This week we met a family who had fled their home and sought refuge with
relatives. Not an unusual story in Gaza, perhaps. However this was a
Palestinian family from Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus. The mother of
the family is originally from Gaza. Her three sons have never been here
before in their lives. Their father is still trapped in Syria.
The
eldest son, 17 year-old Ahmed is bright, sincere and softly spoken.
Listening to his accounts of the situation in Syria was staggering.
During this conflict I have found it difficult to comprehend the brutal
reality faced by the Syrian people. It still is, but meeting Ahmed has
brought it home to a much greater extent.
He showed us a video
clip he'd filmed in the immediate aftermath of a government missile
strike on a mosque in a residential neighbourhood. Over 200 people had
been killed, some of his friends amongst them. He hadn't posted the
video online while he was still in Syria for fear of reprisal.
Meanwhile,
a friend from Germany whose trip to Gaza had been delayed, instead went
to the refugee camps on the Turkish-Syrian border. From there she went
into north-western Syria, to the region around the city of Idlib. What follows is her eyewitness account.
Freedom spray – Our days within Syria
21-23/1/2013
Article and photography courtesy of Julia
While i search to find my way through the dark into a borrowed pyjama in the sleeping room of a family I don't get to know because they fled the bombing i stumble over a left behind bottle of deodorant. "Freedom spray" it says. Quickly i spray a little puff onto me and offer the others too.
We laugh.
We are in Maarrat Al-Numan, a city in Syria in the
close range of Idlib. The city used to have about 120.000 inhabitants, now the
people remaining –we will never get the exact number. The estimations vary from
2000 to about ten thousand. People keep leaving in fear and keep coming back
when there is hope that it has become safer.
The city is now split in two halves.
The ‘free side’ we get to know is that of a constant
hide out. But freedom is there, since the people lost the fears of the regime,
they tell us. The frontline of fighting between the army of Assad and the
‘dshesh horr’, the free army runs through it.
You need to know which streets to walk, you don’t just
take a chat at the wrong corner. Snipers can shoot very far.
We get asked if we want to visit the ‘Jabbha’, the
front and we reject. The question feels strange, because we are already close
to about one kilometer to it, the constant barrage of bombs and shooting
becomes our usual surrounding very fast. We reject as we don’t see the need to
go. Neither are we journalists hunting a story, nor do we feel can we achieve
any ease to the situation by going there. We are not on an adventure trip and even
if our feelings with the resistance grow day by day, sharing the ditches men in
arms lye in is not our mission. But we understand the need of the people
wanting us to know all of their story. And that of the resistance at the front
understandingly is part of it. We stubbornly stick to our decision that we will
not go further and this is respected by all we meet.
The shelling that has been inflicted on this city is
so intense and the destruction we witness so massive, that searching a comparison
i can only find comparisons in the images and stories I know of German cities
in 1945. But the massive difference here is this society did not start or lead
a war.
The life, that is crawling through the cracks is also
similar to the stories I've heard of those times. You'll see a little chimney
popping out of the ground somewhere, the only sign that there is people
underneath. Windows of half crushed houses covered to not let the little bit of
light through that those inside have managed to organize for themselves.
Mainly what we see is just dead and silent. The only
sounds we hear is those of the continuity of bombs dropping. It's become a
ghost city. We walk streets and corners of destruction, never knowing when the
next bomb drops close or far.
When you do meet people, everybody greets each other
intensely and also the good byes are of a kind that has a different depth than
when you usually meet at a street corner. One day we will be passing a building
and returning a few hours later find it crushed completely. Two of the young
men we had met there in the morning were hit by the crush and were now
evacuated with heavy injuries to Turkey.
There is quite a lot of cats around and the people
remaining have built a strong relationship with them. One will tell us that he
has now 27 cats he is feeding –because it makes him sad that they too have
nothing left to eat. Another who is a photographer collecting the images of his
city being killed has a little collection of happiness in his photo files that
he shows me: the cats of his city in various moments and places. People tell us
about the story of a cat hit by the Assad army and that they gave surgery for
her in one of their field hospitals.
We have come here with a group called “hopeful smile”.
They have always been here, also before the revolution started. They are just a
group of people of this city who have always tried to do nice stuff. They show
us pictures of their activities of before –pictures where we can also see the
city of before and the life there used to be.
Street cleaning actions within the neighborhood, like
giving aid, toys or times of fun to families in need, maybe a little summer
camp or such. At least this way we get to remember them not only as
survivors of the horror, but also as the other people they are. Through their
eyes and stories we can know this city has once been different. This ‘before
the revolution’ and ‘after it succeeds’ is the all surrounding frame of the
stories of now.
When the things developed as they did, from the first
demonstrations to the complete destruction we are finding now the people of
“the hopeful smile” decided to stay.
