For many of Syria’s fighting men in rebel-held areas, it became a status symbol to be accepted into Jabhat al-Nusra’s vaunted ranks, given that would-be recruits were routinely turned away—unlike other armed groups that accepted anyone, keen to beef up their numbers and their profiles on YouTube. “We pay a great deal of attention to the individual fighter, we are concerned with quality, not quantity,” a Jabhat al-Nusra commander in Aleppo once told me. Men who didn’t pray were rejected. So were smokers (because smoking was a sin). More interested in a man’s mind than his military prowess, Nusra worked on both. A potential recruit undertook a ten-day religious-training course, “to ascertain his understanding of religion, his morals, his reputation,” and, only after that, a fifteen-to-twenty-day military-training program. Successful recruits swore bayaa, or a pledge of allegiance, to Jabhat al-Nusra, essentially a religious vow to follow the chain of command. The Free Syrian Army had no such means to enforce discipline.
In December 2012, the United States designated Jabhat al-Nusra a terrorist organization, identifying it as an alias of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. The terrorist label did not isolate the group within Syria. Instead, anti-Assad Syrians rallied around what was one of their most effective fighting forces, a group that still hid its Al-Qaeda lineage. On December 14, the first Friday after the designation, Syrians across the country marched under the slogan THE ONLY TERRORISM IN SYRIA IS ASSAD’S. Dozens of rebel groups publicly declared, “We are all Jabhat al-Nusra.” Even the leadership of the political opposition in exile—which Nusra didn’t recognize—condemned the terrorist label. Just a year after it had announced its presence in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra had achieved what Osama bin Laden had dreamed of—a formidable force with strong popular support.
RUHA
Ruha’s father, Maysaara, returned home to Saraqeb on July 15, 2012. He’d spent months in hiding, recuperating from gunshots sustained in an ambush that killed his friend Abu Rabieh. He’d been in the desert flatlands between Idlib and Raqqa under the protection of a tribal sheikh, and then eight weeks in Turkey. The three-car Free Syrian Army convoy of relatives that escorted him from the Turkish border honked like a wedding procession when it turned into his alleyway. Ruha and her siblings—Alaa, Mohammad, and Tala—waited outside their front door like coiled springs, pouncing on their father when he stepped out of the car. He scooped up his two youngest and walked into his mother’s living room. Zahida was in her usual spot, the faded blue couch. Maysaara knelt before his mother and kissed her cheeks. She took his bearded face in her hands: “Why have you come back?” she asked.
He laughed. “Is that any way to greet your son?”
“I’m happy to see you, but I’m afraid for you. You should leave.”
Saraqeb was disfigured, broken, changed after a four-day military assault in March. Twenty-four civilians had been executed and more than a hundred homes torched in fires Assad’s men lit and fed with liquid flames, including Aunt Mariam’s apartment. Another eleven homes were destroyed by tank fire, forty-six more damaged but still livable. In the souq, the corrugated-metal store shutters were peppered with bullet holes, blown out, and twisted into macabre art by the heat and force of explosions. No two looked alike. It had all happened as Kofi Annan, the United Nations Special Envoy to Syria, had peddled a six-point peace plan. Assad said he backed Annan’s initiative, even as Syrian troops stormed Saraqeb and other towns in Idlib Province.
On March 27, the military withdrew from Saraqeb but left four outposts behind. A dairy factory in the northern neighborhood and an olive oil factory in the southern neighborhood became barracks. A checkpoint called Kaban was created, and snipers were planted at the Iza’a (a radio communications tower). Four Free Syrian Army groups in Saraqeb opposed them, including one Maysaara helped finance, as well as non-FSA Islamist groups and a small contingent of Jabhat al-Nusra fighters who kept to themselves.
Ruha’s mother and siblings, her grandmother, and her Uncle Mohammad and his wife Noora fled to their farm during the incursion, living in its supply room. Ruha’s Aunt Mariam stayed in town with one of her sisters, haunted by “ghoulish” cries that kept her awake and the sounds of storefronts being smashed and looted.
