World Without Names
By: Hasan Almossa
Tags: Syria

I met Um Osman for the first time in 2012, when we were distributing humanitarian aid in the area around the Serjilla caves. That was before the interview with her son aired on TV.

Serjilla is an important ancient region in the Zawiya Mountain, and its history goes back to the first century CE. It was abandoned some 2000 years ago, in the middle of the third century, as a result of natural disasters and a plague-like epidemic. It witnessed social and economic prosperity in the fourth century and then, in the tenth, it was abandoned again. In 2011, people who were escaping the shelling in nearby villages and towns found shelter in its caves and bathhouses, which shielded them from warplanes, or so they thought.

That day, I asked myself: “Did the war send Syria a thousand years back in time so that people would seek shelter from the regime’s jets in the Serjilla caves? This was happening at the same time as other nations were thinking of extending their reach to outer space and settling on other planets”.

In one of Serjilla’s homes that had been abandoned for a thousand years, I met Um Osman. Even though the regime did not care about such important monuments, the houses’ structures had been preserved. They were two-story buildings with supporting pillars in the corridors. The upper level was occupied in living and sleeping rooms, while the bottom was used as a storage area for food, supplies, and tools. However, people now used the bottom levels to protect themselves, as the upper ones were without roofs and thus open to jets. Some people stayed in animals’ stables or in graves that had black stone coffins carved from huge rocks.

Most of the people of Zawiyah Mountain escaped to the ancient places that surrounded their towns, generally at night, to avoid the barrel bombs thrown during their sleep. Some would return to their hometowns during the day to work in their farms and earn a living.

Um Osman had escaped to these ancient places with her daughter-in-law and grandson, who had not yet been named, waiting until his father came back. They called him “Abu Osman”.

When Um Osman knew that we work with humanitarian organizations, she left the corner where she had been sitting, her body thin inside a pitch-black dress, and headed towards us, her back bent so that her hands almost touched the ground. She would extend her head toward me like an elderly turtle with poor eyesight. Symptoms of her illness had appeared all over her body, leaving her pale face carved by the wounds of age and misery.

“Oh son, I have no wish for aid, thanks to God who gives us enough food and water, but I would like you to help me find my son.”

I sat next to her, and she began telling me her tear-stained story. I remember some of what she said:

“Osman went to Idlib to sell his motorbike and buy my cancer medication. I did not want him to go because God, all thanks to Him, gave me the strength and will to endure and be patient. He’s been gone for a year and four days, and there has been no news about him yet.”

When I turned to Abir, wondering about this story, she nodded her head in acquiescence.

“Everyone lies to me — they told me that he’d escaped to Lebanon to visit his brother, and they also said that he went to work in Damascus so that he could afford the price of the medicine. Yet Osman is a good son, and it isn’t likely he would go away without telling me. They said there was no way to communicate and that the roads were out of service. But even a mountain wouldn’t keep Osman away from his mother. They’re all liars — my heart says they arrested him and took him, just like his father, because he’d joined in the demonstrations. Half of the young people were taken and arrested. My heart aches for their stolen youth.”

Her moans intensified. “The last time they lied to us was when they took us to the border near Hama to talk to him by phone. They took money for the call — I do not know how much, Abir knows — but everything we were told was lies, lies.”

She turned toward Abir. “Let Abir tell you.” She pointed out at her daughter-in-law, who was sitting like an antique statue in that abandoned place while holding her baby. “Tell him, Abir!”

But Abir kept silent, and I discovered that she did not want to talk in front of her mother-in-law.

Hours later, Abir told me secrets Osman’s mother did not know, and should not know.

She looked for me when we were distributing aid so as to give me those details she did not want her mother-in-law to hear.

She said: “Osman is neither in Lebanon nor in Damascus. He’s being held in Saydnaya Prison, but we did not tell anyone. I swear to you that my mother-in-law would die if she knew. A while ago, a man came and visited us, and he said he’d been detained with my husband in the same prison, and Osman had told him to let us know that they had arrested him from Idlib’s main square when he went to sell the motorbike.

