“I was 17 years old when it all started”
- Five years of Syrian Revolution

[Interview] “They who did not participate have no honor”
appeared in lundimatin #86, Dec. 19th 2016

The world has suddenly cast their eyes upon Aleppo for the past week now. Powerlessly, we watched the fall of liberated parts of the city, square meter by square meter. In the media, every commentator ends up contradicting what another commentator has to say. They say that the “civilians” are either trapped by the rebels or by the regime. The whole matter is made confused by the way the people of Aleppo are presented as a powerless population, a population which by the thousands has fled to the zones controlled by the regime. At the same time, European humanitarianism rushes the stage to say it is on the side of “human life” and tells us that now is the best time to “save Aleppo.” Adding to the horror of the massacres and the abjection of such cowardice, there is the discourse and maneuvering which seeks to bury five years of revolution in Syria, so as to re-write history.

Since 2010, the Arab insurrections have been a part of our history and we have found and lost in them friends. It is unthinkable to allow the spilling of their blood to be covered over by lies, manipulation and calumny. In Aleppo a revolution is being massacred.

This week we interviewed a Syrian in exile. From the age of 17, in 2011, he has participated in the uprising against the regime at Deir ez-Zor, before fleeing his country in 2015.
He recounts for us when, as a high school student, on Cinéma Fouad street, he threw himself into the revolution with his friends from the very first protests. He also recounts the transformation of the revolution into an armed conflict, the birth of the Free Syrian Army, the arrival of Jabbat al-Nosra and the installation of the Islamic State.  Or rather, how those who started the revolution had been pushed out from it and now find themselves in exile in Europe. The second half of this interview will be published later.

Can you start by telling us how things were before the uprising at Deir ez-Zor? How were things under the regime, but also how things were between the various religious communities and the relationship that you had with “politics.”

At Deir ez-Zor, people were pretty mixed-up. There were Christian neighborhoods without being totally identified as “Christian neighborhoods.” This happened since there have been mixed marriages. My first girlfriend was Christian and someone in my family married a Kurd. Since 2010, in a village near the city’s airport, at Jaffra, there were Iraqi Shiites who came to try to convert families. This village became well-known since its residents converted to Shia Islam. The attempts by both the Iraqi & Iranian regimes to proselytize the Syrian villages have already been a subject of tensions in the past. This was an even more divisive issue in the province of Hassaka. For a long time, there have been regions, villages and neighborhoods that were specifically Christian, Kurdish or Arab. At Raqqa and at Deir ez-Zor this was not the case. In many cities there were Alawites who worked in important positions as school directors or administrative directors who came from the coast. We knew they were Alaouite, you could tell by their accent. In any case, during the protests we all came out together, the watchword was the fall of Bashar [al-Assad], and that’s it.

As far as the regime goes, we felt its threat everywhere with the presence of secret services all over and by permanent surveillance that we were all aware of. Everyone knew there were many secret service agents in the cafés, the schools, everywhere. And we knew who some of them were but some of them were more discreet and you would speak with them but you wouldn’t be able to make out who they were. There were even other secret service people who passed themselves off as beggars. People were very aware of not making any faux pas in places that dealt with the government. Before the revolution, when someone went to prison they systematically underwent an interrogation to find out if they were involved with politics or knew someone who was, or if they had political contacts. It was common for people to become paid informants upon release from prison.

At Deir ez-Zor there were many  former political prisoners or people who were previously politically active. But no one talked about politics, even with their families. For example, you’d know if such and such uncle or cousin was jailed during the time of Hafez Al-Assad without knowing why. You were not even able to find out for sure who was or was not in prison. We feared the regime. We would not even imagine what it would mean to insult Bashar Al-Assad. When people died at Dera there was a switch-up… And this is when we started to really talk to each other. For example, before I only vaguely knew that something had happened at Hama but it was only after the start of the revolution that we started to have images of what had happened and to really talk about it.

What set off the first protests and general shake-up in Syria?

