The next morning, we left Rosa, who had not slept well and was irritated with the aunts over some small family matter, and headed towards Latakia, in the Alawite heartland. We wanted to see the mausoleum of Hafez al-Assad, the father of Bashar, who had been president from 1971 until his death in 2000. We passed checkpoint after checkpoint until we got closer to Qardaha, the burial site. There were stone lions everywhere; Assad means lion in Arabic and is the name Bashar’s grandfather had adopted as a family name.
Maryam was suddenly very conscious of her white hijab. ‘We are in the land of Alawites now,’ she said when we stopped at a café overlooking one of the austere mountains surrounding Latakia. She picked up her can of Pepsi. ‘I feel uncomfortable.’
‘But you’re Syrian. Your family has a home nearby.’
‘I don’t feel Syrian here,’ she said. ‘This is Alawite country.’ I had never heard Maryam mention sectarian divides before, and she gave me an abridged history of the Alawites.‘They feel different. They are different.’
The Alawites are a minority religious branch of Shia Muslims that represent about 12 per cent of the Syrian population. The core of Alawite belief differs from mainstream Islam; for this alternative belief, the Sunni rulers of the area had historically persecuted Alawites. But, during the period of French rule in the interwar years, an Alawite state was carved out in modern-day Latakia, meant to keep Alawites safe from persecution. The French considered the Alawites and Druze to be the only ‘warlike races’ in the mandate territory, for which reason the Alawites were largely recruited into the French forces, and still compose a large section of the modern Syrian army (indeed, this is how Hafez al-Assad rose to power). But despite the Alawites’ prominence in the armed forces, the majority of this group worked as labourers for Sunni landowners, a fact that had fostered the animosity between these groups.
When the waiter came to take our order, Maryam motioned to me to be quiet. ‘It’s a good thing Mama is not here,’ she muttered when the waiter went away.
At the grandiose Assad family mausoleum, the guards – young men in sombre, well-cut blue suits – were friendly. They were surprised to see a foreigner and served me tea before escorting me inside to the green marble-covered graves where Hafez and two of his sons were buried. They gave me his condensed biography – how he had been the first Alawite to go to high school, how the Alawites had been subjugated by the French before Syrian independence. As they spoke, pouring more tea, the air heavy with the scent of roses and incense, I looked at an empty corner of the mausoleum and wondered if the current president, Bashar, would soon find his place there as well.
‘We may never see this again,’ Maryam said as we left, passing another lion. ‘If the regime crumbles, the opposition will tear this place down to the ground.’ I turned around to fix it, visually, in my mind, like taking a Polaroid. In the dying days of Saddam Hussein’s regime, I had done the same in Iraq. I had obtained permission from an equally restrictive Ministry of Information to drive from Basra to Mosul, visiting ancient monuments and archaeological ruins, which I knew, with a horrible sense of political foreboding, I would never again see in my lifetime.
We drove out of the village, and headed into the Jibal al-Alawiyin mountains, stopping to eat at a roadside restaurant. A river rushed below us, as the blue-eyed waiter – many Arabs of the Levant have blue eyes, but particularly Alawites – took a seat at the table with us. Talking to Maryam, he said he had moved to Latakia when he was a child. As an Alawite, he told us that he constantly felt marginalized: even as part of the minority that controlled the country.
When he left the table, Maryam said, ‘He feels marginalized? Seventy-four per cent of the country is Sunni Muslims, but most of the government jobs and postings are occupied by Alawites.’
The waiter came back with bottles of mineral water.
‘The Europeans don’t understand us,’ the waiter complained. ‘Everyone takes the side of the rebels. But as Syrians – all of us – we are all losing so much.’
Two men at the next table were listening to us. They were Alawite businessmen, dressed in suits, smoking cigarettes. They were down from Damascus for work, and they were drinking rakia, a form of brandy made with aniseed, a drink that is also popular in Turkey and the Balkans.
