A Woman in the Crossfire (18 page)

The doctor continues, “After Salkhad we continued walking to reach Dar‘a. It was a straight path to Bosra. In the village of M. there was a man with a pick-up truck in which we could carry food and medicine. I was responsible for the medical side. We'd sew up the wounds and the surgeries under lanterns because the electricity was always cut. The people were so incredibly helpful. When we had to perform surgery once at two in the morning the young men went to ask one of the pharmacists for assistance, and he opened the pharmacy so they could take whatever they needed without asking them a single question. We were able to pass through Salkhad because there were no soldiers there, but security forces and
shabbiha
were crawling all over the place, and they were even more brutal than the soldiers. They extorted two thousand liras from the businessmen of Suwayda. I would enter the southern area, where the checkpoints and the tanks began. There were BMB tanks, which were Russian and could reach 90 kilometres an hour and T-82 tanks that appeared on television. So many tanks, tanks everywhere. So many foot soldiers, as if it were an entire army, an army in a war. Hundreds of tanks, every intersection in every neighbourhood of Dar‘a had a tank. The BMB tanks were the most common even though Dar‘a was empty, as if it had no human beings. Only tanks and dogs and security.

“There were also funny things that happened I would like to tell you about. You know, the situation in Nawa and Jasim was different from the situation in Dar‘a, where it was bleak and where the killing never stopped. In Nawa miracles took place. Shirtless young men would come out and stand in front of the snipers and the tanks, in huge demonstrations despite the siege and the death. But in Dar‘a they killed anyone who came out to demonstrate and arrested everyone else. There are stories of heroism that will be told for generations among the people of Dar‘a: reluctant, nonsectarian and honourable people, old women stronger than tanks. There was a woman named Hajjeh A. who bumped into the tanks by coincidence outside the clinic and she thought they had discovered the clinic so she came out to attack them and push them away. The young men inside shouted at her to come back but she didn't listen to them and advanced in the direction of the tanks and the soldiers and the
shabbiha
. They were making fun of her, and the young men in the neighbourhood who were staying out of sight. She picked up a rock and threw it at the tank, then moved forward, raising her hand up to the sky. Of course it turned out the tanks and the
shabbiha
were cruising by in a show of force and they never discovered the young men or the clinic, but the Hajjeh stayed where she was until they were gone. Do you want to know what made me happiest while I was doing my work? It was when I was doing the intubation, which is an operation where we insert a tube into the lungs so the person can breathe again when the heart has stopped. The happiness when a person starts to breathe again, when people come back to life, those were the happiest moments of my life. You know what, I'm getting tired. This is painful to talk about, but I'll tell you one more thing. Here in Damascus, there's a security agent outside every door of every hospital, just go to the Ibn al-Nafis hospital and you'll see, they refuse to let any patient in the operating room without security clearance.”

My conversation with this man ends and I go home to catch up on the events of the day. I am stressed out, so I take a sleeping pill and go to bed. Writing down what the doctor told me today reminds me of those painful feelings over what happened in Dar‘a, and what is happening now in Talkalakh and Homs and Nawa and all the other besieged cities. I wait for tomorrow,
Azadeh
Friday.

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

More than any other day, I feel free and unmonitored on Friday, when everyone is busy with the demonstrations. The demonstrators decided to name today
Azadeh
Friday, which means freedom in Kurdish. Kurds have been coming out in droves in spite of the fact that many were recently granted citizenship; the regime thought they would be able to buy them off like this but it didn't work. Since this morning, the news has reported gatherings in Qamishli and Amuda preparing to go out for huge demonstrations, and there is also word of a substantial security presence. Consecutive messages come in over email and Facebook asking about me and about the situation among Alawite intellectuals. Even though every word poses a danger to me, I simply must say something to those young men and women, and I write the following comment on my Facebook page:

 

If the price we have to pay on the path of speaking the truth is our lives, it has been preordained and falls within the natural order of a more just human existence. At this historical moment of rupture that is opening up days of bloodshed in Syria, what the regime is attempting to accomplish must be exposed: the notion that the popular protest movement sweeping across Syria has a sectarian character is an utter fabrication. Despite the well-known regime tactics, such as dividing cities militarily along sectarian lines or targeting certain sectarian neighbourhoods for bombardment instead of others, and despite the collective punishment and the intimidation and the label “traitor” that is applied to any free Syrian citizen who happens to belong to the Alawite sect, I say to all the young women and men of the other sects who have sent me long letters regarding this question: I am here and I know there are others. Let us offer our spirits up alongside them, and add our voices to theirs. The fear of sectarian war has its justifications, and it may be the price we have to pay if the rhetoric of violence and murder continues unabated. But we have nothing to lose except our lives!

