Syrian Dust: Reporting from the Heart of the War

by Francesca Borri

  and now that it’s official, they’ve all left.

  Now that Obama has made up his mind. No bombing.

  And they all left.

  On the other hand, in Cairo the activists end up back in prison. Clashes, attacks. And everywhere hangs the portrait of General al-Sisi, the man responsible for the coup. Like the portrait of Mubarak before. “What, you’re still in Ramallah?” Lorenzo asked me. “Don’t tell me you’re going to miss Egypt.”

  It seems normal now, Syria, the war.

  And the journalists are gone.

  “There’s nothing to write about.”

  The first photo always arrives around 5 a.m. Today’s shot is a courtyard with red, blue, and green patches scattered about. Clothing. An Islamic charity that distributed clothes. At night, to prevent being seen. But they were struck by a mortar. Almost all of the victims were children, sent to preclude being hit. Because you think: Children. Let’s send the children, children won’t be targeted. If you enlarge the photo, zoom in, some of the tattered rags aren’t rags at all. Meaning, they’re not cloth.

  Then comes a photo of some children reflected in a pool of blood. A missile strike—a picture of rescue workers after the missile, digging through stone after stone with their bare hands. An eleven-story building. A photo of fathers carrying their children in their arms, lined up as if at the entrance to a nursery, but instead they’re in line at a cemetery, their children wrapped in white cloth. A little boy on a bike pedaling swiftly past the snipers, head down, and this little girl with a flower in her hair, a pleated skirt, collecting scraps of metal to make weapons. “Come play with me?” she asks, with her flower in her hair, and another little boy nearby is missing an arm and is playing in front of the ruins of al-Shifa. They’re playing at being executed against a wall, they are playing at being tortured, they are playing at being corpses, at being mutilated, this head wedged in the rubble, charred. “Come play with me?” she asks while everything, all around, explodes, explodes and topples, blood drips on them as they skin a rat, emaciated, yellow from typhus, skin and bones and scars. “Come play with me?” as they search for a corpse, search for food, or fly on swings soaring over common graves. You walk along and they cling to your arm, follow you, as if you were worthy, as if you were here to save them, collecting all the fingers they can find, a bouquet of fingers of the field, as if you were worthy and everywhere you turn, those heads, they stare at you, those heads among the rubble, that questioning look, they stare at you, the blood dripping down, they stare at you as if to say: I don’t understand those feet, those hands, those arms in the rubble, and they cling to you as you run away, asking, “Come play with me?” these charred children, these empty eye sockets, “Come play with me?” and they pull you down, they grab you, as if you were there to save them, they grip you by the ankles and . . .

  it’s 3:37 in the morning.

  Only 3:37.

  I keep waking up at the same time.

  But all that’s left are the photographs.

  None of us is willing to go to Syria anymore.

  Even Father Paolo Dall’Oglio has disappeared. He’d lived in Syria for thirty years at the monastery of Mar Musa, not far from Damascus, and was—still is—the symbol of dialogue between Christianity and Islam in Syria. He had returned a few days ago, after being expelled by Assad. And he was headed to Raqqa, the only city controlled by the rebels, and therefore the first city of democratic Syria. A tenacious opponent of the regime, he had returned to start again.

  But he was kidnapped by Al Qaeda.

  Even Father Paolo Dall’Oglio.

  Kidnapped by the rebels.

  An opponent of the regime.

  So now none of us reporters dares to return.

  What’s left are the photographs.

  The emails. “Obama thinks about bombing and suddenly you’re all prepared to take a chance. Because for you the news isn’t the war in Syria, it’s American foreign policy. You yourselves are the news. For you being for or against bombing means being for or against the United States. For you journalists, there’s nothing to write about, apart from the United States, apart from all of you,” a Syrian wrote to me. He said, “Shame on you.”

  Only these kinds of messages are left.

  Hour after hour.

  Minute after minute. They’re killing us all! Where are you? They’re killing us all!

  Only these emails.

  And photos of blood.

  i tried reworking my list. But it still says R for Red, C for Corpse, A for Airplane, H for Helicopter, E for Explodes. R for Rubble.

  R for Rubble, M for Mortars, W for Wounded, B for Blade, G for Grief. G for Guilt.

  O for Obsession.

  “Change jobs!” Elias yelled at me yesterday. I had phoned him to see if anyone felt like going back to Aleppo. “What more do you want from Syria? Forget the war!” he shouted. “Forget about Syria! If you’re not able to forget, if you’re not able to move on, do something else! Write novels! You and your Syria! Write a novel. This is no job for people who are fragile! What do you expect from Syria?” he yelled at me. And he hung up. Just like that.

  He’s one of the best. A photographer who has portrayed Syria as few others have.

  But now we don’t even talk about it among ourselves. I mean, we thirty-somethings who were there at al-Shifa. Rooted to the spot. So we wouldn’t miss the bombings, because we knew it was only a matter of time. Only a matter of aim. We knew that some of us would be killed, yet we stayed there. Tacitly taking turns in shifts. Especially the photographers.

  Italians, Spaniards. The ones who in Italy we call bamboccioni, stay-at-homers who still live with their parents.

