A Woman in the Crossfire (34 page)

“I got to try ‘the tire.' I took 235 lashes on my feet and 250 cracks before the stick splintered on my body. After that I spent a month unable to stand on my feet. I couldn't walk. They took me to the military hospital and I couldn't stand up for an entire month.

“This isn't to boast about how brave I am or how bad I had it. I came forward to complain about the prison guards because the law gives us the right. Later the prison guard came to me and said, ‘I'm an officer at the presidential palace, you can't touch me.'

“The second time I was arrested I was still in the army. It was around the time Imad Mughniyeh died. I asked the officer, ‘How come everyone wanted by the Americans here ends up dead? Why is that?' He told me to shut up and sent me to jail. That place was unreal. Every time you enter a room there are whips coming at you right and left. They say it's to purify you. I got to try the wooden tire a lot. I was held there for ten days, never allowed to sleep, never allowed to lie down, never even allowed to talk. You had to be naked in there. There was a guard called Issa, who I'll never forget for the rest of my life. He'd say to me, ‘You. Come on.' And he'd start beating just to hurt you. He'd come in through the main prison door bellowing, and whenever we heard his voice we all had to turn our heads to the wall. You could never let that guy see anyone wearing clothes. Would you need anything more than that to be against this regime?

“Then came all the Arab revolutions we had been dreaming about. I would say, ‘When are we going to smell someone setting himself on fire so that we'll get out into the streets?' Sometimes we'd ask jokingly, ‘Does anybody smell burning? I'm just saying.'

“I was arrested on 30 June. The Faculty of Economics demonstration was happening. It was the last day of finals and we were all hopeful that the students were going to mobilize. We demonstrated outside the faculty. It was the peak of defiance because the security could see us but we wanted to demonstrate and raise the banner of freedom despite them. I didn't stay there for long, and when they started attacking everybody fled. I crouched down outside the Faculty of Arts, shouting at my friends. Some people had run away a little before the demonstration, and I was yelling at them to come back. ‘Why did you all run away, we weren't that many in the first place, now look what happened, they're turning everything upside down.' I was spotted by security, I mean, the Patriotic Union of Syrian Students as they call themselves. The Union even had popular committees. I know for a fact that it's the Union of
Syrian
Students. Not the Union of Bashar's Students.

“They caught us. My head still aches from the truncheons, the beatings and the curses. What a disaster. They would divide us according to al-‘Ar‘ur. ‘You're all al-‘Ar‘ur followers, you're all such-and-such.' Five of us were taken to the al-Qanawat station. There was so much killing. They put my friend on the ground and started in on him. Then they brought us over to wipe up his blood with our bare hands. He's a medical student. He left the country and is never coming back. They beat another one a lot just because he's from Hama.

“We were transferred to criminal security. How can I describe for you the horror, the beasts, the heroes? I mean, what is heroism? Is it, like, to beat up some defenceless guy with a blindfold over his eyes and smash his head against the wall? Is it heroic to throw down insults on my mother? They brought us in. One of us happened to be gay, just imagine what was in store…

“There was all kinds of torture. And they had this game called ‘electricity' they would play with us whenever we were coming or going. They held it to my friend's neck. He was paralyzed for five minutes. There was interrogation every few minutes, first thing in the morning, at mid-morning, in the afternoon, before and after we ate. Just so you would confess you were at the demonstration.

“I was kept at criminal security for six days, and then they transferred me to political security. The situation was worse there. They took my friends downstairs and I had no idea what they were doing to them, but we could hear their screams up above. It was like a sort of terrorism for us, so that we would confess, you know, that we were there. They brought us each in turn to see an interrogator… and before you could say anything he would greet you with a slap. We got used to being slapped like that, it became a totally normal thing.

“They would start questioning me, beating me the whole time, even though I had already told them I wasn't at the demonstration, that I'm a Druze from Suwayda and we don't have anything but pro-regime demonstrations.

“They brought us to the
Palais de Justice
. We were supposed to spend the night there, but then they sent us to court and we were released straight away. We have a trial on 20 August.”