Mariam lost everything in the March fire. Her white plastic chairs and kitchen table melted into smooth, hard puddles. She couldn’t tell whether the heaps of ash were once her clothes, cushions, quilts, or books. Her ceiling fans drooped like wilted flowers. She remembered thinking they looked beautiful. She walked out of her home with a partially melted coin collection in a metal box. That was all she kept. Her neighbors weren’t allowed to put out the fire, although one tossed a hose from his kitchen window through hers. “One of my neighbors asked the security forces, ‘Why are you burning the home of an old lady and her niece?’ They said, ‘You don’t know anything. Terrorists visit her home.’ They were talking about my nephews and brothers, and brothers-in-law.”
Mariam suspected that a neighbor’s son had informed security forces about her family visits. She’d tutored him in the ninth grade. “I am not annoyed or upset,” she said. “God compensates the oppressed. I forgive them. If it will stop here, I swear I do. Let them burn the house, we’ll build something better, as long as nothing happens to any of us. We are two single women who had never protested and they burned our house. If they did that to us, what is going to happen to Syria?” Mariam and her frail aunt, Zahida’s older sister, moved in with her mother, Zahida.
Ruha wore one of her best dresses—pink with yellow polka dots—the day Baba came home, but she quickly changed into the new Turkish clothes Maysaara had bought his children. She didn’t even pause to take off the tags. The house was full of aunts and cousins. It felt like Mother’s Day. For the first time, Ruha was relieved, not afraid, that Baba was home. “I wasn’t scared because I saw that he was carrying a gun, he could defend himself a little bit,” she said. “Before, he had nothing except his voice.”
She knew her father was part of something called the Free Syrian Army. She’d heard the adults talk about it. She had worried that his injuries might have incapacitated him, but he looked the same, except for the Kalashnikov that never left his side, his green ammunition vest, and the grenade he carried at all times, even during meals and when he played with his children. “I’d rather die a thousand deaths than be captured by them,” he’d often say. It was a common refrain. One of his adult nephews walked around with a plastic bag full of grenades that bulged like lemons. Maysaara may have looked the same as before, but the murder of his friend Abu Rabieh hadn’t merely changed him—he said it destroyed him. “It is like a piece of shrapnel lodged in my heart,” he said. “I wanted them all dead.”
WAR ARRIVES SUDDENLY, uninvited, and brings with it a new normal. It has its own cadence, its own logic. It is the mundane experienced through heightened, sometimes supercharged emotions. The daily rhythm of life goes on, as it must, but with a constant undercurrent of tension, a baseline permanently shifted with the knowledge that a single abrupt event at any time—a knock on the door, an artillery shell, a sniper’s bullet—can upend everything. The commonness of death cheapens life. Mourning periods—typically weeks, months, and years long, depending on a person’s relationship to the deceased—become abbreviated. Otherwise, as Mariam said, much of Saraqeb would be draped in black. The town’s rebels called ahead to the gravedigger before they went on a mission. Some paid his fee of 2,500 Syrian pounds in advance, so their families wouldn’t have to. Government snipers were stationed near the graveyard, hunting the bereaved. To avoid them, townsfolk often buried the dead at night, hastily and with little ritual.
There were daily power cuts now, sometimes for nine hours, sometimes for two. Ruha’s family switched from an electric burner to a gas stove, although the gas cylinders that once cost 275 pounds were now 3,000. Bread remained at its prewar price, but the fresh produce in the market—onions, potatoes, beans, and cucumbers harvested nearby—were inflated by a factor of at least three. The family could still
afford what it didn’t grow. Others couldn’t. Cell-phone and Internet coverage had been out since October 2011, but the landlines still worked. Indiscriminate artillery fire was the new background noise. Doors were kept open so they wouldn’t blow off their hinges from the force of the blasts, windows were slightly ajar to not shatter against each other. After every round of shelling, Ruha’s Uncle Mohammad would conduct a family headcount by phone to check on everyone and try to locate the strikes.