  But now we don’t even talk about it, our own ghosts.

  Each of us who can’t sleep. Though no one will say it.

  Each of us talking in our sleep about brutality and carnage.

  Especially after it became a war. After everything changed, after everything went bad, and you are no longer the same person the activists helped get across the border illegally. Because everyone sees you as nothing more than an instrument: an instrument of propaganda or an instrument of profit. Everyone: the rebels, the regime, and everyone around you, who in reality have zero interest in Syria, in the world. In you. They’re all there waiting for your photo, your piece. An icon. While all you have are children grasping at your ankles.

  Because the hardest thing, in the end, isn’t writing about the front, about other people’s wars, but your own. And so here we are. Each with his own ghosts.

  Here, where we don’t even talk about it anymore.

  If you’re unable to move on.

  If you can’t forget.

  O for Obsession.

  But who is more rational? Those who move on or those who stay put? Those who observe or those who deny? Those who aren’t traumatized by 110,000 deaths, by two years of war? Who is more rational?

  More fragile? Those who look or those who look away?

  Because in the end you can hide all you want, but it’s like those portraits by the Dutch photographer Claire Felicie, like those marines before and after Afghanistan. When only a year had passed, and instead it seemed like ten: the rough skin and that unreadable expression, as though they’d been scorched by life. Like the photos in our passports, if we look through them. If we confront ourselves: Before. After.

  Elsewhere. Endlessly elsewhere, as I wander through Ramallah, through this city that was the beacon of the Middle East. No longer my home.

  “Change jobs!”

  “What more do you want from Syria?”

  “See a shrink.”

  I look at Alessio’s photos.

  Once, twice, a hundred times. Just Alessio’s photos.

  Radiohead’s music.

  Nothing but Alessio’s photos.

  Because there’
s a story.

  And it’s not over. F for Fragile, F for Fear. P for Passion.

  In the newsroom they reassure me: “You can write about Syria just as well from Rome.”

  Or from Ramallah.

  There’s no need to go back.

  sure. bad enough you have no idea what’s happening in Syria even when you’re in Syria.

  Those looks boring into you.

  Heads in the rubble.

  All I know is there’s a story there.

  It’s not over.

  A for Angels. D for Demons.

  Kill my demons, and you kill my angels.

  L for Loneliness.

  S for Syria. M for Mirror.

  But what does it matter? You can write about Syria just as well from Rome.

  Because, though you don’t realize it, the only ones left who are still writing about Syria are Syrians. They work for the major agencies, the major newspapers, and contribute with articles written from New York, Paris, London. They are the famous “citizen journalists,” highly glorified even by those who would never think of going to a “citizen dentist.” The result is cases like that of Elizabeth O’Bagy, the analyst at an American research institute who was cited by John Kerry at the time of the chemical attack. The Wall Street Journal, in fact, had just published one of her pieces about the rebels, which essentially gave the impression that they are decent people, and that there are only a handful of extremists in Syria. Because for the U.S., that is the problem, isn’t it? They are afraid that Assad could be replaced by Al Qaeda. Shortly afterward, while Human Rights Watch denounced the rebels for crimes against humanity, it was discovered that not only did Elizabeth O’Bagy not have a PhD as she had claimed, but more importantly that she was on the payroll of a Syrian lobby whose objective was to persuade Obama to intervene. In the age of Twitter and YouTube, when newspapers save on correspondents because they can always find some Syrian on Skype who will recap what took place in front of his house, we base our foreign policy on reports like those by Elizabeth O’Bagy. Our wars.

  The resulting deaths.

  On the reports of a person who began to write about the Middle East two years ago and who was born in 1987.

  What does it matter? You can write about Syria just as well from Rome.

  * * *

  6 “The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.” Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature: Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1987), 341.

  7 The full name of the treaty, which entered into force in 1997, is the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction. It is administered by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), an intergovernmental organization based in The Hague.

  AUTUMN 2013

  In line at the gate for Antakya, standing in front of me at the Istanbul airport, are two guys with beards, Korans, and British passports. One is missing an arm. The other an ear.

  I’m not the only one returning to Aleppo.

  But only jihadists remain now. There’s no media left in Antakya. The TV networks, the BBC, Sky, still have their offices there, all their equipment, but no one to man it, just a few local staff. Correspondents from newspapers like the Guardian, Le Monde, correspondents from real newspapers who cover the entire Middle East, don’t have a free minute now that everything is in upheaval, so they swing by every two or three months.

  The others weren’t there before, and aren’t there now.

  We freelancers aren’t there anymore either.

  “There’s nothing to report,” a Spanish guy who came to pick up his bulletproof jacket immediately tells me. “It’s pointless. They’re where they were a year ago.”

  Even the Ozsut is deserted.

  I ask for an espresso. “Sorry, we don’t have any,” they tell me. “Only Turkish coffee.”

