A Woman in the Crossfire (37 page)

“The refugees want the fall of the regime. Near the village of Guvecci I saw four families with nineteen children. The children in Hajji Basha would steal glances through the fence around the camp, while a child on the other side would try to communicate with the children inside, but the Turks forbade this. All the Syrians in the camps were hiding under veils, they were thirsty to know what was going on outside of the camps, which had become giant prisons.”

 

Hoda's testimony ends here. I drown in a sadness that is hardly accidental. Bashar al-Assad and his family have turned my people into martyrs and prisoners, fugitives and refugees, prisoners of camps in foreign countries. What more can this criminal do against his own people?

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

I leave in a few days.

Despite the constant calls of concern from my friends, I am certain nothing bad is going to happen to me at the airport. Yet I am really nervous about the idea of leaving Syria. I convinced myself it was only going to be temporary, a period of time that would pass and then I would come home. The important thing now is for me to save my daughter. I'll give interviews and meet with representatives from humanitarian organizations. I'll communicate to the world what's happening here. They must know that the demonstrators going out to protest are unarmed and peaceful people, and that their demands are for freedom and dignity and justice. So many thoughts run through my mind, but one thing is undeniable: I am living through one of the most difficult moments of my life.

This is the first time I put my daughter first. All I want is to find an agreeable way to make the hardships all around me end. I'll leave my heart here and float away like an empty balloon. Maybe I'll come back soon, maybe not. Leaving now, like this, brings to mind a nursing child yanked away from her mother. I have become a raging storm; I must rise above it and soothe myself. Now I need to transcribe the final testimony I collected from a frightened officer on the run. I don't want to cross the border at the airport with the tape recording in my possession. He told me the name of the neighbourhood they invaded but he trembled as he made me swear on my daughter's life not to mention it. I had understood his fear. He is married with two daughters. He went so far as to shoot himself in a town near Homs, on the edge of the desert, injuring a part of his body he wouldn't let me mention either. He told me he did that so he could go home without arousing any suspicion. When I asked him whether the stories we were hearing about soldiers being killed were true, he asked, “Do you want to hear my story or somebody else's?”

“I want to hear yours!” I said.

He was a handsome young man from one of the coastal cities, he belonged to the Alawite sect and that was the reason for his fear. I understood his anxiety. In fact, I understood it better than anyone. They would never forgive him if they found out; they would liquidate him at once.

“We got orders to head for the neighbourhood,” he said. “Orders to attack an armed gang there. The orders came directly to us. Agents from the air force
mukhabarat
station were there with us. Twenty agents and I went. As soon as we entered the neighbourhood we came under fire. There was a small room off to our left, and even though we were sneaking in under cover of darkness they were able to ambush us. I sensed something suspicious going on. It was the third time they had gone to attack the armed gangs, and suddenly we're caught in an ambush. This always seemed to happen just before Friday. It was Thursday night and we had to be back in Homs by morning to deal with the demonstrators. There was a real battle, a battle of life and death. Every member of the armed gang except for one died. Three of my comrades were killed. Their injuries were all direct hits to the head and chest. Until that moment, the task as far as I was concerned was to get rid of Salafi armed gangs that wanted to kill all Alawites, but several things happened right in front of us. We were sitting ducks for those gangs that always managed to appear and open fire on us wherever we were.”

Even more importantly, he added, his veins bulging out of his neck, “Every time we captured someone from that gang the air force
mukhabarat
would take him away immediately. Except last time, one of the prisoners was right there in front of me, he was supposedly a member of the gang, but when he fell into the hands of one of the agents who pointed the barrel of his gun at him, he started crying and screaming and blathering. He peed his pants, and when the higher-ranking officer from the air force
mukhabarat
, whose name I won't reveal, showed up. He took care of him personally and, as he did, someone escorting the officer, a security agent, shot the prisoner in the head, at which point I became certain of one thing: We were just bait. How that happened, though, I have no idea. It seemed we had fallen into a trap, and after seeing our comrades killed by armed gangs we would be even more aggressive with the demonstrators the following day. The whole thing was very strange, like everything they had told us was a lie. I have no idea who the people going out for demonstrations are. We in the army are completely cut off from the outside world, but I knew for a fact the officer killed that prisoner because he was afraid of what he might say. All these things pushed me to shoot myself the following Wednesday. I waited for the gunfire to come raining down on us as we advanced, and that's what actually happened. In those moments when life and death were one and the same, while everyone else was distracted, I opened fire. I've been home now for a month and a half, and I hope this nightmare will be over before I'm forced to go back into that hell…”

