A Woman in the Crossfire

Diaries of the Syrian Revolution

Samar Yazbek, Max Weiss

• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781908323149
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A well-known novelist and journalist from the coastal city of Jableh, Samar Yazbek witnessed the beginning four months of the uprising first-hand and actively participated in a variety of public actions and budding social movements. Throughout this period she kept a diary of personal reflections on, and observations of, this historic time. Because of the outspoken views she published in print and online, Yazbek quickly attracted the attention and fury of the regime, vicious rumours started to spread about her disloyalty to the homeland and the Alawite community to which she belongs. The lyrical narrative describes her struggle to protect herself and her young daughter, even as her activism propels her into a horrifying labyrinth of insecurity after she is forced into living on the run and detained multiple times, excluded from the Alawite community and renounced by her family, her hometown and even her childhood friends. With rare empathy and journalistic prowess Samar Yazbek compiled oral testimonies from ordinary Syrians all over the country. Filled with snapshots of exhilarating hope and horrifying atrocities, she offers us a wholly unique perspective on the Syrian uprising. Hers is a modest yet powerful testament to the strength and commitment of countless unnamed Syrians who have united to fight for their freedom. These diaries will inspire all those who read them, and challenge the world to look anew at the trials and tribulations of the Syrian uprising.

1 July 2011

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

Get Out Friday

 

Ambulance sirens wail from time to time under my house that looks out on the intersection of al-Hamra and al-Shaalan streets and the al-Rawdeh neighbourhood. The streets are empty, the sun is blazing. I watch this Friday on the internet and on television. Like every Friday, I sit and wait for sadness. How can a person wait for sadness? We don’t just live it here, we wait for sadness and death and prison. Sadness and death and prison have all become a part of our diaries, like water and the air we breathe.

When I heard the ambulance sirens I tried to figure out in which direction they were going. The news coming out of Barzeh is that people have been wounded and killed there; there is heavy gunfire in the al-Maydan neighbourhood, where people have gone inside three different mosques. With every siren wail, my knees buckle. I think about the blood streaming through the streets of Damascus and about the faces of the demonstrators out in the sun. I remember how at the start of the protest movement I had gone to Jableh in secret, without my family knowing about it, dressed in a disguise: a long dress, black sunglasses and a headscarf. With the help of my girlfriend I managed to get inside the old neighbourhoods in Jableh that were on the brink of death. Death on all sides, from all the shooting. If they had got their hands on me, most of the Alawites in the demonstrators’ neighbourhoods might have killed me; if the Sunni fundamentalists knew I was there, they might have done the same thing. If the security forces and the Ba‘thists got wind of my presence they would have launched a military campaign against the neighbourhood, claiming there was an armed gang there. But I walked in like a visiting relative with a fake ID. My name alone was guarantee of a problem, after I had been marked for death and leaflets against me had been handed out in my city and my village.

My friend got me into one of the fishermen’s houses, where the poor man couldn’t furnish his clean-smelling, one-room house with anything more than an old shabby couch. There were blankets and bedding and sheets piled on top of each other extending as far as the metal door that let out a sharp creak when it was opened. The man told me what the security forces and some Ba‘thists had done at Jableh port and what the shabbiha had done to them. It was a long conversation that required several pages. One day I’ll give it its own folder. After sitting there with him for two hours, I was upset when I left. How could a human being dare to take a cut from those poor people who can barely eke out a living from the sea? How could they take a cut from what kept their empty stomachs alive? The man was in his forties and had three children, who were out playing in the street. His wife was veiled. He was basically illiterate, but he went out for the demonstrations. He told me, “We want them to leave us alone so we can live our lives, nothing more than that.”

This is the people’s revolution of dignity. This is the uprising of a brutalized people who wish to liberate themselves from their humiliation. That’s how the uprising in Syria broke out. I saw it among the people I first interviewed, before I was prevented from moving between the Syrian cities and before the security services and the shabbiha and the Ba‘thists placed a bounty on my head wherever I went.

