Political money and foreign agendas split rebel ranks, even as those same states urged the men on the ground to unite. Some private sponsors, including ones in exile, tried to dictate operations down to which checkpoints to hit. Despite the mayhem, the Istanbul Room’s supplies between May and September 2012—there were no more than half a dozen shipments—helped turn huge swaths of northern Syria into rebel territory. The Syrians hoped that with a de facto “liberated” zone in northern Syria, the international community would implement a no-fly zone over the area to ground Assad’s planes and helicopter gunships. The territory could then serve as a space for hospitals to operate unmolested by air strikes, where the political opposition could base itself and establish the institutions of a new state, where thousands of displaced could seek refuge instead of fleeing the country. The no-fly zone never happened.
The Farouq Battalions took support from all who offered it—private donors, Syrians in the diaspora, sheikhs in the Gulf, the Saudis, the Qataris, the Europeans, the Turks—with the aim of being beholden to none of them. Ask any two Syrians who funded the Farouq and you’ll get three answers. “We refused to politicize our rifles,” Abu Sayyeh, the former lawyer and one of the group’s four leaders said. “We were not aligned with any party, local or foreign.”
The Farouq—given its control of Bab al-Hawa and its role as the Istanbul Room’s distributor—worked closely with MIT, the Turkish National Intelligence Agency. The Turks denied any role in arming or allowing other countries to arm Syrian rebels via Turkish territory, but that’s precisely what they facilitated. Convoys of arms and ammunition, overseen by MIT, routinely crossed the Turkish border into Atmeh—never through the official Bab al-Hawa crossing—in operations conducted between midnight and dawn. Once inside Syria, the Farouq convoys faced attack by regime forces as well as ambushes by renegade rebels and criminals looking to intercept the supplies. The Farouq was also accused of faking strikes on its own vehicles in order to keep the cargo. It issued receipts upon delivery, the vouchers outlining the inventory and including a pledge, signed and fingerprinted by the recipient, that the goods were a loan to be returned to a future Syrian state. But what state? And who would enforce such an agreement? The documents didn’t even bear a letterhead. In the end, it didn’t really matter. The Istanbul Room would be short-lived and the pledges not worth the paper on which they were written.
RUHA
Ruha didn’t like being stuck in the cellar, with its thick stone walls and arched ceiling, the oldest part of their family complex, but she hated the basement more. At least the room they called the cellar was above ground. The basement was the family’s new go-to refuge when the jets screamed and things crashed around them. That occurred most days now, and more than a few nights. On the worst nights, the family slept down there, in a space crowded with neighbors, aunts, and cousins. There was little safety beyond the illusion of it, only solidarity in numbers. The women of the family had swept the dusty space clean, pushed its knickknacks against a wall, and placed a pile of thin mattresses in the center of its uneven concrete floor. The men had installed a toilet and a kitchenette. Ruha’s grandmother, Zahida, proud and stubborn, refused to “cower like a rat” in the basement. If she was going to die, she’d often say, she’d die in her bed or on her faded blue couch.
Ruha wished she could stay with her grandmother, but she wasn’t allowed to. The little girl wasn’t good at sitting still, not for hours that ran into days. She felt suffocated in the airless underground room. “What if it is shelled and we are stuck under rubble?” she asked one day. “At least outside or above ground we might have a chance to get out, to get away or something, but under ground? And under rubble underground? We’ll die for sure. Isn’t that true?”
Ruha’s younger sister Alaa didn’t mind the basement as much. She was calmer and more solitary by nature, but the sudden change in atmospherics would frighten her. “The air, something happens to it, I feel like I am dying,” she said. She was too young to know that explosions could suck the air out of a room, but not too young to feel it.
