A Woman in the Crossfire (38 page)

 

14
Maher al-Assad (b. 1967) is the younger brother of Bashar al- Assad, head of the Republican Guard and commander of the Fourth Armored Division of the Syrian army.

 

15
The Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) is a state media organization.

 

16
A maternal cousin to Bashar al-Assad, Hafiz Makhlouf (b. 1975) is a colonel in the Syrian army, a senior officer at the General Security Directorate and the brother of Syrian telecom mogul Rami Makhlouf.

 

17
Syrian Vice-President until 2005, Abd al-Halim Khaddam (b. 1932) was forced out of the government and into exile, from where he has been attempting to direct various groups in opposition to the current regime.

 

18
Fawwaz al-Assad (b.1962) is the son of Hafiz al-Assad's younger brother Jamil al-Assad (1933–2004). The European Union placed sanctions on him in 2011 due to his suspected involvement in organizing and providing material support to the
shabbiha
in Syria.

 

19
Between the end of World War I and 1922, the Alawite territory in northwestern Syria was ruled under an autonomous administration. Attached to French Mandate Syria in 1922, the French renamed the territory
L'Etat des Alaouites
(The Alawite State) in 1925 and then the
Gouvernement de Lattakia
in 1930 before the province was formally incorporated into Syria.

 

20
Abu Muhammad ibn Yusuf al-Makzun al-Sinjari (d. 1240) is a minor Alawite folk hero who is said to have traveled from Iraq to Syria in the early 13th century in order to help unify the sect against local Kurdish rivals.

 

21
al-Husayn ibn Hamdan al-Khasibi (died circa 957–969) was a traditionist – i.e. a
muhaddith
, or transmitter of traditions or sayings of the Prophet Muhammad – as well as the main transmitter of Nusayri tradition after the death of the eponymous founder of the Nusayriyya, Muhammad ibn Nusayr (died circa 874); the Nusayris were labeled extremist Shiites (
ghulat
) who would come to be known as the ‘Alawiyya or the Alawites under French Mandate rule (1920–1946).

 

22
The
Ikhwan al-Safa
(Brethren of Purity) are authors of an eponymous 13th century collection of letters that is an important medieval literary source and thought to have been penned by adherents to Isma‘ilism, another esoteric Shiite variant. Their inclusion in Alawite sacred history may be attributable to the erroneous conflation of Isma‘ilism and Nusayriyya/‘Alawiyya by Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) in a well-known yet highly controversial and sectarian
fatwa
(non-binding opinion) against the Nusayris.

 

23
Born in the town of Kufa (present-day Iraq), Abu al-Tayyib Ahmad ibn al-Husayn al-Mutanabbi (d. 965) is perhaps the most acclaimed Arab poet of all time.

 

24
Al-Nakba (lit. the catastrophe) Day commemorates the Palestinian catastrophe of dispossession that accompanied and resulted from the establishment of the state of Israel on 15 May 1948, and the ensuing conflict that led to the dispersion of some 700,000 Palestinians. On 15 May 2011, thousands of Palestinians and Syrians attempted to hop over fences near Majdal Shams in the northern Golan Heights and several people were killed when Israeli forces opened fire.

 

25
baltajiyyeh
is derived from an Ottoman Turkish term for “axewielder” that refers to hired thugs; it is more commonly used in Egypt and North Africa.

 

26
It is common in many Mediterranean cultures for intimate family members to address each other reciprocally by the same term, so a mother (Mama) will call her son or daughter “Mama” and a father (Baba) will call his son or daughter “Baba.”

 

27
Jamil al-Assad (1933–2004) was the third brother after Hafiz and Rifaat, who played a somewhat lesser role in politics.

 

28
Free Virgin Women (
al-hara'ir
) is a term that is derived from the same root as the Arabic word for freedom. The term does not appear in the Qur'an and is rarely cited in compendiums of
hadith
(Prophetic sayings), including the following attested by Ibn Maja (d. 887) in chapter 8 of his
Kitab al-nikah
(Book of Marriage): “Whosoever wishes to meet God in purity should marry a free virgin woman.” However, the term appears commonly in Islamic legal and juristic writing (my thanks to Michael Cook for clarifying this). Since the outbreak of the Syrian uprising a women's group loosely affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood has emerged, calling themselves
al-Hara'ir
.

