A few days after my arrival in Raqqa in April 2024, Nour sent me a message. Well, more of a summons. She wants to talk to me about something, a secret. Stupidly, and probably because love stories fascinate me, I imagine that she will tell me that she has finally found a man who lives up to her expectations. Nour was getting married and I already saw myself invited to her wedding.
Our meeting is set at the Raqqa hotel where I sleep. An establishment that has just reopened. She arrives right on time and asks me if we can go and talk in my room. Nour sits on the bed and looks straight at me with a smirk.
– Céline, I was arrested by the Assad regime in June. I thought I was going to die.
My heart starts beating faster. I’m afraid for Nour. I am afraid because I have listened to dozens of testimonies from former prisoners of the Assad regime. Men broken for life by almost daily torture. I also know that women are not spared. Syrian women systematically raped by Bashar al-Assad’s men to terrorize opponents. This type of crime is still taboo in Syria, but the regime will stop at nothing.
An olive pit bracelet
In January 2020, while I was reporting in the northwest of the country with my journalist colleague Edith Bouvier, we came across two young women who had just come out of one of the prisons in Damascus. Not just any: the one nicknamed the “Palestine Branch”, managed by the formidable Syrian intelligence services, where the two sisters shared a cell the size of a coffin for several years.
That day, sitting in their father’s living room, their distress pierced my heart. The youngest remained silent on an armchair. The eldest didn’t say much. In any case, we were unable to ask them any questions about what they had experienced. Pushing victims of the unspeakable to remember in order to fuel a report is to awaken deep traumas. Journalists, unfortunately, too often forget this.
After about ten minutes, one of the sisters gets up to bring us a gift. She returns with, in her hand, two small bracelets made from olive pits. Throughout her detention, she was only allowed one meal a day: rice and olives. To occupy her mind, she made bracelets by collecting the stones of these olives. Carefully, she pierced them with a knife she had hidden. To tie them together, she pulled threads from her clothes. When she slips mine into my hand, I gasp with emotion. A tear runs down my cheek. The tale of horror needs no verbiage, this bracelet alone tells it all.
You know me!
When Nour tells me that she was arrested by the Assad regime, I immediately think of these two sisters. Very quickly, she reassures me and begins to laugh nervously, feeling my anxiety for her.
– Céline, I got through it as always. You know me! I’ll tell you about it, but you shouldn’t tell the people of Raqqa because very few know about it.
Nour is not ashamed. Nour is afraid of traitors. Those who live in Raqqa, but who transmit information to Damascus. A neighbor who is a little too jealous; an acquaintance seeking revenge on his family, a spurned lover… In times of war, anything is possible.
For half an hour, Nour will tell me about his arrest at Qamishli airport in northeast Syria. It was June 2023. She was going to Lebanon to participate in a conference with young Lebanese people. Qamishli is managed by Kurdish forces, but the Damascus regime controls some areas of the city, including the airport.
Nour, follow us
“When I arrived at the counter to check in my luggage, a man came to me and said, ‘Nour, follow us.’ This is how I found myself in an office with three men from the Bashar regime’s intelligence services. They questioned me for hours about my life, about my family, about my contacts. And I lied with each of my answers.
“I said for example that my father was retired, that he did nothing, that we had no money. They asked me where my iPhone came from. I replied that a friend had lent it to me to take beautiful photos in Lebanon. You know it when we travel, we opponents, we clean our phones before going to the airport, I had deleted all the applications like Whatsapp, Facebook, Instagram but I made a mistake: I did not delete my directory. They watched everything and I lied again. I begged them to believe me.
“They had a very precise information sheet on me with a lot of detail on who I was seeing in town. People are giving them information here in Raqqa! There was also the name of my brother and my father, but I told them that wasn’t my family. That they had the wrong person. I swore to them that my family was not against President Bashar al-Assad.”
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