The Girl From Aleppo: Nujeen’s Escape From War to Freedom. Christina Lamb

when he saw how that first protest in Deraa spread to Homs and Hama, he changed his mind.

      He told us that in Hama there were so many people it was like a human wave had taken over the central square. Hama was the town where all those people had been massacred in 1982, and many of the protesters were orphans of that massacre. They poured into the streets after Friday prayers and as usual the regime retaliated. Three army trucks with large guns appeared and opened fire on them, killing seventy people. The men in the front row shouted the word ‘Peacefully!’ as they were felled. The killings incensed the town and soon the entire square was full.

      ‘This is it,’ Mustafa told us. ‘By the third week it will be finished.’

      Then he happened to be in the Kurdish town of Derik in south-east Turkey near the border when there was a birthday celebration for Abdulhamid Haji Darwish, head of Syria’s Kurdish Democratic Progressive Party, at which everyone was discussing how we Kurds should respond to the revolution. All Kurds thought the regime finished and the discussion was how to make sure we got our own state or at least some autonomy like the Kurds in northern Iraq. They had sent someone to Baghdad to meet Jalal Talabani, the President of Iraq, and also a Kurd, to ask his opinion. He said the Assad regime wouldn’t fall. That wasn’t what people wanted to hear, so they said, ‘Oh, Talabani has got old.’

      It turned out he was right – he knew what was going on.

      Syria wasn’t the same as Egypt and Tunisia. Assad had learnt from his father the brutal way he had put down the Hama revolt, and even before that from our French masters. Back in 1925 when we were under French rule, Muslims, Druze and Christians together rose up in what we call the Great Revolt. The French responded with an artillery bombardment so massive that it flattened an entire quarter of the Old City of Damascus. That area is now known as al-Hariqa which means the Conflagration. They killed thousands of people and held public executions in the central Marja Square as a warning. After that the rebellion was crushed and we continued under French rule for another two decades until 1946.

      Maybe because we didn’t remember this history, we young people were sure there had to be change. When we heard that Assad was going to make another speech in June 2011 we expected he would finally announce some major reform. Instead he again took a hard line, denouncing what he called a conspiracy against Syria and blaming ‘saboteurs’ backed by foreign powers and ‘religious extremists’ who he claimed had taken advantage of the unrest. He said no reform was possible while the chaos continued. It was clear that he, or maybe his family, had no intention of giving up power. Like I said, they thought they owned us.

      After that there started to be organized resistance. Hundreds of different rebel groups got together in what they called the Free Syrian Army or FSA and began to prepare for war. Most were young and inexperienced and untrained, but some were disgruntled members of Assad’s own army. There were even reports that senior army officers had defected and joined the FSA. Kurds didn’t join the FSA as we had our own militias, the YPG or People’s Protection Units.

      Assad simply stepped up the military action. Much of his firepower in those early days was trained on Homs, where my tortoise came from and which was one of the first places to rise up. Homs is our third largest city, and Sunnis, Shias, Alawites and Christians had lived side by side there, just as in Aleppo. The people didn’t give up, particularly in the old neighbourhood of Babr al-Amr, even though Assad’s forces were pulverizing the place. Soon it was known as the capital of the revolution. We thought that, when they saw all the killing, the Western powers would intervene as they had in Libya. There they had created a no-fly zone to stop Colonel Gaddafi from using his air force against protesters, and since April they had been launching airstrikes against regime targets like Gaddafi’s compound in Tripoli and otherwise helping the rebels. By August the rebels had seized Tripoli and taken over. By October Gaddafi was dead, caught like a rat in a hole, and his body displayed in a freezer just like he had done to his opponents. But our opposition was divided, and it seemed the West did not know how to respond. Foreigners left the country and embassies started to close. By the end of 2011 much of the country was an open battleground between the resistance and military. Mustafa said it was causing chaos, which was good for his business as he didn’t have to pay customs duties, but then the FSA started setting up checkpoints in their areas just as the regime did. Yaba was worried about him, so he didn’t tell us that much.

      The funny thing was for us it all seemed far off, not just for me on the fifth floor at 19 George al-Aswad Road, but even for Bland and my sisters. Even though we were the biggest city, Aleppo had not really joined the revolution. Maybe because we were the commercial and industrial centre of Syria and had lots of wealthy people, there were many loyal to the regime, worried about the effect of instability on their businesses. Also we had many minorities, Christians, Turkomans, Armenians, Assyrians, Jews, Circassians, Greeks and of course Kurds, and they were unsure about joining the opposition who were mostly Sunni Arabs and, people said, were getting help from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. It was kind of weird, like there were two parallel worlds. There was this revolution, people being killed every day and Homs being destroyed, yet here in Aleppo people were going to the cinema, or for picnics, and constructing big buildings as if nothing had changed. It didn’t make sense.

      One good thing anyway. Around that time I stopped having asthma attacks.

      5

       A City Divided

      Aleppo, 2012

      People say that history is written by the victors, but here is something I don’t understand. Why is it we always glorify the bad guys? Even though they have done terrible things we talk about them being charismatic or brilliant military leaders. When I was learning to read and write, Third Sister Nahra made me write out sentences in Arabic over and over again and one of them was ‘Alexander is a great hero.’ Later I found out he was a selfish, spoilt boy and I felt deceived.

      I hate the fact that I didn’t know anything about the good people but everything about the bad people. I don’t really know anything about the lives of Gandhi or Nelson Mandela. I hadn’t heard of Mandela till the World Cup was in South Africa – so why do I know so much about Stalin and Hitler?

      I can tell you for example that Hitler was born on 20 April 1889, his father was Alois and his mother Klara, and she died of breast cancer and he was terribly affected. Then he wanted to be an artist but was rejected twice by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, and he thought the majority of the selection committee were Jews – so the Holocaust began like that. And he was in love with his niece Geli who killed herself when he left her, and then with Eva Braun who committed suicide with him in a bunker in Berlin.

      Stalin killed 6 million people in his gulags and in the Great Terror. Hitler’s regime was even more murderous – 11 million people were killed and 17 million became refugees. But it’s Stalin and Hitler I can tell you about, not any of their victims. In fifty years is it going to be the same with Assad? People will remember all about him and not the good people of Syria. We will just be numbers, me and Nasrine and Bland and all the rest, while the tyrant will be engraved in history. That is a scary thought.

      When the revolution finally came to Aleppo in spring 2012, it was as if everyone had been asleep and had woken up. Like that moment in the morning when the light streams through the apartment and highlights all the dust and cobwebs.

      Nasrine was happy that the first people who protested were the students at the university. On 3 May she had gone to her physics class and found a big demonstration under way demanding that Assad go. She and her friends joined in, and it was exciting protesting for the first time in their lives, saying things they had never been able to say before. Then suddenly they heard a bang and the next thing Nasrine knew her eyes were full of tears and burning, so she ran. There was a lot of fear because we knew what kind of regime we had – if anyone got arrested they were certainly dead and maybe their whole family too.

      That night Nasrine got a message from a friend who lived in college to say security forces had stormed the dormitories. They shouted through megaphones that everyone should leave, then