The Morning They Came for Us (10 page)

As we drove, she pointed out where things once were before they got levelled: ‘See, there was the house of the doctor . . . that was the school . . . oh no, that was where my auntie had a shop . . .' In the ashen aftermath of war, it is impossible to imagine what Darayya looked like before, or what really happened here.

To me, it looked as if it had been bombed first from the air, then house-to-house operations must have been conducted. People began to gather around us when we got out of the car – they wanted someone to hear their stories. They were shouting. They wanted to be witnesses. Some said men and boys were killed at close range with guns; others said knives were used.

‘The problem is now there is no food, no water, no electricity,' J., the father of one family, told me.

J. had let his two children go outside to play and they were climbing up and down in the rubble, using it as a bridge, pretending to build small houses.

J. told me to go and talk to his smallest daughter. ‘There's nothing to do, no one to play with,' said six-year-old Rauda. ‘My friends left when the bombing started. I stayed close to my mother and held her. But she said we were not leaving.'

The government reports in the aftermath, and amidst the international condemnation, were that there was no massacre in Darayya. Instead, it was a ‘prisoner exchange' gone wrong. The British reporter Robert Fisk, who has worked in the region for many years, accompanied Syrian Army troops into town. Fisk wrote in the
Independent
on 29 August 2012:

But the men and women to whom we could talk, two of whom had lost their loved ones on Daraya's day of infamy four days ago, told a story quite different from the popular version that has gone round the world: theirs was a tale of hostage-taking by the Free Syrian Army
and desperate prisoner-exchange negotiations between the armed opponents of the regime and the Syrian army, before Bashar al-Assad's government decided to storm into the town and seize it back from rebel control.

Officially, no word of such talks between sworn enemies has leaked out. But senior Syrian officers spoke to the Independent about how they had ‘exhausted all possibilities of reconciliation' with those holding the town, while citizens of Daraya told us that there had been an attempt by both sides to arrange a swap of civilians and off-duty soldiers in the town – apparently kidnapped by rebels because of their family connections with the government army – with prisoners in the army's custody. When these talks broke down, the army advanced into Daraya, only six miles from the centre of Damascus.

Fisk interviewed two people who claimed to have seen dead people on the streets even before the Syrian Army entered the town.

One woman who gave her name as Leena said . . . [she] saw at least ten male bodies lying on the road near her home. ‘We carried on driving past, we did not dare to stop, we just saw these bodies in the street.' She said Syrian troops had not yet entered Daraya.

Another man said that although he had not seen the dead in the graveyard, he believed that most were related to the government army and included several off-duty conscripts. ‘One of the dead was a postman – they included him because he was a government worker,' the man said.

Fisk concluded: ‘If these stories are true, then the armed men . . . were armed insurgents rather than Syrian troops.'
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But, to be fair, Fisk was accompanying government troops and perhaps the two people he interviewed told him what the soldiers around him wanted to hear (or they were frightened). The people I saw said that the government tanks had rolled right down the centre of town, destroying everything in sight, crushing the street lights, the houses, even the graveyard walls. Then the killing started.

There seemed to be no window left in town that was not shattered. In the middle of some buildings that were crushed like accordions, I saw a lone cyclist with a cardboard box of tinned groceries strapped to a rack over his back wheel. He said he was trying to find his home.

In another building, I found a man hiding in the aftermath of the killing. He had just been released after six months in prison.

Rashid had been arrested in December 2011, although he said he was not a member of the Free Syrian Army.

‘They told me that I was one of the organizers of the strikes,' he said.

He was taken to Jawiya Air Force Prison near the Mezzeh neighbourhood, stripped of his clothes, made to stand outside in freezing temperatures and doused with cold water. He was then beaten with sticks and fists.

‘I stayed there for five hours, freezing, my hands tied behind my back, and they kept asking if I was organizing strikes.'

He was then hung with his hands behind his back so that his shoulders were pulled out of their sockets. He kicks off
his dusty sandals to show the bottoms of his feet and the angry, red scars that reveal where he had been whipped and beaten. ‘The electrocution was the easiest of it.'

