A Woman in the Crossfire (33 page)

“The sectarian tension seemed very high in Baniyas, Jableh and Latakia. The
shabbiha
would stir things up by going to Sunni neighbourhoods and shouting sectarian slurs as they passed through. They found willing ears among some people while others responded in kind with sectarian slogans of their own, which all took place while the men from al-Skantouri and the Palestinian camp of al-Ramel and the al-Saliba neighbourhood would use their knives to attack anyone they saw, without distinguishing between security forces and demonstrators. I can assure you that the situation was not sectarian at the beginning of the protest movement, because I saw with my own eyes a man named Ayyub from the Alawite community stand up to address the demonstrators, ‘I'm an Alawite and I'm participating in the demonstrations. I'm against the regime; they forced me from my home for many years. We are a single nation.'”

The man's testimony ends here, and I know deep down what these words mean, because this was one of scores of testimonies that I collected about the participation of some ordinary Alawites at the beginning of the protest movement and how they were brutally repressed by the regime and its supporters.

 

Story #3

My neighbour, a volunteer in the security forces, told me about this incident.

He says: “During the siege of Jisr al-Shughur, the bombardment was violent, things got all confused and I no longer knew what I was supposed to do. Suddenly I was all alone amidst the rubble and I started running, trying to hide my identity. I was sure that if the people captured me they were going to kill me. I believed the armed gangs actually existed and that they wanted to slaughter and kill us all. I entered one of the alleyways and tried to disappear down one of the paths. I saw a man and I hid who I was from him, but the man knew I wasn't from around there. He had a beard and dust all over him, and he was holding a bag in his hand. I later discovered that he was delivering some food to his family. I stood there before him, weaponless. I was wounded in the foot and limping. The man approached me and asked, ‘Are you with security?' I said yes, and waited there to die. He calmly said, ‘Come with me.' I followed him inside his house. There was a spare room where he cleaned my wounds, put on some bandages and then looked at me, saying, ‘We aren't animals, and I know you're not a killer.' He left the room and came back a little later with another man. The two of them talked amongst themselves, saying that if I stayed there people might take revenge on me, that even though it was unlikely, I wouldn't be safe there. ‘What do you think about crossing the border pretending to be my cousin?' I was speechless as he handed me his ID and said, ‘Use this to cross over until things are safe for you, you can send it back to me later.' I didn't know what to say. First he saves me and now he wants me to save myself while he stays behind in Jisr al- Shughur. He told me he'd join up with me in a few days, and he gave me his phone number so I could call him. They took me to a secure location but I never crossed the border. I gave him back his cousin's ID and thanked him. When I got home to Latakia, they asked me what had happened to me, and I told them simply that I blacked out and suddenly found myself someplace I didn't recognize.”

The man in the story left his house and disappeared. His neighbours no longer see him. The neighbours say he was killed but I know he's hiding out for fear that the security forces are going to kill him. He told me as much:

“I won't participate anymore in what's happening, those people were kind to me and saved my life, despite the fact that the man who gave me his cousin's ID was with the Muslim Brotherhood.”

 

Story #4

“A man from the military security in Latakia came and told the Alawites in the al-Hammam neighbourhood near Basnada that the Sunnis had attacked their daughters at the Qaninas School, and so the people rose up and attacked the school, frightened and in a panic. There was a big commotion as tens of cars showed up and surrounded the school. The people took sticks and savagely attacked the school. The girls screamed and the teaching staff fled, but not a single Sunni was inside the school. After hours of recrimination and shouting and beating with sticks between the people and the teachers, the people came back with their daughters, and one of the girls' relatives came back after taking his daughter home, his blood still boiling in anger, and told the security agent who had been in touch with the group of
shabbiha
at the entrance to the neighbourhood, ‘It isn't true, there was no reason to frighten the people.' The security forces and the
shabbiha
surrounded him and shouted at the man, ‘Go home before I have all of you arrested!'”

