The Morning They Came for Us

by Janine di Giovanni

  In a government office near the Mezzeh Highway, a Christian official with a Muslim name told me he grew up in a country that, like Bosnia, was a melting pot for ethnic groups, for refugees from Armenia, for Christians, Shias, Sunnis and Greek Orthodox. He said the uprising would change all of this. ‘Everyone who believed in the Syrian model is betrayed,’ he said.

  Now it was June 2014. I was in Baghdad. The border between Syria and Iraq had been erased.

  The Islamic State (ISIS) was racing through Iraq, swallowing up entire Yazidi and Christian villages, engulfing anyone who did not embrace its strict Salafist ways.

  The Yazidis, a mystical sect, were once again driven out, seeking refuge on a mountain near Sinjar, facing scorching temperatures by day and a lack of water, food and medical care. They were eventually rescued and brought to refugee camps, but ISIS – at the time of this writing – controlled most of the areas where they used to live. The Yazidis, whom I visited in 2003 and lived with for several days, attending their weddings and funerals and learning some of the secrets of their faith, had become refugees and wanderers, as they had feared.

  A few days after ISIS gained control of Mosul, raiding the Central Bank, driving out families and destroying all religious idolatry and statues of poets, I lay on my bed in my hotel in Baghdad, trying to organize my memories in the way that Iraqis do when they are talking about the past. I felt an overriding emotion that entire swathes of the map of the Middle East had been lost. I kept feeling a dull, unending sense of depletion, damage, injury.

  My Iraqi friends always refer to epochs: this was back in the Saddam days; that was when I fought in the Iran-Iraq War; this was during the first Gulf War; this was the second invasion; this was after the Americans came. Now it was: before Mosul fell. Now it was: before the war in Syria, before the Arab Spring.

  Sometimes, in war, there are also pleasant memories. The camaraderie that exists, the intimacy between human beings, the fact that sometimes barriers are broken down and a level of communication occurs that could never thrive in peacetime. People say things and do things that are profound and genuine.

  I remember a hot summer day, in the old town of Damascus, when a famous artist sat in his studio – a room in the former home of a Jewish family who had used it to keep their sacred Torah – and said the war was edging closer. He was neither pro-government nor pro-opposition; of course he believed in democracy and freedom of expression, being an artist – but most of all he cared simply about creating art.

  In 2010, before the Arab Spring, the artist expressed his vision of the future of the Middle East in a sculpture exhibition called Guillotine. He opened it first in downtown Damascus.

  Now, several years on and with hundreds of thousands dead, something has changed irrevocably in his country. It will not return to what it was, not now, not ever. How can Syria ever be what it once was? It has been burnt alive by hatred.

  Shortly before I finished this book in the spring of 2015, after numerous trips back to the region, as ISIS spread past Mosul and reached Palmyra, I got an email from a group of reporters and photographers I had worked with in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war. They had put together a collection of photographs and writing, our memories, into a time module, a way of not letting anyone forget, ever, what happened to that defeated and broken country.

  They had bundled our words and photographs and some haunting music together to make a ten-minute presentation that basically traced the war from beginning to end – from the first nationalist parades, to the murders of innocents, to the mass graves and the destruction of mosques, villages and cities, and finally to the Dayton Agreement in 1995, which ended the war. It was our way of saying: look, this is how war begins, how it destroys, how it ultimately ends. Nothing good comes from it.

  I could not help watching the short film over and over, the way you pick at a wound that hurts, and the more you pick, the more painful and sore it grows, but you continue. And every time I watched it, tears rolled down my face onto my T-shirt, just as they had that day in the hospital in Aleppo. I felt ashamed of my reaction – after all, I had survived, I had not been ethnically cleansed from my village or been raped or had my parents murdered in front of me – but most of all I felt immense sorrow. We had tried, my colleagues and I and dedicated humanitarians and diplomats, but we had failed to protect the very people we had come to report on, to stop the killing, to somehow not allow this country to be ripped apart, limb from limb, throat, eye, knucklebone.21

  I swore to myself, after Bosnia, that I would never live through another war that would consume me. I swore that I would not feel again the terrible stirring of guilt so profound – that feeling of we did nothing. I wondered sometimes what my life would be like had I never stumbled into a war zone for the first time when I was a very young woman, so young that I was embarrassed to tell my age.

