The Morning They Came for Us

by Janine di Giovanni

  Then there was a march with the living soldiers carrying the coffins of the dead, to the strains of a gloomy marching band, into a courtyard, where families and members of their regiment waited. There were sisters, wives, mothers, brothers, children, fiancées and friends, all of their faces streaked with tears.

  Soon enough, I thought, those who watch Syria closely will privately acknowledge that Assad is winning, his forces backed by Hezbollah, stronger and more determined to fight and win; his other backers of Russia and China and Iran more convincing than the opposition’s backers of Qatar and Turkey (and to some extent, though not completely, the US, Britain and France).

  But for today, I thought, this funeral of so many men, killed in a single day, is an acute reminder of how hard Assad’s forces are getting hit by the opposition. And how brutal war is, and how it comes down to the basics – that politicians argue but soldiers fight. And soldiers are always someone’s child, and that child is getting hurt. That child is getting killed.

  I met an official in his office – he wouldn’t give his name – but he was friendly and made me coffee. After he politely set down the sugar bowl and handed me a spoon, he pulled out a manila file and said that 105 government soldiers were dying every week. This was based on the figures of the men he admitted to his hospital and the reports of others. He said he had been told to keep it quiet, that the number would be bad for morale, bad for the fighters, bad for the mothers who had to send their sons off to war.

  We sat for a while in the quiet of his office drinking the coffee. At last, he said: ‘No one likes to count the dead.’

  Upstairs, on the seventh floor of the hospital, was someone’s son who had been sent to war: Firis. He was thirty years old, a major, very handsome with long dark hair and sombre eyes. He lay under a sheet, and I could not see at first that his right leg and right arm were missing. He sat up when he saw me, smiled, and with his only hand, reached out to take mine. There was no self-pity in his demeanour. He motioned for me to sit and he began, carefully, to tell his story.

  At the end of May, Firis Jabr was in a battle in Homs. On an afternoon of which he remembers every detail – the position of the clouds in the sky, the feel of the warm air on his cheek – he was ambushed. Shot, he lay in a ditch bleeding profusely and says that the men who shot him at close range were not Syrians, but ‘foreign fighters: Libyans, Lebanese, Yemeni’.

  ‘Are you sure they were foreign?’

  ‘They were not Syrian. I promise – they were not Syrian.’ He said he heard their accents, that their Arabic was not the Arabic he knew. ‘They looked different, they fought differently – I swear to you, another Syrian would not kill his brother Syrian.’

  Firis is an Alawite, but he says he is not particularly religious one way or the other. His fiancée stood near the bed while we talked, anxiously shifting her weight from foot to foot. Firis, without a leg and an arm, spoke to me for more than an hour, and kept a smile on his face. ‘I am not going to be full of pity,’ he said.

  ‘Even for war that might not have had to happen?’ I asked.

  He slumped back slightly on the bed. ‘I was fighting for my country!’

  He introduced me to his mother – ‘Mama’, he called her – and she made us coffee from a small hotplate in the corner of the room. She served delicate, rosewater-scented Arabic pastries with pistachios. She told me that she was a widow and that Firis was her eldest son. She was in tears as her son re-told the story of the day he was injured; her son was not. She said quietly that she did not see him as a soldier; she saw him as a small boy, playing football, walking to school with his friends – the child she carried, that she bore.

  Firis said he wasn’t really political, but he believed in Assad and he would continue to fight, as soon as he was fitted with his prosthetics. He said they were capable of making extraordinary false limbs – he talked about athletes who were able to run using artificial legs.

  ‘You’ll go back to the front line with an artificial leg, and an artificial arm?’

  ‘I’m an officer – I will go wherever they send me, but yes, I would go back to the front. I would fight again.’

  Firis turned and gave Mama, who had flinched when he talked about going back to fight, a bright smile.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ he told her, as she turned her face to the wall. He tried to lift himself up with the side that no longer had a leg or an arm. To me he said, ‘You must not pity me. I have two loves. My fiancée and Syria.’

