Rashid describes the attack on Darayya, which took place the Saturday before, the fourth day of the Eid holiday.
‘The shelling started at 7.30 a.m. There is no sound more frightening than rockets,’ he said.
Sunday continued with more shooting and shelling, and then finally, on Monday, he said the army arrived. Most people hid in basements. Some were pulled out and executed outside; according to witnesses, others were sprayed with machine-gun fire.
‘We had some informers [the word in Arabic is awhyny] who pointed out where Opposition people were,’ he said. ‘They let the women run away but they shot the men one by one. In some cases, they went into the basement and killed old men and children – just because they were boys.’
Another woman who was cooking for victims and taking food to the mosque, Umm Hussein, was hurrying along during the bombardment with her young daughter and twenty-year-old son. A truck went by with soldiers shouting: ‘With our life, with our blood, we will fight for Assad!’
Umm Hussein and her children did not make it in time: they were stopped and while she and her daughter were spared, her son was shot. She says his body was taken out of town; there are rumours that some victims are being moved to secondary graves, which was also the case with the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia in 1995.
But some people I meet say that the regime soldiers fed them and provided medical attention to the wounded. ‘They gave us bread,’ one man says. ‘Not all of them were monsters.’
In the initial days after the chaos, no one knew who was dead or alive. The VDC (Centre for Documentation of Violations) put the figure at somewhere around 380. The Syrian opposition put it in the thousands.
The mounds of freshly dug, moist earth in the cemetery in the middle of town looked as if they harbour at least several hundred dead. One woman came every day to scan a list posted outside the graveyard; she was looking for her sons, who are missing: ‘We are still searching houses and abandoned ruins trying to find them.’ She says that everyone waits for the hour when the gravedigger arrives, because then there will be new bodies to identify.
After a while, Maryam and I went to look for the gravedigger to see if he could give us a more accurate count of the dead. There was a tightly packed crowd of people who were reading a sign put up by desperate families – a list of the missing. They parted and let us through to look at the sign.
That’s where I met the mechanic. It was there, looking over the list, that he told me: ‘Syrians cannot do this to other Syrians.’
Many of the bodies were discovered on the fifth day, when Human Rights Watch obtained satellite images of the battle. Initially, they were not clear if the killing was committed by government forces, or whether Shabiha militia carried out the assassinations after the town was shelled and bombed by helicopters: ‘What we don’t know yet is who did the dirty work, the executions – whether it was men in uniform or Shabiha,’ Ole Solvang, from HRW, told me a few weeks after the battle. ‘We’re still talking to people.’
‘I think whoever did it,’ Maryam told me solemnly, ‘they were trying to teach Darayya a lesson.’
But why? Why teach a town a lesson? And who were they? One Syrian journalist later told me that Iranian militias were also working alongside the Syrian Army.6
Darayya was long regarded as a bastion of opposition and a base for the Free Syrian Army. Eventually, 3,000 FSA fighters made Darayya their stronghold, as it was strategically situated on the edge of the military airport at Mezzeh, a town being used for air strikes against rebel-held areas. Both rebels and local residents reported that opposition forces conducted mortar and rocket strikes against the base from Darayya. Also, a few days before the government attack, the rebels claimed to have killed thirty soldiers when they attacked a military checkpoint outside the town.7
But there are some reports that the FSA began withdrawing from their holding positions at least two days before, to spare the town from being pummelled.
Not long before the massacre, there was a week of gruesome discoveries of the bodies of people summarily executed by regime forces, which began turning up in Damascus suburbs, such as Douma. In the northeast area of that city, sixteen men were found executed, allegedly by regime forces.
Shortly after, in an extraordinary act of indecency, a pro-regime television journalist, Micheline Azaz, entered the town and filmed a fourteen-minute piece on camera, largely interviewing victims who needed medical care. She interrogated them before they were removed by emergency services, when they were still in immense pain and shock, demanding to know if ‘terrorists’ had done this.