They still don’t carry guns. They know their people,
they know the area and they know what they need to do.
They are finding the families in hiding, they search
them everywhere in every crack and every cellar, in the holes in the mountains
and under the ruins of ancient cities built 4000 years ago. They find the needs
and try to cover them. İt’s an almost impossible task, they themselves have to organize
the aid from an outside that is hard to reach and feed the hundreds of people
they find in the various shelters.
İt is everything people need: food, water, blankets,
clothes, plastic sheets to protect from the rain, a doctor and a smile. “the hopeful
smile” are a group of young men who are also everybody from this city of
before: a doctor, a student, an engineer, a teacher, a teenager who used to go
to school or somebody who used to have a little shop.
We go out with them to deliver and we are very
impressed by the correctness of their work in this big mess. When the search
crew has located a family they will first take the exact data. Who are they,
how many, which age and as such, what is their need and what can their ration
of the few things there are consist of.
There are ready packed bags of food, that can feed a
family for a few days. There are big packs made of a big plastik sheet serving
as a make shift roof, in it wrapped you will find a matrass, a few rubber
boots, socks and two or three blankets.
They carry with them a few bags stuffed with clothes
they collected and search the exact fit out of these bags when they find people
too poorly dressed to withstand the cold. All of it is documented and when things
are unclear they are solved first before the aid goes anywhere. İt is hand
delivery only, this sole correctness hard to keep up when the rules of need and
greed take over in the isolation this society has found itself in.
From people we hear that whole truck loads of aid are
stolen by thieves. But then it is hard to understand again. In many cases of
course there is a main criminal intent behind the robbery, but in some it might
be the decision to steal from the big agencies who are neglecting the people
inside and take care that the aid reaches there. A logical understanding tells
me that the resistance of course wants to feed it fighters. The other logical
understanding in me knows that this situation creates powers, where only the
strong ones have the methods to decide.
The “hopeful smile” stick to their methods of
correctness and sit over long exel files, countless photos and videos they make
to prove this. The aid they receive is paid by themselves or by few donors like
friends of theirs in exile.
With them we crawl into little caves in the hillsides.
İn a cave we will find 10, 20, sometimes thirty people hiding from the bombs
that drop on their cities.
We travel to the ancient ruins of a byzantine city,
once a tourist attraction or a place to have a picnic, the ruins and the
aqueducts underneath have now become a shelter for many more families.
These are families from a farming community called
Faruma that has been hit by the shelling of the regime. As people they have
already lost their homes and quite some family members, but as farmers they are
determined to at least keep what is left of their live stock. So the byzantine
times have become alive again, with simple shepherds filling the scene of a
movie like atmosphere in the midst of a surrounding so beautiful it’s hard to
grasp while the sound of bombs shake the air.
While the animals are still a little savior and
luckily the old aqueducts continue to carry some water, these people too lack
whatever else there is. The plastic sheets help cover some of the shelters,
blankets and clothes protect from the cold. Wheat, rice and lentils delivered
will cover some few days, if portioned in small rations.
On the way to the families already on the delivery
list we will find more families. More to add to the list the “hopeful smile” is
trying to feed. When we return to our own hideout, we are greeted by the
laughing chief cook, a man with a face of a boats captain. We crowd ourselves
around a laptop that has made itself a path into the world wide web and discuss
why this world is not reacting.
In front of the oldest mosque of the city, just in the
city center completely destroyed we find two public phones. The blasts that has
his them has modernized them, they are now wireless and we joke while we try to
call the UN.
The news of the 50 million dollars for humanitarian
aid that have now been decided on by the U.S. leaves everyone speechless, when
we understand they have decided to deliver it to the people through the regime.
This kind of news become terrifyingly gruesome when
you go to visit the only make shift hospital in the city.
When you think that meeting the first children of this
city and learning that they all have infected themselves with hepatitis is bad news,
well the hospital conditions we find just make them feel worse.
İt is in a cellar and I have no clue if a public
report should mention it’s location. İ don’t know how things go here, but when
i know that all hospitals the city used to have were bombed, i feel the need
this place not known.
The creativity of the last five doctors and the rest
of the medical staff has no borders. They have been able to retrieve some basic
equipment from the destroyed hospitals and built wooden rooms in the cellar as
operation stages. The hygienic surrounding is a disaster, as is that of
electricity for light or heating that a place like this would need. A basic
x-ray is possible, but that’s just about it. The doctor we are travelling with
most of the times had just finished his studies and specialized on cardiology.
“Now,” he says “I need to do everything, but surgery
most of the time. We learn quickly, but we do many mistakes too.”
