A Woman in the Crossfire (19 page)

“On Thursday, 24 March,” the young man couldn't stop talking, as if pus was oozing out of his heart, “people were tallying up all the martyrs and dressing others' wounds. The mosque was occupied and everyone was in a state of shock and disbelief. About 100,000 shirtless barefoot men came out and the security forces and the army opened fire on them. They fled inside the houses. People opened up their homes and hid them. We discovered a large number of people had gone missing, and to this day we still don't know whether they're dead or incarcerated. Despite all the death and imprisonment people were brave. My father said, ‘I'm willing to sacrifice the three of you as martyrs.' Then Bouthaina Shaaban made a speech wishing the people well. There was a wedding where people held up pictures of the president, these were security and Ba‘thists and party members who were bussed in to show their support for the president. The people mourning their children were incensed by these weddings. Inside the mosque, after security had pulled out, everything was ruined, and there were writings in Persian. I saw security forces with scruffy beards, which was unlike the security forces we knew. Some people later said that one of the two snipers they captured didn't even speak Arabic. On that day, 24 March, the crowds chanted,
The People Want to Topple the Regime!

“On 25 March, the people congregated in big numbers at the al-Umari Mosque for the martyrs to be buried. There were huge crowds, more than 200,000 people. The people intended to go and assemble in Governor's Square. We had been promised we wouldn't be harassed by anyone from the security or the army, Bouthaina Shaaban herself said they wouldn't shoot at demonstrators. The people crowded together and shouted in unison:
The People Want to Topple the Regime!
They also yelled:
Hey Hey Maher you Cowardly Man, Send Your Dogs Down to the Golan!
During the demonstration we got news of a massacre in al-Sanamayn where more than twenty people were killed, and when it was confirmed, the people went mad. They jumped up and down on pictures of the president and tore them up, they attacked a statue of the president, pounding it and shaking it violently. There was heavy gunfire coming from the governor's mansion. There were snipers. In that moment women stood side by side with men, and when the heavy gunfire broke out the people froze. They stayed there until they brought down the statue and set it on fire. The shooting continued for two hours. People attacked the governor's house to bring down the snipers who were up there killing demonstrators, then they set the governor's house on fire and the blaze lasted for hours. When it was all over the people knew the punishment was going to be severe but they stayed there anyway, burning tires outside the governor's mansion.

“Thursday, 31 March: Local representatives talked with the people of Dar‘a about attending a meeting with the president. 25 notable figures went. Hisham Bakhtiar had chosen fifteen, and the people selected ten, but before going out to meet with the president the women told those ten, “When you go out to represent us, their blood is on your hands.” Among the demands made by the fifteen men who were collaborating with the security forces was the return of the women wearing
niqabs
. The people of Dar‘a hadn't asked for that, and later on this demand was shelved. They met the president and were back in the afternoon. We heard the ten men selected by the people courteously greeted the president. When Dr. Hisham al-Muhaymid, whose brother Ali al-Muhaymid was martyred in the events, saw the president, he rapped on his own chest and told him, ‘We were the ones who tore up pictures of you and knocked over the statue, because you killed my brother.' According to our sources, the president was diplomatic and a polite and sympathetic speaker, telling Dr. Hisham he was prepared to do whatever they wanted. They had brought pictures and CDs and videos with them, and after making the president watch everything, he told them he had no idea this was happening and promised to withdraw the security and the army, saying he would do whatever they wished. The army really did withdraw, and the prisoners and the children were released. But that was just another trap set by the president, who we learned later on had actually ordered them to open fire in the first place.”