Now I get back to remembering that day. I hear about two people who are killed in Homs. The bloodshed is starting back up again even as we sit here. My energy flags on Friday. I don’t meet with anyone, I think about answering the call of the young men and women who have been questioned about me by the security forces but any action I take along with them will be in the spotlight. There had been one last warning. My case had truly come down from the office of the senior officer who told me he was going to transfer my file to the security services and leave it to the grunts to take care of me. That’s literally what he said, and after that things were different. Apparently he had actually done it. A number of friends started calling me and asking me to be careful. I took some comfort in the fact that the regime didn’t want to implicate itself any more by detaining intellectuals as part of whatever scheme it was going to hatch next. But I was nervous about getting arrested at the airport. I was intent on getting my daughter as far away from here as possible and on running away from the senior officer who would not stop harassing me, which seemed like the craziest thing I could do. I wanted to find a safe haven in a calm place far away from everything that was happening around me. My life had been ripped open and had reached the point of no return. There at that shadowy point, where I found myself floating in a current of discomfort, I decided to leave the country as soon as possible.

I return to the television. Demonstrations are getting started in Syrian cities and towns and rural areas. In Hama alone half a million demonstrators come out. Nine people have been killed today so far. Numbers have become a game, turning into engineering problems. The three people killed in this city are crossword puzzle trivia: two in that one, one person is killed in another. It’s as if these numbers don’t mean souls and human beings with names. My heart hurts and I feel nauseous. This feeling always comes on Fridays when the demonstrators are going out, but lately, with all the daily killing, I get sick to my stomach, which has to be evacuated of everything inside. As soon as I have thrown up, I open the refrigerator to eat some more, continuing to keep track of what is happening four months on from the outbreak of the uprising. I think about what has happened, what is happening and what is going to happen. The uprising isn’t going to stop. The organization of the local coordination committees and the Federation of Coordination Committees take intelligent steps that reflect a deep consciousness among the young people in organizing an uprising, rising to the occasion and guaranteeing its persistence.

3 July 2011

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

I have to get ready to go back to my former home. There’s no longer any pressing reason for me to stay in this downtown apartment that costs half my monthly income, and which everybody knows about anyway. I don’t have to stay in hiding anymore, since it’s now clear to me that they are not going to arrest me. Intimidation and smearing my reputation and frightening me – that is all they are going to do. What else could those trips I had to take have meant, the trips I called ‘Visits to Hell’. They were not visits, maybe ‘Snapshots of Hell’ would be more like it, but they were enough to sow hell in my heart.

The second time they came to my house there were only two men instead of three. I had stopped writing and I was trying to reorganize these diaries, trying to recall all the details, but they kept escaping me. The two men were exceedingly polite and I thought it strange that they didn’t look anything like the security forces and the shabbiha that had taken me the first time. They calmly knocked on the door and politely asked me to get dressed. I refused and tried to find out what they wanted, but one of them just shook his head and pointed outside. The second confidently stated, “Madame, we’re going to stay here at the door until you get dressed.” He had said ‘Madame’ with a funny accent, it made me want to laugh, and then turned his back. I could see a pistol at his waist, shoved between his belt and his wine-coloured shirt. Flashing the gun spoke more than words, but the other one said, “The boss is waiting for you.”

I knew what was going to happen, but the idea of going back to that shadowy dungeon and seeing the young men’s mutilated bodies terrified me. I wished they would just arrest me and throw me in with the other prisoners so I could be through with this nightmare, but I knew in that moment that they weren’t going to do that. It would be hard for them if it ever got out that there was an opposition in prison consisting of well-known personalities from the Alawite community. In addition to covering up this issue, it was clear that the officer held a personal vendetta against me. Blind rage – I understand the reason for it and I understand the communal loyalty it stems from. I heard from a relative of Hafiz al-Assad that when he seized power after the military coup in 1970, he imported German officers to train his security services based on their expertise. I know that this officer who takes pleasure in torturing me was the apt pupil of one of those German officers at the time. I thought about how smart Hafiz al-Assad was to employ loyalty-building strategies that would turn his sect into loyal killers who would fight to the death for him and his family. It never once occurred to the father president that his entire sect might not always stand with them. Nevertheless, he managed to create an army of murderers among the ranks of his security apparatus. So much of the information I have about that family and other families seems like the stuff of novels and fictional stories; it was all so strange and scandalously mired in injustice.

I had gone out to al-Rawdeh Street with the two security agents when the man put the blindfold over my eyes. As I tried to figure out where we were headed, the car looped around a few times, driving in a circle and returning to the same spot. Just then I told myself we must still be in the al-Jisr al-Abyad neighbourhood; some people had told me that’s where the senior officer’s office was located. But how could this giant prison so crammed with people be right in the middle of downtown Damascus? I thought perhaps I was mistaken and we were heading towards the Kafr Sousseh roundabout, where all the security branches were located, but I couldn’t be certain where I was exactly. The blindfold was tight around my eyes, and the man held my hands and placed them behind my back, politely saying, “Madame, don’t move your hands.”

