The Morning They Came for Us (18 page)

‘I'll get more petrol in the morning,' he said, then sat in a chair and said nothing.

That night, the two of them stayed up late. There was half a roast chicken on the table that A. had gone out to the dark street to buy from a vendor. It lay, greasy, on a piece of wax paper on the dusty table.

The two Syrians pushed their sleeping bags together on the floor and lay on their sides facing each other, whispering. Perhaps it was flirtation, though the girl said she had a boyfriend fighting somewhere on the front line, a powerful rebel commander, and that she was a woman of the revolution. Later, as I was trying to fall asleep, I could hear them smoking – crumpling the pack of cigarettes, striking a match, inhaling deeply, exhaling, and laughing. It was 2 a.m. The shooting outside was still going on, and a mortar landed somewhere. I finally fell asleep much later to the sound of the girl comforting A., who was sobbing once again. He sounded like a child, not a hardened fighter.

A few weeks later A. would be murdered while sitting in his car. That handgun he kept below the seat had not helped him. It was a crime related to factions within the rebel groups; it might have been a revenge attack, it might have been a robbery. No one seemed to know, and worse, no one was surprised.

O., the driver who had taken us back and forth to Aleppo neighbourhoods, to bread queues, to the Old City, had also
been shot and badly wounded while driving his car. He survived.

I wrote to the beautiful Syrian girl, but she did not respond. Many months later, I had an email from her, a strange and disjointed message, asking me to join her somewhere inside Homs. In the email, she gave me a time and place, and said she would be waiting. It seemed like a trap, and I did not reply – I was suspicious, paranoid as everyone always is with messages that come out of Syria. I never saw her again, but many months later I got a message from her that she had not sent the message. Someone said it was a way that Nusra, and later ISIS, lured foreigners to be kidnapped.

Steve was the one to write to me about A.'s murder.

‘I'm not shocked,' he wrote. ‘I always felt a bit uncomfortable walking into his office. He had to have been a target. The people in the city are sick of the mess, and their feelings towards those helping journalists as much as he did must have been negative. I have lost so many friends in this war as well. It's hard to keep it from getting to you.'

We became closer friends, trying to understand why A. had been killed. What had he been doing at the time of his death, and who would want him extinguished?

Steve wanted to go back to Syria, even though he told me he believed he was on a blacklist, and that the rebels were after him for something he had written, which he said was not true.

He wrote to me from Michigan, where he was giving a talk on Libya ‘to some Texan oil men', to say that he was drifting
a bit, going to see his family in Miami, then heading back to covering the war. He wrote to me on Facebook: ‘I want to turn my full attention to Syria. I should be in Antakya in early April. I plan to be in that area through summer. I'm starting to look into Raqqa
¹⁵
/Hasaka as well as northern Hama and Homs . . . I'd be interested in working on the rape issue with you . . . although as you say, men don't get much from the locals on this topic.'

By 16 April, he said he was ‘back on the radar' and preparing to go to Syrian Kurdistan. He still wanted to work on the sexual violence project I was completing. He was having money issues, and sometimes feeling spooked by the enormity of travelling alone, without financial and emotional backing. He was also aware that he was on a sort of list: ‘apparently the border idiots have me and Barak on a list and I'm trying to find out how/why . . .'

Do those guys really matter? I asked.

‘When I'm being accused of responsibility for the Dir Shifa bombing,
¹⁶
I think it does,' he responded tersely. ‘Even though I did not enter Syria until weeks after that.'

So don't go, I said. Sounds like the fog of war.

‘Sounds like the fog of bullshit,' he replied.

He was not frightened though, or if he was, he did not show it.

‘We are all naïve,' he wrote to me shortly after another friend of ours was killed in Aleppo in March 2013. ‘I still run out to take video on my cell phone when bombs drop out of jets. It's easy to feel invincible, even with death all around. It's like
This is my movie, Sucker – I'm not going to die!
 .
 
