By 16 April, he said he was ‘back on the radar’ and preparing to go to Syrian Kurdistan. He still wanted to work on the sexual violence project I was completing. He was having money issues, and sometimes feeling spooked by the enormity of travelling alone, without financial and emotional backing. He was also aware that he was on a sort of list: ‘apparently the border idiots have me and Barak on a list and I’m trying to find out how/why . . .’
Do those guys really matter? I asked.
‘When I’m being accused of responsibility for the Dir Shifa bombing,16 I think it does,’ he responded tersely. ‘Even though I did not enter Syria until weeks after that.’
So don’t go, I said. Sounds like the fog of war.
‘Sounds like the fog of bullshit,’ he replied.
He was not frightened though, or if he was, he did not show it.
‘We are all naïve,’ he wrote to me shortly after another friend of ours was killed in Aleppo in March 2013. ‘I still run out to take video on my cell phone when bombs drop out of jets. It’s easy to feel invincible, even with death all around. It’s like This is my movie, Sucker – I’m not going to die! . . . and on a lighter note, where did you get those food packets when I saw you at Abdullah’s. They looked so good behind that aluminum foil in Abdullah’s kitchen I seriously almost jacked that shit!’
He returned to the region and on 25 July, he wrote excitedly: ‘Hey Mama G! I’m back in Turkey! Have you gotten over your sickness of Aleppo? I may head in early next week.’
He wanted me to meet him and split the costs inside the country. But something that summer made me not want to return to Aleppo. My son was growing too fast, I had already missed too much of his boyhood. I told Steve to be safe, that I wanted to be with my little boy in the summer, that I would come in the autumn and meet him.
‘You 2 have fun,’ Steve wrote to me, recommending films and ice cream. The last time he wrote to me was a few days before he went missing.
More people were being kidnapped. On another trip, I met a young American girl called Kayla Mueller who had just arrived from Arizona and had come to work with Syrian children. She was with a Syrian friend of mine; she said he was her fiancé. She seemed bubbly and young, naïve and sweet. The challenge of working with Syrian refugees seemed a prospect she was willing to take on, although I could not get an answer from her about who she was working with. A few days later, she would also be kidnapped.
She was twenty-six years old at the time of her death, during a bombing raid in Raqqa, where the Islamic State held her. She never married my friend, and she never had children. She barely got to work with the refugees she wanted to save.
On 6 August 2013, at 2.14 p.m., I got a message from Steve’s Facebook account, written by his friend Barak. Hi Janine. It’s Steve’s friend Barak. Steve went into Syria 48 hours ago with Yusuf friend of Abdallah and has gone dark. There are rumors on S-Logistics17 that Yusuf is missing. Do you have contact information for any of his friends inside? Please don’t share this information with anyone because no one knows yet.18
We soon found out Steve had been kidnapped and sold to Islamic State. He was held in prison for a year. His family kept it quiet, worried that the kidnappers would realize he was Jewish and that he had studied in Israel, even though he did not hold beliefs that were in line with that state’s current government. He shared a cell with other Europeans who were kidnapped, including Jim Foley. He and Jim bonded with the others, sometimes fought, sometimes cried, and then, painfully, watched the others be released as their governments paid a ransom. Steve and Jim must have known – realizing that it was US policy not to pay terrorists – that they would not be released.
In September 2014, Steve Sotloff was murdered, by the ‘bearded guys’ of the Islamic State, as he had once described them to me. I could not imagine that this smiling, laughing boy, who told jokes and avidly followed the basketball scores of the Miami team he loved, who wrote wise and funny emails, who had offered advice on raising a boy, and who was a generous colleague and friend, had been beheaded.
Jim Foley, too, despite Nicole’s desperate search, despite his family’s constant interventions, had been beheaded a few weeks before.