Above the operation stage you will notice the
professional kind of lamp setting needed to light the surgery. İt’s shape is
just as it is in every operation room, but when they point us at it we
understand they built it by themselves. İt is a big satellite disc, in which
they have fixed halogen lamps.
One bigger room is filled with patients. We are
supposed to document, but I am too shy to point my camera at them. One is lying
in bed like a shadow of life. He is completely paralyzed from top to bottom. He
is so thin and so grey that it chokes whatever there is in me.
He had surgery in Turkey, but as the care centers
there are full he has been returned and now grows thinner and greyer day by day
in this cellar, while the bombs around make the building rumble.
We meet a patient whose toes were removed due to
diabetes. There is no treatments left also for the sick or old, in a place
where you men get their legs and arms cut off, due to the lack of any other
medical choice.
The people working here in these conditions are the
heroes I can easily side with and claim as such.
While we walk the streets again we receive a recount
of the revolution and how things developed here since then. Back at the hide
out center the stories told to us are underlined with the many videos and
pictures collected throughout these last two years in exactly these streets.
We pass more buildings and streets. ‘This was
the street of the first demonstration, tens of thousands were peacefully
chanting for freedom and change of regime. They shot two of us. We returned
with their bodies the day later to demonstrate and filled even this street too
-they killed more. There were snipers everywhere. Then there were helicopters,
then they dropped two bombs on a demonstration. People were presenting their
naked breast and shouting that they could just shoot all of them’
–and the shots fell.
It was after the helicopters and the bombs they
dropped on the people, that the first arms were taken up by the citizens of the
city.
They show us the locations Assads army used to hold:
the museum filled with ancient mosaics for example, that this city is famous
for. From here about 200 people were shot by snipers.
‘you want to die? Just visit the museum,” they used to
say. “We had no chance than to defend ourselves” they say.
It took almost half a year and many dead in Maarat,
before the armed resistance took its go. It has achieved a lot: nobody is being
shot from the museum any more. This part of the city is free.
People are desperate to prove their peaceful intent.
Again and again they demand us seeing the videos, where we can see the proof:
the same buildings, the same streets and the people being killed within. There
is no way around the facts, this is how it happened.
The question where the weapons of the resistance came
from in the first place and who delivered them with which intent is another.
But the understanding why people decided to take them is easily fulfilled.
Some people tell us, where the weapons came from. They
say it was the regime of Assad himself who facilitated or at least let gaps
open for weapons to flow. They are aware that even if at some point they
decided to take up arms there is also the side to the story that it was
convenient for the regime to have this change of picture. It supports him, they
say “to portrait us as violent and terrorists. But we have to defend ourselves
too.”
In the same time many weapons came from the Gulf
countries. The explanation people give us is that the regimes in those
countries fear uprising themselves. They too like the image broadcasted which
is that of Syria now of violence, destruction and fear. The message it sends is
clear: “you dare a revolution, you receive a civil war.”
Then of course there is weapons and logistics from the
West and various groups with religious narrative.
We meet the fighters of the Free Syrian Army. Of
course we meet them. They sit at the sides of the road and come to greet us on
our ways. They are grandfathers, fathers and sons. They are cousins and uncles.
They too are students, or workers, or shop owners, or teachers or engineers. At
least within this city. They are the ordinary citizens of Maarat.
They too are very upset about the image of them being
some sort of Al Qaida. “Where is Al Qaida?” they ask. Joking they add that
maybe Al Qaida could actually help them out with the fight at the front only
two kilometers away.
They, just as people before grab us by the shoulders
and intensely demand us hearing that they are not fighting an ethnic or
religious war. “We have Alewites with us! No Problem! Christians, Sunni, Shia!
We were neighbors, friends and sometimes mixed within one family. Jews! We have
Jews in Syria, there is no problem, no problem. Al Nizar (-the gouvernments)
that’s the problems. Assad, Iran, U.S.A., Israel, that’s the problem. No
problem Alewites or Jewish. No problem people.”
They explain us how the ethnic divisions are
systematically produced. They know about villages of poor Alewites, first
besieged and starved, then pressed into fighting on the side of the regime. A
big amount of the free soldiers we meet have been police or soldiers in Assads
forces themselves. They know how terrifyingly difficult it can be to defect.
They tell us that it’s not even the soldiers in that
army they consider as their enemy. But the reality of this fighting knows no
pity. They tell us that as well.
And they know that the media reproduces these fears
and divisions. They fear that the ethnic and religious war will become the
truth, when only the powers push long enough for it. They fear this imposed on
them, more than they fear death itself. And the way they move and talk and act
I strongly believe them: they have lost the fear of death. Religion and belief
surely is part of gaining this strength. But the fear of their society becoming
one they never wanted is still alive.
