The Girl From Aleppo: Nujeen’s Escape From War to Freedom

I watched things too and would know when men had come home from work in the late afternoon as the sweet smell of tobacco would rise up from them lighting up their hookah pipes and start to tickle my treacherous lungs. Sometimes as I watched the shadows move across the street and caught sight of figures disappearing down winding alleys I wished I could wander. What would it be like to lose yourself in a warren of narrow streets?

Aleppo was a place where many tourists came and which everyone says is beautiful with its medieval citadel, Great Mosque and the world’s oldest covered souk selling goods from along the Silk Road like Indian spices, Chinese silks and Persian carpets. Our apartment was high so if one of my family helped me stand I could see the citadel lit up at night on a hill in the middle. How I wished I could go and see it. I begged my mum to take me but she couldn’t because of all the steps.

All I saw was our room and the parts of my home I could drag myself to with my rabbit-jumping. My family did try to take me out but it was so much effort as we had no lift, so I had to be carried all the way down five flights, and then the streets were so full of potholes that it was difficult even for an able-bodied person to walk. The only place I could go was my uncle’s house because it was near by and his building had a lift, so I became less interested in going out. When I did, after five minutes I would want to be back, so I guess you could say I was the one who locked herself up.

Sometimes I saw Yaba looking at me sadly. He never told me off even when I flooded the bathroom by playing water-polo and he would fetch me anything I liked – or send my brothers – whether it was fried chicken from a restaurant in the middle of the night or the chocolate and coconut cake I loved. I tried to look happy for him. He never let me do anything for myself. Nasrine used to get cross. If I was thirsty and demanded a drink, my father would insist she fetched it even if the bottle was just across the table from me. Once I saw her crying. ‘Yaba,’ she said, ‘now we’re all here, but what will Nuj do when we all die?’

The worst thing about being disabled is you can’t go away and cry somewhere on your own. You have no privacy. Sometimes you just have a bad mood and you want to cry and push out all that negative energy, but I couldn’t because I couldn’t go anywhere. I always had to rely on people. I tried to avoid people looking at the way I walked. When I met someone for the first time my mum would recount the whole story of my birth then go on about how smart I am, as if to say ‘Look, she can’t walk but she is not mentally disabled.’ I would just stay silent and stare at the TV.

The TV became my school and my friend, and I spent all my time with adults, like my uncles who lived near by. I never played with toys. When relatives came to visit, they sometimes brought dolls or soft toys, but these just stayed on a shelf. Mustafa says I was born with the mind of an adult. When I tried to make friends my own age it didn’t work. My eldest brother Shiar has a daughter Rawan who is a year and a half younger than me and she and her mum came to stay with us several times. I really wanted to be her friend so I would do anything with her, play even the most boring game or let her use me as her model for experiments in hairdressing. But as soon as anyone came who could walk I would be brushed off. One day when she was five and I was seven, I asked her why she didn’t play with me. ‘Because you can’t walk,’ she replied. Sometimes I felt I was just an extra member of the world’s population.

3

The Girl on TV (#ulink_011e047b-ba3d-5d33-81a5-6b6d3bac8b52)

Aleppo, 2008–2010

Apart from facts I like dates. For example, 19 April 1770 was the day Captain James Cook found Australia and 4 September 1998 was the date Google was established. My least favourite date is 16 March. That is a black day in the history of Kurds when in 1988, in the final days of the Iran–Iraq War, around twenty of Saddam Hussein’s fighter jets swooped down and dropped a deadly mixture of mustard gas and nerve agents on Kurds in the city of Halabja in northern Iraq. The town had fallen to the Iranians who had joined forces with local Kurds, and Saddam wanted to punish them. We call that day Bloody Friday. Thousands of men, women and children were killed – even today we don’t know how many, but perhaps 5,000 – and thousands more were left with their skin all melted and with difficulties breathing. Afterwards lots of babies were born with deformities.