Azaz, who worked for the Syrian channel Addounia, was shown interviewing victims against a backdrop of classical music. The cameraman first filmed close-ups of several corpses stretched out on the ground or in cars.
‘As usual, by the time we arrive at the scene,’ Azaz said breathlessly, ‘the terrorists have already done what they do best: committed criminal acts, murdered people . . . and all in the name of freedom.’
She then approached an elderly woman who appeared to be in agony, waiting for medical help. Azaz extended the microphone with perfectly manicured hands and demanded to know who was responsible.
Then she found a small child, about five years old, in a car sitting next to a lifeless body.
‘Who is that?’ Azaz asked the child.
‘My mother,’ replied the girl.
A woman named Reem, who lived in Darayya, was there when Azaz did her broadcast. ‘It was horrific,’ she said. ‘She was a vulture. She went through the crowds talking to the wounded as though she was floating on water, as though there was not this scene of hell in front of her . . .’
For weeks, the blame went back and forth – the government blaming the FSA and other armed ‘terrorists’, the witnesses I spoke to blaming the government.
The day after I left Darayya – after government soldiers found me talking to people and, rather remarkably, calmly asked that I get out of town instead of arresting me – I went to see a government official.
Abeer al-Ahmad, who was the Director of Foreign Media at the Ministry of Information (MOI),8 was in her office drinking coffee with an opened box of biscuits in front of her, and she was visibly furious. Even before I told her, she knew I had been inside Darayya – no one does anything in Syria without the secret police knowing.
‘It was a prisoner exchange of terrorists gone wrong,’ she insisted. ‘It’s always been a hideout for terrorists. It was meant to be part of a wider campaign in the southern suburbs to rid the area of the opposition forces.’
A few days later, she alerted me to a statement made by the President himself. ‘The Syrian people will not allow this conspiracy to achieve its objectives,’ Assad said. ‘What is happening now is not only directed at Syria but the whole region. Because Syria is the cornerstone, foreign powers are targeting it so their conspiracy succeeds across the entire region.’
‘So you are blaming foreign forces for Darayya?’ I asked her.
‘Something like that.’ She made it clear the meeting was over.
The official state news agency, SANA (Syrian Arab News Agency), stated, ‘Our heroic armed forces cleansed Darayya from remnants of armed terrorist groups who committed crimes against the sons of the town.’ It accused the ‘terrorists’ of carrying out their own massacre.
The Syrian journalist I spoke to earlier remembered this:
There was a story of a little girl who bribed a Syrian soldier as she escaped her family’s massacre running. She told him ‘I have 500 Syrian pounds on me, take them and don’t kill me.’
He took them and didn’t kill her. Another little girl begged one of the soldiers as they were ready to massacre her whole family, that she has savings, that she will give it all to the soldier. She was begging – in return that they do not kill her eleven-month-old brother. They shot away . . . but she and her brother did survive.9
When last I checked with them, Human Rights Watch said there was no in
dication of Free Syrian Army atrocities. ‘It was either government or pro-government forces behind the executions,’ the researcher told me.
But I still remember what I witnessed those days.
When we left the town, crossing through the checkpoints, Maryam suddenly cried out: ‘Look! They destroyed our mosque!’ Then she grew silent, pensive, grave. I didn’t hear her say another word until she dropped by my hotel later that night. There she told me that ‘even the French during the occupation did not destroy mosques when people took refuge in holy places’. She was disturbed. She raised her voice: ‘This is a crime against God . . . and Alawites believe in God as well as Sunnis.’ She was close to tears as she turned to me, saying later that it was in this moment that she truly realized that people were certainly killing each other.
‘Why?’
Maryam shrugged. ‘No reason. I can’t answer.’