The town had become a canvas, a character telling its own story. Cinderblocks—added to already high fences around homes near snipers—spoke of terror. Those streets had new names, too. One was dubbed “Moharram [Forbidden] Street,” because, after 8 p.m., regime snipers made it too dangerous to cross. Families still lived there. Where else would they go, mused one woman—to the humiliation of a refugee camp or to burden relatives? Walls displayed great blasts of color, through painted murals and graffitied messages, especially around Saraqeb’s cultural center. WHERE WERE THE ISLAMISTS WHEN THE REVOLUTION STARTED? appeared on one wall. The response, beneath it, was equally curt: IN PRISON. Spongebob Squarepants marched across a wall carrying a Syrian revolutionary flag. Handala was there, too, the iconic image of a barefoot Palestinian refugee child in tattered clothing, hands clasped behind his turned back, strands of thorny hair sprouting from his head. He faced a brick wall above the phrase I SWEAR, WE HAVE PAID ENOUGH. The poetry of Palestine’s Mahmoud Darwish was magnified in sweeping calligraphy: AND WE LOVE LIFE, IF WE FIND A WAY TO IT. One wall, in black and red, bore a simple message: THE BEST OF HISTORY IS WHAT HAPPENS TOMORROW.
Yesterday’s neighbors, meanwhile, had become today’s enemies, as differences—social, economic, religious, tribal—were magnified to confirm the otherness of the other side. One morning, a sticky bomb, a small explosive attached to a magnet or adhesive, was planted on the car of an alleged regime informer. He lived a few streets from Ruha’s home. The blunt boom wounded but didn’t kill the man. The women of the family looked up from their morning coffee when they heard the noise. “This is a revolution of the streets,” one of Maysaara’s sisters said after the target was identified, “and the streets know each other.”
One of Maysaara’s nieces and her teenage daughter, Lama, lived in Saraqeb’s closest house to the Iza’a and its resident sniper. “He’s our new neighbor,” Lama joked. The sniper had shattered their windows. They repaired them with fiberglass. He shot that, too. Lama would crawl through the bedroom she shared with her single mother, certain the man with the gun could see them. He’d emptied seven bullets into their bedroom door. One night, he kept firing at the thin electrical wire that attached their home to the grid until he snapped it. “I think he was bored,” Lama said. After a direct rocket strike splintered a door and crushed a wall, mother and daughter moved out and into the family complex.
Mariam lived in fear of men storming their home. She took shorter showers lest she be caught naked or inappropriately dressed. Like her sisters and nieces, she slept fully clothed, including in a headscarf. But not everything changed. One afternoon, Mariam and the other women of the family sat in the inner courtyard, joking and laughing as they picked the leaves off bundles of green molokhia stalks spread out on blankets in front of them. Ruha and Alaa helped, too. The leaves were left to dry for days before being stored for the winter mouni, or supplies, in a small room near the laundry. The men watched from the adjoining cellar. “Why are they bothering?” Maysaara asked. “Will we live till the winter?” One of his brothers-in-law said he no longer allowed his family to gather in the same space when thuds intensified. He scattered his children in different rooms so that if a bomb fell, somebody, he figured, might survive.
Ruha’s mother, Manal, stepped away from the courtyard and into the kitchen to do the dishes. Her eldest daughter followed her, just as a bullet hit the outer kitchen wall. Manal shuddered. “It’s just a sniper,” Ruha told her mother. She knew it meant one shot, not a fusillade. “Mama is so scared of bullets,” she said, smirking. She was embarrassed that her mother had flinched.
ON WEDNESDAY, JUNE 18, just after lunch, one of those things happened—a single abrupt event that could upend everything. It took the form of an audacious, unprecedented attack on the heart of the regime in Damascus. By chance, there was electricity and the television was on, so Mariam heard the breaking news that several members of Assad’s inner circle were killed in an explosion during a meeting at the National Security Bureau in the capital. Defense Minister Daoud Rajha, Deputy Defense Minister Assef Shawkat (who was also Assad’s brother-in-law), and the head of the president’s crisis management office, Hassan Turkomani, all died instantly. A fourth official, the director of the bureau Hisham Ikhtiar, would later succumb to his wounds. Mariam let out a shriek, lifting her shaking hands to her cheeks. “Thank God, thank God,” she said. “Does it mean it is nearly over?”
