12:17 a.m. The few neighbors still around ventured outside, calling out to each other to make sure everyone was accounted for. Uncle Mohammad yelled back that they were fine. On that night, the strikes tore through empty houses, not flesh and blood.
The family did not escape the next morning. They couldn’t leave Zahida behind, and she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—travel. The next afternoon, at 1:30 p.m., just as a lunch of peas and rice, mint and cucumber salad was being laid out, a warplane screamed overhead. The women prayed loudly, Lama put her shaking hands up to her temples. The jet passed without dropping its payload. But later that evening, the familiar nightly schedule got underway—a little earlier this time, at 11:11 p.m. The family once again scurried to the basement, accompanied by the hiss, whoosh, and boom of things exploding around them.
“Why isn’t anyone helping us?” Noora screamed. “Why doesn’t anyone care?”
SARAQEB WAS HIT with twenty-two barrel bombs one day in July, improvised explosives packed into water heaters or barrels full of metallic fragments and dropped from helicopter gunships. The barrel bombs were crude, unguided weapons, directed only by gravity and the wind. One of the barrels exploded at the foot of Ruha’s street, demolishing the home of her best friend, Serene, the young Assad supporter Ruha used to walk to school with. Serene’s grandfather had invited his children and their children to lunch. Serene was the only survivor. She lost an eye in an attack that claimed fourteen of her relatives. Ruha, far to the north in Turkey, cried for her friend. The barrel bomb did not respect childhood or even politics. It didn’t care that Serene’s family members were closeted loyalists.
After that attack, Maysaara rushed to Saraqeb and insisted that the family members vacate to their farmhouse on the outskirts of town. His mother, Zahida, complained but did not deny her favorite son’s demand. Maysaara and his brother, Mohammad, began building extra rooms and bathrooms in the farmhouse. The family complex was abandoned.
Ruha’s parents enrolled their children in school that September, in an overcrowded Syrian-run facility in Antakya that offered Arabic-language instruction and Turkish lessons. They could no longer ignore a hard truth—the regime was not about to fall and they were not going home anytime soon. Ruha cried on the first day of school, but then she did that every year. “Honestly, it doesn’t matter how old I get,” she said, “it’s a habit.” She was almost twelve, and happy to be with Syrians her own age. “Now,” she said, “I have somebody to talk to, to empty my heart to. To take out my frustration.”
The school ran in two shifts, morning and afternoon. The older girls, Ruha and Alaa, didn’t get home until 7 p.m.; their younger brother Mohammad had the earlier shift. Little Tala, who had recovered from her hormonal disorder, started kindergarten. Manal was happy to see her children regain a sense of normalcy that eluded her. Although still living “a half-life” in two worlds, she was relieved the family had moved to the farmhouse and proud that her twin brother, Chady, was helping build a bakery. She followed news of its construction as closely as her children’s homework assignments.
In early October, Maysaara surprised his wife and children with a trip to Syria to celebrate the Muslim Eid al-Adha holiday. Ruha was ecstatic. She shopped for days, picking out gifts for her cousins. They returned home on October 12. The next day, Uncle Chady was killed in an air strike on the bakery. He was thirty years old. His sister was inconsolable. A shy, soft-spoken woman, Manal retreated deeper into herself. Ruha was devastated. “I wanted to see Uncle Chady before he was buried,” she said. “They wouldn’t let me. I wasn’t allowed to go and sit in condolences, either. What do they want to protect me from? This thinking is wrong. A child should learn everything, not be told to go to the next room when adults talk. No! We need to know about the situation we are living in, to understand what is happening, to not be frightened by it.”
It was dangerous to stay in Syria, Ruha knew that, but she still threw a tantrum a week later when Maysaara said they were leaving. “When I came back from Syria after that Eid, I started wishing to die,” Ruha said. “I didn’t want to live in Turkey. I’d rather live in Syria, even if I might die. At least I’d be in my home with my grandmother and family. We die when God wants us to, at a time of his choosing, isn’t that right? So what do we think we are running from?”
