Syrian Dust: Reporting from the Heart of the War

by Francesca Borri

  But it’s not his appearance that makes Abu Maryam a portrayal of Syrians today. Persecuted by the regime, he was then assaulted by the rebels. And is now wanted by the Islamists.

  “I was cooking one evening in the mess hall, the canteen for displaced people, when I heard shots against a roll-up shutter. It was the Fatah brigade, trying to break into the warehouse on the corner. I went over and they said: ‘It belongs to a shabia.’ They said: ‘We have orders to confiscate everything.’ But we all know each other here, and it’s not true, the owner is not a shabia. So I protested. But they surrounded me. Insulted me, shoved me. And at some point the butt of a rifle split my head open. And someone, while he was at it, stole my wallet.”

  Head trauma and thirteen stitches. “I honestly don’t know who these guys are. Where they came from. Some of them are familiar faces: they took part in the demonstrations. With helmets and clubs. They were policemen. Those in the Free Army seem to be faithful to an old Arab proverb that says better the dog that barks with you than the dog that barks at you.

  “And so the Islamists, at the beginning, in a situation like this, with all these guys out of control, these Kalashnikovs, the Islamists were a reliable presence. Correct, rigorous. Uncompromising. They not only stopped Assad, but also restored a minimum of public order. But then they started to show up at the demonstrations, demanding to replace our banners with theirs, which called for a caliphate instead of a democracy. They’ve never been loved here because, in the end, ours is a secular country, and even the Muslims have always distinguished between the private sphere and the political sphere. Still, the Islamists were respected. Today they are mainly feared. Whatever you say, they accuse you of being blasphemous. You tell them that weapons are prohibited at assemblies—you tell them to leave them outside—and they say you’ve offended the Prophet. You tell them that bread should be distributed here, not in the mosque, and they say you’ve offended the Prophet. One Friday, at a rally, I snatched their banners. The first time I escaped, the second time they arrested me. And whipped me.”

  He looks at me, he says, “I’m worried. They treat those who don’t share their views the same way they treat criminals. That’s what a regime does.”

  Abu Maryam, in fact, is not a Syrian like the others. He’s the leader of Bustan al-Qasr, one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Aleppo. The front winds in and out: sometimes you’re walking along and you run into a barricade of tires and trash bins. It means they’re shooting on the other side. On this side, those bins are the posts for a makeshift soccer field. Bustan al-Qasr is a kind of city within a city. Its citizens are self-governing. They have their own schools, their own clinic. A radio station. They manage water, electricity. The canteen for displaced persons. The original plan developed by the Local Coordination Committees (LCCs), a pivotal force in Syria before the Free Army was formed, was to oust the regime not by destroying everything but by appropriating the institutions and reestablishing them with new people, new ideas. New practices. To renounce the officials of Ba’ath, the single party in which power in effect resided, ignore the laws, the orders, and adopt new ones. To reject the administrators appointed by the regime and elect new ones. Their own. “Without challenging Assad on the field that suits him most,” said Abu Maryam: “the field of violence.”

  “Because with weapons it is obvious that he will win,” he says. “But with numbers, we can choose. We can be bullets against air power. Or 22 million against one.”

  In theory, the Local Coordination Committees still exist.

  Not only here. Throughout Syria.

  But they never end up in the newspapers.

  “I understand,” Abu Maryam says. “I realize that Syria is one war among many, for you. That it’s a bidding war. And that the mother who loses two children and reacts by shooting is more spectacular than one who reacts by adopting two orphans.” I understand, he says. “The problem is that if you only talk about those who fight, any revolution becomes a war.

  “The problem,” he says, “is that my freedom depends on you as well.”

  Because it’s true that even after 94,000 have died, after 1,663,713 have fled the country as refugees, the activists have not lost their energy. Their determination. After two years and four months, only one thing has changed: now the protests are no longer just against Assad.

