The Morning They Came for Us (9 page)

They tore into the house like a swarm of bees. Hussein thinks there were about thirty of them. They immediately shot Hussein in the shoulder and hand to disable him. He was shocked, but he remembered the excruciating pain. He held up his deformed fingers, and touched the angry red circle on his shoulder blade. Once he was shot, the impact of the bullet made Hussein reel backwards, and he ended up lying next to his dying brother, looking him straight in the eye.

‘I was watching the life go out of him,' he said quietly.

The men then picked him and his brother up by their hands and feet, and carried them – along with several dozen men from the neighbourhood – into a truck, throwing them inside, one on top of the other. They said they were going to use them as human shields. Some of the men in the truck were already dead; many were badly beaten and lay groaning
in agony. Some were shot, others looked as if they had been beaten with clubs or rods.

‘One guard pulled a man up by his ear and said, “Say Bashar al-Assad is your God.” The man replied “I have no God but God,” and the guard shot him and tossed him in the pile of bodies. The guard looked up at the others, defiantly. “Assad is your God!”'

Hussein was bleeding, but his brother was closer to death. They took the men in the truck to a military hospital, but not to treat them. Hussein knew what the hospital was – a place of torture, not a place of healing. The minute they closed the doors, the men who had kidnapped them began to brutally beat Hussein with sticks made of plastic and wood.

Hussein's brother was tossed in an underground room that served as a morgue. He died alone, Hussein reckons, quietly suffocating or drowning in his own blood. This was the same room in which, from then on, Hussein was thrown every night to sleep after he was tortured: on top of the dead bodies.

But he never slept, of course, lying on top of mostly corpses. Some of them were not yet dead. Hussein described how he would lie awake, listening to people breathing their last breaths. One night they tossed him on top of a body and when he turned his head, he saw his dead brother.

On his first day in captivity, Hussein's torturers, who were Syrians, introduced themselves as doctors. There were about four of them, and together they brought him into a room that appeared to be used for operations.

‘Are you a fighter?'

‘No, I'm a student.'

‘Are you a fighter?'

He insisted: ‘I'm a student. A law student.'

They held his penis and took a blade and said, ‘OK, cut it off.'

They pressed the blade into his flesh, enough to draw blood; they then began leaning painfully on his bladder, forcing him to urinate.

‘Why do you want to kill me?' Hussein asked, terrified and in pain.

‘Because your people are killing us,' he was told.

Then they electrocuted him. This went on for three days. Beatings, burnings, cuttings. Then, again, beatings, burnings, cuttings. The worst, he says, was ‘the cutting'.

‘They came for me. I lay down on a table and closed my eyes. I saw them cut my gut with a scalpel. I felt nothing because I think I was still in shock. Then they lifted something out of my body – I felt pulling. It was my intestine. They stretched it. They held it in their hands and laid it on the outside of my body. They made jokes about how much the rebels ate, how much food was inside my intestines. Then they sewed me back up, but in a rough way so that there was skin and blood everywhere.'

Hussein told me his stomach was ‘open' for two days before they properly stitched the wound closed.

The next day the torturers – who must have had medical knowledge – punctured Hussein's lung. They took a long plastic tube and cut an incision that runs from under his nipple to the middle of his back. They inserted what he described as a small plastic suction tube.

‘I felt the air go out of my lung,' he said quietly. ‘My right lung had collapsed. I could not breathe.'
^*

But of all the physical misery he suffered, he said the worst for him was the psychological torture – the feeling that he would never get justice, that he was being punished for something that he did not do. Because Hussein was a student of human rights law, he said he felt, above all, betrayed.

‘By whom?' I asked.

By Syria, by Syrians, by his government. By his own people, who brought violence to what had started, in March 2011, as a peaceful protest for democracy.

‘We have broken our country,' he said.

