We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled

by Wendy Pearlman

  A series of international monitors, cease-fire plans, and peace processes attempted to end the bloody conflict, without effect. Western governments condemned Assad, yet did not offer the antiaircraft weapons or no-fly zone demanded by the opposition to protect civilians from his assaults. The United States, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and other private and state sources funneled funding to the rebels, but it came through disparate channels to different contacts, and promoted competing interests. Skeptics of the Syrian revolt criticized its fragmentation and disorganization, and highlighted its divisions as reason to hesitate giving greater assistance. Rebels insisted that chaos in the external sources and distribution of resources was the gravest cause of disunity, if not also corruption, among their ranks.

  The Assad regime enjoyed more decisive external support. Iran, Russia, Iraq, and the Lebanese Hezbollah movement provided the Syrian regime with money, weapons, fighters, and ultimately airstrikes against its foes. This support was not only vital in reinforcing the regime, but also dramatically illustrated how the Syrian war was embroiling the region at large.

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  Part VI probes the experiences of civilians living this brutal multidimensional war. By the summer of 2013, rebels pushed government forces from some 60 percent of the country, gaining control over large swaths of its north and west. A dramatic battle transpired when rebels launched an offensive to take Syria’s largest city and economic capital, Aleppo. The operation stalemated in the division between the city’s western neighborhoods, which remained with the regime, and its poorer eastern areas, which came under rebel control.

  In these and other territories that the opposition regarded as liberated, civilians and fighters established local councils to govern and provide services to the population. In Aleppo, residents elected their local representatives. There and elsewhere, populations struggled to cope with electricity, water, and food shortages, vast physical destruction, devastated economies, rebel rivalries, and ongoing shelling and bombing by the Assad regime and its allies—the only forces that controlled the skies. Whether creating playgrounds out of recycled missiles, forming rescue teams to salvage strangers from under rubble, or renewing demonstrations whenever cease-fires offered fleeting respite, such communities mustered the resilience to keep going. Residents of government-held neighborhoods likewise steeled themselves and buried their dead, many killed by mortars fired indiscriminately by rebels in adjacent areas.

  In a war whose greatest victims were civilians, terror took many forms. Imposing shockingly brutal rule in the areas that it seized, ISIS raped women and girls, enlisted child soldiers, and committed murder through such gruesome means as public beheadings. Far greater numbers of casualties occurred at the hands of the Assad regime. The single greatest killer was barrel bombs, typically oil drums or gas tanks packed with explosives and shrapnel and dropped on areas that included schools, hospitals, markets, and residential neighborhoods. Government forces also imposed strategies of surrender-or-starve by encircling communities and preventing entry of food. An iconic photograph from the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp near Damascus offered a glimpse of what happened on the rare occasions that the United Nations, operating in Syria only at the whims of its government, was permitted to reach besieged areas: ghosts of men, women, and children queued to receive food packages, as far as the eye could see.

  August 2013 registered a new level of war crimes when chemical weapons, carried by rockets that experts insist only could have been fired by the Syrian army, hit the Damascus suburb of Ghouta and killed some fourteen hundred individuals, more than four hundred of them children. U.S. declarations that use of chemical weapons was a red line raised many Syrians’ hopes for decisive intervention. Yet threats of a strike came and went, and when the United States finally did dispatch planes in the summer of 2014, it was with the mission of targeting ISIS, not Assad. By March 2015, the United Nations reported that 6 percent of Syria’s population had been killed or injured, some 80 percent lived in poverty, and the majority of children no longer attended school. Satellite images showed a country literally “plunged into darkness,” with 83 percent of lights gone out.

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  Part VII follows Syrians who fled their country in search of refuge near and far. As of early 2017, more than half of Syria’s prewar population of 22 million had been forced from their homes since 2011. Estimates suggest that 7 million were internal refugees, 4.9 million were refugees in countries neighboring Syria, and about one million were seeking asylum in Europe.

  Many refugees were displaced within Syria several times before leaving its borders. The decision to flee was usually a painful one. People abandoned homes in which they had invested their life savings and neighborhoods that were the repository of their life memories. They often left some extended or nuclear family behind.

  Refugees’ first stop outside Syria was usually one of the countries on its borders. Without opportunities for asylum or permanent residence, most Syrians there lived in a kind of precarious limbo. An estimated half of the 1.5 million Syrian children were not in school. Only a small fraction of refugees obtained legal permission to work, and those who were lucky enough to find jobs in the informal sector usually endured conditions and wages that locals would not tolerate. Others, including mothers and children, were reduced to begging or selling trifles on the streets.

  Host countries struggled under the burden of the refugee influx just as refugees struggled to build dignified lives. Jordan’s Zaatari camp, haphazardly raised in a desert prone to sandstorms in summer and floods in winter, became the country’s fourth-largest city. In Lebanon, Syrian refugees totaled approximately a quarter of the population. In the absence of official refugee camps, hundreds of thousands rented shacks or plots for tents in squalid informal settlements. Turkey led other states in extending what it dubbed “temporary protection” to nearly three million Syrians, as well as relatively robust chances to earn some income. Yet the building blocks of a stable future, such as legal standing and educational opportunities, remained insufficient.