‘May we join you?’ one asked, bringing the bottle and his glass before we answered. They wanted to know why I was in Syria, what I thought of the country, and what I was going to report. Although she was too savvy to give anything away, I could feel Maryam’s discomfort. She was brave simply to be with me, to take me to Homs, to Latakia, to places that she really should not be showing a foreigner.
‘Feel free to talk,’ one of the men said warmly. ‘We want to hear your opinion.’ The waiter brought our food, but no one ate.
At first we spoke blandly, drinking rakia, being careful not to probe, not to ask sensitive questions. After several glasses of rakia, I asked them about what happened to men like Hussein, who were captured and tortured in Baba Amr.
There was visible stiffening, then a determined silence. One of the men reached for the bottle, the other lit a cigarette. The plate of lamb that the waiter had brought us, along with the roast potatoes, remained untouched.
‘That does not happen,’ said the one with the glass. ‘It’s propaganda.’
‘But it does happen,’ I insisted, ‘on both sides.’
Maryam changed the subject rapidly and abruptly stood up. ‘We need to drive back to Damascus,’ she said, trying hard to smile in a friendly way. We attempted to pay the bill – the men would not let us – and left. She said nothing until we got to the car.
‘They weren’t lying,’ she said finally. ‘They really don’t believe this is happening. You see Syrians simply cannot bear that we are doing this to each other. At least, civilized, educated Syrians.’
She was quiet for a long while, fiddling with the radio stations. Then she spoke. ‘Once we had a common enemy – Israel. Now we are each other’s enemy.’
A few days later, we went to an old summer retreat in the mountains outside of Damascus, Zabadani, where Maryam had come as a child to breathe in the fresh air. ‘It was a place where you went for peaceful drives with your family, to get out of the city, to have some country food,’ she said. Now the Free Syrian Army was holding the town, although it had changed hands so many times – from government forces to rebels, back to government, back to rebels – that even Maryam, whose brother was close to the FSA, was not sure who held it.
Zabadani was on an old smugglers’ route from Lebanon before the war, and had been mainly populated by civilian Sunnis, but it was now full of soldiers. The al-Shabab, the guys, the rebel fighters, who were at that point said to be funded by Qatar and Saudi Arabia, had old guns, some of them from the days when their fathers took them hunting. There were no anti-tank weapons or anti-aircraft guns. They were wearing sneakers with their uniforms.
They told me that before the war, Zabadani had been one of those places where religion and ethnicity had not mattered. If it did, it was not used as a method of divisiveness.
‘There was a feeling of belonging in Zabadani that the regime deprived us of,’ said Mohammed, a young journalist I had met in Beirut. He was born and raised in Zabadani, but had been forced to flee at the start of the uprising because he was involved in opposition politics. ‘We felt Syrian more than any ethnic or religious denomination.’
In a sense, one of the many tragedies of the war was the re-emergence of religious ties. Assad’s regime, though a dictatorship, was at least allegedly nationalist; that is to say that nationality was stressed to be more important than one’s ethnicity or religion. That is why Assad tended to find support among minority groups such as Alawites and Christians. Was it the brutal war itself, rather than the regime and Assad’s policies, that destroyed the sense of Syrian unity in Zabadani?
On the day we arrived, I was told there had been fifty-two straight days of shelling. We drove from Damascus, first to t
he house of a farming family who lived high above the town, then the farmer loaded us into his car and we drove down to the centre of Zabadani. A small unit of men was crowded into a courtyard of an old house that had been badly shelled. They were sitting, doing the same thing that soldiers all over the world do when they are waiting for an attack, or to be attacked: they were smoking cigarettes, they were drinking tea.
So what did you do in your former life? I asked them. One was a mason, one was a truck driver, another was a teacher, another a smuggler who came from a long line of smugglers in Zabadani. ‘Thirty years ago,’ he said, ‘everyone on the road between Damascus and Zabadani was smuggling. Levis, cigarettes, electrical things, anything.’
‘Once,’ the smuggler continued, realizing he had the attention of the entire courtyard, ‘I got a shipment of Lacoste T-shirts, real ones, with the alligator . . .’
A burst of machine-gun fire outside the door. He stopped talking. Someone came in and told them to move. We hustled out into another building.