 

Story #5

“A citizen of Latakia was coming home from his fiancée's house when he got stopped by a military checkpoint and told to get out of the taxi. Although he swore to them on his highest honour that he hadn't taken part in any demonstration, they became furious with him, beat him violently and cursed him anyway, telling him, ‘You don't love the president, you dog!' He replied angrily, ‘I don't love injustice, but I swear to God that I was just going to my fiancée's house.' They threw him down on the ground and stamped on him. They beat him in middle of the street and then arrested him. In prison they tortured him violently until he confessed to them what they wanted him to say. He is still incarcerated today.”

 

Story #6

“In al-Haffeh, Abd al-Qadir al-Sousi ‘the Sunni', a man who was known for his open-mindedness, moral rectitude and good relationships with a number of Alawites, was killed and his corpse was dumped in the Alawite village of al-Zubar. When his body was found, Alawite
shaykhs
and Sunni
shaykhs
got together and disavowed the act. In spite of the incident there was no sectarian conflict. A resident of al-Haffeh confirmed that the
shabbiha
had killed him and dumped his body in the Alawite village in order to provoke the people to start fighting each other. The
shabbiha
were killing people and the ordinary people were still licking their wounds when a number of sectarian troubles took place after the discovery of the death of al-Sousi. The people of al-Zubar village got together and went to al-Haffeh and told the people there, ‘We are not responsible for the death of this man. If you have any proof that we killed him, bring it forward now and hold us to account.' But the matter ended there. That doesn't mean there weren't individual acts of revenge, as when security forces or ordinary people from both sects were killed.”

 

Story #7

“A man went into one of the neighbourhoods and said, ‘There's an infiltrator here!' The people would run off after him to chase down this supposed infiltrator and hand him over to the security. On another day and in another neighbourhood the same infiltrator appeared and they captured him again. But because the Alawite neighbourhoods were so close together, somebody noticed that they had captured the same person. One of the men told the head of the security detention centre sarcastically, ‘Uncle, change your infiltrator every once in a while if you want the people to believe you!'”

 

I stop writing down what the security forces were doing in Latakia to stir up sectarian conflict. My friend supplying me with information said he had dozens more stories about what they did in the city.

“They were breaking down people's sympathy and building up walls of hatred,” he tells me. “The security and the
shabbiha
both, they worked hard at that.”

His testimony stops with that sentence. I think about how my compiling all these conversations and testimonies is no substitute for redoubling my efforts in the street. Just now I wish I had not written in the newspaper about what I had seen, and I wish I were able to move around with greater freedom, not to be directly in the spotlight. But on the other hand I also think: Somebody has to smash the narrative of this criminal regime with the truth of the revolution. This is a revolution and not a sectarian war, and my voice as a writer and a journalist must come out in support of the uprising, no matter what the cost.

..............................

Today I hear more news about the arrest of a young activist in the uprising, the young man I had been coordinating with and whom I saw on a regular basis. I feel boundless pain, because I knew the young men of the uprising, quite a few of them. I have seen morality and their humane spirits, their determination and their patience amidst the difficult circumstances they were going through.

This is the young man who had sent me a warning just days before the security forces started asking about me. Apparently the senior officer's warning that he was going to leave me to his underlings in security had come to pass. This leads me to the conclusion that he was acting on his own. That doesn't really matter anymore because this young man who left his work and his university education and committed himself to working for the uprising and coordinating demonstrations needed constant support. I have been worried about him lately, him more than others. He is a noble young man. I find myself sobbing in the street. I feel a maternal instinct towards him. I am very concerned about him, but I simply say, “He'll get out in a few days, no doubt they have nothing on him. Especially seeing as he wasn't arrested at a demonstration.”

