The election was meant to choose the leader of the Local Council, a civilian
Syria’s Last Bastion of Freedom
Amid the brutal civil war, a town fought off the regime
and the fundamentalists—and dared to hold an
election. Can its experiment in democracy survive?
By Anand Gopal December 3, 2018
Osama al-Hossein, an accountant in Saraqib, said, “Before the revolution, we used to live the life
of a herd, just following without question. But then we realized the sheer number of lies we were
living under.”Illustration by Bill Bragg
The province of Idlib, a pocket of rolling olive groves and shimmering wheat
fields in northern Syria, is home to three million people who, since 2015, have
been effectively trapped. They live in the country’s last remaining opposition
enclave, amid a chaotic assortment of rebels, the most powerful of whom
are religious fundamentalists. Last year, the U.S. special envoy Brett McGurk
called Idlib “the largest Al Qaeda safe haven since 9/11.” Syria’s dictator,
Bashar al-Assad, has vowed to launch an invasion of Idlib, which could
subject its cinder-block towns and villages to rockets, barrel bombs, cluster
bombs, even chemical weapons. This could spark a refugee crisis of historic
proportions, driving millions of people into Turkey and Europe. Idlib
residents, in the meantime, must continue to live on a capricious battlefield
with no rule of law and no clear governing authority. In the summer of 2017,
for the first time anywhere in Syria since 1954, the residents of the town of
Saraqib decided to seize control of their future—and hold a genuinely free
election.
On the morning that polls were to open, an activist named Osama al-Hossein
woke up at five o’clock, feeling anxious. He soon headed to Idlib Gate, a
former department store that had been turned into a meeting hall. A small
crowd was milling about: local journalists, election monitors, and suited
dignitaries who, in international circles, represented the Syrian opposition.
body that governed the town. Poll workers checked their phones for reports
of air traffic: Syrian and Russian jets were known to attack public gatherings,
and activists had posted sentries around the province.
Hossein, who was thirty-five, had the deeply lined face of a man well
acquainted with long nights of coffee and cigarettes. Before the war, he’d
been an accounts manager at a cement company, but in recent months he’d
been volunteering to organize the polls. He later admitted to me that, given
the circumstances, holding a popular election was a “crazy idea.” He had
attended campaign meetings for his preferred candidate, a lawyer named
Ibrahim Bareesh, inside a makeshift bunker, sitting near a wall of sandbags.
He’d helped organize debates, live-streamed on Facebook, in which five
candidates sparred over the breakdown of the local electricity grid and over
rapidly escalating food costs—some argued for price controls, others for the
free market. Hossein and other volunteers had conducted a local census,
distributed pamphlets, and recruited poll monitors. Thousands of voters had
registered, but nobody was sure how many would turn out. Danger
emanated not only from the sky but also from the concertina-wire-crowned
berms and highway checkpoints ringing the town—areas under the control of
Al Qaeda.
The polls opened at eight-thirty. The sun was already powerful, but the
streets were empty, the iron shutters on storefronts not yet drawn. No
campaign posters hung on the town’s walls, because the candidates could
not afford them. Hossein hauled eight glass ballot boxes to schools that
were serving as polling stations. When he was done, he waited outside al-
Baneen High School, the streets droning with generators. After an hour, the
first voters trickled in. He then visited al-Salam school, where a few women
were forming a line. A dizzying realization set in: people were actually
coming.
Hossein saw friends, relatives, and a steady stream of people he didn’t know,
including a seventy-year-old man voting for the first time in his life. At noon,
Hossein returned to Idlib Gate, which was now crowded. The three-star flag
of the 2011 Syrian revolution hung between pillars. Plates heaped with
roasted chicken, potatoes, and rice were passed around. Someone loaded a
cassette by the local singer Ahmed al-Tellawi into a tape deck, and the poll
workers and Hossein began to dance.
By the early evening, voting lines were spilling onto the street. Two
candidates remained on the ballot for the Local Council presidency, and their
camps had gathered at Idlib Gate; as the returns came in, they broke into an
argument. The election bylaws, which Hossein had helped design, stipulated
that, if turnout failed to reach fifty per cent, voting would be extended for a
day. Bareesh’s rival, who sensed that he was ahead, demanded that the polls
close. As workers huddled in a corner, counting votes, Hossein shuttled
between the opposing camps, trying to persuade them to abide by the
regulations. When an election worker announced that turnout was fifty-five
per cent, the room erupted in cheers.
Before the war, Hossein had been an accounts manager at a cement company. He later became a
political activist, and, in 2011, he was tortured and imprisoned by Assad’s forces for five
months.Photograph by Emin Özmen / Magnum for The New Yorker
Hossein was bone-tired, but he wanted to celebrate. While poll workers
tabulated the results, he went with friends to a farmhouse outside town. On
the porch, under the pale glow of a fluorescent light, they put meat on the
grill and opened a bottle of Grant’s 25. Hossein could not believe what they
had accomplished. The 2011 uprising had begun with peaceful protesters
demanding reforms, but, as the government cracked down and rebel
factions arose, the country entered a death spiral: bullets, barrel bombs,
beheadings. One Syrian town after another fell out of government control,
and from this anarchy new horrors arose. The flags of ISIS and Al Qaeda
were raised across the country. Child refugees drowned at sea; Western
hostages were murdered on camera. Syria seemed to have descended into
barbarism, and, in the eyes of the international community, the harsh stability
of the Assad dictatorship came to appear reasonable, even desirable. Syria
was said to illustrate the folly of imagining, in a region riven by religion and
ethnicity, that a better world was possible.
Somehow, Saraqib had avoided this fate. It offered an alternative history for
the entire Syrian conflict—and, Hossein believed, its citizens embodied the
true soul of the revolution. That evening, he imagined other tiny democracies
flowering across Syria, and the rest of the world coming to understand, at
last, that his country had more to offer than bloodshed and tragedy.
When he returned to Idlib Gate, at around 3 A.M., an election official
announced the victor: Bareesh’s opponent, a lawyer named Muthanna al-
Muhammad. Applause rolled across the room. The results mattered less than
the fact that citizens had taken part in a ritual of democracy. People were in
tears. Even though Bareesh had lost, Hossein received hugs and
handshakes.
Just then, the doors swung open and a pack of men entered, clutching
weapons and looking panicked. Hossein recognized them as local rebels
who supported the election. “Everyone get out!” one shouted. “Make
yourself safe!” As everyone in the hall rushed toward the door, news swept
the room: Al Qaeda was storming Saraqib.
Situated on the broad plains of southern Idlib, Saraqib is a melancholy one-
post-office town, much like its neighbors. For decades, it was a rest stop
along the Damascus-Aleppo highway, known primarily for its residents’
expertise in repairing the rigs used to drill water wells. Crisp polygonal tracts
of farmland radiate from the edges of town. Saraqib’s streets are narrow
alleys of yellowing concrete walls. Small balconies hang from the top floors
of rough cinder-block houses. The downtown is dense with awning-covered
shops and curbside grocery stands. There are no cinemas, parks, bars, or
night clubs. On the town’s northern side lies a soccer field, shaded by fig and
elm trees; residents take the sport seriously. Many of Saraqib’s thirty
thousand inhabitants trace their roots to Ottoman times, though in recent
decades a community of Roma has settled on the south side, cornering the
market in dentistry.
For many years, there was no town newspaper or radio station, and news
arrived through the state-run press from Damascus or Aleppo. Huge
propaganda posters took the place of billboards. One placard, atop the
electricity substation, bore the words “SYRIA IS PROTECTED BY GOD,”
accompanied by a photograph of Assad eying the street below.
