The Morning They Came for Us (19 page)

Not far beneath the surface of the festivities, there was a current of tension, a tangible dread that the month-long conflict would soon spill onto the streets of Damascus. People had begun to leave the city when I arrived. There were going-away parties, and embassies were shutting down. The neighbourhoods of Barzeh and al-Midan, where I walked the streets after Friday Prayer, became no-go areas, opposition strongholds. I wonder how many people I saw at the mosque fled Syria, crossing over the border to Lebanon or Turkey.

I know about the velocity of war. In all of the wars I have covered – including in Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Chechnya, Somalia, Kosovo, Libya, and more – the moments in which everything changes from normal to extremely abnormal share a similar quality. One evening in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, in 2002, for example, I went to bed after dinner at a lavish Italian restaurant. When I woke up, there was no telephone service and no radio broadcast in the capital; ‘rebels' occupied the television station and flares shot through the sky.

In my garden I could smell both the scent of mango trees and the smell of burning homes. My neighbourhood was on fire. The twenty-four-hour gap between peace and wartime gave me enough time to gather my passport, computer and
favourite photos and flee to a hotel in the centre of the city. I never returned to my beloved house with the mango trees.

In early April of 1992, a friend in Sarajevo was walking to her job in a bank, in a mini-skirt and heels, when she saw a tank rolling down the street. Shots were fired. My friend crouched, trembling, behind a rubbish bin, her life for ever altered. In a few weeks, she was sending her baby to safety on a bus, in the arms of a stranger, to another country. She would not see him for years.

This is how war starts.

In the summer of 2012, Major General Robert Mood of Norway, the former chief UN monitor in Damascus, told me there is no template for war. But reading dispatches from the village of Tremseh,
¹⁹
and seeing the refugees fleeing Homs with mattresses strapped to their car rooftops, the tiny faces of children pressed against the windows, it is hard not to remember the mistakes of the past two decades.

All summer long, and into the following winter and spring, there were political wranglings. Russia continued to veto Security Council efforts to sanction and reproach President Bashar al-Assad.

Syrians who called themselves Syrians a few years ago were now saying they were Alawites, Christians, Sunnis, Shias, Druze.

Diplomacy failed. The UN had stood on the sidelines and watched as genocide unfolded in Bosnia and Rwanda, during which time Kofi Annan was in charge of peacekeeping operations. He eventually left his position as UN Envoy to Syria in August 2012.

Lakhdar Brahimi, a seasoned negotiator who had managed to end the war in Lebanon, held the joint role of UN and Arab League Special Envoy. Brahimi, who was seen by many as the salvation of the region, also left in disgust in May 2014. As I write this, the Italian/Swedish UN veteran Staffan de Mistura is currently negotiating. De Mistura is a humanitarian – his happiest working conditions were in the field in Bosnia or Sudan. He is doing all he can, but all he can is not ending the war.

In every war I have covered, ceasefire is a synonym for buying time to kill more civilians. Or, as my colleague at the BBC Jim Muir put it so brilliantly, ‘truces frequently spur the combatants to try to improve their positions on the ground before the whistle blows and hostilities stop'.
²⁰

As I write, de Mistura is holding a series of low-level meetings in Geneva between various actors in the scenario of war: Iranians, Syrians, members of the opposition, Turks, Russians. So many circles involved in ending the war, like a Russian doll, and inside the smallest of circles are the Syrian people.

Fifteen years ago, Kofi Annan issued a report to the UN General Assembly on the failure of the international community to prevent the massacre of Bosnians at Srebrenica. He called it ‘a horror without parallel in the history of Europe since the Second World War'.

Yet once again, the member states lack the will or impetus to stop the slaughter of women and children. As they bicker and squabble over reports and sit in hotel rooms, unable to be the eyes and ears on the ground and report what is happening, more people die.

This is what the beginning of civil war looks like.

In the time I spent in Syria, I talked to as many people as I could, from as many denominations and backgrounds as possible. I wanted to see how Assad's supporters told the story of what was happening to their country. And I wanted testimonies from those who suffered under the regime.

In 2012, before the ceasefire, on the two-hour drive from Damascus to Homs, I went through eight government checkpoints. Inside Homs, the half of the city that had not been levelled by tanks and fighting was only semi-functioning: the shrubbery in the centre of the road had been left to run wild, but a bus passed through to collect a few lingering people. It was a strange sign of normality.

