Finalist: Associated Press, by Staff
For its brave portrayal of the chaotic civil war in Syria, using text stories as well as multimedia tools to provide on-the-ground accounts as well as wider context, often at personal peril to the journalists.
Nominated Work
June 21, 2012
EDITOR'S NOTE: Journalist Ben Hubbard was part of a three-member Associated Press team that spent two weeks with rebels in northern Syria, gathering firsthand information on the increasingly bloody rebellion against President Bashar Assad — the longest and deadliest uprising of the Arab Spring.
By Ben Hubbard
SARJEH, Syria (AP) — Rebel commander Ahmed Eissa al-Sheikh keeps a paper on his desk bearing the names of the dead from his brigade. The first 16 are neatly typed below a Quranic verse extolling martyrdom. The next 14 are handwritten and crammed into the margin, because the paper is full.
Al-Sheikh, an Islamist with a long black beard and gray fatigues, runs the Falcons of Damascus group from the mayor's office in his village, which his fighters have taken over. The list is a constant reminder of al-Sheikh's personal score with the Syrian regime: 20 of the dead are his relatives, including three brothers and his 16-year-old son, all killed fighting Syrian forces in the last year.
One of northern Syria's most powerful and best-armed commanders, Al-Sheikh boasts more than 1,000 fighters, and they don't shy away from rougher tactics themselves. They have released prisoners in bomb-laden cars and then detonated them at army checkpoints — turning the drivers into unwitting suicide bombers.
Most of their weapons are booty, including at least two anti-aircraft guns, some anti-tank missiles and one tank, but they buy arms with donations from "honorable businessmen." Although al-Sheikh, who ran a grocery store before the uprising, wouldn't disclose the source or amount, he gets enough to pay some of his men monthly salaries of about $25, slightly more for those with wives and children. His fighters say the cash comes from Syrian expatriates and other Arabs. He was heard on the phone thanking a group in Bahrain.
"God willing, Syria will not bow to anyone but Allah after the regime falls," he said.
Al-Sheikh is one face of the rebel movement in Syria. There are many more.
During two weeks in northern Syria, three Associated Press journalists counted more than 20 rebel groups, with anywhere from fewer than 100 to more than 1,000 fighters each. They go by names like the Idlib Martyrs Brigade and the Shield of the Revolution, and while all share a deep hatred of President Bashar Assad's regime, their unity stops there.
Simply put, no one is in charge.
This comes at a time when efforts to end 15 months of strife in Syria are collapsing, and the rebel movement has taken the lead in the struggle against Assad. Some countries have talked of boosting the rebels' capabilities against the regime, and U.S. officials have told the AP that U.S. operatives are sifting among the rebel groups to determine which should receive arms from other Arab nations.
Rebel coordination rarely extends beyond neighboring towns and villages and never to the provincial or national level. Many rebels don't even know the commanders in towns two hours away.
While the regime has been brutal, so have some of the rebels — another cause of concern for the West.
Opposition activists filter most information about the rebels sent outside the country, making it hard to get an accurate picture. But several groups said they had sent captured soldiers "to Cyprus," which the rebels use as a euphemism for execution usually by gunfire.
One group said it had killed two brothers caught collaborating with the regime — one during interrogation, the other by firing squad.
Rebels have scored small victories against regime forces throughout Syria's northern Idlib province. Armed with bought, looted or homemade weapons, they have destroyed government army posts and littered main highways with charred army vehicles.
In the countryside, they roam freely in much more territory than was previously known, their bearded, camouflaged gunmen on motorcycles zipping through strings of towns and villages with no remaining police or security presence. Children often hail the fighters with V-for-victory signs and calls of "May God protect you!"
But Syria's army retains a chokehold on many large towns and cities with tanks, attack helicopters and heavy artillery, weapons that the rebels' current arms can't challenge.
Indeed, more than two dozen rebel commanders, fighters and activists said that without better arms they can do no more than chip away at the regime — a recipe for a long, deadly insurgency.
"If we get military aid, the end will come quickly," said Ahmed Abdel-Qader, a rebel coordinator in the village of Koreen. "If not, we have no idea how this will end. We are here. We're not going back. God will decide the rest."
Even groups associated with the Free Syrian Army, which claims to represent the armed opposition, bemoan the failure of its Turkey-based leadership to deliver aid. While they wait, most rely on guerrilla tactics.
One afternoon, 50 fighters in a vast olive grove crawled under barbed wire, leaped over oil drums and dove through flaming hoops in training for future attacks. Most were in their 20s and 30s and had fled the provincial capital of Idlib when the army seized it in March. Their rifles can't match the tanks guarding the city, and they can't afford better weapons.
Commander Maan Dahnin said a Kalashnikov rifle now costs $1,500 and bullets are $4 each. That's why when they lined up for target practice, most fighters fired only a few times.
Some weapons come from neighboring Iraq, though many are duds, and some from Turkey, he said. The best come from corrupt officers in the Syrian army itself.
"There are those who worry that the regime is going to fall, so they want to fill their pockets first," Dahnin said.
For now, his group's 1,000 men never gather in one place, so that if they are shelled or come under fire, not everyone will die. Meanwhile, they focus on roadside bombs built with dynamite, sugar and fertilizer and detonated by remote control.
Like most rebel commanders, Dahnin said his group gets no outside support.
"Here's the biggest proof," he said, pointing to a fighter wearing plastic flip-flops. "He's only good for one thing: toothpaste advertisements," he said, prying open the man's mouth to reveal a row of rotten teeth.
The conflict in Syria has already killed more than 14,000 people and appears headed for civil war. The Syrian government has ignored popular demands for reform, instead blaming the violence on armed gangs and foreign-backed terrorists. Others have warned against an influx of Islamists. The AP journalists saw no evidence of foreign fighters.
The uprising reached Idlib in April 2011, about a month after Syrian protesters inspired by other Arab Spring revolts first took to the streets and faced violent security crackdowns.
The protests started small in Ariha, a busy commercial center on the face of a round-topped mountain, but residents were shocked when regime forces shot and killed five protesters in one day, said Khalid Naif, a doctor. Many more people then joined in, armed first with hunting guns and later with attack rifles.
A year ago, the army surrounded the city and took over a downtown building, paralyzing the city center, Naif said. He easily named many of the dozens of people he has treated for gunshot and shrapnel wounds since. Others died before reaching the clinic.
Early this month, when a military convoy arrived to quash the city's opposition, rebel fighters blew up tanks and armored cars in a hail of gunfire and grenades and stormed the army position downtown.
Weeks later, battle scars remain. Three destroyed tanks sit in the main boulevard, their tops blown off like bottle caps. The former army post is charred black, and walls of nearby buildings are pockmarked with bullet holes.
Graffiti on one wall reads, in English, "The people wants SOS." Elsewhere: "We bow only for God."
But the rebel victory was limited. Some stores have reopened and shoppers have returned to downtown, but a ring of army checkpoints restricts movement in and out, forcing many residents to sneak out on foot. Military helicopters and snipers still target the city, wounding more people every week.
The city's rebel commander, Jamal Akta, who ran a unisex barber shop before the uprising, said the battle had killed 10 civilians and no rebels. While proud of the fight, he said his men could do no more.
"If we get more weapons, we can get rid of all the checkpoints," he said. "But the ammunition we have now is enough to defend the city, no more than that."
A ring of checkpoints with a central army post full of snipers and armored vehicles also strangles Khan Sheikhoun, a dusty, sun-baked city further south, on the country's main north-south highway. Local rebels can't clear out the army, so they blast military vehicles on the highway with rocket-propelled grenades. Two destroyed armored vehicles, one still on its trailer, now lie in the road, and local fighters say the army has changed its route.
"We can't face the regime as an army face to face, so we have to fight like street gangs," said Waddah Sirmani, head of one of the town's half-dozen rebel brigades.
Fighters have also surrounded the central base and fire on supply vehicles to keep the soldiers inside hungry and short of ammunition, he said.
"You could say that those soldiers are imprisoned among us," said activist Hisham Nijim.
Almost all the rebels the AP journalists met were from Syria's Sunni Muslim majority, and many consider the fight a religious cause. When asked what they are fighting for, most said they are fed up with corruption, harassment by security services and a system that gives preference to members of the ruling Baath party and the Alawite sect, to which Assad belongs. The word they used most often was dignity.
"If I go to the beach, I don't want an Alawite to call me a dog and I can't respond," said Ahmed Salim, 27, who left the police for the rebels in October. "I don't want to be treated like an animal. I want to be treated like a human."
Most fighters said they did not target other sects, only those who had fought for the regime.
There was little evidence of rebel attacks on civilians, but they were often merciless with regime troops. For most, the fight to topple Assad has become personal after they have been chased from their cities, their friends and relatives killed. Many frequently flip through "martyr" photos on their cellphones for inspiration.
