Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War
✒️ Author: Marwan Hisham, Molly Crabapple |. 📖 Published: 2018 | 🗓 Read: August 18, 2020 | 📄 Pages: 281
Summary
A bracingly immediate memoir by a young man coming of age during the Syrian war, Brothers of the Gun is an intimate lens on the century’s bloodiest conflict and a profound meditation on kinship, home, and freedom.
Why You Should Read It
An insightful look into the Syrian Civil War beyond the headlines you may have or have not heard.
Notable Highlights
In Arabic, it is said: “Whatever is banned is desired.” But instructors inverted the proverb: Whatever was desired was banned.
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Qawmiya is the Arabic word for nationalism, and it refers specifically to the pan-Arabist doctrine of Syria’s Baath Party. The English translation fails to capture its chest-puffing, militaristic cultishness; its saccharine exaltation of sacrifice; its pseudo-scientific pomp.
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We were both idealists—we wanted a modern country of clean buildings and respectful, educated people dressed in neat clothing who never raised their voices, who were sensitive to others, who bothered to sweep the streets outside their homes.
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As for the more scandalous parts of Nael’s Damascus life, he tried to keep his unseemly unconventionality from reaching his people’s ears, but boys have a weak point called pride, from which even the most damning secrets will leak.
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Our people used religiosity as a tranquilizer. Some viewed technology as devilish, while others saw it only as a testament to the wonder of God’s creation, rather than the product of questing human minds.
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To us, life here on earth was a trivial, ephemeral pleasure. Only the next world mattered. We must work for everlasting paradise.
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No one can see, in the moment, which of the thousand hidden preconditions have combined to turn a slain protester into a catalyst. You never know which murder will be the one too many. You never know which pebble will start the avalanche.
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He was an idealist by practice. He had to be. He had to make material the unmaterialized.
Notes: 1) Great phrasing and wording
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His grandson, caliph Harun al-Rasheed, fancied building a summer capital in the fertile Euphrates River Valley in the middle of the desert, and so he did, in Raqqa. But after the Abbasids, Raqqa would be all but forgotten for centuries. It burst back onto the world map in the most rash and dangerous of ways.
Notes: 1) Raqqa
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In the al-Has mountains, there were domed houses like the one my grandfather had built. My uncle contemplated the domes’ thick walls of straw and clay, which gave shelter from the desert’s cold. In summer, the breeze penetrated their perforated walls and refreshed the sweating faces inside. The scene along the mountainside—seashell-colored domes against barren cliffs—appealed to him so much that it inspired another painting for his office wall.
Notes: 1) Description Of Raqqa homes
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In its finished form, the café resembled the domes of al-Has, yes, but was so much more. It was a tribute to centuries of art that this land had once known but then forgotten. Its undulating curves were whitewashed, sensual in their simplicity. On nights when the power was not cut and the Euphrates’s level had not sunk too low, the café cast a captivating reflection on the river’s surface. Its reflected image, surfing upon those familiar waves, gave warmth to the passersby. The gracious lines of its domes danced and swam and endowed the eyes with pleasure, free of charge.
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The culture of restaurant dining barely existed in Raqqa, and only elitists practiced its etiquette. Raqqans did not notice the café’s artistry—for them it was just another place to eat. If the final bill was too high in their estimation, they simply refused to pay. They talked too loudly and carelessly damaged the elegant chairs. The tulip-shaded glasses slipped from their fingers, shattering on the dark-gray stone. My uncle realized that he had spent too much money and effort on the café, but he had created it to satisfy his artistic tastes rather than financial desires. He had built a tribute to the beauty of his land, but the café only reflected one thing in our community: our inability to appreciate refinement.
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Raqqa, along with the neighboring provinces of Deir ez-Zor and Hasakeh, is nicknamed the “breadbasket” of the whole country, but that winter the cost of one loaf mounted to twenty Syrian pounds, ten times the price from the previous month. People crowded in front of bakeries’ small windows for hours, squeezing, shoving each other, sometimes punching and cursing. If you were short, you would suffocate. If you were weak, you’d be thrown away. No law in the world can contain hungry mouths and empty stomachs.