On and off during the days Hussein was tortured, he was hung upside down, sometimes for up to five hours. The story of his rescue is so unlikely it is almost unbelievable, and yet I met him, alive, broken but healing, in a hospital ward in northern Lebanon, several months after the event.

He went back in his head to those days of torture. He told me how he was ‘used as a punching bag by nearly everyone that walked by as a way of having fun'. On the fifth day, when it was quiet, a doctor suddenly knelt before him.

‘I am on the side of President Assad, a pro-regime doctor,' he said quietly to Hussein. ‘My job is to make sure that you are still alive and can sustain more torture. But I can't watch this any more.' The doctor touched Hussein's wrist, taking his pulse.

‘Your heart has technically stopped twice, once for ten seconds and once for fifteen.' The doctor leaned forward and opened a notebook. He did not look in Hussein's eyes.

‘I am going to close your file and write that on the second attempt to revive you, I failed. Do you understand what I am saying? You are dead.'

He repeated it slowly. ‘Do you understand what I am saying?
You are dead.
The records show that you died.'

As the doctor walked away, he said, ‘If Allah intends you to live, you will find a way to get out of here.' The doctor looked at Hussein for a long moment, finally met his eyes, then was gone.

It took several minutes for Hussein to understand what the doctor meant. But the doctor ordered Hussein to be taken down from his ropes; someone lifted him, and then he was tossed back into the morgue room.

After an hour amongst the dead, in pain so brutal that he could think of nothing but the blood pumping through his ears, a female nurse came into the room.

She leaned down and whispered to Hussein that she had been paid by the Free Syrian Army to bring out any men who were still alive in this room. She told him to follow her instructions carefully: she would give him a Syrian government uniform, and a number, which he must memorize. She made him say it twice.

‘Do you understand?' she said quietly. ‘You have to do exactly as I say if you want to live.'

Hussein mumbled that he could stand no more, so she lifted his shirt and gave him an injection of painkiller. Then, she gently lifted him up from the bodies, and helped him put on the uniform of a government soldier.

‘Hurry,' she said.

With his arm around the nurse for support, they walked out of the courtyard of the military hospital. It took twenty minutes to walk only a few feet; but later Hussein said it felt like days, walking out of that darkness. A guard asked him for his serial number. He gave the number the nurse had rehearsed with him while she nervously looked on.

On the other side of the gate, a car was waiting. He got in. It was someone sent by the Free Syrian Army. They opened the door and the nurse helped him in and turned away, without looking back. He never saw her again.

‘Will anyone be jailed for what they did?' he asked. ‘Will they get punished?'

I thought about it, thought about the war criminals in Bosnia, in Sierra Leone, in other wars, still at large.

I told him that I didn't know.

*
I believe Hussein's story entirely. But I am a journalist, and the need to be objective meant that I wanted to check this story from all sides. I asked a Syrian surgeon now living in the United States (originally from Damascus, Christian Orthodox) to read this section. He did so, and he questioned the medical credibility of this account, suggesting it might have been a procedure undertaken to cure the interviewee, but without anesthetic (which is an unfortunate necessity in a war-torn country lacking basic resources). He believes it to be ‘technically impossible', at least to the extent described above, but agrees the other torture methods are well documented and accurately described. However, the doctor has not lived inside Syria for some time and was not altogether familiar with the torture used under the Assad regime. This account was also checked with researchers at Human Rights Watch who had worked extensively inside Syria, and who found that, unfortunately, it could be entirely credible.

5

Darayya – Saturday 25 August 2012

The mechanic searched for his family for three days. He combed through destroyed buildings, checked under piles of rubble. He listened for sounds of someone calling out for help, someone who might be buried. He listened for anything. He listened for the voice of his father.

Before the war, he fixed cars. Now the sight in his right eye was gone, lost during the battle in Darayya – he thought the shrapnel that lodged in his eye came either from a helicopter bomb or possibly from a grenade. He wasn't sure. Blinded in one eye, he moved through the rubble like a ghost.

‘Baba!' he called out until his voice grew hoarse.