One night at al-Sheikh's headquarters in Sarjeh, a group of fighters flipped through brigade photos on a laptop.
"Martyr, martyr, martyr, martyr, martyr," they said, pointing out those who had died fighting.
Videos of the group's attacks showed roadside bombs destroying tanks and flipping over army buses, as Islamic chanting played in the background. In one video, a booby-trapped van sped toward a checkpoint and blew up, splattering two soldiers into nearby trees.
The group was still high on a recent attack that had destroyed a military camp nearby. In the end, they photographed the dead bodies of 35 soldiers, drove off a tank they now park under a tree in the village graveyard and held trials for five captured soldiers. All were found guilty of killing other Syrians.
"They traveled to Cyprus," al-Sheikh said with a grin. "On a fast plane."
June 23, 2012
By Ben Hubbard
KHAN SHEIKHOUN, Syria (AP) — Her daughter, 8, often hides in a closet, terrified of flying bullets. Her son, 6, still asks for his father months after he turned up in a morgue. And the family has little income because her brother-in-law was killed too.
Umm Moussa's extended family is smaller now. They live day to day in a house of simply furnished concrete rooms around an empty courtyard in this dusty city in northern Syria.
"I'm always worried that after all I've lost, I'll lose something else," said the thin, shy 27-year-old, leafing through photos of her dead husband.
As Syria's 15-month-old uprising has morphed from a popular call for reform into an armed insurgency, the country's civilians have paid the highest price.
Most of the more than 14,000 people activists say have been killed are civilians. Countless others have watched their livelihoods collapse, their neighborhoods turn to battlegrounds and their friends and relatives die or disappear.
During two weeks in northern Syria, three Associated Press journalists met scores of civilians whose lives have been altered by the conflict: students who cannot cross army checkpoints to reach schools and universities; merchants whose suppliers have stopped delivering; and farmers who left land fallow because they can no longer afford diesel for irrigation pumps.
The international community has harshly condemned President Bashar Assad's regime for its role in the violence, endorsing a plan by U.N. envoy Kofi Annan to try to end it.
But that plan has fallen far short — as is obvious here in Khan Sheikhoun, a city of 80,000 people surrounded by wheat fields and orchards on the country's main north-south highway.
Six military checkpoints ring the city, housing snipers who fire on civilians and rebels alike. Troops block roads to the fields and sometimes set them ablaze, meaning farmers can smell the smoke of their crops burning but cannot fight the flames.
Regime forces have also seized the state hospital and other downtown buildings, parking armored vehicles out front and piling sandbags on the roofs. Residents call the shuttered central boulevard the "street of death" because so many people have been shot there.
Rebels run the rest of the city and have mined its entries. They blast army vehicles passing on the highway with rocket-propelled grenades, and patrol in two armored SUVs that they captured.
They also run a clinic and hang out in a former security building. A bust of the former president, Assad's late father Hafez, is positioned near the entrance, defaced with devilish horns sprouting from the head.
The regime shells occasionally, and the rebels clash with those manning the checkpoints daily.
One sweltering afternoon, rebels blasted machine guns around the corners of buildings while sniper fire chipped at the streets and walls around them.
Standing at the door to his house, Mohammed al-Safa, 24, listed neighbors struck by those snipers: the family across the street who'd abandoned their home; the 10-year-old girl paralyzed by a bullet in the back; the elderly man shot dead on his roof while adjusting his satellite dish.
"May God protect you!" al-Safa's mother yelled as rebels rushed down their alley.
"The Free Army is all we have to protect us," al-Safa said. "No one else can."
The media team for the city's rebels, now based in a former office of Assad's ruling Baath party, says the numbers show the regime's disregard for civilians: Of the more than 130 people killed in the uprising, only 31 were fighters, said activist Hisham Nijim.
When asked about the Annan plan and the nearly 300 observers sent to monitor it, residents recall "the massacre."
On May 15, U.N. observers left a security building, walked past a number of sand berms and through a rowdy anti-regime protest about 100 meters (yards) away. Apparently feeling protected by the observers, the crowd inched toward the soldiers guarding the building, chanting, "The people want to execute Bashar!" and "Traitors! The Syrian army are traitors!" according to a video of the event.
Minutes later, the soldiers opened fire in a deafening roar, and protesters dropped in the street as the crowd scrambled for cover.
Nijim said 44 people were killed. Photos of 32 of them, including young children and old men, hang in the media office.
"Annan's plan is worthless," Nijim said. "It is impossible that this regime will give up power peacefully. It will only go under force of arms."
The Syrian government rarely comments on its military's actions. It has never acknowledged popular calls for reform and blames the uprising on foreign-backed gangs and terrorists seeking to weaken the country.
The troubles for Umm Moussa's family began in February 2011, when her husband's youngest brother was arrested in a cafe for chatting online about the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. When those uprisings inspired Syrians to protest a month later, his arrest pushed the two older brothers to join.
Umm Moussa's husband, Mohammed Tilawi, became a leader, drawing banners and outfitting a pickup truck with huge speakers to blast anti-regime chants, she said.
Security forces attacked the protests and raided activist homes, killing four people on one day in June. More people joined, and some sought arms.
"Anyone who had a weapon — a hunting rifle, a Kalashnikov, even a club — came out to defend the city," activist Osama Abu Homam said.
That month, Mohammed's other brother, Mukhlis, was shot and killed while manning a rebel checkpoint. The family never found out who shot him.
Mohammed sold his brother's car to buy a rifle. Umm Moussa and their four children saw him less and less as the clashes grew more frequent.
"We often fled the house because we were afraid they'd arrest us to get him to turn himself in," Umm Moussa said. She last saw him alive in September: Gunfire broke out near a protest, and he took his gun and left.
They found his body days later in a morgue in Hama, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) away. The handwritten hospital report she keeps in her pocket said he'd been shot through the gut and that state security had delivered the body.
It didn't explain his broken jaw, nor the large bruises on his face and around his groin. The family suspects he was tortured.
The younger brother was finally released without trial in February 2012. He was shocked when he got home.
"I was surprised to learn how many people had been killed, and I had to get used to life without my brothers," said Abdel-Razaq, 32.
Since then, he has become a cameraman, filming protests and violence to post on the Internet. In April, shrapnel from a shell attack sliced through his stomach. He has a pink, four-inch scar over his navel from the operation to remove the shrapnel.
The family struggles without his brothers' incomes. Before the uprising, Mohammed had a fiberglass workshop that made sinks. Muklis was a blacksmith. Now both shops are closed, and Abdel-Razaq cannot go back to Dubai, where he worked as a cook before the uprising. His mother, 65, wears black daily and cries when she mentions her sons.
Umm Moussa struggles to comfort her children when gunfire breaks out. She worries when her 12-year-old boy, Moussa, sneaks out to attend protests. She chose to give only her nickname, Arabic for "Mother of Moussa," fearing retribution by Assad's regime.
But she also hopes the uprising will give them better lives.
"There is no way this regime can stay after all the people it has killed," she said. "That would be the biggest crime."
August 11, 2012
By Ben Hubbard
AZAZ, Syria (AP) — Residents of this north Syrian border town like to snap photos of their children atop the tank parked downtown, one of more than a dozen captured or destroyed by rebels in the battles last month that "liberated" the area from President Bashar Assad's army.
Across the street in air-conditioned offices once occupied by Assad's Baath party, a new political order is emerging. Local rebels have formed committees to fix power lines, fire up bakeries and staff the nearby border crossing with Turkey. They also run security patrols and a prison with some 60 captives. Two men were executed by firing squad recently after a judge and Islamic clerics found them guilty of murder.
"We run a state system here," said Samir Hajj Omar, the silver-haired former teacher who heads the rebel political office for Azaz, a town of 35,000. "We're enforcing the law."
In recent months, Syria's rebels have extended control over a large swath of territory in the northeastern corner of the country after forcing the army from town after town in a string of bloody street battles.
As a result, for the first time in Syria's 17-month conflict, rebels have a cohesive enclave in which they can move and organize with unprecedented freedom, plus a long stretch of the border with Turkey key for moving out refugees and smuggling in weapons. They also have one official, working border crossing.
The area extends about 50 kilometers (30 miles) south of the Turkish border and from the edge of Idlib province in the west to the cities of al-Bab and Manbaj some 130 kilometers (80 miles) east. Its southern edges reach the outskirts of Aleppo, Syria's largest city and for weeks the scene of heavy battles as regime forces try to uproot rebels who have taken control of several neighborhoods.
The pocket is not an outright safe zone. The military holds two bases within it — at Mannagh airport near Azaz and at an infantry academy north of Aleppo. From there, it shells nearby towns daily, wrecking buildings and killing people. It often targets rebel enclaves with helicopters and fighter jets; there remains a continual back-and-forth of residents fleeing homes around the areas.