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I looked at these people, desperate, angry, and scared. They were scared to blame the rebels who were about to enter the city. The rebels had supporters. Many. “They have a long hand,” it was whispered. They quietly assassinated Abduladeem Sheikho, my teacher at elementary school, who led the prayer last Eid, when Assad visited the city for the first time in the hopes of showing the world that he had support. Oh, the revolutionaries berated Raqqa for that one. Employees, teachers, supporters, tribesmen, and union members were all press-ganged by the government for a rally in the general square. Friends told me how they faked, for their bosses, reasons to excuse themselves from participating. One of them claimed that he attended, but not a single one of his co-workers had caught a glimpse of him. They were also scared to criticize the government officials or the soldiers, both of whom had their own doors through which to enter the bakeries and load their pickups with hundreds of pounds of bread, right in front of our yearning eyes. No one dared say a word. The government might stay in power. They had proved well enough that they were ruthless.
Notes: 1) Description of the nuanced Syrian civil war. Many people caught in the middle.
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We might fight each other for a sack of bread, but before the men with guns we were meek and humble, in a compliance that was its own species of humiliation. Oh, how politely the powerless must behave.
Notes: 1) Powerlessness
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One did not need to mention the year 1982, the year that old Hama vanished. The word events was enough. “Events” that eat up humans, that drown memories, that we never speak of again.
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Raqqans longed for one side to win, so that the siege would finally lift. We knew the regime firsthand, in all its brutality and intransigence. The rebels were unknown, but they said that they fought in our names. Perhaps they might be open to our influence. Raqqa stood at a fork between two potential futures—prison versus anarchy.
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We had grown so far apart that it took his family three weeks to tell me. Nael had joined the rebels. And here I was, standing on line in the freezing morning, giving a damn about nothing but a sack of bread.
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Shots came from all directions, in a continuous symphony, punctuated by the percussion of mortars. They flew through the chilly 5 A.M. light to crack like champagne glasses thrown against a wall. Their violence commingled with a sense of jubilation; the clashes rose with the sun.
Notes: 1) Word choice
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Who were the men fighting on the outskirts of my city? At the time, it didn’t seem like a priority to know. I wanted the regime to leave Raqqa because the regime was acting as our enemy—but as to the twenty-three battalions trying to oust them? I didn’t exactly have a chart. I knew about as little as a Western analyst. In the rest of the country, rebels fell into multiple categories. There were the local groups, like Nael’s group, Ahrar al-Tabga. They were countless in number, drawn from young men trying to defend their villages, or sometimes just bandits disguised as such.
Notes: 1) Situation
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Then there were the groups formed by the Islamists whom Assad had released from Sednaya prison after the first months of protests. Ideology, networks, cohesion. These guys had everything in place. Ahrar al-Sham started as three groups, merged into one, and in a matter of months snapped up territories in thirteen governorates. Some were Salafi, some not, but most were nationalistic in focus, disciplined in execution, and seized with a moronic misapprehension that democracy was an import from the decadent anti-Islam West.
Notes: 1) Situation part 2
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Some of the groups in these three wide categories fought under the three-starred independence flag of the Free Syrian Army, some did not, and some mixed nods to the FSA with Islamist references, but the FSA was more of a brand name than any sort of centralized command structure anyway.
Notes: 1) Situation part 3
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Finally, there was Jabhat al-Nusra. Al-Qaeda’s local branch—though they did not admit to being so at first—might have set up shop during the chaos of the war, but it was foreign in origin and objective. Nusra did not believe in our revolution, or that there was a revolution, or that revolutions were anything more than an infidel innovation imported from the infidel West. They did not care about the ideals for which Syrian protesters had died.
Notes: 1) Situation part 4
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Over several broken minutes I caught glimpses of fighting far away. Guys hid behind walls, shot, ducked—as their buddies readied their payloads of death. Vans swerved to disgorge more fighters. From my doorway, I stood and stared.
Notes: 1) Wow
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I never wanted the revolution to be armed, and I never fired a gun at another human. Every blown-off leg, every burned-off face filled me with anguish. War disgusted me. Yet there I stood, just steps outside the same home I’d lived in for years, enthralled, obsessive. You won’t hate me for confessing my enchantment. On this narrow ledge where violence met banal normality, I could feel life as pure upon me as the first warm rain of spring.
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No metaphor captures that sound a plane makes when it dives, the moment before releasing its load. It is its own—a pure creator of horror. You anticipate the consequences. You hold your breath as you imagine where the bombs will fall. The planes circled above the city to taunt us, then flew closer, making our tables tremble from the force of their sonic booms. Once, the pilot looped low enough for me to see the plane’s number on its wing. His white helmet shone like an astronaut’s. Raqqa is small, and when bombs hit its center, the whole city shook. They might strike ten miles away, but I could feel them closer than my jugular vein.