He kept searching at night, even when it was too dangerous to be on the broken streets. There weren't many people left in Darayya, and he was afraid of the ones who were.

On the third day of searching, he found his father's body, on a farm on a road leading out of town. It was only luck that led him to take that road, and he had begun to feel that the searching was in vain. The old man was lying in the farmhouse kitchen, and there were three other bodies, beginning to decay.

They were boys, between the ages of sixteen and twenty. He closed their eyes and went back to find a car he could use to bring their bodies back to town.

He was grief-stricken, when telling me this story.

‘Can you tell me why they would kill an old man?' he asked, bent over crying. ‘An old man? He can't fight any more.'

The dead man's son lit a cigarette. He searched carefully for his words. ‘This is not my Syria. When I see the sorrow that happens in our towns, all I think is – this is not my Syria.'

The people I later met spoke of the killing sprees that had happened on some of the hottest days of the year in the poor Sunni community of Darayya. They remembered ‘intense shelling from helicopters with mounted machine-guns', ‘mortars from a government military airport near the Mezzeh neighbourhood', and ‘snipers in buildings' north of the city.

They spoke of soldiers moving from house to house, of informers pointing out where the activists lived; they spoke of bodies lying in the street; of groups of civilians hiding underground only to be found, lined up and summarily executed. The UK's Foreign Office Minister for the Middle East, Alistair Burt, called it ‘an atrocity of a new scale, requiring unequivocal condemnation from the international community'.

Darayya, a suburb seven kilometres south of Damascus, was once known for its handmade wooden furniture. It also featured in another version of the St Paul legend. Darayya
is allegedly the place where Saul had a vision of God, and became a believer. From Darayya, the enlightened man began the journey to Damascus.

But there was no miraculous vision here in August 2012, when more than 300 people, including women and children, were killed – the town was ‘cleansed'.

I went there a few days after it happened. I was driven by a Sunni resident, Maryam, and we passed easily through the government military checkpoints manned by young soldiers with stubble, holding Kalashnikovs. I wore a white headscarf like Maryam, and dark sunglasses – my face was hardly visible. The soldiers, thinking we were both locals, casually waved us through. As we drove through the last checkpoint, Maryam told me about one of Darayya's most famous heroes: a twenty-six-year-old named Ghaith Matar.

Matar was a protester, but he wanted ‘nothing but peace', Maryam said. He used to bring government soldiers Damascus roses and bottled water during demonstrations. ‘That was before the demonstrators got met by bullets,' she said.

Matar was killed in September 2011, one year before the alleged Darayya massacre, leaving behind a twenty-year-old pregnant widow. There are rumours that he was tortured before being killed – that his throat was cut out.

The killings in Darayya came eighteen months into the war. If the figures for the dead were as high as people told us, if the civilians were really murdered in basements and shelters, laid out in the courtyard of the Abu Suleiman
al-Darani Mosque, or dumped in the cemetery in the centre of town – it would be the single largest atrocity of the Syrian war.

Maryam's family came from Darayya, but they had been at their holiday home near the coast when the massacre took place between 23 and 25 August. ‘It's a good thing Mama wanted to go down to the sea,' she said, taking in the destruction – the bombed-out tailor's and greengrocer's shops, the blocks of flats with their top floors blown off, the rank trash piles on corners, uncollected. There was the unmistakable smell of rotting corpses inside houses.

It was clear, despite her sangfroid, that Maryam was shocked. She had not yet decided if she supported the government or the rebels. She wanted to see for herself what had happened. She said, ‘I am an open-minded woman.' Three months earlier, during the Houla massacre,
⁴
Maryam told me adamantly that she did not believe the reports that hundreds were dead.

Now, the reports were saying as many as 500 people were killed in Darayya, a town where her family had had an apartment for years, where she bought pine-scented chairs, a chest of drawers that she described to me in great detail: ‘The craftsmanship, you cannot believe . . .'