“You’re wounded and an asthmatic,” Jawa told Hanin. “You should return to Baba with our brother.”
“I’m older than you,” Hanin told her sister. “I’ll stay, you go home. Keep your faith in God and take care of our brother.”
The captors were distributing food to the women and children who were to be released, to know whom to load onto the trucks. Hanin handed her juice and biscuits to Jawa. “If I get out, I’ll have access to everything, you have nothing here,” Jawa told her sister. “You drink the juice.”
Hanin refused, and Jawa and their baby brother, juice in hand, were ushered into waiting trucks. Hanin watched them walk away.
TALAL, LIKE THE other relatives of the detainees, learned of the prisoner release on May 7, the day it happened. A cousin working in the government hospital in Latakia called him at 1:30 p.m. and told him that the governor had asked to prepare a ward for Alawite hostages on their way who needed to be examined. “I just assumed it was another lie,” Talal said. “All I heard was that some of the detainees were being released. I hoped my wife and children were among them.”
Jawa and her baby brother arrived at Latakia Government Hospital that afternoon. The little girl cried at the kindness of hospital staff, who brought her and the other freed detainees biscuits, falafel, shawarma sandwiches, French fries. “They kept telling us we were free, we were safe, we would soon be home,” Jawa said. “I couldn’t believe it, but I worried about Hanin. I wished she had come with us.”
It was too late for Talal to travel to Latakia and see his children that day. It was already 4 p.m., and the road from Damascus to Latakia was dangerous at night. He’d have to wait until the next morning. The children’s aunt, their mother’s sister, lived in Latakia City, not far from the hospital. The children were discharged into her care.
“My aunt’s house was full of people,” Jawa recalled. “Aunty couldn’t keep up with serving coffee. So many people were there to check on us. My aunt was crying so much she went hoarse, she couldn’t speak.”
The next morning, Talal left Damascus at 5 a.m. and was in Latakia by 10 a.m. He ran into his sister-in-law’s house, screaming out the names of his children. He saw two of them.
“They seemed as if they had shrunk, like they were years younger,” Talal said. “Jawa was thin. She didn’t know me, her words burned me.”
Jawa mistook her father for her uncle. “I asked him, ‘Where is my father?’ ” Jawa said. “He seemed very different to me, older, tired.”
Talal realized that his wife and eldest daughter, Lojayn, were probably dead because they weren’t among the detainees—either those released or those still held. His “heart burned” that Hanin was still in captivity. “Hanin is very special to me,” he said. “She has asthma. I used to take her once or twice a month to hospital to have her lungs and sinuses cleared. I imagine her in the dust of battles, of places they are hiding them, the dirt. How is she living there with them?”
SULEIMAN
June 17, 2014. A promised freedom. Suleiman prayed it wasn’t another false hope. He woke early after a night sleepless with anticipation, gave away his spare clothes and some of his money to cellmates, then signed and fingerprinted his release form in Adra’s administration office. This time, there was a wire on the desk from the Criminal Security Branch in Bab Musalla, Damascus, that said there was nothing on him, not even pending military service, which surprised him. His father had paid 400,000 Syrian pounds for that paper, and hundreds of thousands more, to delay Suleiman’s military service until October 23, 2014. A little after 11 a.m., Suleiman walked out of Damascus Central Prison in jeans and a navy-blue T-shirt, carrying his pajamas, two diaries, and paperwork in a plastic bag.
He felt like a newborn, unable to orientate himself, unsure where to go. To his parents in Homs? He had no idea what the road was like. To Damascus? It was closer and he had relatives there—a safer bet, he decided—but which way to the capital? He flagged down a micro, clambered into the seat near the driver, and asked to borrow his phone.
“Hello, Baba. I’m out of prison.”
His father cried, his mother ululated. “Mabrouk! Mabrouk! My son! Congratulations!”
His mother took the phone and warned him not to travel to Homs and risk the checkpoints. She told him to call his aunt in Damascus. His aunt, in tears, said she was on her way to meet him. He’d wait for her near the Central Bank at the Square of the Seven Fountains.
