Away From Cities, a Life Laced With Violence for Syrians
Bryan Denton for The New York Times
The Syrian rebels’ flag flies
over the Bab al-Hawa border crossing to Turkey. The rebels’ campaign has
cleared swaths of territory of government forces.
By C. J. CHIVERS
Published: September 29, 2012
RUWEIHA, Syria — The children slept on the floor of a school on a mountain slope.
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Bryan Denton for The New York Times
Syrian families displaced by fighting slept outside at an abandoned school in Idlib Province.
The New York Times
Life in the Idlib countryside has turned into a
wearying grind punctuated, in flashes and roars, by moments of
spectacular and often indiscriminate violence.
They did not stir as artillery shells passed high overhead to slam into
Sarja, the village they had fled, even as each distant rumble told of an
explosion that might have killed them had they remained at home.
“There are eight families here,” said Jaber Zein Aldin, 72, who watched
from the school door as red tracers arced through the night sky. “Forty
people, escaping the shelling and the aircraft.”
In northern Syria, the fighters seeking the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad have created zones in which they and local revolutionary councils are the interim governing force.
They have organized basic services, including field hospitals, policing,
courts and rubble cleanup. In at least one town, they publish a small
newspaper. And here they move openly and prepare for the next fight.
But even in this de facto safe area, the Syrian government retains a
lethal reach. Unable to pursue the rebels on the ground through the
farmland and mountains of Idlib and Aleppo Provinces, Mr. Assad’s forces
drop bombs from aircraft and shell villages where rebels are active,
endangering civilians.
It has also cut off water from much of the countryside and switches
electricity on and off, punishing some towns with longer blackouts than
others depending on residents’ suspected sentiments.
The two sides have entered a duet of attrition, turning life in the
Idlib countryside into a wearying grind punctuated, in flashes and
roars, by moments of spectacular and often indiscriminate violence. With
cooler weather approaching, many crops at risk and fuel in short
supply, Syrians assessing the prospects for the second winter since the
uprising began say the outlook is grim.
“We are afraid of the winter,” said Moyad, a pharmacist and a member of
the governing revolutionary council in Kafr Takharim, a city of about
25,000 people. Moyad asked that his surname be withheld to protect his
relatives from retaliation. “During these last months we have received
fuel only twice, and we have not much flour for bread. This winter will
be cruel.”
On a strictly military level, the rebellion’s tactical successes have
been undeniable. At the start of this year, they were all but in hiding,
and government troops moved freely over the ground.
Since then the rebels’ campaign of ambushes and roadside bombs has
cleared swaths of territory and forced army and militia convoys to avoid
most roads. Even the M5 highway, an asphalt ribbon linking many of
Syria’s largest cities, has long stretches that are in rebel hands.
The rebels’ flag flies over their own border crossings to Turkey, at Bab
al-Hawa and at the Syrian side of Kilis, beckoning to areas of the
country the rebels call free.
Yet Syria’s military and the loyalist militias are far from defeated.
They have concentrated forces in cities and retained part of the
archipelago of outposts that they occupied in the countryside when the
crackdown intensified last year. And they have unleashed an air
campaign, dropping free-fall bombs or firing rockets onto rebel
territory, an indiscriminate practice documented this month in field research by Amnesty International.
Often the ordnance strikes homes. In Ablin — the hometown of Lt. Col.
Hussein Harmoush, the first public defector from the Syrian Army — an
airstrike destroyed the medical center. With no end to the violence
near, Mr. Aldin and his family, sleeping in the classrooms of Ruweiha,
have become a drop in a human tide.
Some families have crowded into others’ homes, where women and children
huddle, sometimes with wounded fighters, listening for the next blasts
and wondering where to go.
In Kafr Takharim, for instance, Moyad said families had taken in as many
as 6,000 civilians displaced by the fighting in Aleppo, where a battle
has raged since midsummer.
Kawkab Darweesh, who has been displaced for months, said she and her
family had been uprooted, forced to survive off the hospitality of
friends. She was from the mountain town of Rama, where government troops
remain. Both sides are expecting a battle for the town, she said, and
she does not know if her home still stands.
“We are afraid to go back,” she said. “We don’t know what happened
there. They are destroying houses over the owners’ heads.”
Other families have moved into the olive groves, where they camp in pump
houses, small agricultural buildings or even in archaeological ruins.
Many have fled over the nearest border, to Turkey.
On one recent night, just short of the border near the Turkish city of
Reyhanli, Syrian families mingled with smugglers in the fields, waiting
for gaps between the Turkish border patrols and then dashing for the
barbed wire and to life as refugees.
More than 90,000 Syrians who have fled the fighting are registered in 13
temporary refugee camps along Turkey’s 550-mile-long border with Syria,
according to figures released Friday by the Turkish government. Many
more have crossed the border illegally and are not in the official
tallies. One local Turkish official, who asked not to be named because
of his diplomatic status, estimated that at least 60,000 Syrian refugees
were living unregistered in Turkey.
Aside from the camps, Turkey has set up a temporary shelter by the
border gate in Kilis, where another 8,000 Syrians stay and receive daily
supplies, the official said. “We see a surge in numbers on days of
heavy shelling by the regime around Aleppo and Idlib, but try to contain
daily entries around 500,” he said. “There are still thousands of
people who have left their homes and live in the fields.”
Many people here said they felt abandoned by the world. The rebels are
short of weapons, the civilians short of safe shelter and the
necessities of life.
Jamal Marouf, a prominent rebel commander in the highlands of Jebel
al-Zawiya, where much of the army has been driven away, said the rebels
were trying to restore services that ended with the withdrawal of the
government, but they lacked the means to be fully effective. “All of the
institutions are not working any more,” he said.
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