As a child, Hossein saw such posters everywhere. I first met him and other
local activists in the summer of 2017. He has the faraway look of a man
perpetually considering life’s deeper mysteries, though he has a weakness
for Real Madrid and moonshine. When Assad controlled the area, Hossein
recalled, even indoor conversations were circumscribed. “We would say,
‘The walls have ears,’ ” he said. The infrastructure of surveillance was
palpable: the squat one-story building housing the local branch of the
Military Intelligence Directorate; the flag-festooned office of the ruling Baath
Party. In grade schools, pupils received instruction in firearms and chanted,
“With our blood, with our souls, we sacrifice for you, Bashar!”
Hossein grew up in the working-class quarters of Saraqib’s west side, where
his father ran a small grocery store. On Fridays, his family would attend the
neighborhood mosque or visit the countryside. From an early age, he
displayed a facility with numbers and amazed friends by recalling the dates
of obscure events. He dreamed of “doing something big,” he said, like
becoming an economist who tackled poverty. But in class he watched
instructors show favoritism toward the children of security officials, going as
far as to supply them with exam questions in advance. On school forms, he
was asked to attest to his party affiliation—there were two choices, the Baath
Party or “neutral”—and he defiantly chose the latter. After he graduated, his
job applications went unanswered.
One day, a friend invited him to a meeting of a socialist party that loosely
followed the vision of the Arab nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser, of Egypt. “I
didn’t know a thing about any of that,” Hossein admitted to me. “I joined
them just because they said they opposed the regime.” He launched a
chapter in Saraqib, and party connections helped him land a position in the
accounts department of the city government. He was drawn to socialist
ideas, though he opposed the “fake socialism” of the regime, which, he
believed, exploited the label to enrich itself. At work, he agitated for wage
increases for public-sector workers, but his efforts were stymied. His party,
he realized, had surrendered its independence to the Baath Party and
functioned as a government front; genuine opposition parties were banned.
Hossein drifted away from politics and eventually found work at a cement
company. He had little time for books—anything worth reading was illegal—
but he developed a taste for Hollywood, and watched detective shows
whenever he could find a DVD player. Most nights, though, he spent in
smoky living rooms and cafés, playing rummy with friends. “There was no
point in thinking about politics, because we felt like the regime was
everywhere—even in the bedroom,” he joked. But one day at his parents’
house, in January, 2011, the satellite feed began showing astounding images
of Tahrir Square, in Cairo, filling with protesters.
At the time, Hossein could not imagine something similar happening in Syria.
But, a month later, students in the southern city of Daraa spray-painted on a
school wall “IT’S YOUR TURN, O DOCTOR”—a reference to Assad, an
ophthalmologist by training. They were arrested and brutalized by security
forces. Protests erupted, and Hossein heard that the regime responded by
massacring unarmed dissidents. As demonstrations spread across Syria,
Hossein wondered if anything could be organized in Saraqib.
“Believe it or not, you’re the first ‘running with scissors’ I’ve ever seen.”
One evening that March, Hossein and five friends met at his parents’ home
to discuss politics. They talked about a Muslim Brotherhood uprising in Syria
in the eighties, and the regime’s vicious response, which left thousands
dead. “We knew very well that if we wanted to stand against the regime the
bill would be high,” he told me. But the recent protests in Daraa had been
about basic democratic reforms, not overthrowing the government, and
Hossein felt confident that Assad would feel constrained by the gaze of the
international community and by social media, which could broadcast abuses.
The six friends decided to hold a protest in Saraqib that Friday, and took an
oath to secretly invite one or two other people they trusted. A so-called
emergency law banned most forms of public assembly, and the group could
think of only one place to stage a demonstration.
On March 25, 2011, a few dozen worshippers gathered at al-Zawiya mosque,
downtown. They stood in rows, arms folded and heads lowered, as the imam
recited the afternoon prayers. Suddenly, a tall, narrow-faced young man
shouted “Allahu akbar! ” (“God is greater”). It was a standard religious
interjection, but in this context it challenged the abiding principle of Syrian
life: that Assad was greater than all things real and conceivable. The young
man helped lead a procession away from the astonished congregation and
onto the street. Modifying a classroom slogan, the men chanted, “With our
blood, with our souls, we sacrifice for you, O Daraa!”
The demonstration lasted only minutes, but afterward the sleepy market and
the bumpy dirt lanes of Hossein’s home town felt different. “We broke the
fear,” he recalled. “And more people started to come and coördinate with us.”
Hossein became close to the man who had shouted in the mosque, a
university student known as Muhammad Haf. They formed the nucleus of a
band of activists who gathered every Friday and marched through the
market as regime agents watched from the sidewalks. In this tense
atmosphere, Haf—who, before the revolution, had never been known to
express a political opinion—offered joy and charisma. “He danced with
children, he climbed onto cars and would begin singing,” Hossein recalled.
“Wherever he was, people would gravitate.” Late at night, under a solitary fig
tree on an olive plantation outside town, Hossein and Haf met with other
activists. They scrawled slogans on placards and planned escape routes. In
the darkness, they went to friends’ houses and entreated them to join the
group.
The Friday crowds steadily grew. Protesters chanted, “Peaceful, peaceful,”
and demanded such reforms as scrapping the emergency law. “I felt like I
was born again,” the activist Manhal Bareesh told the Web site Syria Untold.
“Security personnel in front of me, Baath guys behind me, but I was
protesting with my people. My friends kissed me, some old people cried, I
was expecting a bullet to penetrate my head anytime and to die on their
shoulders. It was a strange and fabulous feeling.”
A few weeks later, the government delivered the body of a soldier from
Saraqib who had served in Daraa. Officially, he had been killed by protesters,
but his corpse showed a bullet wound to the back of the head. Protesters
introduced a new chant: “The people want the downfall of the regime.”
That April, government forces stormed Saraqib. Hossein spent the evening
skirting alleyways and crouching on unlit porches as security personnel
searched houses. He made it home, but almost a hundred activists were
rounded up. “We lost the heart of our movement in a single hour,” Bareesh
told me. “That was the last time I slept in my own bed.” Residents hid the
remaining activists in their homes; Hossein spent each night in a different
farmhouse outside town, sneaking home only to change clothes.
When the Army opened fire on demonstrators that June, killing one person,
residents set the Baath Party headquarters ablaze. Standing in the crowd,
Hossein, with delight and trepidation, realized that the revolution was
overtaking the entire town.
The government retaliated with even greater force; on August 11, 2011, its
tanks and Humvees stormed Saraqib again. When they failed to find activists
in their homes, they arrested their friends and relatives. They ransacked
shops and set houses aflame. From the olive groves outside town, Hossein
watched columns of smoke rise over Saraqib.
One evening, he went to the fig tree, where he found the leadership of the
protest movement—some forty people. An electrical cord from a nearby
farmhouse powered a tiny light bulb, and under its faint glow the men drank
bitter coffee, smoked, and debated. They were young—university students,
farmers, laborers—and had no clear idea of what should replace the
government. None of them besides Hossein had ever read a political tract or
attended a party meeting. The regime had so impoverished civic life that the
activists’ unity was based entirely on what they opposed: corruption, the
rising cost of bread, the daily degradations of dictatorship. Vague ideas
about democracy and the redistribution of wealth were floating around
Saraqib; some residents worried that groups like the Muslim Brotherhood
would intrude on their nonviolent uprising. But no one could fuse these
sentiments into a program of action—it was challenge enough to survive the
night. The activists agreed that, before they could move forward, they
needed to become better organized. So they elected an eight-person local
coördinating committee, which included Hossein, to help direct the protests.
For many of the activists, it was the first time that they had ever voted.