The man said that he knows someone who could offer us a phone call with Osman, but that it would cost us 500,000 Syrian pounds. My brother and I sold the land that we’d inherited from our father to get that sum of money. But the man refused to give us an appointment before we gave the money to a third party from Idlib’s Maaret al-Numaan district. We did not know the third party, but we were forced to give him the money. The appointment was supposed to be three days after we handed over the money. A month passed, and we — my aunt, little Abu Osman, and I,” and here, she nodded at the child, “went to the liberated areas near Hama. Our appointment was at eight in the morning, and we arrived an hour beforehand. I spent two days teaching the child how to say Baba, so that his father, who had never seen him, would hear his voice. I also tickled him so that he would laugh and be heard. I do not know why my aunt made food. She made a lot of the foods that Osman loves,” Abir said while gesturing to the wood stove and black containers nearby. On a high hill near Hama, we sat, waiting in the sun as they told us that’s where we’d have coverage for Syriatel service.

Eight o’clock came, and then it was nine, but no one called. Every time we asked the mediating man, he would tell us to be patient, as perhaps the phone might not have reached Osman, or they could not give it to him at the moment. I do not know why, but my aunt took out the food and said: Come on, people! The food is cold, and Osman has not yet arrived.

When I told her that Osman was not coming, she answered angrily, ‘Just let him call, and I will tell him to come, and he will come because Osman does not refuse my requests. You’ll see!’

Then she said again, ‘Oh God, the food is cold’.

The mediator said that they might not be able to offer the call that day, but my aunt kept telling him, ‘There’s no hurry, he will call. Maybe he’s in the bathroom. Maybe he’s shaving off his long beard, maybe…’.

That day, my aunt seemed to be hallucinating. We waited until afternoon, and no one called. After that, we did not see the man. We did not even know who took the money, and Osman never called.”

I promised Abir that I would make every possible effort to search for any detainees freed from Sydnaya prison, so I could bring her news about Osman. I told her that one of my brothers had been arrested, and had been in the same prison, and that I would search for her husband just as I would for my brother.

It was an amazing coincidence that, when my brother was freed from the detention center, he had memorized a lot of the names and addresses of detainees. Human memory was the only thing allowed to capture and smuggle information out of prisons. Most importantly, he had an oral message from a detainee with whom he’d spent time in Sydnaya, for his mother who had cancer. Unfortunately, we have not been able to deliver the message to the mother.

Later, I learned all the stunning details that filled in the gaps in Um Osman’s story.

My brother, who had been detained after my other brother was injured, told me:

“I know Osman well from our days in the headquarters of state security.

At night, we’d hear the jingling of keys and then the clanking of the door’s lock. Our hearts would drop to the bottom of our ribcage out of fear from the sounds. We’d have to rush to stand so that we were facing the walls. The blood inside our bodies would dry up as we waited for the name the guard would state, and whoever it was would then be driven to an investigation that night. When the name was pronounced, its bearer would head towards the guards without looking at them, extending his hands to be handcuffed, and readying his head for the mask that prevented light from reaching his eyes. Then the prisoner would be pushed through corridors with all kinds of cursing, insults, and punching, and the prisoner wouldn’t know where it was coming from. ‘Do you want freedom, you son of a bitch? You, you brother of a bitch, do not like Mr. President! Have you, you bastard, forgotten who is your lord and the lord of lords?’

With every word, the iron wires would strike the prisoner, until he arrived in the room with the investigator. The prisoner would be fixed to the ceiling like a ghost, and then slow death would commence.

That day, they opened the door and did not call any name. Instead, they threw a few people inside. One of these people was somehow unconscious.

I’d heard that Osman had been a poet since his schooldays. But, at the time, we weren’t friends.

I looked at the face of the unconscious man, bathed in blood oozing from his head, as he was struck by those wires with which they welcomed the detainees.

Dorm 236 was four meters by six, and we were all crammed in that small space that was not large enough for our bodies. We counted tiles that paved the ground, and each person there had less than one tile of space for his body.

The dorm’s door clanked, and they threw him in, in a semi-conscious state.

I treated his wounds and tried to calm him, but he kept crying and repeating one sentence:

“’ My mom, you guys, my mom has cancer, and I was on my way to buy her chemotherapy treatment, I swear…’

We understood from him that he’d been stopped on the motorbike he meant to sell at a checkpoint in Idlib’s main square. They’d yanked off the black scarf he’d wrapped around his head to protect himself from the cold while driving. They made him get off his vehicle, saying he was a terrorist and his scarf was a sign. They dumped the gasoline out of the motorbike and burned it. Then they tied him up and tossed him in their car.