I was in the same office as the last time but this wasn’t the same senior officer. Even though I didn’t recognize his rank I knew he couldn’t have been as senior because of the harshness in his eyes. Here’s something I noticed in recent years whenever I was summoned by security: the higher ranking the officer, the nicer they would be; the lower their rank, the more brutal. I thought they must have sent me this lower-ranking officer in order to torture me and I was truly indifferent in front of him. I played my game of turning the details into a novel, staring back at him in order to seem more courageous, but the man didn’t do anything. Three other men came in. They were enormous, staring daggers all over me and they threw onto the ground a young man who was completely naked except for underwear splotched with blood. His body resembled the mutilated bodies of those young men I had seen last time, only he was whimpering. The officer told me, ‘This young man says you help him organize demonstrations.’ I looked at the young man and calmly replied, “That’s not true. The demonstrations don’t need organizers. The people go out without any organization.”

The officer drew near me, staring into my eyes, but I didn’t flinch. I stared right back at him. I stubbornly refused to blink. He hissed, ‘I swear to God I’ll flay your skin from off your bones, you bitch.’ He gestured at the men and the enormous guys came over to me. I was like a rag doll in their hands. One of them tore off my jacket and I was left there in a see-through shirt that barely covered my chest. Still staring at me, he said, ‘Well, Madame, what do you say we start getting undressed?’ I didn’t respond. I kept staring at him with the same cruel stare. The truth of the matter is that I was panicking and I started to feel paralysis creeping up from the soles of my feet, into my heart. I tried not to look at the young whimpering man’s body.

The officer told me, ‘He also says he’s your boyfriend!’ I started to tremble, but I kept staring back at him in the same way. My eyes started to burn. In reality, I was already very shaky even before I came. I was having bizarre spells. I would be wracked by crying fits in the middle of the night, as the images of dead bodies broadcast on television seeped into my dreams, cackling. My daughter with her throat slit from ear to ear and bathed in strange colours flickered in front of my eyes as I awoke. Every bit of news was about murder. It was enough to shake me deep down inside. The sight of a tank would send a tremor through my nerves, the sight of a military roadblock and those truncheons and human masses pouncing on people and beating them.

I couldn’t take it, and so when he stripped me half-naked from the waist up, my body started to convulse. I gathered that the colour of my face had drained to blue, and I felt my teeth start to chatter. I continued staring at him. My body was beyond the nonnegotiable red line; I had such a direct and clear relationship with it that I hadn’t even known about prior to that moment. I am the master of my self, the owner of my body, my body is made for love alone and only love can make it obey, anything else and it will be a silent, unmovable stone. As those two men held me and squeezed my back, the thought of my body being violated made me shudder. He stared into my eyes. At this point I detached from my game of imagination; it was too much for me to go on playing. I could hear the beating of my own heart, and I felt like there were ropes entangling my head. He drew closer to me and I was ready to bite him if he came any closer. He nodded at the two men and, as one of them got closer, I screamed. I felt as though a sharp knife had cleaved my head in two. It was only a few moments, the two men backed away, and I simply fell down on top of that young whimpering man’s body. I crashed into him and he let out a loud yelp I won’t forget as long as I live. It was the last thing I heard before my head split in two and I blacked out.

When I came to, the senior officer was there and the officer who had initially received me was gone. I was lying on a couch, fully dressed, and I could smell blood. When I was finally able to see myself clearly in the mirror, later on at home, I would discover the young man’s blood all over my neck. The senior officer said, ‘See how harsh they can be with a delicate girl like you!’ He glared at me scornfully. I shut my eyes, my headache was killing me and it still felt like there was a knife splitting my head in two. He said, ‘Let your admirers come and see what a tough girl you are!’ Then he let out a resounding laugh.

I was groggy. I didn’t know what was happening but he suddenly picked me up. The earth was spinning all around me and I fell down again. Then I heard him shouting at them to take me home. His shoes passed right by my eyes as I lay there on the ground. I’ll never forget that moment. It’s seared in my mind. His shoes were shiny and hip, but they were flat. I noticed the curvature of his feet as his shoes clipped the tip of my nose on his way out. At that moment I closed my eyes and wept.

