The Morning They Came for Us (5 page)

‘I did not care what they did to me,' she said, ‘but to see my mother suffering . . .' The soldiers threatened to rape her mother, before telling the mother that they were going to rape the daughter.

‘This was the most terrible psychological pressure. I do not think you can imagine the pain . . .'

Another young woman in Aleppo told me she was arrested for putting up revolutionary posters. She was partially stripped, blindfolded and tied to a chair.

‘Then they said they would pass me from man to man.'

When I met Nada in a safe house in southern Turkey, she had been out of prison for some months. But she still had the reflexes of a prisoner, of someone huddling in a corner, protecting her face and her body from blows. Sudden movements made her jump; she would frequently get lost in her thoughts, and stay silent for several minutes, or well up with tears.

She was minuscule in size, thinner than when she had entered prison, which made it hard for me to believe that anyone could beat her with a stick or a whip. She looked as though she would break in two if you touched her. Her body was the size of a twelve-year-old: no breasts, no hips, shoulders hardly wide enough to carry her frame. She wore a lavender hijab and a tight red sweater. The childish clash of colours seemed to emphasize how young she looked.

When we first met, she cowered when I touched her hand in greeting. She seemed broken, vulnerable. She would not use the word rape. She told her story in staccato. But after a while of sitting quietly, her face changed into a myriad of emotions – sadness, pain, then the heavy flood of memory, and finally revulsion. She told of the day they brought in a male prisoner and forced her to watch him being sodomized. As she talks, her voice deadened, she
opens and closes her hand mechanically, clutching at the straps of her backpack. She starts to cry. It very quickly turns to a raw sobbing.

‘The things I saw . . . the things I saw . . .' she spits out. ‘It is unbearable to explain what I saw . . . 
I cannot forget . . . I saw . . . another prisoner being raped . . . a man being raped. I heard it . . . I saw it . . . Do you know what it's like to hear a man cry?
'

She abruptly gets up from the chair where she is sitting, claps a hand over her mouth, and runs into a nearby bathroom. She turns on the tap and begins to vomit.

A friend, who is with her, is also close to tears.

‘Yes, Nada was raped,' she says. ‘But she can never admit it, even to herself.'

Her friend goes to console her. She comes back. ‘She cannot even say the word aloud. When she talks of others and what they endured,' her friend says, ‘she is talking about what happened to her.'

There are no words to say to her, no more details to extract. What has happened to Nada cannot be undone. What she has seen and heard cannot be forgotten. It cannot be erased.

A few days later, I offered Nada and a friend a ride in my car to a class in Antakya. They were studying English together, taking a course that Nada hopes will eventually get her a job, and maybe a chance at a new life. When her friend talks about this, Nada offers a fleeting smile, and looks, if only for a moment, like any other young woman her age setting out into life – confident, happy, free.

Then something crosses her mind, and her eyes go grey and dead once again.

‘I changed a lot when I was in prison,' she says quietly. Then she smiles. ‘But you know, even there, I was the revolutionary.'

In between beatings and interrogation sessions, she confronted her jailers. She chastised them for small things, for prisoners' rights. It gave her a feeling of having some control.

‘I made them get plates for the other prisoners!' she says proudly. ‘I made them realize we are not just dogs to be kicked and used, but people. I made them put plastic over the broken windows.' She looks faintly triumphant. ‘Before we had nothing, then we got plates!'

Small victories for a broken spirit.

One afternoon in Antakya, a friend introduced me to Shaheeneez, a thirty-seven-year-old former teacher. She was dressed in black trousers and a long black belted coat, despite the heat. She wanted to meet somewhere anonymous. When she entered the room, a shadow seemed to walk alongside her.

After she sat, Shaheeneez explained that she is very religious. As she talked, I couldn't help but notice her headscarf, silver rings and watch, her olive, faintly pitted skin, her full nose and defined jawline. She looked strong rather than pretty.

Still, she was nervous and jittery, visibly shaking as she spoke. When I learned that it was only recently that she had got out of a Syrian jail in which she had been held for ‘several months', I began to understand why.