At night he was kept in a four- by five-metre room that he says housed 150 men. They all had to stand and make one place for sleeping, in which they took turns lying down. He stayed six months in jail.

‘The problem is they forget about you,' he said. ‘Then one day, they just came and said, okay, it was a mistake, you can go.' Human Rights organizations have documented that there are – as of this writing – nearly 38,000 Syrians now being held in detention, often without their families knowing their whereabouts or why they were taken.

Rashid describes the attack on Darayya, which took place the Saturday before, the fourth day of the Eid holiday.

‘The shelling started at 7.30 a.m. There is no sound more frightening than rockets,' he said.

Sunday continued with more shooting and shelling, and then finally, on Monday, he said the army arrived. Most people hid in basements. Some were pulled out and executed outside; according to witnesses, others were sprayed with machine-gun fire.

‘We had some informers [the word in Arabic is
awhyny
] who pointed out where Opposition people were,' he said. ‘They let the women run away but they shot the men one by one. In some cases, they went into the basement and killed old men and children – just because they were boys.'

Another woman who was cooking for victims and taking food to the mosque, Umm Hussein, was hurrying
along during the bombardment with her young daughter and twenty-year-old son. A truck went by with soldiers shouting: ‘With our life, with our blood, we will fight for Assad!'

Umm Hussein and her children did not make it in time: they were stopped and while she and her daughter were spared, her son was shot. She says his body was taken out of town; there are rumours that some victims are being moved to secondary graves, which was also the case with the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia in 1995.

But some people I meet say that the regime soldiers fed them and provided medical attention to the wounded. ‘They gave us bread,' one man says. ‘Not all of them were monsters.'

In the initial days after the chaos, no one knew who was dead or alive. The VDC (Centre for Documentation of Violations) put the figure at somewhere around 380. The Syrian opposition put it in the thousands.

The mounds of freshly dug, moist earth in the cemetery in the middle of town looked as if they harbour at least several hundred dead. One woman came every day to scan a list posted outside the graveyard; she was looking for her sons, who are missing: ‘We are still searching houses and abandoned ruins trying to find them.' She says that everyone waits for the hour when the gravedigger arrives, because then there will be new bodies to identify.

After a while, Maryam and I went to look for the gravedigger to see if he could give us a more accurate count of the dead. There was a tightly packed crowd of people who were reading a sign put up by desperate families – a
list of the missing. They parted and let us through to look at the sign.

That's where I met the mechanic. It was there, looking over the list, that he told me: ‘Syrians cannot do this to other Syrians.'

Many of the bodies were discovered on the fifth day, when Human Rights Watch obtained satellite images of the battle. Initially, they were not clear if the killing was committed by government forces, or whether Shabiha militia carried out the assassinations after the town was shelled and bombed by helicopters: ‘What we don't know yet is who did the dirty work, the executions – whether it was men in uniform or Shabiha,' Ole Solvang, from HRW, told me a few weeks after the battle. ‘We're still talking to people.'

‘I think whoever did it,' Maryam told me solemnly, ‘they were trying to teach Darayya a lesson.'

But why? Why teach a town a lesson? And who were they? One Syrian journalist later told me that Iranian militias were also working alongside the Syrian Army.
⁶

Darayya was long regarded as a bastion of opposition and a base for the Free Syrian Army. Eventually, 3,000 FSA fighters made Darayya their stronghold, as it was strategically situated on the edge of the military airport at Mezzeh, a town being used for air strikes against rebel-held areas. Both rebels and local residents reported that opposition forces conducted mortar and rocket strikes against the base from Darayya. Also, a few days before the government attack, the rebels claimed to have killed thirty soldiers when they attacked a military checkpoint outside the town.
⁷

But there are some reports that the FSA began withdrawing from their holding positions at least two days before, to spare the town from being pummelled.

Not long before the massacre, there was a week of gruesome discoveries of the bodies of people summarily executed by regime forces, which began turning up in Damascus suburbs, such as Douma. In the northeast area of that city, sixteen men were found executed, allegedly by regime forces.