He falls silent, and my head is still buried in my notebook. I want to tell him,
That's right, it was the president and his family and his gang who gave the orders to open fire, and everything else was just a charade they acted out in front of the Dar‘a delegation
, but I keep silent and just listen to what he has to say:

“Friday, 1 April. We felt like this was a victory, everyone from the villages came to Dar‘a. Even people from Damascus came. We headed out from the suburbs for the city centre. There wasn't a single security agent to be seen, there must have been 700,000 of us, huge numbers. Even though it was very hot that day, people stayed out in the squares, in three squares and everyone was chanting:
The People Want to Topple the Regime!
People started protecting government buildings so there wouldn't be any vandalism. There weren't even any traffic police. People were picking up trash and cleaning the streets, protecting the town. Civil revolt was declared and we demonstrated there for two weeks without any security present. Then, on the Friday of Steadfastness, as people came out of the al-Umari Mosque and headed for the station, shots were fired and a lot of people got killed.

There's the story of Musa Jamal Abu Zayd, who was wounded in the leg so people took him to the al-Umari Mosque where they had set up a clinic. Everyone was helping each other. Even though Jamal had been shot in the leg he refused to leave the demonstration. He seemed to have inhaled a lot of tear gas. I think he may have been poisoned, so he was taken to the clinic inside the mosque again. The doctors chided him because he couldn't handle that situation in his condition, but he refused to stay away from the people and the demonstration. When he went back out, a sniper shot him in the neck and he died. Twenty people were killed and the whole time the security forces were killing people as they walked through the streets and the alleyways. One of my friends was killed when they indiscriminately opened fire. They were barbarians. Then there's the story of Muhammad Ahmad al-Radi, a college student studying library sciences who was born in 1986. He was leaving his fianc.e's house, which was near the blood bank and also happened to be on the street where the massacre took place. He saw the wounded in the street and went out to help care for people and take pictures. With nothing but a rock in his hand to defend himself, he was shot in the stomach. He fell down on his front but the people weren't able to save him right away. The security forces got to him first, and made an example of his corpse. By the time the security forces were done with him, his head had been separated from his body. People came over to take him away for treatment but it was too late. His brain slid out of his head right there in front of them.

“On 25 April they moved into Dar‘a. The invasion started at night. People could sense the danger and there were rumours saying that the security forces were going to attack. People started setting up checkpoints and organizing committees to protect the city. We didn't know they were going to enter Dar‘a with tanks. They moved in at dawn with eight tanks. Electricity and landlines and mobile phones were cut off. They pounded the city with gunfire for seventeen hours, destroying the pumping stations that brought water from Mzairib and shooting up the water storage tanks before the army tanks moved into the neighbourhoods. There were 75,000 soldiers in Dar‘a, out of the 200,000 in the entire Syrian army. They invaded Dar‘a along with saboteurs from Dar‘a whose names we found out later on. That was in downtown Dar‘a. Meanwhile they hadn't moved into the suburbs of Dar‘a yet. They broke in and searched the houses, detaining all the young men between the ages of fifteen and forty and all the homeowners who refused to let snipers up on their rooftops; they detained a lot of people, maybe as many as ten thousand. There were a whole lot more names of wanted people and the list just continued to grow. The charge was demonstrating and chanting slogans. The houses in Dar‘a were pockmarked with bullet holes and most of the houses had been sprayed with gunfire inside and out. Then they demolished them in an appallingly savage way, eight days after entering the city. People fled from entire neighbourhoods where snipers were up on the rooftops shooting at anything that moved. During the siege it became difficult to bury the bodies and corpses decomposed. There was one morgue in al-Manshiyya and another in al-Nababta Square, two morgues full of bodies. People carried weapons to protect the morgues so that the security forces wouldn't be able to steal the bodies of their loved ones. After the security forces withdrew, the tanks came back four hours later and started shelling the houses. They opened fire on the houses that were next to the morgues.”

The young man's testimony stops here. I had hoped to meet him once more, so that he could tell me how the people survived the siege and what happened afterward, but the guy never came back. I asked around about him and found out that he's sick and that ever since he got out of prison he suffered from infections resulting from the torture he had been subjected to.

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

I sit down to write about the suicide of a soldier in Jisr al-Shughur.

