The Morning They Came for Us

by Janine di Giovanni

  ‘Do you get frightened?’

  The kid who said he got bored stood up and moved back towards me. ‘Only an idiot is not frightened.’ Exactly on cue there was more gunfire. He picked up his gun and returned to his position.

  The commander of Rifaf’s unit – who did not want to give his name but called himself M. – said he wasn’t sure how many rebel soldiers, then mostly Free Syrian Army (FSA), were left in Homs. Their stronghold was the Old City. There could have been anywhere from 1,500 to 2,000 of them left.

  ‘No one knows,’ M. said. They were ‘reasonably adequate, sometimes good’ fighters. ‘They know what they are doing,’ he continued. ‘But we are bigger, we are more powerful, and they are trying to wear us down.’

  I thought of Hussein while I was there, who was tortured in Homs by Assad’s men – comrades of the men I was now with. But it was hard for me not to like Rifaf, and I wanted to listen to his specific and personal version of events. In Rifaf’s eyes, it went like this: Alawites were members of a minority group who have been oppressed throughout Syria’s history. They were continually trodden upon, persecuted, and are now endangered by the radicalization and jihadization of their country.

  ‘Surely all the FSA fighters aren’t fighting for Islamic jihad,’ I said. ‘Aren’t some of them fighting for a democratic country, without Assad?’

  ‘I’m not really a political guy,’ Rifaf said, cutting the conversation short. ‘I do what I am told.’ When I told him about Hussein’s guts being cut out of him by an Assad government soldier-doctor, he was horrified.

  Like every soldier I ever met in any war, Rifaf wishes he were somewhere else, somewhere other than a cold room, bending low, waiting for a sniper to strike again. ‘He’s there,’ Rifaf said, shifting his position to peer below a grilled window. He nodded his head towards a blasted-out building less than 300 metres away. The building – a former school – was a weapons depot. The government troops hoped to take it by day’s end. He said we had hours to wait, and that the sniper had been shooting all day.

  This is what war is like, I thought: waiting to conquer inch by inch, room by room, building by building, street by street, eventually neighbourhood by neighbourhood. It’s tedious. So much time is spent lighting cigarettes, waiting for the next shot, the next place to aim. Taking territory back is not a blaze of gunfire: it’s a methodical, protracted process.

  Burst of gunfire.

  The room Rifaf and his unit (his ‘brothers’) have turned into their ‘nest’ was once someone’s bedroom, in a house that has long since been abandoned. That person’s home is now a sniper’s nest. Their clothes, their photographs, their lives have been erased.

  There’s more gunfire, and the sharp sound of the sniper responding. ‘Hours, days maybe to take one building,’ Rifaf mutters. ‘This is how it goes. We get one inch, they take back one inch. They get one inch, we take it back.’

  ‘It’s like playing cat and mouse,’ says another soldier, positioned in a corner not far from us.

  This is how urban wars are fought: cat and mouse.

  ‘Who’s the cat, who’s the mouse? You or the sniper?’

  Rifaf laughed. He did not answer.

  All summer long, while Hussein lay in a hospital bed, recovering from his stomach having been sliced open, the war in Homs continued: fluid, deadly and slow. It moved at an inexorable pace. The soldiers who brought me here, who clambered over piles of rubble, were waiting: for the right moment to take out the enemy soldier, for the right moment to charge the building, for the right moment to go home. Occasionally, perhaps remembering why they were there, they would sing:

  With our hearts

  With our souls

  We fight for you, Assad!

  When the Syrian government launched a new offensive in Homs at the beginning of October 2012, Rifaf and his unit were assigned this position and given a clear objective: to take the building opposite from rebel hands. This means a kind of close-quarters battle, urban warfare similar to how the siege of Sarajevo was fought, or the first Chechen war, or the battle of Beirut. The British military call it Offensive Operations in Built Up Areas – OBUA; Americans call it UO – Urban Operations.11 It is taxing on ordnance, ammunition, supplies and manpower. But it is necessary in cities – the only way to fight. Rifaf and his unit were struggling to maintain their momentum, and if their offensive were to fail, they would lose their foothold in the area.