He said he did not know who they were: Were they with the regime? A gang? He did not know.

The next day, when we heard the door’s sounds clanking once more, we rushed to the wall. Death awaited those who looked in the faces of the guards. Again, they wanted Osman. They took him, but we forgot to tell him not to confess to anything, and not to tell the ‘investigator’ about the beating he’d received on the way because if he did, he would be beaten like hell on his way back.”

My brother told me that Osman was not lucky: He was accused of murder.

“How?” I asked.

“They’d bring us in front of the investigator, masked and handcuffed. We wouldn’t see the investigator. We’d hear only the voice that asked us: Do you confess?

And when you asked him, ‘What should I confess to?’ they would tie your hands with rope and hang you from the ceiling such that your toes would hardly touch the ground and your arms would be twisted behind your back and lifted above your shoulders. You would hear your ribs crack and then you’d wish for death without being able to reach it. You’d stay like that for hours, and this was called the Ghost method, and it was in this position that you were questioned.

People differed in how much they could tolerate such a method. Some confessed to all the crimes of a lifetime in the first hour, even though in reality they were innocent from the mere crime of even stepping on an ant. Osman was weak, and he confessed to everything. He was a gentle poet and had a lot of feelings, but he could not remain steadfast until the end.

Osman told me about the first session of his investigation:

‘They guided me through the door to the room, and then stopped me midway. Through my mask, I could see a ghost-like figure sitting behind a table at the center of the room. The smell of cigarette puffs and rancid alcohol was suffocating. It was a matter of seconds before I was fixed as a ghost between the ceiling and the ground, such that my soul could escape through my shoulders. The investigator replied to the uncontrolled screams I emitted, as I felt my ribs being broken and heard the sound of their cracking and all the other sounds ringing in my ears.

And they said: ‘What happened to you, you bastard? Be a man! Just yesterday, you were holding a gun and killing members of the security forces’.

‘I swear to God that I did not do it,’ and my swearing irritated him, as though he were God.

Someone behind me hit me with barbed wires. From the first strikes, I felt I was being cleaved in two. I do not know the number of lashes I received because I was numb. Then the person behind me was ordered to stop hitting me, and I was again asked: “Tell me, how did you kill our guys in Idlib’s al-Maara district? Do not be stubborn and let me help you”.

“I swear, sir, I swear on God the Greatest that I have no piece of information or the faintest idea on the matter.”

And before I could complete his sentence, the man shouted in my face: ‘Which God and which Greatest? Let him come and save you! Here, no one can save you unless you confess.’

The man was silent for a while as he took a drink, then approached me and spit what was left in his mouth at my masked face. It was a disgustingly smelling wine. After that, I felt a burning ember planted at the bottom of my neck. This was the first cigarette to be extinguished on my body. Then I heard his voice going away, and he said: “Warrant officer! Convince him to confess before I come back!”.

‘Yes, Sir.’

They stripped off my clothes, including the underclothes and started putting out cigarettes on my body.

The burning whips again started hitting my back, shoulders, head and stomach. In the beginning, I could sense the flagellum sizzling on my skin, but soon I lost conscience. When I opened my eyes, I was back in the dorm with inmates clustered around me, trying to wake me from my coma, some of them massaging my shoulder muscles while others trying to stop the bleeding of my back.

In another interrogation session, they pulled out my fingernails and toenails. In the next session, they threatened me with rape.

All of this, and I did not confess to anything I had not done. But in the end, I confessed to everything they wanted to hear”.

Osman wept when I blamed him for confessing to something he had not done. He told me: ‘I swear I’m not a coward, I tolerated all kinds of torture: the Ghost for hours and days; being hit by electric sticks; electric shocks even against my testicles; cigarettes extinguished on every point of my body; my fingernails being pulled out; piss on my head and, several times, in my mouth; and being threatened with rape. I tolerated all of that, but what they threatened me with the night I confessed would’ve been unbearable for any human”.

When I asked him, ‘What did they threaten you with?’ he cried for a long time and then he stared at my face: “My brother, they repeated the same scenario with me until the investigator went out, asking the torturers to convince me to confess. They beat me until they were tired. They cursed me with the worst words they knew, and that day they made sure I did not lose consciousness. Then voices swarmed around me, and I hung between death and life more than three hours before the door was open, and I heard a voice:

“Osman! Speak! Tell me how they arrested you!”

