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

The catalyst was the arrest in late February of a group of teenage boys who had been scrawling anti-regime graffiti on school walls. ‘Al-Shaab yureed eskat el nizam!’ they wrote – ‘The people want to topple the regime’ – just as the crowds had shouted in Cairo. ‘Bashar out!’ wrote another. A third was writing, ‘Your turn next, doctor,’ when he was spotted by security forces.

Over the next few days they rounded up ten more teenagers, making fifteen in total, and took them to the local Political Security Directorate – I told you we have many secret police – which was under the control of General Atef Najeeb, the President’s cousin, who everyone was scared of.

Since Assad father’s time, and the Six Day War in 1967 when Israel seized our Golan Heights from the Sea of Galilee in the south to Mount Hermon in the north, our police and security services have had absolute power to arrest and detain anyone indefinitely without trial. They use the excuse that we are in a permanent state of war with ‘the Zionist entity’, which is what we call Israel, though when we fought them again in the 1973 war we didn’t get back the land. Assad’s jails are notorious for torture. People say death is easier than a Syrian prison, though I don’t know how anyone would know that.

Soon there were reports that those boys were being beaten and tortured, the usual Assad specialities like pulling out fingernails and electric shocks to their private parts. Their desperate parents went to the authorities and were told by General Najeeb, ‘Forget your children, go and make more.’ Can you imagine? Round the country young people tried to organize a Day of Rage in support of the boys. I saw Nasrine and Bland looking at a Facebook page called ‘The Syrian Revolution against Bashar al-Assad 2011’, but they quickly closed it. We were scared even to look at the page.

Deraa is a very tribal area, and the arrested boys were from all the largest clans. And like many farmers we knew, its people were struggling because of a severe drought which had been going on for the last four years and they couldn’t compete with cheap imports from Turkey and China. Instead of helping them, the government had cut subsidies. They were angry too at the way General Najeeb had been running the area as his personal fiefdom.

So, on 18 March, after Friday prayers, when the families of the missing marched on the house of the Deraa governor and started a sit-in to demand their release, they were accompanied by local religious and community leaders. Riot police used water cannon and teargas to try and disperse them, then armed police came and opened fire. Four people were killed. When people saw the blood they went crazy. Ambulances couldn’t get through because of the security forces, so protesters had to carry their wounded to the ancient mosque in the Old City which they turned into a makeshift hospital.

Two days after that protesters set fire to the local Ba’ath party headquarters and other government buildings. President Assad sent an official delegation to offer condolences to the relatives of those killed, and sacked the governor and transferred General Najeeb.

It was too late. Now it was our turn. Our revolution had begun.

Predictably (dictators are so uninventive), Assad’s first response was to send tanks into Deraa to crush the protests. Maybe because our army is mainly Alawite like the Assads, they didn’t hold back as the Egyptian tanks had done. Instead they attacked the mosque, which had become a kind of headquarters for protesters, and they did so with such force they left its ancient walls splattered with blood. The funerals of the people killed then turned into mass rallies. These in turn were fired on and more people killed, so there would be more funerals and even more people would turn out.

The government then issued a decree to cut taxes and raise state salaries, which only made everyone even angrier. At the next funeral the following day, tens of thousands of people gathered, shouting, ‘We don’t want your bread, we want dignity!’ Then, at the end of March, Assad gave a speech in parliament denouncing the protesters as ‘sectarian extremists’ and ‘foreign terrorists’. ‘Such conspiracies don’t work with our country or people,’ he raged. ‘We tell them you have only one choice which is to learn from your failure.’

We Syrians were shocked by that speech. ‘He’s treating us like traitors!’ said Bland. Deraa was under siege, but weekly anti-government rallies began in other cities, the details shared on Facebook and YouTube. Throughout April and May there were protests in Homs, Hama, Damascus, Raqqa – spreading from Latakia on the Mediterranean coast to the rural northern regions bordering Turkey and the eastern province of Deir al-Zour where our oil comes from.

Each time they were met with a show of force as the government thought it could just crush the protests. Hundreds of people were being killed. But it didn’t stop. Across the country people were shouting, ‘With our souls, with our blood, we sacrifice to you, Deraa!’

Soon no one spoke of anything else. Even Mustafa’s refusal to get married was forgotten. The air was electric, almost crackling. Revolution! It was like the history programmes I watched. We were full of excitement at the thought that we were going to get rid of the Assads. Suddenly people were talking about everything that had been unthinkable. It was beautiful. People made up songs against Assad. I made curses against Assad which I sometimes said out loud.