But the army has largely surrendered the ground, creating a huge vacuum for rebels to fill. Across the scattered farm towns, locals have formed councils to remove rubble, restore utilities and funnel supplies to fighters in Aleppo. They organize security patrols to guard against thieves and government spies. Some are running prisons and rudimentary courts.
Their efforts are hugely decentralized. Each town is on its own. There is no national, or even regional, body for them to report to.
Since the anti-Assad uprising started in March 2011 with protests calling for political change, opposition leaders have failed to offer little more than a vague idea of the kind of state they hope to found should the regime fall. More than 20,000 people have been killed since as the conflict has transformed into a full-scale civil war.
While still new, these early organizational efforts shine a light on the priorities of rising local leaders. When asked, all say they want a civilian state that respects its citizens. More concerning to the West and to Syria's religious minorities, most said that Islam was their guide more than any political ideology. What that means for them remains unformed in many ways, but what is clear is that they seek a role for religion in public life after four decades of secular rule.
"Religion is the basis of everything for us," said Abdel-Aziz Salameh, head of a "revolutionary council" that coordinates various rebel factions in Aleppo and the nearby countryside. "It is the driving force of the revolution."
Salameh spoke from the basement of the police station in Tal Rifat, some 30 kilometers (20 miles) north of Aleppo, now the headquarters of one of Syria's largest rebel groupings, the Islamist Brigade of Unification.
Fighter jets screeched overhead, and the dull booms of shelling punctuated the conversation.
"May God curse you," the 46-year-old honey distributor said, looking up as the lights flickered.
The brigade, formed last month, now boasts more than 7,000 fighters, Salameh said, bringing together some of the armed factions in the Aleppo region that cropped up as army recruits defected and locals took up arms. Before a new group can join, it must agree not to target civilians or their property and to bring all prisoners to one of the brigade's two prisons, which now house some 500 captives.
This is to prevent fighters from settling personal scores or kidnapping wealthy people for ransom, Salameh said.
Like most rebel leaders, Salameh bemoaned the lack of military support he said the rebels had received from abroad. The small amounts trickling in from governments and private groups he declined to name have done little to help his fighters, most of whom carry arms taken as booty or bought from dealers in Turkey or Iraq.
Salameh acknowledged that many rebel groups operate independently and that a small number want to kill Shiite Muslims and Alawites, the Shiite offshoot sect to which Assad and many in his regime belong.
He said such views violate the tenets of Islam that his group follows, but said not all fighters can be vetted.
"When we're at war, I don't have time to ask every fighter what his views are," he said. "I tell him to put his rifle next to mine and fight."
Most of the brigades in the enclave region formed to fight the army in their own towns and moved on only after their streets were "liberated." Many of these battles were Pyrrhic victories, leaving entire areas destroyed and depopulated.
In the town of Atarib, 30 kilometers (20 miles) southwest of Aleppo, every building downtown is damaged, with windows blown out, doors peppered with shrapnel and awnings shredded to ribbons.
At the center sit the charred shells of the police station and city hall, which troops occupied in February. For months, local rebels attacked their positions and tried to cut their supply lines. By the time the army left in June, the city was destroyed and deserted.
When asked how many of the town's 25,000 residents had returned since its "liberation," the head of Atarib's military council laughed.
"If you put them all in the back of a semi-truck, there'd still be space," said Obeid Ahmed Obeid. Others guessed it was a few hundred.
Nearby, Fatum Obeid, a 50-year-old widow, wandered through the wreckage of her simple home, asking God to destroy Assad and his mother.
Two of her sons had been killed in the uprising. One returned from his mandatory military service in a body bag with no explanation. Another was shot dead by a government sniper before she and other residents fled to nearby villages.
"We'd sit and watch the troops come, then hear the booms and see the smoke," she said.
Town leaders have formed military and civil councils and opened a prison that holds some 15 people.
The army still shells the town daily, keeping residents away, and making some wonder how free they are.
"It's not liberated because you can't sit down without worrying that a rocket will fall on you," said a local activist who declined to give his name because he often travels to Aleppo.
The violence has caused a continuous human tide, first pushing rural residents into Aleppo and then out as the battle there rages. As shelling continues around the province, it is common to see large families driving trucks piled high with washing machines, mattresses and bags of clothing. Many seek shelter in schools, farms and unfinished buildings in villages that local leaders have struggled to keep safe.
The refugees have doubled the population of the village of Maaret al-Artiq to 25,000 in recent months, said Omar Zahra, a resident who helps them find shelter.
"They'll live in any building they can find as long as it's better than a tent," he said.
Azaz, the border town, has fared better than others. Residents are coming home, a few shops have opened and armed men run checkpoints at the town's entrances. Young boys climb around on the destroyed tanks and armored vehicles half buried in the rubble of the security building rebels brought down with homemade bombs.
Graffiti by government soldiers on one wall boasts, "Assad's beasts were here." After they left, someone crossed out "Assad" and wrote "the donkey."
In his vast, carpeted office, Omar, the silver-haired former teacher, fielded calls on three cell phones and two land lines while chatting with visitors. When asked how he got his job, he said it was "automatic" because of his role in the uprising.
As he spoke, however, the now-familiar sounds of a protest rose from the streets below — but this time with a twist.
"This protest is mostly against me," Omar acknowledged with a laugh, dismissing the few dozen marchers as upstarts who wanted power without working for it.
"They feel they were left outside," he said. "But should someone who was sitting on the sidelines come and sit here, or someone who was here for the battle?"
August 23, 2012
By Ben Hubbard
KAFAR HAMRA, Syria — Civil war has chased Fatima Ghorab and her brood of some two dozen women and children across Syria in search of safe havens that keep disappearing in the booms of artillery shells. They now shelter in an unfinished apartment in this Aleppo suburb, crowded into two rooms with a few plastic chairs and some thin mattresses. If their neighbors didn't bring them bread, they'd have none.
As her daughters and daughters-in-law and their kids tuck into a simple lunch of tomatoes and cucumbers, canned meat and apricot jam, the 56-year-old housewife from Damascus struggles to comprehend what has become of her life.
"Before all this we were living well," said Ghorab, whose family ran a supermarket in the capital until it and their home were torched during a government attack on rebels.
"Our house was full and our shop was full. Now we're 100 degrees below zero."
Across Syria, hundreds of thousands of people have been thrown into a life on the move by the widening fight between President Bashar Assad's forces and rebels seeking to end his rule.
Some 1.2 million people are displaced inside Syria, according to the United Nations, on top of a quarter-million who have fled to neighboring countries.
Many have picked up and fled multiple times, pushed from town to town by fighting. When they find a place that appears safe, they pile into half-built apartment buildings or sleep on tile floors in schools or on the dirt in olive groves. In tow, they bring shell-shocked children who wet their beds, get nosebleeds and vomit when they hear explosions or fighter jets.
For many, no place feels safe as the regime ramps up its use of attack helicopters and fighter jets, carrying out near daily airstrikes on towns and villages. While some towns are largely destroyed and empty, others are packed. One day, villagers watch refugees from elsewhere flood in. The next day, they themselves load their belongings into rented trucks and clear out.
Ghorab's turmoil began several months ago, when three of her sons were arrested for anti-regime protests. They were freed, but then her husband was arrested.
When he was released, his feet were so swollen from beatings he couldn't walk, Ghorab said. Then last month, security forces torched the family's home and supermarket during an assault to push rebels from their battle zone neighborhood of Tadamon.
By that time, Ghorab had already fled with her daughters and daughters-in-law, fearing they could be arrested too.
They went first to Aleppo, 200 miles to the north. The city, Syria's largest, had been quiet for most of the 17-month-old uprising. But then last month, rebel fighters pushed into Aleppo and the government tried to bomb them out, turning the city into a war zone.
So Ghorab and her family fled once more, to nearby Kafar Hamra. They have little money, and all their men remain in the cities to protect their remaining properties from thieves.
"I have to take care of all these women and children, and there are no men here and no money," Ghorab said.
Her family has it better than some. Nearby, a public school is packed with some 15 families who fled the town of Anadan, which regime forces have reduced to a rubble-strewn ghost town.
More than 17 months of violence in Syria have ravaged entire communities across this country of 22 million and killed more than 20,000 people, according to anti-regime activists.
Recent months have been particularly bloody as rebel forces have grown more adept at attacking government troops and pushed the battle into the country's two biggest cities – Aleppo in the north and the capital Damascus. In retaliation, the regime has turned increasingly to air power.
But no community has been left unaffected, whether by rising prices for food and fuel, destruction brought by fighting or influxes of civilians.
