A Woman in the Crossfire (36 page)

Sitting there, I pack up my suitcases with everything I want to take with me.

Images of Syrians on television and others on YouTube rush by like a raging flood, shouting full-throated and resounding in a single voice:
The People Want to Topple the Regime!
I sit down to transcribe a recording I received from one of my friends who is a correspondent for Radio Monte Carlo and France 24 and who was with other journalists along the Syrian–Turkish border. Hoda Ibrahim: I mention her name without fear, in contrast with all my other witnesses who remain anonymous in the darkness. I acquired a testimony from her about the time she spent in the refugee camp, and from a young man of the uprising from Jisr al-Shughur, who I'll call M. She spoke with him over the phone while he was up at the Syrian–Turkish border so he could use the Turkish internet.

 

The Story of Jisr al-Shughur

M. says, “We were going out to huge demonstrations in Jisr al- Shughur, approximately ten thousand people. There were only about 300 security forces. They let us demonstrate because they knew if there were any more martyrs, the demonstrations would only get bigger and then they wouldn't be able to control the area.

While we were demonstrating outside a state security branch in Freedom Square and the post office, a man named Bassem al- Masri was killed. During his funeral, security opened fire on the people in Freedom Square. The people were just chanting slogans and the security requested army backup, which came from Idlib in the form of additional troops from both the security services and the army. When the army reached Jisr al-Shughur they believed they were going to find armed fighters, but they discovered this was a lie.

At the time we were fifteen thousand demonstrators without any weapons. The security forces gave the order to open fire. They were standing behind the army. A number of soldiers fled into the fields while others turned around and opened fire on the security forces. There was a clash between the security and the army, and as the fighting continued the security fled into the fields out of fear. Most of the army sided with the defection: approximately 300 or 350 soldiers. The army was stronger than the security forces and they took control of the area once the security forces had fled to Idlib. There were clashes there all the time and the people welcomed the army and the army joined them.

Along with the soldiers there were three defecting officers. They clashed with the eight security forces that were still in the post office building. Five or six defectors died as martyrs and all of the security forces were killed. The army stormed the building and then the security support forces arrived along with army reinforcements. They pounded the place with gunfire. The defectors sprayed gunfire on the state security detention centre, and the security forces inside said, ‘Don't shoot, we surrender!' They handed over their weapons and not a single one of them was harmed, then the defectors went to the military security branch and demanded the security forces hand over their weapons but they refused and there was a clash and gun fighting between military security and the defectors. By the next day there were 170 defectors. We didn't know how many military security forces there were but there were a lot of them. Some of the defecting soldiers and those fleeing Hama, Latakia and Homs joined up with the defected army. The lieutenant colonel Hussein Harmoush was among them, and their numbers grew to between 700 and 800 defectors. They attacked the military security station, took it over and killed whoever was inside. There had been negotiations before that. The defectors told them, ‘Come back to the people and leave the regime behind', but they refused to give up their weapons, saying they were going to demolish all of Jisr al-Shughur on top of its people's heads. The lieutenant colonel told them, ‘Hand over your weapons or we're going to break into the detention centre.' By that time, the director, Abu Ya‘rab, had killed fifteen security agents because they were against all the killing. Their bodies were still inside.

“The defectors broke into the security detention centre and after two days of fighting security forces from Idlib arrived and they clashed with the defecting army in a town called al-Freekeh, seven kilometres outside of Jisr al-Shughur. The defecting army had set up an ambush for the security forces and 120 men were killed. They knew the force defecting from the army in Jisr al-Shughur was large, so they sent 15,000 soldiers and 300 tanks to invade the city along three axes: the Hama axis on the al-Ghab road, the Western ‘Ishtabraq' axis and the Eastern ‘al-Freekeh' axis on the Aleppo road. At this point the defecting army became concerned about Jisr al-Shughur getting bombed and the risk of a lot of civilian casualties, so the defectors started moving people to the Turkish border and securing a way out for them. One reason why they didn't confront the army as it advanced into Jisr al-Shughur was that the defectors knew that what the regime was saying about armed gangs would be validated somehow if the defectors fought back. They preferred instead to withdraw out of Jisr al-Shughur to the Jabaliyyeh region, just before the Turkish border in the west.”