We were watching what was happening in Egypt, in Tunisia and in Libya on television. Before whatever happened at Deir ez-Zor, there were people who were arrested because they put on Al-Jazeera (which was pro-revolutionary at the moment) in their homes or in their cafés. But at Deir ez-Zor, we were very cut off from other regions, due to a lack of technology and means despite the fact that Deir ez-Zor produces 70% of Syrian petroleum!

So we were not very influenced by the news, no one had electricity and people didn’t watch much television. It was mostly the older people who did. No one came out onto the streets because of television. But on the other hand we did have the internet.

At Dera, there were the first historical arrests where young kids, who tagged up the walls, had their nails pulled out. Then they killed Hamza Kattahib, a teenager, and the photos of his body were circulated everywhere on Facebook. At the same time on “Syria,” a pro-regime television chain, it was claimed that he was arrested but that it was a matter of a personal disagreement between the officer and his family. That the youth had sexually assaulted the female officer.

Though the young face on the kid made the whole lie hard to believe. In the same ways, families of the dozens of teenagers arrested at Dera publicly demanded the return of children, to which officers replied: “Bring us your women and we will make you some new ones.” 

video of the mother of Mohamed Mula Aissa who screams at the crowd to not be afraid and to never give up the fight.

I did not head out onto the streets from the very beginning of the protests, on the one hand because there were not many people who were out there on the streets, and also because the regime was shooting at the protestors. I started to come out after the third protest, and when I joined in I heard the shots that killed Mohamed Mulla Aissa. He was a year ahead of me in school. In the beginning we were just in the streets, we did not have the impression that we were engaged in politics. We just had the hope to bring down Bashar. In any case, we did not think these protests were just some mere events. We quickly began to think of a revolution. When we heard that the regime had emasculated a kid, we knew there could be no turning back

Could you recount for us how you all organized yourselves during those first protests?

I was 17 years old when it all started. When we went out to the protests we would not tell our families because they would be afraid of us being arrested or killed. We protested after school, in the evening.

In the first protest I joined, there were just thirty of us. In the beginning there were very few of us and then we were thousands. One of the first slogans used was, “Those who do not participate have no honor.”

To organize ourselves we would talk on the phone but in an indirect way. I am going to recount to you a protest from the beginning that we held on our street. We had let the other students at our school know what was going to happen. We had agreed with many people that we would tell our parents that we were to have some special classes. The people in school who I organized with were people I had already seen at other protests and this helped us to find our allies. So we held a small meeting and every person in that meeting had friends who knew other people. Every person brought their band of friends. Basically, we organized this protest among ourselves. 

We decided upon a meet-up spot and before classes were over we left school and went to see friends in another school to tell them, “Tonight there’s going to be a be a protest.” It was the first time there was a protest on this street because on it there is a police station, a military security building, a police academy, a recruitment office and an army training center. We thought no one would show up to our protest. At this point there had already been some people killed, there had been no clashes but the police were shooting at protesters.

We prepared seven masks. I made a mask out of a t-shirt. We were careful to not be recognizable in the recorded videos of the protests, since the government was arresting those they were able to recognize. So we had masks, a friend brought some loudspeakers, I brought the battery of my brother’s motorcycle and someone else brought a microphone. At 7:30PM it was already getting dark. Since we lived in the area, we just had to leave our houses. We had hidden the masks on the route on the side of a church and we had written slogans on the wall like, “May the regime fall,” “Freedom,” and “Free Syria.”
 
