A Woman in the Crossfire (21 page)

Signs of fundamental change appear today. On the Friday of the Tribes, unconcealed names openly speaking in the name of the coordination committees of the Syrian revolution begin to appear, and the name of the protest movement changes from the uprising to the revolution. And with the wave of army defections, the uprising enters a new phase. I follow what is happening on television. The situation in Damascus is calm. A demonstration goes out in al-Maydan, and outside my house Damascus looks like it is living under curfew. In the middle of the day there is nobody on the street. Last Friday was the Friday of the Children of Freedom, in which more than 60 people were killed in Hama, reminding people of the massacre that took place in the eighties under President Hafiz al-Assad, when the entire city was decimated and approximately 30,000 people were killed. How ironic that today happens to be the anniversary of the death of Hafiz al-Assad, passing by unnoticed for the first time ever in this country.

Death has enshrouded the cities for 90 days, and every day seems worse than the last. Every Friday there are more demonstrations. The number of dead varies from one city to another. The options available to the regime appear to have narrowed, because if the situation goes on like this, the demonstrations are going to grow into a state of total civil revolt. The Turks are hinting at a military option. Things are getting more and more tense, and the military response to the uprising continues apace. As far as the outside world is concerned, the situation seems different from Egypt and Libya and Tunisia. In Syria the promulgation of resolutions is postponed so the blood can continue to flow. The whole world is in agreement: Syrians must die alone. The regime knows how powerful it is, holding Lebanon in one hand and Iraq in the other. And so the regime justifies this violent repression to itself, arrogantly and stubbornly shooting people, and to the West, which is worried about Israel and its security.

Today on the Friday of the Tribes, 39 people are killed and one hundred are wounded. There are demonstrations in 185 different places – in Damascus, in its countryside and its suburbs, in Aleppo and its countryside, Homs and Hama and the governorate of Idlib, al-Hassakeh and the Euphrates region, the coast and the Hawran. Today for the first time since the beginning of the protest movement, I hear the sound of heavy gunfire at 1:30 in the morning, coming from the al-Rawdeh neighbourhood in the middle of Damascus. This is something new, because this neighbourhood is located at the intersection of Abu Rummaneh and al-Shaalan and al-Hamra and al-Salihiyyeh, that is, right in the heart of Damascus. This means danger could be anywhere, even in one of the wealthy neighbourhoods.

I cannot just change myself into a character on paper. Whenever I have to shut my eyes I open them as wide as I can inside my heart. Shutting my eyes is the same thing as the world all around me being hidden away so I can be transported somewhere else. The noises outside are making me nervous – punctuated gunfire. I step out onto the balcony. It might be three o'clock in the morning; the streets are empty. Arnous Square and al-Hamra Street. The shooting stops, and as I become a human being once again, fear does its work. I am more arbitrary than the dictators. I can erase the entire world just by closing my eyes. I stare out onto the empty square, which had been a stage for a number of ‘flying demonstrations': How is it transformed overnight?

These places are beautiful, until the presence of human beings is contaminated by murderers who sprout up in the streets of Damascus. Then they become savage and terrifying spaces.

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My day begins with news about another defection within the army.

The army bombed Ma‘arat al-Nu‘man and the military security branch that defected from the regime. The bombardment of Ma‘arat al-Nu‘man is ongoing, paratroopers are dropped and the
shabbiha
have moved in to pound the city, where 150,000 people demonstrated against the regime. The security forces killed six demonstrators. After the electricity was cut, people fled in the middle of the night for Aleppo and nearby villages.

I scan for news of killing and death in other cities.

