arabic, it’s English.

  The battle began in December. Because it’s from the airport that supplies travel to the section of Aleppo under the control of the regime and in particular to its soldiers; for the rebels, occupying the airport is critical. Because the idea, originally, was to advance from city to city. From north to south, map in hand: Idlib, Aleppo, Hama, Homs, Damascus. But after two years and eighty-five thousand deaths, we are still in Idlib. Still twenty-five miles from the Turkish border. And so the Islamists, more experienced, changed their strategy a day after they arrived. They don’t advance from city to city anymore—those cities impossible to manage, because after all the fighting, the blood and rubble, the dead, in the end it’s still the regime that governs half of it, while cold and hunger reign over the other half, along with Syrians who come to ask for bread. Instead the rebels advance from military base to military base. And this week they launched a decisive offensive—after the decisive offensive of three weeks ago.

  Except that Assad’s superiority lies in his air force, and planes don’t take off from here. “Allah Akbar,” Kadyr reassures me. God is great. “Anyway, we aren’t here for this or that airport. We’re here to testify that it is useless to oppose the will of the people,” he explains. Even though Kadyr is Chechen. What does he know about the will of the people, if these aren’t his people? “We are all men. All brothers,” he snaps back. “But the Syrians want democracy,” I say. “They want to decide their own future for themselves, don’t they?” “Why, did you ask the Iraqis, the Afghans, before deciding their future? Those who are on the side of right win. Only God knows, Allah Akbar. God alone decides.”

  Kadyr is twenty-seven years old, a Chechen from Grozny, and he’s here because Russia exterminated his family and supports Assad. Aazar is Afghani, thirty-one years old, and his father was killed by a mine, just like the daughter of Faryal, twenty-seven, also Afghani. It was a mine manufactured in Italy, he makes clear, and doesn’t speak to me anymore. To his right is Ajeeb, twenty-three years old, Libyan. He lost his mother in an air strike; so did Masun, twenty-five years old, Iraqi, who is a carpenter with a degree in biology. Djamal, on the other hand, twenty-one years old, is from Marseilles, of Algerian origin. He is wearing a Zidane T-shirt and has “nothing to lose.”

  But this is not the best time for a sociological survey of Al Qaeda.

  A mortar, to our right, hits the trench: and the fighting suddenly explodes around us. Because it’s nothing but an earthen ditch we’re in, hidden among the bushes and piles of bricks and stones and rusty iron. A vintage World War I trench, the kind that makes you think that Field Marshal Cadorna will soon appear with reinforcements on horseback. And three of the men simply disappear, pulverized. We have to move and fast, in the time it takes to reload. The mortar is fired from a semi-mobile position; a second strike always follows the first. We scuttle away like rats, heads down, the second shot striking even closer. We run faster. The only shelter is a concrete wall, but it’s twenty yards away. And the trench is destroyed. While Aazar and Faryal cover us with a barrage of fire, we dash across one by one, flying through the bullets, minds switched off, the air now thick with dirt, dust and leaves, shards, unidentifiable fragments. Kadyr slips and is killed, the mortars keep coming, relentless. They’re getting closer and closer. They’ll reach us, Djamal screams, we’re already dead: there’s nothing left to do but attack.

  Djamal is the first to bolt and head toward the depository, while I take shelter behind a half-charred passenger bus, an old advertisement still visible on its side: Welcome to Syria. Djamal is hit almost immediately; the sniper continues firing at him while the others, behind him, rush out all together and in a minute, in a second, it’s war, war like in the movies, bodies running, falling—war that seems like madness, while Djamal, on the ground, goes on shooting until his last gasp. From the two rear zones facing us, RPGs are fired, rockets launched, while Kalashnikovs resound from within the depository. And at every death, the cry: “Allah Akbar.” They drag me over to the bodies, pulpy masses of flesh and blood and agonized expressions that act as a barrier. Sometimes one of them seems to jer
k. To move. But it must be a hallucination, because the battle goes on for two hours. The pile of corpses keeps growing and growing; the dead touch you, look at you, ooze onto you. Ajeeb makes an opening in the tangle of limbs, and shoots from there, coldly. Minute after minute, like a bottomless pit, for every body that comes back, another one rushes out, with only this cry, “Allah Akbar,” Ajeeb makes a dash and sprints, swallowed up by the depository—until a mortar hits the right side, sweeping half of it away. That’s when someone, from the trench, throws a firebomb. Smoke. Then something, inside, explodes. And all is lost, everything inside now silent.

  “Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar,” a Chechen keeps repeating. And he embraces Ajeeb.

  “Allah Akbar, we won. We won.”

  As the flames devour everything, including his companions.

  And while some, on the other side of the front, no doubt, are also contemplating the ashes, at this moment, and exulting: we won.

  “do you know she’s come from Syria?” one barista said to the other barista. “But you’re not Syrian,” the barista said to me. “No,” I said. “I’m a journalist.” “Oh,” he said. “And you’re in Syria?” “In Aleppo.” “Oh. Aleppo.” He said: “Awesome.” Then: “I have a Tunisian friend, you know? He makes fabulous desserts. Absolutely fabulous,” the barista said. “If you ask me, it’s the flour.” And the other barista added: “Sure.” He said: “It’s always the flour. What’s the flour in Aleppo like?” he asked me. “Last time,” I said, “last time it was flour made from leaves.” “From leaves?” “Right. Leaves. Syria is a bit—has been struggling a bit in recent months. Having some problems.” “Still,” he said. “Flour made from leaves.” Then he said to his friend: “Did you hear that? Leaves!” He said to me: “Do you have the recipe?”