Every morning in the tiny village of Sawran near the Turkish border, hundreds of men and boys form long, dense lines that snake from the two windows of a small bakery under the glare of the sun. Most of them have fled to the area from Aleppo or from largely destroyed towns further south and now sleep in schools or farmhouses, often 10 to a room.
Ali Jassem, a stonemason, brought his family from Aleppo and hasn't worked in two months. He said he can barely afford bread, much less gas for his car, so he walks eight kilometers (5 miles) each morning to the bakery, waits in line for an hour, then walks back to the farmhouse of friend where he is staying.
"The hardest part is food and poverty because there is no work anywhere," he said. Minutes later, a fight broke out in the line and men rushed to intervene.
"This happens all the time," Jassem said with a shrug. "It's chaos."
For Mariam, a 42-year-old mother of four, life has become a series of rushed moves whose end has yet to come.
Three months ago, Syrian forces started firing occasional artillery shells at her home village of Mayer, north of Aleppo, she said. Residents guessed their Sunni Muslim village was targeted because they live near a Shiite village that supports Assad's regime.
At first, the family would sleep in nearby fields, but the shelling continued, so they moved to Aleppo.
Then Aleppo's fighting erupted, and neighborhoods were consumed by fighting between rebels and government forces. Mariam's family moved three times inside the city, and finally returned to Mayer.
"We decided that if we were going to get shelled, it might as well be in our own house," she said. The family had also run out of money to rent places to stay.
The shells continued to fall and the family slept in an underground storeroom, though the summer heat made it sweltering. The booms terrified her children, who sometimes screamed in their sleep.
"They all started wetting their beds. Even the teenagers," said Mariam, who asked that her full name not be used for fear of reprisals against her family.
Then the fighter jets came, dropping bombs that shook the walls and destroyed buildings, so a group of families rented a vegetable truck to take them to the Bab al-Salameh border crossing with Turkey. Most didn't have passports, making it hard to leave, so they laid out a plastic mat on the sidewalk to sleep on until they could decide what to do next.
Scores of other families had camped out nearby.
Ironically, other families have fled the same Aleppo suburb that Ghorab fled to.
Abdel-Basit Mustafa's family once ran a successful construction company in Kafar Hamra, which he said remained quiet while violence further north drove entire towns into the town.
Then the shells came their way, too.
On two successive days, several artillery shells hit the town, Mustafa said, one peppering his brother's car with shrapnel. The next day, an airstrike killed three people who had fled to the area from Aleppo.
The next day, Mustafa's family hired a truck to take them to a large olive grove along the Turkish border where many Syrians collect before entering refugee camps on the other side.
Unlike many, the family had the money to rent an apartment in Turkey, but many lacked passports, making it unsure if they could cross at all.
So they waited.
"That's our family over there," Mustafa said, pointing to a dozen women and children in the scant shade of an olive tree. "We'll probably sleep there tonight, on the dirt."
September 21, 2012
October 12, 2012
By Hamza Hendawi
ALEPPO, Syria (AP) — The injured arrive at the hospital in taxis or in the back of pickup trucks, to the blare of car horns and shouts of "Help!"
Sometimes, they are battle-hardened rebels with gaping wounds. Sometimes, they are children, peppered with shrapnel and screaming in pain.
Those who die are left on the sidewalk outside, to be claimed hours later by relatives.
An Associated Press team spent 24 hours at Dar al-Shifa hospital in Aleppo and witnessed the frantic work by overtaxed doctors and nurses to save those wounded in the battle for control of Syria's largest city.
The AP first visited the hospital last month and returned this week to get a fuller impression of how its staff is coping amid Syria's civil war. The routine is as simple as it is brutal: A barrage of shelling echoes over the city, and about 15 minutes later, the wounded flow in.
The medics work amid the wails of traumatized children, badly wounded men shouting Islam's declaration of faith in their final minutes, and rebel fighters holding RPGs mourning dead comrades, with tears streaming down their gunpowder-blackened cheeks.
Blood is everywhere. Orderlies mop it up as more wounded arrive. Amid the din of groans and cries for help, a worker spots a severed limb on the floor and tries to break the tension with some black humor.
"Anyone missing a foot?" he asks.
Once a private clinic owned by a businessman loyal to President Bashar Assad, Dar al-Shifa hospital has been taken over by volunteer doctors, nurses and aides united by their opposition to the regime and the need to give medical care to civilians and rebels.
The seven-story hospital stands only 400-500 meters (yards) from the front line in a neighborhood that is heavily shelled. Nearly three months into the rebel offensive in Aleppo, the facility has taken at least six direct hits, mostly affecting the upper stories; its staff uses the bottom three floors.
Most of the surrounding apartment blocks are badly damaged and deserted, with the only evidence of life being the fluttering of clothes on laundry lines or an occasional resident stepping onto a balcony to get a better cellphone signal.
Dar al-Shifa has only seven doctors, two of whom are trained for emergency duties, and two nurses. The atmosphere is a bizarre and somewhat unnerving mixture of urgency, nonchalance, resolve and anger.
The staff smokes freely in the corridors, watching TV during breaks in treating the waves of wounded. Dr. Osman al-Haj Osman even has moved his wife and two small children into the facility in order to be close to them.
Hospital officials say they see about 100-120 cases a day, of which 10 or 15 are children. Eighty percent of the cases are of civilians; the rest are mostly rebel fighters. In the 24-hour period that the AP was there on Wednesday and Thursday, the hospital's records showed nine dead and 107 wounded.
Because the hospital has no morgue, the dead are left on the sidewalk outside, where it is cooler. If the bodies are not identified and claimed within 12 hours, they are photographed and then buried. Residents who come to the hospital looking for missing relatives are shown the photos and — if they recognize a loved one — are given the choice of exhuming the remains for reburial elsewhere.
Osman, 30, spoke of the snap life-and-death decisions that he and others have to make when the hospital is flooded by casualties two or three times a day.
"I have to make a choice between a child with a 10 percent chance of survival and one with a 25 percent chance," he said.
"Our cruelest moments are when we get a child whose foot or part of his leg is only held by skin and we have to amputate," according to Osman, who said he was jailed and tortured by the Syrian regime twice since the start of the uprising in March 2011. "In the early days, we used to cry when we had a child with a severe injury, then recharge our psychological energy before we return to work.
"Now, there is just no time for that."
When AP journalists first arrived Wednesday afternoon, there were only a handful of patients being treated. Dr. Abu Rayan, who studied medicine in Moscow, stood in one corner chatting with two members of the hospital's pharmaceutical team. The doctor asked to be identified by his nickname for fear of retribution.
A man approached him, complaining of pain from shrapnel lodged in his right leg.
"Forget it, it will never come out," the 35-year-old doctor told him with a smile.
Nearby, Zakariya Khojah lay on a gurney, a tube draining a wound in his side. He had a lifeless stare fixed on the ceiling. Standing at his side was his 13-year-old son, Bashar.
"Papa, is there anything hurting you beside your chest?" the boy asked. The father replied with a slow shake of his head.
"I was walking just ahead of him when a bomb fell close to us," Bashar said. "He's all I got. My mother died three years ago."
The patient was later moved to a chair because the gurney was needed for someone else. Several hours later, he was brought outside to a pickup.
"I fear that my father may not get better," Bashar said before climbing in beside him.
Around 3:10 p.m., shortly after artillery blasts were heard nearby, a wave of wounded arrived. Frantic men screamed, "Emergency! Emergency!" as they carried the casualties inside.
In minutes, the small, three-bed intensive care unit was filled, and the overflow of patients had to be treated on the floor of the lobby.
"Where are you guys? Hurry up, please, guys!" yelled one of the escorts. Others shouted, "God is great!"
Word quickly spread that the wounded, about 15 in all, had been standing in a bread line when a shell fell nearby.
A fighter carrying an RPG launcher on his shoulder walked over the wounded on the floor as he made his way to the narrow staircase leading to the X-ray room in the basement. A woman wearing the Muslim hijab and a blood-soaked black coat was on a gurney waiting for someone to attend to her. A man on the floor had a hole in his back the size of a tennis ball.
"May God curse Bashar Assad until he goes to his grave!" yelled a man in a loose gray robe. "He is a pig and son of a dog! May Allah curse his father, tanks and guns!"
The lobby was swiftly cleared of the wounded. Relatives took them away, either to their homes or to better-equipped hospitals in northern Aleppo province or in government-controlled areas of the city.
The respite did not last long. A series of blasts shortly after 4 p.m. brought a fresh wave of wounded, many of them children.
"Uncle, please take me to my mum at home," said one of them, a 9-year-old named Fatimah, pleading to a journalist.
Fatimah only had shrapnel wounds to her arms and lower torso, but she clearly was in shock. She had been shopping with three aunts and several cousins when a shell fell on the street nearby. One of her aunts died in the hospital.