We Kurds thought we might finally get our Kurdistan, or Rojavo as we call it. Some banners on the streets read, ‘Democracy for Syria. Federalism for Syrian Kurdistan’. But Yaba said we didn’t understand. Older people like him knew the regime was dangerous because they had witnessed the 1980s in Hama when Hafez al-Assad and his brother Rifat quelled protests from the Muslim Brotherhood by massacring 10,000 people and pulverized the city. So they knew what the Assads would do.

The regime seemed deaf and blind to what people were demanding. Instead of real change Assad announced new things to try and appease different sectors of the population. He legalized the wearing of niqab by female schoolteachers which had been banned just the year before. To try and stop us Kurds joining the protests, Assad even passed a Presidential decree which gave citizenship to around 300,000 Kurds who had been stateless since the 1960s. For the first time ever, his spokesman came on state TV to wish Kurds a happy Newroz and played a Kurdish song.

It wasn’t enough – what people wanted was less corruption and more freedom. Calls for reform became calls for the removal of Assad. Protesters ripped down the latest posters of Bashar – in jeans kneeling to plant a tree – and set fire to them and even tore down statues of his late father whose name we had barely dared whisper.

Most of this we watched on Al Jazeera or YouTube – Syrian TV didn’t show it of course. Our best source of information was Mustafa, because he had started a business bringing trucks from Lebanon so was always driving across the country and seeing things. Like Yaba, he said our regime was tougher than the others. However, when he saw how that first protest in Deraa spread to Homs and Hama, he changed his mind.

He told us that in Hama there were so many people it was like a human wave had taken over the central square. Hama was the town where all those people had been massacred in 1982, and many of the protesters were orphans of that massacre. They poured into the streets after Friday prayers and as usual the regime retaliated. Three army trucks with large guns appeared and opened fire on them, killing seventy people. The men in the front row shouted the word ‘Peacefully!’ as they were felled. The killings incensed the town and soon the entire square was full.

‘This is it,’ Mustafa told us. ‘By the third week it will be finished.’

Then he happened to be in the Kurdish town of Derik in south-east Turkey near the border when there was a birthday celebration for Abdulhamid Haji Darwish, head of Syria’s Kurdish Democratic Progressive Party, at which everyone was discussing how we Kurds should respond to the revolution. All Kurds thought the regime finished and the discussion was how to make sure we got our own state or at least some autonomy like the Kurds in northern Iraq. They had sent someone to Baghdad to meet Jalal Talabani, the President of Iraq, and also a Kurd, to ask his opinion. He said the Assad regime wouldn’t fall. That wasn’t what people wanted to hear, so they said, ‘Oh, Talabani has got old.’

It turned out he was right – he knew what was going on.

Syria wasn’t the same as Egypt and Tunisia. Assad had learnt from his father the brutal way he had put down the Hama revolt, and even before that from our French masters. Back in 1925 when we were under French rule, Muslims, Druze and Christians together rose up in what we call the Great Revolt. The French responded with an artillery bombardment so massive that it flattened an entire quarter of the Old City of Damascus. That area is now known as al-Hariqa which means the Conflagration. They killed thousands of people and held public executions in the central Marja Square as a warning. After that the rebellion was crushed and we continued under French rule for another two decades until 1946.

Maybe because we didn’t remember this history, we young people were sure there had to be change. When we heard that Assad was going to make another speech in June 2011 we expected he would finally announce some major reform. Instead he again took a hard line, denouncing what he called a conspiracy against Syria and blaming ‘saboteurs’ backed by foreign powers and ‘religious extremists’ who he claimed had taken advantage of the unrest. He said no reform was possible while the chaos continued. It was clear that he, or maybe his family, had no intention of giving up power. Like I said, they thought they owned us.

After that there started to be organized resistance. Hundreds of different rebel groups got together in what they called the Free Syrian Army or FSA and began to prepare for war. Most were young and inexperienced and untrained, but some were disgruntled members of Assad’s own army. There were even reports that senior army officers had defected and joined the FSA. Kurds didn’t join the FSA as we had our own militias, the YPG or People’s Protection Units.

Assad simply stepped up the military action. Much of his firepower in those early days was trained on Homs, where my tortoise came from and which was one of the first places to rise up. Homs is our third largest city, and Sunnis, Shias, Alawites and Christians had lived side by side there, just as in Aleppo. The people didn’t give up, particularly in the old neighbourhood of Babr al-Amr, even though Assad’s forces were pulverizing the place. Soon it was known as the capital of the revolution. We thought that, when they saw all the killing, the Western powers would intervene as they had in Libya. There they had created a no-fly zone to stop Colonel Gaddafi from using his air force against protesters, and since April they had been launching airstrikes against regime targets like Gaddafi’s compound in Tripoli and otherwise helping the rebels. By August the rebels had seized Tripoli and taken over. By October Gaddafi was dead, caught like a rat in a hole, and his body displayed in a freezer just like he had done to his opponents. But our opposition was divided, and it seemed the West did not know how to respond. Foreigners left the country and embassies started to close. By the end of 2011 much of the country was an open battleground between the resistance and military. Mustafa said it was causing chaos, which was good for his business as he didn’t have to pay customs duties, but then the FSA started setting up checkpoints in their areas just as the regime did. Yaba was worried about him, so he didn’t tell us that much.

