The Morning They Came for Us (11 page)

‘Why?'

Maryam shrugged. ‘No reason. I can't answer.'

One side says this, the other says that. The town also shifted hands several times. From August 2012, government forces kept the town until November 2012, when another battle of Darayya played out. First the rebels pushed back, then, according to
Al Watan
newspaper – which is close to the government – on 20 December, after thirty days of siege, the army penetrated the last areas of the city centre that the rebels held.
Al Watan
claimed most of the fighters were foreigners, playing into the narrative that jihadis were taking over Syria. The next day they launched a massive attack against the city, but rebels reported they met a strong resistance from Darayya. The government remained in control and AFP reported that in August Assad visited the ‘ex-rebel bastion', now mainly under government control, his first known visit outside the capital since March 2012.

By December 2013, government forces were hitting the town with barrel bombs. From 25 to 31 January 2014, as United Nations representatives met with opposition and government officials in Switzerland for the Geneva II ‘talks', the regime continued to bomb Darayya mercilessly.
¹⁰

Reporters asked Walid Muallem, the Syrian Foreign Minister, at the Geneva talks why his government continued to use barrel bombs. Muallem replied: ‘I want to give you a simple response. Do you want [us] to defend our people by sending SMS messages?'

The film mentioned in note 10, made by a local cameraman, opens with the words: ‘Once upon a time: a few days ago. In a land far, far away: Syria.'

By April 2014, government reporters claimed Darayya was mainly being fought for by foreign rebels. The grey plumes of dusty smoke from the bombs could be seen from the highway. When the smoke cleared, there was nothing left behind but skeletons of buildings, of people, of what was once a town.

Maryam never went back.

My government visas were revoked a few months after I entered Darayya ‘illegally'.

As of March 2015, my requests to return to Syria ‘legally' on the government side of the war were met with silence, threats or excuses from the regime.

Once, a Syrian friend went to the Ministry of Information on my behalf to plead my case; she was told that if she wanted to ‘save my ass from getting thrown in a Syrian jail' then she should tell me never to come back to Syria.

6

Zabadani – Saturday 8 September 2012

By the autumn of 2012, in the wake of Darayya, the evolving skirmishes in Syria had become a full-blown war. The denial that had existed a few weeks before among a certain class in Damascus, the bubble of parties, the insouciant chatter, the seductive evenings at the opera, were gone. That bubble had burst. Four men in Assad's closest circle had been assassinated, probably with the help of FSA members who had infiltrated the government. People were talking about the fall of Damascus. There was heavy fighting in other parts of Syria – in Idlib, in Aleppo, and in the suburbs not far from the capital. If Damascus fell, the country fell.

A Syrian reporter I met through friends invited me to her house, then texted me emphatically to arrive only after dark, and to take the stairs, not the lift, to avoid people seeing me.

When I arrived, the woman's face was darkened with worry. The reporter, who we will call Renda, had been famous in the 1990s. She was a well-known commentator and politically considered herself ‘pro-Assad, but liberal'. ‘I say what I think,' she had told me. ‘I am outspoken.' She had initially taken a strong stand behind Assad and against the rebels. Now she was not so sure. She wanted to meet me to see if I would
take her to Homs so that she could see the destruction for herself.

Renda quickly ushered me inside her small, modern apartment and locked the door behind her. ‘I don't want to let the neighbours see you here,' she said. ‘I've been getting all kinds of threatening emails for the past few days. And someone keeps calling me and hanging up when I answer.' She shrugged. ‘It's the Mukhabarat. What are they going to do? They want to frighten me.'

We sat and drank green tea and she told me that she had only felt in the past two weeks that her world was spinning out of control, that a real war had come to Syria, that perhaps she had judged the opposition wrongly. She had begun to question what was happening in Homs, in Aleppo. Even Darayya, which she did not really believe . . . but …

‘Only now? You only realize it now?'