 

This is the end of M.'s testimony about Jisr al-Shughur, about which we had been getting nothing but distorted news of unexplained killing and gunfire. I still have the last testimony of Hoda Ibrahim to transcribe in front of me. Hoda spent the last two weeks of June along the Turkish–Syrian border, entering Syria briefly and then returning to Antakya.

Hoda says: “I had already entered Syrian territory and was on way back to Turkey, in the village of Ayn al-Baida and the camp at Khirbet al-Jouz. There were nine camps all together. Everyone was from Jisr al-Shughur. Sixty thousand people were living there. Many of them had been forced to flee to Aleppo and other parts of the country, not only along the border. In the Khirbet al-Jouz camp there were two sections: the family section and the men's section. It was mostly men. The families had been smuggled into Turkey. Jisr al-Shughur is seven kilometres from Khirbet al-Jouz.

The young men had set up a media centre I can't reveal the location of, a farmhouse out in the middle of a field to which people risked their lives bringing news and pictures and videos on USB drives from Aleppo, Homs and Hama and from all over Syria. They were only about a kilometre from the border and could use the Turkish internet. The young men of the uprising told me that whenever there was a defection they would inflate the news of the number of defectors and say the siege of Homs and Hama had been broken in order to confuse the regime and steal as much time as possible to get the people out. This caused the regime to send fifteen thousand troops to Jisr al-Shughur. They also told me this was the wrong thing to do because it had a negative impact on the people.

According to the testimonies I heard from the people of Jisr al- Shughur, the people who remained in the city were either imprisoned or killed. They told me about one incident: eleven people on motorbikes, labourers returning home from work in Beirut, came under fire. Three of them were killed and the rest arrested. I had a conversation with one of those who had been taken and he mentioned how they were detained in a sugar factory where they were severely tortured. Everyone was talking about this sugar factory that had been turned into a giant prison for men and children and the elderly.”

I stop here for a moment, shivering. The Syrian regime has turned playing fields into prisons, which is exactly what happened in Baniyas, where they turned the municipal stadium into a giant prison; it turns factories into prisons: What savagery. Someone who was released from the municipal stadium in Baniyas wrote something on Facebook describing the brutal treatment he and the people of Baniyas were subjected to there, how they were forcemarched and made to walk on top of each other's bodies, stamping on them and kicking them.

Hoda continues, far away from my trembling fingers:

“One person who stayed behind in Jisr al-Shughur during those last days mentioned how the sounds of screaming and torture could be heard echoing throughout the night as far as five kilometres away. I heard a few stories from those who managed to escape the sugar factory without being killed, about people being tortured and one worker who saw two of his friends killed right in front of him. He told me the security forces disagreed with one another about killing him, and they finally let him go after killing three of his friends.

“Around 15 June a rumour got started, saying things had calmed down in Jisr al-Shughur. Some people called up those who had fled to Turkey and told them others had come back to the city now that the army had entered the villages. People talked about how the entire family of Al Qasqous believed this and came back. Every last one of them was killed, men and women and children. But another story claimed that the men and women were killed while the children of this family were arrested. In all honesty, when I got to Syria I met a lot of people who didn't know where their families were. I saw men wandering around alone, who didn't know what had happened to them. I saw women and children who didn't know the fate of their men. It was awful, like an entire world had been lost.

