The Morning They Came for Us

by Janine di Giovanni

  ‘Let’s go inside,’ she said, tonelessly. ‘I want to show you. Let’s go see what war does to everyone, even a church.’ She actually believed that, because they lived opposite a church, they would somehow be spared the war. But the church had also been hit by bombs and bullets.

  Inside, the pews were splintered and broken. Except for one icon of Mary, and a few scattered prayer books, everything had been burned and destroyed by shellfire. There was a small safe in the priest’s side room, which had been pried open.

  We wandered through the rubble. Nadem wanted to be picked up. Carla bent down and scooped the child into her arms.

  ‘People were still praying here in March,’ Carla said. ‘They were coming to mass. Then, in a moment, the church was gone.’

  A pitched battle had started on the next street, and Carla wanted to take the children inside. We walked back to her house, glass crunching under our feet. In the courtyard was a broken marble statue of Mary and Jesus.

  At home, the children did not react to the machine-gun fire, which was coming in with greater frequency.

  Naya, Carla’s twelve-year-old, looked hunched and ancient. She said to no one in particular: ‘Nobody knows where this war is going. But it has to go somewhere.’

  ‘Doesn’t it have to go somewhere, Mama?’ Naya repeated. ‘Doesn’t it, Mama?’

  Carla was silent.

  ‘Mama?’

  Then there was a renewed burst of machine-gun fire, and Naya went quiet.

  8

  Aleppo – Sunday 16 December 2012

  Every afternoon, I saw him. He never changed: not his position, not his posture, not his clothes. Aleppo was desperate in those months, and he, this old man on the road to the hospital, buried up to his waist in trash, seemed to me the symbol of all that was dying in that city. He was standing in a field of garbage, his hands buried deep in some box, foraging. He was scavenging for something to eat.

  We were driving in a battered car we had picked up in Turkey, with a driver called O., a nervous, small-boned Syrian man, towards the small hospital that remained open in the faintly lit darkness. Someone in the car, one of my colleagues, either Paddy or Nicole, said, ‘I’ve seen that guy before – he’s there every day.’ The old man was always in the same place. In the same position. Bent, broken.

  Did he ever find anything?

  I don’t think so. But he kept coming back.

  We had come together to Aleppo, the three of us – Nicole, who was small and brave, from Hong Kong, who wrapped her long hair in a dark scarf, and set off with her cameras alone to front lines to look for her friend, Jim Foley; and Paddy, who was English, and calm. We wanted to write about what people were eating, whether they were starving, how they survived.

  The answer was, virtually nothing. On this winter day, there was no power to bake bread: there was no cooking gas. Life here was about deprivation, the driver told us, about yearning, wanting, forgoing. It was about memory and forgetting.

  Once, a photographer friend of mine, trying to describe Afghanistan during the Mujahedeen years, called it The Land of the Elastic Hour. I understood instantly what he meant. There are places where time either races ahead like a finely tuned car, or remains impotent. Here in Aleppo, memory is elastic. Sometimes during wartime, minutes are endless. It seems you will never move forward to the next day – a day when there might be cooking gas and a lull in shelling.

  This sense of timelessness, of lost time, is set against the fact that Aleppo is ancient – 7,000 years old, and imbued with history. The chronology of the oldest continuously inhabited city on earth stretches back to the latter half of the third millennium BC.

  Archaeologists digging in the Mesopotamian ruins found tablets that spoke of the city’s military power, its strength, its virility. Aleppo was the end of the Silk Road, weaving through Central Asia and Mesopotamia, a strategic trading point. The horses and caravans carried copper, wool, Chinese silk, spices from India, Italian glass, metal from Persia.

  On this December day, three years into the war, I was looking for traces of Aleppo’s former glory. I saw nothing but a weakened cavity, a shell. How could a city that was once the third-largest in the Ottoman Empire fade before one’s eyes? On this day, a week before Christmas, when I should have been at home in Paris, putting up the Christmas tree with my small son, or shopping for presents and wrapping them in shiny paper, I was in a city that seemed apocalyptic.

