A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea Read online

  The family knew that the prison conditions could be terrible and were fraught with worry. They imagined him sleeping on the floor of a crowded cell, hungry and unable to wash or exercise. They couldn’t afford a lawyer, so the family was uncertain about how they could navigate the complexity of the Jordanian justice system.

  As the days passed, their concerns mounted. Not only were they worried about Shokri’s well-being, they also couldn’t afford to live without him. They barely scraped by on the money he brought home, and now they had no income. Hanaa’s family stepped in, giving them food and whatever extra money they could. As a poor family, the Al Zamels had no connections to influential people in the government who might be able to help, and they didn’t dare alert local officials to Shokri’s imprisonment in Jordan, fearing that it could cause him further legal problems upon his return.

  The family was not permitted to visit the prison or talk to him on the phone. So they received news of Shokri sporadically from contacts living in Jordan, but it was mostly confusing and only made them more anxious about his treatment. Doaa and her sisters cried every day, and at night, after the girls were asleep, Hanaa wept as well, wondering if her husband would ever come home.

  The whole extended family came together to find a way to get him out. Four months after Shokri’s arrest, a friend of his brother’s named Adnaan paid a well-connected lawyer in Jordan ten thousand Syrian pounds (the equivalent of $500) to help Shokri. The lawyer was familiar with the Jordanian legal system and knew the prison officials and the judge who would need to be bribed if Shokri was to be released.

  With the ten thousand pounds, the lawyer bought the purest Syrian olive oil—worth two hundred pounds a kilogram—for the officers in charge of the case and the finest cuts of meat for the judge. He persuaded the judge that Shokri had been tricked by the factory owner and was just a simple man trying to support his family. The bribes worked and Shokri was finally released from prison.

  Doaa and her family almost didn’t recognize the thin, heavily bearded man who arrived at their doorstep late one night. Once they heard his familiar voice, the girls ran to him, screaming with delight and throwing their arms around him. After four months, Doaa had her father back, and she never wanted to let him go again.

  Normal life resumed quickly after Shokri’s release. He went back to his days at the barbershop, while Hanaa continued to cook the family meals. Together they continued to pursue their dream of having a home of their own. Eventually they found an affordable apartment in a cheaper section of Daraa, and they packed up the girls and moved.

  * * *

  Doaa’s second home was a three-room apartment in the underdeveloped, conservative, and poor neighborhood of Tareq Al-Sad. It took Shokri and Hanaa months to find the dingy, dirty apartment, which was in ill repair. But here they didn’t have to worry about upsetting aunts and uncles, and the children could run freely and be themselves. The girls quickly set out to help their parents clean up the rooms and make them cheerful. Doaa’s sisters immediately took to their new home.

  Doaa, however, had trouble adjusting. She hated change and she missed her cousins. She especially missed her old school. It had taken her a long time to open up around her teachers and classmates, and now she had to start all over again. At her new school she hung back shyly while her sisters made new friends. She often feigned illness so that she wouldn’t have to attend class. But Doaa was the kind of child that attracted kindness from others, and over time she slowly made friends and began to enjoy her new environment.

  In 2004, the family celebrated the birth of Doaa’s little brother, Mohammad, nicknamed Hamudi. At last, the family had a son. The girls adored him and fought over who got to take care of him. Now that there was a boy in the family, Doaa’s aunts and uncles invited them to move back into the family home, but Hanaa refused. They were now settled in their place and had put down roots in their new neighborhood.

  But when Doaa turned fourteen, the news came that the owner of the apartment they had come to love needed it back, and the family had to move yet again. Doaa, who despised change, would have to uproot her life once more.

  Finding a new home on Shokri’s modest salary seemed an insurmountable challenge. More people were moving to Daraa to find work, and rents were rising. But after a three-month search, Doaa’s family finally found a place beyond their expectations: a modest three-room apartment in the leafy El-Kashef neighborhood with a small light-filled kitchen and a roof lined with grapevines. Shokri and Hanaa had their own bedroom, and the girls slept in a room that doubled as a living room during the day. By then the eldest daughter, Ayat, had married and moved in with her in-laws.

  Doaa, though, saw no promise in their new home, just the irretrievable loss of the friends she’d made in the old neighborhood and the people who understood her without having to try. Once again in a new environment, she was overcome with shyness.

  She refused to speak in her new school and her grades fell. At first, she resisted any gestures of friendship. No matter how much her older sisters Asma and Alaa urged her to make friends, Doaa retreated, showing them that no one could force her to do anything she didn’t want to do. Both her shyness and her ferocious stubbornness protected her, allowing her to control unfamiliar situations. It took Doaa a long time to trust people or to allow anyone to see who she really was.

  But slowly over time, as in the other neighborhoods, Doaa’s walls began to come down, and she eventually came out of her shell. Doaa made new friends and often went on walks with them through the neighborhood, and they visited one another’s homes to study, gossip, and talk about boys. They frequently went up to Doaa’s roof—her favorite place in her new home—to bask in the sun. At dusk, they would move inside to play Arabic pop music and dance in a circle, singing along with the words in unison.