As she told it, in 2012 she was arrested at the airport on her way to Egypt from her home in Aleppo. She was going
to a conference. ‘I think my name was on some kind of list.' Her actual arrest was probably for political activities, but she is not sure.

After she was taken, the men who arrested her threw her into a state security prison in Damascus. There she was blindfolded and interrogated, often for hours at a time.

‘It confused me,' she said, trying to explain what it was like to be asked questions with her eyes covered. ‘I heard voices, but could not put the faces to them. It was a tactic, made to scare me more.'

The interrogation exhausted her, but she had no intention of giving away names. She was aware of what they were trying to do to get her to confess. At one point, the interrogators changed their tactics; their voices grew rougher and they began to hit her. One wallop knocked her to the floor. While she was on the ground, they tied her hands together. She remembered how the rope cut into her skin. One of the men hovered over her. Someone tugged at her clothes. She heard a door open, close.

‘That is where they abused . . .' she stumbled over the word, ‘. . . me.'

She said they kept her on the floor. They partially removed her clothes.

‘They said they would do terrible things if I did not cooperate . . .' Shaheeneez's shoulders began to shake under her dark coat.

‘They said rape . . . then I was on the floor… then I felt something hard inside me . . .'

She paused now in this room far from where it actually happened, but she was still trembling, and she moved to the
window. She opened it, turned her face towards the sunlight, her back to the room. She seemed to gulp air.

‘They raped me,' she said. She said it again. Then all the breath went out of her.

Afterwards, Shaheeneez cried for a long time while I sat opposite her. I was unable to say anything that would console her. I laid a hand on her shoulder; she flinched at the touch. The tears rolled off her face onto her collar.

She said she had been seeing a psychiatrist since the violation, but it didn't help. At the time, she had been in love. She had plans to get married and had a life mapped out in front of her.

Her doctor urged her to tell her fiancé the truth. But when she did, he left her. ‘He said he could not marry me, that he had to find a clean woman,' she said, adding that it is more than a feeling of being violated, it's one of being completely ruined.

‘But I don't think the interrogators did the actual rape. I think that man who entered the room did.' She sat on the bed, sweating and shaking. ‘I think it took them less than half an hour. And then, after they untied me and took off my blindfold, I found blood on my legs.' She did not know whether the ‘hard thing' was an object they used to penetrate her, or a penis.

She had been a virgin.

Shaheeneez seems as damaged as Nada, but is even less able to cope and continue living. While neither woman will forget what happened, Nada says she wants to move on, to find a new path forward. But Shaheeneez says she cannot forget. The rape, she says, destroyed her life.

‘If I get engaged again,' she says, ‘I will never tell him.'

A few days later, I was working inside Atma Camp, the largest internally displaced camp in Syria at that time, home to 50,000 displaced and miserable souls. I was searching for a woman called Rana, who was trying to help a group of other Syrian refugee women who had been raped. In technical terms, they are called ‘survivors'.

As far as refugee camps go, Atma was well organized. As far as living goes, it was hellish.

When I found the camp doctor – a young man working in the camp who spoke halting English – and told him what I was investigating, he looked anguished. I had not used the word rape, only ‘sexual violence'.

‘In Syria, the innocent people suffer the most,' he responded, finally. ‘Do you really find women who have been touched? For us, this is the worst thing to do to the men – because they are our women.'

We climbed down a hill, passing the water stations that had been set up as showers and sinks. Only a dozen water stations for hundreds and hundreds of people.

We then realized that a tiny boy was following us. He looked like an ordinary kid, about the age of my own nine-year-old, hiding his face behind a blue hoodie. He was wearing fake G-star jeans.

But then I saw his face: it was completely burnt. His mouth appeared to be nothing more than a hole and his nose was practically non-existent. His ears were flaps of skin, which had been stretched tight into pink crevasses, across his skull.

I asked him his name. It was Abdullah and he told me he was eleven years old.