I have come here and I am moving around as a single
woman also in the nights that have become the streets of men. It is these men
who easily are produced to a picture of the extreme and hateful. I did decide
to wear a veil in these days to not make things more complicated and as we have
no experience anyhow in how things can develop in these circumstances.
We too were frightened before entering. And it was not
just the bombs we were frightened of. It was also the fierceful image of militias
we see as the image of Syria nowadays.
But even though my veil keeps sliding off, as I have
no practice in tying it, even though i smoke, talk and move as a woman in a
conservative surrounding here wouldn’t I receive respect and protection in all
the days and places we travel.
On our ways to the city and to the villages we see
other faces of fighters than from the city. More grim behind some weapons, more
strict in the look, more controlling.
The fighters from Jabbah al Nusra who freed Taftanaz
Airbase surely are not the chatty kind of guys we can easily become friends
with.
They obviously did an amazing job: seeing the huge
space and tens of now burnt helicopters they freed is impressive. From this
place the wrath of the regime was brought upon the Syrian people. But we feel
this wrath has been returned. What happened to those injured or captured and
the many bodies of the dead of the Assad army is a question nobody we dare to
ask can answer.
We discuss the intentions of religious groups coming
to fight in Syria. People don’t deny, also the men we get to know from FSA
don’t deny that there is those who come with a vision of there own. That there
is those who are criminal and low in moral. People tell us how they are
struggling to set up courts to trial those who use the power their guns give
them wrongly. İt becomes obvious that things are a mess. A very big and a very
sad mess.
But this mess is a mix more complex than a division
between the good and the bad. The secular or the religious. The peaceful or the
violent.
Even if the vision of some of the very religious is
not shared by all, this does not mean that all the very religious fighters are
low in moral, are acting with crimes against the people or are trying to impose
their visions. İt is a whole mess of a people fighting to save themselves and
others, of trying to keep up the ideas and demands of a revolution, keeping up
the popular committees while drowning in the isolation the world has set upon
them and the interfering interests of states and secret services, of groups
intending to import sharia, all of them acting through the channels of support
and neglect, money, weapons or aid. But all of the wrong in the territories
freed by the FSA does not make right what is on Assads side.
The paths to solidarity with the Syrian people have
become quite stumbly. It is hard to find them and also not when you want to
find. While we move around we have to question every story we hear again and again,
we learn to look at it from all sides and have still understood much too little
and much too much.
It is very obvious that the things happening here are
a big heap of a crime, committed by many. But these have many colors, and they
many seem to agree in one thing: that they all have the need to instrumentalize
the crumbling of the Syrian society for the benefit of theirs.
The only reason this is happening and all parties are
participating in doing the best possible actions and inactions leading to this
total chaos, is the power struggles in which each part thinks they can win
their strategies, when only the Syrian society has at last lost its’ soul.
As a European citizen I feel my main objective in
demanding our governments to play a role in breaking the isolation people are
trapped in, at least on the level of making humanitarian aid possible. People
we are talking to are very aware of foreign intervention and they don’t wish
it. But as the world acts as if it weren’t happening, the mess here is a whole
collection of foreign intervention already. Only that it solely seems to be the
ugly side of it reaching and not that of simple aid.
The activists on the ground are having to fill this
gap, their political struggle for freedom and equality is being pushed aside
while they are pressed to do what aid agencies should do in a much bigger
scale. The starvation of the people and massive displacement is the fertile
ground for corruption and violence to have its’ go, while the societies popular
movements are systematically destructed.
The complete refusal of our governments, or the
International Community to launch their capacities for aid can only mean that
there is a great interest in this society breaking and extremist forces taking
over.
As an anti-imperialist I feel my main objective in
tossing the debate of the traditional left into a new analysis and this very
fast, as our traditional debate has already lost track of the fast developments
in the area.
In my opinion the useless try of our voices being
heard and our positions being set within the debate of siding or opposing whole
states strategies as such have always been wrong. İn the case of Syria they are
more wrong than ever.
There can be no romanticized position next to a
regime, just because this regime opposes some of the other regimes or states we
also oppose. Assads regime is not the anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist secular
dream, or the partner of a humanitarian libertarian left. And many of the
rebels on the other side are obviously not as well. But for now they are not an
entity or have the power of a state. For now they are the direct result of a
people being slaughtered and starved.
If we live up to our so called ideologies of freedom,
equality and justice we must continue –no we must at last start to walk in
Syria, we must be creative and loving in the solidarity we have to offer, we
must not let the sole aid be that of liberals or extremists, we must not let
the people drown into dependence on partners that are none.
At the moment it is not the right to determine
political aims of ours within Syria, at the moment people just need support to
survive. They are very well capable of keeping up their society of differences,
of creating a free and equal Syria for all, if we only meet face to face with
them and give the isolation and stigmatization they are confronted with a
united blow.
