The Morning They Came for Us (14 page)

‘But over there,' I said, pointing towards Bab al-Sebaa Street, ‘they are fighting a war of hate.'

‘They are fighting for politicians and proxy countries, not because they hate each other,' Saadij said.

‘The FSA says they are fighting for freedom,' I added.

Saadij says, ‘They can keep their freedom if this is the price we pay.'

By late October, the second year into the war, people started creeping back to Homs because they had no choice. Many had left and fled across the border – with smugglers or in trucks and buses to Lebanon. But 20 to 30 per cent of the
pre-war population – about 10,000 people – came back to try to find their homes and rebuild their lives.

It was a maze of a city, a labyrinth, a tangle of destruction – then you passed a checkpoint, or an area that was completely destroyed, and found leafy streets with elegant houses that seem untouched, with courtyards and balconies and the jasmine plants still blooming. Near Baba Amr or Bab al-Sebaa the buildings were gutted and people were living on the front line. In the early morning light, I saw women tugging on their headscarves, gathering wood for fuel, or scouring the garbage for food. It was like Aleppo.

On a last trip to Bab al-Sebaa, I met a woman pushing a ten-month-old baby in a broken-down pushchair. One wheel was stuck, and the pushchair shuddered when she tried to push it. The expression on her face seemed frozen in torment. We stopped and talked. There was a time when she left, she said, when the bombing was too much to take. But her husband stayed in Homs, and she came back and put the children in a wartime school, and they got used to walking to it during bombings. Like the town hall workers, they would go in shifts, so that all the children got a chance to learn at least something. There was a shortage of teachers, books, paper, pens, of ‘everything', she said.

As we were talking, her eleven-year-old son Abdullah greeted her. He was on his way home from his school shift.

‘He's been here the entire time the war has gone on,' his mother said. ‘I'm not sure he is the same boy.'

‘I heard all the bombs, I just waited,' he said.

‘What were you waiting for,
habibi
?' his mother asked, using the sweetest term of endearment – darling, sweetie.

He shrugged and picked a scab on his wrist.

‘For it to end?'

He did not respond.

Near the front line, across the street from Bab al-Sebaa church, which was destroyed in the spring, is a little shuttered house. Everything around it is rubble; but Carla, who is thirty-two and a Christian, is living inside it with her children, in the home that she refuses to abandon. She invites us inside, opens the shutters, opens the doors. It is very cold, and her child coughs. The house is in near-darkness.

Carla fled briefly in November 2011, when the fighting was more brutal. She couldn't take it any more, and the children were hiding under the beds. Then she came back. ‘Where were we supposed to go?'

Her husband, who worked in Homs's petroleum plant, stayed during the worst of the battle to protect the house, but Carla went to the countryside with her children. She hated it. She was frightened for her husband; she was frightened she wouldn't be able to find food for the kids; she was frightened for the future. She did not want to be alone. She came back to the centre of the war to keep the family united. They live off canned goods that they had from before the war, sacks of rice, some pasta – whatever they can find. ‘You learn how to exist with war ways,' she says.

All of her children are traumatized in different ways, she explained. Some were wetting the mattress where they slept on the floor. Some of them would scream in their sleep. Her four-year-old, Nadem, began losing her hair.

‘Let me tell you what helpless is: helpless is being a mother and not helping your kids.' Carla stared out of the window towards the church. It was peppered with bullet holes and there was a hole in the roof.

‘Let's go inside,' she said, tonelessly. ‘I want to show you. Let's go see what war does to everyone, even a church.' She actually believed that, because they lived opposite a church, they would somehow be spared the war. But the church had also been hit by bombs and bullets.

Inside, the pews were splintered and broken. Except for one icon of Mary, and a few scattered prayer books, everything had been burned and destroyed by shellfire. There was a small safe in the priest's side room, which had been pried open.

We wandered through the rubble. Nadem wanted to be picked up. Carla bent down and scooped the child into her arms.

‘People were still praying here in March,' Carla said. ‘They were coming to mass. Then, in a moment, the church was gone.'

