A Woman in the Crossfire (7 page)

Now security prevents people from making it to the demonstration squares in all the cities of Syria. In Homs security surrounds the district of al-Bayyada and imposes a curfew.

In al-Qamishli the people come out to demonstrate. People emerge from the mosque in the al-Maydan district of Damascus. There are tear gas canisters and ten buses filled with security agents who beat up the demonstrators scattered throughout the neighbourhoods chanting for freedom and for the siege on Dar‘a to be lifted. They are unarmed. There are about a thousand demonstrators, but they quickly disperse because of the violent beating and the tear gas.

I hope there will be very little bloodshed. Every Friday I have an appointment with pain, not simply pain as an aggravation, but the kind of pain that keeps me awake. Ever since the uprising began I can only sleep with the aid of sleeping pills: Xanax.

Now there is news from Dar‘a: heavy gunfire, snipers are still up on the rooftops, nobody can move, there is a flour embargo. Why are they doing this? After the electricity and the water and the medicine, they'll even cut off the bread?! Are they just going to let the people die from hunger? All the eyewitnesses who come forward confirm that the snipers will kill anyone who moves in the city. In the Damascus suburb of Saqba there are also huge demonstrations demanding the fall of the regime.

It's pouring with rain in Damascus now, and there's news about the Jordanian army shoring up its forces near the border. My heart is in my mouth.

I still pace around the house like a madwoman. I feel powerless. I can't go out into the street, the net is shut off, there's no news about what's going on in the outside world. Hailstones pound the windows. My heart clenches. I feel dizzy. The rain keeps falling. Large hailstones. I think about the demonstrators caught out in this downpour when suddenly I receive a text message from a childhood friend:
Dear traitor even god's with the president and you're still lost
.

I am not going to respond.

The internet connection is finally restored.

There are demonstrations in all the cities. They're calling for freedom and the downfall of the regime.

The southern entrance to Damascus is closed as the army redeploys to al-Ma‘damiya. The people of Homs hold up olive branches. The news reports that people went out to demonstrate in spite of the stormy weather. But I am nervous. News of the dead still hasn't arrived and there are reports of heavy gunfire in the al-Saliba neighbourhood of Latakia. How much Syrian blood will be spilled today? This mighty people that came out to die will not go back to the way things were. That is the message that arrived today. The Syrian people will not go back to the way things were before. For the first time all of Damascus went out, its centre and its periphery. The news still isn't clear, but what is clear is that the people went out into the streets in force and the security apparatus carried out a sweeping arrest campaign.

Today will not end without bloodshed, that's what I assume anyway, but I hope for the best. News from my city of Jableh reports women and men coming out, forces from the Fourth Division and fire trucks are present. What is happening right now in those streets where I grew up? I know all too well what the
shabbiha
and the regime goons are willing to do in order to stir up the Alawites against the Sunnis; they will shoot at the Alawites to make them believe the demonstrators want to kill them. I wait for civil war to break out in Jableh at any moment; it still hasn't happened, but the regime won't hesitate to make it happen. Maybe they are waiting a while just to play on Alawite fear and stir up even worse sectarian strife.

Now there is confirmed news that demonstrators are coming out in Aleppo. Here is something that will frighten the regime, in light of the city's commercial and strategic significance. I see a report about demonstrators coming out in Hama, the city that still bears so many memories of death and destruction from the early eighties.

My fingers start to tremble. I am under siege in my own home. I want to go out into the streets, but my daughter's tears hold me back. Now I must make her feel safe, even if only a little. But nobody can feel that way amidst our daily fear.

I have been thinking I shouldn't stay here much longer. In two days I'll move to a house in the middle of the capital.

The Arab and non-Arab channels broadcast the wedding of William and Kate. I'll go down and get some supplies. I tell my daughter I have to leave her for an hour, just a car ride through the streets of Damascus. On the verge of tears, she shouts, “Don't go! I know where you're going.” Then the tears spill from her eyes. I respond by sitting down next to her.

