{"id":167923,"date":"2018-03-28T05:44:37","date_gmt":"2018-03-28T05:44:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=167923"},"modified":"2018-03-30T05:55:10","modified_gmt":"2018-03-30T05:55:10","slug":"these-are-the-faces-of-those-who-have-been-affected-by-the-siege-of-eastern-ghouta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=167923","title":{"rendered":"These are the faces of those who have been affected by the siege of Eastern Ghouta"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robert Fisk — The Independent March 28, 2018<\/h1>\n
\"Sana<\/a>

Sana el-Boukeri in Syrian refugee camp. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

They were frightened \u2013 traumatised might be our medical definition \u2013 but the civilians from Douma in Eastern Ghouta were alive. Sat quietly on the government bus that had brought them to the Arbeen crossing were\u00a0the children with their mothers, the old men, watchful, the younger men \u2013 there were not so many of them \u2013 looking out of the windows. When we climbed aboard alone with them, notebook in hand and camera moving across the passengers, they sat like extras in a movie, faces from the siege. Were they silent because they were fearful of the future? Or because they were still trying to frame their own suffering of the past?<\/span><\/p>\n

We were all aware of the usual rumours; that those armed jihadis who had refused the Russian conditions for leaving the besieged villages and fields of Ghouta would shell the refugees to discourage them from crossing. Rubbish. Or that\u2019s what we thought until a mortar swished over the buses and crashed in the powdered rubble 30 metres away. The refugees \u2013 for that is what they were now after the tunnels of Ghouta \u2013 turned their heads like birds towards the cloud of smoke rising into the sky, and the Syrian soldiers outside ran towards the buses. A general climbed aboard. \u201cGet these buses moving!\u201d he shouted.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the bus \u2013 and in the hours that followed \u2013 we tried to put together the story of Eastern Ghouta and soon realised that it would take a year, perhaps a decade, to understand the killing and the cynicism and the innocent suffering behind this epic battle. There were things one noticed which did not quite match the narrative; these people talked of living in tunnels. But the passengers and the thousands of refugees we met later were clearly not starving. Their faces were full, their clothes were clean. But most had lost relatives or friends.<\/span><\/p>\n

We will not mention here the large number of Islamic fighters we were to see emerging from the rubble under the Russian peace agreement \u2013 a vast army compared to the few fighters we had expected, coming out in their hundreds, bearded men whom we had not seen, ever, in those mortifying videos of civilian suffering that came to us from the siege over many weeks. How come we had not seen them before? Some still carried their weapons. But that is, as they say, for tomorrow. Civilians must come first.<\/span><\/p>\n

A man with grey stubble who might have been 65 but who was only 48, said his 18-year-old son had been kidnapped by \u201cterrorists\u201d \u2013 some of these new refugees had already adopted the language of the regime \u2013 and was not allowed to leave with him. Nisreen, a woman in black,\u00a0spoke of the bombardment of Douma.\u00a0She did not mention aircraft \u2013 and said that both her husband and 11-year-old son had died in the original bombing of Eastern Ghouta more than two years ago.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMohamed had taken Hassan to the mosque to pray. Then the bomb exploded on the roof. My other son was in the street.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The buses moved at speed away from this front line and we followed them across the muddy laneways south of Adra city to where a former children\u2019s holiday camp now housed 15,000 of the civilians who had already managed to flee Ghouta. It was a slightly shabby institution but there were flowers and UN tents and piles of bread. Despite the propaganda, this was no show\u00a0camp for visitors \u2013 it took a long time to negotiate our way inside. There were piles of bread and UN tents and men selling coffee; most seemed eager to talk to us \u2013 up to a point.<\/span><\/p>\n

A young woman in a pale scarf said that, yes, she had lost three members of her family in Douma. Her sick father had died from lack of medicine, and her nephew and the daughter of her cousin had been killed from what she called \u201ccrossfire\u201d. I was to hear more of this \u201ccrossfire\u201d as the hours went by. The man had mentioned this on the bus and another figure making coffee by a gas stove talked of more \u201ccrossfire\u201d, between the Faylaq al-Rahman and Jaish al-Islam fighters. If you believed this, then there must have been an awful lot of internecine gun battles between the jihadis as the Syrians and Russians rained fire upon them.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Refugees<\/a>

Refugees from eastern Ghouta. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

When I asked another woman if she knew of civilians killed in the Syrian and Russian bombing of this month, a Syrian NGO lady who spoke enough English to be unpleasant, demanded \u201cFor who you work? \u2018Independent\u2019<\/em>? NOT independent!\u201d But slowly the stories were told. There was a man in a wheelchair, Alaa Younis, with a bullet wound in his neck who had been paralysed from the waist down \u2013 after another gun battle, his father Mohamed said. His wounds were real, his waist bound with fresh medical tape, his face sometimes contorted with pain. Then came another woman who spoke this time of the bombs, \u201cfalling in the streets, and all the houses had come down in the streets\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

