Excerpts from a martyr’s journal

“I write my journals in haste and keep them safe;
Perhaps in the pause between two sieges I will be able to send you what I’ve written.”

It was with these words that the martyr Khidr Al Deaar began one of his letters (or his journal entries as they might be termed). The martyrs deserve more than us, not least that their writings reach people. Their writings: kneaded with their blood, their rhetoric more than a wordsmiths flourish. Death sits at their right hand and at their left, behind them and before them. He splits with them their loaf of bread, shares their cup of tea and stalks their dreams when their eyes droop for an instant.

I had an agreement with Khidr that he write me a daily report and as a consequence his letters are a journal of life that we on the outside never lived, a life lived at a temperature warm enough to revive what is human in us. That is the definition of the revolution that we set up as our figurehead, the meaning for whose sake we once gave so much. Khidr was one of those who strived alongside us before he became the martyr witness to the “resurrection of Syrian blood”.

These letters came from a womb pregnant with the future, inside which our dreams pulsed. We heard our dreams’ heartbeats, a living fetus in their bellies, among its many names: Freedom.

Fawaz

“At last, miracles seem no great thing,
At last, the impossible throws up its hands in surrender
At last, we abandon our fear, throw off our deaths,
To catch up with life’s caravan.

Despite all we see and hear, despite our fear that hides behind the screens, hastily thrown up in the alleyways, despite staying up all night so that the tank tracks don’t find their way into our children’s dreams, despite the estrangement between our eyelids and sleep, despite the sound of blind gunshots: we still crack jokes and smile.

We are determined to pay no mind to the cries of death, rapping at the door to our souls every moment. We roam the alleys. We check to see what’s left of our friends. We console the relatives of those whose wait is over, knowing our own vigil could be cut short by some stray bullet: stray or aimed.

What is certain, though, is that when we die, we’ll die with eyes that much wider open on the gathering dawn.

Our blood: as candid as a child on a swing. Our breasts: bare as truth. They shall see that our dreams were stronger than the bullets.

Khidr Al Deaar[1]”

“They imagined—their sick imaginations told them—that were they to increase the dosage of death a little, that it might terrorize us. But they failed, and they will fail.

We have been dosed with their death for forty years. We’ve drunk it down in every flavor. We know all its varieties, from rotting away in prison to the very last convulsion before death. Because of this, and because we have never known anything but killing, they have failed and will never again be able to confiscate our freedom through murder nor take away the dignity we’ve reclaimed. The stories we will tell shall prove it:

On that night, and on that day, when it was Deirezzour’s turn to receive its share of the massacres brought on by the Arab League monitors …
On that night, the city’s alleyways ablaze, its youth crying “Death rather than humiliation!”; its youth who never slept in case they missed the blind and self-important monitors …
On that night of conspiracy, Deirezzour had a date with the massacre that had been prepared in advance to welcome the blind monitors of the Arab League.

The simplest thing one can say about the Arab League mission to Syria is that it meant more death for those cities than welcomed them in.

On that night, everything seemed different: the air, the streets, the houses, the passers-by who move grim-faced and hurrying, the calm and confident faces, their confidence tinged with fear and wariness, the wakeful, restless eyes that signal their determination, the curt smiles in parting, the rushed meetings to arrange some plan or cover some loophole in another … Every street the monitoring committee might pass down is covered despite their knowledge of the inevitable death and detentions that will result, but the determination displayed by all proclaims that the game isn’t over yet: that we play the game of death best of all, for the sake of life: the most basic form of free and dignified existence. We want no more than this.

We hunt down the phantom monitors in every nook and cranny. Perhaps we’ll find some honourable committee man to listen to our pains, to listen to just part of the testimony of our wounds, our martyrs and our prisoners. We had gambled on finding someone to lend us his ear (like Anwar Malek) and everyone was ready to do all they could to get the truth across, no matter the price, to document each and every step, even it trod through our blood. All we wanted was to convey just a part of what we lived through so that our listener could not deny the reality of what he saw under any circumstances.

But it never occurred to anyone that the trap had been set in advance, in cooperation with some members (I do not say “all” out of respect for Anwar Malek) of the monitoring committee, who exposed the horror of what befell us, but only once the massacre had happened.

Everyone stampeded to the places that the committee was due to visit and it was there, in the wide avenues and public squares (and especially in Hassan Al Taha Street, which leads into Freedom Square), that we were received by bullets in place of observers. The children of the Euphrates met their fate: this one with a round in his chest, that with a piece of shrapnel in the waist and so on, to the last drop of blood.

By the time the afternoon sun began to set some thirteen young men had died. They had volunteered to take their places in the caravan of blood to restore the dignity the regime had denied them all those years. No one was shocked at what happened: it was the timing of the massacre that came as a surprise, the timing of the massacre that destroyed the credibility of the monitoring committees and the prestige of international resolutions.

Here is Deirrezzour, embracing its wounded and hiding its martyrs in the houses despite everything, despite death’s majesty and the bullets’ potency. It embraces its martyrs despite being torn apart within sight and hearing of the monitors who wolfed down kebabs and cups of water from the Euphrates and slept replete in their hotels, heedless of the rising blood and clanging bullets all about them.

Deiezzour stands on the frontline, stripped bare of everything but the throats that have not and never will tire of screaming “Death rather than humiliation!”; cries from the heart uncowed by death and the executioner’s brutality.

In Deirezzour this night, exposed breasts awaken the bullets’ hunger. A martyr in every alleyway, in every corner a someone wounded. In Deirezzour all the clinics and hospitals have been surrounded to give death a chance to cure the wounded and devour them.

In Deirezzour, the hastily erected field hospitals throng with the wounded, fleeing their deaths. The wounded, who choose the bleeding and pain of the surgeon’s attentions, the pain that brings camels to their knees, to avoid a second and more horrific death should Assad’s criminal gangs get hold of them, the men who commit crimes unequalled in Syria’s history.”

Khidr Al Deaar