The hospital in Zabadani that day was a former furniture shop. It kept getting relocated because every few days the government found out where it was and shelled it. When I walked in, the doctor was stitching up the leg of a soldier in his late teens who had been hit by shrapnel. The doctor worked slowly and methodically, pulling the thread through the two sides of the wound, and talking quietly to the soldier, who did not flinch.
‘After Darayya,’ he said, meaning the battle in the suburb of Damascus a few weeks before, ‘there’s no going back. There was a time we felt maybe this was not real, maybe it was not really war – not really war.’ He finished stitching and cut the thread with a small pair of scissors. ‘Now I am working in a furniture store, trying to save lives. We’ve moved six times in the past two weeks because we keep getting hit. We’re all demoralized.’
He guided me around the small back room, and introduced me to the other patients: kids who had shrapnel lodged in their flesh, another soldier with a head wound. Before I left, he insisted on giving me a medical kit, although I told him I did not need it. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘You need it. You must take it.’
As I left, his wife ran to our car. She had brought a gift, some freshly washed pears that came from the trees that were still blooming and growing fruit throughout Zabadani.
‘Pears were the symbol of Zabadani,’ said the doctor. ‘They used to be the sweetest thing.’
At 10 a.m. Central Europe Time on 22 February 2012, while I was in Belgrade with LR, someone in Beirut rang to tell me that the journalist Marie Colvin was dead. She had been hit by a massive explosion in Baba Amr, in Homs. I had seen her a few weeks before, talked of our boyfriends, of clothes, of work, of visions. When the phone call came, I was at the gym. I slipped into the locker room, leaned against a wall and sat stunned: how many more colleagues would die in this war?
Marie was fifty-eight. She had gone through many conflicts. She had lost an eye working in Sri Lanka, sustained a difficult recovery, then went back to work wearing an eye patch. She rarely complained. Now, edging towards sixty, with a whole new tribe of war reporters coming up in her wake, she wanted a peaceful life, one where she could write, and read, and sail boats across challenging waters. As committed as she was to telling the story – she once told me the book that changed her life was John Hersey’s Hiroshima – she did not want to go to Homs on this particular trip; she had a bad feeling. But she was a professional, and she went, and she ended her days in a lonely street in the middle of a strange and foreign country, in the middle of a war. There was a moment when the shelling got so bad in Homs that she finally wanted to leave, but by then, it was too late. It’s usually too late by the time you reach that conclusion.
I booked a flight to London immediately, and my friend LR drove me to the airport, allowing me the space to be silent. The phone kept ringing non-stop – it was as though Marie’s death was a wake-up call for so many of us who did this work.
Marie died quickly, they say, but her body lay in Homs while intricate negotiations went on to bring her home. Eventually, after much negotiation, her battered body was driven to Beirut and then flown home to Long Island, where she grew up. Finally, I supposed, she was at peace. But I could not help thinking about her dying on a street in Homs. My only solace was that someone who was with her had said she died quickly. Perhaps she did not know what was coming, but I kept thinking about her last moments, waking up in the top floor of a house in Baba Amr, hearing the intense crack of shelling, running downstairs to put on her shoes to go outside, bending to tie them, getting hit by the blast. Never going home again, never saying goodbye to the people you loved, never getting to tell your last story.
After that, every time I went to Syria I was afraid. And that was a good thing. I was liberated, realizing that the normal emotion that most people felt when they went into one of the most dangerous places on earth had finally reached me. It did not particularly change the way I worked, but it slowed me down, particularly once ISIS had arrived, and once the kidnapping began.
After my second trip to Damascus with a government visa in 2012, I returned to Paris and thought often of a small child I met in Homs, with whom I had passed a gentle afternoon. At night, the sniping started and his grandmother began to cry for fear of being found with a foreigner in her house. She made me leave in the dark.
I did not blame her. She did not want to die. She did not want her home to be raided by the Mukhabarat for harbouring a foreign reporter.
The boy had been indoors for some months and he was bored: he missed his friends. He missed the life that had ended for him when the protests began.