Even with the doctor as my guide, I didn't find the raped women in Atma. They had been moved. But later, I saw Abdullah again, standing in front of a refugee tent. It was his home.

His parents invited me inside; they told me how he was injured at home in the city of Hama last October.

It was a clear day: good weather for bombing. When the bombs came that day, Abdullah was playing on his computer. It was always so difficult to keep the children occupied inside, his mother says. Hearing the crash of bombs, Abdullah – in his fear – ran outside.

He got the full impact of the bomb that landed near his house.

‘I heard the worst thing in the world that day of the bombing,' the father said. ‘The sound of my own son's screams of pain.'

He looked at Abdullah, who stared back at him with confusion.

Then he said something that both Nada and Shaheeneez also said to me – the mantra their jailers tormented them with. It is the battle cry of the activists, the first demonstrators in Daraa, filtering down to all the Syrian cities, the provinces, and villages: We Want Freedom.

Abdullah's father turned towards his son's raw face. He asked: ‘So is this freedom?'

3

Ma'loula and Damascus – June–November 2012

I was in Ma'loula, watching the morning prayers of a group of solemn nuns, a quiet and reflective moment, when I heard about the car bombs back in Damascus. Ma'loula is an ancient mountaintop town dug into a cliff, renowned for its spiritual healing qualities and restorative air. It was a place I felt drawn to: something of an oasis of tolerance. The residents were mainly Christian – it is one of the last places where Western Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ, is still spoken – and they vowed at the beginning of the Syrian conflict not to succumb to sectarianism and be dragged into the chaos.

Their determination was all the more remarkable given the town's location. It lies on the main road at an equal distance between Homs and Damascus. It was a defiant place, but their defiance reflected a bitter history.

Ma'loula was besieged during the Great Syrian Revolt in 1925, when rebel Druze, Christians and Muslims tried to throw off the colonial oppression of France. The history of that insurrection lingers. Many older residents were weaned on stories of women and children hiding in the caves of
the three mountains that surround the town, to escape atrocities.

The Christians are largely from the Greek Catholic and Antiochian Orthodox offshoots; the Muslims are Sunnis. But most people would not classify themselves by religion, preferring to say simply, ‘I am from Ma'loula.'

That morning, I had awoken early in Damascus and drove with my friend, Maryam, a Sunni from Damascus, to Ma'loula, about an hour away. We left our car, and began to walk up and down the streets. There was serenity in the shaded courtyards edged with olive and poplar trees that calmed me after the chaos and noise of Damascus. Maryam described how she had come as a small girl, and watched the nuns go about their daily tasks in a quiet and humble way, making apricot jam, or polishing the candlesticks in the chapel.

Maryam had a friend, the Sunni imam of the town, Mahmoud Diab. She knocked at his door with some hesitation and asked if we could come inside for tea, and to talk to him. He opened the door, asking us to put on our headscarves, and led us to chairs under the flowering trees. Even in his courtyard, there was still a fading poster of Assad attached to the wall. ‘Do you still support him?' I asked.

Diab looked surprised. ‘Of course,' he said.

We sat quietly for a few moments waiting for our tea. He pointed out the sounds of the birds. I asked him how Ma'loula remained so peaceful.

‘Early on in this war, I met with the main religious leaders in the community: the bishop and the mother superior of the main convent,' Diab said. ‘We decided that even if
the mountains around us were exploding with fighting, we would not go to war.'

Diab had not been born and raised in Ma'loula, but was educated here, married here. He was, at that time, also in the Syrian Parliament. He was a Sunni, he said, but that did not mean he wanted his city to be torn to bits.

‘It's a sectarian war, in politics it's another name,' he said with a shrug. ‘But the fact is, there is no war here in Ma'loula. Here, we all know each other.'

Tolerance had been a tradition in Ma'loula since St Takla – the daughter of a pagan prince, an early disciple of St Paul, and possibly even his wife – had fled to these mountains in the first century AD. She was escaping from soldiers sent by her father, who threatened to kill her for her religious beliefs.