  While eventually Doaa became happy with her new neighborhood and friends, it became clear that the life of a traditional Syrian girl was not going to be enough for Doaa. Her childhood stubbornness grew into a resolve to make something of herself. Daraa was a traditional community, but Doaa knew from soap operas and the occasional movie that some women studied and worked, even in her own country. The Syrian state had officially declared itself in favor of women’s equality, and tension was growing between two factions: those who believed that women should be housewives submissive to fathers and arranged husbands, and those who felt that women could pursue higher education, careers, and husbands of their own choosing. Doaa’s favorite teacher was a woman who told her female students, “You must study hard to be the best of your generation. Think of your future, not just marriage.” When Doaa heard this, she felt a stirring inside her to break people’s assumptions about her and to live an independent life.

  After the sixth grade, boys and girls no longer shared the same classrooms. Doaa and her friends would talk about boys; however, it was not culturally acceptable to talk to them. At fourteen, she and her friends were approaching the traditional age for marriage. The other girls would make bets about who would marry first. But when Doaa thought about her future and what it might hold, all she could think of was helping her family.

  Her favorite place outside of school and her home was her father’s barbershop. She wanted to show him how she could be a useful and efficient worker, even if she wasn’t a boy. From the time she was eight, Doaa would go to Shokri’s shop to help him whenever she could. As Shokri trimmed and cut, Doaa swept the hair that fell on the floor and always appeared right at the moment he finished a shave, holding open a clean, dry towel. When new customers arrived, Doaa would slip into the small kitchen at the back of the salon and emerge with a tray of hot tea, or small cups filled with bitter Arabic coffee.

  On Thursdays after school, Shokri let Doaa shave him with the electric razor. He would laugh at her earnest face and call her “my professional” as she concentrated on her task. This nickname stirred an extreme sense of pride inside her and only made her more intent on one day earning money to support
her father.

  So when her sisters Asma and Alaa married at seventeen and eighteen, and her family began to tease her, “You’re next in line!,” Doaa immediately let them know that they should drop the subject and that she wasn’t interested in getting married anytime soon. After their initial surprise, Doaa’s parents accepted that she would take a different path from other girls and would at times dream that maybe she could be the first in their family to go to university. Hanaa always regretted that she never had that chance and loved the idea of one of her daughters achieving her own professional dreams.

  Doaa surprised everyone when she announced that she wanted to be a policewoman. “A policewoman?” Hanaa said. “You should be a lawyer or a teacher!”

  Shokri hated the idea as well. He despised the thought of her patrolling the streets, mingling with all levels of society, and confronting criminals. And on top of that, he didn’t quite trust the police. Shokri was old-school and believed it was a man’s role to protect society, particularly to protect women, not the other way around. But Doaa insisted, saying that she wanted to serve her country and to be the kind of person whom people turned to in times of trouble.

  While Doaa’s father disapproved, and her sisters made fun of her for dreaming of becoming a policewoman, Hanaa didn’t tease Doaa at all. Instead she talked to her and tried to understand her daughter’s motivations. Doaa confided that she felt trapped as a girl. Why couldn’t she be independent and build her own life? Why did it always have to be linked to a man’s?

  Hanaa admitted to Doaa that even though she had fallen in love with Shokri, she regretted getting married at seventeen. Hanaa had been at the top of her class in school and excelled in her math and business courses. She had hoped to go on and study at the university, but back then, women had few options other than marrying and starting a family, but Hanaa thought perhaps Doaa could be different.

  When Doaa was invited by her aunts on a trip to Damascus, the cosmopolitan capital city, Shokri allowed her to go, hoping that the trip might satisfy her urge for adventure. Instead, her visit only increased it. Doaa was transfixed by the bustling city. She imagined herself wandering the streets, visiting the beautiful Umayyad Mosque, negotiating in the bustling trade at the souk, and walking the paths of the sprawling university where she hoped to one day study. Damascus opened Doaa’s eyes and set her mind on the idea of a different kind of future than the traditional one prescribed for her.

  But those dreams would soon be torn from her. On December 19, 2010, after clearing the dinner plates, the family gathered as usual around the TV to scan the satellite channels for the news. Al Jazeera was leading with a breaking story from Tunisia about a young street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi, who set fire to himself after the police confiscated his vegetable cart. A lack of economic opportunity in the country had reduced him to selling fruit and vegetables, and when that last bit of dignity was taken from him, he ended his life in a horrifying and public show of protest. It was the beginning of what was to become known as the Arab Spring. Everything in the region was about to change.

  Including in Daraa. But not in the way that the people of Doaa’s hometown had hoped.

  TWO

  The War Begins

  It all started with some graffiti spray-painted on a wall by a group of schoolboys.