An older woman in the micro tapped Suleiman on the shoulder. She handed him a passport photo of her son, she spoke his name. Did Suleiman know him? Had he seen him in prison? She’d been searching for two years, she said, two years of begging mukhabarat branches for information about her boy. He disappeared from their hometown of Haffeh, in Latakia. Suleiman turned to face her. She could have been his mother. He wished he knew something about her son, but he apologized—he didn’t.
His aunt neared the square, her husband steering the wheel with one hand, clutching a smartphone in the other, filming the moment: “Look to the right! Do you see him? Where is he?” he said. He scanned a street busy with pedestrians.
“Where is the bank? Where is the bank? Stop! Stop! Let me out! There he is!” said his aunt.
The wheels were still turning when Suleiman’s aunt jumped out and rushed to her nephew, arms outstretched. She forcefully embraced him, kissed his cheeks, his head, his eyes. Suleiman clung to her. “Habibi, my darling, it’s over! It’s finally over! You look good, habibi. What can I get you, habibi, what do you need, what do you want? Whatever you want! Just tell me! It’s over! It’s over!”
Relatives assembled at his aunt’s house in Damascus, others began gathering in Homs. The congratulatory phone calls left Suleiman dizzy. Too much noise. Too many people. He had grown used to solitary silence. A relative snapped a photo of him—of a tired, thinner Suleiman smiling broadly, who was still all eyelashes and sweet dimpled grin. “This is a photo of me an hour after my release from a detention that lasted two years, twenty-three days, and eleven hours,” Suleiman later wrote on Facebook after he reopened an account.
Arrangements were made to get him to Homs that afternoon. A cousin paid a mukhabarat agent he knew to escort him and Suleiman through the checkpoints to Homs so they wouldn’t be harassed. At every roadblock, the agent flashed his ID card and was waved through. Suleiman’s father was pacing the street outside the apartment. Finally, Suleiman glimpsed his father for the first time in more than two years. An emotional avalanche, exhilaration, relief, guilt, love, overpowering and jumbled, tears warm and uninhibited, a reunion cut short by Suleiman’s mother, who hurried father and son into the house, fearing neighbors’ prying eyes. The apartment was in a government-controlled area. Suleiman’s mother did what Syrian mothers do—she prepared a feast of all her son’s favorite foods. He had returned. He wasn’t in Rastan—that house had been destroyed—but his parents were his home.
THE DECISION WAS MADE for him. Suleiman was to leave Syria. Only one of his sisters was still in the country, his only brother and other sister were already in Egypt. Suleiman’s relatives warned of men they knew who were rearrested days and weeks after their release from prison. Suleiman’s mother was convinced he was imperiled every time he left the house. His father feared he could not indefinitely delay his son’s conscription. The old man made all the arrangements, paid 200,000 Syrian pounds for a new passport, and decided on the destination—Turkey. Suleiman agreed, but he still had one more thing to do in Damascus—there was someone he had to see.
He saw her on his third day of freedom, the woman he’d called from Adra, the one he’d drawn in his diaries, his date at that café in Homs on March 15, 2011, the start of the Syrian uprising. She’d sent him close to six hundred messages via Facebook during his incarceration. She took the day off work to see him. They met in a park. His future was uncertain. He would be leaving and didn’t know when or whether he could return. Her life was in Damascus, so he released her from his heart. It hurt to le
t her go. Would he have married her had he not been detained? He didn’t know. The only thing he was certain of was that he loved her, that the hope of seeing her had sustained him in the darkness, and that she deserved better than an unstable life in an uncertain exile. He didn’t tell her he was leaving, couldn’t bring himself to, but she sensed it. “I feel this is the last day I’m going to see you,” she told him. She was right.
ON JUNE 27, ten days after his release, Suleiman and his parents took a taxi from Homs to Tripoli, in northern Lebanon, escorted to the Syrian border by a paid member of the mukhabarat. From there, they boarded an overnight ferry to Taşucu, about a hundred kilometers south of Mersin, in southern Turkey. Suleiman posed for photos on the deck like a carefree tourist: clean-shaven and smiling, in a powder-blue Lacoste polo shirt and faded jeans, beads of summer sweat on his forehead, arms around his parents, calm blue waters behind him.
