The Morning They Came for Us (7 page)

By 2015, it was difficult to calculate the number of missing and detained in Syria after four years of conflict. But Bassam
al-Ahmad from the Violations Documentation Center told me: ‘Those we can document by name, we believe to be 36,000 held by the regime, and around 1,200 by ISIS. But if we are talking about estimated figures, we are sure that the numbers are bigger.' The Syrian Organization for Human Rights gave a higher figure.

The President of the International Federation of Human Rights, Karim Lahidji, told me the conditions for detainees, especially the political prisoners, are terrible: ‘In the jails of the regime, torture and abuse are the norm. The overwhelming majority are arbitrarily detained.'

‘I have worked in many countries where torture has been a significant problem, but, quite frankly, I struggle to remember a place where torture has been so widespread and systematic,' said Ole Solvang from Human Rights Watch. ‘The Syrian government is running a virtual archipelago of torture centres scattered around the country.'

The other face of Syria was not an archipelago of torture. This was Damascus, party time: people drinking champagne in Narenj, the fancy Damascus restaurant, or getting married in tight sparkly dresses with low-cut backs and holding elaborate parties at Le Jardin Restaurant with Druze musicians, or filmmakers doing high-end commercials with actors who were not in prison.

‘This is how I see it:
We don't want our world to change.
I'm still jogging and swimming every day,' Rida, a well-off, sixty-four-year-old businessman said one afternoon over lunch. ‘This is
not
a war. Our regime is strong. Seventy per cent are fully supporting Assad.'

‘You don't want your world to change, but for some people, it has changed without their consent,' I said. ‘They are getting bombed or tortured or shot at.'

‘This is the bias of the press,' he retorted.

His wife, Maria, who wore a headscarf and went to the Opera nearly every week, agreed. ‘When the FSA [the Free Syrian Army] comes and tells people to close their shops and protest against the government, they burn them down if the people refuse,' she said. ‘This is why I am supporting the government.'

‘Are you frightened?' I asked. ‘Will your world change?'

‘Not at all,' says Rida. ‘Last week we had a party of twenty people on our balcony. We were all relaxing and smoking the shisha. We heard gun shots in the background – but it seemed a long way off.'

During the years I spent in Syria, I twice went to the opera house, which is said to be the second-grandest in the Middle East. Once I went with Maria and Rida. The second time I went to meet the director. She did not want me to use her name.

‘I do not want to give the impression that we are like the
Titanic
 – the orchestra plays on while the ship sinks,' she said. We were sitting in her office and she motioned overhead with a hand gesture then put her finger to her lips, meaning that the room was probably bugged, although I am not sure what music has to do with state security.

I told her that there was a cellist who played Albinoni's ‘Adagio' over and over in the ruins of the National Library of Sarajevo during the siege from 1992 to 1995. She mentioned
the Russian musicians playing during the siege of Leningrad, with the performance of Shostakovich's Symphony no. 7 broadcast over loudspeakers, much to the anger of the Germans besieging them.

‘Music and art in times like these fuel the soul,' she said. ‘It gives people hope.' To get to the concerts, people had to pass checkpoints at night, a time when it is not necessarily safe to go out.

She told me that, unlike Rida and Maria, she was scared. ‘People are leaving, people are packing up and going to Europe or Lebanon.' In the summer heat, she shivered. ‘This is my country! How can I go?'

It was not long after our meeting that I heard she too had fled, leaving her prestigious job and the second-best opera house in the Middle East and moving to Paris.

But one morning, while she was still in Syria, she invited me to see the Children's Orchestra practising. They were led by a visiting British conductor. She was proud that he had come ‘in these times'.

Some of the musicians were very young – around eight, with tiny hands holding their instruments. But others looked like teenage kids from anywhere else – Brazilian surfing bracelets, baggy jeans, long flowing hair. They practised a powerful song of innocence, ‘Evening Prayer' from Humperdinck's fairy-tale opera
Hansel and Gretel
.