Jisr al-Shughur can still remember the massacre of 1980, during the term of al-Assad
père
; they have a new massacre in 2011. In the first massacre more than 97 martyrs were killed. During the popular demonstrations they chanted slogans against the regime and they were met with bullets. Meanwhile the events in Jisr al- Shughur were overshadowed by the size of the massacre that took place in Hama, the city of
norias
, two years later. No fewer than 70 people have been killed by the security forces' bullets in the massacre that is happening right now. Defection from the army has left in its wake a lot of dead soldiers and security agents. Jisr al-Shughur is surrounded, as helicopter gunships hover over it and security forces occupy the city. Conflicting reports are coming out of the besieged city. In other news, the number of refugees to cross the border into Turkey climbs to 4,300 today. The army forces stand at the entrance to Jisr al-Shughur, without moving in, waiting for the number of refugees to reach ten thousand. There is a video clip on television and YouTube of Syrians fleeing for their lives from Jisr al-Shughur. I feel as if I am shrinking, my fingers become sharp knives that scratch my skin. In images I have never seen before, I recognize the Syrians afresh, like pictures of Palestinian refugees we were shown when we were children: families searching for somewhere to live under the trees, families living out in the open, a family packing its kitchenware in a plastic box and staring at the camera in grief. Children huddle around their mothers, who curse the president, saying, “Bashar chased us out of our homes.” The refugees look markedly exhausted and the tents people made for those who could find no space in the refugee camp look tattered. The scene is like a fantasy movie about people who are displaced and lost, stranded and hungry, eating out in the open, sleeping out in the open, in the forest, like prehistoric man who lived millions of years ago. Soldiers appear with the refugees, talking about how the security forces would kill them if they failed to carry out orders to kill civilians. Women appear, screaming how the tanks rolled in during the middle of the night, how the soldiers and the security and the
shabbiha
killed all the livestock and set their land on fire, how they even threw away powdered milk for children. I can't believe these atrocities. Even though I know they are true I just want to go back to my game of hiding. I know this is happening even as I sit here, panicked and perplexed. How can the regime kill its own people? How can this murderous president sign people's death warrants? Is he going to force his entire people to flee? Will Syrians all become refugees now that the army has invaded Jisr al-Shughur in the middle of the night and swept through the surrounding villages, burning down the crops and killing all the livestock?

I switch over to news from the other cities, without leaving the computer. Homs is tense. Military reinforcements arrive in Latakia. It is midday and news is still coming in that a violent assault is taking place right now in Jisr al-Shughur. Once the army moved in, the regime must have decided to teach the army defectors a harsh lesson. I wait for news of a ceasefire. The internet is blocked now, so I can't know what is happening all around me. The internet was blocked for most of yesterday as well. More and more I have to live without the internet. In addition to blocking the internet, they also block the roads and annihilate the cities. A never-ending nightmare.

I try to transcribe an interview I had conducted with a young woman and her boyfriend who were both detained for a few hours after a demonstration in the Souq al-Hamidiyyeh, but my head isn't clear. It is now plain to see that they may resort to annihilating every Syrian city one by one before they even consider stepping down, or regime change, and for the first time I think about how they would do exactly what they are doing in Jisr al-Shughur to Damascus if it ever decided to rise up against them. Today for the first time I realize how hard it is to talk about any other scenario than that of devastation. It is now plain to see that the president is not going to step down without a fight and the people will not go back to the pre-15 March period. The people no longer want the regime at all, even as the regime sets the sights of its war machine on its own people. There has been too much bloodshed now.