A pitched battle had started on the next street, and Carla wanted to take the children inside. We walked back to her house, glass crunching under our feet. In the courtyard was a broken marble statue of Mary and Jesus.

At home, the children did not react to the machine-gun fire, which was coming in with greater frequency.

Naya, Carla's twelve-year-old, looked hunched and ancient. She said to no one in particular: ‘Nobody knows where this war is going. But it has to go somewhere.'

‘Doesn't it have to go somewhere, Mama?' Naya repeated. ‘Doesn't it, Mama?'

Carla was silent.

‘Mama?'

Then there was a renewed burst of machine-gun fire, and Naya went quiet.

8

Aleppo – Sunday 16 December 2012

Every afternoon, I saw him. He never changed: not his position, not his posture, not his clothes. Aleppo was desperate in those months, and he, this old man on the road to the hospital, buried up to his waist in trash, seemed to me the symbol of all that was dying in that city. He was standing in a field of garbage, his hands buried deep in some box, foraging. He was scavenging for something to eat.

We were driving in a battered car we had picked up in Turkey, with a driver called O., a nervous, small-boned Syrian man, towards the small hospital that remained open in the faintly lit darkness. Someone in the car, one of my colleagues, either Paddy or Nicole, said, ‘I've seen that guy before – he's there every day.' The old man was always in the same place. In the same position. Bent, broken.

Did he ever find anything?

I don't think so. But he kept coming back.

We had come together to Aleppo, the three of us – Nicole, who was small and brave, from Hong Kong, who wrapped her long hair in a dark scarf, and set off with her cameras alone to front lines to look for her friend, Jim Foley; and
Paddy, who was English, and calm. We wanted to write about what people were eating, whether they were starving, how they survived.

The answer was, virtually nothing. On this winter day, there was no power to bake bread: there was no cooking gas. Life here was about deprivation, the driver told us, about yearning, wanting, forgoing. It was about memory and forgetting.

Once, a photographer friend of mine, trying to describe Afghanistan during the Mujahedeen years, called it The Land of the Elastic Hour. I understood instantly what he meant. There are places where time either races ahead like a finely tuned car, or remains impotent. Here in Aleppo, memory is elastic. Sometimes during wartime, minutes are endless. It seems you will never move forward to the next day – a day when there might be cooking gas and a lull in shelling.

This sense of timelessness, of lost time, is set against the fact that Aleppo is ancient – 7,000 years old, and imbued with history. The chronology of the oldest continuously inhabited city on earth stretches back to the latter half of the third millennium BC.

Archaeologists digging in the Mesopotamian ruins found tablets that spoke of the city's military power, its strength, its virility. Aleppo was the end of the Silk Road, weaving through Central Asia and Mesopotamia, a strategic trading point. The horses and caravans carried copper, wool, Chinese silk, spices from India, Italian glass, metal from Persia.

On this December day, three years into the war, I was looking for traces of Aleppo's former glory. I saw nothing but a weakened cavity, a shell. How could a city that was once the third-largest in the Ottoman Empire fade before one's eyes? On this day, a week before Christmas, when I should have been at home in Paris, putting up the Christmas tree with my small son, or shopping for presents and wrapping them in shiny paper, I was in a city that seemed apocalyptic.

The Battle of Aleppo seemed as if it would never end. The conflict was between Bashar al-Assad's government forces – combined with Hezbollah – and various Syrian opposition forces, largely composed of defected Syrian Army officers. I would like to list the components of the Syrian opposition, known as the rebels, but the recipe of warriors changes every day. There is internecine fighting. There is – as often happens in cities and communities that descend into war and anarchy – criminality as a means of survival.

At this point the opposition also included al-Nusra, or Jabhat al-Nusra (The Support Front for the People of Al-Sham), sometimes called Tanzim Qa'edat Al-Jihad fi Bilad Al-Sham, who are the al-Qaeda branch operating in Syria. They were formed in Syria in January 2012 and currently have an estimated 6,000 members.