  When I left, Firis was being taken away for an examination; his mother was still looking towards the wall, the dish of uneaten pastries balanced on her lap.

  4

  Homs – Thursday 8 March 2012

  When my son was born, shortly after the American occupation of Iraq, I was unable to cut his nails. It was a visceral, rather than rational, reaction. I would pick up the tiny baby scissors, look at his translucent fingers – clean and pink as seashells – and feel as though I would retch.

  One night, in the hour before daylight, that hour when the subconscious mind allows the source of such neurosis to become clear, I suddenly understood my inability to perform such a straightforward task. I had a vision of an Iraqi man I once knew who had no fingernails.

  In the dying days of the Saddam regime, pre-April 2003, I had an office inside the Ministry of Information for several months. It was a sinister, paranoid place. After a while, I fell into the bubble of that world and became paranoid myself. Staying inside the country required a special visa: one had to prostrate oneself before the Saddam officials to receive it. Journalists begged, bribed and pleaded to stay inside the country to report, offering the ministers live goats they could kill and eat for holiday meals as well as money, food, expensive wine and pharmaceutical products from the West (such as Regaine, to stop hair loss), which sanctions did not allow.

  But staying inside Iraq came at a high cost. Even with visas, we were followed and videotaped. Our phones were tapped. We all knew that our hotel rooms were equipped with hidden cameras. I dressed and undressed in the darkened bathroom.

  And we were surrounded by the remnants, the ghosts of Saddam’s brutal regime: the terrified, the stunted, the families of the disappeared, the survivors of brutal torture.

  One of these was the man with no fingernails. Every Monday morning, he arrived in my office and stretched out his hands, utterly un-selfconscious that in place of nails were bloody, raw beds of flesh. He had come for his weekly bakhsheesh – his bribe. His job was to get the money to seal my satellite phone so I could not use it unless the Ministry watched me. Once you paid, you would receive a seal – which only he could break – allowing you to use it. It was a backwards, futile system, of course, but everything about how Saddam operated in those days was pointless.

  Every time the man arrived and I looked at his spread hands, I immediately felt a wave of panic that quickly turned to nausea. And yet, I could not take my eyes off the place where his fingernails had been ripped off. Questions that I could not ask him raced through my mind. What had he done to deserve such agony? Was he an informer? Had he tried to escape Iraq and been caught? Was he part of the secret network attempting to overthrow the dictator? I never asked. Nor would he ever have answered. We were living in a republic of fear. He became one of those sinister fixtures one holds in one’s mind for ever, hovering on the fringes.

  The man, whose name I never knew, seemed to bear no resentment that he had been disfigured in such a public way. Because hands are one of the first things we notice about someone, every time he stretched his out, it was immediately apparent that he had done something.

  Or perhaps he had done nothing at all. Perhaps it was all a horrible mistake. Such things happen all the time in dictatorships. People get locked up for years, forgotten about. Then the key opens their cell door and a jailer says, ‘You can go now.’ They never know why.

  The day Saddam’s regime fell, I went to search for the man with no fingernails to open the seal so I could use m
y satellite phone. In the chaos of the American troops pulling down Saddam statues, the looting, the feverish hysteria, I still thought I needed the man to open my phone. But he, like most of the regime staff, had fled. He was hiding in a hole somewhere, like Saddam.

  I went back to Iraq many times after that, but I never saw the man with no fingernails again.

  In the Gaza Strip, many years ago, I stood near the Mediterranean Sea beside one of the saddest men I have ever met. His trauma was so deep that if you walked behind him and suddenly tapped him on the shoulder, he jumped. He also never smiled.

  He had been imprisoned in the Israeli torture centre in the Negev Desert for fifteen months and – like those African tribesmen who believe they will die if they are imprisoned, because they have no sense of the future, only of the present – he woke every day thinking it would be his last day on earth.