  It was one thing to suffer the hardships of life near the border for a year or two while waiting each day for news that it was safe to return home. But as time dragged on, and international aid programs fell further behind need, refugees looked for longer-term alternatives. Syrians could typically apply for asylum upon arriving in Europe or North America; the challenge was getting there. A fortunate few received visas to relocate legally. Others used whatever resources and resourcefulness they could rally to smuggle themselves to what they hoped would be safer quarters. The wealthy could afford exorbitant sums for fake passports and forged visas to get to Europe by airplane. Others exhausted their savings, sold their possessions, or borrowed widely to pay smugglers to get them across the Mediterranean by boat.

  At first, the main choice was the long, arduous journey from Egypt or Libya to Italy. Then, in 2015, Macedonia lifted restrictions that enabled refugees to pass from Greece through the Balkans to western and northern Europe. This overland opening encouraged huge numbers of refugees to travel to Greece from Turkey, a sea passage that was shorter, safer, and less expensive. A billion-dollar trafficking industry emerged, maximizing profits by packing throngs of desperate individuals into rickety or inflatable boats. Thousands drowned at sea. Some who instead smuggled themselves overland, like the seventy-one people found asphyxiated in a truck on a road in Austria, also died en route.

  The record 1.3 million migrants and refugees who made it to Europe in 2015 were thus, in some senses, the lucky ones. While they came from across the globe, nearly 30 percent were Syrian. Refugees trekked across Europe by foot, bus, car, and rail in journeys that could entail weeks of sleeping on the streets, trudging through the rain, carrying babies, and dodging criminals or arrest. More than a third of asylum seekers went to Germany, encouraged by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to open her country’s borders and suspend, for Syrians, the Dublin Protocol stipulation that refugees remain in their
EU country of entry. Sweden’s generous asylum policies made it the second top destination, with arrivals peaking at ten thousand a week.

  For many Syrians, the start of a new life in Europe was the third in a succession of traumas. The trauma of war was followed by the trauma of a death-defying journey, only to be eclipsed by the trauma of disappointed expectations upon arriving in the West. While European newspapers filled with fears about integrating newcomers of a different culture or religion, most refugees remained overwhelmed by the legal and economic nuts and bolts of survival. For many, life was defined by waiting: waiting for residency permits and other bewildering bureaucratic paperwork, waiting to move out of refugee shelters that ranged from former insane asylums in isolated forests to the hangars of a defunct airport in Berlin, waiting to learn enough of the new language to start looking for work, waiting to be reunited with family scattered across continents, or waiting for some piece of good news from home.

  By 2016, Europe had largely closed its borders, leaving some sixty thousand refugees stranded in Greece pending either asylum elsewhere on the continent or deportation. The poorer, overburdened countries neighboring Syria also severely tightened restrictions, even as tens of thousands of people languished in sometimes starving conditions on the Syrian side of their borders. Such was the state of the worst refugee catastrophe since World War II when, in August 2016, the United States accepted its ten thousandth Syrian refugee.

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  Part VIII concludes with testimonials that struggle to make sense of these tumultuous events. A different group of speakers, such as those who support the Assad regime or those who remain in Syria, might offer a different set of reflections. The voices here bring to light the human significance of the Syrian rebellion for those who shared its longing for change. Mixing pride, guilt, sorrow, courage, and hope, their pained words challenge us to think about who we might be if faced with the same trials of revolution, war, and exile. One wonders what might have been different had we listened to Syrians’ voices earlier. It is not too late to listen now.

  Part I

  Authoritarianism

  Fadi, theater set specialist (Hama)

  A Syrian citizen is a number. Dreaming is not allowed.

  Hosam, computer programmer (al-Tel)

  When you meet somebody coming out of Syria for the first time, you start to hear the same sentences. That everything is okay inside Syria, Syria is a great country, the economy is doing great . . . It’ll take him like six months, up to one year, to become a normal human being, to say what he thinks, what he feels. Then they might start . . . whispering. They won’t speak loudly. That is too scary. After all that time, even outside Syria you feel that someone is listening, someone is recording.

  Mohammed, professor (Jawbar)

  There are differences in Syrian society, as in any society. Despite those differences, we recognize each other as Syrians. The key problem has been how to build and how to manage a state.

  The Syrian state inherited a Syrian army designed by the French, and the French designed it to divide and rule. They appealed to religious minorities to go into the army. Minorities were in an economic situation where they naturally wanted jobs. The French saw that, and at the same time wanted to put them against the Sunni majority, which opposed the French. The result was an army that drew too heavily on minority communities.

  The Baath Party came along with an idea of pan-Arabism. This brought Syrians of different backgrounds together, but did not honestly address the problem that Syria is multicultural and multiethnic.

