No Turning Back Read online

  NO TURNING BACK

  LIFE, LOSS, AND HOPE IN WARTIME SYRIA

  RANIA ABOUZEID

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SINCE 1923

  NEW YORK | LONDON

  FOR MY PARENTS, MY SISTERS, MY FAMILY

  I carried your love and support in my heart every time I crossed the mountains, while on my shoulders I bore the guilt of taking you with me

  CONTENTS

  _______

  NOTE TO READERS

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  THE FIRST RUMBLINGS

  2011

  2012

  2013

  2014/2015

  2016

  NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  NOTE TO READERS

  _______

  This is a book of firsthand reporting, investigated over six years and countless trips inside Syria, Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Washington, and several European towns and cities. It tells but a sliver of the Syrian tragedy, how a country unraveled one person at a time.

  Syria has ceased to exist as a unified state except in memories and on maps. In its place are many Syrias. The war there has become a conflict where the dead are not merely nameless, reduced to figures. They are not even numbers. In mid-2013, the United Nations abandoned trying to count Syria’s casualties due to the difficulty of verifying information, although estimates put the death toll at well over 500,000 people. Half of Syria’s population of twenty-three million is now displaced. No life is inconsequential. Each is a thread in a communal tapestry, holding the larger intact.

  In the summer of 2011, I was blacklisted by the Syrian regime, but not as a journalist. Instead, I was branded a spy for several foreign states, placed on the wanted lists of three of the four main intelligence directorates in Damascus, and banned from entering the country. This forced me to focus on the rebel side by illegally trekking across the Turkish border into northern Syria, although I still managed a few trips to government-held areas. I state this only by way of introduction. This book is not another reporter’s war journal. I went to Syria to see, to investigate, to listen—not to talk over people who can speak for themselves. They are not voiceless. It is not my story. It is theirs.

  I did my own fixing, translating, transcribing, logistics, security, research and fact-checking. Any errors are hence mine alone. There are no composite characters, although some names have been changed to protect identities. Some of the people in these pages are now dead, others have disappeared or are in exile, and some are still inside a country that no longer resembles one. Everything I recount is true to the best of my knowledge.

  These things happened.

  These things continue to happen.

  Some of these things should never happen again.

  A portion of my earnings from this book will be donated to Inara, an apolitical nonsectarian charity that “provides life-altering medical care for children from conflict areas who have catastrophic injuries or illnesses and are unable to access treatment due to war.” Founded by CNN correspondent Arwa Damon, Inara is a 501c3 registered charity in the state of New York, and operates across the Middle East. (www.inara.org)

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  _______

  I have employed the Arabic use of kunyas, nicknames that start with Abu or Um (“father of” or “mother of”), which are commonly used even if a person is childless. They are informal, respectful manners of greeting and also serve as noms de guerre.

  IN RASTAN

  Suleiman Tlass Farzat. The wealthy manager of an insurance office in Hama, who became a civilian activist in his hometown of Rastan.

  Samer Tlass. Suleiman’s cousin, a lawyer.

  Maamoun. A mobile-phone repairman-turned-civilian activist.

  Merhi Merhi. A civilian activist.

  Mohammad Darwish. A student who sparked Rastan’s first protests and often led chants.

  First Lieutenant Abdel-Razzak Tlass. One of the earliest defectors, a member of the Khalid bin Walid Battalion and later a leader of the Farouq Battalions in Homs. Suleiman’s relative.

  NON–FREE SYRIAN ARMY ISLAMISTS

  Mohammad (from Jisr al-Shughour). Grew up in Latakia. A former prisoner in Damascus’s Palestine Branch and a member of Jabhat al-Nusra.

  Abu Ammar. Mohammad’s childhood neighbor.

  Abu Othman. An Islamic legal scholar (or Shari’iy) from Aleppo. Mohammad’s onetime cellmate in Palestine Branch and a prisoner in Sednaya.

  Abu Mohammad al-Jolani. The leader of Jabhat al-Nusra, an Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) offshoot established in Syria in summer 2011 and Al-Qaeda’s Syria branch.

  Abu Maria al-Qahtani. An Iraqi who served as Jabhat al-Nusra’s lead Shari’iy. Jolani’s deputy.