“The Syrians in the refugee camps were living in jail,” Hoda said as I continued transcribing:

“They were forbidden from making phone calls, and I saw how fleeing death had caused people to suffer one of the worst possible outcomes; some of those who fled found refuge with their relatives in Iskenderun, and their situation was better than that of those people in the camps. Generally speaking, the Syrian–Turkish border is quite long and the refugees' circumstances varied from place to place. There were so many sad and painful stories. I met a truck driver whose eye had been injured when he got beaten up and whose truck had been torched; they warned him never to come back to Latakia. He used to work between Latakia and Jisr al-Shughur and Iskenderun. I asked him, ‘Who threatened you?' ‘The
shabbiha
,' he said, ‘I don't know who they are, but I don't go there anymore.'”

Hoda said that the driver, Abu Ahmad, remained in the village of al-Rihaniyyeh, selling coffee at a border crossing point.

“We journalists weren't allowed to cross except when the Turks were holding press conferences there. We entered three times.

“The thing that got to me the most was the difficult road we had to cross, stretching five or seven kilometres, in order to enter Khirbet al-Jouz and Ayn al-Baida. Originally the road was only two kilometres long, but we had to loop around it in order to pass through the army checkpoints. It was hot and the road was hard and exhausting. It makes you sad to see such beautiful natural surroundings overlapping with death.

“On 19 June, after the army had moved into those villages, I saw children and women, some of whom were pregnant, walking along the same rocky mountain road. This is what really got to me: crossing this kind of a deadly road could only mean one thing: they were fleeing death or other situations where death was the least of their concerns. We watched the army through our cameras in the village of Guvecci, and noticed they were arguing and disagreeing about something. It seemed obvious that a group of them was in a constant state of disagreement. One young Syrian told me about a horrifying incident, when seven soldiers defecting from the army sought refuge in the village of Ayn al-Baida, turning to an old man for help and asking him to point them in the direction of the road to Turkey. The old man asked them to wait there for a few minutes, and when he came back with security forces, they killed some of them and arrested the rest.

“But what really caught my attention was how many women and children there were. The children were lying on the ground. I saw children wherever I went, and when they saw us they would run toward me to say they didn't want Bashar al-Assad, that they wanted the fall of the regime, and then they would start singing what they had just said. The people informed me that they had captured some of the
shabbiha
in Jisr al-Shughur, but rather than killing them, they let them go. There was someone there who had escaped from Jisr al-Shughur, arriving with iron chains on his hands; he told me terrible things about his imprisonment and torture.

When they handed out food, all the refugees in the camps turned into one big family. In that solidarity I saw a kind of bulwark against death. The water flow dried up and the heat was getting worse. When the water ran out, the camp children drank from the ponds all around them and many of them died as a result. I remember that during my first few days there they started building a camp called al-Rihaniyyeh, but you were forbidden to enter. Ten days later I went back to the camp. It was finished and full of refugees. Turkey was building three other camps, and during our stay in the village of Guvecci we could hear heavy gunfire after the tanks entered the villages. They were combing the villages with bullets. In other villages near Jisr al-Shughur such as al-Zu‘iniyyeh and al-Shatouri and al-Sarminiyyeh the army would go in with security forces and snipers, and the exact same thing that happened in Jisr al-Shughur would happen there as well.

“The people told me that many had been executed at the Jisr al-Shughur school after it had been converted into a prison as well. If they couldn't find someone they were looking for, they would arrest the closest members of his family. One man shouted right in front of me in a quavering voice, ‘What the Assad clan did in Jisr al-Shughur makes you think they have a personal vendetta against this city!' One young man in the Khirbet al-Jouz camp said, ‘There were two young girls who stayed behind in Jisr al-Shughur, they were stripped naked and forced to walk through the streets like that.' Houses were demolished in Khirbet al-Jouz and Ayn al- Baida, livestock were slaughtered. They told me that in the village of al-Sarminiyyeh they took a child, tied his hands behind his back and brought him down into the valley; nobody ever saw him again. They told me there was international Arab silence in the face of the Assad clan's crimes, and that the idea of dialogue with the regime was out of the question.