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The next day, I climbed up to the balcony again. “It’s not safe,” my father pleaded, but I didn’t listen. He seemed different to me now, clueless and worried in spite of all his years. He was no longer the wise, confident man who directed us to do this and that. Me? I was full of everything except fear. I imagined the bombs falling on me. I would be gone in a second. Death was not worth thinking about or hiding from in a basement. There was nowhere else I wanted to be. “Don’t worry,” I told him.
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Haqquna was Arabic for “our right.” Our right to vote. Next to the logo they wrote, Haqquka, Haqquki, Haqquna. Your right (masculine), your right (feminine), our right.
Notes: 1) Definition
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Always, the West comes here, posturing about the protection of minorities, freedom, democracy, fair play. Always, they carve up our countries, steal our resources, bomb our cities—and then wonder why the sweet words they muttered while doing so don’t sound the same in our ears. In the eyes of many Syrians, so-called universal values were tools of a foreign agenda, aimed at the destruction of our society. This idea grew stronger after 2013, when Assad massacred 1,300 Syrians with chemical weapons in Eastern Ghouta. When the international community ignored the victims of the Syrian regime, conspiracy theories flourished and Islamists filled the void.
Notes: 1) The view of the west.
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Flush with money from wealthy Gulf supporters, Syrian Islamists earned acceptance through military victory and self-promotion. The revolution mutated in their hands. They hijacked its language and recruited its fighters but never, not even for a moment, wanted to achieve its goals.
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They say that war brings out the worst and the best in people. In our case, the worst people were rewarded and the best were no more. And this is how I remember Nael.
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War is a team sport, inimical to personal credit.
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Islamists didn’t have to exert much effort to hijack the revolution—it was easily given up by the politically uneducated crowds who had started it. Now it was an arena of jihad, divided into halves, with believers versus unbelievers on one side, and nationalist-believers versus takfiri-mercenaries on the other.
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More and more, Syrians were excluded from the speaking parts. Foreigners directed the scene.
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By mid-January 2014, the Syrian theater had fragmented into something infinitely more complex than a civil war between two sides seeking absolute triumph, more fractal than a mere quadripartite. It became a proxy war masterminded by global and regional powers to gain influence, and Tareq and his fellow fighters were tesserae in a tarnished mosaic.
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But alas, he was probably already a killer without even knowing it. We opened the door for him to our world as a human being, and he entered so gratefully that several nights we had to shoo him away after dawn. “Go back, before your father finds out you’re gone!” It was like some warped mirror of the American teen comedy, in which the boy steals his dad’s car and sneaks out past curfew. But this car had a machine gun mounted to the back.
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Aleppo had celebrated being chosen the capital of Islamic culture, but nine years later, its only culture was class war. Al-Shahba, as its residents like to call it, was burdened by a devastating struggle. It had long been proud of its status as one of the world’s oldest cities, inhabited continuously for thousands of years. But beneath that vanity hid a bleaker state of being. The UNESCO World Heritage Old City that had indulged and charmed visitors for millennia was sandwiched—less romantically—between West Aleppo (organized, increasingly modern, and generous to the wealthy) and the wretched East, deep in the mire of poverty. Only the Citadel separated them, reminding them that Aleppo was more than its present, that both sides were temporary visitors in the span of history.
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Aleppo: the wellspring of my teenage dreams, and dwelling place of my college years. The city of dust and love. The city of love on dust.
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Life here, with its endless accretions of ancient, past, and modern beauties, cultures, and conveniences, seemed no less fine than how I pictured it in the European capitals. A world away, in other words, from the other Aleppo in the east.
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Like much of the city’s East, Karm al-Myassar had been officially designated as an agricultural plain by the government. It was not. It was an urban neighborhood of necessity, built illegally and overnight by the rural poor, who had fled their villages to seek better prospects in Aleppo’s outskirts. It grew up without planning, building codes, or logic—excepting that of the clans who handed out cigarettes and candy for votes and dealt drugs from their wheelbarrows.
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Fighting ISIS felt different from battles against the regime. It felt better.
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Syria’s real loss wasn’t the millions of displaced civilians, nor the hundreds of thousands of casualties. It was the practical side of identity, real or fake.
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Our charge was terrorism, but the only undeniable truth was that governments brought charges against their own jihadis only when they arrived in Syria, though many of them were already on the watch lists, yet they somehow flew to Turkey anyway.
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What finally pushed me to leave was not just the daily threat, nor war’s cruelty; it was the instinctive evil that had started to prevail in people’s eyes. People in Raqqa had begun to prey on each other, and their anger at the world frightened even me too much. Not that I blamed them. Rather, I was afraid of becoming one of them. Raqqa’s time zone had reared hundreds of years backward, and I was striving not to lose all sight of the future.
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