  “I know that for you I am a symbol of today’s Syria. Hunted by everyone. By the regime, by the rebels, by the Islamists. The perfect figure. But I am a symbol in another sense: I am a symbol because I am still here. The rebels, the Islamists, any of them can try to impose whatever they want. We are no longer willing to obey. To submit. And that’s an important difference. It’s the certainty that we will never go back. It’s in that sense that I am a symbol of today’s Syria.”

  “Think of Hama,” he says. “You can’t understand today’s Syria unless you think of Hama.”

  Syrians in Hama, in fact, have always referred to what occurred there simply as “Hama,” without further specification. “What happened in Hama.” The fear, the terror, was so great under the regime that Syrians never said the words “the Hama massacre.”

  And yet, in twenty days, twenty thousand people were killed. February 1982. That’s how Hafez, Bashar’s father, squelched the revolt of the Muslim Brotherhood, which, inspired by the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, had tried to overthrow the regime. Not only because it was a secular regime, and governed by an Alawite moreover, but because it was a regime aligned with the Soviet Union, explains Abu Maryam. That is, a regime that steered the economy through state-controlled five-year plans. Expropriations. Whereas the Muslim Brotherhood was an expression of the bourgeoisie, of an entrepreneurial class. As usual, to understand Syria, Marx can be more useful than the Koran. In February 1982, three years of clashes ended with the Hama massacre. The breeding ground of the revolt.

  The city was literally razed to the ground.

  Annihilated.

  And that’s why so many here still believe that Assad can remain in power. Because what to us foreigners seems impossible after so much violence has already proved to be possible.

  Yet that’s why others believe the opposite.

  Because Syria is complicated.

  And so, those who think the opposite say these kids are our hope.

  They are no longer willing to remain silent. To submit.

  They insist that now that they’ve known freedom, they won’t forget it.

  The demonstrators gather every Friday, no exception, at the mosque.

  Those who make up the procession that winds through the narrowest passageways to avoid being hit by mortars are seventeen, eighteen, twenty years old, no older than that. Adults at windows watch from the shadows. When the young people catch a glimpse of them, behind the slightly parted curtains, they yell from below: “Accomplices! Accomplices! Your silence is the voice of Assad!” And it’s all that’s left of the revolution. This handful of kids, nearly barefoot, scourged by starvation and typhus. Crutches, bandages. The van with the megaphone and amplifiers is still without fuel, still pushed by hand, while a young woman, in a bluesy voice, intones a poem in memory of the martyrs: “Now that there’s nothing left,” she sings, “now that there’s nothing left of you but dust and tears,” she sings as we wind slowly, cautiously, tensely expecting the first sniper around every curve and—and yet they sing, these kids, they go on singing, so vulnerable, their number swelling every few yards. Around every curve. And exposed like that, without gasoline, even then, as they beat the drums, the war in Syria suddenly seems to return to the Syrian Spring: no more missiles and bloodshed, no more rubble, only passion, again, only fervor and courage as the dancing begins, and as the young woman goes on singing, “Now that you’re gone, now that everything speaks to me of you,” now as the surge, from the front row, widens, expands, swells and churns, and as you look at them, one by one, you who are of the same generati
on yet so different, so detached, how can you not feel drawn in? “Now that I’ve lost you,” how can you not feel swept away “now that,” she sings, “what’s left of you is me,” as you look at them, you look at them and envy them, so strong, they’re dancing, dancing and laughing, so strong, even then, even among the ghosts, even amid the ruins, while unlike them you weren’t capable of feeling, in life, and . . .

  And a mortar explodes.

  On a building that has already been destroyed, actually. Three hundred yards away.

  Maybe more. But the procession, instantly, scatters.

  The asphalt remains littered with flip-flops, flags, bottles.

  The megaphone. An overturned chair. A white one.

  And only this van, sideways, in the deserted street. The music still playing.

  The dust, slowly settling.