I recall that hellish visit as I get ready to move home. My daughter is upset. I was aware of how difficult this was for her, but returning to her grandfather’s house was out of the question. The Alawites who treated me like a traitor would never leave her alone, and in Baniyas, where her father lives, the situation was even worse. The Syrian security forces and its websites were urging people to kill me for the crime of inciting people to kill a sniper, this would only expose her to greater hardships. I didn’t say anything about her anger, I tried to make things easier for her but my body was wornout, to the point that while I was packing my bags to go home, I started chronically passing out. This wasn’t easy for me to deal with, especially since my mother was sick and I couldn’t visit to see if she was all right. I shut off my phone and used a new one so they wouldn’t be able to find me. I had cut all my connections, but that was impossible for my daughter. My plan was to go into hiding and work with the young men and women until the regime fell. That was impossible with her around. There was no way to hide when she was with me, and there was no way for me to just leave her to an uncertain destiny. I was at the point of no return but I could not go forward; I was standing there like a silent stone. The idea of leaving the country was the spitting image of my own death. Even though the idea persisted and would soon become a reality, just thinking I was ever going to leave Damascus made me anxious.

Today I sit down to transcribe some testimonies I recorded from my friends, as I try to postpone carrying out my decision to leave Syria.

Stories from Latakia

“On the day of the 26 March massacre in Latakia, my brother and I were coming back at night from the shop where we work. We have to pass through the al-Saliba neighbourhood to get home. Some guys at a checkpoint told us to turn around because there was a demonstration up ahead. We couldn’t tell if they were from the army or military security because they all wear the same clothes more or less. The demonstration wasn’t that far away from us, but at night and from that distance nothing seemed clear. We changed our course as they told us to do, but my brother and I were curious and tried to get closer, hanging out on a street corner not too far from the demonstration. The demonstrators weren’t carrying any weapons. They were chanting, Peaceful! Peaceful! and calling for freedom. The army and the security forces asked the demonstrators to go back, they pushed them away five hundred metres or so. There was a huge army presence and along with the security forces, they formed two continuous roadblocks. When the demonstrators had backed away a little bit, the row of army personnel was suddenly forced down on the ground, twenty soldiers in all, while the second row remained standing. We were stunned to see heavy gunfire directed at the demonstrators, as if they were game and the soldiers were at a shooting range. I saw more than 50 demonstrators get hit. Some were killed and others were wounded; I couldn’t tell which were which. They took the wounded away in trucks and took the dead to some unknown location. They couldn’t see my brother or I. We were in the darkness at the corner. If they had seen us they would have killed us. The cars that took away the dead were Suzukis, and they sped off fast. Then the fire trucks came and their fire cannons sprayed around where the killing had taken place, clearing away the blood. Within an hour the street was back to normal. It seemed weird that the gunfire would be direct, at close range, and aimed at the head and chest.”

I finish transcribing the incident and think about how the demonstrators had been betrayed. Betrayal was the cornerstone of the Syrian regime’s dealings with its own people. They asked them to back away 500 metres while the murderers were protected by a first row of security forces and then they opened fire. How shameful. How despicable to kill unarmed and peaceful people in such a cowardly manner. As I transcribed the stories about the uprising, I also draw strength from them.

Story #2

“During the first demonstrations in Latakia, Alawites came out alongside Sunnis. At the Umar Ibn Khattab Mosque on Antakya Street, there were hundreds of us committed to nonviolent demonstrations and we refused to let even a single demonstrator carry a rock. We chanted, Peacefully, Peacefully, No Alawites and No Sunnis! Some figures from the Alawite community were in the lead and at the Shaykh Daher statue we were met by the shabbiha who started cursing us and pelting us with rocks. Up until that point there had not been any direct contact. During that time somebody informed a group in the al-Saliba neighbourhood and in al-Skantouri that the Alawites were killing Sunnis. I think it was one of the shabbiha, or one of their helpers in al-Saliba. At that point, a group of thugs from the al-Saliba and al-Skantouri neighbourhoods showed up and ransacked the stores. There was heavy gunfire. Four people died, and for your information, neither the police nor the security forces ever came near the people, who continued chanting, Freedom, Freedom, until some giants with bulging muscles showed up. We all knew they were shabbiha and that they were the ones who open...