 

29
Ibrahim al-Qashoush was a poet and singer from Hama who wrote and performed a number of important protest songs during the first few months of the revolution. His throat was slit and his body was dumped into the Orontes River in Hama on 4 July 2011.

 

30
The Day of Return (
yawm al-‘awda
) is another name for al- Nakba Day, emphasizing the persistent Palestinian collective and individual rights of return to their homes and their land.

When the first buds of the ‘Arab spring' sprouted in Syria, there were many skeptics regarding the prospect for the country to experience peaceful political transformation. Meanwhile, ordinary Syrians rejected the baseless notion that they were somehow incapable or unworthy of the same mobilization, hopefulness and sense of possibility that was sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa. Although sporadic protests took place throughout Syria in January and February 2011, including at least one instance of a man setting himself on fire in al-Qamishli – most likely a direct echo of the iconic Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi – it was only after several attempts to organize collective “days of rage” demonstrations in February that mass mobilizations were successfully carried out simultaneously in multiple Syrian cities on 15 March 2011.

Over the ensuing months – the first four of which Samar Yazbek evocatively documents in her riveting diaries – the Syrian people sprang into action. During these heady early days, young and old Syrian men and women from across the political spectrum demanded the rights to life, liberty and dignity, building upon previously-existing civil society institutions but also, almost miraculously, organizing themselves into new kinds of affinity groups and associations, which eventually took the form of the local coordination committees. Many activists dared to dream big, envisioning their “Syria of tomorrow” – a post-authoritarian Syria where fear of arbitrary harassment, arrest or worse would melt into the stuff of memory, and some version of direct democracy might become possible.

Syria had been ruled by a single-party regime held together by durable interlocking alliances between the army, the Ba‘th Party, the state bureaucracy and – increasingly since 16 November 1970, when a clique surrounding then Defense Minister Hafiz al-Assad seized power in a relatively bloodless coup d'état or “correctionist movement” – a substantial paramilitary force encompassing some fifteen separate divisions of the security apparatus.

In the wake of his brother Bassel's untimely death in a car accident in 1994, Bashar al-Assad, an ophthalmologist then pursuing post-graduate training in London, returned to Syria. Shortly after the death of Hafiz al-Assad on 10 June 2000, Bashar somewhat awkwardly and hesitantly inherited the reins of power. Many Syrians hoped this would be a meaningful turning point in the country's political history as well as in the spheres of economy, society and culture. To a certain extent, this proved to be the case. During the first several years under Bashar al-Assad, Syria witnessed substantial economic growth, apparent political liberalization and gradual cultural opening. However, the so-called Damascus Spring of 2000– 2001 and further attempts to unify forces in the political opposition through the Damascus Declaration in late 2005 were effectively stamped out as Syria found itself traversing more and more unstable local and regional circumstances. Despite occasional proposals to shake things up including the unveiling of a five-year plan based on the principle of a Social Market Economy in 2005 and other minor adjustments, by the late 2000s it became increasingly clear that the regime would only ever condone political and economic transformation in Syria in the guise of gradual reform managed from above.

If the country was in something of an economic and political holding pattern through the late 2000s and early 2010s, Syria was plunged into a tailspin in the winter of 2011 as a growing number of people – informed by concurrent events elsewhere in the region – began to demand constitutional reform and greater public freedoms, including the abrogation of emergency rule, the removal of the constitutional clause securing the Ba‘th Party as “the leading party in state and society” and the elimination of other repressive features of the Syrian constitutional, legal and political landscape. Indeed, by the summer the Syrian regime seemed poised to roll out certain constitutional and political reforms that would defang the mobilization that was snowballing all over the country.