. . and
on a lighter note, where did you get those food packets when I saw you at Abdullah's. They looked so good behind that aluminum foil in Abdullah's kitchen I seriously almost jacked that shit!'

He returned to the region and on 25 July, he wrote excitedly: ‘Hey Mama G! I'm back in Turkey! Have you gotten over your sickness of Aleppo? I may head in early next week.'

He wanted me to meet him and split the costs inside the country. But something that summer made me not want to return to Aleppo. My son was growing too fast, I had already missed too much of his boyhood. I told Steve to be safe, that I wanted to be with my little boy in the summer, that I would come in the autumn and meet him.

‘You 2 have fun,' Steve wrote to me, recommending films and ice cream. The last time he wrote to me was a few days before he went missing.

More people were being kidnapped. On another trip, I met a young American girl called Kayla Mueller who had just arrived from Arizona and had come to work with Syrian children. She was with a Syrian friend of mine; she said he was her fiancé. She seemed bubbly and young, naïve and sweet. The challenge of working with Syrian refugees seemed a prospect she was willing to take on, although I could not get an answer from her about who she was working with. A few days later, she would also be kidnapped.

She was twenty-six years old at the time of her death, during a bombing raid in Raqqa, where the Islamic State held her. She never married my friend, and she never had
children. She barely got to work with the refugees she wanted to save.

On 6 August 2013, at 2.14 p.m., I got a message from Steve's Facebook account, written by his friend Barak.
Hi Janine. It's Steve's friend Barak. Steve went into Syria 48 hours ago with Yusuf friend of Abdallah and has gone dark. There are rumors on S-Logistics
¹⁷
that Yusuf is missing. Do you have contact information for any of his friends inside? Please don't share this information with anyone because no one knows yet.
¹⁸

We soon found out Steve had been kidnapped and sold to Islamic State. He was held in prison for a year. His family kept it quiet, worried that the kidnappers would realize he was Jewish and that he had studied in Israel, even though he did not hold beliefs that were in line with that state's current government. He shared a cell with other Europeans who were kidnapped, including Jim Foley. He and Jim bonded with the others, sometimes fought, sometimes cried, and then, painfully, watched the others be released as their governments paid a ransom. Steve and Jim must have known – realizing that it was US policy not to pay terrorists – that they would not be released.

In September 2014, Steve Sotloff was murdered, by the ‘bearded guys' of the Islamic State, as he had once described them to me. I could not imagine that this smiling, laughing boy, who told jokes and avidly followed the basketball scores of the Miami team he loved, who wrote wise and funny emails, who had offered advice on raising a boy, and who was a generous colleague and friend, had been beheaded.

Jim Foley, too, despite Nicole's desperate search, despite his family's constant interventions, had been beheaded a few weeks before.

I did not, could not, watch the video of either of their murders. But I did see a still photograph of Steve before he was killed, wearing an orange jumpsuit. He had lost weight, a lot of it. His face was no longer chubby and round, and he was not wearing glasses. A random thought crossed my mind: Steve had joked that in Turkey he could not seem to get girls because of his jihadi beard.

Now, his face was clean. There seemed to be no curiosity or youth left in it, just fatigue, an eternal tiredness. He was kneeling in the Syrian desert, looking young, small and weak.

He died brutally in a foreign land, unique in its beauty, surrounded by strangers.

Nicole and I went back to Aleppo in the spring, and this time we stayed with a group of young fighters who were growing more and more radical, more and more Islamic. Now the streets were no longer safe to walk on: as foreigners, we were targets. Now we had to stay in the bedroom assigned to us to eat, where a neighbour woman still left food outside our door on a tray; we weren't allowed in the main room where the men gathered, talking and working on their computers. When we passed to use the bathroom, to wash, to get water from the kitchen, they stopped talking and dropped their eyes.