Renda nodded. She clutched her hands in her lap. ‘It's not my fault – who wants to see their country turning to war? You avoid it if you can, you avoid thinking about it. You don't want to believe it.' But now, she said, 2,000 people had fled the capital alone. Refugees were flooding the Turkish, Jordanian and Lebanese borders. The winter was going to be harsh. ‘If Syrians go to Lebanon as refugees, the Lebanese will not welcome them entirely,' she added. ‘Look at the situation of the Palestinians there.'

She had no way of knowing, but in two years' time, more than four million Syrians would be refugees, crossing the borders and fleeing to neighbouring Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Egypt. The luckier ones – or maybe not so lucky, as the migrant crisis in the late summer of 2015 demonstrated – got
to Europe in boats, with the help of smugglers, or on foot. There would also be nine million displaced people inside Syria by 2015. By the end of the summer of 2013, Renda would also close up her small apartment and leave for Beirut, going by road with a few suitcases, planning to stay for a few weeks; but she would stay for months, then eventually – without being aware of time passing – she imagined she would be there for years.

One morning, Maryam and I had permission to go to visit her relatives in Homs, which was divided into government-held and rebel-held areas. Maryam's family were Sunnis, but they were on the government side, at least geographically, if not philosophically. We took her mother, Rosa, along with us, and put her in the front seat. I put on my white headscarf, which matched Maryam's and Rosa's, and my big dark glasses. Rosa assured me I looked Syrian. At every checkpoint, Syrian government soldiers did not even bother to look in the back seat and see me, a foreigner.

‘Go ahead, grandma,' they said to Rosa, and let us pass. She chastised a few of them (‘what would your mother say about your bad manners?'), and when we were held at one particular checkpoint for several hours, inside Homs, she began to lecture them about their ‘rudeness to adults'.

‘Do you really think I want to be here,
Teta
?' he asked her incredulously. ‘Do you think I want to be a soldier?' They showed us around the house they had confiscated from a Sunni family and were now living in. A few bedrooms with dirty sheets, where soldiers with muddy boots were lounging, sitting with a teakettle. There was no phone line to their headquarters, and they did not want to let us go. They sat
talking to Rosa for hours, about their families, their holidays, their children, their schooling.

Eventually, they let us go. ‘They're not bad boys,' said Rosa, who had been the wife of a successful and wealthy Damascus businessman. ‘Slightly ill-brought up, but not bad boys. They are provincial, it's not their fault.'

Maryam's family, which included mainly elderly aunts and an uncle, made us an elaborate lunch of many courses. It was indulgent and embarrassed me because I knew that they were struggling to get food. ‘Just be quiet and eat,' Maryam whispered, passing a plate. ‘You'll insult them if you refuse, so say nothing.'

There was a sort of thick lentil soup, rice, roasted chicken, there were piles of bread, there was even tinned fruit. Everyone ate quietly as we heard shelling coming from a nearby government base. Maryam had asked me emphatically not to talk politics with her family. ‘They have lived for so long under the Assad regime that they are frightened of talking to outsiders,' she said. ‘So don't ask, don't put them in danger.' So we talked about classical music, the opera and the British Museum. One of her cousins had been imprisoned for years in Hama during the crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1980s; then he went to live in Aleppo. Maryam had briefed me beforehand not to talk about it. ‘He still has nightmares from those years in prison,' she said. ‘We choose not to talk about it. And since people now suspect radical jihadis are entering the country, he has to be very careful.'

One of the older aunts, Rosa's sister, a lady with a soft gentle face, got up from the table and changed into a
nightdress. She said she was lying down to take a nap. Rosa picked up her coffee cup and said she would join her, in an adjoining bedroom. The two elegant, elderly ladies then left the room, before quickly running back to the table a few moments later when a particularly heavy bomb landed somewhere nearby.

‘This is the background music of our lives,' the uncle said ‘since we are talking about Bach at lunchtime.' The relatives did not want their neighbours to see foreigners staying with them, so as the day ended Maryam and I left Rosa, crossed town and stayed in a darkened hotel where the secret police called me to their table and questioned me at length about why I was there. I pulled out my note of permission from Damascus, but they still held me for an hour, while Maryam – who was partially deaf and so spoke louder than most people, her shrill voice rising to a high pitch when she was angry – argued with them to let me go. Eventually, they did. We slept that night to the accompaniment of heavy shelling.