As he says ‘that hell', something inside of me jolts, because now someone else is uttering the same word I repeat on a daily basis.

Hell…

Hell…

After finishing up his testimony, I continue getting ready to leave.

I'll leave behind a whole raft of small issues.

I'll leave behind my anger at all the intellectuals who remain silent in the face of this killing, at their cowardice and fear.

I'll leave the door in my heart open onto death and open the door of life for my daughter. That's exactly what I am going to do: walk resolutely towards death. Leaving Syria means death and nothing else. It means shedding my skin, casting away my heart and everything I ever wanted to do.

My mind was hazy as I packed my bags, I must have folded my clothes a thousand times. Throwing away everything behind me, letting my daughter walk her own path, hiding inside the night in order to become whatever I want.

For the first time I really must not become what I don't want.

To become whatever I want – such a simple phrase, but it can limit one's life: who among us is actually what we want to be?

Writing these last words I resolve not to return to these pages until I can turn my diaries into a book. I'd never be able to do that in Syria; if I could, I would just stay. I will pack my bags and zip them up, closing along with them so many horrifying secrets I witnessed and that have happened to me. I am afraid for them to be revealed. I am afraid for my family and for my daughter. I know I am panicking, that is an accurate description of what is happening. That's the way I have been throughout the past few months. I have been alone, and more and more I realize just how very alone I have been, how even some of my friends would be willing to walk over my dead body in order to make their loved ones look better.

I don't like to talk about heroic deeds. Heroism is an illusion. Sure, I was panicked, but through that panic I learned how to cultivate a dark patch in my heart, a zone no one can reach, one that remains fixed, where not even death can penetrate. All the trials and torments, which I had once thought worthless, would make me a stronger woman; but they weren't enough to make me the kind of woman who could just calmly go on living while such shameful acts crash down on people all around her. As with every major turning point in my life, and in spite of all my panic, I was positive that if I were to travel back through time I would have done exactly the same thing, even if some serious mistakes that were made from the beginning of the uprising could have been avoided, mistakes that rendered me and what I was doing visible to so many people.

Now I can say, along with so many others:

Fire scalds. Fire purifies. Fire either reduces you to ash or burnishes you. In the days to come I expect to live in ashes or else to see my shiny new mirror.

1
Bouthaina Shaaban is a political and media adviser to President Bashar al-Assad who became one of the chief mouthpieces of the regime during the uprising. Shaaban was the recipient of emails from a New York-based public relations guru who advised al-Assad on effective ways to handle his upcoming December 2011 interview with Barbara Walters that were subsequently hacked and leaked to the media.

 

2
The largest market in Syria, the Souk al-Hamidiyyeh in Damascus dates to the late Ottoman period and is named after Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909).

 

3
Derived from the Arabic word for ghost, the term
shabbiha
(s.
shabih
) is a Syrian colloquialism that refers to 1) thugs or henchmen who are considered the regime's staunchest defenders and most terrifying manifestations, willing to defend the interests and reputation of the regime against opposition by any means of violence and intimidation; and 2) organized crime syndicates that operate with relative impunity throughout the country, but particularly the “Alawite territory” of the northwest.

 

4
Bashar al-Assad (b. 1965) is the second child of Aniseh (n.e Makhlouf) and Hafiz al-Assad and the current President of the Syrian Arab Republic. His older brother Bassel (b. 1962) was the heir apparent to the presidency, but when he died in a tragic car accident in 1994 Bashar immediately cut short his ophthalmology post-graduate training in London and returned to Syria in order to be groomed for military and public service; after Hafiz al-Assad died on 10 June 2000, he acceded to the presidency in July.