Aleppo had changed radically, in just a few months. This is when we knew that in desperation, the soldiers who were once fighting for freedom were now radicalized. On the
drive out, passing along the road, I tried to look for signs of the old Syria, the one that was there before the Islamists arrived, and did my best to take photographs inside my head, pictures that I would remember, that would show a country that no longer existed.

EPILOGUE

March 2015

In the winter and spring of 2013–14, I worked on a project for the UN's refugee agency, UNHCR, in Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon, about Syrian refugee women who were in exile from their country and raising their children alone.

Along with a team of researchers, we met with these women, their children and their extended families, in the tents, shacks, garages, camps, and in some cases apartments, where they lived. The women were alone because their husbands had been killed in the fighting, or were still fighting in Syria, or were lost. Many of them had never made a single decision in their lives; some had never left the house without a male escort. Some had married as young as fourteen years old. Then they were thrust into a world so far removed from the Syrian countryside where they had lived that the transition was unendurable.

As single women, thought to be ‘promiscuous', they were sexual prey for other men in the settlements or camps where they were living. Some were afraid to leave their tents, let alone venture into a nearby village to do the shopping in order to feed their children.

I spoke to one woman in a barren, half-constructed tower block in northern Lebanon, who had survived the Houla massacre by hiding her children as the Shabiha rampaged through the village. Her husband had been killed in the fighting earlier on, and she was alone. She closed the windows and kept the kids out of view, and somehow, the militiamen passed over her house. When the killing was finally over, she picked up her children and made her way to the Lebanese border.

In Egypt, I met Maria (her name has been changed), who was working with her two small daughters in a refugee centre. Her story was one of unrelenting pain, but also of resilience. She left Homs (and an abusive husband who had turned ‘radical' in the time that the FSA was recruiting) and travelled to Central Syria. En route, she was pulled off the bus by government troops and threatened with rape. Her daughters watched from the bus window as she pleaded and begged the soldiers not to abuse her.

She got away. She settled in a small town, only to face arrest again. She left in the middle of the night, went to Latakia, and was taken by the police and put in jail. Her daughters and husband (who had caught up with her) went to Egypt. She followed, only to endure his physical and emotional abuse. In an act of pure courage, she and her daughters escaped and made their way to Cairo.

When I met her in Cairo, she sat at a table in the refugee centre where she was trying to teach other Syrian women how to care for themselves in a strange and new world, and she seemed to me the most courageous woman I had ever met.

‘You have to try to make yourself happy,' she told me, for starting a new life after a war had cut into her psyche so profoundly.

Eventually, by boat, by car, by bus and by foot, she made her way to Germany with the girls. But she was, she told me, painfully aware that she would probably never go home.

Over the years, I have met hundreds of refugees from different kinds of war and different kinds of conflict and humanitarian disaster. I always have the same questions, though:
What did you take with you? What did you leave behind? What do you miss the most? How will you re-start your life?

And, more importantly, I want to know why they left.
What was the exact moment, the trigger, when you felt you had to leave your country? At what point was it unbearable? At what point do you say – enough, now I must leave?

Or if you decide not to leave, what conditions do you choose to stay under?

For ordinary people, war starts with a jolt: one day you are busy with dentist appointments or arranging ballet lessons for your daughter, and then the curtain drops. One moment the daily routine grinds on; ATMs work and mobile phones function. Then, suddenly, everything stops.

Barricades go up. Soldiers are recruited and neighbours work to form their own defences. Ministers are assassinated and the country falls into chaos. Fathers disappear. The banks close and money and culture and life as people knew it vanishes.

During my time in Damascus when I initially started this book, daily life unfolded as it does everywhere else. I attended operas at one of the best opera houses in the Middle
East, bacchanalian pool parties on Thursday afternoons, and weddings in which couples married in elaborate Sunni and Shia ceremonies. I watched makeup artists work their magic on actresses' faces for a magazine photo shoot. All of these activities were part of a life that somehow continued as war crept up to Syria's doorstep, but that is about to fade away, left as memory.