The Morning They Came for Us by Janine di Giovanni

Author:Janine di Giovanni
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

7

Homs, Bab al-Sebaa Street – Sunday 14 October 2012

It was early autumn in Homs, the heat was subsiding, the air was beginning to turn cool. I had come back, with a government visa, with strict orders from Abeer to ‘Behave. Tell the truth. Stop telling lies about the Syrian people.’

I asked her to let me travel with the Syrian Army, and she said she would think about it – ‘I’m not sure you will tell the truth about the battle we are waging,’ she said suspiciously. Finally, on a weekday morning, she telephoned me before breakfast. ‘You can go,’ she said. ‘You can see our brave boys and what the terrorists are doing to them.’

So I found myself on the other side of the city, the other side of the war. I was technically embedded with the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), the force branch of the Syrian Armed Forces, who have played the active role of ‘governance’ in Syria since 1946. The unit I was assigned to were trying to take out a sniper who was targeting their men inside a hollowed-out building. We had to crouch because the sniper was so close; he could see us through the windows.

I was with Rifaf, whose name in Arabic means the sound of a bird’s soft fluttering wings. He was holding his Kalashnikov, waiting for the next incoming, large-calibre, automatic weapon fire. Rifaf was tense and because I was so close to him that I could see the muscles in his cheek twitching and smell the cigarettes on his breath, his tension spread to my own body. Fear has its own physiology.

We had reached Bab al-Sebaa on foot, running across abandoned boulevards and empty houses. You drive to the last possible safe area, but then vehicles must be abandoned. The army had guided me through a tangle of buildings to reach this place. We crawled through tunnels punched into the walls of buildings known as ‘mouse holes’. These allowed soldiers to move from one building to the next, to breach one obstacle after another, without having to go out onto the street and expose themselves to incoming rockets and sniper fire. Other buildings were connected through alleys where buildings have collapsed, and we walked across planks, piles of shattered glass and improvised bridges leading from one building to the next.

We inched forward slowly. It took us an hour to reach the building we wanted to be in. Normally, it would probably have taken five minutes.

The Ministry of Information had sent a ‘minder’ along to watch me. Shaza was in her thirties, outspoken, brave, and an ardent supporter of Assad – she did not have to accompany me to the front line, but she wanted to see what it was like for the ‘boys’. She had a sense of humour: ‘Next time,’ she panted to me as we were crawling through a hole, ‘don’t wear a pink headscarf. The snipers can see you.’

The men in the unit near Bab al-Sebaa were young, raw recruits, with a few older career officers.

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