Syrian Dust: Reporting from the Heart of the War

by Francesca Borri

  Now that life is more frightening than Syria.

  * * *

  8 Remarque, op. cit., 165.

  9 Lorenzo Milani Comparetti, known simply as don Milani, was a Roman Catholic priest, best known as an educator of poor children and an advocate of conscientious objection. The phrase quoted is from his collection of letters entitled Lettere al mio prossimo (Letters to My Neighbor).

  10Federico García Lorca, “Afternoon. November 1919,” Book of Poems (Selection)/Libro de poemas (Selección): A Dual-Language Book, trans. and ed. Stanley Appelbaum (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004), 71.

  "Still going on about that story? They're where they were a year ago!” Lorenzo told me predictably from Kiev. “Let them tell their own story! It’s their war—what the hell do you want with Syria?”

  I’m back at the border. Since my last time here, no one has been able to get into Aleppo anymore. More exactly: no one has come back. In three years, sixty-two journalists have been killed. I’m here waiting for a Saudi commander to give the green light. The problem is to avoid a regime checkpoint controlled by Iranians, but everything has been arranged now. The fixer is a Tunisian, and I’ll even have Internet. At the base of a group of Afghans. The interpreter came from Amsterdam, like me.

  There’s no one left in Syria. Not even Syrians.

  Because for three months now, explosive barrels have been raining down. All day, all night: tons and tons of nails and dynamite. They have the power of aviation, but the frequency of artillery—and the Syrians gave in. Terrified, they poured into Turkey by the thousands. We have no idea how many dead there are, but the latest estimates say 150,000, plus 250,000 so-called secondary deaths, that is, those who technically did not die as a direct result of the war, but because cancer, even now—even in Damascus, where journalists friendly to the regime, the only ones who can get a visa, assure us that everything is normal, that life goes on as usual in Syria, maybe just in the morning, to shower, you know? the water is a little cold—even in Damascus, cancer today is treated with herbs and teas.

  To those who for months have had nothing but leaves and roots for supper, the only meat that of stray cats, to those who, depleted, chew cardboard so as not to black out, even the flu is lethal.

  Negotiations in Geneva, meanwhile, have failed. So to speak. More precisely, they were discontinued. Because they couldn’t even reach agreement on the reasons for the failure. At a certain point the delegates simply left and never came back.

  Nevertheless, faced with photos of skeletons under siege, the NGOs and UN agencies have finally mobilized. They’re still at the border, still here where they can only assist refugees: only those who manage to flee Syria on their own. A truly noteworthy undertaking, since refugees now number two and a half million. And represent only one-third of the more than nine million Syrians who no longer have a home—though at least now they’re struggling as hard as they can to go back. Assad, however, doesn’t respond: he’s busy with the elections, the vote is in June. He re-nominated himself for president. While the rebels decided to regroup. Too many brigades, they said, too much anarchy: everyone here does as he pleases. So they appointed a new commander. But when asked at his first interview if the rebels would finally stop kidnapping everyone now, he said: “Can I call you back in five minutes?” He wasn’t aware that he was head of the Free Army.

  He said he had to check a minute. To hear it on the news.

  The explosive barrels are so deadly that I thought Aleppo would fall. But it’s been this way for months. The rebels seemingly about to win, advancing and advancing. Then, abruptly, the weapons stop coming. And the regime goes on the offensive at that point, seemingly about to win, advancing and advancing. Then suddenly new weapons reach the rebels.

  At the beginning some analysts, especially in the U.S., advised: “Let them butcher each other.” Hezbollah, Iran. Al Qaeda. Let them kill each other. Let them use their weapons against themselves, instead of against Israel. Against us.

  Did we really just watch? Not intervene?

  Is this really not our war?

  Meanwhile, even now, all I get are these messages. Every day. Where are you?

  They’re killing us all! Day after day, hour after hour—Where are you?

  Three years later, however, it’s not true that things are still the same here. Now they no longer tell me: “There’s nothing to write about.” Now they say: “But you’ve finished the book, why the hell do you still care about Syria?”

  — Antakya, March 30, 2014

  JOURNEY TO THE END OF ALEPPO

  Since the fighting started in August 2012, since the rebels of the Free Army began their offensive, only one thing hasn’t changed here. The only anti-aircraft protection is bad weather.

  The only refuge is luck.

  Over these months I’ve written about a city reduced to rubble. About bursts of mortars, streets peppered with snipers, missiles and bomb blasts, I described a city disfigured by typhus, by leishmaniasis, by starvation, I wrote of children who look like they’re in Ethiopia or Somalia, the skin on their bones like wax, their supper grass and rainwater. I wrote about rivers spewing corpses, clouds of insects on the remains of an intestine, a liver, a lung; about grenades, rockets, fighter planes, beheaded activists, executed fifteen-year-olds. In hospitals being bombed, I saw kitchen knives used as scalpels, a nurse’s touch the only anesthetic; I saw mutilated bodies, heads, hands, fingers, skull fragments lying on chairs.

  150,000 confirmed dead, 220,000 estimated. I wrote about horror, over these months, about dismay, brutality, savagery. Pain. I used every possible word.