Every year on that day our Kurdish TV channel would play mournful songs about Halabja and show old film, which made me so sad. It was awful to see the clouds of white, black and yellow smoke rising up in tall columns over the town after the bombing, then people running and wailing, dragging their children behind them or on their shoulders, and bodies piling up. I watched one film where people said the gas smelled of sweet apples and after that I couldn’t eat an apple. I hate that day – I wish I could delete it from the calendar. Saddam was an even worse dictator than Assad. Yet the West kept supporting Saddam for years, even giving him weapons. Sometimes it seems that nobody likes the Kurds. Our list of sorrows is endless.

March is actually the best time and the worst time for Kurds because it is the month of our annual festival Newroz, marking the start of spring, a festival that we share with the Persians. For us it also commemorates the day when the evil child-eating tyrant Zuhak was defeated by the blacksmith Kawa.

In the days running up to Newroz the flat would be filled with heavenly smells of cooking, Ayee and my sisters making dolma, vine leaves rolled around a stuffing of tomato, eggplant, zucchini and onion, and potatoes filled with spicy mince (apart from one potato that we always leave empty for luck for whoever gets it). And it was the one time of year when I went out. A few days before Newroz we and all our neighbours would festoon our balconies with coloured lights in red, green, white and yellow, the colours of the national flag of Kurdistan. On the actual day we would dress up in national dress and set off in a mini-bus.

Of course the regime didn’t like it and put lots of police on the streets that day. They only allowed the festival because they knew how stubborn we Kurds are and feared there would be riots if they banned it. But you still needed an official permit which was hard to get, and we weren’t allowed to enjoy our festivities on the local streets. Instead we had to go to a sort of wasteland called Haql al-rmy on the outskirts of Aleppo, which the army used for rifle practice and which literally means shooting field in English. It was a bleak rocky place, so we took lots of rugs to sit on and to spread our picnics on.

To be honest, sometimes I hoped it would be banned because I hated going to it. First it was almost like torture to get me down those five floors of stairs. Then when we got there it was totally loud and crowded, and so uncomfortable sitting on the hard ground. I couldn’t even see the folk dancing or the march with our national songs. And we had to be careful what we said because among the revellers were vendors selling balloons and ice-cream and candyfloss and people thought they were spies for Assad’s intelligence. Actually we were always careful. In the evening there would be a bonfire which people would dance around and fireworks would light up the sky.

Then a week or so later would come the arrests of the organizers, the people who had set up the stage for the musicians and sound systems. In 2008, police shot dead three young men celebrating Newroz in a Kurdish town and there were calls for it to be banned. Rather than having an outright clash with all the Kurds, the regime announced that from then on that date would be Mother’s Day, and any festivities would be to celebrate that. See how wily these Assads are.

That was the year I missed Newroz because the doctors decided to try and lengthen my Achilles tendons to enable me to stretch out my feet and put my ankles on the ground, instead of always standing on tiptoe. I woke in Al Salam hospital with the bottom halves of my legs encased in plaster. It felt as if my feet were on fire, and I cried. I missed my eldest sister, gentle Jamila, who had got married the previous year and moved away. Bland had finished his studies and got a job as an accountant for a trading company and Nasrine had just started at Aleppo University to study physics in the footsteps of my sister Nahda. I was happy for them but it meant I was alone at home all day with Ayee and Yaba.

One day I was sitting on the rug on the big balcony when Ayee came with my uncle Ali, who had just been visiting relatives in the city of Homs. ‘Your uncle has something for you,’ she said. Uncle Ali handed me a tissue box and laughed as my face fell. A box of tissues didn’t seem much of a gift.

‘Look inside,’ he said. I did and there among the tissues was a small tortoise. Homs was famous for its tortoises. I was so happy I sat with the box on my lap all day long. I loved tracing the patterns on her domed shell with my finger and watching her little head poke out, all grey and wrinkled like snakeskin with little beady black eyes. That first day she barely moved and I was terrified I had damaged her as I was notorious in my family for breaking everything I touched. For the first few days I would check her every two minutes to make sure she was still alive. We kept her on the balcony, fed her salad leaves and called her Sriaa, which is Arabic for fast because she was very slow. Even slower than me.