I did not, could not, watch the video of either of their murders. But I did see a still photograph of Steve before he was killed, wearing an orange jumpsuit. He had lost weight, a lot of it. His face was no longer chubby and round, and he was not wearing glasses. A random thought crossed my mind: Steve had joked that in Turkey he could not seem to get girls because of his jihadi beard.
Now, his face was clean. There seemed to be no curiosity or youth left in it, just fatigue, an eternal tiredness. He was kneeling in the Syrian desert, looking young, small and weak.
He died brutally in a foreign land, unique in its beauty, surrounded by strangers.
Nicole and I went back to Aleppo in the spring, and this time we stayed with a group of young fighters who were growing more and more radical, more and more Islamic. Now the streets were no longer safe to walk on: as foreigners, we were targets. Now we had to stay in the bedroom assigned to us to eat, where a neighbour woman still left food outside our door on a tray; we weren’t allowed in the main room where the men gathered, talking and working on their computers. When we passed to use the bathroom, to wash, to get water from the kitchen, they stopped talking and dropped their eyes.
Aleppo had changed radically, in just a few months. This is when we knew that in desperation, the soldiers who were once fighting for freedom were now radicalized. On the drive out, passing along the road, I tried to look for signs of the old Syria, the one that was there before the Islamists arrived, and did my best to take photographs inside my head, pictures that I would remember, that would show a country that no longer existed.
EPILOGUE
March 2015
In the winter and spring of 2013–14, I worked on a project for the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, in Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon, about Syrian refugee women who were in exile from their country and raising their children alone.
Along with a team of researchers, we met with these women, their children and their extended families, in the tents, shacks, garages, camps, and in some cases apartments, where they lived. The women were alone because their husbands had been killed in the fighting, or were still fighting in Syria, or were lost. Many of them had never made a single decision in their lives; some had never left the house without a male escort. Some had married as young as fourteen years old. Then they were thrust into a world so far removed from the Syrian countryside where they had lived that the transition was unendurable.
As single women, thought to be ‘promiscuous’, they were sexual prey for other men in the settlements or camps where they were living. Some were afraid to leave their tents, let alone venture into a nearby village to do the shopping in order to feed their children.
I spoke to one woman in a barren, half-constructed tower block in northern Lebanon, who had survived the Houla massacre by hiding her children as the Shabiha rampaged through the village. Her husband had been killed in the fighting earlier on, and she was alone. She closed the windows and kept the kids out of view, and somehow, the militiamen passed over her house. When the killing was finally over, she picked up her children and made her way to the Lebanese border.
In Egypt, I met Maria (her name has been changed), who was working with her two small daughters in a refugee centre. Her story was one of unrelenting pain, but also of resilience. She left Homs (and an abusive husband who had turned ‘radical’ in the time that the FSA was recruiting) and travelled to Central Syria. En route, she was pulled off the bus by government troops and threatened with rape. Her daughters watched from the bus window as she pleaded and begged the soldiers not to abuse her.
She got away. She settled in a small town, only to face arrest again. She left in the middle of the night, went to Latakia, and was taken by the police and put in jail. Her daughters and husband (who had caught up with her) went to Egypt.
She followed, only to endure his physical and emotional abuse. In an act of pure courage, she and her daughters escaped and made their way to Cairo.
When I met her in Cairo, she sat at a table in the refugee centre where she was trying to teach other Syrian women how to care for themselves in a strange and new world, and she seemed to me the most courageous woman I had ever met.
‘You have to try to make yourself happy,’ she told me, for starting a new life after a war had cut into her psyche so profoundly.
Eventually, by boat, by car, by bus and by foot, she made her way to Germany with the girls. But she was, she told me, painfully aware that she would probably never go home.
Over the years, I have met hundreds of refugees from different kinds of war and different kinds of conflict and humanitarian disaster. I always have the same questions, though: What did you take with you? What did you leave behind? What do you miss the most? How will you re-start your life?
And, more importantly, I want to know why they left. What was the exact moment, the trigger, when you felt you had to leave your country? At what point was it unbearable? At what point do you say – enough, now I must leave?