  Saleh. A former Sednaya Prison detainee from eastern Syria. Part of Nusra’s inner circle.

  Abu Loqman. Saleh’s former cellmate in Sednaya Prison and, later, ISIS’s emir in Raqqa.

  Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The Iraqi leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and, later, ISIS. Self-proclaimed caliph.

  Abu Mohammad al-Adnani. A Syrian, and Jabhat al-Nusra’s chief amni (security agent) before he was appointed the ISIS spokesman.

  Firas al-Absi. A non–Al-Qaeda militant stationed at Syria’s Bab al-Hawa border with Turkey.

  THE FREE SYRIAN ARMY

  Abu Azzam (Mohammad Daher). A fourth-year Arabic-literature university student in Homs. From Tabqa, eastern Syria, he became a commander in the Farouq Battalions.

  Bandar. A university student from eastern Syria, Abu Azzam’s sometime roommate in Homs.

  Bassem. Bandar’s brother and Abu Azzam’s colleague in the Farouq Battalions.

  Abu Hashem (Hamza Shemali). A realtor-turned-Farouq foreign liaison who later headed the Hazm Movement.

  Abu Sayyeh (Osama Juneid). A lawyer-turned-Farouq military commander.

  Sheikh Amjad Bitar. A cleric from Homs and key Farouq financier.

  Bilal Attar and Abulhassan Abazeed. The founders of the Shaam News Network (SNN) and, later, senior members of the Farouq Battalions.

  Okab Sakr. A Lebanese politician and member of Saad Hariri’s Future Movement political party.

  General Salim Idris. The head of the FSA’s Supreme Military Council.

  IN SARAQEB

  Ruha. A nine-year-old girl (in 2011).

  Maysaara (Ruha’s father) and Manal (Ruha’s mother).

  Alaa, Mohammad, Tala, Ibrahim. Ruha’s siblings.

  Zahida. Ruha’s grandmother.

  Mariam. Ruha’s aunt.

  Mohammad. Ruha’s uncle, married to her Aunt Noora.

  IN LATAKIA

  Talal, an Alawite from Blouta, Latakia Province, living in Damascus.

  Lojayn, 13 (in 2013), Hanin (10), Jawa (8). Talal’s daughters.

  Dr. Rami Habib. A physician operating a field clinic in the town of Salma.

  THE FIRST RUMBLINGS

  _______

  Revolution is an intimate, multipart act. First, you silence the policeman in your head, then you face the policemen in the streets. In early 2011, the Middle East was electrified by an indigenous democratic fervor, not the cynical imported kind that exploited the slogans of democracy to cloak military coups and foreign interventions. Ordinary men and women unlearned fear. Their demands, powerful in their simplicity, ricocheted from Tunisia to Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, and Yemen: Dignity! Freedom! Bread! They didn’t call it a “spring.” This was a new revolutionary pan-Arabism, born of shared humiliation and frustration, spread by the tools of social media and satellite television. In Syria, it began timidly, with small public gatherings in solidarity with protesters elsewhere—such as the one on February 23, 2011, in front of the Libyan Embassy in Damascus, and the detention i
n the southern city of Daraa of a group of teenagers accused of writing antiregime graffiti on school walls.

  Protests were banned in Syria under an emergency law in place since 1963—as long as the ruling Baath Party. News of the vigil on February 23 spread through word of mouth and Facebook, the social platform recently unblocked by the government (to better monitor calls for dissent, many suspected). The plainclothes, not-so-secret, police, or mukhabarat, arrived more than forty minutes before the scheduled 5 p.m. start, followed by black-clad policemen carrying Kalashnikovs. Antiriot police, in olive-green uniforms and black helmets, transparent face shields at the ready, blocked both ends of the narrow, tree-lined street housing the Libyan Embassy. They wielded worn truncheons, the stumpy ends flayed of the black skin that still covered their handles. There’d been a small, peaceful vigil in the same place the night before, but this night would be different.