I wait there until the end of the day, when I learn that the number of demonstrators killed is 62.

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

The cities of Syria are under siege. Water and electricity have been intentionally cut off for two days, and now there is a growing threat of humanitarian disaster. People began sending calls for help on behalf of children who might die of starvation. That all started yesterday, even as reports about the use of live ammunition against the people were still ringing in my ears.

I am not all right this morning, either. I go to see a friend from Baniyas, I want to hear something true from him. He had left his house and his family behind because he was an Alawite who stood with the peaceful demonstration in Baniyas. My friend is staying with his wife in a small room in al-Mezzeh. He is a lawyer and his wife a public employee; he is an old friend of mine and I can relate to the pressure he is under because I suffered from the same thing, even if my story has been better publicized in the media, more distorted and more like an incitement to kill. The Alawites of Baniyas consider him a traitor, but as far as I know most of the Alawites in Syria think I am one. Entering Mezzeh 86, I am terrified. I happen to know that most residents of that neighbourhood are Alawites who had been brought together in the eighties by then President Hafiz al-Assad's brother Rifaat
¹²
in order to form the Defence Brigades, which were the forces that carried out the massacres in Hama and at the Tadmur prison. I tell my girlfriend accompanying me, “If they find out who I am, they'll tear me to shreds!”

“Kurds live side by side with Alawites in this neighbourhood,” she says. “Nobody's going to know who you are.”

I am so worn out I start to feel woozy and weak inside my own skin. Today 50 women hold a demonstration outside the Syrian parliament calling for the siege of Dar‘a to be lifted, and security confronts them and arrests some. Reports of killing are still coming out of Dar‘a: the shelling of the city, six new martyrs, pictures of dead children and women who were put into a vegetable refrigerator. Images arrive from Dar‘a, and finally there is news of arrests. But the most disconcerting thing as far as I am concerned is the feeling of despair that starts working its way through my heart, all the signs of life informing me that the situation in Syria is going to last for a long time, there will still be a lot more death and killing and bloodshed before the regime falls, or before another crazy situation can take its place. I am unnerved by the latest threat – they hacked my Facebook page and deleted all the comments, insinuating that my daughter would be harmed. I had reached the point where I resolved to stay home and write these diaries in order to understand how the uprising began. Going out for the demonstrations has become impossible, but that means nothing to me compared to my tragic feeling of powerlessness. It is all I can muster to write down what happened in Baniyas. I also have an appointment tomorrow with a journalist who managed to break through the siege of Dar‘a, and who promises to tell me everything he knows about the accursed day when the massacres took place.

Today it is cloudy; this is enough to change my mood. Imagining that at any moment while I am out somebody could break into the house and take my daughter just like they threatened to do, I decide not to tarry too long at my friend's while recording his testimony.

Even in the middle of the afternoon Damascus looks miserable. Security forces are still deployed out in the streets, at military checkpoints on the bridges and intersections, all around government buildings. Hesitation and caution is inscribed on people's faces, and something indicates that everyone is in a hurry: they just want to get home or wherever they are going. After hearing sporadic gunfire elsewhere in the city we get scared that cars carrying armed men who would open fire on us might pass by at any moment, randomly shoot people and then disappear as if nothing had happened.

We sit there in the one-room apartment. It is a painful meeting, and my exhausted friend is not able to tell me much, but I write down enough of what he says to make some sense of how the events in Baniyas got started.

I.H. says: “The demonstrators set out from the al-Rahman mosque in Baniyas. It was 8 March after Friday prayer when A.S. called on the people to go out of the mosque against tyranny and in order to demand freedom. As about 200 to 300 men came out of the mosque, three were detained by criminal security and taken to the police station over by the bus terminal. The demonstrators followed them in order to demand their release, and on their way down there people poured out into the streets, heading for the garage and smashing up the buses. The demonstrators tried to prevent any vandalism but those thugs got in their faces, and so they immediately started collecting donations to repay the bus owners. They managed to raise some money that they gave to those who had sustained damage. Those thugs were Sunnis who smashed up Alawite buses, but the damage in that initial demonstration stopped there.