  It was February of 2011, and for months the people of Daraa had watched as repressive regimes throughout the Middle East were challenged and brought down. In Tunisia, disenfranchised youths, identifying with Mohamed Bouazizi’s despair and reacting to his self-immolation, set cars on fire and smashed shop windows in their frustration and desperation. In response, the hard-line Tunisian president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who had been in power since 1987, promised his people more employment opportunities and freedom of the press and said that he would step down when his term ended in 2014. However, his announcements did little to assuage the public. Riots erupted all over the country demanding the president’s immediate resignation. Ben Ali responded by declaring a state of emergency and by dissolving the government. His hold on the country weakened and his ring of supporters in the army and the government turned against him. On January 14, less than a month after Mohamed Bouazizi took his own life, the president resigned from office and fled to Saudi Arabia with his family.

  For the first time ever in the Arab region, a popular protest had succeeded in bringing down a dictator. In Syria, families such as Doaa’s watched in amazement. No one imagined that they could ever defy the Syrian regime. Everyone disliked some things about the government—the ongoing emergency law, worsening economic conditions, a lack of freedom of speech—but the people had all learned to live with them. Everyone felt that nothing could be done. An all-seeing security apparatus reached into every neighborhood and kept an eye on troublemakers. Activists in Damascus who had demanded reforms after the death of former president Hafez al-Assad had landed in prison, which had intimidated people from speaking ill of the regime, much less making demands—until now. The uprising in Tunisia made it seem to ordinary Syrians that anything was possible.

  Doaa, now sixteen, and her sisters began to press their parents for details about what was happening in the region, wondering whether it could happen in Syria as well. Their father tamped down their enthusiasm, afraid to encourage them. Syria was different from Tunisia, he told them. Their government was stable. What happened in Tunisia was a onetime thing. Or so he thought.

  Then came Egypt, then Libya, and Yemen. In each country, protests followed a different script, but all of them called for the same thing: freedom. One man’s desperate act of protest had ignited flames of revolt across the Middle East. The Arab Spring was born, stirring hope in the discontented, especially the youth, and fear in those who ruled them. When the uprisings swept over Egypt, Syrians took particular notice. The two countries had merged for a brief three-year period in 1958 into the United Arab Republic. Syria had seceded from that union in 1961, but cultural ties remained strong. So when Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was forced to step down on February 11, 2011, many disgruntled Syrians celebrated the victory of his toppling as if it were their own leader.

  Doaa and her family watched the television reports in awe as the thousands of demonstrators in Tahrir Square in Cairo erupted into joyous celebrations. They cheered along to the chants of “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) and “Misr hurr” (Egypt is free) streaming from their TV screens.

  Daraa had always been considered a reliable base of support for President Assad and his Ba’ath Party. But after the fall of Mubarak, in hushed discussions, citizens of Daraa started to talk about their own oppressive regime. Who would dare confront the Syrian government? they wondered. Assad was known for meeting dissent with crushing violence. Maybe ordinary people rising up against an all-powerful system could change things in other countries, but not in Syria, they felt sure.

  A group of defiant young boys on the cusp of puberty would be the first dissidents to gain attention in Syria. On a quiet night in late February 2011, inspired by the rallying cries that had dominated the Arab Spring, they spray-painted graffiti on their school wall, Ejak Al Door ya Duktur (You’re next, Doctor), alluding to Bashar al-Assad’s training as an ophthalmologist. After they finished, the boys ran home laughing and joking, excited by what they saw as a harmless prank, a minor act of defiance. They knew the graffiti might anger the security forces, but they never imagined their small action would provoke a revolution of Syria’s own and lead to a civil war that would divide and destroy the country.

  The next morning, the headmaster of the school discovered the graffiti and called the police to investigate. One by one, fifteen boys were rounded up and taken off for interrogation to the local office of the Political Security Directorate, the arm of the Syrian intelligence apparatus that tightly monitors internal dissent. They were then transferred to one of the most feared intelligence detention centers in Damascus.

  Doaa’s family knew some of the boys and their relatives. Almost eve
rybody did. In the close-knit city of Daraa, everyone was connected somehow, either through marriage or community. No one was sure which of those rounded up, if any, had actually sprayed the graffiti. Some boys were pressed to confess or implicate friends. Others were interrogated because their names had been scribbled on the school walls long before the graffiti was painted. No one could believe that these kids had been arrested for such a minor act.

  About one week later, the families of the boys visited Atef Najib, a cousin of President Assad’s and the head of the local Political Intelligence Branch, to appeal for their release. According to unconfirmed accounts that became legend, Najib told the parents that they should have taught their children better manners. He allegedly mocked the men, saying, “My advice to you is that you forget you ever had these children. Go back home and sleep with your wives and bring other children into the world, and if you can’t do that, then bring your wives to us and we will do the job for you.”

  This was the final insult to the people of Daraa. On March 18, protesters took to the streets, demanding the release of the boys. This came three days after hundreds of people staged a rare protest in the old city of Damascus, calling for democratic reforms, an end to the emergency laws, and the release of all political prisoners. They chanted, “Peacefully, peacefully,” as they marched to announce the nature of their movement. Six protesters were allegedly detained that day.