The only person who didn’t like the tortoise was Yaba. He complained she was haram or unIslamic. I laughed, but then summer came and we slept outside on the balcony and one night we were all awoken by loud cursing. The tortoise had climbed on to my father and he was furious.

The next day I couldn’t see Sriaa anywhere. I looked all over the balcony, becoming more and more suspicious. Finally, I went to Yaba. ‘Where is she?’ I demanded. ‘I’ve taken her to be sold,’ he said. ‘It’s for the best, Nujeen, it’s cruel to keep animals confined.’

‘No!’ I screamed. ‘The tortoise was mine and was happy here. How do you know what will happen to her now?’ I bawled my eyes out.

I couldn’t complain of course as he had got rid of her for religious reasons. And afterwards I was secretly relieved. I had been so worried about Sriaa dying. If you hold a tortoise by its tail it will die. I wouldn’t have been able to cope with that.

With the other children from the building off at school, and no more tortoise to watch, there was nothing to do but watch TV. The satellite dish meant my room suddenly opened into a whole new world. National Geographic, the History Channel, Arts & Entertainment … I liked history programmes and wildlife programmes – my favourite animal is the lion, king of the jungle – and scariest is the piranha which can eat a human in ninety seconds.

Mostly I watched documentaries. Everything I know about aliens or space or astronauts like Neil Armstrong and Yuri Gagarin is from documentaries. I was very cross with Gagarin because he said that when he became the first man to cross the Karman line into outer space in 1961 he didn’t see any signs of God. That is very hard for us Muslims. But later I saw another programme which said he didn’t actually say that. We are always being deceived.

The TV was on all the time, its blue aquarium light flickering night and day until sometimes Ayee or Mustafa shouted at me to turn it off so they could sleep. As I didn’t go to school, sometimes I watched till 3 a.m. then got up at 8.30 a.m. to start again. My favourite day was Tuesday when they broadcast an Arabic version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? I loved quiz shows. There was also one every evening at six called Al Darb which means The Track where people competed as teams. I could usually answer all the questions.

It wasn’t a big TV – 20 inches – and it had a big crack on one side because once I grabbed the TV table to try and stand up and the TV fell on me. I cried, not because I was hurt, but because I thought the TV would never work again. Every so often Bland got cross with me. ‘Nujeen, you’ve convinced yourself that you love home and TV and that it’s better than going out, but no one really wants to be indoors all the time,’ he said. I ignored him. But sometimes I did wonder what other disabled people did. Then I went back to the TV.

Ayee, Nasrine and I liked watching tennis. The US Open, the French Open, the Australian Open and best of all Wimbledon with the umpires so smartly uniformed in green and purple and the grass courts so perfect like carpets. Soon I knew all the rules. Ayee liked Andy Murray, while I liked Roger Federer and Nasrine liked Nadal, just as in football I liked Barcelona and Nasrine liked Real Madrid.

The one time everyone watched together was during the World Cup in 2010. My family loves football! As usual everyone in the area hung flags for their favourite team. I hung an Argentina flag from the balcony for Lionel Messi. Our neighbour had an Italian flag. But I was distracted and kept crying for my second mother Jamila. The doctors had said I would get better as I was older but my feet, which were supposed to have straightened, seemed more curled up than ever. Eventually my brother Farhad in England found out about a famous orthopaedic surgeon in Aleppo. He was so sought after that it took months to get an appointment, so we went early one morning to his surgery to get a ticket and found villagers who had been waiting all night. We were number 51. Every patient got five minutes and we finally saw him in the late afternoon.