I was waiting on three of my friends who were supposed to come with some buddies of their own to kick off the protest. We had some comrades keeping an eye out at different spots, who would let us know if the military security forces or the police were on their way. I was waiting for everyone to arrive and at 7:30 pm I saw my friends putting on their masks, so I did the same. And it was then that we realized there were plenty of people that were waiting on the sidewalks to join in. A friend then started to chant on the microphone, “Freedom, freedom for the people of Deir ez-Zor.” All those who were in the shops or on the sidewalks came out and joined the protest. We quickly became three hundred strong. On this street there were always plenty of markets and store fronts so there were plenty of people. The shops started to grow nervous and started to close up. As for me, I kept my phone nearby, waiting for the eventual call from one of the lookouts. After about 10 minutes, we turned down a street and that was when one of the lookouts called me but the call was cut off. We did not expect the police to arrive in their vehicles and they arrived in pick-up trucks. So we cried, “Disperse! Disperse!” They arrested about thirty to thirty-five people. Of the seven people who organized the march, five were arrested. Myself and a friend were able to get away. We expected those arrested to be killed and that they would obtain our names and then arrest us. So from then on I did not sleep at home. They were released after having been severely beaten. Some of them gave up names but not the right ones, not our names at least. Due to this protest we really got into some tangles with the organizing committees that were more organized. They always held their protests at the same place. We told ourselves, anyway, what does it matter if we hold another protest on the same street since people get arrested all over the place.

video of the Cinéma Fouad Street protest

one of the more important protests near the Al-Fardous mosque

The protests continued and this lasted for over a year. I remembered that at one moment I was going to protests everyday. The biggest ones must have been 15,000 strong. We were sure that the regime would fall. Then after the summer, the protests became more and more organized, people started to show up armed to defend and protect us from the eventual gunfire. 

What were these coordinating committees which you speak of, those who reprimanded you after the first protest you organized?

They mostly distributed flyers and organized protests. They knew more people and were older than us, probably between twenty and thirty years old. After the protest we self-organized, we did not organize anymore on our own and instead we went to their protests. As far as our protest goes, some say we were not being conscientious, that it was our fault that so many were arrested, but others would say that it was a victory, that it was courageous to protest on that street. As the cities started to become liberated, the coordinating committees transformed into municipal councils which included much older generations of people. Some of them started to arm themselves and some of them were able to become a part of the FSA (Free Syrian Army).

There was a whole period of protests up until the end of 2011, when the marchers started to become more structured and armed themselves against the attacks of the regimes. After, how did they build up towards the creation of an armed front, with the FSA and the liberated zones happening?

Indeed, there was that period, in 2012, at Deir ez-Zor and elsewhere in Syria, where there were armed protests without any offensive intention. It was a means to protect themselves from the gunfire from the police and military. Some tribal members of the surrounding countryside came armed to defend the protests before the creation of the FSA. They came to the protests saying: “My name’s Hassan…I come from such-and-such village...” There were also city people that took up arms. In certain cities, you could spot snipers on the buildings during the protests, that would shoot at the police as soon as they tried to approach. The educated people, the political people were generally against taking up arms. But among us, there is a bit of a culture of where if someone kills someone else, they have to be killed, there’s this culture of revenge.

Then during the summer of 2012, we started to hear talk on the TV of the arrival of the army from Palmyra to put down the protests. We called this the military campaign on Deir ez-Zor. This had already happened in other cities. We thus knew that the army would arrive in ten days. We started to erect barricades and checkpoints in anticipation of the army. We made the barricades of whatever we could find, tables, couches, barrels. We were not expecting tanks. Everyone that was armed waited at the barricades to hold them back. At this moment the city was not entirely liberated but the police rarely came out and the security forces were not at liberty to freely move about the neighborhoods. If they came out at all they would fire a few shots from their barricades and then return to their bases. The state had declared a curfew, so those out on the streets were potential targets. Let’s take my street for example, we could go only up to a certain point on the street, up until the point covered by the regime’s snipers up to where we would not venture, especially at night. The police were afraid of having their bases attacked, so they put snipers all over the place.

The army arrived in the morning with plenty of tanks. I had never heard the sound of a tank before but my father recognized the sound of their motors and of their tracks. So then we started to hear rumors that they killed such-and-such person or that they fired upon such-and-such place. They were looking to fire upon the neighborhoods where there were the most checkpoints of the insurgency. There were neighborhoods like Jbelle, a neighborhood of mostly houses where they did not even bother to aim, they fired indiscriminately at the houses.

the arrival of the tanks at Deir ez-Zor

 the burial on the hills of Deir ez-Zor. The security forces
arrived from other hills which we can spot behind the funeral procession.