 

A Second Testimony

“With the outbreak of the events, everything exploded in Dar‘a. The events really hit us hard. The idea of a revolt against this regime had been brewing for years. We were all involved in politics and human rights but there was never the space or enough freedom for you to work on it the right way. There are always immediate causes and more distant ones. Dar‘a was the immediate cause while the distant ones are well known: Syria, the current situation, the state of tyranny, miserable circumstances and widespread corruption.

“When the events broke out we started building a network and making phone calls and getting in touch with other young people who were involved. We pushed aside what some now call ‘the Islamic character of this revolution.' We all worked together, young people well known in their fields; intellectuals and others who were concerned. We mobilized on Facebook, through art and writing. We tried to forge relationships during that period. Of course, Fridays were the day people went out demonstrating. Some regions were easier to mobilize than others. Damascus was an unlikely spot because it was encircled. We had the option of the Umayyad Mosque. We weren't Islamists; I wouldn't even set foot inside a mosque. It just didn't seem like a good idea for me to be going inside a mosque. So we searched for another place, but in the end we were forced to use a mosque because it was the only place that many people were allowed to congregate.

“There was a group working out of Douma who we started coordinating with, and then there was a call for a demonstration in Douma. Some friends and I went and met inside the mosque. It was plain to see that there were a lot of security agents present, foreign faces, they obviously weren't from Douma. The prayer ended quickly, as if the imam knew what was happening, he rushed through his sermon. We all went out onto the balcony and saw more than two thousand soldiers – not just peacekeepers, they were fully armed with Kalashnikovs and pistols, and there were two convoys around the garden where the mosque was located.

“Rows stretching out behind them were all
shabbiha
, in addition to the
shabbiha
already inside the mosque. That was the moment of truth – either you come out and don't disappoint the people who are expecting you, or you give it all up and run away because the security forces and weapons are too terrifying. You only have two choices: do the right thing and mobilize the people they way you have come there to do, or run away. We got together and some of us locked arms and started chanting the first slogan, the second slogan,
God, Syria, Freedom, That's It!, The Syrian People Won't be Humiliated!
, that's all. Because the
shabbiha
had already organized themselves inside the mosque, they started beating us from behind. They attacked us from the staircase. There were 70 of us outside and some people still hadn't made it out. Others were waiting for us outside. They formed a perimeter to prevent anyone from getting inside the mosque. It was the Great Mosque in Douma and there are other smaller mosques all around there. People were coming to the square outside the Great Mosque in order to start a demonstration. “They started hitting people with tasers and all kinds of chains, wooden sticks and truncheons.

They started beating us from both sides, from behind and from the front. There was only one way out. I remember I tried to get away but the stairs were too far and I couldn't make it. One of them hit me on the head and I fell down. Next thing I know there are ten guys on top of me. One of them squeezes my head and starts pounding me, something like five batons appeared in the blink of an eye. They broke my teeth. It was a savage beating. They threw me out on the street and whenever I tried to get up, one of them would kick me in the chest. They crushed me on the ground. I tried to get away. There were ten of them. Of course not all of them could get to me at once, so they start spitting on me from afar, so much blame and spite, I have no idea where that came from.

The
shabbiha
took me to the security and peacekeeping forces who were standing off to the side. They put me next to the detention buses and started to beat us before throwing us inside. The bus was like a red container on the inside from all the blood. People were so bloodied up it was hard to recognize them. They were all blood. I killed my phone, switched off my SIM card and handed them my mobile. I was in bad shape, I couldn't breath. I was in a lot of pain. The bus could hold maybe 21 people. We must have been about 30. 73 of us were taken to the security branch. Some people had nothing to do with it. They just rounded them up from inside their shops. The arrests were random like that. They were recording us there at the front of the mosque, anyone who went inside was videotaped. Then they would just wait for that person to come back out again.