They discussed how to protect the demonstrations. A fierce argument broke
out when some of the men proposed arming themselves. Iyad Jarrod, one of
the activists, recalled, “I was against it. Most of us were. People were saying
that weapons would take us back to the nineteen-eighties.” Hossein, too,
was opposed. Some weeks earlier, a former member of the Muslim
Brotherhood from Saraqib, who was in exile in Saudi Arabia, had called him
and offered to raise funds for weapons; Hossein had refused. Under the fig
tree, he made an impassioned speech against arming, and the activists
agreed to continue their peaceful revolution.
The meeting dispersed after midnight. Hossein and three friends drove a
tractor to a farmhouse deeper in the country. They bedded down in a
storeroom. In the darkness, they could see only the dancing ends of lit
cigarettes as they mused about a future that, for the first time in their lives,
seemed to belong to them.
In the bazaar or the schoolyard, residents of Saraqib would hear the low rumble of an approaching
aircraft and run in panic. Some weeks, more than a hundred barrel bombs struck the town. People
often couldn’t tell if it was Moscow or Assad attacking them.Illustration by Bill Bragg
They fell asleep. Sometime later, Hossein was awoken by one of the others,
who whispered, “There are lights approaching.” They stepped outside as a
Kia K4000G, used by farmers to transport beets, rolled to a stop. A man in a
jellabiya called out to one of Hossein’s friends, “You in the glasses—come
here.” His accent had the sharpened edges of the coastal highlands, Assad’s
home territory. When Hossein took a few steps back, dark figures jumped
down from the pickup’s bed. As he was thrown to the ground and
blindfolded, he could hear screams and gunshots.
Hossein soon found himself in a large cell, caught in a thicket of limbs and
enveloped by the smell of sweat. He counted more than four hundred
people, including children. His foot was broken and dangling: he’d been
flogged on his bare soles, then tied to a gurney and electrocuted. He had
also been strapped to a foldable board, known in Syrian prisons as the Flying
Carpet; his legs were pressed against his face while he bore the weight of a
jailer.
Weeks passed. Scabies broke out among the inmates, and a golf-ball-size
pustule grew on Hossein’s nose. He heard screams in the prison’s hallways.
One night, guards dragged in a protester whose legs and back were blue
from torture. Inmates gathered around and poured water on his bruises.
Hossein massaged his skin, in a desperate attempt to improve circulation,
but the man was dying. “I have five children, and I have my mother,” he told
Hossein. “Say hello to her.”
Hossein was moved to a series of prisons. Most nights, he couldn’t sleep. He
tried to imagine events back home in Saraqib: the sweltering Friday
demonstrations; the tinny sound of Muhammad Haf’s amplified voice. He
strained to conjure the sweetness of a cigarette, and wondered how his
mother was coping, and if his friends were still marching. It was little
consolation when he discovered a friend from Saraqib, Yaser, in the cell with
him.
One day in November, he heard the faraway cranking of a gate, followed by
muffled footsteps in the corridor. It was a guard, who called out names,
including his own. He and fifty-one other prisoners were shuffled into the
hallway and told to stand, shoulder to shoulder, in two rows. Hossein found
Yaser and stood next to him. An adjutant ordered Hossein’s row to board a
bus, and Yaser’s row to board a different one. Hossein never saw the people
in the other line again. “If Yaser had been in front of me or behind me, he
would be with me now,” he said.
The twenty-six men in Hossein’s row were transferred to another prison.
While being tortured, Hossein confessed to eleven charges, including
mocking the Army, forming a “gang of evil,” harboring a weapon, and funding
terrorists. Thousands of Syrians were being rounded up on similar charges,
but as prisons began nearing capacity the regime started to release some
detainees. On January 20, 2012, after five months of imprisonment, Hossein
walked free. It was dark when he reached Saraqib, and he couldn’t believe
what he saw. The town had arranged a welcome parade for him: honking
cars, children hoisting streamers, women ululating from balconies, men
beating tabla drums. He arrived home and embraced his parents. To his
shock, there were guns everywhere. People were firing joyously into the air,
illuminating the night sky over Saraqib. The friends he used to meet under
the fig tree, once mere teachers and construction workers, were now armed,
each a master of his own brigade.
Hossein reconnected with old friends and threw himself into organizing new
protests. He learned that, after his arrest, the debate about taking up arms
had persisted for weeks. At the time, four or five locals had been collecting
names for the regime. These agents—who came to be known as shabiha, a
term originally referring to coastal smuggling gangs—also harassed the
relatives of activists, and sometimes raided houses. After an activist was
kidnapped, “people were in hysterics,” Manhal Bareesh recalled, adding, “We
realized they knew all the names, they could reach anywhere. We were
terrified.”
One evening, shabiha stormed the market, on a tip that a protester was
present. When they could not locate him, they began threatening people. At
a barbecue restaurant, they forced a boy to the ground and shot him in the
hand. Finally, they found the protester, and began firing at him. Muhammad
Haf, Hossein’s friend, was nearby, and he grabbed a hunting rifle and shot at
the shabiha, driving them off. These were the first rounds fired by a
revolutionary in Saraqib.
The shabiha suspended their raids, emboldening activists to raise funds
from friends and family to buy weapons. By the time Hossein returned home,
six small rebel groups were operating in Saraqib, each led by one of the
original activists. Similar militias sprouted around the country, and even
though there was no central organization, they collectively called themselves
the Free Syrian Army. The F.S.A. was so inchoate that people began to
differentiate among units by speaking of the “good F.S.A.” and the “bad
F.S.A.” In Saraqib, most units were well regarded, though one prompted
outrage after it turned to banditry to fund itself.
Countrywide, the “good” militias, along with unarmed activists like Hossein,
were in the majority, and were making rapid gains. Syrian Army officers
appeared on YouTube, thrusting their I.D. cards in front of the camera and
announcing their defection. Armed rebels began erecting hundreds of
roadblocks. One small town after another fell under the F.S.A.’s de-facto
authority, and the unrest was spreading to major cities.
In the spring of 2012, the regime struck back. A brutal counter-offensive
swept across northern Syria, and soon reached the suburbs of Saraqib.
Hossein and many other protest coördinators fled, but Muhammad Haf
decided to stay behind and marshal F.S.A. members to defend the town.
“This tantrum has been powerful, honest, and riveting, and I think we should give him what he
wants.”
Schools were closed, and, with all military-aged males under suspicion of
supporting the revolution, families sent their sons to other provinces. Rebels
began to lose their nerve. Haf’s group was plagued by dozens of desertions,
until only fifty or so fighters remained.
Regime forces began to amass within sight of Saraqib, and an invasion
appeared imminent. One night, the activist Iyad Jarrod, who had been filming
a documentary in Saraqib, visited a rebel encampment. In a courtyard, under
an orange-tree sapling, he found Haf assembling roadside bombs from
cooking-gas cylinders. A few fighters huddled nearby. The fighters
complained about the lack of international support and a shortage of
weapons. Jarrod asked Haf about desertions. “A tactical retreat!” he replied,
smiling.
“Imagine you are martyred tomorrow,” Jarrod said. “What would you like your
final words to be?”
“I hope those who survive will continue our path, that’s all.” He added, “The
revolution is going to continue no matter how many people die, how much
they fight us and chase us down. We will be victorious.”
I first visited Idlib in the spring of 2012, in the company of local activists. We
entered Syria late at night, on foot, then drove on country roads. In roadside
hamlets, candlelit windows betrayed flickers of movement inside. After
resting in a hilltop village, we descended onto the plains of central Idlib. A
pink dawn exposed the country below: rusting iron shacks, brown barns,
squat houses. Here and there, dark columns of smoke collected over stone
villages freshly subdued by the Syrian Army.
