The Morning They Came for Us

by Janine di Giovanni

  On the day I visited Mohammed, he was burying a man who, an hour before, had been alive. Muslims try to bury their dead before sunset on the same day, so as to honour the dead: the bathing, the enshrouding in white; the funeral prayer; the positioning of the head towards Mecca. But this is war. Two hours ago, this man had been on the front line, fighting. Then a bomb blew him up. His life was extinguished, fast, like a candle.

  He had not been bathed, but someone brought a bloody blanket to wrap him in. Friends brought him to the cemetery, but only three people were standing at the edge of the shallow grave dug by Mohammed.

  His corpse was wrapped but his head was exposed. He had fair hair, a pleasant look about him, and slightly bucked teeth. His eyes were ringed with purple bruises – a result of the explosion? The gravedigger shrugged, and asked one of the three men to say their prayers.

  ‘He’s smiling,’ one of the men finally said, after he had prayed. ‘The martyr is smiling.’

  A martyr, killed in jihad, holy war. A shaheed.

  ‘He’s not smiling,’ another man interjected. ‘He looks shocked. The bomb got him when he was not looking.’

  ‘No, you’re wrong. The martyr is smiling.’

  ‘If he’s smiling, it means he is going to heaven,’ the third man said.

  The gravedigger said quietly: ‘What we know is he is leaving Aleppo.’ He pushed the last bit of earth on the grave, shutting out the sky.

  From Salah al-Din, we drank some tea to get warm and then drove to the broken-down Old City. A man was selling the usual plastic Pepsi bottle of petrol. A tiny girl walked by him, wearing pyjamas, holding the hand of her even tinier brother. She could be no older than five. Where was she going? She said she had been sent out to look for food.

  In the yellow winter light the scavengers were back in the rubbish dump near our new apartment, picking through the mountain of trash for anything that might help them survive. Children were chopping down trees in the park for firewood. The tree stumps looked darkly deformed, grotesque. The kids wore the rubber slippers usually worn by the poolside in tropical climates, and no socks. They slipped as they walked on the freezing ice, the hardened mud.

  Later in the day, before dark, we went to the bread queue at Kadi Askar. The people standing there were the same as those that had been there that morning. Now they were colder, hungrier and angrier. The bakery itself was surrounded by barbed wire. It was to keep people out, since starving people will do anything. People’s faces change to desperation when they wait for food. Some waited with a book, others just looked empty, hollow, aching.

  It was raining. Cold, fat, freezing drops of rain were falling, but very few people had umbrellas.

  The next day, 17 December 2012, the temperature dropped below zero. I remembered my life during the war in Sarajevo, and I wondered if someone here in Aleppo, as in Sarajevo, was recording everything that was happening in the city: who lived, who died, the temperature, how many shells fell, who took what ground. I wondered if someone was keeping a Book of the Dead. That day in Aleppo, without newspapers, radio, TV or Internet, I knew from talking to people that the Free Syrian Army still held around 60 to 70 per cent of the city and were battling to take an old fort outside of town. I knew from watching them that every time there was an explosion, the people in the bread queue shifted slightly. It is terrifying when people no longer react to gunfire, so accustomed are they to its sound.

  I knew that people were sickened and weary of war, but what I did not know was that two years later, if I had been able to project into the future, the same thing would be happening. The war would not be over.

  All of the stories would be similar. ‘I walked into a room and I saw a government soldier with a gun,’ said Ahmed, a wounded FSA soldier, waiting near me.

  ‘I couldn’t kill him so he tried to kill me.’ He paused and stared down at the missing half of his leg. Ahmed was unable to shoot at a young boy near his own age, who in a different world might have sat next to him in a classroom. Seeing Ahmed’s hesitation, the boy had shot at him, blowing off half of his leg.

  ‘Isn’t that a nice story?’ Ahmed said, his face rigid with pain, before turning away.

  In the bread queue the people talked only of the war.

  ‘I have been here five hours.’

  ‘I have been here six.’