Back in Turkey, Ruha voluntarily did more of the housework, quieted her siblings, helped cook. “I felt like my siblings’ mother after Uncle Chady died,” she said. Maysaara stayed home more. He took Manal and the children on day trips to the beach, to the mountains, to the mall as often as he could, but none of it seemed to draw his wife out of her deep sadness. Manal struggled with a grief made heavier by its invisibility. “In the beginning, they used to say the names of the martyrs,” she said, “then the martyrs became numbers. The day Chady died, his name was not mentioned. He was a number, one of thirty-six people who died in Syria that day. Nobody is talking about us as people. On top of the oppression and the war, we are also dehumanized. We are people.”
MOHAMMAD
Mohammad the Nusra fighter was based in the Latakian countryside, part of the sweep of territory known as the Sahel, or the coast. The Sahel extended from the twin mountain chains of Jabal al-Akrad and Jabal al-Turkman, near Turkey, down to the glistening waters of the Mediterranean and the country’s two main port cities of Latakia and Tartous. It was Alawite heartland, the only place in Syria where the demographics were reversed and sectarian minorities were a majority, not Sunnis. The area included Assad’s ancestral hometown of Qardaha.
Mohammad was based in the village of Doreen. Salma and Doreen were the two closest rebel towns on the cusp of regime-held territory. “A bullet in the Sahel is like a rocket to the regime,” he once said, explaining the area’s importance. If Assad lost the Sahel, he lost the war just as surely as if he lost the capital, Damascus. It formed his support base. In Doreen alone, seventy-five men had signed up to be suicide bombers to help push rebel forces deeper into the Sahel. The prospect of killing Alawites also drew foreign fighters to the area in droves. (There were foreigners on Assad’s side, too: Lebanese Hizballah, Iraqi Shiite militias, Afghan mercenaries, Iranian and Russian military advisers and, later, Russian pilots.) The muhajireen waited with Syrian fighters—including Mohammad and Jabhat al-Nusra—in Salma and Doreen, facing sleepy Alawite villages, until August 4, 2013, when, in a predawn raid, they seized eleven Alawite villages—and 106 Alawite women and children.
EIGHT-YEAR-OLD JAWA couldn’t sleep the night she was kidnapped. An odd smell drew her out of her bedroom sometime after 3 a.m. She wondered why anyone would burn something outdoors at such an hour.
Jawa lived in the Alawite village of Blouta with her mother and siblings: two sisters—Lojayn, thirteen, and Hanin, ten—and a three-year-old brother. Nothing much happened in Blouta, which is exactly why the family was there. Jawa’s father, Talal, sent his wife and children to the village after several car bombs targeted their street in the Damascus suburb of Mezzeh 86. As the breadwinner, Talal stayed behind in Damascus to run his cosmetics and perfume store.
Jawa watched cartoons in the living room. Her sister Lojayn, also roused by the unidentified smell, joined her after shutting off the gas canister in the kitchen, thinking it had leaked. Their mother woke to drink a glass of water and urged her daughters to go to bed. She was still in the living room when the lights went out, the television darkened, and gunfire erupted outside. “Hurry, gather in the corridor!” she told her children as she scooped up her sleeping son. “Mama, let’s escape!” Jawa whispered. There was just one window, a small one in a bedroom, that wasn’t covered in security grills. “Mama, let’s go through that window,” Jawa said. Her mother shook her head. “I can’t fit, and your older sisters can’t fit through it. I don’t want to lose you. What if they take you?”
The front door burst open and armed men with covered faces barged in. Talal’s wife fell to the floor, covering her baby son with her body. Lojayn locked herself in a bat
hroom, Jawa dove under her bed, while Hanin hid under her parents’ bed. The men were in the corridor. “Kill me but don’t harm my children!” Talal’s wife told them. “If there are children, bring them to me,” a man replied. Talal’s wife didn’t respond. The rebel fighters spread out through the house, shooting at shadows. Talal’s wife panicked. “Okay! Okay! Stop shooting!” she yelled. She called her children to her. The family was marched onto the verandah. Hanin struggled to walk—she’d been shot and was bleeding. A rebel tank was outside their home. Gunfire and screaming in the streets. Jawa’s mother asked her to go back into the house and get their shoes. She didn’t want her children stepping on empty cartridges. Jawa returned with shoes for everyone except her mother.
The men with the guns told the family to join the neighbors and relatives walking in their nightgowns and pajamas toward one of the larger houses in the village. Jawa was terrified of the armed strangers, of the gunfire, of Hanin dying because she was bleeding. She felt guilty that her mother was walking barefoot because she hadn’t been able to find her slippers.
