No Turning Back

by Rania Abouzeid

  Outside, crickets chirped, foliage rustled in the darkness. Inside, a small gas burner hissed as water bubbled and coffee brewed. The eight defectors were jumpy, hypervigilant to sounds around their hiding place. They had reason to be: Forty-eight hours earlier, there had been nine of them. The nine had publicly announced their defection as a group in a brief video statement that Suleiman shot and uploaded to YouTube. It was aired by Al Jazeera on August 6. The officers made individual videos, too, which Suleiman also filmed, such as a forty-eight-second clip showing First Lieutenant Fady Kism, a tall, bearded man with dark eyes and plump lips, announcing his split from the Syrian army’s Third Division. “I’m doing it because of the destruction that I saw in Rastan, and in Homs, in Daraa and Hama,” the twenty-three-year-old told the camera.

  The next afternoon around 1 p.m., shortly after his mother watched the video of Rastan’s defectors on Al Jazeera, Kism was dead, killed in an ambush by loyalist soldiers traveling in a blue van with tinted windows. The soldiers tricked the defectors into thinking they wanted to join them. A firefight broke out. The next day, the official Syrian Arab News Agency ran a short piece about “an armed terrorist group” that had “set an ambush four kilometers east of Rastan city, opening fire on a convoy carrying officers to their workplaces.” An officer and two soldiers were killed, the report said, adding that three loyalists were also wounded. “We only protected ourselves,” Lieutenant Ibrahim Ayoub said. “We are not interested in attacking unless civilian lives, or our lives, are in danger.”

  At 5 p.m., just hours after he was shot, the announcement of Kism’s death was broadcast from the loudspeakers of Rastan’s mosques. Suleiman’s mother opened the window of her living room to hear it: “The martyr, the First Lieutenant Fady Abdel-Jalal Kism, may God have mercy on his soul, will be buried today,” it said, followed by melodic Quranic verses. She kept the window open and stood there for a moment to hear the prayers. “The blood made us hate him,” she said, almost to herself. She was talking about Bashar al-Assad. “Before that, we loved him. I loved him, to be honest. We were content. People lived and worked in peace.” She lamented Assad’s first speech on March 30, two weeks into the uprising. If only the president hadn’t chuckled as he spoke while blood spilled in the streets. If only he’d apologized for the killings and for detaining and harming the Daraa youths blamed for the graffiti. If only he’d addressed the real reasons people were in the streets, instead of stoking sectarian fears and talking about sabotage, sedition, foreign and local conspiracies. Suleiman’s mother gestured toward the villas, not far from her home, of the former defense minister, Mustafa Tlass, and his sons. “They are traitors,” she said. “I don’t know how we can reconcile with them. They aren’t planning ahead for when Bashar falls. They don’t think that he will.”

  Just before sundown, the body of Fady Kism was lowered into the ground in jeans and a blood-soaked army-green T-shirt. The men of the Khalid bin Walid remained in hiding, but hundreds of others poured into the spaces between the tall white headstones, the sun’s dying rays painting the hillside cemetery a warm golden hue. Dusty hands tossed gritty dirt into the grave.

  “To Heaven we are going, martyrs in our millions!”

  “Death but not humiliation!”

  “Syria is ours, it’s not for the Assad family!”

  “There is no God but God!”

  Kism’s dazed mother rocked back and forth as she sat on the concrete floor of her home in upper Rastan, mourning the eldest of her four sons. “May their hearts burn the way they have burnt mine,” she said. “There are a lot of informers here, they must have informed on him.” Her son hated the army, she said. He defected five days earlier to avoid being sent to Deir Ezzor in Syria’s east. “He told me he wanted to join the free officers, that he’d rather die with them than have to shoot people,” she said. She put her head in her hands and burst into tears. Kism’s first child was due in weeks.

  Outside Al-Kabir Mosque, firecrackers exploded just before 10 p.m., as they did every night during Ramadan, signaling the start of another demonstration after taraweeh prayers. Friday was protest day, but across Syria during that Ramadan, every day had become Friday. Al-Kabir Mosque was opposite the once-dreaded State Security branch, where Suleiman had found reports about his family. The building’s beige concrete walls were now plastered with antiregime graffiti: BASHAR IS A DONKEY, BASHAR IS A TRAITOR, BRING DOWN BASHAR!