  The only ones left are jihadists and NGO people. The way they are now, it’s as if they weren’t there. The great majority are young people living as if they were someplace else, a place that is identical throughout the world, with their banana cakes and evenings for foreigners only, unmistakably all dressed alike, hanging out only with each other, getting drunk in countries where alcohol is forbidden, and things like that. Like in Ramallah on New Year’s Eve, who can forget it? New Year’s Eve 2009, when the Danes threw a party on a terrace and meanwhile Gaza was an inferno.

  Because those were the days of Operation Cast Lead.

  Nearly 1,400 deaths, all of Ramallah in the dark as a show of solidarity, all of Ramallah silent, and that festively illuminated terrace. The music blaring.

  By now you can expect anything from the NGOs.

  Not that operating here is easy. The first obstacle is Assad, of course, who allows only a few friendly NGOs to operate in Syrian territory. The second obstacle is Turkey, which initially handled everything itself through its primary NGO ascribable to Prime Minister Erdogan. Because for Erdogan it’s not a question of solidarity: Syria is an opportunity to show the world what Turkey is capable of—this Turkey that the European Union rejected. But then the number of refugees rose to tens of thousands in just a few months, an unsustainable financial burden, triggering a crisis and threatening to drag Turkey down with it. And so our NGOs obtained the first authorizations. Though with a thousand hurdles and constraints, and strict controls, for fear that now that they’ve arrived they’ll start dealing with other things—with the Kurds, for example. For sure, operating here isn’t easy.

  Especially given the third obstacle, the war.

  “But the problem is that the NGOs have hung back at the border for a year. Now it’s dangerous, true, but they didn’t go in even when it was possible,” Mahmoud Saeed from the Media Center in Aleppo tells me. “Many were afraid of the mortars. Which is more than understandable. But if you’re afraid of mortars, which is the least that can be dropped on you in a war, don’t raise funds saying that you’ll distribute aid in war zones. Explain that you will distribute your blankets to those who manage to flee and reach Turkey on their own, while the rest are dying, starving to death. Because when you promote yourself as a hero, people then think we have humanitarian aid, that someone is doing something, that you’re here. In Aleppo, we’ve never seen a single bottle of water, not one bag of rice, with the logo of one of your NGOs.”

  Of the dozens of NGOs lingering at the border, only Doctors Without Borders, after months of negotiations, months of persistence, set up its hospitals. One of them was the infirmary where they treated my knee. God only knows how brave, how generous they were there, because it was like al-Shifa, with bombings twice a week on average, in a city so small that everyone knew it was only a matter of time. A matter of aim.

  Yet they were there.

  Because the point—the point is that, unlike others, some do go in. People in Need, for example. A small NGO from the Czech Republic. When none of the others went, with their Master’s degrees and doctorates in humanitarian crises, their years spent testing procedures, calculating the right algorithm for distributing blankets, the universal algorithm, when the others didn’t go, Michal Przedlacki did. A man of few words, thirty-four years old, with very pale blue eyes, in jeans, T-shirt, and scarf. He was in Thailand, the day of the tsunami, when it seemed like everyone around him died.

  And instead of going home, back to his advertising agency, he went to Chechnya.

  In all these months, he’s been the only foreigner living in Aleppo. And when you ask him how it happened, all he says, shyly, is “commitment.” Commitment and passion.

  “I’m not here for others. There’s no such thing as their life and my life—this is our life. And when you’re here, and the Syrians understand that you’re trying, that maybe you won’t succeed in the end, but that you’re trying, day by day, as hard as you can,
and that you’re sharing their lives—it’s not as if you come in for ten minutes, throw them a couple of sacks of potatoes and rush off. You’re settled here, you live here. When they realize that you know what it means to be here, a social protective net forms around you. Which is, after all, the only real protection in situations like this. Everyone thinks it’s about dollars. Dollars and strength, like in the movies, paying the best-equipped guards, the toughest rebels. But there are things you can’t buy. For example, respect. It’s the opposite: you have to fit in. You have to build human relationships, not contractual ones. You have to stay here because you care, not just because it’s your job. If you do that, it doesn’t mean you’re invulnerable. It’s not to say it’s easy. But you can try.”

  No, it isn’t easy. For months now, Michal hasn’t slept.

  For months I have woken up at the same hour.

  “Everyone asks me why. Why do you stay there? But, simply put, once you’ve seen, you can’t unsee. Once you’ve seen, as Arundhati Roy says, remaining silent becomes as much a political act as speaking out. As acting. Either way, whatever you choose to do, you’re accountable. I’m not the only one who stays: in a way, we’re all here. Those who keep silent and those who don’t. Those who look or those who look away. We’re all here. Each of us can decide which side to take.”

  In fact, there are others who would like to try. Including an extraordinary Italian woman. But she is so frustrated by having spent months here without ever going in, writing and rewriting reports about a Syria she’s never seen, that she has decided to drop everything and study nursing. As an American aid worker says: “I tell my boss about Michal, and my boss, from Washington, says to me: ‘That guy is one of those who do what the Syrians tell him. They tell him they need rice and he buys them rice. And maybe they need sugar more than rice.’ Humanitarian aid has its own rules,” he says. “It’s not improvisation. You have to follow the rules.” Then he tells me: “Only sometimes you have to follow your conscience too. Play by the rules, but also go by what’s real.”