One side says this, the other says that. The town also shifted hands several times. From August 2012, government forces kept the town until November 2012, when another battle of Darayya played out. First the rebels pushed back, then, according to Al Watan newspaper – which is close to the government – on 20 December, after thirty days of siege, the army penetrated the last areas of the city centre that the rebels held. Al Watan claimed most of the fighters were foreigners, playing into the narrative that jihadis were taking over Syria. The next day they launched a massive attack against the city, but rebels reported they met a strong resistance from Darayya. The government remained in control and AFP reported that in August Assad visited the ‘ex-rebel bastion’, now mainly under government control, his first known visit outside the capital since March 2012.
By December 2013, government forces were hitting the town with barrel bombs. From 25 to 31 January 2014, as United Nations representatives met with opposition and government officials in Switzerland for the Geneva II ‘talks’, the regime continued to bomb Darayya mercilessly.10
Reporters asked Walid Muallem, the Syrian Foreign Minister, at the Geneva talks why his government continued to use barrel bombs. Muallem replied: ‘I want to give you a simple response. Do you want [us] to defend our people by sending SMS messages?’
The film mentioned in note 10, made by a local cameraman, opens with the words: ‘Once upon a time: a few days ago. In a land far, far away: Syria.’
By April 2014, government reporters claimed Darayya was mainly being fought for by foreign rebels. The grey plumes of dusty smoke from the bombs could be seen from the highway. When the smoke cleared, there was nothing left behind but skeletons of buildings, of people, of what was once a town.
Maryam never went back.
My government visas were revoked a few months after I entered Darayya ‘illegally’.
As of March 2015, my requests to return to Syria ‘legally’ on the government side of the war were met with silence, threats or excuses from the regime.
Once, a Syrian friend went to the Ministry of Information on my behalf to plead my case; she was told that if she wanted to ‘save my ass from getting thrown in a Syrian jail’ then she should tell me never to come back to Syria.
6
Zabadani – Saturday 8 September 2012
By the autumn of 2012, in the wake of Darayya, the evolving skirmishes in Syria had become a full-blown war. The denial that had existed a few weeks before among a certain class in Damascus, the bubble of parties, the insouciant chatter, the seductive evenings at the opera, were gone. That bubble had burst. Four men in Assad’s closest circle had been assassinated, probably with the help of FSA members who had infiltrated the government. People were talking about the fall of Damascus. There was heavy fighting in other parts of Syria – in Idlib, in Aleppo, and in the suburbs not far from the capital. If Damascus fell, the country fell.
A Syrian reporter I met through friends invited me to her house, then texted me emphatically to arrive only after dark, and to take the stairs, not the lift, to avoid people seeing me.
When I arrived, the woman’s face was darkened with worry. The reporter, who we will call Renda, had been famous in the 1990s. She was a well-known commentator and politically considered herself ‘pro-Assad, but liberal’. ‘I say what I think,’ she had told me. ‘I am outspoken.’ She had initially taken a strong stand behind Assad and against the rebels. Now she was not so sure. She wanted to meet me to see if I would take her to Homs so that she could see the destruction for herself.
Renda quickly ushered me inside her small, modern apartment and locked the door behind her. ‘I don’t want to let the neighbours see you here,’ she said. ‘I’ve been getting all kinds of threatening emails for the past few days. And someone keeps calling me and hanging up when I answer.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s the Mukhabarat. What are they going to do? They want to frighten me.’
We sat and drank green tea and she told me that she had only felt in the past two weeks that her world was spinning out of control, that a real war had come to Syria, that perhaps she had judged the opposition wrongly. She had begun to question what was happening in Homs, in Aleppo. Even Darayya, which she did not really believe . . . but …
‘Only now? You only realize it now?’
Renda nodded. She clutched her hands in her lap. ‘It’s not my fault – who wants to see their country turning to war? You avoid it if you can, you avoid thinking about it. You don’t want to believe it.’ But now, she said, 2,000 people had fled the capital alone. Refugees were flooding the Turkish, Jordanian and Lebanese borders. The winter was going to be harsh. ‘If Syrians go to Lebanon as refugees, the Lebanese will not welcome them entirely,’ she added. ‘Look at the situation of the Palestinians there.’