Or if you decide not to leave, what conditions do you choose to stay under?
For ordinary people, war starts with a jolt: one day you are busy with dentist appointments or arranging ballet lessons for your daughter, and then the curtain drops. One moment the daily routine grinds on; ATMs work and mobile phones function. Then, suddenly, everything stops.
Barricades go up. Soldiers are recruited and neighbours work to form their own defences. Ministers are assassinated and the country falls into chaos. Fathers disappear. The banks close and money and culture and life as people knew it vanishes.
During my time in Damascus when I initially started this book, daily life unfolded as it does everywhere else. I attended operas at one of the best opera houses in the Middle East, bacchanalian pool parties on Thursday afternoons, and weddings in which couples married in elaborate Sunni and Shia ceremonies. I watched makeup artists work their magic on actresses’ faces for a magazine photo shoot. All of these activities were part of a life that somehow continued as war crept up to Syria’s doorstep, but that is about to fade away, left as memory.
Not far beneath the surface of the festivities, there was a current of tension, a tangible dread that the month-long conflict would soon spill onto the streets of Damascus. People had begun to leave the city when I arrived. There were going-away parties, and embassies were shutting down. The neighbourhoods of Barzeh and al-Midan, where I walked the streets after Friday Prayer, became no-go areas, opposition strongholds. I wonder how many people I saw at the mosque fled Syria, crossing over the border to Lebanon or Turkey.
I know about the velocity of war. In all of the wars I have covered – including in Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Chechnya, Somalia, Kosovo, Libya, and more – the moments in which everything changes from normal to extremely abnormal share a similar quality. One evening in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, in 2002, for example, I went to bed after dinner at a lavish Italian restaurant. When I woke up, there was no telephone service and no radio broadcast in the capital; ‘rebels’ occupied the television station and flares shot through the sky.
In my garden I could smell both the scent of mango trees and the smell of burning homes. My neighbourhood was on fire. The twenty-four-hour gap between peace and wartime gave me enough time to gather my passport, computer and favourite photos and flee to a hotel in the centre of the city. I never returned to my beloved house with the mango trees.
In early April of 1992, a friend in Sarajevo was walking to her job in a bank, in a mini-skirt and heels, when she saw a tank rolling down the street. Shots were fired. My friend crouched, trembling, behind a rubbish bin, her life for ever altered. In a few weeks, she was sending her baby to safety on a bus, in the arms of a stranger, to another country. She would not see him for years.
This is how war starts.
In the summer of 2012, Major General Robert Mood of Norway, the former chief UN monitor in Damascus, told me there is no template for war. But reading dispatches from the village of Tremseh,19 and seeing the refugees fleeing Homs with mattresses strapped to their car rooftops, the tiny faces of children pressed against the windows, it is hard not to remember the mistakes of the past two decades.
All summer long, and into the following winter and spring, there were political wranglings. Russia continued to veto Security Council efforts to sanction and reproach President Bashar al-Assad.
Syrians who called themselves Syrians a few years ago were now saying they were Alawites, Christians, Sunnis, Shias, Druze.
Diplomacy failed. The UN had stood on the sidelines and watched as genocide unfolded in Bosnia and Rwanda, during which time Kofi Annan was in charge of peacekeeping operations. He eventually left his position as UN Envoy to Syria in August 2012.
Lakhdar Brahimi, a seasoned negotiator who had managed to end the war in Lebanon, held the joint role of UN and Arab League Special Envoy. Brahimi, who was seen by many as the salvation of the region, also left in disgust in May 2014. As I write this, the Italian/Swedish UN veteran Staffan de Mistura is currently negotiating. De Mistura is a humanitarian – his happiest working conditions were in the field in Bosnia or Sudan. He is doing all he can, but all he can is not ending the war.
