We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria

by Wendy Pearlman

The first two martyrs were killed. The second day there was a funeral procession. We didn’t expect anyone to participate, because of the killing that had happened the previous day. But we went to the funeral and more than 150,000 people attended. People came from all the surrounding villages.

Later, the phase of night chanting began. Electricity was cut daily at seven in the evening, so there were no lights. In the darkness, people would shout from their windows, “God is great!” Whoever was strong of heart would start, and then everyone else joined in. You’d hear voices coming from all directions. The security forces would arrive and everybody would go quiet. Then the security forces would leave and everyone would start again.

So beautiful

I was too scared to protest. I went only once, because my girlfriend wanted to go. In the taxi and then at the demonstration, I thought that everyone else was a security agent about to arrest me. A guy I know got arrested that way. They brought him in for interrogation, but he wouldn’t confess that he’d gone to a protest. Then they showed him a video and asked, “If you didn’t go, who is this?” He turned yellow. In the video he was in the middle of a demonstration, sitting on someone’s shoulders—and that someone turned out to be the interrogator.

I was in a demonstration. Others were shouting and I joined them. I started to whisper, Freedom. And after that I started to hear myself repeating, Freedom, freedom, freedom. And then I started shouting, Freedom! My voice mingled with other voices. When I heard my voice I started shaking and crying. I felt like I was flying. I thought to myself, “This is the first time I have ever heard my own voice.” I thought, “This is the first time I have a soul and I am not afraid of death or being arrested or anything else.” I wanted to feel this freedom forever. And I told myself that I would never let anyone steal my voice again.

My first demonstration was better than my wedding day. And when my wife heard me say that, she refused to talk to me for a month.

The regime went even further in terrorizing us. It said, “We won’t just kill you. We’ll kill your entire family, too.” I’ve heard that in some countries the government only arrests the wanted person himself, not his brother or mother or sister. In Syria, the entire family and the entire neighborhood is accused and targeted.

So from day one, the regime was saying that groups of radicals were coming. It was like, “Imagine what will happen to you if one of those terrorists get into power.” Alawites felt that they had no choice but to be 100 percent behind the leadership. And Bouthaina Shaaban, the regime spokesperson, got on TV and said, “Those radicals, they want to make strife between the Shia and blah blah blah.” Are you kidding me? Our children are in prison and we have a shitty government and you’re talking about Shia and Sunnis? I didn’t even know the difference between Shiite and Sunni until this whole thing started, because nobody cared. Don’t get me wrong—Shia and Sunnis have been fighting forever. But nobody was mentioning any of that in Syria at the time. In 2011, the needs, the goals, and the demands had nothing to do with that. The goals were political reform, participation, real representation, and some actual active citizenship in the country.

Security forces opened fire on the ambulance, so it wasn’t possible to move a single injured person. Only one or two wounded people managed to escape and make it to the hospital. We just sat there and waited and cried. There was nothing we could do. People were dying and we couldn’t even reach them to offer first aid.

During the first few days of the revolution, we weren’t careful, and we brought the wounded to government-run hospitals. In the morning, we’d take an injured person to the hospital with a gunshot wound in his leg. That night, we’d return to find him dead with a gunshot to the head. Guys would die and they’d force their families to say that their sons had been killed by terrorist gangs. So we created field hospitals. A friend of mine donated his house and transformed it into a place to help the wounded. There were doctors and nurses, and young women and men volunteered to help.

There was a systematic effort to give the movement a bad image. Every time a demonstration passed by a street, the police would run after it and break windows and lights, or sometimes spray paint graffiti.

We faced other questions, like: “What’s the alternative to the regime? If not Assad, who can take his place?” They’re stupid questions. Everybody who opened their mouths to talk about what was happening in the country was shoved in prison. The regime puts all the movement leaders in prison, and then comes and says that the movement has no leaders. Well, how do you expect there to be leaders when you arrest them all?

We buried him. And about three months later, some guys who were released from prison contacted us and told us that my brother was actually still alive. They’d been with him in prison. The body we’d buried belonged to a different person; he was so disfigured that we couldn’t tell he was someone else.