She had no way of knowing, but in two years’ time, more than four million Syrians would be refugees, crossing the borders and fleeing to neighbouring Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Egypt. The luckier ones – or maybe not so lucky, as the migrant crisis in the late summer of 2015 demonstrated – got to Europe in boats, with the help of smugglers, or on foot. There would also be nine million displaced people inside Syria by 2015. By the end of the summer of 2013, Renda would also close up her small apartment and leave for Beirut, going by road with a few suitcases, planning to stay for a few weeks; but she would stay for months, then eventually – without being aware of time passing – she imagined she would be there for years.
One morning, Maryam and I had permission to go to visit her relatives in Homs, which was divided into government-held and rebel-held areas. Maryam’s family were Sunnis, but they were on the government side, at least geographically, if not philosophically. We took her mother, Rosa, along with us, and put her in the front seat. I put on my white headscarf, which matched Maryam’s and Rosa’s, and my big dark glasses. Rosa assured me I looked Syrian. At every checkpoint, Syrian government soldiers did not even bother to look in the back seat and see me, a foreigner.
‘Go ahead, grandma,’ they said to Rosa, and let us pass. She chastised a few of them (‘what would your mother say about your bad manners?’), and when we were held at one particular checkpoint for several hours, inside Homs, she began to lecture them about their ‘rudeness to adults’.
‘Do you really think I want to be here, Teta?’ he asked her incredulously. ‘Do you think I want to be a soldier?’ They showed us around the house they had confiscated from a Sunni family and were now living in. A few bedrooms with dirty sheets, where soldiers with muddy boots were lounging, sitting with a teakettle. There was no phone line to their headquarters, and they did not want to let us go. They sat talking to Rosa for hours, about their families, their holidays, their children, their schooling.
Eventually, they let us go. ‘They’re not bad boys,’ said Rosa, who had been the wife of a successful and wealthy Damascus businessman. ‘Slightly ill-brought up, but not bad boys. They are provincial, it’s not their fault.’
Maryam’s family, which included mainly elderly aunts and an uncle, made us an elaborate lunch of many courses. It was indulgent and embarrassed me bec
ause I knew that they were struggling to get food. ‘Just be quiet and eat,’ Maryam whispered, passing a plate. ‘You’ll insult them if you refuse, so say nothing.’
There was a sort of thick lentil soup, rice, roasted chicken, there were piles of bread, there was even tinned fruit. Everyone ate quietly as we heard shelling coming from a nearby government base. Maryam had asked me emphatically not to talk politics with her family. ‘They have lived for so long under the Assad regime that they are frightened of talking to outsiders,’ she said. ‘So don’t ask, don’t put them in danger.’ So we talked about classical music, the opera and the British Museum. One of her cousins had been imprisoned for years in Hama during the crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1980s; then he went to live in Aleppo. Maryam had briefed me beforehand not to talk about it. ‘He still has nightmares from those years in prison,’ she said. ‘We choose not to talk about it. And since people now suspect radical jihadis are entering the country, he has to be very careful.’
One of the older aunts, Rosa’s sister, a lady with a soft gentle face, got up from the table and changed into a nightdress. She said she was lying down to take a nap. Rosa picked up her coffee cup and said she would join her, in an adjoining bedroom. The two elegant, elderly ladies then left the room, before quickly running back to the table a few moments later when a particularly heavy bomb landed somewhere nearby.
‘This is the background music of our lives,’ the uncle said ‘since we are talking about Bach at lunchtime.’ The relatives did not want their neighbours to see foreigners staying with them, so as the day ended Maryam and I left Rosa, crossed town and stayed in a darkened hotel where the secret police called me to their table and questioned me at length about why I was there. I pulled out my note of permission from Damascus, but they still held me for an hour, while Maryam – who was partially deaf and so spoke louder than most people, her shrill voice rising to a high pitch when she was angry – argued with them to let me go. Eventually, they did. We slept that night to the accompaniment of heavy shelling.
The Morning They Came for Us Page 8