And then towards us, smiling but with what must have been the saddest face in Syria, came 53-year old Sana el-Boukeri. She wore spectacles and was dressed in black and wanted to talk. Yes, she had been in Douma during the bombing. And four months ago, her husband Jamal el-Din and her 13-year-old son Mahmoud were in the street when bombs came down and they were killed. Sana did not cry, she simply looked at us to see if we understood her and she obviously wanted to talk. Many times she shook her head.<\/span><\/p>\n

It emerged that she was a historical vision of Syria\u2019s terrible war. For she said that her other son was an 18-year-old soldier and that he was fighting in the Syrian army unit commanded by General Soheil Hassan, the \u201cTiger\u201d, now the military\u2019s favourite soldier \u2013\u00a0and Vladimir Putin\u2019s too, so it is said \u2013 who has reputedly never lost a battle and who was personally on the battlefront in Eastern Ghouta. But this son, she said, had been wounded a week ago and she\u2019s\u00a0had no telephone contact with him since. So while one son was killed in the Syrian bombardment, the other was fighting for the government, perhaps only a mile away. Sana stood in front of us, swaying slightly, her spectacles reflecting the sun, occasionally looking at the other refugees to see if they understood her story.<\/span><\/p>\n

There were other groups sitting on the grass or in the shade of the brown concrete camp offices. \u201cWe lived in tunnels \u2013 for weeks,\u201d one man said. \u201cThey [the fighters] would not let us leave the tunnels. They lived in the tunnels with us. They stole the aid that came for us from outside.\u201d But why were they in the tunnels in the first place? The answer was obvious: to avoid the Syrian and Russian bombs. But they did not mention this. They spoke of the price of bread \u2013 \u00a38 sterling for 800 grams \u2013 and how the cost of a pack of 10 cigarettes had soared from US $2\u00a0to $80. But surely this was not the cost of this devastating siege.<\/span><\/p>\n

When new refugees arrived at the camp, I saw no muhabarrat<\/em>\u00a0intelligence men \u2013 the white-socked, leather-jacketed regime operatives paid to sniff out subversives \u2013 checking the incoming buses. Nor wandering around in the camp, though there may have been willing stool-pigeons. But many of the el-Ghouta people had relatives in the centre of Damascus, and they left freely when relatives called for them. There was no violence, no shouting. This does not give anyone a clean slate. Indeed, Ibrahim Hassoun, the schoolteacher who runs the camp \u2013 yes, there is a portrait of Bashar al-Assad on his wall \u2013 insisted that men who admitted they had fought for the jihadis were free to go to Damascus city if they promised to leave their weapons forever. \u201cThey are now civilians again \u2013 the president said they must be free to relive their natural lives again.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But opposition groups have claimed that refugee men fear they will be enlisted in the Syrian army if they left their homes in el-Ghouta. And Ibrahim Hassoun agreed that there was an office where all men aged between 20 and 50 years must go within 15 days of their arrival to be questioned by the \u201cgeneral security\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYes, you can go there \u2013 you can see the men waiting. You can see the rooms. If a man is of the age for military service, yes, he must join the army like all others do in Syria. If they are fighters, they will be trained for six months and then there will be rehabilitation \u2013\u00a0for their minds.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

So was this reprogramming? Or what we like to call \u201cderadicalisation\u201d? We set off to the security building \u2013 open from eight in the morning until eight at night \u2013 and there, outside, were a group of men sitting on the ground, close together, waiting for their turn at the desk with the computer inside and the man behind it. Some smiled at our camera, several \u2013 very obviously \u2013 hid their faces; one held up an identity card. We climbed the steps and peered into the hall. There were a line of desks, young men behind computer consoles and others sitting in front. They did not expect us. There were no cells, no interrogation rooms \u2013 we checked the building. But the men outside were nervous, frightened may not be too strong a word. They knew what had happened in Eastern Ghouta. But how much would they tell?<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr Hassoun was full of reassurances. Medical facilities were good at the camp \u2013 this appeared to be true \u2013 12\u00a0pregnant refugee woman had been delivered of their children, another had given birth in the camp which holds 10,000 women and children and 5,000 men. He listed the villages they came from in the dozens of square miles of Ghouta: Jobar, Sawa, Beit Sawa, Hosh Nusri, Taube, Zibdin\u2026 \u201cThe badly injured are moved to our hospitals, others can be treated here. The fighters who have come here are now civilians. An officer takes their names, but they will not be arrested.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Source <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robert Fisk travels on a bus with refugees from Eastern Ghouta<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":138,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[83],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-167923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-syria"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/138"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=167923"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167923\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":167930,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167923\/revisions\/167930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=167923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=167923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=167923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}