In Saraqib, the streets were desolate, the shops shuttered. A week earlier,
the Army had reconquered the town. Regime forces were bivouacked on the
outskirts, and locals were afraid to talk. I eventually spoke to several people
who’d witnessed the battle. One of them was Mousab al-Azzo, who lived in a
working-class neighborhood on the west side. Azzo, a bright-faced thirty-
nine-year-old with graying hair, had been a popular soccer coach until
economic difficulties forced him abroad to find work repairing water-well drill
rigs. He returned to Syria just before the revolution and soon became a
fixture at the Friday protests. He was at home when the regime invaded
Saraqib. “The battle was truly terrifying,” he said. “We could hear rockets,
and the children were crying. Then it was quiet, and we saw tanks coming.”
More than thirty F.S.A. fighters were killed in the assault. Haf and other
survivors hid in abandoned buildings. The regime soldiers went house to
house, looking for rebels. They ransacked Azzo’s home and beat his father.
The next day, someone fired a rocket from the neighborhood, and the regime
responded by bombing a house next to Azzo’s. He watched through a
window as his neighbor, a tailor, looked for survivors. Soldiers suddenly
appeared, detaining the tailor and one of his cousins. The tailor’s mother ran
outside. “Please, I’m begging you,” she cried. “He’s a simple guy, he’s just a
worker!” A soldier threatened to kill her. She clutched her son, but they
wrested him away, saying, “Your son is defiled.” The tailor and his cousin
were marched to a nearby gas station and executed.
For the rest of the day, Azzo remained hidden at home, as other residents
were taken to the gas station and killed. The next day, soldiers began looting
the market and setting fire to shops as they hunted for Haf. During a search
of houses, they discovered his brother, Sa’ad, who had suffered a bullet
wound while fleeing the offensive. Haf’s sister, Wisal, who was with Sa’ad at
the time, recalled, “They began brutally assaulting him, targeting his head,
his face, and his fresh wound.” She told the soldiers that Sa’ad was just a
university student and hadn’t carried any weapons. “We are all Syrians, why
are you doing this?” she begged. “We are not your enemy. We are not Israel!”
Officers arrived, and she swore that she did not know Haf’s whereabouts.
One of the officers ordered his men to set the house afire. “Burn it down!”
she cried. “Burn down all the houses!” Pointing at Sa’ad, she said, “Just leave
my brother alone.” Then soldiers began beating her youngest son, Uday, a
ninth grader. “They took my son right in front of me,” she recalled. “He was
so afraid and speechless.” Sa’ad and Uday were both dragged outside. It
was almost evening, and the power had been cut.
She heard a man’s screams. It was Sa’ad, shouting “Allahu akbar! ” as
soldiers demanded that he say “Bashar is great!” He was executed. Then
Uday began chanting “Allahu akbar! ” He, too, was killed.
Wisal rushed out into the dark street. Women were wailing. Bodies were
strewn everywhere. She found Uday, eyes open, as if he were still alive.
For two days, the Army continued killing. Haf and a few rebels were spotted
near a farmhouse outside town. Regime soldiers opened fire. Haf ran behind
the farmhouse and shouted for his men to escape while he provided cover.
He was killed within minutes.
That evening, the Army left Saraqib. Hossein rode a motorcycle to Haf’s
house, where mourners had gathered. He wept as Haf was buried. “Haf, he
made Saraqib,” Hossein told me. He felt that his own youth, idealism, and
imagination were being lowered into the earth along with his friend.
Before regime soldiers left the scene, they had filmed Haf’s corpse. “O,
brother of the whore, O, son of the pimp, are you happy now?” a soldier said
on camera. “Fuck the pussy of your mother.”
The regime moved on to quell rebellions in other towns, but it left behind a
few checkpoints, and a sniper positioned himself in a radio tower overlooking
the neighborhood of Mousab al-Azzo, the former soccer coach. For months,
the sniper shot at anything that moved. One of Azzo’s neighbors was gunned
down buying groceries. A four-year-old girl was struck in the spine and
paralyzed. Hossein, who lived nearby, could visit his home only after sunset,
wearing black. The journalist Samar Yazbek, in her 2016 memoir, “The
Crossing,” wrote, “Many of the townspeople had torn down the walls
between homes, turning these into thoroughfares. We could pass through
strangers’ homes, jump out of windows or climb down ladders to street level,
then slip through the courtyard carrying our shoes.”
But, with the regime forces largely gone from Saraqib, surviving
revolutionaries began to regroup. Amid burned market stalls and heaps of
rubble, protesters filled the streets once again. F.S.A. ranks swelled with
recruits who’d lost loved ones. Qatar and other Gulf states flooded Syria with
guns and money, and rejuvenated rebel units were soon invading Aleppo and
pressing at the gates of Damascus.
Backcountry towns like Saraqib now seemed immaterial to the regime’s
survival, and the Army withdrew from much of Idlib in order to bolster its
forces in key cities. In November, 2012, rebels in Saraqib expelled the sniper,
and the final regime checkpoint fell. Elated demonstrators blared
revolutionary songs from car speakers. “As the Army fled, they began
shelling us,” Hossein recalled. “Maybe five hundred and twenty shells landed
on Saraqib, and we were running around, digging through the rubble, but for
the first time we had the idea that this was actually our town.”
He had little time to celebrate: his town had to contend with continued
shelling, destroyed markets, devastated neighborhoods, and homeless
families. Municipal directors and factotums had fled along with intelligence
agents and shabiha. Trash piled up, electricity was intermittent, schools were
open irregularly. Activists on the local coördinating committee of protesters
debated how to keep the lights on and the people fed. They decided to
establish a twelve-member body to govern Saraqib, and they called it the
Local Council. Hossein was named its first president.
Not long afterward, Hossein was introduced to Kinda al-Kassem, an in-law of
his brother. She had studied physics at college and was now teaching the
subject to schoolchildren. He drummed up the courage to ask for her hand;
they married on March 15, 2013, the second anniversary of his country’s
uprising.
Despite his new domestic life, Hossein continued to work long days to help
revive Saraqib’s services, linking up with activists in other municipalities
engaged in experiments of self-rule. In response to the exigencies of
wartime collapse, Local Councils had spontaneously arisen in hundreds of
liberated towns and cities. Hossein and his comrades knew of no model for
such a bottom-up government, but they understood that whoever ran
Saraqib would need strong public support. Hossein concluded that Local
Council members should, one day, be chosen through a free and fair
election.
Not all residents embraced the notion of a democratic Saraqib. The first
hints of resistance came from the market, where DVDs that portrayed the
exploits of jihadis battling American troops in Afghanistan were surfacing.
Then, during the sniper days, Hossein began noticing bearded fighters
around town, who kept to themselves and did not carry the tri-star
revolutionary flag. Their leader was a stout, jovial man known as Abu Anas. In
the nineties, Abu Anas, a teacher of Arabic literature, had founded a circle of
activists devoted to opposing communist ideas—then popular in universities
—and to championing a purist doctrine of political Islam called Salafism.
After 2003, some of these men went to Iraq to battle the U.S.; when they
returned, they were imprisoned by Assad’s regime. In a series of amnesties
in 2011, most of these fighters were released, and made their way back to
Saraqib.
When the revolution erupted, Abu Anas and the Salafists avoided the Friday
protests. “We didn’t want the regime to say this is a revolution of the Muslim
Brotherhood and Al Qaeda,” Abu Anas told me. Nevertheless, he added, “We
started communicating with our old friends.” One day, fundamentalists from
around the country converged at Abu Anas’s house in Saraqib and formally
launched an armed Salafist movement. They named themselves the Free
Men of the Levant, or Ahrar al-Sham.