The soldiers running sluggishly through the neighbourhoods could hear the sound of their own hearts beating and the heavy rumbling of their stomachs. A town resident that dashed over to try to help despite all the shooting and death noticed the seared scar line running along one soldier's cheek. The soldiers hurried on as the city was emptied of its inhabitants; many inhabitants of Jisr al-Shughur fled after the demonstrations were so violently repressed by the army, the security forces and the
shabbiha
. This came on the heels of many other incidents where soldiers and officers defected from the army and refused to follow orders. This forced the security forces and the
shabbiha
themselves to open fire on the unarmed people, those who had come out at the beginning of the demonstrations with olive branches and called for the fall of the regime. The response was as violent as it had been in other cities, killing, sniping and machine gunfire. But Jisr al-Shughur was different because people got their hands on weapons and tanks; we still don't know how many they were. Plus the army defected there. The city had to be taught a lesson, obliterated. The residents fled and became refugees in Turkey. Helicopters hovered overhead. There were orders to kill people and break into their homes, to set fire to the farms and agricultural land and to drain the water tanks – put simply, there was a scorched earth policy that was to be applied to the rebellious city. I was tracking the news, as I had done ever since the beginning of the uprising, and listening to the stories, writing them down and then finishing it all off with a cigarette and overflowing tears. This story in particular held my attention for a long time. I heard it from a frightened officer who didn't know whether he should have been talking to me but he told me anyway, crying:

“Nobody had any way out, everyone simply went there to die.”

I return to the story of the soldiers:

Four soldiers who got orders to open fire and to break into a house in one particular neighbourhood were creeping along. None of them asked each other: Why are we moving so slowly? Over the past few days they had seen more than enough bloodshed and not a single one of them was ready to invade those narrow alleyways in the heart of Jamid and Ayn Maghmada, because those they were being asked to kill were their own people. Still, orders are orders. One of them said they had to carry out the orders without hesitation, that it was their job to protect the homeland and the people and they had to rid the people of the armed gangs.

One, who had been silent, looked over, his helmet glinting in the sun and told him, as the crying man later told me:

“But which armed gangs? I haven't seen a single gang, they're all people just like us…”

He stood there silently, his beard was quivering. The other responded, and he would come to regret saying this, later telling his commanding officer he would never forgive himself for what he said, “You coward… march!”

The soldiers marched forward. Those soldiers also had sweethearts, mothers and siblings, those soldiers also had moments of fear, when their hearts got weak and heaved in pain, those soldiers also cried at night and laughed like children. Those soldiers were children themselves once, and dreamed of having children of their own. But now they had to follow orders. The army leadership told them they had to break into the house in question and kill whoever was inside because it was a headquarters for the armed gangs. One of them veered off course and entered a nearby building that wasn't their target. Two others followed him surreptitiously. His eyes were closed. He took off his helmet and looked at his comrades with alarm. The fourth one watched in confusion. They were all staring at each other nervously. The one who had taken off his helmet started smashing his head and hands against the wall, and he kept doing that until his fists were all bloody, then he rammed his head against the wall one last time, tears shining in his eyes, before he fell down in a heap. His comrade tried to pick him up but his heavy equipment prevented him from doing so and he crashed down on the ground, which, along with the heavy gunfire in town, made an odd boom. The third soldier standing between the two of them backed away. The other one stood up in disbelief, his gun at his side, hanging down at his knees. He was swinging it back and forth and staring up at the patch of sky that was visible through the door, as the sound of gunfire grew louder. He heard screaming, picked up his gun and stuck the barrel right under his chin, staring into the eyes of the third soldier, a gaze without any meaning whatsoever, and a gunshot rang out. The bullet entered his neck and came out of his brain. When he fell down dead, the fourth soldier could smell it, a smell familiar to those who had lived with death. He looked down at the soldier crumpled at his feet and before he could move, he heard the sound of a helicopter hovering in the sky followed by long bursts of gunfire. He moved closer to the other two soldiers on the ground. He felt saltiness washing over his lips, then he collapsed onto the ground, surrounded by heavy gunfire.