Erdogan Rising - Hannah Smith Lucinda

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As she and I walked through that souk on a fresh April day, Assad’s thugs were opening fire on demonstrators in Deraa, eighty miles down the road, picking them off from the rooftops with the indifference of schoolboys playing video games. I hummed a non-committal murmur, which seemed enough to satisfy her.

      After a series of protracted emails, phone calls that came from a different number each time, missed meetings and finally some good luck, I eventually found an opposition activist called Roua. She was one of the young Damascenes – there were so few of them at the time it’s incredible they managed to find each other – who was trying to organise the Day of Rage that Friday. So far, the activists hadn’t scored much success – mere handfuls of people were showing up to their protests, and most were immediately arrested. Their ranks, such as they were, had been fully infiltrated by Syrian intelligence.

      When Roua came to meet me, on a sultry Tuesday night in a bustling restaurant in the Christian quarter of the old city, she was wearing a paper dental mask over her nose and mouth, and didn’t take it off in the whole time we spent together. She claimed she was hiding some work done recently on her teeth.

      ‘We are speaking to each other using Skype,’ she told me in perfect English. With her hennaed hair and hippyish clothes she wouldn’t have looked out of place at Glastonbury. ‘We use false names, and actually we wouldn’t even know each other if we passed on the street.’

      Her parting sentence confirmed my suspicions: she was terrified that if she showed her face, someone might notice that she had been meeting with a foreigner and start putting two and two together.

      ‘The walls have ears,’ she said, tapping her knuckles on the age-worn stone of the restaurant’s wall as she rose. I never managed to meet her or speak to her again; her phone numbers rang out, my emails to her went unanswered.

      All that fear and paranoia had birthed a society of sycophants. Everywhere I went in Damascus in that month when the uprising was just sprouting I found pictures of Bashar al-Assad. Bashar in military uniform, pasted onto a kebab shop’s heated glass cabinet. Bashar administering eye drops to a baby, pinned up on the door of a stationery shop. Bashar in dark glasses, superimposed onto the rear window of a sleek black Mercedes.

      Syrians who wished to go one step further put up posters of the Shia troika – Bashar with Hassan Nasrallah, the pugnacious leader of the Lebanese Shia militia Hizbollah, and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, the president of Iran at that time. For real favour-winning bonus points, they would also stick up a picture of Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father and first president of the dynasty – over a decade dead, but never too far away. Some young Syrians I met, befriended and went drinking with warned me to be careful on Fridays.

      ‘Stay in your hotel,’ said Faris, a plump and cheerful guy from an upper-class Sunni family. ‘Don’t go to the mosques or the old city. Wait until Friday prayers are fully over.’

      One of the others, a gay man called Ahmed, said he was sick of Bashar, but deeply apprehensive about the opposition. ‘We don’t know who they are,’ he warned me. ‘They might be Islamists, anybody.’

      I left Damascus and its small sparks of revolution in the spring of 2011 and returned to London to pitch the story. I got a couple of commissions from marginal magazines, but nothing more: the uprising in Libya was revving up and would dominate the news from the region until Gaddafi’s bloody end at the hands of a mob in October of that year.

      Meanwhile, the protests were growing in the Syrian cities. Homs, a multicultural university town close to the Lebanese border, was one of the epicentres, with thousands of people turning out around the old clocktower in the centre of the city chanting: ‘The people want the fall of the regime!’ With no international media able to operate freely in Syria the news of the demonstrations leaked out through shaky mobile phone footage. And as the protests spiralled out of the government’s control, the security forces started posting snipers on the rooftops to fire into the crowds. The increasingly emboldened activists were rounded up by the score and thrown into the regime’s feared prisons.

      Then, in the autumn of 2011, videos started appearing on YouTube showing groups of armed men in mismatched camouflage waving a three-starred flag – similar to but distinct from Syria’s official two-starred flag. The three stars quickly became the symbol of the opposition and the rebels announced themselves as the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Soon after, scores of Syrian military officers started defecting to join the FSA and the protests turned into full-blown conflict. Assad’s army placed the centre of Homs under siege, and the death toll began to soar. Suddenly Syria was the story.

      I had witnessed the opening acts and was desperate to go back and report there again. So over the next two years I saved up, made some more contacts in the newspaper industry and bought a flak jacket, and in February 2013 travelled to the Turkish borderlands with a few phone numbers and a plan to cross the frontier and go into rebel-held Aleppo. Thousands of Syrians were flooding into Turkey every day to escape the fighting between the FSA and Assad’s forces in the northern provinces of Idlib and Aleppo. Going the other way and entering the war zone was as easy as showing your passport to a Turkish border guard.

       February 2013 Free Syria

      The Syrian rebels had captured two main border crossings with Turkey, Bab al-Salaam (the Peace Door) and Bab al-Hawa (the Windy Door), and the Turkish government kept them open allowing rebels, refugees and journalists to cross in and out of rebel-held Syria. What had once been sleepy frontier outposts frequented by intrepid backpackers and cross-border traders were now funnels for weapons, aid and desperate people. My Syrian fixer, who had picked me up the night before and run through the basic logistics of the route into the war zone, left me at the first Turkish checkpoint at Bab al-Salaam, telling me that he would pick me up on the other side. With no passport, he had to travel into Syria via one of the smuggling routes a few hundred metres along the border. It was discombobulating enough to be left alone among the crowds of grimy kids tugging at my leg to sell me water, amid lines of cars, packed in every spare space with blankets, nappies and clothes. But that was nothing next to what I found on the other side of the frontier, past the scrums of shouting Syrians waving their documents at exasperated Turkish bureaucrats, the looted duty-free store, and finally the huge scrappy flags of the FSA that had been hastily sewn together and hoisted over their captured frontier. WELCOME TO FREE SYRIA, read the sign.

      Free Syria looked like a set from Mad Max. Armed men, many with their faces covered, roamed through city streets pancaked by Assad’s airstrikes. Mortars had slammed into the top floors of the housing blocks, leaving masonry dangling like melted cheese, but families still lived on the lower floors and on the street traders sold trinkets, children’s jewellery, scarves and wristbands decorated with the FSA’s three-starred flag. Hawkers at the side of the road sold the only fuel available, an illegal brew that they dispensed from plastic jerry-cans, and which screwed up car engines in months.

      In the rebel-held suburbs of Aleppo city in February 2013 I found the kind of idealistic young activists I had tracked down in Damascus – but they had been overwhelmed by the men with guns. Now, the so-called ‘liberated areas’ were battlegrounds for warlords who wanted to extract their share of bounty from the chaos. A thousand new little fiefdoms had sprouted in the space Assad left behind, each with an egocentric man drunk on hubris at the top and a score of lackeys beneath him. Former merchants, construction workers and imams had become self-styled leaders, their men either looting with abandon or, increasingly, imposing their own draconian ideas about Islam on the suffering population.

      At night, the city went dark – at least, the rebel-held part did. The electricity was cut off there and most people relied on generators powered by the moonshine fuel from the roadsides. The tarry smoke caught in my nostrils as I sat inside a scruffy makeshift media centre, once a family home and still dotted with keepsakes on the cracked and dusty shelves. Outside, young rebels took over the streets at night to fire mortar rounds into government territory, just a couple of kilometres away and still fully lit and functioning. That inevitably drew return fire, and curses from everyone desperate for a full night’s sleep.

      Stark daylight revealed huge piles

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