The little girls had learned the vocabulary of war, new words like katiba (battalion), qannas (sniper), hawen (mortar), shazaya (shrapnel). They knew the sounds that accompanied some of the words and how to tell them apart. They fashioned new games from the new words. They made paper planes—pretend planes to shoot down the real ones above them, to pretend they weren’t powerless and stuck in an underground space their parents pretended was safe. Their mother would hush them, promise them sweets if they were quiet. War or no war, she didn’t want her girls thought of as ill-behaved. Manal was more or less raising the children on her own. Maysaara had pulled away from his family. He wanted his children to get used to living without him, in case one day they had to. He also stayed away from them because, he said, “Children can make a man weak. They make a man a coward. I try to keep them at a distance from my heart, from my eyes. It is negatively affecting the children, I know it is, but we have a duty. We’re talking about the fate of a country.”
He was still helping finance an FSA group mainly comprised of relatives, as well as smuggling medical supplies and satellite communication devices from Turkey. He transported the goods in black duffel bags he and his nephews carried on their backs across the border. He’d pour the jumble of medical packaging in a heap on the basement floor for Ruha and Alaa, their mother, and Aunts Mariam and Noora to sort through. The women placed like with like: packs of gauze, blood bags, intubation tubes, sachets of hemostatic agents, and other items whose use they couldn’t divine.
Manal feared what the war was doing to her children. “They are used to the sound of rockets, it doesn’t scare them,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s because they don’t understand the consequences of the sound, that if a rocket lands near us we would, God forbid, die or be chopped to pieces,” she said. “They don’t understand this.”
Except they did. Alaa devised a game around it, one she played in the basement. She explained the rules one day. “I hear what they’re saying about who died. I memorize it as if I’m recording it on paper. I record it in my mind. I count who died, who has lived, who has left.” When asked why, she just shrugged and repeated a word that was her default answer to what was happening around her: “It’s normal.”
Alaa’s other game, the one she played with her sister when they were allowed above ground, was collecting shazaya, shrapnel. “They are like my toys. I like them, they are unusual shapes.” Alaa displayed them on windowsills until Manal scolded her, afraid of the sharp edges and the possibility of explosive residue in the remnants. The sisters gathered the pieces in a plastic bag they hid on the stairwell leading to their flat roof. Another game involved pretending to man a checkpoint and asking passersby for identification. “Are you with the revolution or against it?” a child asked as he stood at his front door. The local version of cops and robbers was now thuwar (revolutionaries) and shabiha (regime thugs). Nobody wanted to be the shabiha.
For Ruha, the open-air inner courtyard where she used to play had become her great fear. She’d dash across it, whispering prayers under her breath, certain the sniper a few streets away and the ones she imagined nearby could see her. The family’s rooftop water tank was shot, so she knew her house was within range. She also knew that being a little girl was no protection. The sniper at the Iza’a had severed another little girl’s spinal cord. Her name was Diana, and Maysaara had helped her get to a hospital in Turkey. Ruha saw a photo of the girl in a hospital bed, so she knew it was true, not just something her parents told her when she complained that she wasn’t allowed to play in the street anymore.
In Saraqeb, there were new neighbors as parks became cemeteries and the dead moved closer to the living, or the displaced sought refuge there because it was safer than what they were fleeing. Ruha’s Aunt Mariam cleared out her blackened apartment and allowed a displaced family to squat in it.
The adults, like the children, were trying to figure out the
new rules. The regime’s hold over towns like Saraqeb had disintegrated, but its replacement was unclear. Criminals exploited the instability across rebel-held northern Syria, kidnapping people for ransom and carjacking civilian vehicles. Every man with a gun was becoming an authority. Ruha’s Uncle Mohammad was carjacked twice in one month at fake FSA checkpoints. He accepted the loss of his first vehicle (he refused to pay the 400,000 Syrian pounds, $6,225, the criminals demanded), but not the second. Within ten days of its being stolen, Maysaara retrieved the second car, “by force of guns, not kind words,” as Uncle Mohammad put it.
Syria’s revolutionaries wanted to bring down the Baathist regime but not the Syrian state. How to untangle the two? How to dissect a regime from institutions that were a reflection of its corruption and paranoia? Was it enough to remove senior officials and leave the rest? How much of an institution could be hollowed out and replaced without sacrificing competence for politics? And how to bring the various armed rebel groups under a new civilian control (an impossibility but still a hope)?
