Tales of the Revolution’s Heartbreak

My family and I fled Syria on January 24, 2012. Too many of us had already been arrested and it was no longer safe.

The government had eyes and ears everywhere. Young men were being paid handsome amounts of money to join the ranks of the shabiha paramilitaries. They were on every corner, in every neighbourhood. They were the worst kind of human beings, with no moral scruples.  

My family and many others suffered a great deal because of the shabiha. They detained people for trivial reasons without a second thought as to what would become of them. They didn’t care if the person was a man or a woman, young or old.

We fled our country because of these villains.

After we reached safety in Turkey, we heard many first-hand accounts of the injustice, violence and humiliation the shabiha had brought upon people.

One woman told us how she had been detained in al-Qusur street. She was carrying a laptop the shabiha probably wanted for themselves. They accused her of participating in terrorist activities and threw her in jail.

Her family had no idea what had become of her and started looking everywhere. When her youngest son went to the local intelligence headquarters to ask after her, he too was thrown in one of their cells. The woman was later released, but her son remained in prison for two years. He was tortured until he died.

A friend of mine from a village in Latakia’s countryside also suffered at their hands. She is a young mother of one son and three daughters; the eldest of her children is ten years old, the youngest is three.

“They took my husband and held him for three years, following which they executed him. He died before meeting his youngest daughter,” she told me.

“He was an aircraft engineer and was caught while sabotaging one of their military aircrafts. They told us the news in July 2014, and I still don’t know how I managed to flee with all of my children. We had a tough journey but finally managed to make it to Turkey.”

My friend is a college graduate specialising in education, but she couldn’t find a suitable job. She was forced to work in the fields, picking cotton in return for meagre wages in order to feed her children. But she was resilient and finally succeeded in finding a job at a school where she continues to work hard to provide for her family.   

Then there was the woman from the village of al-Bayda in Banyas.

The village was one of the first in the governorate of Tartus to announce its support for the revolution. The woman I met told me about a massacre in May 2013 in which at least 250 people were killed as a punishment for the uprising.

“They divided the men, women and children into separate groups, then killed them in the ugliest of ways. It was indiscriminate murder. Neither gender nor age mattered to them. They even set the wounded on fire.

“When they left, those of us who had survived gathered the bodies of the dead and buried them in mass graves. Then more than 500 families fled, and we were amongst them,” she said.

The woman’s elderly father-in-law was slaughtered along with his two sons, while his third son watched in horror. That third son was her husband.

The atrocity left him mentally unstable and in need of special treatment. His wife told me he is longer the same man who worked covertly as a doctor in the revolution’s field hospitals.

The couple sold their house in Banyas for a fraction of what it was worth to fund their journey to Turkey and then to Europe where they hoped to find medical care, jobs and a future for their young children.

Last but not least is the story of Umm Mohammed, a woman in her fifties who last saw her son Mohammed on November 6, 2012.

That day, the government launched a major offensive on her town of Saraqib. Mohammed’s wife was martyred. When they found her she was still clutching the loaf of bread she had gone out to buy for her children.

Umm Mohammed searched amongst the bodies of the martyrs for her son, but she could not find him. She took his children and fled to Reyhanli in Turkey where she how lives with her daughter.

More than three years have passed, but Umm Mohammed refuses to believe that her son is gone. She has shed many tears over him, but she has not lost hope that he is alive and that one day they will be reunited.

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.