When at night I go to sleep

Fourteen angels watch do keep

Two my head are guarding

Two my feet are guarding

Two are on my right hand

Two are on my left hand

Two who warmly cover,

Two who o'er me hover

Two to whom 'tis given

To guide my steps to heaven

Sleeping softly, then it seems

Heaven enters in my dreams;

Angels hover round me,

Whisp'ring they have found me;

Two are sweetly singing

Two are garlands bringing,

Strewing me with roses

As my soul reposes,

God will not forsake me

When dawn at last will wake me.

I sat for a good while watching the fresh, young faces intently reading the musical scores and holding their instruments with something akin to first love. I wondered what this room would look like if I returned exactly this time a year later. How many of these boys would be sent for mandatory military service? How many would flee the country? I tried not to ask myself if any would no longer be living.

They begin to play again, at the urging of the conductor. As I watched and listened, I grew emotional and I thought of the words that I had often sung to my son when he was a tiny baby in his crib. It is a song of protection, of reassurance,
of love. But I could already feel that no one was protecting Syria, there were no angels, and that perhaps God had forsaken them.

Maria Saadeh's last name translates from the Arabic as ‘happiness'. She lives in Star Square, in the old French mandate section of Damascus, in an old 1920s building that she helped to renovate. A restoration architect by training, educated in Syria and France, she had recently been elected, without any experience, as the only Christian independent female parliamentarian.

The Christians are anxious. On Sundays during my stay, I go to their churches – Eastern Christian or Orthodox – and watch them kneel and pray. I smell the intense aroma of beeswax, and see fear on their faces. It reminds me of being at mass in Mosul (which would be overrun by ISIS forces on 10 June 2014, causing its Christian population to scatter) before the American invasion in 2003. Fear, mixed with faith. Trembling hands clutching rosary beads, prayers invoking protection and peace. Some of the parishioners in Damascus approached me after mass and tried to ask questions about what would happen to them.
Will we be wiped out? Do other Christians think of us? Where will we go? Will the United States save us?

The Christian minority fears that if a new government – perhaps a Muslim fundamentalist one – gets in and takes over, they will be cleared out of Syria in the same way the Armenians were driven out of Turkey or massacred in 1915.

‘Alawites to the coffin, Christians to Beirut,' is one of the chants of more radical opposition members.

But Maria seemed confident for the moment. She was not going to Beirut. She sat on her roof terrace in an expansive top-floor apartment, her two small children, Perla and Roland, peeking through the windows, a Filipina maid serving tea. It could have been an ordinary day of peacetime – except that, earlier that day, there had been another car bomb.

Maria was tall, blonde, multilingual. Her husband was in the contracting business. She was someone who had benefited from the regime, even if she said she has felt as if she was in a minority, even if she said that while she was studying she was passed over in favour of Alawite students despite her better grades.

She was pro-government, but she wanted change. Just not yet, she said. ‘We're not ready.'

She also refused to believe that the government had tortured, maimed and killed civilians. When I listed the atrocities one by one she stopped me, putting down her cup of tea. There was an angelic smile on her face.

‘Do you think our president could put down his own people?' she asked me incredulously. ‘Gas his own people? Kill his own people? This is the work of foreign fighters. They want to change our culture.'

Earlier in the week, I had gone to a private Saturday night piano and violin concert where the director of the opera house performed Bach, Gluck and Beethoven. She wore an elegant long dress, and the concert was held in Art House, a boutique hotel built on the site of an old mill that has water streaming over glass panels in parts of the floor.

It would not have been out of place in the Hamptons or Newport. The audience was a mix of women in spiked heels
and strapless black evening gowns and bohemian men in sandals and chinos, sitting with their well-behaved children.