I was afraid during this offensive since I thought they probably had my name and were going to arrest me. I still wanted to go down into the streets but my father forbade me. On the other hand, he went down into the streets and once he was stopped by the army, they asked him in which neighborhoods they could find the most armed people. To which my father responded, “At my home there are no armed men, but there are revolutionaries.” The army told him that if he were not an old man they would have fired upon him.

To face the tanks, we had but a few Kalashnikovs, Molotov cocktails, rifles and shotguns. Those who had done their military service showed the others how to use the weapons.

The army stayed for ten days. They left after having destroyed the barricades, arrested and killed many people. They arrested those they thought were the leaders.

I am not sure of the exact count but they arrested about 1,500 people and killed around 300 others. 

When we saw that the army had randomly killed children and civilians we then hid since we had joined the rebellion. The regime stayed on for two more months until the arrival of the Free Syrian Army.

Only ten days after the army’s offensive on Deir ez-Zor there was a huge protest in which forty people died. The slogans became more hardline. We started with chanting, “We’re gonna cut Bashar Al-Assad’s head off!” and we shouted the names of the martyrs. We chanted that we would carry Bashar’s head to their tombs, we told the martyrs, “We will not forget your blood,” we chanted for the liberation of prisoners, etc. 

Once we went to bury seven martyrs at the cemetery and some guys from the FSA protected the burial. We had to pass through a small valley before heading up a hill above where we were going to bury them. Around the hill there were other hills on which were security forces and they fired heavy rounds on the burial. 

The city had not yet been partitioned, but there were neighborhoods where it was known that many people from the FSA lived
 and so the police would come out and arrest people, and they would get shot at. But they would still come to arrest people when they would roll out in heavy numbers. The prisons were held at the military security bases and in the aviation information bases. There were attempts made to attack the prisons. At this point in time the FSA only came out at night, they would prepare dynamite at home and then throw the dynamite from motorbikes.

At this time, the Free Syrian Army had already come to be and the clashes began. Where did the combatants come from and what did you do once the protests ended?

There were people from the city and others from the surrounding countryside, some came from Homs. The neighborhoods of Baba al Homs and Khaldiye were retaken by the regime and the combatants in these neighborhoods then rejoined us at Deir ez-Zor. This was the end of 2012. It was not so much the FSA that arrived here but that it just simply appeared. Among my friends we would say that it was necessary for the FSA to be present. In any case, at that point we would say that protests were now worthless. Many revolutionaries joined the FSA. The clashes began, the FSA had first attacked the military security base. The neighborhoods that remained in the hands of the regime were neighborhoods where there were important bases like the air force and state security bases.

All the organizing that I had done with my buddies was now over. Mainly because many of the people who I had started to organize with were now dead or had joined the FSA. I did not want to leave my home and to boot we had already buried some of our people in the streets so we could no longer leave, but I did not want to kill. I was not against the presence of armed groups but I did not want to join them. With some others, I would write on the internet what was happening in our neighborhood. There were not many people who did the same the thing that I was doing, most people joined the FSA.

When I saw that the regime had started a bombardment campaign, I knew it would go on for a while and my father would tell me that the regime will not fall. Old folks would often say, “You did not live through Hama, they’re going to massacre us,” and the younger folks would say, “No, the regime will fall.”

At one point I spent two weeks in Damascus. When I would say that I was from Deir ez-Zor, people would peg me as a terrorist. There is the case that at Deir ez-Zor once some people had caught a sniper who was firing on the protests and the guy was cut into pieces by a butcher. They had made a video that become widely spread, with the slogan “Tell the Shabihas [Alawite groups in support of the regime] that the people of Deir ez-Zor are neck-slitters.” This cruelty worked against us and was a mistake.