"It's OK, sweetie. Just ask God to exact revenge on Bashar," a fighter told the girl, who wore her long brown hair in two ponytails.
She grimaced every time she looked at the other patients nearby. A man lying on the floor with a back injury repeatedly shouted, "There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet."
Addressing the medic treating him, he said in a heart-wrenching voice: "May Allah have mercy on the eyes of your parents."
Next to him was a dying man who did not speak.
Next to Fatimah was a man whose right foot was hanging only by his skin. He held a cellphone in his right hand. As the staff walked past him to help others, he tugged at their coats.
"May Allah be with you," he said, pleading for assistance. The man eventually lost his foot and the staff bandaged his leg to stop the bleeding.
Rawyah and Bedour, two girls about 9 or 10, were screaming in pain as a doctor and two assistants attended to them. Lying on their backs, they kicked their legs in the air every time bits of shrapnel were removed from their bodies.
Undeterred by all the gore, Osman's two children, Omar and Rushd, wandered around the lobby the same way others their age would walk in a park.
"Don't worry about them. They've become used to this," he said. "As a family, we made a decision to live together. There is no such thing as a safe place. So, we live here and we die here. At least we will die while providing a service to our cause."
Rushd played with three screwdrivers, which she used to try and make a hole in a wall. She seemed totally oblivious to the cries of pain.
"The psychological pressure on us is tremendous," said Abu el-Baraa, a 23-year-old army medic who deserted his unit in July in rural Damascus and also asked to be identified by his nickname out of fear of retaliation. To avoid arrest, he walked for five days in the countryside and then obtained an ID card of an older brother that he used to get past army checkpoints on the road to Aleppo.
"This has been a miserable day par excellence," he said of Wednesday.
Around 9 p.m., guerrilla commander Sheikh Hussein and a band of armed fighters in camouflage fatigues stormed into the hospital carrying a wounded man named Ali Al-Sheikh, who died minutes later.
"Ali has been martyred, you guys," Hussein said, fighting back tears.
His men began weeping. One punched the metal door of an out-of-order elevator and another sat with his face buried in his hands.
Hussein, about 40, with an assault rifle slung across his shoulder, left the group and headed to one side of the hospital's lobby to offer a brief prayer for Ali. He did not use a prayer mat on the bloodstained floor.
Afterward, he tapped his comrades on the shoulder with his blood-soaked hands.
"Don't cry. Just say 'thank you, God,' because he is now a martyr," he told them, his brown worry beads wrapped around the barrel of his rifle.
Al-Sheikh's body, wrapped in a sky blue sheet, was taken from the ICU and carried outside by the fighters who shouted, "There is no God but Allah."
Thursday morning was ushered in with an airstrike and intense shelling that sounded much closer than the previous day's attack.
There were more injured: a sniper victim who prayed loudly until he succumbed to his chest wound; a child no more than 10 who stared at his severed left foot lying in front of him; a man who begged for help and was told firmly by a medic: "Act as a believer and wait for your turn."
The overwhelmed staff asked those with superficial wounds to go home and come back later.
"My brother is dying!" cried a young man as he stood next to his wounded sibling. "For God's sake, people, come and help him!"
Dr. Abu Rayan was preparing to meet his wife and two children across town in a government-controlled area of Aleppo, using a fake ID to get him through checkpoints. But he delayed his departure to help out.
Then the power went off, and an overworked generator kicked in as the sound of shelling got louder.
"I don't know whether we will ever be able to lead normal lives again," Osman said. "Will we have dreams and ambitions like regular people, or have we been scarred forever?"
October 16, 2012
By Hamza Hendawi
ALEPPO, Syria (AP) — Most of the rebels fighting government forces in the city of Aleppo fit a specific mold: They're poor, religiously conservative and usually come from the underdeveloped countryside nearby.
They bring to the battle their fury over years of economic marginalization, fired by a pious fervor, and they say their fight in the civil war is not only against President Bashar Assad but also the elite merchants and industrialists who dominate the city and have stuck by the regime. The rebels regard this support for the government to be an act of betrayal.
The blend of poverty, religious piety and anger could define the future of Aleppo, and perhaps the rest of Syria, if the rebels take over the country's largest city, which is also its economic engine. They may be tempted to push their own version of Islam, which is more fundamentalist than what is found in the city. Their bitterness at the business class may prompt them to seek ways of redistributing the wealth.
"Those who have money in Aleppo only worry about their wealth and interests when we have long lived in poverty," said Osama Abu Mohammed, a rebel commander who was a car mechanic in the nearby town of Beyanon before he joined the fight.
"They have been breast-fed cowardice and their hearts are filled with fear. With their money, we could buy weapons that enable us to liberate the entire city in a week," he said.
With neither side able to decide the battle after three months of fighting and with winter fast approaching, however, the rebels from the countryside in Aleppo province risk losing the popular good will they have enjoyed from their fellow impoverished Sunnis in the city.
On Saturday, civilians pelted a group of rebels with broken glass as they headed to the front line because they feel the fighters' presence brings the regime's destruction down on them, according to an Associated Press photographer and cameraman who witnessed the incident.
"The city of Aleppo has not really joined the revolution," acknowledged one 32-year-old fighter who goes by the name of Abu Ahmed and is from the nearby town of al-Bab. "All of us are from rural Aleppo."
Like some other rebels, he spoke on condition he be identified only with that nickname — by which he is widely known among his comrades — fearing that use of his real name could bring retaliation on his family.
The battle for Aleppo is a stark illustration of how Syria's conflict, now in its 19th month, is as much a revolt of the underclass as a rebellion against the regime's authoritarian grip.
The countryside surrounding Aleppo is dotted with small farming towns where the population is overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim, with a social fabric built around strong family and clan ties, primarily guided by local customs and a conservative brand of Islam.
In contrast, Aleppo's estimated 3 million residents are a mix of Syria's main ethnic and religious groups — Sunni and Shiite Muslims, Alawites, Christians, Kurds, Turkomen and Armenians — with a relatively liberal lifestyle.
The northern city is home to a powerful community of factory owners, manufacturers and merchants, mainly from prominent Sunni families, who were largely allowed to operate without government interference while the Assad family's Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, kept its grip on political power.
The flashpoints of the uprising have been the poorest parts of the country.
It began in March 2011 in the impoverished southern province of Daraa. A drought hitting parts of the country displaced tens of thousands of people from farming areas, putting more pressure on the economy. The city of Homs, which has been a main center of the rebellion, is known as "the mother of the poor" because the cost of living is lower and its population generally less well off. When Damascus saw its worst fighting yet in July, it was largely in the capital's poorer districts that the rebels operated.
The gap between rich and poor across Syria grew in the more than a decade of free market economic policies initiated by the late Hafez Assad and accelerated by his son, Bashar, when he took power in 2000.
Focused on the service sector, the new policy benefited a tiny segment of the country's 22 million people, particularly a clique of regime-linked businessmen and the mostly Sunni merchant class in Aleppo and Damascus, who have largely stuck by Assad. But the policies also triggered steep price increases that reduced many Syrians to poverty, particularly among the country's broader Sunni majority.
For much of the uprising, Aleppo largely remained on the regime's side, with little rebel activity. The city's businessmen could use their influence, threats and payoffs to make sure of that — with tens of thousands on their payrolls and the countryside dependent on them.
What few anti-Assad demonstrations that did take place early on came from the dormitories of the University of Aleppo, home to students from rural parts of the province.
Then the rebels from the countryside launched their surprise attack on the city in July. They moved into its impoverished, mainly Sunni districts, where residents are mostly of rural origin. They have since used those areas as their base from which to wage their bid to take over the city. To this day, all of Aleppo's rebel-held areas are poor, while the city's affluent parts remain under government control, with life there reportedly continuing much as it had before.
Once inside the city, the ranks of the rebels swelled with Aleppo volunteers bitter over their poverty.
Mohammed Al-Ali, 25, is one of them.
Just back from a two-day stint on the front lines in Aleppo — "the enemy was no more than 15 meters away from our position," he said — Al-Ali is fighting as much for social justice as for freedom.
In a blue tracksuit and tennis shoes, he spoke of a father with a meager pension of $200 and a family so poor he had to drop out of school and take various jobs in shops to make ends meet as prices skyrocketed across Syria in the past decade.
"We sold everything in the house that we did not absolutely need," Al-Ali said.
Besides being a fighter, he earns a monthly wage of $80 as a helper in a field hospital.
"I am hoping that when this is over, I will go to university and study Arabic literature. This is my dream," he said.
The rural fighters also bring with them their more fundamentalist religious outlook, which the trauma of war has only deepened. Most rebels in Aleppo wear beards, a hallmark of piety, and their conversation is filled with verses from the Quran or sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad. They frame the fight in a religious context and speak of martyrdom as something they wish for.