I go to a mourning ceremony in Harasta with two young girlfriends. They tell me there would be a few military checkpoints, nothing too scary, people coming and going. I put on a headscarf until we are past the checkpoint. There are no expressions of sadness at the mourning ceremony, which is the strangest thing about mourning sessions for martyrs who have fallen in Syrian cities. They always turn into demonstrations. People are gathered together in mourning, chanting for the fall of the regime. I withdraw to a distant corner as the weeping continues. I don't know whether I am sad for the young people who are killed and who fall like birds or whether I am happy to discover that I belong to such a strong, free and proud people. I don't budge from where I stand. The people chant. I greet all of the women and embrace them. I have been going to mourning ceremonies in secret, without wanting anyone to know I am there. Two young men help me out. I am supposed to write stories about the martyrs' mothers, but time is not on my side.

At the end of the evening I return home, my eyes burning and my heart racing. The bouts of sharp ringing that spread from the base of my head to settle in my ears return, and as I climb the stairs I start to feel dizzy again. My head is like a swing. I have been smoking like a madwoman, but I simply must keep watching the videos that one of the young men had sent me showing how the martyrs' bodies were returned with their stomachs split open, stitched up in a strange way. The young man who sent them said, “It's really awful, they steal organs from the young men before killing them, maybe while they were still being tortured. There are testimonies from their families.” I wrote to tell him I could meet with the families of those martyrs, and he asked me to wait a while because they were scared. I continued watching the videos. There truly was something peculiar going on.

The martyrs' bodies were stitched up in such a way that proved they had undergone some kind of an operation. I wasn't sure whether the families ever verified that their children's organs had been stolen before burying them. I sent the video to a group of friends in Europe and the Arab world so they could follow up on the matter, and I stop working on that issue just before falling asleep on the couch. It isn't enough for them to kill people; they were buying and selling their bodies. Oh my God, how can we live alongside these murderers? How can they walk freely among us? My shaking fits start up again as I think about the bodies of my young adolescent friends and the criminal scalpels of the security forces cutting them to shreds.

..............................

News of the killing increases by the day. There are many stories of people disappearing and being kidnapped, about the torture of children, stories about prisoners. I sit down to transcribe the testimonies of young men who are barely twenty years old. I record them as they are, in colloquial dialect, because I find this to be fresher than writing them in modern standard Arabic. A female journalist recorded them for me.

 

The First Testimony

“One time when I was little, they brought a file and told me to write my name and sign. ‘What is it?' I asked them. They told me it was for the Ba‘th Party, and when I asked them what that meant and why I should sign, they beat me up. We learned we couldn't say anything against the regime. Take the Lord's name in vain, just don't curse the regime. You couldn't go complain, there was nothing you could do. We got older and I went to the army. In the army I learned what a joke we were living. I was one of those planting landmines along the front. And when everything happened on the Day of Return
³⁰
, I was shocked: Where were the mines I put there? I used to tell my friends, don't get close to the mines; turns out there weren't any. How can that be?

“I served in the army. It was awful. When I first started out, the commanding officer at the barracks came out and said, ‘Pigs on one side, humans on the other!' The drill was, I'm not serving a homeland, I'm serving one person. Corruption was everywhere, it was shameless. It was always like anyone with connections could get time off. It took seven months before I got leave. There were other people who never showed up.

“I got tortured in prison while I was still in the army. The first time, they needed to get a presidential convoy through and we were moving people out of the way. This old woman walks by and I tell her, ‘
Yalla
Auntie, move along.' The station chief comes over and beats that 70-year-old woman with a stick. I ask him, ‘Sir, why would you treat an old woman like that?' He says, ‘None of your business, jackass.' So I tell him, ‘When his Excellency the President comes by I'm going to tell him and he'll stop the convoy.' They pulled me out and took me somewhere called the security office. They beat me a lot. I was strapped to a chair while two of them stood over me, beating my chest nonstop. Even Guantanamo would have been better. They put me on the ground and told the guys, ‘The one who gets the most hair off his body gets a cigarette'… so they attacked me and started plucking. There was one guy in there with me who had got drunk and cursed the president… before my very eyes they shoved the whip up so far up his ass that when they pulled it out he threw up flesh… he couldn't walk and they broke every bone in his body. Meanwhile, we had all been taken out to the bathroom.