Then, between 2013 and 2014, there was the arrival of the Jabbat Al-Nosra. How did this come about and how were they perceived by the population of Syria?

The Jabbat al-Nosra came from the countryside. They were there since for them it was less dangerous to organize in the countryside. They were very powerful and it was made up of foreigners. There were Egyptians, Tunisians, Saudi Arabians and Iraqis… My impression was that they were very effective against the regime, they had liberated many regions. This is why people respected them. They were also respected because they did not apply Sharia law to the neighborhoods they controlled. If they saw you smoking they would say, “Smoking is bad for you.” If they heard you playing music they would simply ask you to keep the volume down, something which happened to me a few times.

In the beginning there were a few brigades of the FSA that started to become Islamists but not Islamists in the “Chop off their heads” fashion, but rather that they would say “Our martyrs died for God,” etc. The Jabbat al-Nosra were perceived as people who came to help out the revolutionaries. Anyway the name, Jabbat al-Nosra, is often translated in French newspapers as “The Victory Front” but that is a mistake, it really translates to “Support Front.” “Nosr”  does mean “victory” but “Nosra” means “support.” The complete name is “The support front from the families of Sham.” Basically their own policy is to state, “We are just here to help, we are not here to take power.” When we would ask them what they would do once they took power, they would say they were not there to do that but to help out. Secretly they would say, “We want to influence the revolution so that it becomes Islamist but we’re here also so that the revolution is victorious.” They would say, “As soon as we are done in Syria we will go elsewhere, to fight somewhere else where there are oppressed peoples.”

 fighters from Jabbat al-Nosra fight against
the regime in the neighborhood of Roshedya in 2013

There were not many people who opposed them. Another element which explains the respect they enjoyed was due to the fact that when they arrived they arrested people who were doing robberies in the name of the FSA, they had instilled justice. They had always held the city alongside the FSA. During this period the Jabbat al-Nosra was very powerful, so we started to grow optimistic. Today, the neighborhoods that Daesh control, some 80% of the city, were ones that Jabbat al-Nosra had liberated.

Once the war had begun it became necessary to avoid the daily bombardments. The coordinating committees transformed into local councils and their role was to distribute resources and to bring aide. They had materials to help repair homes destroyed by the bombardments, etc. They had a kind of fire department, civil defense and markets organized in the liberated neighborhoods.

With some friends, we set up the cellar at our place. We worked on the internet. We would often go to the front to see how the fights were going. There were many people who would film the fights, us included, but our videos did not often get out of Deir ez-Zor.

At one time  you told us that war “changes everything” and that we should hang on to something solid. What is this “something solid”?

For me, that was my friends that  I hung onto. We would tell ourselves that Jabbat al-Nosra would help us take down the regime, but when Daesh came things changed.

What I recall from this time was the uncertainty in which we lived. Because you do not know if you are going to get shot at or if you are going to get imprisoned. Some of my friends died, many of my acquaintances are now with Daesh, and others are now in Germany or in Turkey. Among my best friends, just one of them stayed on at Deir ez-Zor and two others are now with Daesh. The two with Daesh threatened me because I left Deir ez-Zor instead of joining Daesh.

The first two years of the uprising were the best years of my life. When you live during times of life or death your relationships really grow strong. When you almost die alongside someone, you become particularly close.

This has also brought us closer to God. People did not necessarily become more religious, but when people died they would say that they were martyrs, who have now joined God. We would say that God was on our side and this was our way of reconnecting with each other. 

I really changed my way of life. Before, I was a smart aleck, my life’s goal was to successfully pick up girls and to get a motorbike from my family. I did not really think about my future besides one day owning a motorbike. I was a bit of a spoiled kid. After all this I set out to look out for my family. All this really changed my life. The most important thing is to find your real friends. We also realized that certain people were trash.