  Hafez al-Assad used the Baath Party. He was a military person and didn’t really believe in democracy or pluralist politics or all of those liberal ideas that other national figures believed in at that time. He relied on Alawites more than others, even though he later killed a lot of them because they were his rivals. It was pragmatic to use primordial relationships to consolidate power, but it ultimately created even more divisions in Syria.

  Assad was a shrewd politician. He managed various players within the Syrian mosaic and patched together a system loyal to him. He allied himself with the traditional urban merchant class and gave them space to make money. At the same time, he kept the underprivileged communities happy with trickle-down state funds, like subsidies for workers and peasants. He allied with traditional Sunni clerics, because he knew that they had control over the religious narrative in society. In the late 1970s, the Muslim Brotherhood had its own vision and used force to try to bring it into effect. Assad used his alliance with clerics to fight the Brotherhood, and some of those clerics, amazingly, stood by him and then his son. There was opposition to him from the left, and he destroyed that, too.

  Issam, accountant (rural Aleppo)

  In my opinion, there used to be coexistence, but under security pressure and judicial control. It wasn’t real coexistence. You couldn’t even say to someone, “You’re Kurdish, or you’re Sunni or Shiite.” It was forbidden; you’d be fined or punished.

  We weren’t educated about the different people in the country, so there wasn’t real integration. Arabs didn’t know about Kurdish culture. Arabs and Kurds knew nothing about Turkmens. We’d hear that there were people called Syriacs and Assyrians, but who are they and how do they live? We didn’t know. The Druze? You know that they live in Syria, but what is their culture and what do they want? We were all just groups of strangers. A country of closed communities, held together by force.

  Abdul Rahman, engineer (Hama)

  There was an attempted military coup against Hafez al-Assad, but it failed and the Muslim Brotherhood escaped to Hama, which was the capital of its movement in Syria. The army invaded the city from many directions. They started with shelling, and then chose neighborhoods in which to start killing people. In one neighborhood they gathered males over thirteen years old and executed them. They left the corpses so people could see them.

  The army came to my grandparents’ neighborhood and took four of my uncles. A few days later, they invaded my parents’ neighborhood and started kidnapping men in the same way. My father told my mother that he might never come back. But then my dad’s best friend called the commanding officer and told him to halt the executions because all the people they’d detained were government workers. He said, “This is a friendly neighborhood, they all work for us.” And it was true: My father was a member of the Baath Party. Two of my uncles who got killed were members of the Baath Party, too.

  And that’s how my father survived. My alcoholic uncle also survived. When the army came to his house, he was naked and kept shouting, “Viva Assad, viva Hafez, viva the military!”

  My grandmother went crazy after they took her sons. She never believed that they were killed. My father kept asking people and kept searching. He even went to the cemetery, where he saw mountains of shoes. He dug and dug in the hope of finding his brothers’ shoes, just so he could have some evidence that they were killed. He told me that there was blood all over the place and the smell was so bad that he was fainting. But he kept digging, digging, digging. He dug without success.

  Aziza, school principal (Hama)

  I’m from Hama, but wasn’t there in 1982. I later returned to work as principal of a school. People used to come and talk with me, and each had a story. You can’t imagine how they raped the women, how they stole and looted. A relative told me that she saw bodies tied together and tossed into the Orontes River. A friend was a doctor at the hospital where injured regime soldiers were brought for treatment. One died and when they gathered his things they found piles of gold in his pockets. She told me that she took it to the officer and told him that it should be returned to its rightful owners. He swore at her. “Return the gold to his body. Those are spoils of war.”

  They played with people’s lives like it was a game. People said that the troops used to enter a neighborhood, gather all the men, line them against the wall, and shoot them. Once, there was a delay in the firing orders. The soldiers asked what to do and the office
r told them to pull the men’s pants down. He said, “If they’re wearing short underwear then they’re with us, so let them live. If they’re wearing long underwear then they’re terrorists, so kill them.”

  It was winter and most of the men were wearing long underwear, and they killed them. One man was left whose underwear was to the knee. It wasn’t too long or too short. The soldiers asked what to do. The officer said, “Leave him. He’ll spread the word about what he witnessed here, and that will serve us.” And so the man survived.

  Kareem, doctor (Homs)

  I was born in 1981, at a time when many people were being arrested or killed. The regime told people that they had no right to ask about their family members in prison. If they asked, they risked getting arrested themselves. So I’m from a generation in which dozens of my friends didn’t know whether their fathers were dead or alive.

  We’re Muslims and our community is conservative. Just like Christians pray in church, we pray at home. But people had to pray in secret. My family said that if someone called for my dad while he was praying, I should say that he couldn’t come to the phone because he was in the bathroom. They told me that if the regime knew that someone was praying, it would think that he had Islamist tendencies, and there would be consequences to pay. I was just a child, but I was trained to lie for the safety of my family.