“No one had conducted a general election before under these conditions,” Hossein said. “But then
I thought, Why not? We have this chance to learn from the experience, to create something for all
of Syria.”Illustration by Bill Bragg
As the revolution militarized, Ahrar al-Sham remained underground. Only
after regime forces invaded Saraqib did the fundamentalists begin to show
themselves in public. “We recognized from the beginning that this regime
could not be defeated peacefully,” Abu Anas told me. “But we wanted the
people to come to that conclusion themselves.” Unlike Hossein and his
cohort, the fundamentalists of Ahrar al-Sham were seasoned operatives,
with keen minds for political strategy. With funds from Qatar and private
donors, Ahrar al-Sham bought heavy weaponry and attracted recruits. In a
matter of months, it became the most powerful rebel group in Saraqib.
Before long, chapters began appearing across Syria.
In early 2013, a Saraqib man drinking alcohol was kidnapped and beaten.
Not long afterward, masked men barged into the office of a grassroots
organization, demanding that female employees cover their hair. After
activists established a local court to try crimes committed by rebels, Ahrar
al-Sham maneuvered to install three religious sheikhs—turning it overnight
into a Sharia court.
One afternoon, fundamentalists appeared in the Saraqib market with two
prisoners. A long-haired fighter declared that one of them was guilty of
allowing his daughter to remarry too soon after a divorce. The prisoner was
made to kneel. As two other fighters restrained him, a masked man delivered
violent blows with a whip, counting aloud. The prisoner writhed like a
beached fish, crying, “Oh, God!” At the count of fifty, he was replaced with
the other prisoner—his son-in-law—and the count began anew.
Hossein and his fellow-activists were outraged. Though many of them were
pious, they had come to the conclusion that faith was a matter of the heart,
not of the state. At the time, Mousab al-Azzo told me, “They are hijacking
the revolution. It is like a cold war here.” At a Friday protest in February, 2013,
Hossein and hundreds of other demonstrators marched along the market
street, calling for the downfall of the regime. Then some protesters, including
Hossein, chanted a new slogan explicitly calling for secularism: “Saraqib is a
civil state! We want a civil state!” An Ahrar al-Sham member assaulted a
secular protester, threatening, “We will attain our caliphate by force!” The
fundamentalists stomped on the Free Syrian Army flag. For the first time in
the revolution, a protest in Saraqib had split. The secular demonstrators
broke away, waving the revolutionary three-star flag, shouting for freedom
and unity. The fundamentalists marched ahead, hoisting white-and-black
flags emblazoned with the words “There is no god but God.”
In this growing division, the revolutionary fervor of many Saraqib residents
was flagging under relentless regime shelling and economic catastrophe.
The fundamentalists attempted to win popular support by highlighting
corruption in F.S.A. ranks; in nearby mountain villages, one notorious rebel
commander had been erecting rogue checkpoints and plundering motorists.
Religious courts like the one in Saraqib offered reliable, if harsh, justice,
whereas secular courts in the region were riddled with conflict and
inefficiency. But for most citizens the core issue was bread, which the regime
had once supplied at subsidized prices to poor families. Ahrar al-Sham
opened a bakery in Saraqib and began providing cheap bread.
Fundamentalists had begun doing this in many Syrian cities, allowing them to
marginalize or expel secular revolutionaries; members of Saraqib’s Local
Council were determined to outmaneuver the fundamentalists. Hossein
recalled, “We knew very well that, if you left a gap in services, it would be
filled by extremism.”
The Local Council realized that the government’s electricity line ran through
Saraqib to the city of Idlib, the provincial capital, which remained under
Assad’s control. Hossein called the regime’s governor with a threat: continue
supplying wheat to Saraqib’s public bakery, or revolutionaries would sever
the electricity line. Supplies arrived, and the bakery’s workers began
managing the facility themselves, in coöperation with the Local Council.
The Local Council kept matching the fundamentalists’ every move, and the
rivalry became Hossein’s obsession. When Ahrar al-Sham opened a clinic,
Hossein hunted down donations for the public hospital. When the
fundamentalists began providing aid for war widows, he scrounged funds to
do the same. Ahrar al-Sham had wealthy donors in Kuwait and Qatar;
Hossein and his comrades were forced to appeal to Western sources,
including various U.S. government grants, which provided the Local Council
with salaries and construction equipment.
Ahrar al-Sham began publicly accusing Hossein and the Local Council of
collaborating with American “crusaders.” New fundamentalist groups
appeared, including a band of men who’d fought in Iraq and declared
themselves members of Jabhat al-Nusra—the Syrian franchise of Al Qaeda.
Nusra was even more radical than Ahrar al-Sham: it advocated banning
cigarettes, segregating unrelated men and women, and covering women—
even female mannequins in store windows. From the secularists’ point of
view, though, both groups were seeking to impose their strictures on the
population.
Masked men roved Saraqib’s streets, speaking with foreign accents. There
were staccato bursts of gunfire at night and, by morning, news of young men
gone missing. Hossein’s friends warned him to flee Saraqib, but he refused.
Leaving had never been an option for Muhammad Haf, or for his other slain
comrades. To abandon the town now, he told himself, would be a betrayal.
Instead, Hossein focussed his energies on coördinating municipal services.
One day in April, 2014, he drove outside town to discuss the failing power
grid with members of various armed factions. He approached a lone
checkpoint on the empty road. Suddenly, he was snatched from his car,
blindfolded, and thrown into a trunk. At a nearby wheat mill, a Jordanian from
a radical splinter faction asked him about Western funding of the Local
Council. His phone and laptop were searched, and then he was put inside a
shed, its door bolted shut.
“I was on the earth, hands tied behind my back,” he recalled. “It was
excruciating.” A woollen cap covered his face, and days passed in darkness.
Occasionally, a man entered and pulled up the cap; Hossein blinked in the
light as the man shoved a sandwich at him, ordering him to eat. But mostly
he was alone. He could hear the singing of birds, the bleating of livestock.
He tried to think of home, his wife, and his comrades, but the pain was so
unrelenting that his mind went blank. In the regime prison, he’d been in the
company of others. Now he was preparing himself, in solitude, for the
moment when he’d be dragged away and dumped in a ditch.
But one day the shed’s door swung open, and he was told he was free to go.
When he reached home, he realized that the fundamentalists had overplayed
their hand: his kidnapping had sparked protests across Saraqib. His captivity
had lasted only six days, but Hossein was deeply shaken. In the past, he’d
had to evade only a handful of shabiha; now he had many enemies, and they
lived alongside him. There was no safe quarter. That evening, Hossein
resigned from the Local Council.
In the spring of 2015, a rebel coalition that included Al Qaeda and had heavy
Gulf backing captured the city of Idlib. This triggered Russian intervention in
Syria, and soon two air forces were screeching through the skies above
Saraqib. In the bazaar or the schoolyard, people would hear the low rumble
of an approaching aircraft and run in panic. Some weeks, as many as twenty-
five barrel bombs a day struck the town, and residents often couldn’t tell if it
was Moscow or Assad attacking them. Once, rebels downed a Russian MI-8
transport helicopter in the suburbs. According to local aid workers, Russia
retaliated with a hundred and sixty-five air strikes, hitting schools, shops, the
blood bank, the cemetery. The Assad regime sent a mass text to townsfolk
demanding the pilots’ bodies, warning, “Help us return them if you do not
want more pain.”
As Saraqib’s casualties piled up, residents opened a second graveyard to
accommodate the dead. The Local Council members strained to keep the
town afloat while trying to stay alive themselves. Once, when Hossein was
visiting the Local Council headquarters, an opposition activist came to the
door. The activist was scheduled to visit that day, but he had foolishly
announced his plans on Facebook. The men soon heard the faraway whirring
of a chopper. Hossein switched on a walkie-talkie; it was blaring warnings of
an incoming aircraft. He shouted, “Get out!” The walkie-talkie squawked,
“Barrel bombs!” Seconds later, the world exploded. Casement windows blew
outward; dust choked the air. “There was an incredible silence,” Hossein
recalled. He looked down at his legs to see a man clutching at them. When
Hossein emerged from the wreckage, he saw that the building’s roof had
been blown off. His successor as president of the Local Council, Nihad
Sheikh Deeb, was dead.
