London Review of Books - Syrian Notebooks - Jonathan Littell
I would pass the town hall many times, a large four-storey building in the Soviet style, its windows smashed, sandbags on its roof to protect sniper nests. Until recently, the snipers fired regularly into the streets, especially at night. After an assault the FSA managed to enter it and signed an agreement with the commander; his men have remained quiet since then. In fact, the FSA travelled freely throughout the town, sometimes in pick-up trucks armed with heavy machine guns, with the insignia of the al-Faruk katiba, the unit in charge of the zone, on their doors. Every night, when civilians gathered in the street to protest against the regime, dozens of armed FSA soldiers positioned themselves at the crossroads to protect them. ‘We rarely intervene,’ an officer I met the next day, with a dozen of his men in a farm outside the hamlet, explained. ‘The checkpoints stay in place, and they don’t bother us. We only attack when the regular army attempts an operation.’
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What is especially striking is the political intelligence of ordinary Syrians involved in the revolt. Abu Abdo, one of our drivers, asked us, ‘So, have you seen the Salafi here, as Bashar says?’ ‘That depends,’ Mani replied. ‘What do you mean by “Salafi”?’ ‘Exactly. The word means two things. The Muslims of Syria follow the way of moderation, and to live correctly they have to follow the example of a pious ancestor. That is the original meaning of the word. The other, which implies the Takfiri, jihadist, terrorist movement, is a creation of the Americans and Israelis. That has nothing to do with us.’ Later on, during a long break at a farm, he would show himself to be very critical of the opposition parties: ‘Today, unlike Hama in 1982, it’s the people that’s rising up. The Muslim Brotherhood, the Communists, the Salafi and the other political movements are running to catch up with it and climb up on its shoulders. But the Syrians in the street refuse the politicisation of the movement. They accept help from wherever it comes, but that help can’t have strings attached. The streets reacted to reaction to oppression and humiliation; they didn’t demand any particular political option. The Syrian people were raised as if in a hen house: you have the right to eat, sleep, lay eggs, and that’s it. There’s no room for thought. It’s the North Korea of the Middle East.’
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At the end of the demonstration, dozens of young people surrounded me, trying out their four words of English. They all showed me their scars, their bruises, their electrical burns, or where bullets or shrapnel had struck. The brother of one of them had been killed by a sniper as he was crossing the street, the mother of another by a shell; everyone wanted to tell everything, right away. They were waving their mobile phones: ‘Shouf, shouf, look!’ A corpse mottled with torture marks, another with its skull smashed in, in yet another the camera lingered on each wound, gaping holes in the groin, the leg, the chest, the throat. Wherever we went, it was the same. In an emergency clinic in al-Khaldiye, in the northern part of the city, the smartphone of a young nurse appeared even before tea did: on the screen, a man is dying in the hands of a doctor who is trying to intubate him on the ground, at the foot of the sofa I was sitting on. He was a taxi driver; he was hit in the face by a bullet and is lying in an immense pool of blood, his brain pouring onto the floor. ‘You see the hands, there?’ the nurse said. ‘That’s me.’ She went on to the next video, the tea arrived, I drank it without taking my eyes off the little screen. Every mobile phone in Homs is a museum of horrors.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/2012/03/01/jonathan-littell/syrian-notebooks
