With The Rescue Team
Aleppo 2016
In times of war, you would deem any place you go to as the best portrayal of the Syrian tragedy. This is what I thought when I walked in destroyed and abandoned streets. Here, you can see the war and all its remaining scars with your naked eyes. When I visited field hospitals, I thought they contained all the tragedies of the war, but then I changed my mind and realized that working with rescue teams was in fact the epitome of misery. There, you come in contact with injuries and tragedies directly, in the first moments they occur. You hear the first screams and see the first shock. I still cannot forget the man who stood desperate as we lifted his whole family from under rubble. It was an unforgettable day.
It was a day from the siege of Aleppo, when I was forced to stay in the city, as all crossing points that connected it with the outer world were closed.
I remembered my friend Ahmad, my fellow student at school who came from my same neighborhood. After we lost contact for more than two years, he told me that he had recently joined the Syria Civil Defense forces to rescue civilians in Aleppo. Ahmad was a rebellious boy. He always was a high-spirited handsome young man, a buzzing bee in my class. The teacher would often give him dozens of notices for his chitter-chats that always got him in trouble. But people liked him. And he was nothing of a lazy student. However, from the very first demonstrations, he stopped going to school, was keen to attend every protest, chanting in the first row and hoisted on people’s shoulders.
Pictures of him were circulated, and these reached the regime. His family knew he would be arrested, so they tried to hide him. After two years, I got a phone call from him at the Syrian-Turkish border. This was the first time I talked to him after his long absence. It was also the last. I learned from him that he was working in Aleppo with the Syria Civil Defense teams. As usual, he talked like a storm. I understood that he adored his work and considered it a holy act. More than once, he recited me a verse from the Quran.
“And that if a person saves a man from death, it will be as if he had saved the whole of mankind.”
He asked me to visit him in Aleppo, and I promised that I would search for him the moment I would arrive to Aleppo. When I asked him about his address, he laughed in a manner I will never forget.
“You won’t have to search long to find the Civil Defense teams, as we’re the first people to reach the places hit during bombardments. Some even say that we know about the strikes before they happen, as if we’re making them up. This is what many news reports claim.”
He added: “Look at the places hit by jets, and you’ll know from the dirt clouds that form where to head, and you’ll find our teams are already there.
The dirt cloud is the address of the Civil Defense.” Ahmad was right, but I was too late. I did not find him. I was late by only a few days, not more.
Reaching their address was not difficult, as they were in every location. Very soon after a jet hit an area, you would hear sirens of their vehicles whistling like wind as they headed toward the targeted area before the cloud of dirt drifted away.
I reached their center before evening. It was located next to a school that had been previously hit. Education ceased to be when students’ blood got mixed with the ink from their papers. When their notebooks became dyed with crimson red.
They were housed in the semi-dark basement. Sunlight snuck in through rectangular windows along the ceiling. The acidic smell of moisture, socks, and the remains of food permeated the space. Dozens of iron beds were scattered along. On the walls of the basement that resembled those of a prison, some memories were scribbled in unclear letters. Old clothes and white helmets were hung. It was from this humid grave that they set off like the wind to offer life to other people.
I asked the head of the team, Abu Zaid, about my friend Ahmad. By chance, he was the first one I met, and Ahmad had been close to him. He did not reply directly, but I saw the answer in a tear lingering inside his eyes. I discovered that Ahmad had been martyred just a few days before, while trying to rescue a victim.
I decided quickly, as usual, to work with the team in Ahmad’s place, as long as I was trapped in Aleppo. When I spoke to Abu Zaid about my decision, he was more than welcoming.
Yet, what happened after the rest of the team got back from their mission and met me was something else. Abu Zaid introduced me to the team and said I would be working with them. Their opinions on this varied. Some welcomed me, some kept silent with neutral smiles, but there was a small guy called Jako who really annoyed me. Hostility showed in his first look, and he denied my existence. He asked me, doubtingly, as though underestimating my abilities: “Do you know how dangerous it is to do the work we do?”
“I can learn from you,” I said, smiling.
“We took classes to be able to do this work.”
“I’ll do what you ask of me.”
“You’ll cause trouble for us, and we do not know you. Maybe you work for…” Then he winked and laughed in a silly way. For a long time, he tried to make the others laugh, too.
I felt rage against that boy circulating through my veins. He was young — not more than 17 — and although his features seemed childish, deep inside his eyes I saw a malice that belied his gentle features. I wished I could grab his from his clothes and shout:
“Why do you want to stop me from helping people? You’re no better than me. I have been a part of many humanitarian projects, and I serve people just like you do,” but Abu Zaid’s angry voice brought the situation to a closure when he blurted out a warning.
“Jako!”
This mere word was enough to cut off Jako’s hysterical laughter, as though he’d been slapped across the face. Abu Zaid continued:
“This is a friend of the martyr Ahmad, and you know Ahmad, so why do you doubt him? May God’s mercy find Ahmad, who was the best and most courageous among us.”
The team members whispered, asking God to bestow His mercy upon Ahmad’s soul.
“And remember,” Abu Zeid said. “It’s not your job to accept or refuse people, Jako. That’s my job.”
Jako withdrew to his bed in a faraway corner, and there he got out his mobile and started playing with it without uttering a single word. Abu Zaid took my hand, asking me to disregard and forgive Jako’s doubts, as sometimes regime collaborators did try to join them.