During the next four years, the regime scored five direct hits on the Local
Council. It also diversified tactics. In April, 2013, a helicopter dropped three
smoking cannisters over the neighborhood where Hossein and Azzo lived.
People vomited and lost consciousness. One woman was rushed to the
hospital, foaming at the mouth, but did not survive. According to a
subsequent United Nations report, an autopsy indicated that the woman had
“tested positive” for the nerve gas sarin.
Bombing raids in Saraqib became so routine that activists developed an
early-warning system. If a plane taking off from Aleppo began cutting across
the eastern mountains within two minutes, a call went out to lookouts in Idlib
province. If it banked over the town of al-Hader, the lookouts knew that it
was coming for Saraqib. Residents had only seven minutes to flee. Activists
spread the word on walkie-talkies and cell phones. Rebels fired shots into
the air. People drove outside town to hide in fields and in olive groves; after
the raid, they returned to see if their houses were still standing. The regime
eventually learned that residents were escaping and dispatched an L-39
Albatross to strafe fleeing vehicles. Residents began making getaways on
foot, or, if it was dark, in cars with the headlights turned off. “I did this myself
maybe a hundred times,” Hossein said.
Almost every person I met from Saraqib knew someone who’d died in the air
raids. Nevertheless, they spoke of their gutted and starved town with a
sense of hope, even wonder. By 2016, Saraqib had been free of government
authority for nearly four years, and in that time the town had experienced a
flowering of art and political debate. Before the revolution, the hamlets of
Idlib lacked a single local newspaper. Now dozens of liberated towns issued
their own weeklies and monthlies. In Saraqib, the leading publication was the
Olive, which sometimes featured frank debates about the role of Islam. One
writer argued, “Secularism is not interested in the relationship between
individuals and their religion, and would never actually interfere in that
matter.” One activist started a monthly magazine devoted to the ideas of the
nineteenth-century Islamic thinker Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi; another
revolutionary launched a bimonthly children’s periodical. Activists
established Radio Alwan, a station featuring news and commentary, by fixing
a small FM transmitter to the back of a pickup and trundling down
neighborhood lanes, broadcasting programming block by block.
Nestled among half-ruined buildings were the headquarters of institutions
previously unknown to Saraqib: a poetry forum, a comedy troupe, a theatre
company. Inspired by Bertolt Brecht, an ensemble of actors staged plays that
broke the fourth wall, drawing the audience into tales that offered pointed
critiques of war profiteering and other injustices. An activist collective
painted over bullet-scarred walls around town, daubing the crumbling
concrete in luminous greens and blues, and inscribing them with
philosophical musings and fragments of verse. Before long, the town’s walls
were covered in messages to lost loved ones, and locals began to call the
initiative Lovers’ Notebooks. A wall near Hossein’s home was painted with a
verse from the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: “We’re alive, we’re here,
and the dream continues.”
Mousab al-Azzo taught himself video editing and began filming the
aftermaths of Russian air strikes—rescue workers pulling bodies from rubble.
He would break down in tears, then compose himself and upload the video
to YouTube. He became a correspondent for an F.S.A.-linked television
station, and contributed freelance articles to the Olive. He wasn’t paid for his
journalism, so he supported himself by working in a bakery.
The strength of this revolutionary movement blunted the impact of Ahrar al-
Sham. Nearly every attempt by the group to impose its rule on Saraqib had
backfired; when it tried to create a new political body—a “senate”—to
undermine the Local Council, the activists won control of that institution, too.
By 2017, Ahrar al-Sham had grudgingly adopted the revolutionary tricolor
flag.
At the same time, Nusra, which was well funded and tightly organized, was
swallowing up swaths of the Idlib countryside. Carefully at first, and then
with increasing brashness, its members descended on popular
organizations; revolutionary newspapers were shut down, and activists were
hounded into exile. Faced with the prospect of extinction, Local Councils
began to drift into Nusra’s orbit.
By 2017, Saraqib was one of the few places in Idlib unconquered by Nusra.
The organization sometimes conducted raids on the town—at one point, it
seized Radio Alwan’s transmitter—but it also exerted soft power by
distributing bread and clothing. Saraqib, however, had one of the few Local
Councils that levied taxes, so it could afford to keep pace in the delivery of
services.
“Damn it, cilantro ruins everything.”
Yet, even with both camps doling out aid, there was not enough to go
around. Most residents could find only a few days of work at a time, if any at
all. They spent nights by candlelight, and sometimes turned on the faucet to
find it dry. Discontent against both sides simmered. (Once, after the Local
Council failed to fully account for how it spent tax revenue, an Olive editorial
demanded, “Where is the rest of the money? What are they spending it
on?”) In early 2017, a campaign spread on Facebook calling for a public
election of the Local Council, to better track aid spending and hold
accountable the revolutionary leadership—no taxation without
representation.
Hossein was skeptical at first. “No one had conducted a general election
before under these conditions,” he said. “But then I thought, Why not? We
have this chance to learn from the experience, to create something for all of
Syria.”
As voters filed in to the polling centers, on July 18, 2017, Hossein marvelled
not only at his town’s political awakening but at the audacity of it all. And so,
early the next morning, when F.S.A. rebels burst through the doors of the
meeting hall to warn that Islamists were attacking Saraqib, it felt to Hossein
like a loss more profound than the failure of an election, or even the
demolition of his home town. It seemed to be a cruel vindication of the
Syrian government’s core message, one that he refused to accept but that
much of the world had embraced: the only alternative to Bashar al-Assad
was Al Qaeda.
Hossein and his friends regrouped at the farmhouse where they had
celebrated the election. He lay awake at night, listening to the thumping of
artillery fire. In the morning, news reached them that Nusra was hunting
down men belonging to Ahrar al-Sham. The fight had the appearance of a
mere factional dispute, but Hossein knew that Nusra was using it as a
pretext to abolish the Local Council and install a new dictatorship.
Many Ahrar al-Sham fighters fled; a few dozen stalwarts holed up in a bunker
at the F.S.A. headquarters, downtown. The only hope for Saraqib, Hossein
believed, was to persuade Ahrar al-Sham members to leave the city, keeping
the fighting as far away as possible. He headed for the bunker.
The streets were deserted. He passed the Local Council headquarters, and
saw masked Nusra gunmen pulling down the revolutionary flag. At the F.S.A.
compound, a narrow building in an enclosed courtyard, he descended into
the bunker to find the leader of the Ahrar al-Sham battalion, a few of his
fighters, and some Local Council officials. “I was trying to reason with them,”
Hossein recalled. “But they were terrified, and they wouldn’t budge.”
Before long, Nusra discovered Ahrar al-Sham’s presence at the bunker and
surrounded the headquarters. Masked gunmen began scaling its walls.
Some fighters carried giant Al Qaeda flags.
Saraqib’s revolution had survived assaults by regime jets and tanks but now
was in danger of falling at the hands of a dozen gunmen. Hossein texted
friends, relatives, anyone he knew, pleading for assistance. Other activists
sounded the alarm over walkie-talkies. Soon, speakers on mosques around
the city were blaring, “Youth of Saraqib: Come to the Free Syrian Army
headquarters! Defend your revolution!”
Mousab al-Azzo heard the call. A few months earlier, he’d opened the
Saraqib Sports Café, and during the election he had offered the space as a
salon, inviting candidates to hold debates and make speeches. After hiding
the hookah pipes in his café from Nusra, he headed downtown. The streets
had begun to fill with residents carrying the three-star revolutionary
standard. Someone in the crowd began filming on his cell phone; Azzo
turned to the camera with a message for Nusra. “We overthrew the world’s
most tyrannical government!” he yelled. “We can do the same to you. Our
system of government will remain civilian. We will not allow an armed faction
to rule us.” Men on motorbikes buzzed past him. “Saraqib is free, and free it
will remain!” Azzo exclaimed. “The institutions are ours to run. They don’t
belong to you.”