The next morning, we left Rosa, who had not slept well and was irritated with the aunts over some small family matter, and headed towards Latakia, in the Alawite heartland. We wanted to see the mausoleum of Hafez al-Assad, the father of Bashar, who had been president from 1971 until his death in 2000. We passed checkpoint after checkpoint until we got closer to Qardaha, the burial site. There were stone lions everywhere; Assad means
lion
in Arabic and is the name Bashar's grandfather had adopted as a family name.

Maryam was suddenly very conscious of her white hijab. ‘We are in the land of Alawites now,' she said when we stopped at a café overlooking one of the austere mountains
surrounding Latakia. She picked up her can of Pepsi. ‘I feel uncomfortable.'

‘But you're Syrian. Your family has a home nearby.'

‘I don't feel Syrian here,' she said. ‘This is Alawite country.' I had never heard Maryam mention sectarian divides before, and she gave me an abridged history of the Alawites.‘They feel different. They
are
different.'

The Alawites are a minority religious branch of Shia Muslims that represent about 12 per cent of the Syrian population. The core of Alawite belief differs from mainstream Islam; for this alternative belief, the Sunni rulers of the area had historically persecuted Alawites. But, during the period of French rule in the interwar years, an Alawite state was carved out in modern-day Latakia, meant to keep Alawites safe from persecution. The French considered the Alawites and Druze to be the only ‘warlike races' in the mandate territory, for which reason the Alawites were largely recruited into the French forces, and still compose a large section of the modern Syrian army (indeed, this is how Hafez al-Assad rose to power). But despite the Alawites' prominence in the armed forces, the majority of this group worked as labourers for Sunni landowners, a fact that had fostered the animosity between these groups.

When the waiter came to take our order, Maryam motioned to me to be quiet. ‘It's a good thing Mama is not here,' she muttered when the waiter went away.

At the grandiose Assad family mausoleum, the guards – young men in sombre, well-cut blue suits – were friendly. They were surprised to see a foreigner and served me tea before escorting me inside to the green marble-covered
graves where Hafez and two of his sons were buried. They gave me his condensed biography – how he had been the first Alawite to go to high school, how the Alawites had been subjugated by the French before Syrian independence. As they spoke, pouring more tea, the air heavy with the scent of roses and incense, I looked at an empty corner of the mausoleum and wondered if the current president, Bashar, would soon find his place there as well.

‘We may never see this again,' Maryam said as we left, passing another lion. ‘If the regime crumbles, the opposition will tear this place down to the ground.' I turned around to fix it, visually, in my mind, like taking a Polaroid. In the dying days of Saddam Hussein's regime, I had done the same in Iraq. I had obtained permission from an equally restrictive Ministry of Information to drive from Basra to Mosul, visiting ancient monuments and archaeological ruins, which I knew, with a horrible sense of political foreboding, I would never again see in my lifetime.

We drove out of the village, and headed into the Jibal al-Alawiyin mountains, stopping to eat at a roadside restaurant. A river rushed below us, as the blue-eyed waiter – many Arabs of the Levant have blue eyes, but particularly Alawites – took a seat at the table with us. Talking to Maryam, he said he had moved to Latakia when he was a child. As an Alawite, he told us that he constantly felt marginalized: even as part of the minority that controlled the country.

When he left the table, Maryam said, ‘He feels marginalized? Seventy-four per cent of the country is Sunni Muslims, but most of the government jobs and postings are occupied by Alawites.'

The waiter came back with bottles of mineral water.

‘The Europeans don't understand us,' the waiter complained. ‘Everyone takes the side of the rebels. But as Syrians – all of us – we are all losing so much.'

Two men at the next table were listening to us. They were Alawite businessmen, dressed in suits, smoking cigarettes. They were down from Damascus for work, and they were drinking
rakia
, a form of brandy made with aniseed, a drink that is also popular in Turkey and the Balkans.