The Islamic State, or ISIS – who would rise to power later in the war, to fight al-Nusra and the opposition and to drive parts of Syria and Iraq into 7th-century Islam with their brutal
sharia
law – were still somewhere in the shadows, embryonic. Nascent, waiting, forming.

Aleppo, the most industrial Syrian city, also once held the most diversified population. Before 2011, there were more
Christians here than in Beirut. There were Syrian Arabs, Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, Turks, Circassians, Jews and Greeks. There are thirteen poetic references in the Bible to Aleppo (which from the eleventh century had the Hebrew name of Aram-Zobah).

From Psalm 60: ‘to the chief Musician upon Shushan-eduth, Michtam of David, to teach; when he strove with Aram-naharaim, and with Aram-zobah, when Joab returned and smote of Edom, in the valley of Salt, twelve thousand.'

The Valley of Salt is about four hours from Aleppo on horseback, according to a slender document I have read, written by Henry Maundrell, a theologian who travelled the region in 1697. This is where David smote the Syrians.

Who is now smiting the Syrians? They are destroying each other. Brutally, horribly.

The regime forces, led by President Bashar al-Assad, use barrel bombs – a type of improvised explosive device (IED).
¹²
The bombs are like no other I have witnessed in the dozen or more wars I have lived through. They are unspeakably effective at causing pain: made from a barrel that is filled with shrapnel or chemicals, they are then dropped from a height by helicopter or aeroplane. Militants like them because they are cheap to make (sometimes costing under $300) and can easily be dropped on a highly populated civilian area, with severe consequences.

The image of the aftermath of a barrel bomb: knee-deep rubble, cries of agony, the frantic search for survivors; limbs dissected, muscles and pools of sticky blood. The fact of being alive in concrete, rubble, your legs broken, waiting
for someone to dig you out. The entire weight of an apartment floor crushing your suddenly helpless and broken body.

I was waiting in front of the bakery in Handarat when I saw a helicopter roaming. It was 9.30 a.m. It circled in the air three times and then dropped the barrel bomb. It fell two metres from me. I saw it falling, but where could I hide? I felt the explosion. I felt the shrapnel going inside my leg . . . The shrapnel hit my neck and leg and my other leg was broken . . . I saw four injured people. They were moving on the ground. I was told in the field hospital that five or six people died.

Elias, seventeen years old, in a statement to Human Rights Watch
¹³

Aleppo was a microcosm, in a sense, for the entire war in Syria: the Leningrad of the Syrian war. Or, as one rebel fighter told me, the ‘Mother of All Battles'. It started here in much the same way as it did in Homs, in Hama, in Damascus, with pro-democracy rallies challenging Assad's autocratic rule, as part of the larger Arab Spring. It transformed from protests in 2011 to clashes in February 2012. At that point the rebels held the rolling countryside, bursting with crops in the summer, more barren in the winter, and it was still possible to drive from the Turkish border and pass through villages that had not yet been ravaged by war. Farmers were still at work, children still walked to school, tiny backpacks in place. Small schools, small houses: a normal life in a corner of what once was Mesopotamia.

In August 2012, in the heat and dust of northern Syria, the rebels had stormed Aleppo, and the intense fighting began. In this bleak month of December – four months later – opposition forces had cut off nearly all supply routes to Aleppo. Most of the UNESCO world heritage protected sites, such as the Old Town, were destroyed. The lives of the people living in Aleppo were destroyed, too.

There are two important criteria for staying alive here: hiding from the regime's barrel bombs, and finding food. On the government side, people have not been paid salaries and do not get humanitarian aid. On the rebel side, the portrait of daily life is equally bleak. No one respects ceasefires. As is so common in times of war, there is crime, distrust and sorrow.

No one seems to be able to end it, least of all the United Nations, whose peacemaking efforts have failed again and again. At the time of writing, in 2015, the third Special Envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, an Italian-Swedish diplomat who had formerly worked in Afghanistan and Iraq, has been proposing that small local ceasefires, or ‘freezings', will take place. But on the morning of 17 February 2015, when de Mistura was set to brief the United Nations Security Council in New York, the government forces launched a new offensive to cut off the main supply road to insurgents in Aleppo.