  The place we’ve dashed into is a small shop, selling canned meat, mango juice. Stale biscuits. The owner is a tall young man. Thin. And he’s just returned from his combat shift; like many he spends eight hours at the front, eight hours behind the counter. He notices the Nikon. “My wife is in the Free Army,” he says. Ever since the story of Guevara went around the world, everywhere you turn here someone stops you to say: “My wife is in the Free Army.” He says: “$100.”

  They live upstairs.

  He’s thirty-eight years old, she’s twenty-six. She opens the door in jeans, but in a minute reappears in camouflage and a baseball cap with the Jabhat al-Nusra logo. Of their three children, the youngest is four months old and her name is Revolution. Her grandmother takes care of the baby, while she and her husband alternate between the front and the shop. Even though, at the front, she doesn’t fight. She cooks. She primps for the photo, combs her hair, reapplies her makeup, eyebrow pencil. Revolution in one arm, a Beretta in the other hand.

  Mahmoud, five years old, toddles in. A Pokémon T-shirt and a plastic gun. He comes in and tells me: “When I’m big I’m going to kill Assad.” And then? Meaning, after you’ve killed Assad. What will you do then? Be a doctor? Or maybe an astronaut. You could be an astronaut, a soccer player. A violinist. Killing Assad isn’t a profession. “I want to cut the infidels’ throats,” he says. “There are a lot of them,” he says. “It won’t take just one day.”

  Children.

  Now that they’ve come to know war.

  all i remember is the asphalt.

  All of a sudden.

  Which by then wasn’t even asphalt anymore, covered by a kind of gravel made of glass, stones, shards. This was the second line of the front, in Sheik Maqsoud. One of those times when you don’t know what’s going on. The bombing had ended a couple of hours ago, the air was still thick with smoke, and a manhunt, street by street, had begun. The rebels were searching for shabia. One by one.

  But all I remember is the asphalt.

  All I know is I suddenly found myself on the ground. I went across last, on the run, the sniper firing from our left, from a hospital. Or something like that.

  All I know is that I found myself on the ground.

  I realized afterward that he’d hit me.

  When I got up again and crawled behind a car.

  And my knee. It was all dust and blood.

  All scorched.

  I don’t know why he didn’t shoot again.

  Stanley says it was a stray bullet. Because it grazed me.

  Or maybe the sniper saw the veil, under the helmet. That moment of surprise.

  And I was already on the other side.

  I don’t know.

  All I remember is the asphalt.

  Just those three seconds—three, five. I don’t know. A lifetime.

  Nose on the asphalt.

  Those three seconds when I thought

  I thought

  How could you have left me here?

  Where the fuck are you? Where the fuck did you all go?

  so that’s why I’m here now. With my knee bandaged, limping around Antakya a little dazed, somewhat sad, somewhat bewildered. A little empty. I read. I read something entirely different, I read a novel. Partly because there is no one left. And of the few who are left, Lorenzo shows up, looks at my knee, and says: “And there wasn’t even anything to write about.”

  And so I read.

  I read and toss down cappuccinos at the Ozsut Café, a café for foreigners here. All shiny. One of those cafés you’ll find anywhere in the world, where if you ask for a biscotto, all they have is a muffin, and wherever you are, no matter what country you’re in, they’ll serve you a fake American breakfast with scrambled eggs. They even have maple syrup—and you thought only Donald Duck used it—and banana cake too, and at nine in the morning they’re already listening to Justin Bieber. But a young woman wrote to me. A girl I don’t know, a certain Martina, she must be twenty years old or so. She’s studying anthropology at the Sapienza. The university in Rome. She wrote to me because she reads me, and, because readers are sometimes weird, she sent me a list of the things she loves to do. To me, though I don’t even know her. I don’t know why. A list of things she loves to do. And this list has things like driving at night with the car windows open. At night. To me, who at night . . . My first thought was: But they’ll shoot you at night, are you crazy?

  Windows open.

  At night.

  I thought: How many years has it been since I’ve driven at night with the windows open?

