Syrian Dust: Reporting from the Heart of the War

by Francesca Borri

  And there are others like him. A German aid worker. Another American. Disheartened. Stuck in their offices in Antakya, planning what Syria needs without ever having been in Syria.

  Distributing blankets to refugees, but only to those who manage to flee on their own.

  And yet the vast majority aren’t bothered by it. They hang around here, bored, between one meeting and another. They plan outings and get together for drinks. They are already excited about Halloween. They are keeping an eye out for typhoons and earthquakes because they’ve discovered that Antakya doesn’t even have a movie theater or a real disco, nothing, and the girls here don’t have sex before marriage. They want to leave. They know Syria as much as they know Antarctica. “I have several contacts with Hezbollah who might help you,” a Frenchman who’s been in Lebanon kindly tells me. He leaves me a slip of paper with some phone numbers. Hezbollah. Sure. They could help me disappear. Hezbollah is with Assad. Or this other Frenchman who deals with minorities, flour and minorities, and calls me because he’s looking for a representative from every Christian community. He has to deliver his flour. He calls me and says: “Do you think you can find me some Copts? I have an Orthodox and a Chaldean. I even have a Melkite, an Assyrian too,” he tells me, “but I’m missing the Copts.” It’s not that he’s missing them; it’s that they’re missing in Syria because they’re found in Egypt.

  It’s confidential. You ask them what they’re distributing, where, and they tell you: It’s confidential. How they choose the areas in which to operate, which areas have the most urgent needs, how many people they assist—ask them anything. Ask them what the weather is like and they tell you: It’s confidential.

  All they’ll tell you is that they distribute aid through Syrian NGOs. For anything else, they tell you to call their press office in London or Brussels. And the press office tells you that it’s all online. Online, at best you learn that they have a budget of “X million euros.” Not a word about how the money is used. With what results. Apart from what the Syrians say: “We’re starving.”

  But there are small exceptions. The Czechs. And the Norwegians, as usual, go anywhere.

  “About a dozen NGOs are ready to step in. But no one contacts us. And when we asked that milk for babies be made a priority in Aleppo, they said it was a cultural matter, that breast milk is better than powdered milk. And they suggested we do a training session for women,” Mohammed says. Who in April was wearing a Metallica sweatshirt, working for a Western NGO. Now he has a beard and works for a charity linked to Al Qaeda.

  I have no doubt that it is less black and white than that. And this is Aleppo: only Aleppo. Maybe farther east, farther south, it’s different in Uganda. But for the moment, this is all they tell me—all I can write about. There are two pieces that are impossible to write here. A piece on the Islamists. And a piece on humanitarian aid. It’s hopeless: they don’t speak to journalists. But Al Qaeda’s salaries are not paid with our donations.

  It’s confidential.

  That’s all I’m allowed to write.

  Too dangerous to go in, they say.

  The only way is to rely directly on the Syrians, they tell you.

  On the other hand, the National Coalition even has an internal Assistance Coordination Unit specializing in humanitarian aid and reconstruction. It was established a little less than a year ago, in December 2012, and has raised forty-seven million dollars to date. The bills are kept in packets in a storeroom. But here, too, it’s hopeless; they don’t speak to journalists. The only ones who explained the results obtained were two officials, Bassam al-Kuwatly and Mohammed Ayoub. After they resigned. “The money was delivered in plastic bags. Someone would say: ‘I need $150,000 for this project.’ And he was given $150,000. Without a shred of paper to justify that the $150,000 was actually needed. And above all, that the project was needed.”

  Disproportionate salaries, incompetence, unjustified expenses. Mark Ward, an American diplomat, commented: “Better than nothing.” At first, the group whose phone line functioned the best received the money.

  Later a shy, introverted man who had been a laborer all his life would manage to accomplish what the National Coalition never could, what neither the UN nor the NGOs nor anyone else could do—those like me, who spent years studying for a degree in solidarity, then a Master’s in refugees, and another degree in locusts and famines. Yakzan Shishakly, thirty-six years old, was born in Damascus, and after finishing high school he immigrated to Houston, Texas, where he paid for courses in English by working as a waiter, and he started a company that installed air conditioners. When in September 2012 he saw the war rapidly advance, along with the world’s indifference, he came back here. At the border, behind barbed wire, he saw women and children, in the rain out in the open, with nothing. The border sealed. And he simply asked them what they needed most. They told him tents, and that’s how he started. With what he had in his pocket. Today thirty thousand people live in his camp at Atmeh. For each family, he spends eight times less than what the United Nations spends on refugees a few miles away.

  Of course, Yakzan Shishakly isn’t fond of journalists either. When you approach with your notebook, he points to the refugees and tells you: “Don’t write about me. They’re the story, not me.”

  He tells you, “Do what you can with those few lines you have.

  “Even if it is just a few lines,” he says, “even if they do not seem like much, they are important.”

  He says: “They are your part.”

  Yakzan, in Arabic, means “he who is awake.” He who is aware.

  Who has a conscience.

  Because there is no one left here.

  It’s too dangerous.

  And besides—why risk it? After all, you can write about Syria just as well from Rome, can’t you?