When he saw my feet he was cross and told my parents they shouldn’t have let them deteriorate, that I should have been doing exercises. He said I would need to have three operations together as soon as possible and sent us to the hospital for blood tests, then he would operate the following day. He did a new operation on my ankles and two others to lengthen my knee ligaments, which had become too short from lack of exercise. It cost my family $4,000, paid for by my second eldest brother Mustafa from his water wells, and this time the whole of my legs were in plaster, from hip to ankle, only my toes poking out, and I had to lie flat.

I was supposed to stay in hospital but insisted on coming out after one night to watch the football. I was desperate for Argentina to win, otherwise Spain. However, the pain was so bad I screamed all the way back in the taxi and again at home, until I drove Mustafa and Bland out of the room because they couldn’t bear it.

Finally, the pain stopped but I was in plaster for forty days, which felt like a very long time. Then Mustafa paid for a special brace to put my legs in to strengthen the muscles. They looked like robot legs, and oh they were agony! I had to wear them ten hours a day and I complained so much. But after a week I got used to them and they meant that for the first time I could stand with the help of a walker. I could see parts of the apartment I never normally went into like the kitchen and I could see the citadel from the balcony without any help. Ayee says it was like I was newborn.

About that time I started watching an American soap opera. It was called Days of Our Lives, about two rival families called the Hortons and the Bradys living in a fictional town in Illinois and a mafia family called the DiMeras and their love-triangles and feuds. They all had beautiful big houses with lots of clothes and appliances and each child had their own bedroom. One of the men was a doctor in an immaculate shiny hospital, not at all like Al Salam where I had been. Their lives were so different to ours. To start with I didn’t understand what was going on and sometimes the story was odd, with characters coming back from the dead, but after a while I caught up. I watched it with Ayee and it drove Nasrine mad. ‘What on earth do you see in this?’ she asked.

We had our own family soap opera. My parents were desperate about Mustafa not getting married. As second son, he should have got married after Shiar in 1999, but first he said he should wait for Jamila, then once she was married he said he needed to devote himself to work as he was our main provider. But now he was thirty-five which in our culture is very old to be unmarried. We have arranged marriages – not love-matches, which from what I could see from Days of Our Lives was not a very good system. My mother kept going to meet suitable brides from our tribe, but Mustafa always refused to take it further and just laughed. It didn’t matter whether he was there in the apartment or not – it seemed like all anyone talked about. I hated it. Whenever they raised the subject, I shouted, ‘Not again!’ and covered my ears.

4

Days of Rage (#ulink_8cbaf6d1-72e2-58e4-b58f-69638545a138)

Aleppo, 2011

It was 25 January 2011, just after my twelfth birthday, and I was watching Days of Our Lives, worrying that I might be a psychopath because my favourite characters always seemed to be the bad guys, when Bland rushed in from work and grabbed the remote. I looked at him in astonishment. Everyone knew I was in charge of the TV.

Bland is usually so calm and laid back that I always feel there is a part of him nobody knows, but this time he seemed to be spinning like one of those dust-devils we used to get in the desert. Now, not only had he taken the remote but he switched over to Al Jazeera. My family all know I don’t like the news: it was always bad – Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, war after war in fellow Muslim countries pretty much since I was born.

‘Something has happened!’ he said. On the screen we could see thousands of people gathering in the main square in Cairo, waving flags and demanding the removal of their long-time President Hosni Mubarak. I was scared. Dictators fire on people. We knew that. I did not want to see it. I started shaking my head.

‘I was watching my programme,’ I protested. One of what I call my ‘disability benefits’ is that my brothers and sisters all knew they weren’t supposed to upset me. Even when I threw Nasrine’s things out of the window, like her blue pen and the CD of Kurdish songs she used to play all the time.

As I predicted, soon came the teargas and rubber bullets and water cannons to drive the demonstrators away. The thud of the bullets made me jump. After that Bland let me switch back. But the protests didn’t stop. Mustafa, Bland and Nasrine talked of nothing else, and whenever I was out of the room they switched to the news. I gave up trying to resist and soon I too was glued to Al Jazeera watching those crowds in Tahrir Square grow and grow. Many of the protesters were young people like Bland and Nasrine and had painted the Egyptian flag on their faces or sported bandannas on their heads in red, white and black.