At a crowded refugee centre, I met a woman named Sopia, who last saw her twenty-three-year-old son, Muhammad, in a Homs hospital bed in December. She told me that shrapnel had hit him during a mortar attack and a piece had lodged in his brain. Sopia said she arrived at his bed one morning and found it empty. Doctors explained to her that they had moved him to a military hospital. Sopia said she had a ‘terrible feeling' as she began to search desperately for her son.

She found Muhammad's body, ten days later, in the military hospital. It bore clear signs of torture: there were two bullets lodged in his head, electrocution marks on the soles of his feet and around his ankles and cigarette burns on his back.

For Sopia, the morning she saw her son's body was the moment she realized she was in a country at war. She told me her son was a simple man, a construction worker, and had
no links to the rebels. But Sopia and her family lived in Baba Amr – an area of Homs that had been an opposition stronghold – and men of a certain age are assumed to be fighters or supporters of the Free Syrian Army.

I asked Sopia over and over whether her son was a fighter. No, she said, he wasn't.

Sopia's grief was not unlike that of the mothers of government fighters, about the same age as Muhammad, who had been killed in Damascus by IEDs or flying shrapnel. To them and to Sopia, politics matter less than raw pain, inconsolable loss.

That day, which is now fading from my memory, armed soldiers at roadblocks throughout the country checked passing cars for guns and soldiers. Suspicious passengers were detained for questioning. On my way to Homs, polite but menacing pro-Assad gunmen detained me. Sometimes those situations have a silver lining – you are concerned that you might be thrown in jail, but you get to hear people talk about a different vision, a different side. I always listen to them, no matter how abstract their arguments may seem.

In Homs on that trip, I met a little boy who sat on a parquet floor playing Go Fish. For him, the war had started when Syria's Arab Spring began, in March of 2011. Then, his parents forbade him to leave the house. When I visited him, there was a sniper at the end of his street, and in the evening mortar rounds thundered in the dark, and got louder as night wore on.

The little boy lived near the ghostly ruins of Baba Amr, where the air outside his balcony was still rich with the scent
of jasmine, olive trees and orange blossoms. If he went inside and closed his eyes, it would be possible for him to believe no war was going on outside.

The boy's family did not support Assad; in fact, the boy's grandmother vehemently loathed him. But they did not leave. Why? The boy's mother told me they were staying because this was their home. Life here was already like life in a prison, a sense that would only worsen.

In a government office near the Mezzeh Highway, a Christian official with a Muslim name told me he grew up in a country that, like Bosnia, was a melting pot for ethnic groups, for refugees from Armenia, for Christians, Shias, Sunnis and Greek Orthodox. He said the uprising would change all of this. ‘Everyone who believed in the Syrian model is betrayed,' he said.

Now it was June 2014. I was in Baghdad. The border between Syria and Iraq had been erased.

The Islamic State (ISIS) was racing through Iraq, swallowing up entire Yazidi and Christian villages, engulfing anyone who did not embrace its strict Salafist ways.

The Yazidis, a mystical sect, were once again driven out, seeking refuge on a mountain near Sinjar, facing scorching temperatures by day and a lack of water, food and medical care. They were eventually rescued and brought to refugee camps, but ISIS – at the time of this writing – controlled most of the areas where they used to live. The Yazidis, whom I visited in 2003 and lived with for several days, attending their weddings and funerals and learning some of the secrets
of their faith, had become refugees and wanderers, as they had feared.

A few days after ISIS gained control of Mosul, raiding the Central Bank, driving out families and destroying all religious idolatry and statues of poets, I lay on my bed in my hotel in Baghdad, trying to organize my memories in the way that Iraqis do when they are talking about the past. I felt an overriding emotion that entire swathes of the map of the Middle East had been lost. I kept feeling a dull, unending sense of depletion, damage, injury.

My Iraqi friends always refer to epochs: this was back in the Saddam days; that was when I fought in the Iran-Iraq War; this was during the first Gulf War; this was the second invasion; this was after the Americans came. Now it was: before Mosul fell. Now it was: before the war in Syria, before the Arab Spring.

Sometimes, in war, there are also pleasant memories. The camaraderie that exists, the intimacy between human beings, the fact that sometimes barriers are broken down and a level of communication occurs that could never thrive in peacetime. People say things and do things that are profound and genuine.