“At that point Alawite security forces started stirring up sectarian sentiment. Regime goons and
shabbiha
known for their sectarianism started coming out and chanting that the Sunnis had attacked the Alawite businesses in Baniyas and that they were going to burn everything in sight, especially in the al-Qusoor neighbourhood. Then phone calls were made to the thugs up in the Alawite mountains. A whole bunch of them arrived at the political security branch that was located along the border between the Alawite and Sunni neighbourhoods, and they started making some provocations and threats, until a decision was taken by the political security forbidding clashes between Alawites and Sunnis so they withdrew to the Alawite neighbourhoods, but the provocation by the security forces and the regime
shabbiha
continued.

“The next day those who called themselves the Voice of the Alawites started mobilizing and communicating with one another. With a directive from political security they came together and tried to get in touch with Shaykh A.I., a Sunni
shaykh
they called ‘the voice of truth' in Baniyas. It's important to note that throughout the demonstration and the assemblies the security would roll out some prominent Sunni personalities in order to contain the crisis and convince the demonstrators to go home, so this one time they brought the mayor, but the demonstrators chanted,
Get out, get out you thief, get out!
They say the mayor paid millions of liras to get that position, that he paid off a group of Ba‘thists
¹³
and security agents. Then they brought Shaykh I.H. and another imam, who received the same shouts from the demonstrators:
Get out of here, you liars!
They were also corrupt men.

“At this point the demonstrators asked the security forces to bring Shaykh A.I., because he could be trusted and because he was a Sufi. The people of Baniyas gave them a handwritten letter with their demands for Shaykh A., which he read. Their demands included: the release of prisoners, including Tal al-Malluhi, the abrogation of the emergency laws, the return to work of women who wear the
niqab
, the re-opening of the
shari‘a
high school, forbidding the mixing of the sexes as in every other Syrian governorate, complete freedoms, the replacement of the head of the port of Baniyas because he behaved like a security officer and imposed taxes on poor fishermen who could barely make ends meet…”

At this point I.H. stops talking and I receive a news bulletin from Damascus about more killings:

 

Internal source in the army: Under a total media blackout an army hearse delivered the bodies of at least 42 civilians from the village of Tafas outside Dar‘a who were killed near the housing bloc of the Fifth Division as well as the body of a soldier from the Fifth Division Housing Bloc who is believed to hail from the coastal region. The bodies were delivered to the Tishreen military hospital at approximately 3 p.m. The 43 bodies had been shot in the head or in the chest by a single sniper firing from a great distance (the sniper's bullet was small both upon entry and exit). Another bit of news to add to the chain of news stories about killing. My friend stops talking and his wife remains silent, frightened. I am stunned. It takes a few minutes for the conversation to start up once again. We flip through channels as night starts to fall. My daughter starts to call. She is scared. I tell her I will be home soon, that she should lock the door well and not open it for anyone. Then I ask I.H. quickly to finish his story.

 

“After these events,” he says, “and with both direct and indirect orders from the security, rumours started whipping around the Alawite street to the effect that those who came out to demonstrate were sectarians and Islamic fundamentalists who had no other goal than to strike at the Alawites. The proof was what they had said about the women in
niqabs
and the
shari‘a
colleges, or even the issue of gender mixing, all of that helped to exacerbate the sectarian mood between Sunnis and Alawites, and caused the Alawite sect in Baniyas to further cling to and wrap themselves around the regime and the security.

“The next Friday,” I.H. continues, “there was a demonstration of approximately one thousand people, and a group of Alawite individuals were there. A young Alawite woman named A.I. got up and made a politically pointed speech in front of the demonstrators that confronted the regime head-on, and she received a warm welcome from the demonstrators as all the slogans were patriotic and decried sectarianism. Until that moment there hadn't been any slogans calling for the fall of the regime. It was 15 March.”