  The Battle of Aleppo seemed as if it would never end. The conflict was between Bashar al-Assad’s government forces – combined with Hezbollah – and various Syrian opposition forces, largely composed of defected Syrian Army officers. I would like to list the components of the Syrian opposition, known as the rebels, but the recipe of warriors changes every day. There is internecine fighting. There is – as often happens in cities and communities that descend into war and anarchy – criminality as a means of survival.

  At this point the opposition also included al-Nusra, or Jabhat al-Nusra (The Support Front for the People of Al-Sham), sometimes called Tanzim Qa’edat Al-Jihad fi Bilad Al-Sham, who are the al-Qaeda branch operating in Syria. They were formed in Syria in January 2012 and currently have an estimated 6,000 members.

  The Islamic State, or ISIS – who would rise to power later in the war, to fight al-Nusra and the opposition and to drive parts of Syria and Iraq into 7th-century Islam with their brutal sharia law – were still somewhere in the shadows, embryonic. Nascent, waiting, forming.

  Aleppo, the most industrial Syrian city, also once held the most diversified population. Before 2011, there were more Christians here than in Beirut. There were Syrian Arabs, Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, Turks, Circassians, Jews and Greeks. There are thirteen poetic references in the Bible to Aleppo (which from the eleventh century had the Hebrew name of Aram-Zobah).

  From Psalm 60: ‘to the chief Musician upon Shushan-eduth, Michtam of David, to teach; when he strove with Aram-naharaim, and with Aram-zobah, when Joab returned and smote of Edom, in the valley of Salt, twelve thousand.’

  The Valley of Salt is about four hours from Aleppo on horseback, according to a slender document I have read, written by Henry Maundrell, a theologian who travelled the region in 1697. This is where David smote the Syrians.

  Who is now smiting the Syrians? They are destroying each other. Brutally, horribly.

  The regime forces, led by President Bashar al-Assad, use barrel bombs – a type of improvised explosive device (IED).12 The bombs are like no other I have witnessed in the dozen or more wars I have lived through. They are unspeakably effective at causing pain: made from a barrel that is filled with shrapnel or chemicals, they are then dropped from a height by helicopter or aeroplane. Militants like them because they are cheap to make (sometimes costing under $300) and can easily be dropped on a highly populated civilian area, with severe consequences.

  The image of the aftermath of a barrel bomb: knee-deep rubble, cries of agony, the frantic search for survivors; limbs dissected, muscles and pools of sticky blood. The fact of being alive in concrete, rubble, your legs broken, waiting for someone to dig you out. The entire weight of an apartment floor crushing your suddenly helpless and broken body.

  I was waiting in front of the bakery in Handarat when I saw a helicopter roaming. It was 9.30 a.m. It circled in the air three times and then dropped the barrel bomb. It fell two metres from me. I saw it falling, but where could I hide? I felt the explosion. I felt the shrapnel going inside my leg . . . The shrapnel hit my neck and leg and my other leg was broken . . . I saw four injured people. They were moving on the ground. I was told in the field hospital that five or six people died.

  Elias, seventeen years old, in a statement to Human Rights Watch13

  Aleppo was a microcosm, in a sense, for the entire war in Syria: the Leningrad of the Syrian war. Or, as one rebel fighter told me, the ‘Mother of All Battles’. It started here in much the same way as it did in Homs, in Hama, in Damascus, with pro-democracy rallies challenging Assad’
s autocratic rule, as part of the larger Arab Spring. It transformed from protests in 2011 to clashes in February 2012. At that point the rebels held the rolling countryside, bursting with crops in the summer, more barren in the winter, and it was still possible to drive from the Turkish border and pass through villages that had not yet been ravaged by war. Farmers were still at work, children still walked to school, tiny backpacks in place. Small schools, small houses: a normal life in a corner of what once was Mesopotamia.

  In August 2012, in the heat and dust of northern Syria, the rebels had stormed Aleppo, and the intense fighting began. In this bleak month of December – four months later – opposition forces had cut off nearly all supply routes to Aleppo. Most of the UNESCO world heritage protected sites, such as the Old Town, were destroyed. The lives of the people living in Aleppo were destroyed, too.

