Sisters of the War Read online

  For all the children, in Syria and elsewhere, who are forced to grow up too soon

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Map

  Cast of Characters

  Epigraph

  2011

  Hanin

  Ruha

  Hanin

  Ruha

  2012

  Ruha

  Hanin

  Ruha

  Hanin

  2013

  Ruha

  Hanin

  Ruha

  Hanin

  2014/2015

  Ruha

  Hanin

  2016

  Ruha

  Hanin

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Also by Rania Abouzeid

  Copyright

  IN SARAQEB

  Ruha, a nine-year-old girl [in 2011]

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

  Alaa, eight, and Tala, two (Ruha’s sisters)

  Mohammad, five (Ruha’s brother)

  Zahida (Ruha’s paternal grandmother)

  Mariam (one of Ruha’s seven aunts)

  Mohammad (Ruha’s paternal uncle, married to Noora)

  IN DAMASCUS AND BLOUTA

  Hanin, an eight-year-old girl [in 2011]

  Ta lal (Hanin’s father, from Blouta in Latakia Province, living in Mezzeh 86 in Damascus) and Awatif (Hanin’s mother)

  Lojayn, ten, and Jawa, six (Hanin’s sisters)

  Wajid (Hanin’s baby brother)

  “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars”

  —Khalil Gibran

  The three sisters—Lojayn, Hanin, and Jawa—knew they lived in a special place, an ancient city where history wasn’t confined to books; it was alive and all around them. The Syrian capital, Damascus, was one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, a place that countless generations had called home for many thousands of years. The girls—ten-year-old Lojayn, eight-year-old Hanin, and Jawa, who was almost six—didn’t live in the capital’s fancy parts, in its rich neighborhoods or historic districts; they lived on its fringes, on a hill in an overcrowded slum called Mezzeh 86. Still, they were proud to say they were from Damascus, even if their sliver of it was its poorer outer edge.

  Relative to the grand old capital, with its long, rich history, Mezzeh 86 was practically brand-new. It had sprouted up in the 1980s, a chaotic burst of concrete not far from the Presidential Palace. It was a messy maze of cramped buildings so close their thin outer walls kissed. The proximity and cheap building materials meant neighbors could sometimes hear conversations in other homes. It was noisy, with potholed streets that puddled in the winter, the plonk, plonk, plonk of raindrops falling on tin roofs setting off a symphony of sound. Honking drivers navigated narrow, sharply sloping two-way streets that were barely wide enough for one-way traffic. Too many people in too small a space, but to the sisters, the bustle made it feel more alive.

  The family lived in a small four-room apartment off the busy main road. Their first-floor home had only one bedroom, which their parents used, so Lojayn, Hanin, and Jawa all slept in the living room on thin mattresses that doubled as floor couches during the day. The young sisters all had full rosy-red cheeks and brown eyes. They all wore their curly brown hair short but still long enough for the colorful clips and headbands and ribbons they loved to wear. They had a new baby brother, Wajid, just a few months old, who filled the small house with joy (and screams and wailing). Wajid’s arrival meant Jawa was no longer the youngest child. She wasn’t overly jealous or resentful of her changed status (perhaps just a bit), but she felt she’d outgrown being the baby of the family. After all, she was about to start school later that year. She looked forward to September, when she would join her sisters on the curb outside their home every morning as they waited for the minivan that would drive them to and from classes.

  The older girls, Lojayn and Hanin, were also enrolled in a music school a short walk from their home, and Jawa hoped to join her sisters there, too. By early 2011, Lojayn had five years of violin lessons under her belt and was good enough to perform in two concerts with her class at the neighborhood’s cultural center. Hanin’s chosen instrument was the piano. She’d only just begun studying it in 2010, but it came naturally to her. “It was very easy for me,” she said. Her electronic keyboard, propped on its metal stand, had pride of place in the living room. She was always careful during practice to turn the volume down in case it disturbed the neighbors, but the neighbors never complained. Jawa hadn’t yet decided which instrument she wanted to play, although both of her sisters gave her lessons on their instruments. She preferred the piano to the violin.