  Before I had left Damascus for Homs, Darren White – a security and military expert in London – had explained to me the precision of this kind of fighting. It looks simple – moving around buildings, taking small pieces of land. But according to White, ‘it requires control, command and micromanagement. It’s what the Russians did when they took the Reichstag building during the battle of Berlin in the spring of 1945. It took ten days to secure one building.’

  By the autumn of 2012, the Syrian Army was winning in Homs. But they were a conventional army, they were trained in the conventional manner. They come from across the country: this was not their home. The FSA were locals, they knew the terrain, they could fight like guerrillas. They were defending the ground and had the advantage of defensive fire and coverage. Rifaf compared the rebels to boxers who jab at a fighter who is laid low. ‘You annoy him, you take short, sharp, hit-and-run attacks. It’s lethal.’

  An hour goes by. A packet of cigarettes is nearly finished. You judge your time not by a wristwatch, but by how many cigarettes are lit. Every once in a while someone says something encouraging, like ‘we’ll get this school . . . eventually’ or ‘it’s only a matter of time’.

  The sun was sinking. Rifaf needed to talk to the commander, so we crept our way back to a street. Someone mentioned that Homs’s finest high school was once here, pointing to a destroyed cluster of buildings. In another time, students sat in cafés drinking coffee or meandered through the streets with their backpacks. Now it looks like a post-apocalyptic Mad Max world of rocket-blasted buildings, skeletal structures – once homes – destroyed churches and front-line positions.

  Shaza led the way into an old building the FSA rebels had just abandoned. It was located on another nearby front line. There were scattered medical supplies – empty bottles of painkillers, some used syringes, old bandages – and bloody clothing left behind. It used to be a triage hospital for wounded soldiers. Shaza disappeared and came back triumphantly from the corner of the room, showing me a rusted meat hook hanging from a doorframe.

  ‘This is what the rebels used to torture our soldiers,’ she says. ‘They say we torture them – but they torture Assad soldiers they capture.’ She pushed me forward into the room and made me examine the meat hook at close range. She pointed to the dried blood on it.

  ‘You think we put it here?’ she said, watching my face.

  ‘I don’t know. Did you?’

  Shaza walked away.

  This building, this former hospital that once treated FSA soldiers, fell after two days of fighting, an SAA soldier told me. The rebels abandoned the position in a matter of minutes when they realized they were defeated. They left behind two rusted IEDs – improvised explosive devices – some grimy, balled-up clothes, and one lone sneaker. There was a deep hole in the courtyard. Shaza stood next to it, peering inside, with one of the soldiers next to her.

  ‘There’s bodies down there,’ she said, finally. ‘That’s where the FSA captured our Syrian boys, killed them and stuffed them down there.’ She stood up and took my arm, urging me to move forward. She herself dropped back down on her knees, squinting into the darkened hole.

  In East Timor, in Dili, during the violence in the aftermath of the 2000 referendum, some locals took me to a well in a lush, walled garden. They pushed me forward to see the bodies stuffed inside the well; they said there were dozens. I saw two or three, floating on top, purple and swollen and distended, but could see there were many more underneath, propping them up. A hand jutted through the water, and a foot. One of the locals had a long stick and
was prodding the mass of dead flesh. They wanted me to take pictures, to write about it, they wanted to take me out onto the street to look at the other bodies that were floating up from the sewers and gutters.

  I did so diligently, on autopilot, writing in my notebook, then climbing on my scooter that was driven by a former fisherman I had hired to work with me, and going to another part of town – finding more corpses. After a while, I stopped counting how many. They seemed to be everywhere – floating aimlessly in the sewers that I stepped over, in the road rotting, in the lush tropical bushes. It was so evil, that place, for such a place of voluptuous beauty. But the overwhelming memory for me of Timor was the bodies: and the smell of bodies rotting in the sun, like Rwanda.