  How different my life would have been had I never seen a mass grave or a truck with bodies, all dead, piled one on top of the other, their skin changing from the softness of the living to the leathery skin of the dead. Or a torture cell with the incarcerated’s dying wish and last words of love to his family.

  But that is not what happens. Perhaps, as the political scientist I studied so diligently as a student, Charles Tilly, wrote, men are inevitably linked to war as a way of state-making. Wars make states – or is it the other way around? Do states make wars?

  I have never been very good at theory. But I am good at counting, and attempting to remember those who lived, who walked the earth, but who fell during the course of the violence that ripped their countries apart.

  As I write this, the Syrian war continues and there are nearly 300,000 Syrians dead. The Book of the Dead is not yet finished.

  Notes

  1According to the Human Rights Watch, the Bosnian genocide between 1992 and 1995 resulted in an estimated 100,000 deaths of Bosniak Muslims and Croatians by Serb forces; it was the worst act of genocide since the Nazi regime’s destruction. While the UN did little to prevent the systematic atrocities committed against Bosniaks and Croats in Bosnia while they were occurring, it did actively seek justice against those who committed them. In May 1993, the UN Security Council created the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague, Netherlands. It was the first international tribunal since the Nuremberg Trials in 1945–46 and the first to prosecute genocide, among other war crimes. In the weeks after 6 April 1994, 800,000 men, women and children perished in the Rwandan genocide, perhaps as many as three-quarters of the Tutsi population. Tens of thousands of Tamils were murdered in Sri Lanka during a twenty-five-year war. In both these genocides, the international community failed to intervene in a timely or effective manner. Despite a UN mission in Kosovo, human trafficking continues, as does rape in the Congo, which is perpetrated mostly by the Congolese forces. Five years after the Haitian earthquake, Haiti suffers from disease and poverty, unable to develop a stable government amidst the international NGOs. Sometimes absent and sometimes present too late, the United Nations seems unable to resolve these issues, despite the sincere determination of some of its officials.

  2Freeze zones are meant to suspend fighting in some areas and allow humanitarian aid to be delivered. ‘It should be something that freezes the conflict in that area and gives an opportunity for some type of humanitarian improvement and for the people to feel that, at least there, there will not be this type of conflict,’ de Mistura said (al-Arabiya News). It is an ‘action plan’ rather than a ‘peace plan’.

  3From 4th Report of the Commission of Enquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, A/HRC/22/59 (5 Feburary 2013), by United Nations, General Assembly. © United Nations 2013. Reprinted with the permission of the United Nations.

  4A United Nations report in August 2012 into an earlier massacre at Houla found that the indiscriminate attacks against civilian populations and other atrocities were ‘state policy’ and claimed Assad’s forces and allied Shabiha militia were involved at the highest levels
in ‘gross violations of international human rights’.

  The UN inquiry found that anti-Assad forces had also committed war crimes including ‘murder, extrajudicial execution and torture’, but that these abuses ‘did not reach the gravity, frequency and scale of those committed by government forces and the Shabiha’.

  The 102-page report said that Syrian government forces and Shabiha fighters have carried out numerous war crimes in the country including murder, torture and the massacre of 100 civilians, almost half of them children, near the town of Houla in May, 2012. The UN’s independent international commission of inquiry said the violations were the result of ‘state policy’. It claimed President Bashar al-Assad’s ‘security forces and government’ at the highest levels were involved in ‘gross violation of international human rights’. The violations included ‘unlawful killing, indiscriminate attacks against civilian populations and acts of sexual violence’, it said. The report painted a bleak picture of events on the ground in Syria, noting the situation inside the country had ‘deteriorated significantly’ since February.

  The commission, led by investigator Paulo Pinheiro, also reported that Syria’s rebels were guilty of violations including murder, torture and extra-judicial killings. But it said abuses by anti-government groups were not ‘of the same gravity, frequency and scale’ as those committed by Syrian regime forces and allied Shabiha militia.

  5Robert Fisk, Independent, UK, 29 August 2012: ‘Inside Daraya – how a failed prisoner swap turned into a massacre’. © Independent Print Limited, Robert Fisk and Independent.

  6The source is a Syrian journalist who wishes to remain anonymous.