 

5
“J'envoyais au diable les palmes des martyrs, les rayons de l'art, l'orgueil des inventeurs, l'ardeur des pillards; je retournais à l'Orient et à la sagesse première et éternelle.” Rimbaud, A Season in Hell/
Une saison en enfer
& The Drunken Boat/
Le bateau ivre
trans. Louise Varèse (New York: New Directions, 2011 [1945]), 70–71. Reprinted with permission.

 

6
Known as Nusayris, after the eponymous founder of this esoteric Shiite sect, Abu Shu‘ayb Muhammad ibn Nusayr al-‘Abdi al-Bakri al-Numayri a.k.a Muhammad Ibn Nusayr (died circa 874), until the French Mandate period (1920–1946), the Alawites (also Alawis/Alaouites) are a heterodox offshoot of Shiite Islam, presently constituting approximately 10–12% of the Syrian population. The community in Syria was historically concentrated in the mountainous and coastal regions of the northwest.

 

7
Saadallah al-Jabiri (1893–1947) was a political notable from Aleppo who co-founded the National Bloc and twice served as Prime Minister of Syria, appointed for the first time by President Shukri al-Quwwatli in 1943. He remained involved in elite Syrian politics until his death in 1947.

 

8
Shukri al-Quwwatli (1892–1967) was a nationalist politician from Damascus and the first President of Syrian Arab Republic (1943–1949); he became President of Syria again in 1955 and retired from public office in 1958.

 

9
Kafr Qasim is a Palestinian village located just inside the Green Line in Israel that was placed under Israeli military government along with all Palestinian citizens of Israel from 1949–1966. On 29 October 1956, amid Israeli military maneuvers during the Suez crisis, Israeli border police acting under the command of the Israeli Defense Forces carried out a military strike that killed nearly fifty innocent civilians. The massacre is now officially commemorated as such in Israel. Lebanese filmmaker Burhan Alaouie directed
Kafr Qasim
(1974), a feature film based on the Kafr Qasim massacre.

 

10
Hafiz al-Assad (1930–2000) was born into an Alawite family in the village of Qardaha in the province of Latakia. After a military career that included flying in the air force and serving as Minister of Defense in Ba‘thist administrations following the 8 March 1963 revolution, Hafiz and a faction of supporters seized power through a “correctionist movement” in November 1970. Over the following three decades, he consolidated power in the executive branch and dramatically expanded the size of the armed forces and the security apparatus. He died in 2000 and is buried in a mausoleum in Qardaha, along with his son Bassel (d. 1994).

 

11
The
mukhabarat
(also
istikhbarat
) are the intelligence services or secret police. In Syria, the
mukhabarat
are divided into upwards of fifteen divisions, each under a separate personalized command. Under Hafiz al-Assad, the security apparatus ballooned into a force as numerous and more powerful than the national armed forces; manpower estimates are sketchy, but range to as many as several hundred thousand.

 

12
Rifaat al-Assad (b. 1937) is the younger brother of former Syrian president Hafiz al-Assad and currently resides outside of the country. In addition to heading up the internal security forces and the “Defense Brigades” (
saraya al-difa‘
), he is most infamous for being one of the commanding generals who oversaw the Syrian military operation against the city of Hama in February 1982 that led to the decimation of the city and the death of more than 15,000–20,000 people.

 

13
The Ba‘th (lit. resurrection or renaissance) party is formally known as the Arab Ba‘th Socialist Party (
Hizb al-ba‘th al-‘arabi al-ishtiraki
) and was founded in 1947 by Michel ‘Aflaq and Salah al-Din Baytar, two schoolteachers at the renowned
Tajhiz
secondary school in Damascus who had studied at the Sorbonne in Paris during the 1930s. Inspired by Romantic European nationalism and pan-Arab nationalism, from the early 1960s the guiding ideological principles of the party have been Arab unity, liberty and socialism.