I realized that were were capable of anything. I still think this way. If you do not understand what I am trying to say, let me give you an example. When I left Syria, along the way, some of my friends were killed because they were captured by Daesh. I escaped both the regime and Daesh, I left Syria running through landmines with the Turkish police on my heels. Before I had the impression of being someone superficial and simple-minded, that I was not capable of doing something with my life but after all this…

You told us that after Daesh arrived things changed, could you tell us about this?

There was a period between the summer of 2013 and January 2014 where Daesh and the rebels had not yet fully declared war against each other. They were considered a faction among the many, even if Daesh did not really fight the regime at that time. They put themselves at the rear of the front, they organized themselves, they imposed their laws and as soon as they thought that a certain brigade of the FSA was too bad, secular, criminal or whatever else, they would attack them. The other brigades feared internal divisions and so they would rarely intervene. Then they would take advantage of certain FSA battles by swooping in and recuperating the weapons left behind. This is what happened at the aerial base in Northern Aleppo where a Chechen brigade of Daesh arrived after months of battle only to steal weapons from the regime. In January 2014 there was open war. It was either that or declaring allegiance to them.

When Daesh arrived at Deir ez-Zor they started to fight everyone, against Ahrar al Cham, against Jabbat and when they would capture someone from the FSA they would execute them. They also killed civilians who were not practicing Islam and/or were close to the FSA. We had to leave quickly. Those who relayed the fights on the internet were accused of being too close to the FSA and were thus threatened. I went to a zone controlled by the regime, since my family was over there. This was the summer of 2014. At the end of a month, the zones controlled by the regime were under siege by Daesh. This was the worst moment in my life. If the regime had found me in their files they would have had me arrested and if I were to flee the zone I would most certainly end up among Daesh. To boot, there was very little food and electricity. I stayed there for ten months, up until 2015.

How much hope remained that you had from the beginning of the uprising when you had to leave the city?

At that moment I was no longer thinking about the uprisings. I was only concerned with helping my family since my father is old. When we tried to leave the zone controlled by the regime we were all arrested by Daesh. One of the members of my family was ill with cancer. It was shitty, they caught us travelling by car and mistreated us. Since I was young I was treated especially bad, they would tell me, “you, you were in the regime zones, so either you were shabiha or you were a combatant.” They separated me from the others and took me to another place, away from my family. It was not necessarily a prison but closed off centers through which everyone went. They held me for two days and released me at Raqqa. They forbid me to leave the Daesh zone. They took all my papers and in Syria you cannot move about without your papers. You must have your military booklet which proves you have completed your military service if you are over 18 years of age. This allows you to bypass checkpoints where they verify if you have completed your service, if not you you’re in some deep shit and you’re sent off directly to the army. But the papers they took from me were false ones. I was able to get back my real ID at Raqqa once I found my family there.

At Raqqa, we saw people arrested by Daesh for either stories about cigarettes, alcohol or hashish. Anyway, the dealer was in Daesh and he always had a belt explosive on him. There was a time when we had the impression that everyone had a belt explosive on them with their hand on time detonator in case anything went down. There were plenty of rebel leaders and activists who were not at all Islamists who also wore them. If you got something like that on you then no one will mess with you. For example, the people in Jabbat would show up to local council meetings with one on and would sit down saying, “I was not invited but I will sit with you”…

At Raqqa, when Daesh would arrest people for common law stuff, they would physically punish you and then make you do a two-step program. At first it was like prison, where people would be locked up and later set free. People would have to return during the day but go home in the evening. They would do this to let you know what they were capable of. The second part of the program included theoretical courses on religion, jihad, what is forbidden and they would explain this saying, “Life down here cannot really be enjoyed, it is pointless and worthless, so one must sacrifice themselves for the afterlife.” Their goal was to make people give up trying to escape, so that they would imagine that they would have no other choice but Daesh.

But when you have lived through the times of fighting with the FSA, at Deir ez-Zor, you become less susceptible to their propaganda. So I would tell myself that not all was lost and that I must flee. It was foremost my family who would pressure me to make off. My brother that was still at Deir ez-Zor came to join us and then my family organized our departure for the two of us.