  ‘Once you have been tortured,’ he told me, ‘you leave the human race.’

  Victims of torture often recount their methods for surviving during such barbaric pain. Someone once told me that they tried to recall complicated French verbs. Another used meditation to distance their abused and battered spirit from their body.

  And yet, I have never interviewed a torture victim who has come away feeling they have not been betrayed. They say it’s by the person who turned them in to the police, or by their countrymen who might be the ones doing this to them, or even by God for inflicting upon them such unthinkable horror.

  In Syria, however, it is not just the torture victims who feel betrayed. The cost of loyalty on all sides – even if you believe in nothing at this point, five years into the war – has been steep.

  In northern Lebanon, in a town now inhabited by refugee Free Syrian Army fighters who are recovering from severe injuries, I walked up a series of dark staircases to reach the floor where the victims of torture were recovering.

  It was a secret place, in a secret location. I was asked not to write the name or the address, or the names of the men. They had been shipped by road across the Syrian border to this frontier town, and they were still afraid of Assad’s spies, who could kill them, bring them back to their country, or harm their families.

  As I walked around the room, I passed a man who had recently had twenty-nine bullets removed from his body. ‘They just kept shooting me as though I were a piece of paper,’ he said.

  Then I met a paralysed man strapped to a board who was playing with a child – an orphan. The man had been badly beaten with a club by the Assad security forces and had been left with a fractured spinal cord. He lay on the board, joking with the small child, and repeated that he was exposed to the same mantra that Nada and others had been subjected to, over and over: ‘Every time they hit me,’ he said, ‘they screamed at me, “You want freedom! Okay, take this! Here is your great freedom!”’

  Next, I met a man whom I will refer to as Hussein, a student of human rights law. He was tall, thin and bearded, and had – as expected – a broken, desolate expression, which reminded me of my Gaza friend, and his words about being exiled from the human race.

  Hussein was only twenty-four years old and dressed in baggy dark trousers and a T-shirt; he had a shy, but gentle demeanour. He kept trying to give me packs of Winston cigarettes, but I kept refusing, and it became a kind of farce – he kept insisting, gently, that he must give me a gift. I kept saying that I do not smoke. He would push the cigarettes across the bed sheets, where he was lying. Eventually, I took them. When I did, I saw that there were cigarette burns on his hands and arms.

  On another bed, pushed against a wall, a fourteen-year-old boy sat listening. When I suggested that he leave the room for the duration of the interview, which I knew was going to be grisly and detailed, the boy explained to me earnestly that his father was killed in front of him, so he could take whatever else was about to come. ‘You can speak freely,’ he said.

  Hussein was Sunni and religious, but he still shook my hand – which surprised me – and got off his bed, limping, to fetch me a chair. He told me that he came from an educated family; his father was a civil servant, his brothers are all university educated.

  Then, without words, he began to tell his story. Slowly, he removed his T-shirt. A scar, thick and angry, began under his mid-breastbone and swam down to the proximity of his groin. He sighed, lit a cigarette, and started to talk in a low voice.

  Hussein came from Baba Amr, the shattered and symbolic district in the centre of Homs. Homs is by now iconic – it is Syria’s third-largest city and was under siege from May 2011 until May 2014. As of this writing – though this might change – it is under Syrian government control. But when Syrian government troops and paramilitary units initially overran Baba Amr in the spring of 2011, in the early days of the uprising against the government of Bashar al-Assad, the fighting was bitter, fierce and dirty.

  Homs’s population reflects Syria’s general religious diversity and it is home to a community of Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites and Christians who lived side by side, only to find that – in the collapse of the police state – any sense of common purpose had dissolved.

  Civil war came early to Homs, and it was fought in an urban and strategic way – one street, one building, one apartment at a time. The battle was like a seesaw: the opposition would gain ground, and then the government would take it back.

