Samar Yazbek - The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria

CONTENTS

In 2011, Samar Yazbek, an outspoken critic of Assads regime, was forced into exile from her beloved Syria. She watched as the peaceful uprising in her homeland turned to bloodshed, and tried to alert the world. When her pleas for intervention were ignored, she became determined to take action herself. She decided to return.

The following summer, Yazbek made the first of several brave, clandestine visits, squeezing through a gap in the fence on the Turkish border. As the only Syrian writer to travel widely through Liberated Syria, the Northern area under the control of the rebels, she worked with local activists. Beyond her desire to be close to her people, she had a purpose: to help however she could, from building schools and comforting the bereaved to negotiating with gunmen.

Above all, Samar Yazbek bears witness. The Crossing is a powerful testament to the reality of Syria today. From the first innocent demonstrations for democracy, through the beginnings of the Free Syrian Army, to the arrival of ISIS, here are the daily lives of soldiers, children, ordinary men and women struggling to survive. In heartfelt, luminous prose, Yazbek shares their stories of unbearable brutality, and of the humanity that can flower even in the most terrible of circumstances.

Born in 1970, Samar Yazbek studied literature before beginning her career as a journalist and a scriptwriter for Syrian television and cinema. Her translated work includes the novel, Cinnamon, and A Woman In The Crossfire, her diaries of the first four months of the Syrian uprising, which has won many prizes. She lives in Paris.

A Woman in the Crossfire
Cinnamon

For the martyrs of the Syrian revolution.

I write, with fumbling fingers.

I write blindly.

I exist in the real world but, as I write about it, I begin to disappear.

I look at the people around me as though I were one of them. I hear the roar of real aircraft, but I tell myself: its just a detail in a wider story.

This is my second testimony to the saga of Syrias slaughter. After A Woman in the Crossfire, I am forcing that gap in the window back open, letting in a thin ray of light, just enough to reveal the many layers of hell.

I am the storyteller who considers your short lives, who holds you in her gaze, just as we used to on those long nights, when we laughed out loud, guessing which of us would be struck by the next shell. Im doing this for your sake. I can only conjure you up in my mind, and build your stories into pillars that reach from the earth up to heaven.

I am writing for you: the betrayed.

The FIRST CROSSING

The barbed wire lacerated my back. I was trembling uncontrollably. After long hours spent waiting for nightfall, to avoid attracting the attention of Turkish soldiers, I finally raised my head and gazed up at the distant sky, darkening to black. Under the wire fence marking the line of the border a tiny burrow had been dug out, just big enough for one person. My feet sank into the soil and the barbs mauled my back as I crawled across the line of separation between the two countries.

I took a deep breath, arched my back and ran, as fast as I could, just as they had told me to do. Fast. Half an hour at a sprint thats the distance you have to cover before youve safely crossed the border. I ran and ran until we were out of the danger zone. The ground was treacherous and rocky, but my feet felt light as I sprinted. The pounding of my heart carried me, lifting me up. Panting, I murmured to myself: Im back! This isnt a scene in a film, this is real. I ran, mouthing, Im back Im here.

Behind us, we heard gunshots and military vehicles moving around on the Turkish side, but wed done it: we were through and we were running. It felt like it had all been fated long ago. Id put on a headscarf especially, and a long jacket and loose-fitting trousers. We had a steep hill to climb, before we hurtled down the other side towards the waiting car. On this occasion my guides and I werent part of a convoy of strangers. At the time I didnt even know if I would ever manage to write about it later; somehow Id just assumed I would die, like so many others, when I returned to my homeland. Darkness settled in for the night and everything seemed normal, as expected, or so it seemed.

Later on, after I had made this crossing a number of times over eighteen months, I saw many changes: the chaotic state of Antakya airport, near the border, would be ample evidence of what was happening to Syria. I stowed it all away in the back of my mind, along with everything else that testified to the rapid and profound upheavals taking place in my country. Back then, though, I was ignorant of what was to come as I scrambled down the hill for the first time, my legs throbbing with pain.

When I reached the bottom, I crouched down and paused for at least ten minutes, wheezing and gasping for breath, trying to calm my beating heart. The young men accompanying me must have thought I was emotional at seeing my homeland again. But that was the last thing on my mind. We had been running for so long, I felt like my lungs were being wrenched from my body and I couldnt stand up.

Finally, we reached the car and I started to breathe normally again. I sat in the back with the two men who would be acting as my guides, Maysara and Mohammed. They were two very different combatants from the same family, the family in whose home I would take shelter. Maysara was a rebel fighter who had started out campaigning peacefully against the Assad regime, but had later taken up arms. Mohammed was in his twenties and had been a business student who, like Maysara, had been involved in the peaceful protest movement before joining the armed resistance. As we worked together over the coming weeks he became a lasting friend. In the front were our driver and another young man.

We were travelling through Idlib province, an area only partially liberated from the control of Assads forces. Between the endless roadblocks set up by the Free Army, we sped along a road lined by olive groves. Everywhere I looked there were armed militants, victory banners. I tried to take snapshots in my mind of what I could see as I stretched my head out of the car window, detaching myself emotionally from my surroundings. The road seemed to go on forever as we drove along with the thud of shelling in the distance. And yet a sense of exhilaration tickled every cell in my body as I looked at this part of Syria, which had been mostly freed from Assads troops.

Well, some of the land might be liberated, but the sky wouldnt let us celebrate yet; no, the sky was on fire. It felt like I was being bombarded with frenetic images competing for my attention; to take it all in, I needed eyes in the back of my head, on my ears hell, even on my fingertips. Staring ahead, I tried to make sense of my surroundings. Machines of destruction. The blazing sky. A solitary car carrying one woman and four men, heading through the olive groves to the town of Saraqeb.

The Syria that I remembered had been one of the most beautiful places in the world. I thought back to my early childhood in the town of al-Tabqa (also known as al-Thawra) near the city of Raqqa on the Euphrates river, and my teenage years in the historic city of Jableh on the coast, followed by Latakia, the principal port city of Syria. As an adult, I had lived alone with my daughter in Damascus, the capital, for several years, at a distance from my family, community and sectarian ties. I had lived independently, free to make my own choices, but my lifestyle had cost me a great deal of rejection, criticism and harm to my reputation. It had been difficult to be female in a conservative society that did not allow women to rebel against its laws. Everything had seemed resistant to change. The last thing Id imagined on my first visit to the rural areas of northern Syria was to see it being destroyed.