A cousin met them at the harbor in Turkey. Days later, he drove Suleiman and his parents on a fifteen-hour trip to Istanbul to seek the counsel of Suleiman’s eldest uncle, the one who owned shares in the bank in Aleppo, who had interceded on his nephew’s behalf with the mufti’s son at Aleppo’s Air Force Intelligence branch.
Suleiman felt unanchored in his freedom and adrift in exile. He’d never wanted to leave Syria. He met up with old friends living in Turkey and working for various Syrian political opposition bodies. They’d changed in ways that disgusted him. “Almost all of them were looking for material benefits, and if there were no such benefits, they wouldn’t do a thing,” Suleiman said. He understood the need to make a living, but this was something else: “There was no revolution—only business, personal benefits, personal cliques, and corruption. Very few of them had a conscience.” He thought of his friends in Rastan’s original tansiqiya, killed in that dawn raid on their hideout near the dam in late 2011. “Those who worked from their hearts for nothing,” Suleiman said, “were either arrested, killed, or quit.”
He declined a high-paying job arranged by his uncle in the opposition’s interim Ministry of Finance. Like many Syrians inside Syria, Suleiman also despised these exiles. They were little more than a toothless club of well-paid big talkers who represented only themselves and their foreign backers. “If there was a one percent chance to do something honorable for the revolution, I would have stayed,” Suleiman said, “but it had taken a different direction.” His parents returned to Syria. Suleiman stayed with his cousin in Mersin. He looked for work but found none. He explored educational opportunities, but little suited him.
He thought about applying for UN asylum to be relocated, or registering at a European university and hoping for a student visa. It would take many months at least—if he was lucky—and he knew of friends who had tried both and been rejected. I’ve already wasted a lot of my life, he thought. I’ve gone backward, lost everything. Egypt wasn’t an option. Local authorities were intimidating Syrians to the degree that Suleiman’s siblings were looking to flee. Lebanon was no better. He had a good friend from Rastan, a university colleague he’d known since primary school, who’d migrated to Germany before the revolution and advised him to try to join him there. In Mersin, Suleiman heard the talk of smugglers and people risking the sea to Europe. He wanted a life. Perhaps he’d find one in Germany. He told his father and uncle. Both men opposed the idea at first, but eventually they relented and between them handed Suleiman $6,000. That was the smuggler’s fee.
SULEIMAN NEVER MET the smuggler he entrusted with his life and $6,000. He found him the way many Syrians did back then—somebody knew somebody who knew somebody who had heard of him. It was the summer before hundreds of thousands would attempt similar journeys seeking sanctuary in Europe, aided by public Facebook pages advertising routes and brokers. The smuggler, a Kurdish man, was based in Istanbul. He provided instructions over the phone—Suleiman was to pay upfront in an insurance office in Reyhanlı, a four-hour bus ride from Mersin. No receipt, no guarantee. The destination was southern Italy. There were other, cheaper options, such as Greece, but that was farther from Germany. It meant more overland borders to sneak across. Suleiman returned to Mersin and waited for the designated departure date.
The smuggler kept his word and his appointment. On July 24, 2014, Suleiman milled outside the Mersin Arena, a 25,500-seat stadium, where he and others had been instructed by phone to wait. Suleiman was surprised to see one of his relatives—a doctor and his wife and three young daughters. They, too, were about to brave the sea. It was just after dusk in the last days of Ramadan. Suleiman and his soon-to-be fellow travelers broke their fast together, murmured prayers for God’s protection. The darkness deepened. After several hours, a bus arrived to transport them to an isolated stretch of the Turkish Mediterranean about sixty kilometers away.
Suleiman’s possessions fit into a rucksack. A few changes of clothes, pitted dates and biscuits for the journey, money and paperwork, including his prison diaries, wrapped in cling film and placed in ziplock bags, and a life jacket. He didn’t pack water, which he was told would be provided on the boat. He had nothing from home except memories.
