The Girl From Aleppo: Nujeen’s Escape From War to Freedom. Christina Lamb

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СКАЧАТЬ opened fire. Four people were killed. When people saw the blood they went crazy. Ambulances couldn’t get through because of the security forces, so protesters had to carry their wounded to the ancient mosque in the Old City which they turned into a makeshift hospital.

      Two days after that protesters set fire to the local Ba’ath party headquarters and other government buildings. President Assad sent an official delegation to offer condolences to the relatives of those killed, and sacked the governor and transferred General Najeeb.

      It was too late. Now it was our turn. Our revolution had begun.

      Predictably (dictators are so uninventive), Assad’s first response was to send tanks into Deraa to crush the protests. Maybe because our army is mainly Alawite like the Assads, they didn’t hold back as the Egyptian tanks had done. Instead they attacked the mosque, which had become a kind of headquarters for protesters, and they did so with such force they left its ancient walls splattered with blood. The funerals of the people killed then turned into mass rallies. These in turn were fired on and more people killed, so there would be more funerals and even more people would turn out.

      The government then issued a decree to cut taxes and raise state salaries, which only made everyone even angrier. At the next funeral the following day, tens of thousands of people gathered, shouting, ‘We don’t want your bread, we want dignity!’ Then, at the end of March, Assad gave a speech in parliament denouncing the protesters as ‘sectarian extremists’ and ‘foreign terrorists’. ‘Such conspiracies don’t work with our country or people,’ he raged. ‘We tell them you have only one choice which is to learn from your failure.’

      We Syrians were shocked by that speech. ‘He’s treating us like traitors!’ said Bland. Deraa was under siege, but weekly anti-government rallies began in other cities, the details shared on Facebook and YouTube. Throughout April and May there were protests in Homs, Hama, Damascus, Raqqa – spreading from Latakia on the Mediterranean coast to the rural northern regions bordering Turkey and the eastern province of Deir al-Zour where our oil comes from.

      Each time they were met with a show of force as the government thought it could just crush the protests. Hundreds of people were being killed. But it didn’t stop. Across the country people were shouting, ‘With our souls, with our blood, we sacrifice to you, Deraa!’

      Soon no one spoke of anything else. Even Mustafa’s refusal to get married was forgotten. The air was electric, almost crackling. Revolution! It was like the history programmes I watched. We were full of excitement at the thought that we were going to get rid of the Assads. Suddenly people were talking about everything that had been unthinkable. It was beautiful. People made up songs against Assad. I made curses against Assad which I sometimes said out loud.

      We Kurds thought we might finally get our Kurdistan, or Rojavo as we call it. Some banners on the streets read, ‘Democracy for Syria. Federalism for Syrian Kurdistan’. But Yaba said we didn’t understand. Older people like him knew the regime was dangerous because they had witnessed the 1980s in Hama when Hafez al-Assad and his brother Rifat quelled protests from the Muslim Brotherhood by massacring 10,000 people and pulverized the city. So they knew what the Assads would do.

      The regime seemed deaf and blind to what people were demanding. Instead of real change Assad announced new things to try and appease different sectors of the population. He legalized the wearing of niqab by female schoolteachers which had been banned just the year before. To try and stop us Kurds joining the protests, Assad even passed a Presidential decree which gave citizenship to around 300,000 Kurds who had been stateless since the 1960s. For the first time ever, his spokesman came on state TV to wish Kurds a happy Newroz and played a Kurdish song.

      It wasn’t enough – what people wanted was less corruption and more freedom. Calls for reform became calls for the removal of Assad. Protesters ripped down the latest posters of Bashar – in jeans kneeling to plant a tree – and set fire to them and even tore down statues of his late father whose name we had barely dared whisper.

      Most of this we watched on Al Jazeera or YouTube – Syrian TV didn’t show it of course. Our best source of information was Mustafa, because he had started a business bringing trucks from Lebanon so was always driving across the country and seeing things. Like Yaba, he said our regime was tougher than the others. However, when he saw how that first protest in Deraa spread to Homs and Hama, he changed his mind.

      He told us that in Hama there were so many people it was like a human wave had taken over the central square. Hama was the town where all those people had been massacred in 1982, and many of the protesters were orphans of that massacre. They poured into the streets after Friday prayers and as usual the regime retaliated. Three army trucks with large guns appeared and opened fire on them, killing seventy people. The men in the front row shouted the word ‘Peacefully!’ as they were felled. The killings incensed the town and soon the entire square was full.

      ‘This is it,’ Mustafa told us. ‘By the third week it will be finished.’

      Then he happened to be in the Kurdish town of Derik in south-east Turkey near the border when there was a birthday celebration for Abdulhamid Haji Darwish, head of Syria’s Kurdish Democratic Progressive Party, at which everyone was discussing how we Kurds should respond to the revolution. All Kurds thought the regime finished and the discussion was how to make sure we got our own state or at least some autonomy like the Kurds in northern Iraq. They had sent someone to Baghdad to meet Jalal Talabani, the President of Iraq, and also a Kurd, to ask his opinion. He said the Assad regime wouldn’t fall. That wasn’t what people wanted to hear, so they said, ‘Oh, Talabani has got old.’

      It turned out he was right – he knew what was going on.

      Syria wasn’t the same as Egypt and Tunisia. Assad had learnt from his father the brutal way he had put down the Hama revolt, and even before that from our French masters. Back in 1925 when we were under French rule, Muslims, Druze and Christians together rose up in what we call the Great Revolt. The French responded with an artillery bombardment so massive that it flattened an entire quarter of the Old City of Damascus. That area is now known as al-Hariqa which means the Conflagration. They killed thousands of people and held public executions in the central Marja Square as a warning. After that the rebellion was crushed and we continued under French rule for another two decades until 1946.

      Maybe because we didn’t remember this history, we young people were sure there had to be change. When we heard that Assad was going to make another speech in June 2011 we expected he would finally announce some major reform. Instead he again took a hard line, denouncing what he called a conspiracy against Syria and blaming ‘saboteurs’ backed by foreign powers and ‘religious extremists’ who he claimed had taken advantage of the unrest. He said no reform was possible while the chaos continued. It was clear that he, or maybe his family, had no intention of giving up power. Like I said, they thought they owned us.

      After that there started to be organized resistance. Hundreds of different rebel groups got together in what they called the Free Syrian Army or FSA and began to prepare for war. Most were young and inexperienced and untrained, but some were disgruntled members of Assad’s own army. There were even reports that senior army officers had defected and joined the FSA. Kurds didn’t join the FSA as we had our own militias, the YPG or People’s Protection Units.

      Assad simply stepped up the military action. Much of his firepower in those early days was trained on Homs, where my tortoise came from and which was one of the first places to rise up. Homs is our third largest city, and Sunnis, Shias, Alawites and Christians had lived side by side there, just as in Aleppo. The people didn’t give up, particularly in the old neighbourhood of Babr al-Amr, even though Assad’s forces were pulverizing the place. Soon it was known as the capital of the revolution. We thought that, when they saw all the killing, the Western powers would intervene as they had СКАЧАТЬ