  There are two important criteria for staying alive here: hiding from the regime’s barrel bombs, and finding food. On the government side, people have not been paid salaries and do not get humanitarian aid. On the rebel side, the portrait of daily life is equally bleak. No one respects ceasefires. As is so common in times of war, there is crime, distrust and sorrow.

  No one seems to be able to end it, least of all the United Nations, whose peacemaking efforts have failed again and again. At the time of writing, in 2015, the third Special Envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, an Italian-Swedish diplomat who had formerly worked in Afghanistan and Iraq, has been proposing that small local ceasefires, or ‘freezings’, will take place. But on the morning of 17 February 2015, when de Mistura was set to brief the United Nations Security Council in New York, the government forces launched a new offensive to cut off the main supply road to insurgents in Aleppo.

  De Mistura had left Europe faintly confident – he had seen Assad in Damascus a few days before and had got his word that there would be a lull in the bombing for six weeks to allow humanitarian aid to pass through. De Mistura had also announced – to the horror of the Syrian opposition – that any political process would have to involve Assad. At dawn on 17 February, hours before de Mistura in New York got ready to lay out his freezing plan for Aleppo (which had, in part, been conceived by a young American analyst, Nir Rosen, who was working for an NGO called the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue), the battle broke out.

  Later, the rebels fought back. More dead, more bodies lying in the muddy winter of Aleppo. De Mistura gave a grim reading to a few UN reporters gathered outside the Security Council hall, but he would not take questions. Just like Kofi Annan and Lakhdar Brahimi, the two former special envoys, both veterans of ending prior wars, he looked defeated.

  As reports were being read aloud in New York, and ambitious bureaucrats beavered away at their desks overlooking Lake Geneva, the history of Aleppo was fast disappearing. The souk and the covered bazaar, which date back to the fifteenth century and were carefully remodelled by governors and a Grand Vizier in the sixteenth century, served as a front line in this battle. In 2012, Stefan Knost,14 a German historian who had taken part in excavations in pre-war Aleppo, said: ‘We must unfortunately assume that either large sections of the bazaar have already been destroyed, or will be destroyed.’ Three years later, there were snipers poised in crevices of the old walls, destruction, ruins.

  The government forces stayed inside the Citadel, a fortified medieval palace once occupied by Greeks, Byzantines, Mamaluks. The government forces now use the walls of the former UNESCO world heritage site as barriers, and in the heights snipers nest, laying their rifles against the ancient stone.

  What occurred inside those walls, in peaceful times when ancient people occupied it? But even history seems irrelevant now. The most important thing is to hide from bullets.

  ‘The most difficult thing is not being able to feed your kids,’ Umm Hamid said on my first night in Aleppo. She was a woman of average age, height, weight, everything indistinguishable under her full abaya. She had sallow skin, rough-pored and dirty hands, rubber slippers on her feet. We were in her home in Bustan al-Qasr, a neighbourhood between the old Citadel and the Queiq River, where civilians had been killed and tossed aside, their purple and swollen bodies floating on the tide.

  Bustan al-Qasr was now a crossing-point between rebel-held and regime-held areas. There were snipers everywhere – positioned on the top floors of government buildings – and the streets were not safe. People needed to move between the two points, to work, to study – the University was on the regime-held side of the city – or to try to find food. There was a marketplace, but it too was targeted by snipers. To reach some buildings, you had to climb through holes that had been knocked out, or rather bombed out, of the walls, and you reached the other side from the inside. Rabbit warrens, little tunnels, short cuts to trick death.

  As in Sarajevo during the siege, people used inoperative buses and piled sandbags to try to shield themselves from the snipers. It looked strange at first, then you got used to seeing them and they appeared normal. When we left our car to get to Umm Hamid’s flat, we moved quietly, heads down, silently and quickly. It was always a relief to get into the car, even though in reality a sniper’s bullet or a rocket or anything else can cut through the side door or window.

  In a few months’ time, O., our driver, would be badly injured in exactly that manner, in this same car, in this same city. It would take him a year to recover from his bullet wounds, his broken bones.