Every town in rebel-held Syria struggled with the same questions. Each one had become an independent republic, responsible for its own governance. Saraqeb’s approach was to retain some elements of the old order. Staff at the baladiye, or municipal council, still showed up for work and drew state-paid salaries. Other government offices, like the records of births, deaths, and marriages and the agricultural office (which dispensed subsidized fertilizer and other staples), functioned as per normal. The headquarters of the Baath Party, however, was burned, because, as one young activist said, “It didn’t serve a purpose.”
Older, more traditional forms of power like religion and tribal authority, once repressed, now rebounded to fill the governance void. Sharia courts emerged to try to impose order on lawlessness. The traditional pyramidal structure of the tribes was reconstituting. Assad’s Syria did not entertain alternative sources of power, so it weakened the vertical authority of the tribal chieftain at the apex (whose word was once law) by elevating other lower members whose power came from their close ties to the Baath and hence their ability to get things done. But the old, broken lineages of power were being restored.
Across the rebel north, tansiqiyas, Local Coordination Councils like the one Suleiman had joined in Rastan, became the main founts of budding governance systems based on friendships, local reputations, and the size of one’s family or tribe. Non-FSA Islamist battalions like Jabhat al-Nusra also had their own social-service arms that often competed with tansiqiyas and, with time, would develop their own courts and schools. Saraqeb’s tansiqiya was beset with problems of its own making. By August, it suspended its activities because of a 1.2 million Syrian pound ($18,700) bill accrued by its two free medical clinics. False receipts—a lot of them—were suspected of being issued by some members. The tansiqiya relied on donations, mainly from Syrians in the diaspora, but the influx of money was irregular. One month, it was 10 million Syrian pounds. The month before that, only one million.
A restructuring of Saraqeb’s tansiqiya was proposed. The body’s nine elected positions would expand to forty-five, to include representatives from all of the main families—to spread the responsibility and accountability and expand the body’s activities. On a warm summer night, Maysaara and his brother, Mohammad, hosted a meeting in their cellar to discuss the new plan. Current and former members of the tansiqiya, the town’s notables, and FSA fighters were in attendance. Ruha’s Uncle Mohammad opened proceedings by saying he resented being told what to do by younger members of the tansiqiya in a society where elders made decisions.
“What did your generation do for us against the regime?” one of the younger men asked. “We fought it, you didn’t. You can’t tell us what to do now! How many people over forty-five are involved in the revolution?”
Not many, Uncle Mohammad said, because they had family responsibilities. “It’s not like we told Maysaara not to get involved. We are three brothers. If something happens to us all, what happens to the family?”
“If everybody thinks, ‘I have family responsibilities,’ nobody would have moved,” the young man countered.
“That’s our problem!” another man said. “We argue with each other more than work together. Look at the Islamists and their discipline! I don’t blame people for thinking they are cleaner than we are.”
“The longer it takes, the more extremists there will be,” said Uncle Mohammad. “There weren’t armed foreigners in Syria before, now there are. If only Bashar had introduced reforms, it would have been okay. I’m a democrat, a believer, I pray five times a day, but I’ll drink whiskey or beer,” he said. “These extremist groups can’t dominate Syrian society. We are the majority, our way of thinking will prevail.”
“When we finish with Bashar, we may need to get rid of them,” a former tansiqiya member said of non-FSA Islamist groups. “Even if the regime falls, the harder battle will be forming a new country. We will sacrifice a lot more to create a new country than we will to bring down the regime.”
“I don’t accept, even now, that Syrians are killing each other,” Maysaara said quietly.
“Didn’t I tell you that you’re not suited to be a military commander?” his brother teased.
Maysaara nodded. “We want a new Syria,” he said. “They’ve tried to kill me many times. I hope I’ll get to see it.”