  Suleiman and his friends in the tansiqiya set up lights and speakers in the square between the mosque and the former intelligence building. They all contributed to buy a professional sound system, a microphone, and bullhorns. A donated projector beamed Al Jazeera or Al Arabiya, whichever channel was broadcasting live protests, onto a screen stitched from several white sheets and hung against the wall of the mosque. The images were a reminder that Rastan was not alone.

  Tanks surrounded them, eighteen checkpoints harassed them, informers walked among them, yet thousands of men, women, and children still filled the square, their faces softly illuminated by strings of lights hoisted above them. Some waved flags—the two-starred, red-striped flag of the state as well as the three-starred, green-striped flag of the revolution. They held cheeky placards. One mocked General Maher al-Assad, the president’s younger brother and commander of the feared elite Republican Guard and Fourth Armored Division. He’d reportedly said that he hadn’t even put on his uniform yet, meaning the regime’s opponents had yet to see the full force of his response. IF MAHER’S IN HIS PAJAMAS, WE’RE STILL IN OUR BATHROBES! the placard read.

  A large, eight-panel cardboard banner moved through the crowd: THE FALL OF THE REGIME SERIES, EVERY NIGHT AFTER TARAWEEH PRAYERS, PRODUCED AND DIRECTED BY THE HEROES OF THE REVOLUTION. This year, Ramadan’s traditional epic TV dramas were playing out on the streets, not on the screen. Songs of defiance, including the anthem of the revolution, roared from the speakers, loud enough for the soldiers in their tanks streets away to hear:

  Hey Bashar, hey liar.

  Damn you and your speech, freedom is at the door.

  So come on, Bashar, leave [Yalla Irhal ya Bashar].

  The martyrs’ blood is not cheap.

  So come on, Bashar, leave [Yalla Irhal ya Bashar].

  On the balcony of the intelligence building stood the members of the tansiqiya, including Suleiman, who was livestreaming through Justin.tv, using the DSL line in Maamoun’s store next to the mosque. Suleiman panned the crowd, waved to friends who caught his eye. “What a dream, a beautiful dream!” he said. Mohammad Darwish, the eighteen-year-old who shouted “Freedom!” and prompted Suleiman’s first protest, took the microphone. Darwish, his back curled, right foot on the balcony’s shin-high ledge, leaned toward the crowd below. “We salute the hero Fady Kism!” he yelled. A mighty cry of pride and anguish, anger and defiance rolled back to him. Framed portraits of the dead, black ribbons in their corners, were held high. On that night, Fady Kism’s image joined them.

  “What happiness, what Eid [religious festival], when every day we have a shaheed [martyr]” Darwish sang. The crowd clapped along, a thunderous rumble that shifted in rhythm and intensity as Darwish switched between chants. “One, one, one, the Syrian people are one!”

  “We salute the free Alawites, the free Christians,” shouted another man standing at the microphone. “We salute them!” the crowd responded, fists pumping into the air.

  The energy was infectious, exhilarating, the crowd electrified, the mood more festive than fearful, despite the security forces streets away. Protesters defied them with their joy, their music, their dancing. Their faces were uncovered. Drummers set the beat as small groups danced and twirled and jumped and hugged, working themselves into a sweaty frenzy. They chanted in solidarity with other towns and villages under attack. Their threats were one, their experience shared, their demands the same: to bring down a regime that had ruled them for almost five decades—and, as some were now chanting, the execution of the man at its helm. The crowd of thousands sat dow
n. “The people demand the fall of the regime,” they whispered, rising to a crouch. “The people demand the fall of the regime!” they repeated a little louder, standing a little taller. “The people demand the fall of the regime!” they screamed, jumping into the air, hands clapping above their heads, arms stretched toward the sky.

  The crowd was pressed together tightly. Many had stories about a brother, a daughter, a neighbor, a friend who was killed or wounded or disappeared. They wanted to be heard. Modesty was discarded as clothing was edged away to reveal scars, electrical burns, or the red-raw anger of bullet wounds. Mobile phones, like so many fireflies, lit up with grisly images of corpses that were once loved ones.