When everyone was seated, we were asked to stand and pay homage to the ‘war dead' with a minute of silence. Everyone, even the children, remained quiet and pensive. Afterwards, the director and the pianist received a standing ovation. Then everyone in the audience filed out to an open-air restaurant and began sipping the chilled champagne that was served. I overheard several people talking in hushed voices about what had happened around the city that day: explosions and intense fighting near the suburbs.

‘A toast to the symphony,' said one man, holding his glass of champagne aloft. Then he paused.

‘And another toast that we will live through the next few years.'

It is easy to be cynical towards your government when they send you to fight a war and you come back with one leg and other parts of your body removed.

One scalding summer morning, a Saturday in June 2012, I drove to Barzeh, which is a toehold of the opposition inside Damascus. In Barzeh, there are frequent protests, and the government soldiers respond with arrests, shootings and killings. But Barzeh is also where the government-run Tishreen military hospital cares for wounded soldiers and takes care of the dead.

That June morning, there was a funeral for soldiers who had been killed fighting for Assad. I broke away from the hospital minder – a woman in her forties wearing high heels and a military uniform – assigned to follow me and make sure that
I was seeing what they wanted me to see, and managed to find the room where they were preparing the dead. No one noticed me as soldiers and hospital staff loaded the mangled bodies – disfigured and broken by car bombs, IEDs, bullets and shrapnel – into simple wooden coffins. They were then secured with nails before being draped with Syrian flags.

Then there was a march with the living soldiers carrying the coffins of the dead, to the strains of a gloomy marching band, into a courtyard, where families and members of their regiment waited. There were sisters, wives, mothers, brothers, children, fiancées and friends, all of their faces streaked with tears.

Soon enough, I thought, those who watch Syria closely will privately acknowledge that Assad is winning, his forces backed by Hezbollah, stronger and more determined to fight and win; his other backers of Russia and China and Iran more convincing than the opposition's backers of Qatar and Turkey (and to some extent, though not completely, the US, Britain and France).

But for today, I thought, this funeral of so many men, killed in a single day, is an acute reminder of how hard Assad's forces are getting hit by the opposition. And how brutal war is, and how it comes down to the basics – that politicians argue but soldiers fight. And soldiers are always someone's child, and that child is getting hurt. That child is getting killed.

I met an official in his office – he wouldn't give his name – but he was friendly and made me coffee. After he politely set down the sugar bowl and handed me a spoon, he pulled out a manila file and said that 105 government soldiers were dying every week. This was based on the figures of the men
he admitted to his hospital and the reports of others. He said he had been told to keep it quiet, that the number would be bad for morale, bad for the fighters, bad for the mothers who had to send their sons off to war.

We sat for a while in the quiet of his office drinking the coffee. At last, he said: ‘No one likes to count the dead.'

Upstairs, on the seventh floor of the hospital, was someone's son who had been sent to war: Firis. He was thirty years old, a major, very handsome with long dark hair and sombre eyes. He lay under a sheet, and I could not see at first that his right leg and right arm were missing. He sat up when he saw me, smiled, and with his only hand, reached out to take mine. There was no self-pity in his demeanour. He motioned for me to sit and he began, carefully, to tell his story.

At the end of May, Firis Jabr was in a battle in Homs. On an afternoon of which he remembers every detail – the position of the clouds in the sky, the feel of the warm air on his cheek – he was ambushed. Shot, he lay in a ditch bleeding profusely and says that the men who shot him at close range were not Syrians, but ‘foreign fighters: Libyans, Lebanese, Yemeni'.

‘Are you sure they were foreign?'

‘They were not Syrian. I promise – they were not Syrian.' He said he heard their accents, that their Arabic was not the Arabic he knew. ‘They looked different, they fought differently – I swear to you, another Syrian would not kill his brother Syrian.'

Firis is an Alawite, but he says he is not particularly religious one way or the other. His fiancée stood near the bed
while we talked, anxiously shifting her weight from foot to foot. Firis, without a leg and an arm, spoke to me for more than an hour, and kept a smile on his face. ‘I am not going to be full of pity,' he said.