  7Hugh Macleod, Global Post, 26 August 2012, ‘Inside Syria: For assault on Daraya, Assad regime brings own cameras’ http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/middle-east/syria/120826/inside-syria-sunday-massacre-daraya-assad-regime-brin?page=0,1

  8Abeer Al-Ahmad, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08DAMASCUS445_a.html

  9These words are from the same journalist as mentioned in note 6 above, who wishes to remain anonymous for safety reasons.

  10See this link for a video of barrel bombing of Darayya, but please note, the content is disturbing. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10618670/Syrian-military-drop-devastating-barrel-bombs-on-city.html

  11The United States Armed Forces’ term for urban warfare is UO, an abbreviation for Urban Operations. The previously used US military term, MOUT, an abbreviation for Military Operations in Urban Terrain, has been replaced by UO, although the term MOUT is still in use.

  The British Armed Forces’ terms are OBUA (Operations in Built-Up Areas), FIBUA (Fighting In Built-Up Areas), or sometimes (colloquially) FISH (Fighting In Someone’s House), or FISH and CHIPS (Fighting In Someone’s House and Causing Havoc In People’s Streets). The term FOFO (Fighting In Fortified Objectives) refers to clearing enemy personnel from narrow and entrenched places like bunkers, trenches and strongholds; the dismantling of mines and wires; and the securing of footholds in enemy areas. For more historic essays on the subject, see Military Operations in Built-Up Areas: X. Essays on Some Past, Present, and Future Aspects, Lilita I. Dzirkals, Konrad Kellen and Horst Mendershausen, Rand Corporation, 1976.

  12In both Aleppo and Daraa, Human Rights Watch documented repeated barrel-bomb attacks since the passage of Security Council Resolution 2139 on 22 February 2014, striking near or on medical facilities, and in residential areas with schools, mosques and markets, and without discernible military targets in the vicinity. Barrel bombs are unguided high explosive weapons that are cheaply made, locally produced and typically constructed from large oil drums, gas cylinders and water tanks, filled with high explosives and scrap metal to enhance fragmentation, and then dropped from helicopters usually flying at high altitude.

  13Human Rights Watch. ‘Syria: Barrage of Barrel Bombs’, 30 July 2014. © Human Rights Watch 2014.

  14http://en.qantara.de/content/destruction-of-historic-sites-syria-is-losing-its-history

  15Raqqa would become the capital of the so-called Islamic State in 2014.

  16Dir Shifa was a hospital in Aleppo that was bombed and destroyed by the Syrian Army in November 2012. This left the local population – quite rightly – distraught, suspicious of all foreigners and angry.

  17Private Facebook page for journalists and aid workers inside Syria.

  18Private correspondence between the author and Steven Sotloff.

  19The battle of Tremseh, a village twenty-two miles northeast of Hama, took place in the late hours of 12 July 2012. The Syrian Army was fighting the Free Syrian Army. Initially, there were reports of a massacre, with dozens if not hundreds killed, including civilians. But two days later, the UN observer mission issued a statement, based on an investigation by a UN team that went to the town, reporting that the Syrian Army had mainly targeted the homes of rebels and activists. The BBC later reported this was a ‘contradiction of the initial opposition claims of a civilian massacre’. The number of civilian casualties was unclear. The village was primarily inhabited by Sunni Muslims.

  20http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-31514447?fb_ref=Default

  21‘And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in their stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.’ Anne Sexton, ‘The Truth the Dead Know’.

  Acknowledgements

  So many people helped this book come to light that I will try to start at the beginning . . .

  First, my thanks to the Syrian people, my friends who cannot be named, and those I do not know, for their courage and fortitude in the face of such a brutal war.

  My publishers, Alexandra Pringle at Bloomsbury and Phil Marino at Norton, who waited, encouraged and believed enough in a book about war, and the late Ash Green at Knopf, who found and shaped me as a very young writer.

  Lara Adoumie, a junior at Bowdoin College with a Syrian dad, who worked tirelessly and consistently on the final drafts, checking, editing and formatting. Yemile Bucay, another intern of Syrian/Mexican origin, who added her expertise on international relations and history, and Fredrik Elisson – my brilliant intern.

  My dear friend Christopher Silvester, who helped me with the copy editing, and Honey Al Sayed, a Syrian reporter now living in America because she cannot live in her own country, who acted as one of my first readers.

  Darren Dale ‘Chalkie’ White, who kept me alive and safe on many a voyage, talking me down when I was terrified; he literally gave me directions on where to go to crawl under a fence to get out of Syria and reach Turkey safely.