  “Listen!” a twenty-year-old man in the center of the throng yelled, his arms outstretched as he turned and gestured around him. “We shattered the barrier of fear with our voices!” He was proud that he had to shout to be heard, and certain this was the only path available to Assad’s opponents. “To stop now is harder than to continue and to go forward, because to go back means certain death. We will be hunted,” he said. “We can’t turn back. Everybody here is a martyr in waiting. Either we die free or we die.” And besides, he said, he was sure the international community would soon demand an end to the violence: “They can’t stay quiet forever as we die, can they?”

  ABU AZZAM

  The seeds of Abu Azzam’s Farouq Battalions were planted that summer, in a nighttime meeting in an orchard in the town of Al-Qusayr, in western Homs. About twenty men—farmers, businessmen, students, and a thirty-six-year-old lawyer named Osama Juneid (better known as Abu Sayyeh) met with defectors from Rastan, including Suleiman’s relative Abdel-Razzak Tlass and others from the Khalid bin Walid Battalion. Many of the men assembled in a two-room farmhouse along the Orontes River were strangers to each other, brought together by the owner of the farmhouse, an activist who helped smuggle weapons from Lebanon into Homs.

  They had been selected because some had picked up arms, and others were at the forefront of peaceful resistance in their areas. They came from neighborhoods in Homs, including Baba Amr, and towns around it, such as Talbiseh, Rastan, and Tal Kalakh. It took them four hours to agree to coordinate their armed efforts, although there was no talk of forming a single battalion or naming it the Farouq. That happened later, in a Skype call in August among three men from Homs: the lawyer Abu Sayyeh, who was present at the farmhouse meeting; a wealthy sheikh named Amjad Bitar; and a realtor-turned-activist, Hamza Shemali, also known as Abu Hashem. “We all agreed that we must do something organized and military, to form a battalion,” Abu Hashem remembered, “and we needed to call it something symbolic. The first battalion to form was Khalid bin Walid, it took an important name. Homs was called the city of Khalid bin Walid, so we needed something bigger for our battalion.”

  They chose a name weighted in history and ambition, and with clear sectarian overtones tied to Assad’s alliance with Shiite Iran. The Farouq Battalions were named for Farouq Omar bin al-Khatab, a sahaba or companion of the Prophet Mohammad, political architect of the caliphate and the second caliph who conquered the Sassanid Persian Empire, among other territories. “We wanted to be called Farouq as an indication of our desire to confront Persian ambitions in our Arab lands,” the lawyer Abu Sayyeh said. They wouldn’t use the name, the Farouq Battalions, until November 2011, when Suleiman’s relative, First Lieutenant Abdel-Razzak Tlass, would publicly announce the formation of the group in Baba Amr.

  ABU OTHMAN

  The clues were accumulating, seeping through the prison walls where Mohammad’s old cellmate, the Shari’iy Abu Othman, collected them. Something was stirring outside. It wasn’t a premonition or similar fancy but a conviction, one cemented by the arrival of three teenagers in Abu Othman’s cell in Palestine Branch in early March, before he was transferred to Sednaya Prison. The teens from Daraa were among the two dozen youths detained and accused of writing anti-Assad graffiti on school walls. They were brought to Abu Othman’s cell number 12. “They looked scared,” said Abu Othman. “It was natural, they were young, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. Their fingernails weren’t pulled out or anything. They’d been beaten and tortured, but nothing more than normal.”

  Mohammad Ayman Alkrad was one of the three. In Palestine Branch, he became 10/12: prisoner 10, cell 12. He was eighteen, about to graduate, and he intended to follow his father, a retired judge, into law. He lived in the Dam neighborhood of Daraa City and played football every night with a group of friends in the concrete yard of Quneitra School, near his home. On February 22, a day before the protest outside the Libyan Embassy in Damascus, Alkrad noticed fresh graffiti on the school wall: IT’S YOUR TURN, DOCTOR, it said, and LET THE REGIME FALL. He didn’t know that similar slogans had been written on other schools, and that other boys had been picked up a week earlier. “I saw it and thought, It has nothing to do with us, let’s play, so we did,” Alkrad said.

  He went home after the game. He had just stepped out of the shower when an agent from the local Military Security branch knocked on the front door. His father answered. Out of respect for the retired judge, his son wasn’t dragged from home but instead told to appear at the Military Security branch in Daraa that night. Neither father nor son knew why. “I swear to God if I tell you I had any idea what it was about I’d be lying to you,” Alkrad said. “Nothing at all because I hadn’t done anything, and I was keen to go and explain that. It wasn’t as if I was scared.”