For entertainment, he watched, over and over, the single video in the house: Home Alone. Like waiting on Groundhog Day, he was waiting for the end of this winter, waiting for normality to return so he could go out and play, find the school friends who months ago had been sent to Beirut or London or Paris to escape the war, and resume his school lessons.
‘When will it end?’ he asked earnestly. For children, there must always be a time sequence, an order, for their stability. As a mother, I know this. My son is confused by whether he sleeps at his father’s apartment, or his mother’s, and who is picking him up from school.
‘And Wednesday is how many days away?’ he always asks me. ‘And Christmas is how many months? And when is summer?’
‘So when is the war over?’ this little boy asked me.
‘Soon,’ I said, knowing that I was lying. I knelt down and took his tiny face in my hands. ‘I don’t know when, but it will end,’ I said. I kissed his cheek goodbye and lied again.
‘Everything is going to be fine.’
7
Homs, Bab al-Sebaa Street – Sunday 14 October 2012
It was early autumn in Homs, the heat was subsiding, the air was beginning to turn cool. I had come back, with a government visa, with strict orders from Abeer to ‘Behave. Tell the truth. Stop telling lies about the Syrian people.’
I asked her to let me travel with the Syrian Army, and she said she would think about it – ‘I’m not sure you will tell the truth about the battle we are waging,’ she said suspiciously. Finally, on a weekday morning, she telephoned me before breakfast. ‘You can go,’ she said. ‘You can see our brave boys and what the terrorists are doing to them.’
So I found myself on the other side of the city, the other side of the war. I was technically embedded with the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), the force branch of the Syrian Armed Forces, who have played the active role of ‘governance’ in Syria since 1946. The unit I was assigned to were trying to take out a sniper who was targeting their men inside a hollowed-out building. We had to crouch because the sniper was so close; he could see us through the windows.
I was with Rifaf, whose name in Arabic means the sound of a bird’s soft fluttering wings. He was holding his Kalashnikov, waiting for the next incoming, large-calibre, automatic weapon fire. Rifaf was tense and because I was so close to him that I could see the m
uscles in his cheek twitching and smell the cigarettes on his breath, his tension spread to my own body. Fear has its own physiology.
We had reached Bab al-Sebaa on foot, running across abandoned boulevards and empty houses. You drive to the last possible safe area, but then vehicles must be abandoned. The army had guided me through a tangle of buildings to reach this place. We crawled through tunnels punched into the walls of buildings known as ‘mouse holes’. These allowed soldiers to move from one building to the next, to breach one obstacle after another, without having to go out onto the street and expose themselves to incoming rockets and sniper fire. Other buildings were connected through alleys where buildings have collapsed, and we walked across planks, piles of shattered glass and improvised bridges leading from one building to the next.
We inched forward slowly. It took us an hour to reach the building we wanted to be in. Normally, it would probably have taken five minutes.
The Ministry of Information had sent a ‘minder’ along to watch me. Shaza was in her thirties, outspoken, brave, and an ardent supporter of Assad – she did not have to accompany me to the front line, but she wanted to see what it was like for the ‘boys’. She had a sense of humour: ‘Next time,’ she panted to me as we were crawling through a hole, ‘don’t wear a pink headscarf. The snipers can see you.’
The men in the unit near Bab al-Sebaa were young, raw recruits, with a few older career officers. They were very tired. Bleary-eyed with fatigue, they were still courteous, surprised to see me, curious. They were not the macho horrors I’d imagined I would meet – they were kids. The most ‘macho’ they got was when they would sometimes punch the air in a rush of adrenalin and chant, ‘God! Syria! Syria and God!’ But even that war cry seemed depleted.
As we crossed the urban landscape, the soldiers pointed out their positions. Some were alone with their weapons, on the first or second floors of buildings that were not in as vulnerable a position as ours; some were in sniper positions higher up; others were clustered in small units of four or five. ‘If you are alone, it gets boring, boring, BORING,’ one said.
The Morning They Came for Us Page 9