One day, we watched – hearts in mouth – as a column of tanks advanced into the square like monsters. Dozens of protesters bravely blocked their way and I could hardly watch. Then something astonishing happened. The tanks didn’t open fire but stopped. The crowd chanted and people climbed on top, scrawling ‘Mubarak Must Go!’ on their sides, and we could see they were even chatting to the soldiers.

A couple of days later, me, Bland and Nasrine were again on the edge of the sofa as crowds of pro-Mubarak supporters pushed their way into the square like a demon cavalry on horses and camels. They were beaten back by the protesters, who hurled stones and ripped out paving slabs from the square to use as shields. The tanks formed a line between the two groups and it was hard to see what was going on, as there was so much dust and things were on fire. Finally, the Mubarakites were chased out and the democracy people erected barricades of street signs and bits of metal fencing and burnt-out cars to stop them coming back.

Where would it end? we wondered. The protesters made a kind of tent city in the square with a field hospital to treat their wounded, with sections of the crowd handing out food and water and even doing haircuts and shaves. It almost looked like a festival, a bit like our annual Newroz. I could see children my age stamping on pictures of Mubarak. The journalists reporting it all were excited too. They even had a name for it. The Arab Spring, they called it. For us that sounded a bit like our Damascus Spring and that hadn’t ended well at all.

The occupation went on for eighteen days. Then around 6 p.m. on 11 February, Nahda and Nasrine had just come back from my uncle’s wedding which woke me up from a nap. We switched on the TV and there was Egypt’s Vice President announcing, ‘President Hosni Mubarak has decided to step down.’ Soon came the news that the Mubaraks had been flown out in an army helicopter to exile in the Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh. That was it, gone after three decades. I was happy for Egypt. Afterwards there were fireworks, soldiers climbing out of their tanks to hug the demonstrators, people singing and whistling. Was it that easy? If I fell asleep again in the afternoon would I wake up and find Gaddafi gone from Libya? Or even Assad?

And Egypt wasn’t all. At the time we hadn’t realized it was a ‘thing’, but the Arab Spring had actually begun the previous December in Tunisia, when a poor twenty-six-year-old fruit-seller named Mohamed Bouazizi poured kerosene over his body and set fire to himself outside a town hall. This was shocking for us Muslims as our holy Koran prohibits the use of fire on Allah’s creation, so he must have been completely desperate. We didn’t know if he would go to heaven or hell. His family said he had been fed up with local officials humiliating him and had become desperate when they confiscated his fruit cart which was their whole livelihood. When he died of his burns in January there were massive protests in the centre of Tunis and ten days later President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and his family ran away to Saudi Arabia after twenty-three years of power.

Soon every day on the TV there were uprisings somewhere new. Yemen, Bahrain, Jordan, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, even Oman, all had demonstrations against their rulers – it was like an epidemic across North Africa and the Middle East. Of course we knew about the forty years of Assads, but we hadn’t realized how long all these dictators had been in power. People would gather after Friday prayers then swarm into the streets and congregate in some central square. Days of Rage they called it.

When would it be Syria? Like those other countries, our population was mostly young and unemployed, and we had had our rights trampled on by a dictator and the rich elite. Even in my room on the fifth floor I could sense that the whole country seemed to be holding its breath. Nasrine said that at the university nobody was talking about anything else. My brothers and sisters came home with reports of odd incidents – a Kurdish man in the north-eastern city al-Hasakah had set fire to himself; some small demonstrations here and there; even a protest in Damascus after police assaulted a merchant in one of the main souks. But nothing quite caught hold.

When the spark finally did come it was in an unlikely place – the small farming town of Deraa in the south-west, near the border with Jordan, which we knew as a bastion of support for the regime that had long sent its sons to top posts. In recent years, they had produced a prime minister, a foreign minister and a head of the ruling Ba’ath party.