  He was scared when the handcuffs snapped across his wrists, when he was hooded and bundled into an Opel sedan and driven thirty minutes away to a Military Security branch in the city of Sweida. He was scared when he entered what he called “the corridor of torture,” when he saw the metal pipe running along the ceiling with handcuffs. He hung from it for days, spun like a rotisserie chicken during those thrashings. He was scared when he realized what he was suspected of: “You’re the one who wants to ruin the nation? You dare to write on the walls about the doctor? What has the doctor done to you?” He was scared when he was squeezed into a tire and beaten with thick cables, doused with cold water in the middle of winter, and electroshocked. He hadn’t done anything. Then he wasn’t sure. “I started thinking to myself, Have I done anything?” After those sessions, his small, dark solitary cell felt like a refuge. The opening of its door did not mean release, the closing of it did.

  After six days in Sweida, Alkrad—bruised, swollen, seared by electric cables, his wrists raw from handcuffs—walked into Abu Othman’s cell with two others: his cousin Shukri Alkrad and a young soldier from the Abazeed clan, one of eleven from that family. Alkrad realized the other two were also implicated in the graffiti. He had thought he was the only one. He looked at the men in cell number 12. “There were about thirty of them staring at me. I didn’t know where I was, so I asked them. They told me I was in Palestine Branch. They were all Brotherhood, Fatah al-Islam, Al-Qaeda.”

  Writing on a school wall. Abu Othman had heard stranger reasons for landing in Palestine Branch. The youths denied the claim, but Abu Othman didn’t believe them. “I was thinking that they may have done what they were accused of, but it was natural that they wouldn’t admit it. They were young and new. I told them to be careful, not to speak too openly, because there were spies in the cell.” The teenagers told the Shari’iy about protests in Egypt and Tunisia, about dictators toppled and others threatened, about a new pan-Arab battle cry shaking the region: The people demand the fall of the regime. Abu Othman was buoyed by the news.

  Abu Othman’s conviction that something was stirring in Syria only grew after he was transferred to Sednaya Prison on March 15, 2011, along with the three hundred or so other Islamists from Palestine Branch. (The three teenagers stayed behind. The Daraa youths, all two dozen of them, were released and returned to a hometown rocked by protests in late March.) Sednaya Prison allowed monthly family visits. If a man was detained on the seventeenth of the month, his family was permitted to see him for thirty minutes on the seventeenth of every
month. “So every day, somebody had a visitor,” Abu Othman said, “and they’d share what they heard with us.” That’s how the inmates learned about the pardons.

  The Syrian regime issued new amnesty laws, including Decree No. 61 in May 2011, which covered “all members of the Muslim Brotherhood and other detainees belonging to political movements,” and another in June, as well as Decree Nos. 161 and 53, which ended the decades-long state of emergency and abolished the Supreme State Security Court, respectively. Sednaya housed pretrial detainees nabbed under the state of emergency laws, awaiting sentencing, and those on whom the court had passed judgment. Sednaya and Palestine Branch were emptied of Islamists and filled with protesters. “I can’t give you names, but we were told by brothers with lots of experience [in jihad], who had spent a lot of time in Sednaya, that upon our release we should sit and not work,” Abu Othman said. “Just sit and wait.”

  Abu Othman was released on June 20, 2011. He went home to Aleppo, to his wife and two children, but it didn’t take long before he and his fellow Sednaya “graduates,” as they called themselves, started quietly mobilizing. “When I was detained, I knew four or five or six, but when I was released I knew a hundred, or two or three hundred. I now had brothers in Hama and Homs and Daraa and many other places, and they knew me,” Abu Othman said. “It took just a few short weeks—weeks, not a month—for us, in groups of two or three, in complete secrecy, to start.”

  The Islamists were certain that the Assad regime offered the amnesties while knowing full well the “graduates” would take up arms against it. “If an Islamist brother was going to act, he was going to do so with weapons to face the security [forces]. It would be jihadi, and this would allow the regime to say to the world, ‘Look at the terrorists.’ We were aware of this, we didn’t give the regime that justification,” Abu Othman said, “but in secret, we were working.”