  EGYPT’S HOSNI MUBARAK had resigned two weeks earlier. Tunisia’s Zine el Abidine Ben Ali had fled in mid-January, and Libyan opposition fighters had just seized control of chunks of the east of their country. In Damascus, President Bashar al-Assad gloated over the fall of his much older counterparts. This was the fate of leaders who didn’t listen to their people, he said. Syria was different, he added, largely because of its foreign policy—because Assad’s rhetorical hostility to Israel and the hegemony of the United States, his support for Palestinians and the militant groups Hamas and the Lebanese Hizballah, were in line with perceived popular Syrian sentiment.

  Assad was forty-five, his carefully crafted image that of the everyman. He was the husband who casually dined in Damascene restaurants with his glamorous wife, Asma. The father who strolled through a souq with his children. The reformer who introduced the Internet to the general public in 2000, the same year he ascended to power after the death of his father and predecessor, Hafez al-Assad. Bashar al-Assad was the young leader with plans for change, hamstrung by his father’s old guard and regional crises. He just needed time! Or so the popular narrative went. In a region where power is measured in generations, by 2011 Bashar had “only” been president for eleven years. And he had proven his resilience. He’d outlasted American neoconservative threats of regime change. He’d overcome global isolation after the 2005 murder of former Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri (widely blamed on Damascus and its Lebanese ally, Hizballah). He mitigated the effects of US sanctions and the Iraq War next door, while strengthening Syria’s longstanding ties to Iran. Like his father, Bashar al-Assad knew how to play the waiting game of Middle East politics. He waited until his enemies, foreign and local, were voted out of office, died or were killed, or realized they needed him. All he had to do was survive and wait.

  Facebook calls in the first week of February for “days of rage” against the Syrian regime had fizzled. A self-immolation in late January, imitating the Tunisian produce vendor Mohammad Bouazizi, who ignited the Tunisian uprising, did nothing but harm the Syrian man involved. Syria was different. One of the most pivotal states in the Middle East, Iran’s lynchpin in its “axis of resistance” linking Syria to Hizballah and Hamas, would not yield easily—but it would bend a little, as it did on February 17, 2011.

  On that day, the son of a store owner in Hariqa, near Damascus’s Souq al-Hamidiyeh, was insulted and beaten by traffic police. Nothing unusual, but then, in defiance of the state of emergency, a crowd of thousands massed, their chants of “The people will not be humiliated!” and “Thieves! Thieves!” bringing the interior minister to the scene. The minister, caught in the throng, stood on the ledge of his car door, promised an investigation, and wagged his finger at the crowd: “Shame on you! This is a demonstration!”

  “No! No! It’s not a demonstration!” those nearest to him replied. “We all love the president!”

  Perhaps that’s why Damascus, the “beating heart of Arabism,” decided not to allow a sizable display of pan-Arab solidarity outside the Libyan Embassy on February 23, less than a week later. Its people, after all, might get used to protesting.

  THE MINUTES RUSHED past 5:30 p.m. Few things in Damascus started on time, and the vigil outside the Libyan Embassy was no different. Dusk fell, extinguishing the muted warmth of a shy winter sun. Uniformed men outnumbered the crowd of two hundred or so (double the night before) congregated in a nearby park. Unable to get any closer to the embassy, they chanted where they stood. “Ambassador resign!” “You are a traitor, not one of us!”

  The crowd inched forward. It was dark now. “Okay, you’ve made your point,” an officer told them. “If you don’t mind, retreat and go back to where you were.”

  “If you don’t mind, we want to walk,” said a woman in the front line.

  The crowd sensed an opportunity, picked up a new chant, crept closer. “Peacefully!” somebody shouted. “To the embassy!” came the reply.

  The security forces’ response was swift, like a pirouette in combat boots. The antiriot police lowered their face shields and surged forward as Kalashnikov-wielding police officers retreated in tandem. Truncheons shattered the mass of bodies. Shrill cries. Fists and black boots pummeled backs and legs. Mukhabarat agents shoved men into a minibus. A twenty-eight-year-old university student clung to the metal bars of a fence as blows thrashed his slight frame. “Leave me alone! Why can’t you just talk to me?” he pleaded. The protester was ripped from the fence and tossed into the minibus. The vehicle was moving now, with fourteen detainees, all men. “You traitors! You animals! You want to demonstrate?” the security men onboard shouted as they beat the protesters. “You dogs, you sons of bitches!”