They often trade stories of miracles showing God's support for them.
Waiting at a field hospital as one of his fighters was treated for shrapnel wounds, a rebel commander who goes by the nickname of Abu Ekrimah recounted one such tale to a comrade.
The burly, bearded commander with piercing hazel eyes — his vest full of ammunition magazines and an automatic rifle slung over his shoulder — told how a long-bearded man with a reputation for piety once gave his brigade's fighters some homemade grenades. He instructed them to ritually wash themselves as if for prayers and then throw them while shouting, "God is great!"
"We followed his instructions, and we could see that when we tossed them, they changed course in midair to score direct hits against the enemy," Abu Ekrimah said.
"God is great!" his comrade exclaimed at hearing the story.
For some of the Aleppo rebels, the war against the regime has inspired a turning point in their personal journey of faith.
The rebel Abu Ahmed has images stored on his mobile phone of party dresses he once designed as a tailor working in Egypt, Lebanon and Aleppo: low-cut, strapless, see-through in parts. He says designing such revealing dresses was part of a past he has now put behind him.
He also has a picture of himself with a bruised forehead and a deep cut under his left eye — what he said was the result of a beating from regime loyalists while taking part in a street protest in May 2011. He now is an ambulance driver for the rebels, who revere him for his seeming fearlessness in battle zones.
"Initially, I wanted it to be a peaceful revolution against the regime, but now it is a war fought in defense of our faith," according to the bearded Abu Ahmed.
It is impossible to gauge the degree of support enjoyed by the rebels in the parts of Aleppo they control. The rebels acknowledge that many residents are fed up with the hardships they endure.
Regime forces punish the city daily with artillery and airstrikes. Civilians are killed and wounded while standing on bread lines, walking the streets or watching TV at home. Snipers target civilians in areas where rebels have positions. The staff at the rebels' field hospital said 80 percent of the 100-120 cases they treat daily are civilians.
Even in rural Aleppo, there is a degree of disgruntlement over the impact of the fighting on the local economy. State-supported farmers' associations that once sold fuel, seeds and fertilizers no longer do so. Black market prices for the items are so high it's not worth planting some crops when the season starts in December.
The fighting also almost completely shut down markets that traditionally bought their produce of wheat, barley, chickpeas and olives.
"Supplies were available for the last farming season, but this season will be a very difficult one," said Mazen Aleto, a local council member in Tel Rifaat, a village north of Aleppo. "There may not be a harvest this time."
October 23, 2012
By Hamza Hendawi
ALEPPO, Syria (AP) — The rumble of engines in the sky immediately set the Aleppo neighbourhood below on edge. Men peeked from shops anxiously at the Syrian warplane circling slowly overhead. Housewives emerged on balconies to gauge whether they were about to be hit. But the kids hanging out on the street were unfazed. One kept dribbling his basketball.
Finally, the jet struck. Engines revving louder, it dove and unleashed a burst of heavy machine-gunfire into a nearby part of the city. It soared back up under a hail of rebel anti-aircraft fire, then swooped back down for a second strafing run.
The women on the balconies broke into tears, fearing for the children in the street. But the boys just pointed at the jet, shouting "God is great" in challenge. "God send you to hell, Bashar," one boy yelled as the jet flew away.
With death lurking around every corner, the survival instincts of Aleppo's population are being stretched to the limit every day as the battle between Syria's rebels and the regime of President Bashar Assad for the country's largest city stretches through its fourth destructive month. Residents in the rebel-held neighborhoods suffering the war's brunt tell tales of lives filled with fear over the war in their streets, along with an ingenuity and resilience in trying to keep their shattered families going.
And while residents of the rebel-held areas express their hatred of Assad's regime and their dream of seeing him go, they also voice their worries over the rebels and the destruction that their offensive has brought to their city. Graffiti on the shutter of a closed store declares the population's sense of resignation: "God, you are all we've got."
Since the rebels launched their assault in July to drive government forces from Aleppo, the two sides have fought to a stalemate. Each holds about half the city of 3 million people and neither is able to deal the other a decisive blow. While government-held areas have seen some fighting from occasional rebel forays, the opposition districts are hit daily by artillery, mortars, sniper fire and airstrikes. Hundreds of civilians have been randomly killed by shells or mortars while waiting in bread lines, shopping for food or in their homes.
Rebels drive the dusty streets at breakneck speed, ferrying the wounded to a field hospital. Thoroughfares packed with cars one moment abruptly empty out-- a sign that up ahead a sniper is active.
Men methodically scavenge in the city's heaps of garbage, many of which smolder from unsuccessful attempts to completely burn them. Entire city blocks are eerily deserted, the mounds of debris from the apartment buildings a testimony to bombardments that drove residents to flee. Grim-faced families piling up belongings onto a pickup truck or a taxi to ferry them to a new home and a new life away from danger are a common sight.
Signs around the city advertise basements for rent, where many families crowd for relative safety.
Bab el-Sheaar Square, located near one of the city's many front lines, shows the destruction to the once vibrant life that distinguished Aleppo, Syria's capital of commerce.
Oblivious to the rattle of machine-gun fire and the whistle of mortar rounds landing only 100 or 200 meters away, a 12-year-old boy bicycled across the square, heading home from a visit to his cousins just as the shelling picked up. "I am not afraid," the boy, Younis, declared. "I only fear God."
Another boy, 14-year-old Ahmed, pushed his cart selling sahlab, a hot, milky drink with nuts. With few people in the square, he wasn't finding many customers.
"I want to live, that's it," he said. "I have younger siblings and they need to eat too." He and other residents refused to give their last names or asked that names not be used for fear of retaliation from the regime.
The owner of a household goods store near the square was looking to salvage his business.
"I am renting a new store in an area under government control," he declared as he cleaned his shelves of blenders, juice makers and water boilers that an employee loaded onto a car. "No one likes to see this destruction, but no one wants the regime to stay either."
Corrugated-iron store shutters litter the square, blasted off in the fighting. Electrical cables dangle from damaged buildings. Air conditioners hang off their hinges, waiting to take a fatal plunge to the street below. Bullet-riddled shop signs paint a picture of what was once available: "Al-Zein frozen goods. All types of Arabic ice cream" and "Al-Moayed's cheeses and milk. Natural flavors, perfect quality and nutritional value."
A poster torn to the ground advertises South Korean mobile phones that come in pink and sky blue, proclaiming, "Add a spark to your life. Your first love."
Standing in the relative safety beneath the large overpass running through the square, a group of men discussed the war's impact on their city, from the frequent and lengthy power and water cuts to the steep rise in the price of basic goods like bread, fuel and sugar.
As the men denounced Assad's regime, 46-year-old agricultural engineer Abdul-Jalil, listened quietly. Then he followed an AP reporter into a side street.
"If you have time, I want to tell you my version of what is going on," he said in a conspiratorial tone.
"I don't support the regime, but I am crying rivers of blood for my country," he began. He described what he called the unruliness of the rebels. The fighters damage people's homes by knocking down walls to make passages they can move through without exposing themselves to snipers. They steal electrical cables and furniture.
He said rebels had forced him from his home to use as a base — and that they had done the same to others. He now lives elsewhere with his in-laws.
One of his sons is an army soldier based in Damascus, and Ali had to spend a small fortune by the family's standards — 3,500 liras, or about $50 at black market rates — to fly him home to Aleppo to see his family, he said. Coming by road would have risked being abducted or worse at rebel checkpoints.
"I have not had a single day of work since July," he lamented. His family lives off the debts he collects from farmers he supplied with irrigation pipes on credit.
"What we have now is destruction and theft. Maybe, it is divine punishment for not observing the teachings of our faith," said Abdul-Jalil, a Muslim.
Amid the carnage, there are refreshing signs of cheer.
In his salon, barber Bashar Khatab chatted happily with his customers and joked as he negotiated the price with a mother who brought her two small boys for a haircut. "You come now and you wait a few minutes for your turn," he joked to one client. "Before all this started, your wait could be two hours."
When the man in his chair asked for his hair to be washed, Khatab led him to an outside sink used by the neighboring grocer because the water was out in his salon.
"You will never forget this haircut," he told the man with a laugh. "Where else in the world can you get a haircut and then have your hair washed in a grocer's sink?"
With his ginger red hair fashionably spiked up and wearing trendy jeans and a T-shirt, the 35-year-old father of three daughters even claimed to find the thud of artillery shells and the crackle of gunfire soothing.
"They help me go to sleep at night. Even my girls now are not bothered. They used to be scared. Not anymore."
Others find comfort in unusual places. Ali, a father of two boys aged 4 and 18 months, draws his happiness from his birds.