  On Twitter, on Facebook, on YouTube. Even though the news and even the images aren’t verifiable. Nor current. The first star of the Syrian Spring, in 2011, was a gay activist from Damascus followed by half the world. Amina. Until the Guardian realized that her name was Tom MacMaster and that he was writing from Edinburgh. Or the photo that moved everyone the other day: a child sleeping between his parents’ graves. Except it had been taken in Saudi Arabia as part of an artistic performance.

  Everyone keeps saying: What are you doing there?

  Why don’t you go to Cairo?

  “Read this analysis from the front!” the U.S. State Department tweeted excitedly yesterday. It was a piece by a young repoter already quoted by the Washington Post and the Economist as an expert on Islamic militant groups, and in particular on jihad in Syria.

  Then a reporter called him for an interview.

  He’s twenty-one years old and studied literature at Oxford. He’s never been to Syria.

  Because by now there’s this idea, right? That if something exists, it’s on the Internet. And vice versa. If it’s not on the Internet, it doesn’t exist. But if it really happened, if it’s true, it’s on the Internet.

  It’s just a matter of digging around and finding it.

  And if it’s on the Internet, if it’s just a matter of digging around and finding it, why stay here?

  Go home.

  The danger.

  What do you still want with Syria?

  The problem is that the definition may be new, but the phenomenon isn’t new. Because “citizen journalists” in fact fall into two categories. The individual who is there by chance, on September 11, for example, walking his dog near the Twin Towers. He takes a picture with his phone and describes one of the planes crashing. But we already have a word for him: eyewitness. And no one would ever think of asking him to do an analysis of Al Qaeda, on which to then base the decision to bomb Afghanistan. In the second category are those who live in Aleppo under a regime, rather than in Havana, or in Taranto, in the shadow of the ILVA steelworks, who take pictures every day, report the d
evastation day by day, constantly. Who document. Invaluable. Especially in Syria, with so many cities inaccessible. However we already have a word for them as well. They’re called activists. And like all activists, not only do some merely defend their own cause, their own interests, their view of things; on the contrary, that’s their job. But even the more moderate ones are simply too involved. Journalism is a question of detachment: a matter of being at the right distance. Not too close, not too far away. Any journalist knows that at some point he has to go, especially at the very moment when he’s become a so-called expert and everyone seeks him out. He has to go, because he’s too close to it by now, because a lot of things now seem normal to him. They’ve become invisible to him.

  Because he starts to say, “There’s nothing to write about.”

  Every journalist knows this.

  That information is one thing, journalism another.

  That journalism is what is constructed based on information.

  But we all seem to have forgotten that here.

  When a year ago, in the streets of Aleppo, we ran into the first victims who’d been tortured by the rebels, dragged by the hair, all bloodied, I still remember Giulio wanting to take a picture. Naturally, the rebels kept him at a distance. “What happened?” I asked.

  “He fell down the stairs.”

  Like in the emergency room, right? When a wife arrives. A girlfriend.

  She fell down the stairs.

  The question is always the same. What are you doing in Antakya?

  It’s all online.

  What are you still doing there? It’s all on YouTube.

  Call the rebels, they’ll tell you about it. They’ll even send you photos, you know?

  Every day.

  Thirty times. What the hell are you still doing there?

  Still, Syria is remote, even when you’re in Syria.

  Aleppo, too, is remote, even when you’re in Aleppo. When you’re at the front, you have to call Rome in the evening, so that someone can read you the news agencies’ reports and recap what’s happened, meanwhile, around you. Because all you know is what occurred in your corner of the old city, there with a lone cat and a couple of snipers. Especially in the other half of Aleppo. The part that’s under the control of the regime. Which is a hundred yards in front of us. I’ve been here for two years now and I still don’t know what’s going on across the river. What life is like there. It’s off limits even to journalists who have a visa. Some talk about cafés, restaurants. Shops open for business. Normal things. Schools, offices. They say there’s asphalt across the river, street lights, and paved roads. That there’s water. Others, however, tell of displaced persons, thousands of displaced families. They tell of snipers and mortars, mortars fired by the rebels. As undiscriminating as those of the regime.

  They report everything and its opposite.

  And we will never know the truth.

  Even if it’s all online. All on YouTube.

  Because the truth is that even in Aleppo we have no idea what’s happening in Aleppo.

  Yet the question is always the same. What are you still doing there?

  There’s nothing to write about.

  They’re where they were a year ago. “Go to Cairo.”

  “Go to the Central African Republic.”

  “But I don’t know anything about the Central African Republic.”

  “Exactly. No one even knows where it is. You can write whatever you want.”

  “Still going on about Syria!” Lorenzo says sharply, he too having come to pick up his bulletproof jacket and assorted equipment. “What is it with you, an obsession? They’ll end up kidnapping you, and Italy will have to pay your ransom with my taxes! Instead of funding nursery schools,” he says, his voice rising. “We have to bankroll your obsession! And then we won’t have nursery schools! Because of paying ransoms for people like you! Do you hear that?” he yells to the guy at the nearby table. “They go to Syria to be kidnapped, and then I have to pay their ransom! And for what? What? To report that the Syrians are where they were a year ago! Because they’re obsessed! Go see a shrink,” he tells me. And he stalks out.