In every war I have covered, ceasefire is a synonym for buying time to kill more civilians. Or, as my colleague at the BBC Jim Muir put it so brilliantly, ‘truces frequently spur the combatants to try to improve their positions on the ground before the whistle blows and hostilities stop’.20
As I write, de Mistura is holding a series of low-level meetings in Geneva between various actors in the scenario of war: Iranians, Syrians, members of the opposition, Turks, Russians. So many circles involved in ending the war, like a Russian doll, and inside the smallest of circles are the Syrian people.
Fifteen years ago, Kofi Annan issued a report to the UN General Assembly on the failure of the international community to prevent the massacre of Bosnians at Srebrenica. He called it ‘a horror without parallel in the history of Europe since the Second World War’.
Yet once again, the member states lack the will or impetus to stop the slaughter of women and children. As they bicker and squabble over reports and sit in hotel rooms, unable to be the eyes and ears on the ground and report what is happening, more people die.
This is what the beginning of civil war looks like.
In the time I spent in Syria, I talked to as many people as I could, from as many denominations and backgrounds as possible. I wanted to see how Assad’s supporters told the story of what was happening to their country. And I wanted testimonies from those who suffered under the regime.
In 2012, before the ceasefire, on the two-hour drive from Damascus to Homs, I went through eight government checkpoints. Inside Homs, the half of the city that had not been levelled by tanks and fighting was only semi-functioning: the shrubbery in the centre of the road had been left to run wild, but a bus passed through to collect a few lingering people. It was a strange sign of normality.
At a crowded refugee centre, I met a woman named Sopia, who last saw her twenty-three-year-old son, Muhammad, in a Homs hospital bed in December. She told me that shrapnel had hit him during a mortar attack and a piece had lodged in his brain. Sopia said she arrived at his bed one morning and found it empty. Doctors explained to her that they had moved him to a military hospital. Sopia said she had a ‘terrible feeling’ as she began to search desperately for her son.
She found Muhammad’s body, ten days later, in the military hospital. It bore clear signs of torture: there were two bullets lodged in his head, electrocution marks on the soles of his feet and around his ankles and cigarette burns on his back.
For Sopia, the morning she saw her son’s body was the moment she realized she was in a country at war. She told me her son was a simple man, a construction worker, and had no links to th
e rebels. But Sopia and her family lived in Baba Amr – an area of Homs that had been an opposition stronghold – and men of a certain age are assumed to be fighters or supporters of the Free Syrian Army.
I asked Sopia over and over whether her son was a fighter. No, she said, he wasn’t.
Sopia’s grief was not unlike that of the mothers of government fighters, about the same age as Muhammad, who had been killed in Damascus by IEDs or flying shrapnel. To them and to Sopia, politics matter less than raw pain, inconsolable loss.
That day, which is now fading from my memory, armed soldiers at roadblocks throughout the country checked passing cars for guns and soldiers. Suspicious passengers were detained for questioning. On my way to Homs, polite but menacing pro-Assad gunmen detained me. Sometimes those situations have a silver lining – you are concerned that you might be thrown in jail, but you get to hear people talk about a different vision, a different side. I always listen to them, no matter how abstract their arguments may seem.
In Homs on that trip, I met a little boy who sat on a parquet floor playing Go Fish. For him, the war had started when Syria’s Arab Spring began, in March of 2011. Then, his parents forbade him to leave the house. When I visited him, there was a sniper at the end of his street, and in the evening mortar rounds thundered in the dark, and got louder as night wore on.
The little boy lived near the ghostly ruins of Baba Amr, where the air outside his balcony was still rich with the scent of jasmine, olive trees and orange blossoms. If he went inside and closed his eyes, it would be possible for him to believe no war was going on outside.
The boy’s family did not support Assad; in fact, the boy’s grandmother vehemently loathed him. But they did not leave. Why? The boy’s mother told me they were staying because this was their home. Life here was already like life in a prison, a sense that would only worsen.
The Morning They Came for Us Page 14