 

Returning to my diaries I write down the following incident, which T. related to me, as his face turned red and he gazed up at the sky, repeating, “Oh God… Oh God, where are You?”

“Corpses were arriving at the Tishreen military hospital,” he said, “along with people who were critically wounded and the occasional light injury. One young man who had been mildly wounded was asleep in his bed, and I was standing next to another bed when an officer in civilian clothes came in and sat down next to the wounded man. The two of them started talking. I couldn't understand what was happening at first, but I edged closer to the wounded man and heard what they were saying to each other. The officer asks him, ‘Who shot you?' The wounded man remains silent, and the officer suggests, ‘The armed gangs?' The wounded man remains silent, and the officer instructs him, ‘You'll go on television and say that the armed gangs shot you.' The wounded man looks the officer straight in the face and says, ‘It was security who shot me.' The officer repeats his order, only this time more serious and threatening, ‘The armed gangs shot you.' ‘It was security who shot me,' the wounded man insists, unflinching as he looks into the eyes of the officer. Suddenly the officer stands up, pulls out a gun, and places it against the wounded man's forehead. The wounded man doesn't blink, and the officer stares right at him, ‘Who shot you?' The wounded man says, ‘It was security who shot me.' The officer shoots the wounded man in the head and walks out.”

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

I come out of my stupor, from my hollowed-out heart. Over the past few days I have been suspended between life and death as I try to get rid of all these sleeping pills. I met with a lot of groups who want to contribute to the mobilization, young and old, women and young girls under the age of twenty. Nobody wants to remain on the sidelines, everyone feels a sense of responsibility but the methodology of political action is lacking and most of those who are mobilizing and active must perpetually live in difficult circumstances. I feel anxiety growing in the pit of my stomach. We are mobilizing to set up some kind of movement even as people die like flies; the fact that murder truly has become an everyday occurrence was keeping me awake on a daily basis. Today I sit down to transcribe the interview I conducted with a young man from the A.Z. family in Dar‘a. I met with him once, and I was supposed to continue the interview in order to follow up on what had happened in Dar‘a but that turned out to be impossible, just as it had been with the young man who told me how the protest movement in Baniyas got started, who then disappeared as well. Two days ago I learned he had been arrested. I have no idea whether the young man from the A.Z. family was arrested as well but he disappeared all the same. I am particularly interested in Dar‘a, compiling as many testimonies from there as I can, because it was the spark from which the Syrian uprising first erupted.

This young man in his early twenties says, “I was charged with belonging to a family in the opposition, at the military
mukhabarat
branch they would insult me and beat me.”

I ask him to tell me how the events first unfolded. He was sad but despite his moving speech, his voice remained calm and clear as he said, “On 18 March 2011, when the people went to see Atef Najib in order to demand the release of their children, he said,
Forget your children. Go sleep with your wives and make new ones or send them to me and I'll do it
. Soon after they left, the inhabitants of Dar‘a found out what had happened. They all agreed that on 18 March they would come marching out of the al-Umari Mosque and one other mosque. They came out chanting
Freedom, Freedom! The Syrian people won't be insulted!
and we all went out with them. Just then, sixteen helicopters landed at the new municipal stadium in New al-Assad City and we heard that Atef Najib had told the leadership there had been a coup in Dar‘a. Those who got out of the helicopters were from the counter-terrorism unit, central security. There were security agents all over Dar‘a. There were
baltajiyyeh
with them. I saw them with my own eyes. There must have been thousands of them. As the demonstration marched through the valley, they were sprayed with water from fire truck cannons and gunfire broke out, killing four people, including Mahmoud Jawabra and Hossam Ayyash. That Friday ended without any arrests and four deaths, and the security presence remained heavy.