They disembarked from the bus. No cigarettes, no lighters, no illumination from mobile phones, the driver warned, nothing that might compromise their location. Thick foliage hiding their approach to the water’s edge. Inky darkness, not even a streetlight. Life jackets strapped on. Parents hushed children. The sound of lapping waves and whispered prayers.
In the grainy moonlight, Suleiman made out a hulk of metal floating offshore. About a hundred refugees, from two buses, were herded in shifts onto a skiff that carried them to the waiting fishing trawler. It was approaching midnight. The captain, a fisherman from Latakia, and his crew of four Syrians, directed women and children to the upper decks, men to the lower. The Mediterranean was calm as the boat headed across the sea toward Cyprus, where they would wait just outside Egyptian waters to pick up another two hundred refugees, according to the captain’s announcement. There was no sign of the other desperate souls. People on the trawler grew antsy. Was this a trap? How long could the boat wait before being noticed? They’d been told there’d be no stops, and that they’d be in Italy in six days. A few men begged the captain to push forward without the Egyptian contingent. Others made a suggestion to sweeten the deal—that everyone on board pay an extra $100 to the captain, $50 for children, to forget the Egyptians. They’d been waiting four hours already. The captain agreed, the passengers paid, and the trawler moved on.
Suleiman was seasick for most of the journey. He mainly slept and tried to combat the nausea but also documented the trip for his family. He posed for photos, leaning against the knee-high railing wrapped around the bow. There was plenty of space on the boat, thanks to the Egyptian no-shows. After the first night, people felt relaxed enough to take off their life jackets. Every now and again, the captain told them where they were, but Suleiman relied on his phone’s GPS to capture his coordinates, and Google maps of his journey he’d downloaded to figure out where he was. In addition to his relatives, there were about ten other young men from Rastan aboard. How random, Suleiman thought, to meet them years later on a sky-blue trawler with rusty patches on its hull, trying to sneak into Europe.
Some of the men fished, using rods on board, sharing their catch with passengers. A group of teenagers and children sat on the deck, providing entertainment. They used an empty watercooler bottle as a drum. Men and women clapped and sang along. The sea was flat, the sky a brilliant blue. A pod of dolphins escorted the travelers one day, graceful and free, gliding just below a surface that shimmered in the sun. Children and adults alike were giddy at the sight. Suleiman considered it a good omen. Despite his seasickness, the trip felt like a holiday. For the first time in years, he marked Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, in natural light, not in the darkness of a cell. The passengers on the boat exchanged Eid greetings, but otherwise it was a regular day. Some of them fretted constantly about being caught. Suleiman didn’t care. What are they going to
do? he thought. I survived Bashar al-Assad’s prisons. Nothing could be worse except death.
On the ninth day—three longer than passengers had expected—the faint outline of Sicily appeared in the far distance. To Suleiman, those hazy hills meant hope, freedom, a new start. The captain sent a distress signal via radio, stated his coordinates, and then dumped overboard the radio, a Thuraya satellite phone, and other navigational devices. “I’m not a smuggler, I was just paid for this trip,” he told the stunned faces around him. “Now, I’m one of you.” He and his crew said they wanted to get to Sweden.
Before long, a plane swooped over the boat. The refugees waved and whooped and yelled. A white speedboat cut the waves toward them, the passengers on deck applauding the approach of the Guardia costiera, the Italian Coast Guard. Two men on the Italian craft, in identical white polo shirts and black caps, tossed bottles of water onto the trawler. “Thank you! Thank you!” the Syrians shouted in English.
The passengers were transferred to another larger vessel, which docked in Sicily. That same day, Suleiman and another refugee from the boat boarded a bus for a twenty-six-hour journey to Milan, where they parted ways. The other young man headed toward Sweden. Suleiman spent the night of August 4 in Milan, before continuing to Munich by bus, a twelve-hour ride. Suleiman’s old primary-school friend from Rastan had helped map out his journey. It was another three-hour train ride from Munich to his friend’s home in Mannheim. On August 12, 2014, Suleiman registered as a refugee in Germany. That same day, he sent me a message on Facebook: “Hello, Rania. Do you remember me?”
No Turning Back Page 31