The crowd stormed through the downtown’s narrow alleys, arriving at the
F.S.A. headquarters. They chanted at the Nusra fighters, “Get out!” Gunmen
who were perched on the compound wall held their fire. The crowd pressed
right up to the wall, just inches from the gunmen, crying, “Allahu akbar!,” in
repudiation of Nusra’s claim to legitimacy. It was now five hours since
Hossein had arrived at the headquarters, and for the first time that day he
felt a surge of hope.
A selfie of Hossein at one of the election debates in Saraqib. Hossein helped organize the debates,
which were live-streamed on Facebook.Courtesy Osama al-Hossein
A truck loaded with Nusra fighters sped out from a side street, but
protesters surrounded it. Their chants continued until, suddenly,
pandemonium broke loose at the sound of machine-gun fire: Nusra was
shooting over people’s heads. Hossein screamed, “Don’t shoot!” The Nusra
fighters made a move for the bunker, but demonstrators swarmed in front of
the entrance. A Nusra gunman shot a protester in the leg. Azzo pushed
through the crowd and jumped in front of the bunker door. He’d removed his
shirt, his belly gleaming in sweat. The fighter pointed his weapon and
shouted at him to move. Azzo refused and shouted, “For you, Saraqib!” The
gunman fired, and Azzo crumpled to the ground.
Azzo’s brother, who was also in the crowd, rushed to his side. The frightened
protesters melted away, allowing Nusra to enter the bunker. The gunmen
detained the Ahrar al-Sham leader and withdrew from the premises. Azzo
was rushed to the hospital, but doctors failed to revive him.
Saraqib was now under Nusra’s control. People were wandering the streets,
agitated and unsure what to do. When an ambulance emerged from the
hospital, carrying Azzo’s body, a crowd gathered behind it, raising
revolutionary flags, and a row of honking cars and motorcycles formed. The
procession inched through the dark streets to the martyrs’ cemetery.
Mourners prayed as Azzo was covered in the three-star flag and buried.
Back at the farmhouse, Hossein felt depleted. The election, only twenty-four
hours old, seemed like a distant memory. After six years of struggle, and so
many friends missing or dead, his town had merely replaced one form of
tyranny with another. He roused himself and checked Facebook. People
were leaving memorials on Azzo’s page: photographs of him coaching the
soccer team or chanting at protests. Azzo, who had not attended college,
had listed his education as “the Syrian Revolution.” Hossein posted a tribute
and included as a hashtag Azzo’s last words: #ForYouSaraqib.
The next morning, he checked Facebook again, and saw that activists were
using #ForYouSaraqib to denounce Nusra and, improbably, to call for
another protest. He rushed downtown. To his amazement, the crowd had
doubled in size from the previous day. The mass of bodies surged toward the
courthouse, which Nusra had made its headquarters. A young man raised his
arm and shouted, “Saraqibis don’t fear death! We will not abandon the
revolution!” A chorus of voices repeated these words. Marchers screamed,
“Your blood, O Mousab, we will never forget!” and “We will sacrifice for you,
O martyr!”
Nusra gunmen stood nervously on the courthouse roof. One of them pointed
an R.P.G. at the demonstrators, and a protester shouted, “He’s going to
shoot us!” The crowd chanted “Shabiha! ”—the word used to describe pro-
regime thugs. A young man held a sign that read “SARAQIB IS FOR
CIVILIANS, WE DON’T WANT ARMED RULE!”
The air crackled: Nusra was again firing over people’s heads. The protesters
scrambled, hiding behind parked cars. But then they began inching back
toward the courthouse, and soon the street was full again.
Hossein counted ten Nusra fighters. Despite their camouflage uniforms and
bandoliers, they looked overwhelmed, even terrified, at the tenacity on
display. They radioed their superiors. Soon, a Nusra pickup truck appeared
and parked nearby. One by one, the Nusra fighters began to climb down
from the rooftop. Taunting protesters dragged each one to the truck. As it
rolled away, the crowd chanted, “Shabiha! Shabiha! ”
Nusra did not send reinforcements. It could not risk further popular backlash
—the group had recently faced protests in nearby towns. Demonstrators
climbed atop the courthouse, under a fading amber sky, and hoisted the
revolutionary flag.
Over the next year, Saraqib remained under the control of the rebels and the
Local Council, but it was surrounded by a sea of Al Qaeda. There were
similar islands of resistance nearby. But, if Nusra failed to seize outright
military control of these areas, it could always resort to subterfuge,
politicking, and sowing terror. As in the old days of the shabiha, activists
found themselves being followed. Doctors and aid workers were kidnapped.
Hossein received threatening anonymous texts: “O secular, O infidel, you will
be deprived of the blessed land of the Levant.” He kept out of sight, avoiding
all meetings.
Then one day he got a panicked call from a friend, who’d heard that Nusra
was conspiring to abduct Hossein. Another activist devised a getaway plan
while Hossein hid at friends’ houses. One morning, he packed his bags,
kissed his parents goodbye, and, with his wife, boarded a van belonging to
the grain-distribution directorate. The municipal vehicle was able to pass
Nusra checkpoints without scrutiny, and by the afternoon he and his wife
had slipped into Turkey.
Even as a refugee, Hossein was defiant. “Nusra does not scare me,” he said.
“If I’m going to die, I’ll die. But I don’t want to put those around me in
danger.” His exile was temporary, he insisted, and he planned to return to
Saraqib as soon as conditions allowed. Back home, his comrades were still
keeping the town under revolutionary control, despite ongoing threats from
Nusra.
But soon Saraqib was facing an even greater peril. The Americans and their
allies had vanquished ISIS in eastern Syria, and the Russian intervention had
turned the regime’s fortunes around. Now Assad was on the offensive, and
foreign powers started to abandon the rebels. The regime began
reconquering opposition territory—and in January, 2018, it set its sights on
Idlib province. As government forces blitzed through the southern
countryside, a hundred thousand residents fled. The regime’s immediate
objective was to secure territory leading to a pair of loyalist towns farther
north—a path that ran through Saraqib.
In late January, the regime and the Russians began pounding Saraqib with
unprecedented furor. “The situation was beyond comprehension,” Ahmed al-
Nashmi, a car-wash owner, said. Jets conducted up to thirty strikes a day,
and the ground trembled with barrel bombs and cluster bombs. The power
was out for a week. “The bombing was indescribable,” Baleigh Suleiman, a
local journalist, said. “At night, I could hear air strikes and rockets landing
everywhere in the city, but I had no idea what the targets were until
morning.”
Warplanes struck clinics and first responders. They bombed a private
college and a local charity. They attacked a potato market, and, when the
victims were rushed to a hospital supported by Doctors Without Borders, the
hospital was bombed, killing five. The staff transferred the victims to an
underground bunker, where doctors treated them as munitions rained down.
Saraqib emptied out as families hid in the fields or took shelter in other
towns. The regime’s front line was now only eight miles away. For the first
time, many desperate citizens picked up weapons, vowing to protect their
town alongside the Free Syrian Army. Calling themselves the Free Saraqib
Army, they dug trenches and filled sandbags. “We decided to defend our city
until death,” Suleiman said.
On the night of February 4, 2018, regime helicopters dropped two cannisters
of chlorine gas on a suburb of Saraqib. Poisoned residents screamed in
agony as first responders doused their bodies with water.
The next morning, there was a miraculous turn. A convoy of Turkish tanks
and Humvees entered Syria, and established an observation post near the
regime’s front line. The Turkish presence halted the advance of Assad’s
forces, and the regime turned its attention to conquering opposition
enclaves elsewhere in the country. For the moment, Saraqib was spared.