“Sir, I swear I was going to Idlib to sell my motorbike and get my mother her medicines.”

He shouted: “Medicines for your mother?” Then he described my mother with an insulting word I’d never heard before and said, “You’re wasting your time and ours, and you do not want us to help you!”

He drank from his glass and spit half its content onto my face and asked again, “Where is your mother, you bastard?”

“In the village.”

“Whom does she live with?”

“With me and my wife. We never even leave our home, I swear.”

“How old is she?”

“71.”

“What about your wife, you bastard?”

“She’s 19.”

“Is your wife beautiful, you bastard?”

When I did not answer, he went on: “Is her body beautiful? Is sleeping with her sweet?”

I did not answer, so he said, “If you do not want to confess, she will witness our investigation here tomorrow. She will be here naked beside me, and we will be drinking together. Tomorrow, tomorrow. Then he laughed and giggled like a junkie, and he told someone else, “What do you think, officer? Is his 71-year-old mother good for you? I know you’re a son of a bitch and you like old women, and you wouldn’t let one get away”.

“Sir, I await your order.”

“What would you think if you went and brought her, and spent with her a happy night?”

I was out of control, and I screamed: “No! My mother, no!”

This time, nobody hit me, but he told me quietly, “Why not? Do not you want freedom? The officer will show you freedom by word and also deed… Won’t you sacrifice an old woman to the officer for a few hours? We sacrifice our souls to protect you and your family, and to protect the homeland’s border… How little you feel for your homeland!”.

He then ordered the most difficult of all other torture methods I’d received.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “you will bring the mother and the wife of this animal. Then, at ten at night, you’ll gather for me all the single men and bring a liter of whisky. I want to be drunk with your wife and mother tomorrow, so, if you want, do not confess. Tomorrow, you’ll bring me this animal without a face mask so he can see freedom with his own eyes. Do you want freedom or not??”

I shouted at them, “No! No! My mother’s sick. I can confess everything you want, but do not hurt my mother”.

My brother commented: “Definitely they do that. In the past they had done that and worse. Osman had heard some of what the other detainees discussed, and he could not bear this, and confessed to everything they wanted. Osman was not lucky. He was handed a difficult paper and told to confess to its content, and he signed”.

I told my brother: “I do not understand.”

My brother said: “It does not matter if you confess or not. The investigator has piles of papers printed with ready-made accusations. All he has to do is report daily to his leadership that he’s captured people accused of such-and-such, and when the checkpoints bring detainees, he’ll choose one group by chance, with whatever comes to his hand, giving a paper to the detainee who’s been tortured with the Ghost in front of him for hours and saying: sign this for your confession. Before signing, the detainee suffers in many sessions of torture such as I have told you about.”

“So, they do not want names,” I said.

“No. They want numbers. One time, imagine, they brought us a group of detainees wearing black t-shirts. When we asked what they were accused of, they said they did not know. We found out later that they were accused of wearing black t-shirts because there were orders to arrest a number of people who wore black. The reason was that people in one demonstration agreed to wear black, so they could know each other, and so the regime arrested everyone wearing black, even if they were only passing by in the street and had no connection to the demonstration. Wearing black was a reason to be arrested that day.

They want numbers, and, for every accusation, they want a number from the leadership. Osman was unlucky because he was accused of arming and killing members of the security apparatus, while on my paper, I was accused of demonstrating and sabotaging public property and insulting the president and raising the colonizers’ flag.

Osman was miserable. He was tortured more than any of us. He was called by his name nearly every time the door clanked and people turned their faces to the walls. In the last period, they pushed him down stairs so that ligaments in his leg tore, and he could not get up any more, but they still insisted on calling his name. Another detainee had to sacrifice for him and receive his torture to allow him to rest. I sacrificed and was tortured for him several times. Every time, three torturers whipped me 300 times. These men have no idea what humanity means.

“Did the person who sacrificed for him ever confess instead of him as they tortured them for a confession?” I asked.

“No, no… They find a pleasure in torturing humans. They would come late at night to get twenty people to torture because the officer on duty would be drunk yet not sleepy, so he’d have fun with different types of torture even a demon could not devise.”

My brother kept silent for a while, and then his forehead dropped into his palm, and he lifted his eyes a little.