  Fred Pakis, who gave me the opportunity to earn an MA in International Relations at the Fletcher School of Diplomacy, Tufts University. Mr Pakis awarded me a full scholarship so that I could put my reporting skills into an academic and diplomatic framework. Words cannot express my gratitude for the extraordinary gift of knowledge that he has given me.

  My agents, Kim Witherspoon; David Forrer; William Callahan; David Godwin. At Bloomsbury, Angelique Tran Van Sang, Catherine Best and Steve Cox.

  A special thank you to The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, and Esther Kaplan, who gave me two grants to help research this book. Mark Gevisser, for introducing me to Esther. Robert Templer at The Center for Conflict, Negotiation and Recovery, Central European University, who gave me the role of Senior Policy Adviser, a chance to delve deeper into Aleppo. Kim Abbot, then at International Crisis Group, whom I had never met, but who reached out to help a sister make connections and contacts. Karmen and Carne Ross, for their inspiration of tirelessly trying to make the world a better place,

  At Granta magazine, who first commissioned me to write about Syria, I want to thank John Freeman, Ellah Allfrey, Sigrid Rausing, Emily Greenhouse, Saskia Vogel and Yuka Igarashi for their support and their commitment to publishing long-format literary non-fiction. Ellen Rosenbush at Harper’s, for your friendship on Dark Stormy Nights in Brooklyn. At the Guar
dian, Clare Longrigg and Jonathan Shainin.

  My editors and colleagues at Newsweek who were unspeakably patient with my insistence on writing about Syria and ISIS: Johnathan Davis; Etienne Uzac; James Impoco; Kira Bindrim; Claudia Parsons; Mikka Schaller; Nicholas Wapshott; Annette Fetzer; Balbina Calo; Abigail Jones; Leah McGrath Goodman; Damien Sharkov; Richard Addis; Victor Sebestyen; Cordelia Jenkins.

  At Vanity Fair, Bruce Handy, Graydon Carter and David Friend.

  In Syria: Nicole Tung; Paddy Wells; Scott Rosenfeld; Robert Rippberger; Clare Morgana Gillis; Nir Rosen; Nada Kettunen; Kate Brooks; Renata Dwan; Georgette Gagnon; Elio Tamburi Qunteiro; Omar K.; Liz Sly; Leena Saidi; Lina Khitab; Fadi Dayoub; Ghid Zraik; Joelle Eid; Juliette Touma; Khaled; Dr Luna al Sham; Mouhamad Diab; Nadia Abu Amr; Noura al Yafi; Rafif; Sajad Jiyad; Shoueb Rifai; Kinan Madi; Suzan Haidamous; Waddah abd Rabbo; Yara Bader; Abdi Nova; Yassir the 47th; Catherine Philp; Martin Chulov; Leena Saidi; Liz Sly; Faris S. and Wael.

  Dr Annie Sparrow; Peter Harland; Robert Danin; Paul Wood; Ruth Sherlock; Anne Bernard; Suzan Alandry; Peter Bergen; Andrew Gilmour who gave professional support.

  And all the brave activists.

  In Iraq: Ahmad Chalabi; Tamara Chalabi; Zaab Sethna; Ali Almalawi; Ali al-Saffar; Haider Kata; Sajad Jiyad; Shadi Hamid; Mohamad Rasoul; Ali Hussein; Binar Faeq Karim; Borzou Datagahi; Dr Mowaffak al Rubaie; Hala Gorani; Fareed Yasin; Hanaa Edwar; Jonathan Cohen; Justin Theron; Louay al-Khattib; Sam Morris; Mais Albayaa; Peyman Pejman; Tim Spicer; Robin Gwinner; William Warda; Alice Walpole.

  Mona Mahmoud – who shared so much with me, sorrow and joy.

  At UNHCR: Melissa Fleming; Edith Champagne; Sybella Wilkes; Clare Gillis; Rose Foran; Nadia abu Amr; Rebecca Dowd; Lynsey Addario; Mimi Little-Boyer.

  At Reid Hall, and Sciences Po, Paris: Lisa Fleury; Marianne ‘Nari’ Fischer; Ali Shajrawi; Sophie Zinser; Tess Morgan; Sarah-Nicole LeFlore; Medina Adlova; Kyle Waggoner; Rose Foran.