  Exhausted every adjective.

  Sorry. I still didn’t know what war was.

  Assad’s counter-offensive began in December 2013. You enter the city through ten miles of front line now, starting from the industrial zone of Sheikh Najjar, once so tightly controlled by the rebels that it housed the headquarters of the Revolutionary Council, Aleppo’s provisional government which optimistically planned to restore pipes, reopen schools, even replant trees. Instead you now race full speed through mortars, RPGs, Kalashnikovs, a plane buzzing overhead, to get to shelter as fast as possible in the residential neighborhoods. That is, under explosive barrels. Barrels. Barrels filled with gasoline and dynamite, hurled down from choppers two, three, four at a time. They rain down by the dozens, every day, every night, every hour, everywhere, literally everywhere, an average of fifty per day. And no distinction is made between civilians and combatants. The only difference is that the front is bombed with planes, which are more precise. As usual, rebels and loyalists are so close that they shout insults as they shoot at one another; the barrels would hit the loyalists as well. But that’s the only difference. Because other than that, there is only one criterion for distinguishing and selecting targets in Aleppo: clockwise or counterclockwise.

  We continue to call it that. Aleppo. But by now it’s Dresden.

  Miles and miles—Aleppo no longer exists. Each day more and more rubble.

  Yet it’s not as deserted as it seems. As they say. Because becoming a refugee, as my interpreter remarks, “is a luxury that not everyone can afford.” Not everyone has $150 to pay for a car to get to Turkey, plus $100 a head, for a wife and three kids, to bribe a police officer and cross the border illegally. Only a few still have a passport. And in any case there are now seven hundred thousand refugees in Turkey: the UN camps are a shambles. Aleppo seems deserted, but hundreds of people, thousands, shattered, are still here.

  Eighty thousand, according to estimates. Chewing cardboard to ease their hunger, looking consumed, haggard, standing by the roadside in tatters, gazing up at the sky—because at one time a plane would come and bomb two, three times a week, it would bomb and disappear, but now a chopper hovers overhead and bombs without warning, two, three times an hour. All of a sudden you die. That’s all you can do i
n Aleppo. Nothing else. You wait and you die, in this hornet’s nest, this nest of rumbling booms, that’s all, just the roaring that grows louder at times, only this scream, suddenly, tayara! tayara!, a plane!, and everyone ducks under a chair, behind a cabinet, a vase, a bucket, anything—because Aleppo looks deserted, and instead they materialize from the rubble before you by the hundreds, by the thousands, terrified. They live like this, in the midst of bodies that were never recovered. Thinking that maybe a house that’s already been hit is less likely to be hit again. Scattered amid the stones, amid the concrete slabs: clothes, books, a clock, a shoe with a child’s foot still inside. “To you we’re nothing but a number,” a young man in Sayf al-Dawla protests as he insists on dictating to me the list of victims from the last bombing. Name by name. But as of January, the UN stopped recording the death toll: too difficult to update, the sources, he explained, are unreliable—and so, instead of stopping the war, they’ve stopped tracking the death toll. The young man protests, he insists on telling me their story, one by one. He doesn’t know that to us the dead in Syria are no longer even a number.

  But talking, asking questions in Aleppo is difficult. And not just because journalists are still being targeted by Al Qaeda, still forced to go around undercover, as invisible as possible—at the moment, more than twenty of us are missing without a trace. Talking is difficult because the Syrians try to answer you, men, women, young and old, anyone: they start to speak, say a few words, but then they collapse on your shoulder in despair—and weep. They weep, and it’s they who ask the question—why? Why? they ask you, and they can’t say anything more, despairing. They hug you and weep.

  They weep until the next explosion. Until a Dushka coughs out four, five rounds: not to defend you, not to bring it down, just to warn you that in a few seconds a chopper will arrive, a few seconds and maybe you’ll die, and once again now you too hear the roar, louder and louder, closer, in those infinite few seconds, and they’re all screaming again, running again—and again, viciously, the explosion. You hold your breath. Al-Ansari, 4:40 p.m. The first to emerge is the shadow of a woman. Penetrating the fog of dust and cordite, she staggers toward you. Then a man, another figure, yet another, someone falls unconscious, these limp, incomprehensible bodies in people’s arms, these torn bodies, bleeding, dripping on the ground. The child you came across a short time before is now lying there, ashen, still clutching his teddy bear.

  A rug, a fan, a torso scattered about. A tricycle.

  And for days, at dawn, in silhouette, you see women bent over this shoreline of human remains, as if searching for seashells. Between their fingers a scrap of cloth, a remnant of a child.

  You die in Aleppo. That’s it. You wait and you die.

  They’re on their own, the Syrians, completely alone, on this side of the red line—here where you don’t die from gas, but from everything else. And so nobody cares. Those displaced amount to 9 million, almost half the population. And 3.5 million are in areas that the UN defines as “dangerous to reach.”

  The imams, in November, authorized the cooking of stray cats.