  Then he comes back. “This is no job for a woman!” And he walks out again.

  Everybody in the Ozsut is watching us.

  And anyway, Lorenzo has never paid any taxes. Because almost all of them have a foreign account, in Lebanon, for instance, countries like that. And an account in Italy for the small change.

  It’s one of the most popular topics of conversation here. How to evade taxes.

  Still, it’s true that the Syrians are where they were a year ago.

  Yes. Except the rebels are crumbling.

  And everything is changing.

  Even if things are where they were a year ago.

  In the beginning, the rebels were defending their neighborhoods, the blocks where they lived. That’s how it started, and often it’s still that way. Scattered groups who only have scarce funds that trickle in from abroad, typically from Syrians originally from the same areas. You meet these rebels everywhere, busy crafting their handmade weapons from leftover sheet metal, street posts. Rusty cans. You meet them as they aim left to flush out a sniper on their right, as grenades explode in their hands. Sometimes the journalists happen to be the more experienced ones at the front; sometimes they have to explain how to use a mortar. And the rebels don’t ask for more ammunition these days, but for food: they’re hungry.

  In addition to the young guys with Kalashnikovs and flip-flops, others have banded together in larger, better-equipped groups. Such as the Liwa al-Tawhid, the Unity Brigade, the toughest in Aleppo. Or the Ahrar al-Sham, the Free Men of the Levant, which is the largest moderate Islamic brigade and also has a section for humanitarian aid. The assassination of its leader a few days ago, the work of Al Qaeda, triggered the clashes now underway. Unlike the more radical jihadists who are outside of the Free Army, groups such as Ahrar al-Sham claim a greater sphere for sharia, but in the context of a secular, plural Syria. It’s difficult to get to the truth, however; they don’t speak to journalists. “If you have questions, you can find everything on our Facebook page,” they say. Not the best advice. The first thing you find on Google are videos of heads chopped off. The most recent one, in Aleppo, in a hospital: a patient groggy from anesthesia was murmuring Shiite verses. Only when he was already decapitated did they realize that he was one of them.

  The problem is that what we call the Free Army is not synonymous, generally speaking, with the resistance. It has never included all the insurgents, nor has it ever been able to coordinate them or identify priorities, to formulate a strategy. For a variety of reasons. The first and foremost is that it has long been led by Turkey. By general Riad al-Assad, known for giving orders via Skype. But above all, the Free Army is undermined by competition between Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who vie for the loyalty of the various brigades with rounds of cash. And with individual autonomous brigades seeking and managing arms and resources, the result is that there is no chain of command, and crimes and abuses go unpunished. And it’s not just looting: Abu Sakkar, the rebel who feasted on the heart of a loyalist, was never removed from duty.

  The problem is that what we call the Free Army doesn’t exist. A few days ago, thirteen brigades—about 80 percent of the rebels—split off from the National Coalition. They don’t intend to recognize a government in exile, they have stated, but plan to create a Syria based on sharia. In part because, to be completely honest, rechristening themselves Islamists is the easiest way to rake in dollars from wealthy charities in the Gulf nations. With $175 you can adopt a child long-distance, for life, or donate fifty bullets for a sniper in Syria; $400 and you buy him eight mortar rounds.

  devastated by hunger and epidemics, decimated by missiles, Syrians are disconcerted to see the Free Army wrangle with the National Coalition, and besides that, eve
n more seriously, clash with the Islamists. In fact, each time you come back here you find that the former bad guys are now the good guys, because players have emerged who are even more extremist. And just as Ahrar al-Sham, which terrorized us a year ago, then started protecting us from Jabhat al-Nusra, the group that introduced suicide bombings, today it is Jabhat al-Nusra that protects us from ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the offshoot of Al Qaeda founded in 2004 in Iraq to eradicate not only the Americans, but also the Shiites. Its aim is not to overthrow Assad, but to capture parts of Syria and restore the caliphate. They are all foreigners. And their number grew with the attack on the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, in July 2013, when hundreds of them who had been detained there promptly flocked here. They were also bolstered by the removal of Morsi in Egypt, which was interpreted as evidence that it’s useless to win power through elections, because the U.S. will then organize a coup. Evidence that the only way is jihad.

  Because the Middle East, at times, isn’t complicated.

  And so, these days the rebels are all united in the war against ISIS, which for now is in control and commands the border crossings, namely, the critical supply routes from Turkey. Reports from the checkpoints are unvarying: summary executions of anyone deemed to be an infidel. Names are now circulating for the first time. The first stories were told in a low voice. Deserters who decided to desert again.

  Who decided to go back to Assad.

  Because it’s true: they are where they were a year ago.

  Except things are no longer the same.

  And yet everyone will tell you there’s nothing to write about.

  Only Narciso Contreras is still here. He won the Pulitzer with his photos and yet he’s still here. Aleppo is off limits now, too many Al Qaeda checkpoints. But he’s still here, going wherever else it’s possible to go in Syria. He returned to us last night.

  But it’s tough. He says, “The newspapers aren’t interested.”