  They looked for faces they recognized; the faces they knew from before, of neighbours, aunts, uncles and cousins. No one was recognizable any more. I thought of the Stalin years, how the poet Anna Akhmatova wrote of the queues, of the waiting, of the pain of seeing the people she loved standing in line and being unable to recognize them because of the sorrow that had indelibly been etched into their features.

  This was the only ‘opposition bakery’ – meaning a bakery that was not held by the Syrian government and that was run in an opposition neighbourhood. People going there were hungry, rather than political, but they were still angry with the leaders – and not just with Assad. They were angry with the opposition leaders, with the lack of political leadership, with the West, with China and Russia who support Assad, and with the ‘guys with the beards’ – the radical jihadists who would soon turn out to be a part of the Islamic State.

  They were even angry with us reporters sitting in our beaten-up car. Nicole had been born in Hong Kong, and even though her hair was wrapped in a hijab, when they saw her face, they grew angry. China, along with Russia, had blocked the UN Security Council action against Syria. They began to scream and pound at the car window.

  What has Nicole got to do with the UN Security Council? Nothing.

  But a crowd’s anger is terrifying, and O., the driver, reached for his gun, which was more frightening, because if he had a gun, certainly those in the crowd did too. I told him to put it away, and Paddy quietly talked him down. We finally climbed out of the car in a little tunnel made of people trying to help us, and ran into the bread factory.

  Another man named Mohammed, who had been a car mechanic before the war, managed the bakery. Mohammed had a thankless task. If the bread didn’t rise, if the petrol didn’t arrive to start the generator, if there was not enough bread to be sold, the crowd turned on him. The Assad government had sent messages that he would be kidnapped, tortured and killed if he kept running the bakery. He had not listened, he said. He was too busy baking bread.

  He shrugged. ‘The bread needs to rise so I keep working,’ he said. ‘And it takes five hours to rise.’ He wiped flour off his trousers and led us towards the enormous mixing bowls. He was not afraid of Assad’s thugs, or the criminals who threatened him, or even the FSA bullies. He showed up at daybreak every day at the bakery – a cavernous hole of a former factory – to start the process: getting the generators going, turning on the machines, mixing the flour and water, supervising the barren, empty place.

  There were only about five people working there – he couldn’t afford to pay any more, and no one could make it across the nearby front lines to get in to work. The equipment was ancient.

  ‘If you have a crisis, a war like this,’ he said, ‘you need to work. Otherwise you think about nothing but the war all day long. I would rather think about bread.’ Together, Mohammed and his little team made about 17,000 bags of bread a day – each bag containing fourteen loaves of flat bread. He said this bread was keeping Aleppo alive.

  Before threatening to kill him, ‘the regime offered me money not to make the bread, so that the people would starve’, he said. But now he was protected by the FSA. ‘I’d be dead if they didn’t,’ he said. They even gave him flour and salt, and petrol to run the generator.

  Our lives, he told me, depend on whether we can get petrol for the generators.

  Imagine this, he said in an exhausted voice. ‘Every step I take, everything I do is about whether or not I can get petrol for the generator. I have to feed a city on that hope. Every single day.’

  At dusk, pink shapes came out of the shadows. It was now twilight, the hour of the wolf, the hou
r between the wolf and the dog. Faint stars appeared.

  Earlier in the day, in the early morning light, we had dragged our flak jackets, helmets and backpacks stuffed with supplies for a day or longer (water, power bars, an emergency blanket using plastic sheeting sprayed with aluminium, a medical kit) into the back of O.’s beaten-up car. We headed towards Zarzour Hospital.

  The chief doctor seemed friendly at first. He invited me to a room to talk, but then, when we sat on the cracked and cold leather chairs, he looked at me with the hardened eyes of an abandoned animal. He had been working all day and, before that, all night. His body language was of utter defeat, exhaustion. Not just the clear half-moons of darkness under his eyes, but the way his arms hung from his body – weightless. The fatigue of his work bored into his physical being.

  ‘Hundreds of people in here in the past month because of missile attacks,’ he said, his voice rising in anger. ‘Where is the United Nations? When is the international community coming to save us?’ He said the UN had promised that hospitals would not be bombed.

  But I am not the UN, I protested, and he cut me off.