They entered a house crowded with neighbors, relatives, and screaming, crying children. The house shook from explosions and Jawa shook with it. Windows shattered. A neighbor who was a nurse began treating the wounded, but she had little more than cotton wool and disinfectant. Jawa saw the woman cover a young girl’s bloody face with a blanket. She didn’t understand the child was dead. Jawa hid behind her eldest sister. An armed rebel distributed boxes of biscuits to quiet the children. Another asked Lojayn for coffee. “How do you take your coffee?” Lojayn asked him. “It’s not to drink,” the fighter said, “it’s to put on wounds. Bring me the container.”
Jawa watched the fighter pour coffee grounds on Hanin’s thigh to stem the bleeding. Then he wrapped the wound with fabric he tore from a curtain. His face was covered. Only two or three of the armed rebels revealed their faces, with bushy beards. One of the bushy beards stepped out onto the balcony of the house and in a loud, strong voice began proclaiming, “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!” to a shower of gunfire. A rebel with a walkie-talkie and a Kalashnikov walked into the house. He seemed to be in charge. He told the children to go outside, the women to stay. Jawa walked behind Lojayn, who carried their baby brother.
“Put him down and stay with the women,” an armed man told Lojayn.
“He won’t be quiet except with me and his eldest sister,” Talal’s wife said. “Leave him with me.”
“No,” the armed man said.
It was left to Jawa to carry her baby brother outside and help her sister Hanin, who was leaning on her. The children were directed toward an Alawite shrine not far from the house. It was desecrated. Rebels were still inside, smashing images and wiping their dirty boots on religious texts. Other rebels brought the children jam, chocolate, and biscuits before herding them into a truck. Jawa’s baby brother sat in her lap, her sister Hanin behind her with several of their cousins. There were bags of bullets at Jawa’s feet. She was scared to step on them. Two girls told the two armed men in the truck that they wanted to say good-bye to their mothers. “Go and see them for a minute,” one man said. The girls came back crying, their faces blood red. “They’re all dead!” screamed Zahra, one of the girls.
“Liar!” Jawa yelled.
“Jawa and Hanin, your mother was shot in the mouth and heart and stomach.”
Jawa didn’t believe her. “The armed men said they’d let our mothers follow us,” she said. “I thought maybe Zahra was saying that just to frighten us. I didn’t think it was true, but I wasn’t sure.” The truck started moving. Hanin, an asthmatic, faded in and out of consciousness. The children whispered among themselves. Whatever happens, they told each other, wherever they take us, we’ll stick together.
TALAL’S LIFE CHANGED with a single sentence. His cell phone was set to silent. He didn’t hear the eighteen attempts to rouse him in the early hours of August 4, 2013. He woke at a quarter to six, just as his brother’s wife was calling. “She said that armed men had entered my village and killed my wife and children and everyone in it,” he explained. “That was how the information first reached me.”
The forty-three-year-old father called his wife’s cell phone. Somebody answered but didn’t speak. Talal heard screams, cries of Allahu Akbar, and then the line went dead. He dialed and redialed. The calls were unanswered. He sent text messages. For God’s sake, answer, he wrote. Tell me what’s going on. No response. He drove toward his village of Blouta, one of the eleven seized by rebels, but he could get no closer than a military checkpoint three kilometers away. The Syrian army was shelling his hometown, backed by air support from warplanes and helicopter gunships. So much gray smoke, like vertical clouds that obscured the houses.
Talal’s panic deepened. He remembered what his wife had told him: If there was trouble—and she had time—she would hide their children in an atticlike storage space above the kitchen. The father pleaded with a soldier at the checkpoint. “ ‘Please, sir, don’t let the planes hit my house, there’s a 99.99 percent chance my children are still in it,’ ” Talal recalled telling him. “I don’t know if he listened.”
THE CLIMB WAS TOUGH, uphill through a parched orchard of plum trees with yellowing leaves and fruit the color of a dark bruise. Instead of using the orchard’s well-worn paths, Mohammad clambered over four-foot-high stone terraces cut like a staircase into the hillside. It was no time for a leisurely stroll. Warplanes howled overhead. It was 1:40 p.m., August 15, and the jets had already undertaken eleven sorties, accompanied twice by helicopter gunships, in a bid to win back the eleven Alawite villages. There was a smell of burnt trees, set ablaze by firepower. Mohammad extended the barrel of his Kalashnikov rather than his hand to help me up the hill. He would not touch a female who was not a close relative. He did this twice before realizing there was a bullet in the chamber.