The funny thing was for us it all seemed far off, not just for me on the fifth floor at 19 George al-Aswad Road, but even for Bland and my sisters. Even though we were the biggest city, Aleppo had not really joined the revolution. Maybe because we were the commercial and industrial centre of Syria and had lots of wealthy people, there were many loyal to the regime, worried about the effect of instability on their businesses. Also we had many minorities, Christians, Turkomans, Armenians, Assyrians, Jews, Circassians, Greeks and of course Kurds, and they were unsure about joining the opposition who were mostly Sunni Arabs and, people said, were getting help from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. It was kind of weird, like there were two parallel worlds. There was this revolution, people being killed every day and Homs being destroyed, yet here in Aleppo people were going to the cinema, or for picnics, and constructing big buildings as if nothing had changed. It didn’t make sense.

One good thing anyway. Around that time I stopped having asthma attacks.

5

A City Divided (#ulink_f1702556-9051-57ba-96cb-9d5b10ae6434)

Aleppo, 2012

People say that history is written by the victors, but here is something I don’t understand. Why is it we always glorify the bad guys? Even though they have done terrible things we talk about them being charismatic or brilliant military leaders. When I was learning to read and write, Third Sister Nahra made me write out sentences in Arabic over and over again and one of them was ‘Alexander is a great hero.’ Later I found out he was a selfish, spoilt boy and I felt deceived.

I hate the fact that I didn’t know anything about the good people but everything about the bad people. I don’t really know anything about the lives of Gandhi or Nelson Mandela. I hadn’t heard of Mandela till the World Cup was in South Africa – so why do I know so much about Stalin and Hitler?

I can tell you for example that Hitler was born on 20 April 1889, his father was Alois and his mother Klara, and she died of breast cancer and he was terribly affected. Then he wanted to be an artist but was rejected twice by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, and he thought the majority of the selection committee were Jews – so the Holocaust began like that. And he was in love with his niece Geli who killed herself when he left her, and then with Eva Braun who committed suicide with him in a bunker in Berlin.

Stalin killed 6 million people in his gulags and in the Great Terror. Hitler’s regime was even more murderous – 11 million people were killed and 17 million became refugees. But it’s Stalin and Hitler I can tell you about, not any of their victims. In fifty years is it going to be the same with Assad? People will remember all about him and not the good people of Syria. We will just be numbers, me and Nasrine and Bland and all the rest, while the tyrant will be engraved in history. That is a scary thought.

When the revolution finally came to Aleppo in spring 2012, it was as if everyone had been asleep and had woken up. Like that moment in the morning when the light streams through the apartment and highlights all the dust and cobwebs.

Nasrine was happy that the first people who protested were the students at the university. On 3 May she had gone to her physics class and found a big demonstration under way demanding that Assad go. She and her friends joined in, and it was exciting protesting for the first time in their lives, saying things they had never been able to say before. Then suddenly they heard a bang and the next thing Nasrine knew her eyes were full of tears and burning, so she ran. There was a lot of fear because we knew what kind of regime we had – if anyone got arrested they were certainly dead and maybe their whole family too.

That night Nasrine got a message from a friend who lived in college to say security forces had stormed the dormitories. They shouted through megaphones that everyone should leave, then fired teargas and bullets to disperse them. When some of the students protested and refused to come out, they fired on them and four were killed. Later that night images appeared on Facebook of a dead student, his shirt drenched in blood, and of a dormitory on fire.

The students were of course outraged, and when a delegation of United Nations observers arrived from Damascus to see what had happened, they came out in even bigger demonstrations, maybe 10,000 students, and streamed the rally live on the internet so that everyone could watch. The next day, after Friday prayers, they took to the streets again, holding up pictures of the dead under the words ‘Heroes of Aleppo University’. Over and over came the chant ‘Assad out!’ and ‘The people want to topple the regime,’ the slogan used in Egypt.