“Imagine that once, one of the officers on duty had a nightmare, and he woke up frightened in his bed, calling out: ‘Those dogs want to choke me. They want to choke me. Thirty of them sat on my chest and meant to choke me’. Then he shouted at the guards and torturers, ordering them around on that horrible night.

The door clanked, and everyone rushed and turned towards the walls as usual, and we heard his voice giggling.

He said: ‘You’re still sleeping, right? Too bad… We have a 5-star Meridien service here, right? Listen, you bastards, we’ve got new orders from the colonel. Tonight, thirty terrorists have to be executed. Later, thirty others among you who tried to harm the colonel in his nightmare will be wanted, so let them show themselves or we’ll get them out. We know them one by one’.

Nobody moved. At that moment, we would’ve wished for the walls to break so that we could fly away. How we wished at that moment to die! A horrible silence hung over us for several seconds, and then a soft crying sounded, which spread to the others before the guards’ voice returned like an earthquake.

They said: ‘Escape is not an option, got it? Okay then. Everyone who receives a blow to the head, leave immediately!’

Those were terrible moments. To wait, listening to the voice of the striker as he passed from one head to the next, was to be born again. But I was struck by that iron slap, and thus chosen amongst the thirty to be executed.

They took us out without giving us time to say goodbye or to leave a last will for our families, or to decide how to divide our possessions and clothes amongst those who were to live. We walked, tied together by a long chain that bound us all, to the courtyard full of masked faces.

“You thirty, get ready for an execution after a bit.”

They put us on low chairs, but they did not tie up our hands. We stayed like statues next to each other in a row, and all of us were listening to the prayers of our neighboring inmates as their hearts beat rapidly in their chest. After a torturing handful of minutes, ropes dropped from above, and executioners started placing them around our necks. The main officer’s voice shook the room:

“You’re afraid, right? You still want to live even after you ravaged the country, and you also want to choke me, you bastards!”

He unleashed a flood of horrible curses we did not hear well, as we were making sure to say our last shahadah, “There is no God but God and Muhammad is His Messenger”. One man from, I imagined, the bottom row, raised his voice and challenged the officer by reciting verses from the Qu’ran. The officer and his torturers went crazy, and he shouted:

“Are you calling on your Lord to save you? Let Him come and save you! Let me see Him! Let Him come! If He wanted you, He wouldn’t have let you come here. The lord who can save you here is Mr. President, understand?’

We heard a strong punch, that sounded as if it took off a piece of his head.

“Who is your lord, you bastard?’

The man did not reply, but we heard the sounds of repeated punches accompanied by the question: ‘Who is your lord, you bastard? Mr. President! The president!’

‘I do not recognize your Lord!’

We heard the man’s scream, and then he kept silent forever. I imagined the officer’s voice saying, ‘Let him die like a dog’, then howled like a wolf, ordering: ‘Carry out the executions!’.

The chairs were kicked out from under our feet from the start of the row. Yet the strange thing was that, with every kick to a chair, the man’s screaming increased instead of being choked off. When the chair down my feet was kicked away, I found my hands, as a reaction, grabbing the rope above me so not let it snap my neck and leave my body float in mid-air.

It was a dirty game, as they’d left our hands free, hung between life and death. He whose hands untied the rope no doubt would choke, especially when the torturers struck him and shouted: ‘Leave the rope, dogs, you definitely do not want to die! You want to live…”

The way that night ended was thousands of times worse than a real execution. They said that the officer wanted to have fun after his accursed nightmare, so he made up that game of death.

They did not want us to die at that moment because they did not want to lose the pleasure of torturing us.”

My brother then turned to me. “Do you imagine a death harder than this psychological torture?

They dropped us and splashed us with hot water that burned our bare skin. Then they stroked our bodies with salt and said we could leave for the dorm and sleep in safety. Yet, how could someone whose wounds had been painted with salt taste the sweetness of sleep?

We went back, happy to be alive, as if we had been born again, but not all of us came back. Osman and I came back, but we lost some older people who could not manage seizing the rope. They must have choked. Our friends who were waiting their turn were postponed to the next day, and they lived a thousand deaths before their time of death finally arrived. They allowed us to sleep in their places, stretching out our whole bodies and taking their spots on the ground while they slept standing, awaiting their last moments to come.