  Shaza said no one knew who had been in the hole before, or how many, or where they came from. ‘There’s no bodies there now,’ she said, still on her knees peering down. She suggested we go and talk to the senior ‘officer’, who was in another building, one which we could climb through some more walls to reach.

  General Baba was in his ‘office’, a burnt-out shop that had once sold furniture. He was in his forties, came from Tartus, on the coast, and was the son of an Alawite farmer. He had been on the front for weeks.

  He wouldn’t tell how many men were under his command. ‘That’s classified,’ he said, like a recording. He asked one of his soldiers to make us coffee on a camp stove, and it was surprisingly good. He added three teaspoons of sugar to his cup and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Have you been to Tartus?’ he asked, genuinely interested. ‘It’s very beautiful. You shouldn’t just see the warring parts of Syria.’ He talked of his home town like a travel guide – as if there were no war.

  I had once stayed with friends in Tartus, Sunnis who were loyal to Assad, in their beach-front apartment. It was the early days of the war, and they were in the first stages of denial that their countrymen were killing each other. They took me down to their apartment on the beach to get away from the tension in Damascus, and we drove through the green Alawite heartland, stopping at several different cafés, simple places with wooden tables and chairs that overlooked the mountains.

  We arrived late at night, and the next morning we walked to the beach and waded slowly into the Mediterranean. Looking back, I could see the coast that stretches towards Gaza, towards Libya. We slept with the windows open, and it was quiet. But in the morning their elderly mother sat by a radio and said there was heavy fighting reported outside Damascus. The wife said the road would be closed. We packed quickly, cut the trip short, and drove back to the capital.

  General Baba grew up not far from that beach. When I described it to him, he nodded happily: ‘That’s it – my family’s house is not far from there.’ He had Sunni friends, he says, and Shias and Jews and Christians. ‘As children, we used to sing, all of us used to sing, “One, one, one, all Syrians are one”.’

  The other soldiers remembered the song, and one of them began to sing it.

  ‘We did not think sectarian,’ General Baba says. ‘I know you don’t believe me, but it’s true.’

  He drank another coffee and smoked another cigarette. There was a call on his radio, and his face darkened. Someone had been killed.

  ‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘Another attack has started over there.’ He pointed. ‘And you should leave too, or you will be here for the next two days straight.’

  How many men had he lost since this started?

  Baba did not answer at first. Finally, he said: ‘A huge number.’

  After I left him, I ran through the back alleys and worked my way back to my car, back to the last safe street. It was about a fifteen-minute sprint from the front line. I parked the car in a little enclave called Almahatta, and it was pleasantly quiet, pleasantly peaceful. There were college students in neat headscarves and carefully pressed blue jeans drinking smoothies and smoking shisha. If there were peace, we would be able to sit with Rifaf and drink a coffee like normal people, in a café.

  Less than twenty-four hours later, Rifaf and his unit took the school. Overnight, the FSA sent more snipers to defend their post, but Rifaf said they ‘took them out’. He did not seem happy with the victory. Everyone was too exhausted.

  ‘We finished the battle at 5 a.m.,’ he said, his voice raspy. ‘I’ve got to sleep because we have to start again later in the day. I’ve got a sore throat. I’m getting sick. I gotta go.’ I didn’t see Rifaf again, but I could still hear the sharp sound of the sniper’s rifle, and still smell Rifaf’s cigarette smoke in my hair.

  Shaza wanted me to talk to some ‘ordinary people’.

  ‘I’m so happy there is traffic,’ she said cheerfully. This means people are coming out of their houses, and no longer hiding from bullets. Homs is Syria’s third-largest city, and it isn’t an expansive place. Still, we sat in traffic for about an hour to get to the town hall. Shaza wanted me to see how people are working ‘wartime shifts’, meaning they come in for half a day and swap their positions with other workers who will pick up where they left off – there aren’t enough desks or computers to go around.

  She took me to have coffee with a friend of hers.