Yaba had told Nasrine not to go. ‘What, do you think that a few students will make this regime roll over?’ he asked. ‘They will roll over you instead.’ But I knew she would go. She came back very quiet and she didn’t go again. I know my family were selective in what they told me as they thought I wouldn’t be able to cope, but I found out later that many people had been beaten and forced to kiss posters of Assad. Nasrine herself had seen one of the students dragged away, a second-year architecture student called Ibrahim who was grabbed by security forces and tortured to death with electric sticks. The boy was from Hama. Many of the demonstrating students were from Hama and had lost parents in the massacre of 1982.

Also, in her department was a boy so smart everyone called him Pythagoras. He disappeared and when he came back he was all in bandages, even his face a different shape, and the authorities wiped out his grades so he had to repeat a year.

But the protests didn’t stop. Girls and boys who had only cared about music, clothes, studies and their friends now found themselves trying to bring down a dictator. The university was split with half the professors supporting the revolution and half with the regime. The head of the university protected the student protesters, so a week later he was removed and replaced by a regime supporter. In the end all opposition professors were kicked out. The students were split too. Girls and boys who had been friends were now reporting on one another. In Nasrine’s physics class of sixteen, they were divided into two sides, while the Kurds had their own side as they couldn’t trust anyone.

Apart from demonstrating, some students were volunteering, taking supplies to protesters and sending out reports on social media. Makeshift field clinics were set up to treat demonstrators, because if they went to government hospitals they might be arrested and killed. It was very risky. In June a burnt-out car appeared in an eastern suburb of Aleppo called Neirab inside which were found three charred and mutilated bodies. One had a gunshot wound and his hands tied behind his back, and his arms and legs had been broken. The corpses turned out to be students – Basel, Mus’ab and Hazem – two medical students and an English student who had been giving first aid to injured protesters and been picked up by Air Force Intelligence a week earlier.

Even though my family didn’t tell me things, once I saw pictures of a boy whose head had been cut off lying on a street with a bloody stump where his head should be. When the wind blew in the right direction I fancied I could hear the sound of protests chanting over and over like a drumbeat. Ayee and Yaba were always like tightly strung instruments until Bland and Nasrine came back through the door.

The main protests were in the east of the city. The west was under the tight control of the regime. In Sheikh Maqsoud scary new figures appeared on the streets. These were what we called shabiha which means ghosts, criminals paid as paramilitary by the regime to stop people going to protests and make us feel there were eyes everywhere.

We admired the revolutionaries and like them wanted change, not wanting to be ruled by the same family for more than forty years, but mostly we wanted to stay alive. Mustafa said the revolution was interesting for people aged seventeen to twenty-one but not for people like him who were older and working to earn a living for their families. He also told us that some people in Kobane had been given money to go to the demonstrations. Nasrine had a pro-revolution song on her phone and, remembering what she had said to Yaba about who would look after me if they died, I worried that maybe my brothers and sisters would have done more if they hadn’t had to think about me. Sometimes when I look back on those days, I wish I had been older at the time and able to make a difference. All I could do was listen to the protest songs. I didn’t even get to tear down an Assad poster!

As we had seen elsewhere in Syria, where there was revolution there soon followed war. Assad had stepped up military action and at the beginning of the year had really concentrated force on the central town of Homs, like he was making an example of it, his forces raining mortars and artillery fire on rebel strongholds and bombing centuries-old buildings to dust with people inside. Children were killed, foreign journalists were killed, and the town kept under siege, trapping without food, water or medicines those families who hadn’t fled.

Though the regime eventually pushed the rebels out, many other Syrians were revolted by the way they had done it. Like the Aleppo students, people felt they couldn’t stay quiet any more. Instead of being cowed, more cities joined the fight.

Mustafa said that Assad was losing swathes of Syria as he concentrated on holding Damascus, Homs and the two coastal provinces on the Mediterranean, and that the rebels were taking much of the countryside. They had also captured border crossings with Turkey and Iraq. But it was at a high cost. Maybe 10,000 people had been killed. He told us people were buying gold sovereigns because they worried that the Syrian pound would become worthless.

Yaba clacked his worry beads and said it was only going to get worse. As front lines hardened into stalemate, the rebels got hold of more effective weapons, some seized from Syrian army bases and others smuggled from Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon and funded by Qatar and Saudi Arabia, while Assad was backed by Russia, China and Iran. It was clear that the rest of the world wasn’t going to stop him.

Our war started during Ramadan – the fasting month when everyone becomes tetchy – in the heat and dust of July 2012. It happened quite suddenly. Almost overnight the rebels poured into Aleppo from the countryside. Initially they made quick gains, seizing control of districts in the north-east, south and west within days. Our neighbourhood, Sheikh Maqsoud, was under the control of Kurdish militia, the YPG. But the offensive was not decisive and it left the city divided. The rebels controlled the east and the regime forces the west, some parts changing hands daily. Soon fighting even reached the gates of the Old City.