RUHA AND HER SISTER ALAA may have seemed to their mother a little too unafraid, but their baby sister, three-year-old Tala, wasn’t. She was sick with a strange hormonal imbalance that one of the few doctors left in town said was precipitated by fear. The toddler needed to see a specialist, but there weren’t any—they had fled or been killed. There were endocrinologists in government-held areas, but that was another country, an internal frontier more dangerous and difficult to cross than an official border between states. Turkey was an easier option, but how to get there? There were four ways a Syrian could enter Turkey: with a passport; bleeding in an ambulance; approaching border guards and being sent to a refugee camp; or illegally smuggled in. Ruha’s family didn’t have passports. Maysaara said he couldn’t bear to put his wife and children in a refugee camp. They really only had one option. Maysaara told his older daughters to pack for two weeks.
“We’re going to Turkey! We’re going to Turkey!” Ruha shouted as the sisters hugged and jumped in their coral-pink bedroom. They’d never been beyond Syria’s borders. Ruha put more hair clips and bracelets in her purple backpack than clothes. Alaa picked two of her favorite outfits and a selection of T-shirts and shorts. She folded them neatly into her pink schoolbag and then stood in front of the closet full of teddy bears. “Which one should I take?” she asked Ruha.
“What for? We’ll be back soon.”
Alaa nodded and shut the closet door. Their brother Mohammad was just as excited as they were. His sisters laughed when he walked into their bedroom with his blue schoolbag and showed them what he’d packed. “He’s put his dirty clothes in there!” Ruha said.
“It’s my bag, I can take whatever I want!” he answered.
“Fine. Get in trouble,” Alaa said, but neither of the sisters told on him.
The house was full of aunts and cousins who saw the family off, but it didn’t feel like Mother’s Day to Ruha. “When will I see them again?” she asked me. “Do you think we’ll leave before the nighttime shelling?”
Maysaara pulled away from the curb a little after 8 p.m. Ruha cried and waved to her aunts and cousins standing outside their front door until they faded from view. A pickup truck mounted with a 14.5mm antiaircraft gun moved ahead of Maysaara for protection, and also because one of its two passengers, Maysaara’s nephew, was going to drive the family sedan back home. Little boys cheered, “God salute the Free Army!” as the truck passed.
“We’re the Free Army?” Alaa giggled.
Little Mohammad fell asleep in the backseat. Tala clapped to revolutionary songs playing through a USB device.
Paradise, paradise, paradise.
Our homeland is paradise!
Beloved homeland, your soil is sweet, even your fire is paradise.
They passed towns that looked deserted, saw garbage as proof of life. In one place, children too young to remember parks and swings and slides climbed miniature hills of rubble where nothing grew, their little hands and shoes coated in a fine, gray dust. Streets of disemboweled apartments, barely an exterior door or window untouched by weaponry. A bedroom wall peeled open, revealing its private interior. The mirror of an almond-colored dresser dusty but not cracked. In another town, a field of stalls—vegetables in purples and oranges and reds and greens. Shoes of different sizes in neat rows along the pavement. “Look, it’s normal life,” Alaa said. “Is this opposition too?”
They wove between ribbons of asphalt and dirt roads to stay on rebel-held tracts. They entered an olive grove. Maysaara slammed on the brakes and turned off the headlights. He’d noticed tank treads in the soft earth. The question was, regime or rebel? The pickup truck had detoured. They were alone. Ruha prayed quietly. “I’m scared,” she whispered. Regime or rebel treads? Maysaara relayed the question over a walkie-talkie to FSA units in the vicinity. The answer was inconclusive. There were two routes out, a voice crackled—a shorter one laced with army snipers or a much longer one with a few checkpoints to skirt. Both were dangerous. Maysaara wondered what to do.
“Baba,” Ruha whispered, “do we want the easier road or the safer one? Take the safer one. We don’t want to be caught and beaten.”
Without a word, Maysaara and Manal turned and looked at their ten-year-old and then at each other. “Tikrami ya sitt [As you wish, madam],” said Maysaara. He took the longer route. The pickup truck was waiting for them near the Turkish border. Mohammad woke as the family piled into its backseat.
No Turning Back Page 17