  And so here I am at the Ozsut. Because I used to love coffee, before all this. Maybe it was the thing I loved most. Chatting with friends in cafés. Especially those on the sea, or on a lake, a beautiful café on Lake Piediluco, once, a luminosity I’d never seen before, the kind of radiant light you then keep looking for all your life, at every café you visit. And though Antakya doesn’t have a lake, it has a river, and the Ozsut has all these windows overlooking the river, the people strolling. Strange people who don’t explode, don’t slump to the ground. Don’t get incinerated.

  And so I hang out at the Ozsut.

  Which is a curious place. Only foreigners and Syrians. Because by now everyone knows that only we journalists come here, and so the others are all Syrians. They sit there with their banana cake, a slice of apple pie, at the table next to yours, and you study, write. At some point one of them leans over your table, from behind, and tells you: “I have a child soldier.” Like that, in your ear. He says: “And he’s the son of a shabia! Do you want the son of a shabia?” he asks you. “No one has him.” And the journalists, especially the ones who spend one week in Syria, one week in the Congo, who when the war in Libya starts again say, “Awesome!” the journalists say: “Do you have a suicide bomber too? I need a suicide bomber, possibly drunk.” That’s always the way. With these Syrians who volunteer as “fixers.” A fixer is someone who arranges everything. A logistician. And so they volunteer to be your fixer. To act as your driver, your interpreter. Your cook. Anything you want, even though their English is generally limited to “the cat is under the table, the rebel is on the chair,” and it sometimes happens in Aleppo that they tell you “left” instead of “right”—and on your left there’s a sniper.

  Since Abdallah was killed, that’s how things have been.

  And the other day in Aleppo, I was almost attacked because of a story going around: Paul Wood’s interview with the rebel who ate his enemy’s heart.3 Abu Sakkar. A psychopath featured in a YouTube video where he’s feasting on the body of an enemy, and Paul, who is the BBC correspondent for the Middle East, and therefore more punctilious than anyone, and hates these things that are a little like the movies, explains that it’s not clear whether what the rebel has in his hand is actually a piece of heart, or liver, maybe, or lung. He’s inclined to think it’s lung. And of course it’s not as if it weren’t newsworthy. Only it became the news. All over the world. From Chile to China, like the story about Guevara. And like the photo of that
child, a month ago, who was smoking a cigarette, a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder. A photo that outraged all of Syria. Because it’s one thing to have a weapon slung over your shoulder, and another thing to shoot it. A child soldier is not just a child who’s at the front, he’s a child who’s fighting at the front. Whereas the child in the photo is seven years old, and at seven years of age you don’t have the strength for a Kalashnikov; it’s a contrived photo. But in the meantime it ended up on the front page. All over the world. While no one gives a damn about the 101,000 dead. Like this other story, Abu Sakkar. Because Paul is Paul, he’s one of the finest in the business, and there he was scrutinizing it to see whether it was the heart or the liver, or maybe the lung, weighing every word, every adjective, to cushion it as much as possible. And you could see very well that he was saying: “I’m here because I have to be.” But a cannibal is a cannibal, the BBC is the BBC, and it suddenly seems that the rebels are all animals. And you’d like to replace Assad with them? Russia immediately sneered at the United States, with Saudi Arabia threatening not to finance anyone anymore.

  It’s growing more and more difficult to work here.

  Domenico Quirico from La Stampa disappeared on the border with Lebanon.

  Yet there is a story in this, it’s clear: a man who eats his enemy’s heart. But it’s also clear that it’s a story that will have unpredictable effects, much more powerful than the story deserves—the story of a psychopath, nothing more. An individual who represents no one. Not even the most radical of rebels. A story that could be Syria or someplace in the U.S., say Milwaukee.

  And so here I am.

  Why—I don’t know.

  With this knee, besides.

  Those three seconds. And to be honest I sometimes wonder what’s the point. In the evening, when I’m sitting in front of the TV news, and all I see are dead bodies, corpses and grief, mothers devastated, and maybe it’s Syria, maybe Iraq, maybe it’s another war, I couldn’t say: all I see are dead bodies. And I don’t know.