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

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       The Girl on TV

      Aleppo, 2008–2010

      Apart from facts I like dates. For example, 19 April 1770 was the day Captain James Cook found Australia and 4 September 1998 was the date Google was established. My least favourite date is 16 March. That is a black day in the history of Kurds when in 1988, in the final days of the Iran–Iraq War, around twenty of Saddam Hussein’s fighter jets swooped down and dropped a deadly mixture of mustard gas and nerve agents on Kurds in the city of Halabja in northern Iraq. The town had fallen to the Iranians who had joined forces with local Kurds, and Saddam wanted to punish them. We call that day Bloody Friday. Thousands of men, women and children were killed – even today we don’t know how many, but perhaps 5,000 – and thousands more were left with their skin all melted and with difficulties breathing. Afterwards lots of babies were born with deformities.

      Every year on that day our Kurdish TV channel would play mournful songs about Halabja and show old film, which made me so sad. It was awful to see the clouds of white, black and yellow smoke rising up in tall columns over the town after the bombing, then people running and wailing, dragging their children behind them or on their shoulders, and bodies piling up. I watched one film where people said the gas smelled of sweet apples and after that I couldn’t eat an apple. I hate that day – I wish I could delete it from the calendar. Saddam was an even worse dictator than Assad. Yet the West kept supporting Saddam for years, even giving him weapons. Sometimes it seems that nobody likes the Kurds. Our list of sorrows is endless.

      March is actually the best time and the worst time for Kurds because it is the month of our annual festival Newroz, marking the start of spring, a festival that we share with the Persians. For us it also commemorates the day when the evil child-eating tyrant Zuhak was defeated by the blacksmith Kawa.

      In the days running up to Newroz the flat would be filled with heavenly smells of cooking, Ayee and my sisters making dolma, vine leaves rolled around a stuffing of tomato, eggplant, zucchini and onion, and potatoes filled with spicy mince (apart from one potato that we always leave empty for luck for whoever gets it). And it was the one time of year when I went out. A few days before Newroz we and all our neighbours would festoon our balconies with coloured lights in red, green, white and yellow, the colours of the national flag of Kurdistan. On the actual day we would dress up in national dress and set off in a mini-bus.

      Of course the regime didn’t like it and put lots of police on the streets that day. They only allowed the festival because they knew how stubborn we Kurds are and feared there would be riots if they banned it. But you still needed an official permit which was hard to get, and we weren’t allowed to enjoy our festivities on the local streets. Instead we had to go to a sort of wasteland called Haql al-rmy on the outskirts of Aleppo, which the army used for rifle practice and which literally means shooting field in English. It was a bleak rocky place, so we took lots of rugs to sit on and to spread our picnics on.

      To be honest, sometimes I hoped it would be banned because I hated going to it. First it was almost like torture to get me down those five floors of stairs. Then when we got there it was totally loud and crowded, and so uncomfortable sitting on the hard ground. I couldn’t even see the folk dancing or the march with our national songs. And we had to be careful what we said because among the revellers were vendors selling balloons and ice-cream and candyfloss and people thought they were spies for Assad’s intelligence. Actually we were always careful. In the evening there would be a bonfire which people would dance around and fireworks would light up the sky.

      Then a week or so later would come the arrests of the organizers, the people who had set up the stage for the musicians and sound systems. In 2008, police shot dead three young men celebrating Newroz in a Kurdish town and there were calls for it to be banned. Rather than having an outright clash with all the Kurds, the regime announced that from then on that date would be Mother’s Day, and any festivities would be to celebrate that. See how wily these Assads are.

      That was the year I missed Newroz because the doctors decided to try and lengthen my Achilles tendons to enable me to stretch out my feet and put my ankles on the ground, instead of always standing on tiptoe. I woke in Al Salam hospital with the bottom halves of my legs encased in plaster. It felt as if my feet were on fire, and I cried. I missed my eldest sister, gentle Jamila, who had got married the previous year and moved away. Bland had finished his studies and got a job as an accountant for a trading company and Nasrine had just started at Aleppo University to study physics in the footsteps of my sister Nahda. I was happy for them but it meant I was alone at home all day with Ayee and Yaba.

      One day I was sitting on the rug on the big balcony when Ayee came with my uncle Ali, who had just been visiting relatives in the city of Homs. ‘Your uncle has something for you,’ she said. Uncle Ali handed me a tissue box and laughed as my face fell. A box of tissues didn’t seem much of a gift.

      ‘Look inside,’ he said. I did and there among the tissues was a small tortoise. Homs was famous for its tortoises. I was so happy I sat with the box on my lap all day long. I loved tracing the patterns on her domed СКАЧАТЬ