The 33-year-old Ali has moved with his family to a basement after an airstrike in July partially damaged his small apartment. He can no longer commute to the factory where he worked because of the fighting. So he is on the sidewalk near Bab el-Shearr trying to sell his 14 canaries.
Passers-by ridicule him for trying to sell birds when most of them are struggling to make ends meet. But Ali, in a tracksuit and plastic flip-flops, is not discouraged. Birds have been a hobby since childhood and he seems as happy talking about them as selling them. He boasts his canaries give passing children something pleasant to look at and he answers their questions about the birds' original habitat, mating habits and food preferences.
"They ask me hundred questions and then they leave without buying, of course," he says without a hint of bitterness. "It's like a free lecture on birds."
"That bird in a cage by himself is a promising male," he explains enthusiastically. "He is alone to eat a lot and grow stronger. When he is ready, I will introduce a female to his cage so they can marry and start a family."
His last sale was a week ago.
So, how does he survive? Ali balks at saying the truth directly — that he lives off the charity of relatives and friends.
"Do you want me to beg on the streets? Let us just say that kind people don't forget me or my family," he said, sighing as his eyes welled up.
December 2, 2012
By Ben Hubbard
MAARET MISREEN, Syria (AP) — A year ago, a soft-spoken sweet shop owner from this poor Syrian town got together with his little brother and eight friends to declare war on President Bashar Assad.
They didn't have enough guns to go around. Their leader, 35-year-old Mustafa Filfileh, had no real military experience and little idea how to face one of the Mideast's strongest armies. He didn't even know how to drive.
They learned fast. On Nov. 17, the brigade called "The Beloved of Allah" braced for its biggest challenge yet, making it clear how far its members had come and how far the war had brought them from their former lives.
Men who once sold real estate, laid bricks, wore suits and treated sick farm animals armed themselves with vests laden with ammunition, hand grenades and pocket-sized copies of the Quran. After a two-month siege, they planned to storm a major military base in one of the larger coordinated attacks of the uprising.
It was late 2012, the year that Syria's uprising outpaced the other Arab Spring revolts to become the longest, deadliest and most brutal, killing more than 40,000 people and chasing more than 1 million from their homes.
During the past year, scores of rebel brigades across Syria like The Beloved of Allah have evolved from hapless bands of lightly armed men into formidable fighting groups, shifting the balance against Assad's military. This progress has been marked in recent weeks, with rebels storming military bases and claiming to shoot down government aircraft with newly captured missiles. The government has continued to strike rebel areas, and activists accused it last week of blacking out Syria's Internet for two days.
As the rebels racked up successes, their leadership in exile reorganized under pressure from the West and was recently recognized as Syria's sole legitimate representative by France, Britain and several Arab states. U.S. officials say the Obama administration is moving to do the same.
However, this new leadership body has little traction with the rebels inside Syria, many of whom have evolved during 20 months of conflict from civilian protesters into hardline, Islamist fighters. The shift among rebel groups toward a more militant Islam will likely alienate them from other Syrians and from Western nations that could provide badly needed military aid.
The transformation of The Beloved of Allah, now 150 men strong, was documented in hours of interviews and days spent with the group in June and November 2012, plus dozens of videos shot by its members.
"Our only allegiance is to Allah," Filfileh told his fighters before they attacked the base. "Victory or martyrdom, God willing."
____
The Beloved of Allah began with ten men, five rifles, one rickety machine gun and a few rocket-propelled grenades soon discovered to be duds. It was born in Maaret Misreen, a town where tractors and motorcycles outnumber cars in Idlib province, a center of rebel activity along Syria's northern border with Turkey.
The town first protested in April 2011, one month after the uprising began in the southern city of Daraa. Filfileh, well-liked by the young men who hung around his sweet shop, helped organize.
Filfileh, then 33, wasn't overly religious, sporting a trim beard and often missing some of the five daily Muslim prayers, his brother Mohammed said. He never cared for politics, but joined the uprising to fight a hereditary regime he felt had done little for poor Sunni Muslims like him.
Syria's Sunni majority forms the backbone of the opposition while Assad's regime is dominated by minority Alawites — an offshoot of Shiite Islam.
Through 2011, that regime resorted to increasingly brutal tactics to crush the spreading dissent. By December, Filfileh decided that protesters needed arms, a conclusion reached by many across Syria, starting what would become the Free Syrian Army.
His men pooled their cash to buy guns. They traded a rifle for a van stolen from a security officer, painted it black and adorned the back window with the Muslim declaration of faith, the shehada, a central tenet of the religion that the devout recite in prayer and before traveling, sleep and death: "There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet."
The hood bore their new name: The Beloved of Allah Brigade. The name was inspired by a protest chant about martyrs killed fighting the enemy.
Their first operation was to blow up the house of a Muslim sheik who was arming local residents to fight the opposition. It failed, sparking a two-day clash in December 2011 that killed six people, including Filfileh's brother Ahmed.
"After the battle with the sheik, the whole town rose up and gave up on peaceful means," said Mohammed Tallal, an early member. "It was as if the protesters were tricking themselves."
Young men flocked to the group, leaving their old lives behind. Mohammed Akram, 24, abandoned the suits he wore as an accountant at a brick factory. Abdullah Qadi, 25, dropped his dream to be a professor of veterinary medicine. Abdullah Biram, 23, quit his university business degree. His mother, a teacher, bought him a rifle.
The group's oldest fighter, Mohammed Ibrahim, 41, nursed a grievance. When he was a boy, security forces broke into his home to arrest his father, whom they suspected of belonging to the banned Muslim Brotherhood.
"I woke up, saw them and wet myself," he said. "Since then, I've hated the state."
They started small.
"At first we couldn't attack checkpoints, so we did what God gave us the power to do," Tallal said.
They ambushed security officers to steal their cars, sometimes kidnapping them until they promised to leave the regime. Filfileh learned to drive, rushing wounded people to the Turkish border in his black van and ferrying back guns when he could find them. He rarely visited his wife and five children, but argued with his brother Mohammed when he tried to join the group, Mohammed said. Filfileh felt one of them had to stay alive to support the family.
The Beloved of Allah remained weak.
By June, they were hiding from the army in an unfinished, one-room farmhouse. One wall displayed seven of the group's dead, their faces imposed over a photo of the Grand Mosque of Mecca.
Most days, they'd sleep in, then while away the afternoon drinking tea, smoking and complaining about their lack of ammunition. On hot days, they'd don shorts and swim in the farm's irrigation tank.
They had little idea how to get better arms or challenge Assad's tanks.
____
Through mid-2012, rebel power grew and Assad's army ramped up its response.
Relentless government shelling leveled neighborhoods and killed hundreds. Regular reports emerged of mass killings by the regime or thugs loyal to it, pushing more Syrians toward armed struggle. The government, which often calls the opposition terrorist gangs backed by foreign powers, denied any role, and does not respond to requests for comment on its military. The rebels, too, were accused of atrocities.
Fueling the rebel advances were breakthroughs in arms and organization. Rebels seized a large swath of territory along the Turkish border, and different brigades and groups came together to carry out bigger attacks and solicit funding.
The Beloved of Allah rode this current. In August, Filfileh coordinated with other rebel groups to attack an army convoy heading to the Bab al-Hawa border crossing with Turkey, hauling off machine guns, rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and more ammunition than they'd ever had. He also associated his group with the Farouq Brigades of Aleppo, an umbrella group.
Farouq bought regular supplies of ammunition from arms dealers in Turkey and Iraq with aid from abroad. In return, the Beloved filmed its victories against the regime and claimed them for Farouq to solicit further aid.
All the while, the war was growing more sectarian, with the Sunni Muslims who led the revolt becoming increasingly dominated by Islamists. Extremist groups also waded in, terrifying Syria's Christians, Alawites, Shiites and other minorities.
As the war dragged on and the rebels lost more friends and family members, Filfileh and his men, all Sunnis, increasingly sought motivation and solace in the only ideology with any traction in their patch of rural Syria: Islam. Filfileh grew out his beard, spiced his speech with increasingly religious rhetoric and wore black, Afghan-style outfits, adopting the image of a fighter in jihad, or holy war.
In September, The Beloved coordinated with a half dozen other groups to besiege the 46th Regiment of the Syrian army, near Aleppo. The group had never worked so closely with so many other fighters or tried to take a major military base. They hoped its fall would provide them with valuable booty.
After one failed raid, they realized they didn't have the firepower to take the base. So they divvied up the territory, cut the supply lines and braced for a long wait.
____
The Beloved of Allah held a section near a gated community of luxury villas they assumed belonged to rich businessmen and government officials. They settled into a stately, white villa with a columned entryway, a grassy, tree-lined yard and a swimming pool half full of green water and trash.
