The Truce that Never Was

On Sunday morning, December 20, 2015, Russian military aircraft committed a massacre in my beloved city Idlib.

Various media outlets reported that more than eight air raids had targeted residential areas. Reports spoke of scores of killed, injured and missing people; many of them women and children.

News channels broadcast harrowing images of civil defence teams searching for survivors underneath the rubble. The martyrs and wounded who were pulled out were sent to the few field hospitals in the city.

The raids were carried out during a six-month UN brokered ceasefire covering Zabadani, Kafraya and Al-Fuah.

This wasn’t the first time the truce had been breached by Russian and government planes, but it was the bloodiest.

The truce had encouraged people to return to their homes in Idlib and its countryside. Tired of being on the move, they came back seeking safety.

Houses were once again inhabited, and markets once again packed with shoppers.

But the truce had been violated with no regard for these people. Their homes were shelled, and their roofs collapsed on top of them.

I followed the news on TV, the internet and social media pages that day. My heart broke over the fate of these innocent people.

The footage I saw showed civil defence teams gathering body parts in bags to bury them in mass graves. These body parts belonged to the missing, whose families were probably still searching for them.

I saw a video of a man carrying a baby who had died in his arms. The baby was covered in dust, he had been found under the wreckage of the Sharia court that received the lion’s share of the shelling.

I saw footage of wounded children who were screaming in pain, of a woman desperately searching for her loved ones, and of a martyred civil defence volunteer whose face was covered in blood.  

Everything I saw had that one thing in common: blood. It was everywhere.

The stories I read on Facebook spoke of anguish.

A friend of mine described what his mother had been through during the offensive.

“My mother was about 25 metres away from the area that was being shelled. Shrapnel was flying around her so she recited shahada prayers over and over again, having surrendering her fate to God.

“My mother is a pious woman, she did not want to be found by men lying injured or dead in the street. As the planes circled above her she ran to a building and took shelter in its basement. She could hear repeated explosions. She did not want to die alone.

“She took out her mobile phone and typed a short farewell message to us. She knew she wouldn’t be able to send it as there was no network coverage in the basement, but she hoped we would find it and read it if she died.

“When my mother told me all this I wept. I felt helpless. All I could do was pray for a lasting truce that would spare our mothers the agony of waiting for the death that each breach brought us.”

That is what women are like in my country. They are virtuous and selfless. When facing death their main concern is to find shelter – not out of fear – but so their bodies will not be exposed and so they can send a farewell message to their loved ones.  

Another friend of mine posted a picture of his two year-old son on Facebook. He asked people to pray for his baby whose mother had been martyred during the attack. The child too had sustained serious injuries and doctors had been forced to remove his spleen. He needed God’s mercy and our prayers.

Throughout the day, civil defence teams continued to pull more martyrs and wounded from beneath the rubble. Ambulances rushed those with life-threatening injuries to the border, so they could be transferred to hospitals in Turkey.

Throughout the day, Idlib’s local coordination council posted the names of the martyrs on its page, mourning them one by one.

This is how people live in Syria, and still many of them refuse to leave.

All I can do is pray for them, and hope God will heed my prayers and keep them safe.   

Bahja Muallem is the pseudonym of a Damascus Bureau contributor from Idlib. The 22-year-old was arrested for filming and participating in anti-government protests. Bahja was forced to abandon her political science studies and seek refuge in Turkey along with her family.

This story was produced by Syria Stories (previously Damascus Bureau), IWPR’s news platform for Syrian journalists.