Today, the revolution in Syria is effectively over, and so is the war—except in
Idlib province, which the regime is saving for last. Nusra exerts dominion
over much of the province, even if it has failed to bring a few towns like
Saraqib to heel. But in May the U.S. froze some two hundred million dollars in
aid to the province. President Trump said, “Let the other people take care of
it now. We are going to get back to our country, where we belong.”
Overnight, Local Councils, radio stations, and charities—the core of the
resistance to Nusra—lost their funding. Idlib’s population has doubled in size,
to three million, as Syrians escaping the regime have sought refuge, but now
they have nowhere left to flee. In September, Turkey signed a deal with
Russia to spare the province from an all-out onslaught, and in return it
pledged to force jihadist factions like Nusra to leave Idlib. But no one knows
if this is possible; if Ankara fails, the Assad regime is poised to invade Idlib,
and, in the words of the U.N. envoy Jan Egeland, the assault will cause
“human suffering like none we’ve seen even before in this conflict.”
In August, as Assad’s troops were advancing through the province’s
southern countryside, I crossed into Idlib again. Looming over a highway was
a billboard depicting a darkened field of lilies, alongside the words
“WHEREVER YOU ARE, BLOOM.” My driver and I passed small roadside
towns—shops huddled together, trash burning here and there. Vast russet-
colored fields, once devoted to crops, were crowded with mud—spattered
tents, webs of clotheslines, eddies of plastic bags, children investigating
mounds of refuse. When the regime had seized territory elsewhere in Syria,
people had been offered a choice: decamp to Idlib or surrender. In one
Damascus suburb, air strikes had been so incessant that residents had
raised the regime flag and chanted, “We don’t want freedom anymore!” The
fields of Idlib teemed with Syrians who could not, or would not, live under
such an authority.
We passed a roadblock operated by Nusra fighters in black balaclavas.
Traffic was heavy, and they did not stop us. We passed villages of half-
constructed houses, and the occasional bomb crater. An ISIS flag was
painted on a stone wall. Checkpoints began appearing with increasing
frequency, surrounded by brambles of concertina wire. We turned off the
highway, and the checkpoints vanished. Multistory ochre buildings began to
crowd close. Electrical wiring threaded among balconies. Many houses were
in ruins, but a surprising number were under reconstruction. A wooden board
hung outside one of them, upon which someone had spray-painted, in white,
“SARAQIB.”
We passed the radio tower from which the regime sniper had once terrorized
the town. The faded sign of the Saraqib Sports Café, Mousab al-Azzo’s
bistro, hung above a shuttered storefront. We drove by the al-Zawiya
mosque, where Muhammad Haf and Hossein had led the first protest. The
painted image of a rose, its petals curled inward to form a clenched fist,
covered a concrete wall nearby. Next to it was written, “If you don’t fight for
what you want, don’t cry for what you’ve lost.” It was one of the few Lovers’
Notebooks to have survived the bombings. An adjacent wall featured an
image of a young boy in bandages, wearing a gas mask, but fundamentalists
had blackened out his face.
On the edge of town, in a small cinder-block house, I met an unemployed
cobbler named Fayez Khatab. In 2016, the regime bombed Saraqib’s market,
destroying his workshop and killing five of his relatives. During the Army’s
incursion this past February, the men in this suburb sent their families away
and stayed behind to protect their homes. One night, as the skies thundered
and flashed, the men took shelter in a basement. An enormous bomb landed
nearby.
“We then heard a very weak sound, like a pop,” Khatab told me. His eyes
started to burn. Men were screaming. They scrambled outside and climbed
the roof. “I couldn’t see anymore,” he said. “Four of the guys started to
vomit. I fell unconscious.”
Later, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons determined
that “chlorine was released from cylinders by mechanical impact.” Khatab
took me to the impact site, a small crater in the middle of a dry, open field. All
around were chalky white mounds that had once been homes. Pillars poked
skyward. Not far away, graffiti was scrawled on a wall: “O Haf, believe that
the eye never forgets the eyelid. Believe that the flower never forgets its
roots.”
Downtown, the market was eerily calm, as if residents had steeled
themselves to their fate. Carts were resplendent with navel oranges and red
plums; a vender sold tamarind juice. A work team was clearing rubble. In a
café, I found an old leftist, wrapped in a kaffiyeh, dragging on a cigarette. “I
won’t leave, I can’t leave,” he said. “Who should I leave it for? Them?” He
pointed to the street, where three masked men in a van were rolling past.
He’d been imprisoned by the regime before 2011, and now he was convinced
that the fundamentalists and Assad represented two sides of the same coin.
“We are against these extremist groups,” he said, loudly. “Saraqib hates
them.”
Nusra had begun reappearing in the city, though its members did not dare
interfere with local affairs. Unlike in some other Idlib towns, there were no
religious police, no Al Qaeda flags. Although Saraqib is amid one of the
world’s deadliest civil wars, I didn’t see a single gunman or checkpoint. I
bumped into Abu Traad, the leader of the Free Syrian Army faction, and even
he was unarmed, wearing slacks and a T-shirt. The activists, I learned, had
insisted that weapons not be carried inside the city limits, immunizing
Saraqib from factional disputes and protecting the revolutionaries’ rule.
Occasionally, I spotted Nusra members hunched in a vehicle; though it was
blazing hot, they hid behind balaclavas. Many residents, meanwhile, freely
denounced the fundamentalists: one told me, “These people are a curse on
God Himself.” It seemed that in Saraqib, at least, people were not afraid of
Nusra; Nusra was afraid of them.
If Saraqib did represent the soul of the revolution, as Hossein believed, then
it also suggested what Syria might be like today had the democratic
revolutionaries received more international solidarity, had they been more
united, and had they been more effective at collecting taxes. Perhaps they
could have outmaneuvered the fundamentalists in the battle for hearts and
minds. Or perhaps no democratic revolution could survive interventions on
the scale of those staged by Russia and the Gulf states.
Hossein had told me that he wished he could step back in time, grab his
comrades by the shoulders, and plead with them again not to arm. It had
only subjected revolutionaries to the rule of the gun, and left the regime with
an excuse to level cities. He’d try to convince them that foreign
governments, even those posing as friends, had agendas of their own. But,
despite all the mistakes, there was now something rooted within Hossein,
and in tens of thousands of Syrians like him, that could never be pried away.
“Before the revolution, we used to live the life of a herd, just following without
question,” he said. “But then we realized the sheer number of lies we were
living under.” Now he was awakened to the world: to the power contained in
thousands of tiny acts of solidarity and defiance, and to the exhilarating
possibility that the future of Syria could rest in its people’s own hands.
We drove to the headquarters of the Local Council, which, after multiple
bombings, had been moved to an old municipal building. Notices for
meetings and charities were posted on its marble façade. A few men loitered
outside. The thrum of a helicopter filled the air. The chopper approached low
and fast. From the fuselage, leaflets fluttered earthward. They proclaimed,
“Coöperating with the Syrian Arab Army will deliver you from the rule of
armed terrorists.”
Inside, a council member, Maher Hassan Najjar, spoke bitterly of the
potential destruction of Saraqib. “The world has turned against us,” he said.
“America’s commitment to human rights is a lie.” His office was threadbare
and littered with ashtrays. The low groan of a generator filled the room. We
made a video call to Hossein, who was living with his wife in Gaziantep,
Turkey. They had just had a baby, whom they called Aboudeh. Though
Hossein spoke with joy, I detected a sadness—a longing for a world that his
child may never see. One of the activists turned the phone camera toward
me, and I could just make out Hossein’s pixelated face. “You’re there,” he
said, with a huge grin. “You’re in my town.” ♦