  ‘Some people here hate,’ said Mayada, an Ismaili (a minority group among Shias) married to an Alawite named Saadij. She was making us tea in her second-floor apartment in another neighbourhood of Homs. ‘But some get much closer to each other because there are people like me who stay neutral. We bond with our neighbours because we are all fed up. You hear about Homs, the battlefield. But how about the people who just learn to live with the bombs?’

  Saadij came into the room where we were sitting. ‘This is the land of Moses, Mohammed and Jesus,’ he said. ‘We always taught our children to be Syrian first. Not Alawite. Just to be good boys. Good Syrians. Good people. People think we will kill each other, but we raised our kids to love, not hate.’

  ‘But over there,’ I said, pointing towards Bab al-Sebaa Street, ‘they are fighting a war of hate.’

  ‘They are fighting for politicians and proxy countries, not because they hate each other,’ Saadij said.

  ‘The FSA says they are fighting for freedom,’ I added.

  Saadij says, ‘They can keep their freedom if this is the price we pay.’

  By late October, the second year into the war, people started creeping back to Homs because they had no choice. Many had left and fled across the border – with smugglers or in trucks and buses to Lebanon. But 20 to 30 per cent of the pre-war population – about 10,000 people – came back to try to find their homes and rebuild their lives.

  It was a maze of a city, a labyrinth, a tangle of destruction – then you passed a checkpoint, or an area that was completely destroyed, and found leafy streets with elegant houses that seem untouched, with courtyards and balconies and the jasmine plants still blooming. Near Baba Amr or Bab al-Sebaa the buildings were gutted and people were living on the front line. In the early morning light, I saw women tugging on their headscarves, gathering wood for fuel, or scouring the garbage for food. It was like Aleppo.

  On a last trip to Bab al-Sebaa, I met a woman pushing a ten-month-old baby in a broken-down pushchair. One wheel was stuck, and the pushchair shuddered when she tried to push it. The expression on her face seemed frozen in torment. We stopped and talked. There was a time when she left, she said, when the bombing was too much to take. But her husband stayed in Homs, and she came back and put the children in a wartime school, and they got used to walking to it during bombings. Like the town hall workers, they would go in shifts, so that all the children got a chance to learn at least something. There was a shortage of teachers, books, paper, pens, of ‘everything’, she said.

  As we were talking, her eleven-year-old son Abdullah greeted her. He was on his way home from his school shift.

  ‘He’s been here the entire time the war has gone on,’ his mother said. ‘I’m not sure he is the same boy.’

  ‘I heard all the bombs, I just waited,’ he said.

  ‘What w
ere you waiting for, habibi?’ his mother asked, using the sweetest term of endearment – darling, sweetie.

  He shrugged and picked a scab on his wrist.

  ‘For it to end?’

  He did not respond.

  Near the front line, across the street from Bab al-Sebaa church, which was destroyed in the spring, is a little shuttered house. Everything around it is rubble; but Carla, who is thirty-two and a Christian, is living inside it with her children, in the home that she refuses to abandon. She invites us inside, opens the shutters, opens the doors. It is very cold, and her child coughs. The house is in near-darkness.

  Carla fled briefly in November 2011, when the fighting was more brutal. She couldn’t take it any more, and the children were hiding under the beds. Then she came back. ‘Where were we supposed to go?’

  Her husband, who worked in Homs’s petroleum plant, stayed during the worst of the battle to protect the house, but Carla went to the countryside with her children. She hated it. She was frightened for her husband; she was frightened she wouldn’t be able to find food for the kids; she was frightened for the future. She did not want to be alone. She came back to the centre of the war to keep the family united. They live off canned goods that they had from before the war, sacks of rice, some pasta – whatever they can find. ‘You learn how to exist with war ways,’ she says.

  All of her children are traumatized in different ways, she explained. Some were wetting the mattress where they slept on the floor. Some of them would scream in their sleep. Her four-year-old, Nadem, began losing her hair.

  ‘Let me tell you what helpless is: helpless is being a mother and not helping your kids.’ Carla stared out of the window towards the church. It was peppered with bullet holes and there was a hole in the roof.