  The sisters were encouraged to express their creativity and to develop a love of the arts, both by their father, Talal, a poet, and by their mother, Awatif. Their small apartment was full of music and literature and drawings the girls made that their mother proudly taped to the walls. On occasion, Talal would read his work to his daughters. They listened in awe, not always understanding all of the words (especially Jawa) but feeling their meaning and the power of their impassioned delivery. Lojayn had even taken to writing poems of her own, hoping to emulate the father she so looked up to. Although Talal had published several books of his work, his poetry couldn’t feed his family. To earn a living, he owned a small store in the neighborhood that sold perfume, cosmetics, and hair accessories.

  “We used to go to Baba’s store often,” Hanin remembered, “and every time we drew something Baba would display it in the store to show all the customers!” The girls sometimes volunteered to stock the shelves in their spare time, for pocket money. They’d line up the hair dyes by order of number and color, smell the new perfumes, and arrange the hair accessories. Jawa usually spent her pocket money on ice cream and cookies. “They wouldn’t really work; it was more like play, but they felt like they were helping out,” Talal said. “We were very happy in that house. Everything was wonderful.”

  Outside of the girls’ happy bubble, many things in Syria were less wonderful. Bashar al-Assad had been president all their lives, and Talal’s daughters (at least the two older ones) knew that Bashar’s late father, Hafez al-Assad, had ruled Syria as president before him. That was about the extent of what they knew about their system of governance and the Assad family’s role in it.

  In 1946, the same year Syria gained independence from France, a then-sixteen-year-old Hafez al-Assad joined a political organization called the Baath Party as a student activist. The next few years in Syria were a period of great instability and short-lived coups, with a parade of leaders who were overthrown and replaced. In 1952, Hafez entered the Homs Military Academy, and later graduated as an air force pilot. By 1963, he had risen through the ranks to become the head of the Syrian Air Force. That same year, he was among a group of Baath Party supporters in the Syrian military who helped the party seize control of the country.

  Syria’s Baath Party, like most of the secular movements sweeping to power in the 1950s and ’60s across the Middle East, preached that all citizens were equal and deserved rights and opportunities. Its idealistic guiding principles were expressed in its slogan: Unity (of the divided Arab states in the Middle East), Freedom (from foreign powers and tyranny), and Socialism (a political and economic philosophy that believes that resources and means of production should be collectively owned and distributed by a community). For Syria’s Baath Party, socialism was the means by which citizens from any religious, socioeconomic, or geographic background could improve their circumstances, aided by the firm guiding hand of the state. At least, that’s what the pa
rty promised on paper. In reality, Syria’s Baath Party, like many of the secular movements in power across the Middle East, birthed a dictatorship, and Hafez al-Assad would soon be cast in the role of dictator.

  In the years after the Baath Party’s 1963 takeover of Syria, growing disagreements between the party’s civilian members and military members like Assad split the organization. In 1970, Hafez al-Assad snatched control of the Baath Party—and Syria—in a coup known as the Corrective Movement. He became the president of Syria, ending the period of coups and instability, and ushering in a new era—the reign of the Assads.

  Hafez ruled Syria until his death in June 2000. After that, his son Bashar al-Assad became president. Before his father’s death, Bashar had been living in the United Kingdom, studying to be an eye doctor, when he was summoned back to Damascus to take his father’s place. He was thirty-four years old, too young by law to be president. The Syrian Constitution stated that the minimum age for a president was forty, so after Hafez’s death, the Syrian parliament amended the Constitution to lower the minimum age to thirty-four, Bashar’s exact age, in order for him to rule the country. That’s how things worked in Syria, or “Assad’s Syria” as it was often referred to, the slogan plastered on billboards and posters for decades, as if only one family could—or would—ever govern the country, as if it belonged to them. For many Syrians, not just Talal’s young daughters but even adults, the Assads, both father and son, were the only leaders they had ever known. By 2011, the Assads had ruled Syria for forty-one years. And they had done so with an iron fist.