  ‘But they are bombing! They are still bombing hospitals!’

  I opened my mouth to say something, but any excuse I had was feeble. I shut it and remained silent. The doctor shifted forward in his seat, inched his body closer, and pointed his finger at me.

  ‘Where are they?’ he demanded. ‘Where is the UN? Who is coming to save us?’

  ‘The UN is not coming,’ I said finally. ‘You must not wait for anyone. You have to save yourself.’

  He stared at me for the longest time. Then he jumped to his feet. He went to the door and asked me to leave. I gathered my things, embarrassed, and stood. As I walked down the hall, he shouted after me: ‘One UN official, and only one, came and promised to help. He did nothing!’

  All the way down the hall, he continued to shout. ‘No one will ever do anything! They promise everything, they do nothing!! We have had enough. We will be alone, as we always have been.’

  But I know, I wanted to tell him. I know that we have done nothing. And this is the worse part of it – when you realize that what separates you, someone who can leave, from someone who is trapped in Aleppo, or Homs or Douma or Darayya, is that you can walk away and go back to your home with electricity and sliced bread; then you begin to feel ashamed to be human.

  That night, in the darkened apartment lit by torches, I met a young American journalist. He had curly hair and glasses, and was rotund in a childlike way. He was also funny and seemed more light-hearted than the rest of us; a relief from the day at the bakery. His name was Steven Sotloff. He was travelling with a researcher from Washington named Barak; they both spoke Arabic and were working together.

  Steve had lived in Yemen, where he had studied Arabic and lived in the Old City. It had been lonely; he had been broke, and he talked about eating potato sandwiches. He and Barak sparred and spoke in jokes. They reminded me of Laurel and Hardy.

  Steve moved from Yemen to Benghazi. ‘You lived in Benghazi full time?’ I asked. ‘So where do you go to the movies? How do you go out on a date?’

  He laughed and laughed, and said his life was fucked up, like that of all foreign correspondents. ‘Don’t you wish you hadn’t gotten obsessed with Syria?’ he asked.

  In another chair sat a photographer named Jason who had put together an achingly beautiful book about Russia. He was wearing all his clothes – his thick jacket, hat and thermal gloves – and sat quietly in the chair. He said he had travelled by bus from his home in Istanbul to Gaziantep. He sat with his cameras in his lap, watching, not talking.

  Steve Sotloff, however, talked a lot. He told me was hungry, so I gave him a bag of my freeze-dried food – unappetizing silver packets of flavoured yogurt and muesli, and chicken in a bright yellow sauce I had bought in a camping shop near Saint-Germain in Paris. He ate it hungrily. He said he liked the taste.

  His slangy language, his Americanism, in Aleppo, made me smile: the juxtaposition of words and place, his expressions, his kid-like curiosity. I forgot the cold, the anxiety, the gnawing fear in my stomach.

  Steve and Jason were travelling cheap and needed rides, so they jumped on the backs of other drivers. Our fixer was a beautiful and nervous man called A. Neither Steve, nor I, trusted him entirely. Everything about A. was ambiguous and uncertain: his name, his age, his past experience as a soldier (it was unclear whether or not he was still fighting with the rebels and, if so, with which brigade). A French photographer had given me A.’s name, and I had contacted him, and arranged a meeting. A. promised, as best one could promise, to keep us safe. I did not entirely believe him.

  Nicole wasn’t sure either. She was only twenty-six, but had good instincts, having spent so much time in Syria, in Aleppo specifically. There was an old-soul quality about Nicole, youthful as she was. She was a sombre woman, quiet, restrained. She said she was in Aleppo to document the war, to photograph, but she was really here to search for her friend Jim Foley, a young journalist who had been kidnapped.

  She had snippets of information – she had been waiting for Jim on the Turkish side of the border when he had disappeared nine weeks before – and she was trying to weave them together like a detective, tracing his last days, his last hours, trying to find out any more information that might bring him home. She talked about him, and as she did so, there was such tenderness in her friendship and her search for him. She loved him like a brother.