Celebratory gunfire erupted even as some fighters in town admonished their comrades to save the bullets. “We will need them!” To which came the reply, “Not today!” Gunfire intermingled with cries of “Allahu Akbar!” from the town’s mosques, and a message to loyalist troops in the four outposts was broadcast over a mosque’s loudspeaker: “Your leaders are dead. You are our brothers! Join us! We will open our homes to you.”
On Arabic satellite channels, reports poured in of defections elsewhere, of checkpoints overrun, their booty of tanks, weapons, and ammunition falling into rebel hands. “What is wrong with us? Why haven’t we done anything yet?” asked one of Mariam’s nephews. “Is it real? Is it really almost over?” another in the Free Syrian Army asked his aunt. “I’m so sick of guns, bullets, bombs.”
It wasn’t over. Shortly before 11 p.m., a rocket plowed the street outside the home of the Brek family. Minutes later, a house painter was outside a base of rebel fighters. He was still in his beige work clothes, splattered with dark green and white paint, and blood. He fell to his knees, red-faced and sweaty, and unfurled a bloody white blanket with pale blue stripes. “People! People! Dear God! Somebody, anybody! Look what they have done! Look! Dear God, oh my God!”
The fighters ran outside. A toddler was wrapped in the blanket. She was wearing a blue T-shirt and white shorts, barefoot, with patches of blood on her pudgy legs. She no longer had a face, her head a squashed blob of flesh. “She’s not the only one!” the painter screamed. He collapsed, deflated, near the child, sweat and tears streaming from him. The young fighters tried to console him with words about God’s will that he didn’t want to hear. They told him to take the child to the town’s hospital, for what he didn’t know. She was dead.
At the hospital, the little girl’s mother lay dead on a stretcher, her deep red clothes soaked in bright red blood. Young men screamed, “Allahu Akbar!” in sorrow and anger. One swept up body bits from the floor. The rocket had killed the little girl, her mother, her brother, two aunts, and another woman from the Brek family, and wounded several others. A child in a long lilac shirt lay on the bloody floor. Her right arm was bandaged and she lay motionless, her eyes open. She looked dead. With great effort, the little girl raised her left hand and made the “V for victory” sign.
THURSDAY, JULY 19. Saraqeb’s rebels had been preparing for what they feared would be an imminent attack by loyalists. State media had laid the groundwork for an offensive, reporting that Saraqeb’s townspeople were asking the regime to free them of “terrorists” nested among them. Then, Wednesday’s strike on Assad’s inner circle reversed the momentum. Saraqeb’s rebels, buoyed by a sense of invincibility, or perhaps inevitability, decided to attack the Kaban Checkpoint, one of the four posts in their town.
The battle began at 6 p.m. The first regime tank shell landed on the home of an Assad supporter—a good omen, the FSA men said. Their smugness turned to laughter when a man drove the white fire truck to put out a blaze near his home. “He’s not from the fire department,” a rebel said. “It’s self-service.”
Then, the sound of a thousand cars backfirin
g. Graceful arcs of red tracer fire, like a string of broken pearls, reaching toward the clouds, falling well short of the helicopter gunship circling overhead, arrogant in its altitude. Mortars unbuilt concrete without any warning until seconds before impact. Shells crashed and thudded into residential streets. The helicopter gunship unleashed its rockets with a whoosh. The electricity was out, but, an hour into the battle, several young activists fired up a generator, hooked up an Internet connection, and called nearby FSA units via Skype. “Listen, brother, the power is out here, so the line might cut. We need RPGs—two, three, as many as you have. Brother, it’s a very difficult situation now! Mortars, tanks, and there’s a helicopter too. Whoever can come, come!”
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