  Assad’s Syria was not a place with a vibrant political or civil society. Opposition of any kind was not tolerated. Syria was a one-party state, with a Constitution that Hafez al-Assad had amended in 1973 to ensure that his Baath Party “led the state and society.” Nongovernmental organizations were banned (except those affiliated with the government). When the Baath Party came to power in 1963, it introduced an emergency law, a measure that was supposed to be temporary, but by 2011, it was still in place and had in reality become permanent.

  Under the emergency law, protests were banned and public gatherings needed official permission. Citizens could be arrested for vaguely defined offenses such as “threatening public order” and “disturbing public confidence.” Everything from private phone calls to personal letters were monitored by the state, meaning government agents eavesdropped on calls and read private mail. The media, including newspapers and television broadcasts, was censored. There was no such thing as anonymity on the internet, at least not in public places, and private internet at home was too expensive for most Syrians. Less than 1 percent of the twenty-three million Syrians in the country had broadband subscription. To get online at an internet café, a person had to hand over their national identity card and a record was kept of websites they visited. Owners could spy on their customers at any time by sharing their screens without permission. Social media sites like Facebook were blocked.

  Assad’s Syria was a security and military state built on its intelligence agencies—and the fear of them. There were four main agencies, known collectively as the Mukhabarat, all headquartered in the capital, Damascus, and divided into dozens of branches and sub-branches spread throughout the country, each with its own detention and interrogation facilities. They operated independently, with little low-level coordination, spying on the population—and on one another. It was assumed that the intelligence agents were always watching and listening, enforcing the emergency law, so much so that some Syrians—when they dared—privately joked that even the walls in their homes had ears. The intelligence agents, although technically supposed to be secret police acting like spies, didn’t bother hiding their activities. They didn’t need to. Under Syrian law, they could not be tried in court, even “for crimes committed while carrying out their designated duties.” They were, in effect, above the law. Local human rights activists and others who challenged the system disappeared in prisons, usually without their family’s knowledge, sometimes for years, sometimes forever. Nobody except the state really knew how many people were behind bars, or how many more people the intelligence agents had killed. People simply went missing, their fate sometimes never known. It was difficult, if not impossible, to hold the powerful accountable, even though technically Syria held elections. The voting results were generally considered rigged and neither free nor fair. International human rights organizations called Syria a dictatorship.

  Yet on the surface, despite the targeted political oppression of some citizens, Syria was an otherwise safe place. It was a country of contradictions where men and women, foreigners and locals alike, could walk home in the middle of the night without fear that a random criminal might attack them. Health care and education were free, and bread, other basic food items, fuel, and gas were subsidized, meaning the government reduced their price for the general public and paid traders the difference. At the same time, Syria was also a country corroded by corruption, where bribes were expected at every level of power, where everyday things like getting a job, or a business license, or securing a competitive place in a university program, could be made harder or easier depending on who you knew, and which officials you could bribe. Unemployment was high. Wages were low.

  Despite all this, citizens knew not to complain or to try and change the system, because the cost of doing so was great. Recent history taught them so, as in 1982, when Islamists staged a mini war against Hafez al-Assad, a war they lost after Assad killed tens of thousands of people (militants and civilians alike) in the city of Hama. Or in 2004, when Syrian Kurds protested, demanding rights in a state that did not give them citizenship or let them speak or teach their Kurdish language. The state’s security and intelligence arms quickly and violently crushed both incidents.