"The first time I walked into this villa, I saw that four of its doors were worth more than my entire house," said Qadi, the veterinarian.
The place had three stories, but the fighters stayed on the ground floor, hoping the house wouldn't totally collapse if the government bombed it. The army shelled the area regularly and most of the house's windows were blown out. But the ground floor had a fireplace to keep it warm and a foosball table to fill idle days.
Militarily, the group had advanced much. Instead of wasting ammunition in frequent clashes, they put snipers in the villas overlooking the base to cover more ground with fewer bullets.
"If you can't destroy a car or shoot a solider and kill him, don't fire," Filfileh said.
One afternoon, the scraping sound of a fighter jet filled the villa. Fighters rushed in, fearing an airstrike.
"To the trucks!" Filfileh yelled.
Within minutes, trucks with anti-aircraft guns blasted at the jet. It dove and struck nearby, sending up a huge cloud of gray smoke.
The rebels downed two jets and sent another away smoking, Qadi said. He had a video of a flaming L-39 training jet falling from the sky, and another of rebels chanting over its wreckage. The videos and claims could not be independently verified.
Food was short, Qadi said. The helicopters dropped packages of bread. Sometimes, the bread fell to the rebels.
____
When the attack on the base finally came, Filfileh called his men together.
Many had long hair and scruffy beards and laughed at how different they looked from their clean-cut selves in old ID photos. They wore camouflage uniforms and black headbands with "There is no God but Allah" embroidered on their foreheads.
Filfileh told them to look out for each other, to fight to the death and to take no prisoners. He said they were fighting for everyone who had been killed or wounded during the uprising. But he framed the fight in stark religious, not political, terms.
"We are heading out for the same goal, all of us," he said, stroking the black beard that now reached his chest. "We are not heading out to topple the regime. We are heading out to raise the banner 'There is no God but Allah.'
"If anyone is martyred, it is because God chose him," he said. "He only takes those whom He selects, the beloved of Allah."
Amid chants of "God is great!" they headed for the base. They stormed their assigned barracks and caught two government soldiers. They were questioned and "eliminated," said Akram, the former accountant.
By dawn, the rebels were clashing with soldiers in another barracks further in. Filfileh and 10 others came under fire and took cover behind a dirt mound. They lay on their chests, shooting at soldiers so close they could shout to them.
And shout they did. "Hey you dogs! Come have a cigarette!" Akram yelled, making his colleagues laugh. "Let me take you for a ride in my pickup!"
The base was falling, and the mood was buoyant. Just then, Filfileh told Akram to get him a rocket-propelled grenade.
When Akram returned, Filfileh was lying face up in the dirt, blood rushing from his forehead.
"Cover! We need cover!" Akram screamed into a walkie talkie. "Filfileh is wounded!"
The fighters carried Filfileh to a van, which raced to the Turkish border. Filfileh lay still on the floor, eyes open, with blood pooling under his head as fighters yelled his name.
At one point, he lifted his index finger in a sign of oath and mouthed the shehada: "There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet."
"He became a martyr next to me!" a fighter wailed. "Filfileh became a martyr!"
That night, the base fell.
____
The next night, the Beloved of Allah collected at the old farmhouse where they once hid from the army. The place had changed little, other than the new martyr photos on the wall.
The rebels had lost about 10 men in the battle, and Filfileh was badly wounded. But some 500 rebel fighters had routed the government soldiers, taken about 50 prisoners and made off with more booty than any could recall seeing in north Syria, including tanks, rocket launchers, armored vehicles, artillery guns and truckloads of munitions.
The survivors laughed when asked about their past or future lives.
"I try to ask myself where I'll be after the revolution and I can't imagine myself anywhere but in the grave," said Qadi, the veterinarian, who had planned to become a university professor before the uprising. "I've forgotten everything that came before."
Tallal invoked religion.
"If God permits, we could reach the presidential palace or we could all be martyred in the same battle," he said. "We depend only on Allah."
Filfileh was rushed to a hospital in Turkey, where surgeons stopped the bleeding from the bullet that had blown through his skull. Now he is conscious, can speak and says he will return to fight in Syria.
His doctor says he'll be released on Monday. Only time will tell if he'll walk without a cane.
Associated Press writer Suzan Fraser contributed reporting.
The Pulitzer Prizes
Columbia University
New York, NY
To the Judges,
As Syria descended into a full-blown civil war in 2012, it was crucial for the world to gain on-the-ground information about the fighting, about the rebel movement and about the suffering of Syrian civilians plunged suddenly into chaos and despair. Yet it was also a monumentally dangerous story to cover. It required going directly into the war zone, gaining the trust of shadowy groups, and being exposed to all the dangers inside Syria -- shelling and bombardment, the possibility of an errant bullet and the risk of abduction or capture.
Reporters Ben Hubbard and Hamza Hendawi called upon their deep knowledge of the region and mastery of Arabic to draw out detailed accounts of the conflict’s complexity in articles about the rebels and those simply caught in the middle. Searing images from photographers Rodrigo Abd, Manu Brabo and Khalil Hamra conveyed the inconsolable grief attending the war, giving immediacy to the conflict in a way words alone never could. Videographers Bela Szandelszky and Ahmed Bahaddou risked all to portray the unpredictable nature of the violence and tell the stories of a population in distress. Their trips without government permission or protection took them into the heart of the resistance movement, in Homs, Idlib and Aleppo, and across the countryside, deepening our understanding as the rebels themselves evolved. The team documented critical turning points, such as the first time the rebels captured a cohesive base, in Aleppo Province, from where they could carry out an assault on one of Syria’s largest cities. And they exposed how many rebels were adopting some of the grimmest tactics of the Syrian regime, such as extrajudicial killings and torture, in their quest to overthrow the Assad regime.
Our access also gave us a first-hand view of the suffering of ordinary people, their stories told with depth and compassion. We portrayed the plight of more than a million Syrian refugees who have been displaced within their own country. In one of the most telling stories, an AP team stayed 24 hours at the ruins of a private clinic in Aleppo turned triage center, recording the flow of the wounded, including children, and the frantic work of doctors and nurses.
In the town of Azaz, AP’s team witnessed a warplane drop a bomb, and then circle round for a second pass. The reaction of the people, and the quick thinking of our team, brought home the horror of what it’s like to live under this kind of random bombardment. It was one of countless narrow escapes, including a moment in June when Bahaddou was wounded in the shoulder during a firefight in northern Syria, an injury from which he is still recovering. Throughout the year, AP bore witness to the fighting, providing insight into the rebellion and where it may lead.
For its achievements, we are proud to nominate the AP Staff, including Rodrigo Abd, Ahmed Bahaddou, Manu Brabo, Khalil Hamra, Hamza Hendawi, Ben Hubbard and Bela Szandelszky, for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
Sincerely,
Kathleen Carroll
Winners
Prize Winner in International Reporting in 2013:
David Barboza
For his striking exposure of corruption at high levels of the Chinese government, including billions in secret wealth owned by relatives of the prime minister, well documented work published in the face of heavy pressure from the Chinese officials.
International Reporting
Finalists
Nominated as finalists in International Reporting in 2013:
Richard Marosi
For his provocative articles on the fate of thousands of illegal Mexican immigrants deported by the United States in recent years, many who are living desperate lives along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Jury
The Jury
Stephen Buckley(Chair )
dean of faculty
Roy Gutman*
bureau chief, Europe
Mary Jordan*
editor
Ellen Nimmons
assistant international editor
David Rohde*
columnist and investigative reporter
Winners in International Reporting
Jeffrey Gettleman
For his vivid reports, often at personal peril, on famine and conflict in East Africa, a neglected but increasingly strategic part of the world.
Clifford J. Levy and Ellen Barry
For their dogged reporting that put a human face on the faltering justice system in Russia, remarkably influencing the discussion inside the country.
Anthony Shadid
For his rich, beautifully written series on Iraq as the United States departs and its people and leaders struggle to deal with the legacy of war and to shape the nation's future.
Staff
For its masterful, groundbreaking coverage of America's deepening military and political challenges in Afghanistan and Pakistan, reporting frequently done under perilous condition
2013 Prize Winners
Adam Johnson
An exquisitely crafted novel that carries the reader on an adventuresome journey into the depths of totalitarian North Korea and into the most intimate spaces of the human heart.
Ayad Akhtar
A moving play that depicts a successful corporate lawyer painfully forced to consider why he has for so long camouflaged his Pakistani Muslim heritage.
Sharon Olds
A book of unflinching poems on the author's divorce that examine love, sorrow and the limits of self-knowledge.
Caroline Shaw
A highly polished and inventive a cappella work uniquely embracing speech, whispers, sighs, murmurs, wordless melodies and novel vocal effects (New Amsterdam Records).