The door to the corridor was metal and it made this loud noise you know from the movies. Every time you heard it, you thought, “It must be my turn.” And all the others thought, “It must be my turn.” Everyone was scared. The noises were harder than the torture itself. Sound enters you in a different way. It felt like the sounds themselves were killing you.

We’d post pictures of political prisoners around town, writing that this person was arrested because he asked for your freedom.

There was one guy in our cell named Yousef. He cried a lot, but wouldn’t say why. After three or four months, he finally told us his story. He worked as a driver for the Damascus Municipality. In the evenings, they’d take him to dig holes near the airport. Then a car would arrive filled with dead bodies. Yousef’s job was to help push them into the hole and bury them. They’d throw their ID cards in the hole so no one could know what happened to them. They simply disappeared.

In the beginning the FSA didn’t have commanders and conscripts. We were just a bunch of friends. Then dollars started flowing into the commanders’ pockets. The good ones got killed or pushed aside. The bad ones became more powerful. They had heating and hidden food rations. They even cooperated with the regime army to get cigarettes.

I swear to God that I have nothing but respect for you regardless of your ethnicity, religion, or nationality. But when my sister is arrested and they rape her, I have no problem entering any place in the world with a car strapped with explosives. Because no country in the world is paying attention to me. Not a single one is doing anything to protect any fraction of the rights that I should have as a human being living on earth.

We stayed in prison for two months, and then were released on a prisoners exchange. After I got out, I went back to Midhat Basha market and asked the shop owners about the brides incident. One said, “Yes, I remember. They arrested them.” I told him that I was one of the brides. He hugged me and started crying. He said, “Do you know what happened the next day here?” He told me that there was an old man who used to sell children’s toys, displayed on a table. The day after our protest he cleared everything off his table and put up only four dolls dressed as brides. Just four brides.

Context: the speaker and three other women walked through town in white wedding dresses as protest.

If we lost fifty people, we thought, “Thank God, it’s only fifty!” I can’t sleep without the sounds of bombs or bullets. It’s like something’s missing. Last year, they shelled the market on the holiday at the end of Ramadan. People left the market. Half an hour later, everyone returned and went back to buying and selling.

The regime has turned us into monsters so it can justify killing us by saying that it’s fighting monsters.

I imagine this man who loses his kids—the thing that defines his future. I completely understand if he turns into a monster. But even a monster has hope. He hopes that someday he’ll go back to being a normal human being.

It’s airstrikes that have destroyed the country. Planes do the most damage, and ISIS doesn’t have planes.

One woman had little children and wanted to register for assistance. They kept telling her to wait. It was such a humiliation; they would leave her to wait for hours in the sun. They’d say “Tomorrow,” or “The day after tomorrow.” Finally she poured fuel on herself and set herself on fire—right there, outside the UN building. There’s nothing to protect us. No state, no government, no law, no human rights. Animals have more rights than we do.

My son spent the first years of his life in Homs stuck inside because of the curfew and the bombing. He had no contact with anyone but his parents and grandparents. He was two years old when he saw another child for the first time. He went up to him and touched his eyes, because he thought that he was a doll.

The worst part is that people ran away from their own countries because they were being threatened. They come to the United States to feel free, to feel democracy, to feel like they can achieve anything. Now their vision of the United States has changed. But still, I love this country. So far, my wife and I haven’t faced any problems. We hope that won’t change. I’ve actually been amazed by how nice people are. You walk down the street and people just start talking with you about how their husband or wife did this or that. I love that. It’s just like back home in Daraa.

Rings true for me too that you find good people everywhere;you just have to stop listening to the news and go out and talk to the people around you. Still, it's too bad that the United States makes a poor first impression (immediately before this, the writer described being told to go home because he's Muslim). Throughout these stories, it's striking how much worse than Sweden and Germany and other major democracies we fare in the eyes of immigrants arriving on our shores -- especially the disconnect between the reality of being in America versus what America symbolizes for the world.

We know that freedom has a price. Democracy has a price. But maybe we paid a price that is higher than freedom and higher than democracy. There is always a price for freedom. But not this much.

We would prefer to stay in our country. If you don’t want refugees, help us make peace in Syria.

Treat the cause, not the symptom. Funny how something this complex can boil down to basic wisdom (even though—yes—treating the cause is hard).