Shortly after, in an extraordinary act of indecency, a pro-regime television journalist, Micheline Azaz, entered the town and filmed a fourteen-minute piece on camera, largely interviewing victims who needed medical care. She interrogated them before they were removed by emergency services, when they were still in immense pain and shock, demanding to know if ‘terrorists' had done this.

Azaz, who worked for the Syrian channel Addounia, was shown interviewing victims against a backdrop of classical music. The cameraman first filmed close-ups of several corpses stretched out on the ground or in cars.

‘As usual, by the time we arrive at the scene,' Azaz said breathlessly, ‘the terrorists have already done what they do best: committed criminal acts, murdered people . . . and all in the name of freedom.'

She then approached an elderly woman who appeared to be in agony, waiting for medical help. Azaz extended the microphone with perfectly manicured hands and demanded to know who was responsible.

Then she found a small child, about five years old, in a car sitting next to a lifeless body.

‘Who is that?' Azaz asked the child.

‘My mother,' replied the girl.

A woman named Reem, who lived in Darayya, was there when Azaz did her broadcast. ‘It was horrific,' she said. ‘She was a vulture. She went through the crowds talking to the wounded as though she was floating on water, as though there was not this scene of hell in front of her . . .'

For weeks, the blame went back and forth – the government blaming the FSA and other armed ‘terrorists', the witnesses I spoke to blaming the government.

The day after I left Darayya – after government soldiers found me talking to people and, rather remarkably, calmly asked that I get out of town instead of arresting me – I went to see a government official.

Abeer al-Ahmad, who was the Director of Foreign Media at the Ministry of Information (MOI),
⁸
was in her office drinking coffee with an opened box of biscuits in front of her, and she was visibly furious. Even before I told her, she knew I had been inside Darayya – no one does anything in Syria without the secret police knowing.

‘It was a prisoner exchange of terrorists gone wrong,' she insisted. ‘It's always been a hideout for terrorists. It was meant to be part of a wider campaign in the southern suburbs to rid the area of the opposition forces.'

A few days later, she alerted me to a statement made by the President himself. ‘The Syrian people will not allow this conspiracy to achieve its objectives,' Assad said. ‘What is happening now is not only directed at Syria but the whole region. Because Syria is the cornerstone, foreign powers are targeting it so their conspiracy succeeds across the entire region.'

‘So you are blaming foreign forces for Darayya?' I asked her.

‘Something like that.' She made it clear the meeting was over.

The official state news agency, SANA (Syrian Arab News Agency), stated, ‘Our heroic armed forces cleansed Darayya from remnants of armed terrorist groups who committed crimes against the sons of the town.' It accused the ‘terrorists' of carrying out their own massacre.

The Syrian journalist I spoke to earlier remembered this:

There was a story of a little girl who bribed a Syrian soldier as she escaped her family's massacre running. She told him ‘I have 500 Syrian pounds on me, take them and don't kill me.'

He took them and didn't kill her. Another little girl begged one of the soldiers as they were ready to massacre her whole family, that she has savings, that she will give it all to the soldier. She was begging – in return that they do not kill her eleven-month-old brother. They shot away . . . but she and her brother did survive.
⁹

When last I checked with them, Human Rights Watch said there was no indication of Free Syrian Army atrocities. ‘It was either government or pro-government forces behind the executions,' the researcher told me.

But I still remember what I witnessed those days.

When we left the town, crossing through the checkpoints, Maryam suddenly cried out: ‘Look! They destroyed our mosque!' Then she grew silent, pensive, grave. I didn't hear her say another word until she dropped by my hotel
later that night. There she told me that ‘even the French during the occupation did not destroy mosques when people took refuge in holy places'. She was disturbed. She raised her voice: ‘This is a crime against God . . . and Alawites believe in God as well as Sunnis.' She was close to tears as she turned to me, saying later that it was in this moment that she truly realized that people were certainly killing each other.