“The bus was all red. The windows were blood red. We were piled on top of each other. They shut the curtains and took us to the security branch. At the al-Khatib station, there's something called ‘reception'. They'll all be standing there on both sides, right and left, and as soon as you enter they start beating you from both sides. I was in really bad shape when I got off the bus, my stomach and my chest. I had been hit a lot in the chest. I couldn't go any further and just fell down. Three guys rush over and start beating me, ‘Come on, get up!' I couldn't walk. I wasn't all right. Two guys picked me up, counted to three and then threw me down on the stairs, hard. I make it as far as the entrance. They start clomping on me as soon as I get inside the room. The reception room was big, seven by five metres, the ceiling was made out of tin, not cement. It wasn't a very old room, and it obviously had been painted recently. I'm a painter myself. I could tell. The paint smelled fresh. They must have painted the walls every two days because of the blood that got smeared all over them. When we first went inside the walls were white. Four hours later they were all red.

They started taking names and whipping people with big twisted handcuffs. ‘Your full name!' ‘Who's this?!' ‘Who's that?!' Naturally I got hit more than most because I'm from Masyaf. That's another thing. I'm from Masyaf. Without even asking what my sect is, I get it even worse. After like an hour and a half, an ambulance finally arrives, and of course the EMTs are all security officers, but they're also doctors and nurses. Male and female nurses were rough with us. They showed no mercy.

The worst thing about it was how their treatment methods didn't adhere to any health care norms I'd ever heard of. They'd stitch up a wound with a regular old sewing needle, stitching and making incisions without sterilization. They wouldn't give you antibiotics even if you were very badly injured. For run-of-the-mill injuries they wouldn't give you anything at all. Not even painkillers. Someone had a nervous breakdown and they just left him there off to the side, spasming. He didn't have any visible wounds on his body, but then he started vomiting a lot of blood. Somebody else had been shot. They left him there for three hours before coming to take him to the hospital. My eye was in pretty bad shape and I was losing a lot of blood. Then they'd come and decide who they were going to take to the hospital. Some people nearby pointed at me, saying I needed to go. My chest was so badly beaten I was having trouble breathing. I could hear the sound of my laboured breath. Those people near me got scared and said I was definitely going to die, that I was in really bad shape. It went on like that for seven hours before they finally took me to the hospital.

My Christian friend was in really bad shape as well and he also needed medical attention. They came to put him on the bus but then brought him back because his name wasn't on the list, even though I could see that it was and told the officer as much. ‘None of your business,' he said and then smacked me. Later I found out they didn't take him because he was Christian, because he would have exposed their lie.

“They unloaded us in the square outside the al-Mujtahid hospital. They had emptied the square and security was lined up blocking cars from getting to the ambulance entrance. The first one would step out and they took him away, then the second, then the third.

“Then came my turn. They brought a wheelchair for me, sat me down, and five armed security agents escorted me. One of them held people away, a second pushed me along with another in front of me, shouting at people to stay back, that I was armed, that I had killed five security agents, that I was a sniper. It became an inside joke between me and my friends that I was ‘the sniper who killed five security agents.' They wheeled me around the hospital just to let people spit on me, saying ‘May God curse you, infidel!' ‘Infiltrator!' ‘Salafi!' I couldn't even lift my hand to tell them they were wrong. When their charade finally came to an end, I deduced why they hadn't brought my Christian friend. Someone might have known that, as usual, ‘the Salafi turns out to be a Christian'!

“We entered a private family room with cloth curtains where I laid down on the bed as the beatings continued, only more lightly now. ‘Come on then!' The orderly arrives to take my chart, my name. As if I am any ordinary patient, they take my father's name, my mother's name. The officer walks over and tears up the piece of paper. They wanted to turn me into a number instead of a name, so they wrote down John Doe. At this point I had to respond: ‘I have a name, here's my ID, look, I'm a Syrian Arab, a citizen just like you, I won't let you or anyone else say I don't have a name.' I got slapped. ‘You may talk like that outside, but not in here!' There was no mercy. They could have helped me get out of bed. It was a kind of punishment, they would try to dislocate my shoulder or hit me. They took me to have an X-ray and an MRI. When the eye doctor saw me he told me my eye was pulverized and that I would never be able to see out of it again.