  The wheels stopped at a mukhabarat branch. Syria’s mukhabarat were divided into four main intelligence agencies: Military Intelligence, Political Security, State Security (also known as General Security), and (the most feared) Air Force Intelligence. The agencies were headquartered in Damascus and divided into dozens of branches and subbranches extending throughout the country, each with its own detention and interrogation facilities. They operated independently, with little low-level coordination, in a tangled surveillance matrix known as the jihaz il amnee, or security apparatus, its many tentacles spying on the population and each other.

  The fourteen men were directed to plastic chairs, expecting further beatings. Instead, they were offered water and the use of the bathroom before being addressed by an officer who didn’t introduce himself. “We are all the sons of this country, we don’t doubt your nationalism or your love for your country, but we would prefer that this episode not be repeated,” the officer said. Some of the men, perhaps emboldened by the civil reception, asked why they’d been called traitors and beaten. “Ignorance,” the officer said. “Some people are smart and aware, and others are not. Perhaps you came across some of those who are not. We also support the Libyan people,” he added, “but if demonstrations were useful, we’d all take part in them, but they’re not.”

  The fourteen men were released hours later. Some, like the twenty-eight-year-old, had never been detained before. The young man had gone to the Libyan Embassy, like many others that evening, to test the boundaries of what the Syrian state would tolerate. He went because he wanted freedom of the press and a law to allow political parties other than the Baath. He went because he didn’t think it right that his personal ambitions—a job and a home—seemed unattainable. He left the mukhabarat branch that night emboldened. He would protest again, he said, until something in Syria changed: “It’s a conscious decision that I have taken. I don’t know where it will lead me, but there is no turning back.”

  At the same time, in the southern city of Daraa, bordering Jordan, some two dozen young men and teenagers had been rounded up by security forces, blamed for scribbling graffiti on school walls that said LET THE REGIME FALL, and IT’S YOUR TURN, DOCTOR, referring to Assad’s training as an ophthalmologist. The “Daraa children,” as they were dubbed in the media, weren’t children, and many had nothing to do with the writing on the walls, but tales of their harsh treatment in custody (real
and embellished) sparked protests for their release, demonstrations that ignited the Syrian revolution in mid-March and christened Daraa as its birthplace. Protesters shed the pretense of pan-Arab solidarity and called for reform (but not regime change) in Syria. The state’s initial tepid response of violence and lectures reverted to its more familiar violence, but Syria had already changed. The great wall of fear had cracked, the silence was shattered. The confrontation was existential—for all sides—from its inception. There was no turning back.

  2011

  _______

  SULEIMAN

  MARCH 15, 2011. HOMS, SYRIA.

  Suleiman Tlass Farzat was on a date. It was early evening, an unfashionable hour, and the café in Homs was almost empty. Arabic pop music melded into the hum of conversation floating from the few occupied tables. Swirls of smoke danced to the gurgling of narghilehs, infusing the café with the sweet smell of fruit-flavored tobacco. Outside, elsewhere, a revolution was stirring, but Suleiman was still unaware of that. A television, playing quietly in the corner, was not far from his table. He wasn’t paying attention to it.

  Suleiman was a son of money. Well read. Elegant. A man who wore labels effortlessly, and not for show. Warm olive skin and a permanent five o’clock shadow. All eyelashes and a sweet dimpled grin, a smile that made you involuntarily smile back. He carried himself with a confidence born of privilege but had the manners not to flaunt it. At twenty-six, he had much of what young men hope for—pretty girls on his arm, money in his pocket, the keys to a brand-new metallic-blue Volkswagen GTI (its beige headrests still covered in plastic), and a family name that opened doors with the regime.

  Suleiman was from the same clan as Major General Mustafa Tlass, one of former President Hafez al-Assad’s most trusted loyalists. Mustafa and Hafez met at the Homs Military Academy in the 1950s, and their decades-long friendship continued through the November 1970 coup that brought Hafez al-Assad to power. Tlass was Syria’s longest-serving defense minister, a post he held for thirty-two years until he retired in 2004. He was a Sunni in the highest echelons of the security state that Hafez built and stacked with his Alawite coreligionists. Tlass was not merely elite, he was so elite that he was part of the small committee that ushered in Bashar al-Assad’s pre-anointed succession after the death of his father, Hafez, in June 2000.