“The next day, 19 March, at six a.m., the people shouted out the names of the dead inside the mosques and assembled for the funeral. We all went out in the way we would for the funeral of any martyr, hoisted the coffin on our shoulders. A huge number of people headed for the cemetery. As we buried them, Shaykh Ahmad al-Sayasina held the microphone and called for calm, saying that they were going to release the children within 48 hours. A young man shouted, ‘The blood of the martyrs is on all of your heads!' The people rose up and started shouting for Atef Najib and the governor to step down.
O Atef O Najib, we all want to see you leave!
The young men set off for the al-Umari Mosque but there was a phalanx of counter-terrorism and riot police and
baltajiyyeh
²⁵
and security forces waiting for us in the valley. They were only one hundred metres from us. Shaykh Muhammad Abu Zayd tried to calm us down. We didn't listen to him. We stood there for a long time, until one of the Dar‘a elite and a supporter of the regime, Ayman al-Zu‘bi, showed up and the young men started beating him. Then canisters started falling down on us like rain, tear gas canisters, and then they opened fire. Atef Najib and the governor were there, but they took off on a motorcycle. We all pulled back in the direction of the town of Hayy al-Karak. They lobbed canisters at us and we set tires on fire. We were set on staying there, which we did until eight o'clock at night, when we came under heavy gunfire and finally all scattered. On 20 March, the people of Dar‘a al-Balad came out to criticize the people of the city of Dar‘a for not having come out with them. On that day when the people of Dar‘a al-Balad came out with us, there were canisters and gunfire again and the security surrounded us on all sides. We pelted the security forces with stones and they pulled back. The people looted a Syriatel centre. They didn't set the entire building on fire, but torched the assets of Rami Makhlouf. They brought out the equipment and burned it. Two people were wounded. We were only throwing stones at the
Palais de Justice
, it was the security forces who set it on fire. A fire truck never showed up. They were burning down buildings on purpose. Security forces gathered together at the governor's mansion. Dar‘a was in a state of war. A lot of people were injured, but they occupied the hospital and any wounded person who went there would either be detained or shot. Donating blood was forbidden. Wisam al-Ghul, a Palestinian, went to donate blood and the security forces killed him on the spot.”

My fingers started trembling, a condition I know all too well. Rarely can I finish recording a testimony without winding up crying or shaking. Rarely can I write down the words coming out of the mouths of the tortured without them washing over me as though it were happening for real. What sort of torture is this? In moments such as these I wish I were an ordinary woman. I long for my diaries to be transformed into the diaries of a vegetable seller on a crowded sidewalk and for my vision to become empty, blind, for me to follow neutrally in other people's footsteps, but that isn't the way I am. I am the one sitting here now beside this young man from the city where the revolution broke out, the one who had been imprisoned. Blood drips from his every word.

He continues, “We woke up on Monday, 21 March and the
Serail
had been torched. We were surprised by the military checkpoints and the sandbag barricades. There were security forces everywhere we went. People came out from all over for a sit-in outside the al-Umari Mosque. They set up tents, called for the release of the prisoners and children and for the abrogation of Article 8 of the constitution, for the release of female prisoners and for the murderers to be brought to justice. On 23 March (it was a Wednesday) there was a massacre. But before that, on 22 March, the people were sitting in and everything was fine; on that day the demonstrations took place without any incidents. But between 12:30 and 1 a.m. on 23 March, violent gunfire erupted. They broke into the al-Umari Mosque, opening fire on the people inside and killing seven martyrs. They smashed the tents and tore up the pictures of the martyrs even as the
shaykh
called for help. Anyone who moved was killed. The young men gathered together and the security showed up and started shooting at us, stamping on our necks, so that nobody would dare to open their doors, lest they get shot at too. The people of the surrounding villages heard what was happening and decided to help the people of Dar‘a. They streamed in from the eastern villages and from west of Dar‘a, and when they assembled at the train station by the post office roundabout, near the Ba‘th Party branch, they were allowed to pass through without being stopped. Then the shooting started, they say 70 people were killed, but I am sure there were at least two hundred. There were bodies that couldn't be identified, we kept going back there for weeks and saw the empty shoes of the dead and so much blood. In short, it was a massacre.