  By the time I arrived in Aleppo, every neighbourhood was now a fiefdom, dictated by political survival and black-market criminality. The people were caught in the middle. It wasn’t clear who was in control of Bustan al-Qasr that week. In August, it was Ahrar Surya, one of the city’s largest rebel brigades. No one knew who was in charge on the day I arrived.

  O. whispered: ‘Best not to ask too many questions.’ He found his gun under the car seat, and slid it back under, further away from the foot well. I asked him not to carry it – he stared back at me wordlessly as if to say, you know nothing.

  Through the dirty car windows splattered with rain and mud, I could see Umm Hamid’s flat from the street, her main window that faced out lit up by candles inside. Nicole went first, then Paddy, then me, up four flights of stairs to the apartment in the dark, the wet tiled floors slippery and cold. Her children stood at the end of one room, shivering. I saw a row of tiny, dirty, tear-streaked faces.

  We stretched out sleeping bags in the front room. Through her windows, the street looked baneful: empty except for a few people carrying torches, illuminating small puddles near their feet with a pale yellow light. There were thuds of shelling and the occasional pop of a sniper’s gun. A few FSA – Free Syrian Army – rebel fighters gathered on the corner.

  Umm Hamid is a ‘laqab’ (an Arabic epithet that identifies a person), meaning Mother of Hamid. Her husband was a local sheikh, regarded with respect in the neighbourhood as a decision-maker, someone to trust. Their address had been given to us via safe contacts as a place we could trust, arranged through SMS from the Turkish border via local mobile phones. How safe is your apartment? When will your husband be back? Will we be able to stay with you without anyone knowing we are there? We’ll arrive after dark so no one sees us.

  She made us tea and spoke of the children. ‘When they wake up at night and want a glass of water, you can’t give it to them,’ she said, squatting on the floor and pouring the tea into dirty glasses. ‘When they wake up at night and want to go to the bathroom, they can’t. When they wake up at night and ask me to stop the bombs, I can’t do that either.’

  Then there was the lack of food. She spoke of what she missed, of what she had lost, of what she felt she would never regain. ‘Before the war, there were fruit trees,’ she said, almost longingly. Then she began to talk about them, memory as a way of never forgetting. Apples, tangerines, pears and plums, pomegranates and jasmine.

  Nights in Bustan al-Qasr were clamorous. There were more than a dozen people in the flat and the mixture of human sounds, coughing, crying, snoring,
laughing, mingled with the shooting and detonations outside the window. When I woke up in the morning, wrapped in a sleeping bag in all my clothes, one of her smaller children was sobbing. She didn’t want to go outside, she said in a broken voice. She was frightened. Please, Mama, she begged.

  Umm Hamid dressed the crying girl. She stuffed her miniature hands into socks instead of gloves to keep them warm. She was taking her to queue outside the bakery in the Kadi Askar neighbourhood. There was no one to leave the girl with, she said unapologetically, so she was bringing her to stand in the line with her. They might be waiting all day, she told us.

  ‘If we get there early, we might be lucky,’ she whispered to the little girl.

  If she were lucky, she would not be living in Aleppo. If she were lucky, she would not have to cook on a wood stove. If she were lucky, her children could play outside, or not be afraid of the balcony, where people shot at you when you stuck your head out. If she were lucky, her husband would not have been jobless for the past four months. If she were lucky, there would be no war.

  The Arabic name for Aleppo is Halab. Some people say it means iron, or possibly copper, because the city was a source of these metals in ancient times. But there is also a biblical legend that Halab means ‘the giver of milk’, because Abraham allegedly gave out milk to travellers when they passed through the city.

  But the city called the giver of milk has now ground to a halt, except for the fighting. Umm Hamid has not had milk at home for months. She had powdered milk, she said.

  Eventually, Umm Hamid coaxed the protesting girl, holding her by the arm, and we followed her down the stairs. On the staircase, she saw her younger son wearing rubber sandals outside on the street instead of shoes. December is cold in Aleppo, covered by grey mud and raked by icy wind. She stared at him, but she did not go inside to get him socks: she did not have any. Nor did he have shoes.

  She just stared at the boy’s feet, purple with cold, then hurried on to the bakery. There was nothing for him to do, and nothing for her to say.