  There was another young woman there, too, a Syrian girl, beautiful and voluptuous, with long flowing hair and eyes lined with kohl. She was what the French would call pulpeuse, and she spoke and moved with a kind of innate sensuality. She took my matted hair between her mittened hands and tried to comb it; she loaned me a lipstick, eyeliner, a hairbrush.

  A. had lost his best friend a few days before we arrived on the front line. He broke down in tears at various intervals – when going out on the back terrace to start the wheezing generator, when talking to us about the situation in Aleppo. He smoked incessantly, never seemed to eat, poured out endless cups of tea. He dropped sugar cubes inside them, stirred, gulped, and poured another cup.

  One night, the night of his friend’s funeral, he and the Syrian girl sat up all night in the sitting room where Jason used to sleep in a chair. I heard them both intermittently laughing and crying, all night long.

  When you saw them together, you could see how damaged they both were. Earlier when we were eating ‘dinner’ – the foil packets of freeze-dried food – A. said his heart was broken. He cried again, this time with great heaving sobs.

  ‘It’s too much,’ he said, in English. He repeated it, louder: ‘Too much.’ The generator went out – again – and the room went dark. A. put on rubber slippers and went out on the patio in the rain to try to start it again. He couldn’t get it going and he came back defeated.

  ‘I’ll get more petrol in the morning,’ he said, then sat in a chair and said nothing.

  That night, the two of them stayed up late. There was half a roast chicken on the table that A. had gone out to the dark street to buy from a vendor. It lay, greasy, on a piece of wax paper on the dusty table.

  The two Syrians pushed their sleeping bags together on the floor and lay on their sides facing each other, whispering. Perhaps it was flirtation, though the girl said she had a boyfriend fighting somewhere on the front line, a powerful rebel commander, and that she was a woman of the revolution. Later, as I was trying to fall asleep, I could hear them smoking – crumpling the pack of cigarettes, striking a match, inhaling deeply, exhaling, and laughing. It was 2 a.m. The shooting outside was still going on, and a mortar landed somewhere. I finally fell asleep much later to the sound of the girl comforting A., who was sobbing once again. He sounded like a child, not a hardened fighter.

  A few weeks later A. would be murdered while sitting in his car. That handgun he kept below the seat had not helped him. It was a crime related to factions within the rebel gro
ups; it might have been a revenge attack, it might have been a robbery. No one seemed to know, and worse, no one was surprised.

  O., the driver who had taken us back and forth to Aleppo neighbourhoods, to bread queues, to the Old City, had also been shot and badly wounded while driving his car. He survived.

  I wrote to the beautiful Syrian girl, but she did not respond. Many months later, I had an email from her, a strange and disjointed message, asking me to join her somewhere inside Homs. In the email, she gave me a time and place, and said she would be waiting. It seemed like a trap, and I did not reply – I was suspicious, paranoid as everyone always is with messages that come out of Syria. I never saw her again, but many months later I got a message from her that she had not sent the message. Someone said it was a way that Nusra, and later ISIS, lured foreigners to be kidnapped.

  Steve was the one to write to me about A.’s murder.

  ‘I’m not shocked,’ he wrote. ‘I always felt a bit uncomfortable walking into his office. He had to have been a target. The people in the city are sick of the mess, and their feelings towards those helping journalists as much as he did must have been negative. I have lost so many friends in this war as well. It’s hard to keep it from getting to you.’

  We became closer friends, trying to understand why A. had been killed. What had he been doing at the time of his death, and who would want him extinguished?

  Steve wanted to go back to Syria, even though he told me he believed he was on a blacklist, and that the rebels were after him for something he had written, which he said was not true.

  He wrote to me from Michigan, where he was giving a talk on Libya ‘to some Texan oil men’, to say that he was drifting a bit, going to see his family in Miami, then heading back to covering the war. He wrote to me on Facebook: ‘I want to turn my full attention to Syria. I should be in Antakya in early April. I plan to be in that area through summer. I’m starting to look into Raqqa15/Hasaka as well as northern Hama and Homs . . . I’d be interested in working on the rape issue with you . . . although as you say, men don’t get much from the locals on this topic.’