  But the sisters Lojayn, Hanin, and Jawa didn’t know any of that. Their parents, like many Syrians, didn’t speak of such things, not even in the privacy of their own home. To the girls, their country and its capital were simply historic, beautiful places. They only knew the Damascus of tour books: the city that wore its history proudly, the place they looked forward to exploring every week. It had become something of a ritual in their home that every Friday (the first day of the weekend in Syria) the family would either go to a park or visit a historic site or a monument like the capital’s famed Opera House.

  The girls relished the Friday outings, especially trips to the famous markets of Souq al-Hamidieh and the adjacent Midhat Pasha Souq in the heart of the old part of Damascus. The markets themselves were relatively new—which in Damascus meant they were only a few hundred years old—but entering the pedestrian-only souqs, with their arched metal coverings, was like being transported back in time to the world of A Thousand and One Nights. Stores lined both sides of the souqs, the traders often standing at their front doors, inviting customers in. There was so much to experience and to see: The handwoven carpets, the delicate scarves in a rainbow of colors and fabrics, soft printed silks and robust cotton tablecloths, the elaborately embroidered and richly threaded gold and silver brocade that Damascus was famous for. Engraved copper platters that glistened when they caught the light. Pretty jewelry boxes with intricate mother-of-pearl designs and hand-carved inlaid wooden furniture. There were sacks of heaped nuts of every type and shape, often near a painter’s palette of colorful spices. So many smells and sights that could make your stomach rumble. The arched black roofs covering the souqs had small irregular-shaped holes that looked like stars in the night sky. They were bullet holes from an earlier generation’s fight for independence from the French, who once controlled Syria. The bullet holes had damaged the structure, but they also let in the light.

  Jawa’s favorite destinations were Souq al-Hamidieh and the amusement parks. “I loved all the rides, I was always so happy in the park.” For Hanin, Fridays weren’t complete without a stop at the famous Bakdash ice cream parlor in Souq al-Hamidieh. She loved the stretchy, almost elastic, handmade ice cream topped with pistachios
that was sold year-round. The store had been in the souq since 1885 and was always crowded with customers, no matter the time of day or the season.

  Damascus was a city layered with a living history. Its stones had outlasted many conquerors, from the Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantine, and various Islamic civilizations, as well as the French and others. Its oldest quarters were still surrounded by the remnants of Roman walls. Its monuments, like the majestic Umayyad Mosque, weren’t simply roped-off relics of the past—they functioned in the present. The mosque still received worshippers, as it had for centuries. Residents still lived along narrow winding alleyways that were built well before the era of cars, or even the horse and carriage. How many people had walked the same streets that Talal and his family walked every Friday? The cobblestones had been rubbed smooth under the feet of countless generations, most of whom lived in peace but some of whom were foreigners who had come in war to conquer and control. But throughout it all, the highs and lows of its history, Damascus had remained Damascus. Back in early 2011, the three young sisters couldn’t have known and wouldn’t have imagined that it would be their own people—other Syrians—who would pose the greatest modern threat to their beloved ancient capital.

  Talal and his wife had imparted a love of history to their daughters, but they hid some of Syria’s darker history from them, like the ugliness their ancestors faced simply because of their religion. Talal’s family were Alawites, like the Assads. Alawites are a minority religious group in Syria, comprising about 11 percent of a population that is more than 70 percent Sunni Muslim. There are also Christians (who slightly outnumber Alawites), as well as small communities of Shiite Muslims, Druze, and other sects making up Syria’s richly diverse society.

  The Alawite religion is a very distant offshoot of Shiite Islam, although it incorporates elements of several belief systems, including Christianity, Zoroastrianism, the Druze faith, and the philosophies of Plato and Socrates. It is the type of religion that a person is born into; conversions are not permitted. Throughout their history, the Alawites were oppressed and persecuted because of their distinctive faith. Both Sunni and Shiite Muslims considered them infidels and punished them for being so. Sometimes the punishment was death. For generations, until the rise of Hafez al-Assad in the 1970s, Syria’s Alawites were second-class citizens in their own country. They comprised the servant class.