  Hussein said he was never a fighter. He admitted that he was one of the organizers of the initially peaceful demonstrations that sprang up. At that time, the protests were headed by renowned Homs figures such as the Syrian television actress Fadwa Suleiman, an Alawite of the same faith as the Assad clan. That was when the demonstrations were still about slogans, marching, and chanting, as a weapon against Assad – not guns.

  When the demonstrations took on a more violent nature, some of the peaceful demonstrators – like Suleiman, who now lives in France – left, disgusted by the violence. Others decided to stay and take up arms, forming the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Composed largely of disgruntled officers from Assad’s forces, plus a cadre of untrained, young and inexperienced fighters, they were bound by a desire to live in a democratic country that was not governed by one family for forty years.

  Hussein said he never was a member of the FSA; he swore that his allegiance to the opposition was always political and, in his case, not military. His inspiration came from the Arab Spring: watching the people of Tunisia, Libya and Egypt rise up gave him and his friends a sense of hope.

  ‘It was about freedom and rights at first,’ he said, and paused. ‘Then came the bullets.’

  Going back into memory is difficult even for those of us who have not withstood war or torture. Going back into war memories, or memories of physical pain and deprivation, requires a kind of iron strength. What Hussein remembered most was the physical pain, the primal sensations: cold, hunger, thirst.

  That first winter in Homs was cold. Food was hard to find. Water was cut, and so was electricity. Rooms were lit by candlelight. Hussein continued:

  Assad’s forces launched a full assault starting at the end of February 2012. They were trying to take back our neighbourhood, Baba Amr. But the fighting and shelling had started getting really bad even in the beginning of February. By the middle of the month, people were exhausted. On the last day of February, someone told my family that the regime was ‘cleansing’ Baba Amr of rebels, and it would be over in a few days. Meaning we would lose our land.

  I remember helicopters. I remember an entire family getting shot and killed, including the five kids. The Syrian Army’s 4th Armoured Division sent in tanks and infantry.

  The Free Syrian Army, the Farouq Brigades, were running away because they were afraid. People had said that they would defend Baba Amr until the last man was left standing – but they were already running away. You could not blame them – they had no weapons. We stayed in the house. By March 1st, the FSA had had enough; they made a ‘tactical retreat’. A neighbour came and told us that seventeen soldiers had been captured by Assad�
�s guys and killed immediately.

  We stayed inside for a week.

  On March 8th, at about 7.30 p.m. – I remember the time – I heard men speaking in a foreign language. I think it was Farsi, so they were either Iranian fighters working for Assad or they were Hezbollah . . . I don’t know.

  I don’t know. It’s so hard to remember what you wish you could forget.

  At first Hussein refused to open the door. He stood behind it, and tried to talk to them. ‘I said, “We are civilians! We have rights!”’

  But the soldiers – who he said were not wearing uniforms, meaning that they could have been paramilitaries – fired intimidating shots, and his brother finally – if reluctantly – opened the door. As he did, the fighters shot the teenager through the chest at close range; the force of the bullet threw him against a far wall where he fell, dying. Hussein could do nothing.

  They tore into the house like a swarm of bees. Hussein thinks there were about thirty of them. They immediately shot Hussein in the shoulder and hand to disable him. He was shocked, but he remembered the excruciating pain. He held up his deformed fingers, and touched the angry red circle on his shoulder blade. Once he was shot, the impact of the bullet made Hussein reel backwards, and he ended up lying next to his dying brother, looking him straight in the eye.

  ‘I was watching the life go out of him,’ he said quietly.

  The men then picked him and his brother up by their hands and feet, and carried them – along with several dozen men from the neighbourhood – into a truck, throwing them inside, one on top of the other. They said they were going to use them as human shields. Some of the men in the truck were already dead; many were badly beaten and lay groaning in agony. Some were shot, others looked as if they had been beaten with clubs or rods.