I remember a hot summer day, in the old town of Damascus, when a famous artist sat in his studio – a room in the former home of a Jewish family who had used it to keep their sacred Torah – and said the war was edging closer. He was neither pro-government nor pro-opposition; of course he believed in democracy and freedom of expression, being an artist – but most of all he cared simply about creating art.

In 2010, before the Arab Spring, the artist expressed his vision of the future of the Middle East in a sculpture exhibition called
Guillotine
. He opened it first in downtown Damascus.

Now, several years on and with hundreds of thousands dead, something has changed irrevocably in his country. It will not return to what it was, not now, not ever. How can Syria ever be what it once was? It has been burnt alive by hatred.

Shortly before I finished this book in the spring of 2015, after numerous trips back to the region, as ISIS spread past Mosul and reached Palmyra, I got an email from a group of reporters and photographers I had worked with in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war. They had put together a collection of photographs and writing, our memories, into a time module, a way of not letting anyone forget, ever, what happened to that defeated and broken country.

They had bundled our words and photographs and some haunting music together to make a ten-minute presentation that basically traced the war from beginning to end – from the first nationalist parades, to the murders of innocents, to the mass graves and the destruction of mosques, villages and cities, and finally to the Dayton Agreement in 1995, which ended the war. It was our way of saying: look, this is how war begins, how it destroys, how it ultimately ends. Nothing good comes from it.

I could not help watching the short film over and over, the way you pick at a wound that hurts, and the more you pick, the more painful and sore it grows, but you continue. And
every time I watched it, tears rolled down my face onto my T-shirt, just as they had that day in the hospital in Aleppo. I felt ashamed of my reaction – after all, I had survived, I had not been ethnically cleansed from my village or been raped or had my parents murdered in front of me – but most of all I felt immense sorrow. We had tried, my colleagues and I and dedicated humanitarians and diplomats, but we had failed to protect the very people we had come to report on, to stop the killing, to somehow not allow this country to be ripped apart, limb from limb, throat, eye, knucklebone.
²¹

I swore to myself, after Bosnia, that I would never live through another war that would consume me. I swore that I would not feel again the terrible stirring of guilt so profound – that feeling of
we did nothing
. I wondered sometimes what my life would be like had I never stumbled into a war zone for the first time when I was a very young woman, so young that I was embarrassed to tell my age.

How different my life would have been had I never seen a mass grave or a truck with bodies, all dead, piled one on top of the other, their skin changing from the softness of the living to the leathery skin of the dead. Or a torture cell with the incarcerated's dying wish and last words of love to his family.

But that is not what happens. Perhaps, as the political scientist I studied so diligently as a student, Charles Tilly, wrote, men are inevitably linked to war as a way of state-making. Wars make states – or is it the other way around? Do states make wars?

I have never been very good at theory. But I am good at counting, and attempting to remember those who lived,
who walked the earth, but who fell during the course of the violence that ripped their countries apart.

As I write this, the Syrian war continues and there are nearly 300,000 Syrians dead. The Book of the Dead is not yet finished.

Notes

1
According to the Human Rights Watch, the Bosnian genocide between 1992 and 1995 resulted in an estimated 100,000 deaths of Bosniak Muslims and Croatians by Serb forces; it was the worst act of genocide since the Nazi regime's destruction. While the UN did little to prevent the systematic atrocities committed against Bosniaks and Croats in Bosnia while they were occurring, it did actively seek justice against those who committed them. In May 1993, the UN Security Council created the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague, Netherlands. It was the first international tribunal since the Nuremberg Trials in 1945–46 and the first to prosecute genocide, among other war crimes. In the weeks after 6 April 1994, 800,000 men, women and children perished in the Rwandan genocide, perhaps as many as three-quarters of the Tutsi population. Tens of thousands of Tamils were murdered in Sri Lanka during a twenty-five-year war. In both these genocides, the international community failed to intervene in a timely or effective manner. Despite a UN mission in Kosovo, human trafficking continues, as does rape in the Congo, which is perpetrated mostly by the Congolese forces. Five years after the Haitian earthquake, Haiti suffers from disease and poverty, unable to develop a stable government amidst the international NGOs. Sometimes absent and sometimes present too late, the United Nations seems unable to resolve these issues, despite the sincere determination of some of its officials.