The number of people killed in Latakia rises to sixteen. The regime still insists that it is combating armed gangs. But the story of the troops who managed to escape along with the refugees to the Turkish border betrays the regime narrative. The soldier Taha Alloush showed his military identification on camera and declared that people would have killed them if they refused to carry out the orders to kill civilians. This was something we had started hearing on a daily basis on television and from the people we meet. Four soldiers who had fled from al-Rastan testified the same thing in no uncertain terms to a French news agency. Taha Alloush talked about the operation that cleansed the city of al-Rastan, a city of 50,000 in the governorate of Homs. He said he escaped from the army three days later, having thought that he and his friends were going to confront armed gangs, but discovering instead that the people were unarmed and simple folk. Muhammad Marwan Khalaf was also called up to a unit in Idlib, near the Turkish border and he is still struck dumb by the horror of this war against unarmed people. This young recruit attested to a French newspaper, “When they started to open fire on the people, I threw down my rifle and ran away.” He specified that this massacre of 20 to 25 people took place on 7 June; this bloodshot and wide-eyed army runaway also attested that he and his friends had considered rebelling but they thought better of the idea because their lives would have been in danger. “They put snipers up in high places,” he added. “Police officers were in civilian clothes, and when the soldiers refused to shoot the protestors, they were killed.” Walid Khalaf attested to the dangers of disobeying orders by saying, “Before us there were six people who wanted to go AWOL, and our superiors killed them.” Along with fifteen other armed friends, this recruit chose to run rather than invade Homs last Thursday. “I knew,” he said, “that if we entered the city we were going to kill a large number of people.” That news was reported by a French news agency and al-Arabiya, and I can confirm the names of the people and their families.

The news stops here. I change the channel and follow news of the bombing in Jisr al-Shughur and the conditions of the refugees in the Turkish town of Yayladağı, where Syrian refugee camps have been set up. Now I hear Muslim clerics with long beards from Lebanon and I am afraid of their presence, as one of them venomously calls on the Syrian regime to stop the massacres. I shudder at the sight. I have been terrified for days now, ever since Shaykh al-‘Ar‘ur went on one of the satellite networks with his sectarian talk. It makes no difference and there's nothing strange about what's happening. The fundamentalist Islamists are scary and what al-‘Ar‘ur is doing is no doubt going to do more harm to the Syrian uprising than if he were to stand side by side with us. The Syrian regime says that the people going out to demonstrate are fundamentalist Islamists and these media images will only confirm their story.

I think I need to go out for a little bit. I have been sitting at home for three days. I go out to do one thing for the ‘Syrian Women in Support of the Uprising' initiative, to meet a young man from the coordination committees, and then come right home. My appetite is growing. We are waiting. We have to make arrangements with doctors about ambulances for the wounded on Fridays. One of the nurses told me they would never let them use ambulances to take the wounded to the hospital, that they were killing the wounded as well and that a number of the wounded had died outside the hospitals because the security forces would not let them inside.

Helicopters continue bombing to the east of Ma‘arat al-Nu‘man, in Wadi al-Daif, as tanks arrive in the area. Refugees flee through the farms and the regime chases them down and kills them at will. Most of them come from families that have been ripped apart; mostly there is only one man left with the women of the family as the young men stay behind to protect their homes. The women and children are in a state of panic and fear and most of the men in the camps are old. All the survivors deny the presence or entry of any armed people from outside.

The incursions into the cities take place without any warning and they target houses indiscriminately. Some of the nearby villages, anticipating being engulfed in the fighting, start to flee in the direction of the camps where they expect large numbers of refugees to arrive tomorrow. The army takes control of Jisr al-Shughur; they discover a mass grave there and everything is burned – the security headquarters, the communications tower, commercial shops. Everything is burned. The city is completely empty.

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We haven't had an hour's peace for two days. At night. During the day. In the afternoon. In the shower. In the toilet. All these noises, all the time: cars honking furiously, as sports cars and a bunch of bullhorns park in the middle of Arnous Square nearby my house, guys and girls wearing white shirts emblazoned with a picture of the president, chanting out loud, singing through the bullhorns an anthem that prattles on about their love for the president. Night and day these processions move along the streets of al-Hamra and al-Shaalan and al-Rawdeh, as the young men and women calmly march. A simple comparison between these and the demonstrations calling for the departure of the president infuriates me – the young men and women in the demonstrations don't ride in cars and they have no bullhorns other than their throats, they barely assemble for a few minutes before human monsters storm out to swallow them up in cars and stamp on them and bloody them up in the streets. No more than a few minutes and their demonstration is over. In the beginning I would say that half the street was with the president. Now I am certain he doesn't enjoy more than 30% support, and most of that comes from the frightened minorities.