The hilltop afforded a panoramic view of the battlefront. Three peaks, each a regime position, rose behind. In front, the captured Alawite villages were tucked into Latakia’s hills and shallow valleys. ISIS and a group of mainly foreign fighters called Suqoor el Ezz had spearheaded the predawn rebel raid on August 4, when Jawa and Hanin and the other Alawites were captured. Units of the Free Syrian Army were also there, but not in the lead.
Mohammad pointed to smoldering houses in one village. The FSA, he said, was tasked with taking the territory but managed to secure only half of it. “The Free Army can’t even take one village. That’s how effective it is. We are the ones taking ground.”
He despised the FSA, especially its defectors, who he said were “raised on Baathism.” To Mohammad, the enemy was everyone who was not like him—the regime, Alawites, the FSA, Sunnis fighting with the Syrian military (most of the army was Sunni, given that more than 70 percent of Syrians were Sunni), even other Islamists who weren’t as conservative as he was. “The decision-makers in this country will be those with military power,” he said. “If they”—the FSA and the Syrian political opposition—“want a secular state and have the military power to create one, let them. If they are going to confront us because of our project, we will confront them. We are fighting for religion, what are they fighting for?”
TALAL’S MIDDLE DAUGHTER, Hanin, the wounded ten-year-old, called him on his landline in Damascus five days after she was kidnapped. It was the first contact he’d had with his family. Hanin told her father that her siblings and mother were with her.
“Where are you?” Talal asked.
“In Aunty’s lap.”
“Which aunty?”
“Aunty Ghada.”
She didn’t have an Aunty Ghada. A man with a Syrian accent took the phone. He told Talal that his wife and other children were dead. “You only have her left,” he said. “If you want her, go to Latakia and tell the head of the Military Security branch to negotiate with us. We won’t speak to anyone else.”
The men holding the 106 Alawite women and children wanted a prisoner exchange with the regime. Talal, a
long with other families, tried and failed to get an audience with Latakia’s head of Military Security. They saw his deputy, who brushed off their concerns. They approached other officials. The head of the local Baath Party chapter offered to arm the families. “After what?” Talal asked him. “After the gangs entered the area, killed who they killed, kidnapped who they kidnapped?” The governor of Latakia asked the families what the armed men wanted. “He was asking me!” Talal said. “If a dog is lost in Europe, they set up an operations room to find it. I told him, ‘Am I supposed to tell you the news?’ ” Talal left the meetings dejected. “They don’t feel with us,” he said. “They’re officials who are just there like a framed photo. We mean nothing to them.”
The only things Talal was sure of were that one of his children, Hanin, was alive, because she’d called him, and that he’d fallen between two fires—rebels who viewed him as an extension of the regime just because he was an Alawite like President Assad, and a regime that didn’t seem interested in helping him. Blouta didn’t receive special government attention because it was Alawite, he said. “Our villages were neglected, poor. We have unemployment, too. I swear to God, I carried a bag on my back for three years and went from pharmacy to pharmacy and to hairdressers selling cosmetics and perfume. I worked as a night guard, as a construction laborer. Why didn’t they [the rebels] think that some of us have problems, too?” He ruled out approaching the Syrian political opposition for help. “It’s impossible,” he said, “because these members of the opposition, whoever they are, are killers and partners in the deaths or kidnappings of our children—without exception.” Talal viewed the opposition the way Mohammad and many fighters on the other side of the Latakia front viewed him.
On August 12, the first images of the Alawite detainees were released in a three-minute, eleven-second video uploaded to YouTube. They showed the women and children seated along the perimeter of a roofed outdoor area, in the presence of an armed guard in a balaclava. Talal saw his three youngest children among them, but not his wife or eldest daughter, Lojayn. The man on the phone had lied to him. Over the next month, the same captor called Talal four times, demanding a ransom of 4 million Syrian pounds (about $35,400 at the time). Talal didn’t have that kind of money. He asked about his wife. The captor said she was dead. Talal didn’t believe him. “Do you think your wife is the only one who died?” the captor said. “Many women died.”
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