  Despite the fact that Security Council Resolution 2139, adopted on February 22, 2014, demands that delivery of humanitarian aid not be obstructed, for now the UN—which by statute operates through the only recognized government, namely the Assad government—chooses not to enforce it. And to conform. Assad prohibits aid convoys from entering via the Turkish border, which is controlled by the rebels, forcing them to enter much further south, with time, costs, and risks up to ten times greater, Human Rights Watch accuses. Worst of all, with so many restrictions on movement that nearly all of the aid, 90 percent, ends up in areas under the regime’s control. The regime claims that it is to ensure the safety of the humanitarian workers, but the story told by the Red Cross, whose files are complete with names and photos, is somewhat different. The regime has arrested and tortured many of those who tried to reach areas under rebel control.

  Those who did manage to reach them, however, were seized by Al Qaeda.

  In theory, some convoys are said to have entered in recent days, but no one in Aleppo seems to have received anything. Rice, sugar. You never come across anything here that has a foreign logo. A bottle of milk. Anything. The only thing you can be sure of is that when you’re embedded with the rebels—no matter which of the more than a thousand groups they are now split into—food is never lacking. In fact, the Islamists, and in particular the young men from the European suburbs who land here with beard and iPad, acclaim Syria on Facebook as “a five-star jihad,” promising potential recruits that they won’t find a new Mali, nothing but hunger and sand.

  The only other certainty here is the fact that the sole area in Aleppo that has never been bombed is Al Qaeda’s headquarters. And it’s the same elsewhere in Syria. Because of the compound’s isolated location, it is strictly speaking the only lawful military target—the only one that could be hit without collateral damage disproportionate to the military advantage gained. Yet it’s still there.

  And it’s the same in other parts of Syria.

  Except for Al Qaeda, everything is under attack. “By now it’s no longer a question of humanitarian aid,” says Moayed Zarnaji, a Red Cross volunteer. “A kilo of rice won’t make any difference. You’ll die anyway.” Often, you’ll die anyway even if you survive the bombing: no one will come to pull you out of the rubble. They have a Civil Defense unit now, guys with flashlights, gloves, plastic helmets, a tractor, sort of like a fire department.

  There are about thirty of them, but the number varies from day to day, from hour to hour. Because the corpses, in Aleppo, are always in pairs: the second one being the person who instinctively runs to help and is hit by the second barrel. And even if they pull you out of the rubble, no one here has anything to treat you with anymore. Only two hospitals are left. Actually, only one: the other was hit as I was writing. “Even if they treat you, you go back under the helicopters,” a little girl tells me. Her left arm is all splinters and scars. Before she can show me her right arm, a mortar explodes, down the street, and she runs away.

  Because you wait and you die in Aleppo. That’s all.

  And nothing is more atrocious than the first bombing. When someone, under there, is still alive, and you hear the voices, the screams, amid the dust, while you still can’t distinguish anything, saa’idni! saaa’idni!, they implore you, help me!, help me! Like this woman, now. We are in Soukkari, hearing the shrieks of her two grandchildren, seventeen and eighteen years old, relatives restraining her as she struggles to break free, and falls, gets up, screams, saa’idni! saaa’idni!, and it’s the cruelest moment, brothers, fathers, friends, everyone restraining them as they struggle to break free, desperate, clawing at the rubble, like that, with their bare hands, and right away, another chopper promptly arrives, hovers sadistically as everyone runs, yet again, and now, no one knows where to run anymore, everyone struggling, falling, scrambling back up, amid the screams, the clatter of the blades, the dust, the blood—the explosion.

  Because you die, in Aleppo. That’s all.

  The city is divided in two: half under rebel control, half under the control of the regime. And in the eastern sector, the rebel half, a new regime, that of Al Qaeda, replaced the old one in September. But today it no longer even makes sense to talk about a regime here; it’s the rebels or Assad. Because Aleppo is, simply, a no-man’s-land. Prey to criminal gangs. Checkpoints have essentially disappeared: the rebels are all at the front, embroiled in fighting. After spending more time looting and extorting than governing the city, and above all, after having destroyed each other in internal clashes, thereby paving the way for Assad’s counter-offensive, they are now engaged in cutting off supply routes with Damascus, as well as carrying out a diversionary operation in the southwest, in the province of Latakia. Our analysts follow military developments step by step, map in hand: who’s advancing, who’s falling back, hour after hour. But no mat
ter who advances, no matter who falls back, in reality no one is governing anything here—it’s life in the wild. No one controls anyone anymore.

  There’s nothing left to capture but rubble.

  The only visible sign of authority is at the entrance to Karaj al-Hajez, more commonly known as “the Death Crossing” because it is the crossing point between the two halves of Aleppo and is under constant fire from Assad’s snipers. For those who live in the eastern half, it’s essential, since for many, a great many, the only source of income is their state employee wages, which must be earned in the western side. That or selling fruit, vegetables, meat, because prices are higher in the west and you can sell a pound there to buy two here. But most importantly, in the west you are not under bombardment. And you have humanitarian aid. Those who have been displaced are all over there. And so the only visible sign of authority is here, at the Karaj al-Hajez crossing. Earlier the Islamists of Al Qaeda had banned the transport of food. Now they’ve built a wall.