As of this writing, however, and more than a year later, Syrians are still struggling to win these basic demands as well as to reclaim their human dignity and some modicum of control over their political destiny. Living in Damascus with her adolescent daughter at the time, Samar Yazbek was among those brave Syrians who instinctively took action in support of the incipient uprising.
A Woman in the Crossfire
will survive as a remarkable documentation of the heady early days of the Syrian uprising, just as the “fear barrier” in Syria was crumbling and new feelings of possibility and hope sparkled in the eyes of Syrians at home and abroad. Here is a moment before it became apparent that the regime was set on exclusively pursuing a military solution that would transform any overt opposition into exogenous terrorism, a time before the conflict became irrevocably militarized. These diaries conclude just as the first defections from the Syrian armed forces started happening. It was from around that point, sometime late in the summer of 2011, that the peaceful popular uprising started to take on occasional tinges of an armed insurrection. More importantly, foreign meddling increasingly militarized the situation, from the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia to more recent attempts at intervention by the so-called “Friends of Syria.”

Many now wonder whether the uprising has been stamped out. If the Syrian uprising is quelled, it will be difficult to know where to assign the blame. Disorganization, political immaturity and clashing egos among the various segments of the opposition cannot be simply written off. The skeptical if not outright sectarianist approaches to the question of Syria by many politicians, pundits and analysts certainly did not help. The unwillingness of Western governments and security services to risk coming face to face with “the devil we don't know” also played a part. Whatever the explanation, Syria has been shaken to the core by a conflict that has cost well upwards of ten thousand lives and all but ensures a continuing bloody struggle for Syria to come.

“I don't like to talk about heroic deeds,” Yazbek writes. “Heroism is an illusion.” Despite her appealing modesty,
A Woman in the Crossfire
indelibly chronicles simple, everyday acts through which she and thousands of other Syrians disprove her statement. Regardless of how one wishes to characterize her – humanist, patriot, feminist, mother, Alawite – these are ultimately labels with which Yazbek would likely find fault, perhaps by arguing that they can so easily be applied, manipulated or torn off. This is precisely where there still may be some hope, though. The account of herself that Samar Yazbek gives us here as well as the dozens of tales recounted in her diaries offer some means of escape for those who seek to shake off the straitjacket of ascribed identities, be they religious, partisan, gendered, sectarian or otherwise. Despite her very real and visible human fallibility, frailty and fears, Yazbek is not cowed by the seductive dangers of clan, family or sectarian allegiance. Indeed, we do not need her or her interlocutors to claim to be heroic in order for us to honor their heroism. Amidst the rubble of almost unspeakable atrocities in Dar‘a, Yazbek salvages “stories of heroism that will be told for generations.” Let us hope that the day is not too far off when Syrians will benefit from real political victories as well as the freedom to revel in such legendary tales of bravery.

Translation can be a solitary enterprise; I would not have been able to bear the emotional toll of this project without the support of many people and I would like to single out a few here. Siobhan Phillips and Zaki Haidar flatter me with their generosity of friendship and critical intellectual engagement; I thank them both for reading the translation and offering tough criticism and helpful suggestions. A thousand times thank you to Jean Entine for opening Windy Hill, where I was able to hunker down and complete an early draft. I am grateful to Barbara Schwepke and Harry Hall at Haus Publishing and Yasmina Jraissati of Raya Agency for their professionalism and for offering consistent encouragement throughout this hectic process of rapid-fire translation. Lastly, and most of all, I thank Samar Yazbek for sharing her haunting personal story and for collecting these horrifying stories for posterity; she is an inspiring, courageous and virtuous asset in the nonviolent movement for change in Syria. Although nobody can predict what history has in store for the people of Syria, I dedicate my translation to all those who have given their lives and all those who continue to sacrifice in the name of building a new Syria – glimpsed in these diaries as “the Syria of the future, the free Syria that knew no fear” – where dignity, justice and happiness may flourish.

Max Weiss

Cambridge, Mass.

April 2012

SAMAR YAZBEK
is a Syrian writer and journalist, born in Jableh in 1970. She is the author of several works of fiction in Arabic and her novel,
Cinnamon
, is published by Arabia Books in English. An outspoken critic of the Assad regime, Yazbek has been deeply involved in the Syrian uprising since it broke out in March 2011. Fearing for the life of her daughter, she was eventually forced to flee her country and now lives in hiding.