I told him that I knew about such cases.
He guided me to an empty bed that would be mine for the duration of my stay. I did not ask to whom it already belonged. However, I felt that the dark-colored sponge mattress and the white helmet hanging on the wall had belonged to Ahmad.
When Abu Zaid sat beside me, I asked how Ahmad was martyred.
He gave a long sigh that ended in a moan.
“He was, may God have mercy on him, very impulsive and hot-blooded. He was always out front, ahead of others.
He told me about this a lot, but I heard only a little. I remembered Ahmad’s features and his devious jokes and quarrels. I remembered seeing him hoisted on people’s shoulders in the demonstrations as he chanted enthusiastically.” Abu Zaid spoke sadly about the same things I remembered in Ahmad. He later tried teaching me some of the principles of rescue work.
“I was always telling him: ‘Ahmad! The safety of the team is the most important thing in rescue work because if the team is bombed, it means death of everyone.’ But he did not listen. Often, the jet would return to bomb the same place it had targeted before, hitting the rescuing teams and the gathering that was caused by the first bombardment.
This was what happened to us as we were rescuing a family, and Ahmad was trying to remove a child from beneath the rubble. The child was calling out, his hands reaching out to Ahmad’s when the jet came back. At that time, we had to leave and hide in the nearest shelter, but Ahmad did not leave. He kept holding the child’s hand amidst the rubble. When we came back, we found him hugging the child, who was alive, but Ahmad was martyred.”
Abu Zaid has just finished this story when the wireless walkie-talkies in everyone’s hands began to cry out:
“Helicopter with barrel bombs was on the way to a target. Helicopter….barrel bombs.” This sentence was repeated a lot. But the team members acted as though they did not hear a thing. Maybe they’d grown used to hearing such warning. However, all stood up upon hearing the word: “Aleppo! Aleppo! Helicopters inbound”.
When they heard the word “inbound,” the white helmets were on their heads and Abu Zaid was the first among them. I voiced out my desire to accompany them.
“You can relax today,” Abu Zaid said. “Things are always like this. We always have work. You’ll get your turn tomorrow.” Abu Zaid laughed. “Do not worry, we have plenty of work. Unfortunately….”
I slept that night in the martyr’s bed. In the darkness of the basement, his face circled around me, snatching sleep from my eyelids. I imagined the smile that never left his face dyed with the crimson red that covered his body getting lifted from under the rubble. I fell asleep at some point, as I was remembering his last words to me:
“And that if a person saves a man from death, it will be as if he had saved the whole of mankind.” When I fell asleep, I saw him flying in green forests over palaces of marble, beneath which rivers flowed.
There really was a lot of work. The jets did not stop their roaring, and the walkie-talkies did not keep silent. Death inhabited every corner of that besieged city.
I was still sleep-deprived from the previous night, and the next day was full of tragedies. It was Friday. I woke up to the team members’ hassle while putting on their clothes. Most of them slept fully clothed. They shouted alerts at each other. Even though I did not hear the sound of the walkie-talkies, I understood they were heading to a place that had been targeted. The sun was barely peaking from its darkness, and the morning still stung sleepy faces with its cold April breeze. I put on the helmet that was hanging above my bed, and I followed Abu Zaid, who told me to go with him.
His eyes scanned the sky. Smoke was blowing over three places not far from us. We set out in more than one car, heading to the three check-points monitored by Abu Zaid and other observers. I was in Abu Zaid’s car and the so-called Jako was with us. We arrived at an old neighborhood, one of those that had been haphazardly built and destroyed. It was an unorganized area in al-Shaar neighborhood, in the Tariq al-Bab district, as I expected. We passed through a street in which all of the buildings sitting on one side were in shambles. The hit target was an old three-storey building. A single family lived in the house. A man, his wife and five children, as well as the man’s elderly parents. This was what we understood from the man who was screaming at the top of his lungs: “Oh God, oh God! God is the greatest! They’re all gone, they’re all gone!”. I learned from the neighbors who gathered nearby that he was the owner of the home.
It was not only children screaming, but everyone else joined in the panic frenzy. You could barely understand a word being said. If you were to look at the bombed building, you would not know where to find the entrance. Everything laid under three piled ceilings. The top ceiling’s front side had slid to the bottom of the second floor, while its back side was collapsed on the first floor. Pillars stretched up into the sky. The stairs that had bound them was suspended in the air. My colleagues climbed through the rubble that poured out in the streets, directly toward the second floor. I followed them. The overlapping walls and blocked corridors ended up pushing us back into the street. When we asked for directions, people withdrew in fear, except for a 40-year old man who was hitting his head with both fists and shouting from the depths of his aching heart: “Oh God! Oh God! All of them are gone!”
He was running towards the pile of rubble, trying to move aside pieces of ashen cement. Hopelessness would assail him, and he would strike his head again and scream, begging: “God! God!”. I knew that this man was the owner of the house, and that it was his elderly parents, wife, and five children who were suffocating beneath its rubble. It was his fate to have gone outside not more than a half an hour before the bombardment, perhaps to bring them breakfast.
He was screaming: “I wish I were with you! I wish I had not gone out and I’d died with you instead! Oh God, who is there with me now?”
The team was working with unparalleled effort, regardless of the simple tools they used. I was working with them when someone noticed my confusion. “Do like me,” he said.
Despite their persistence, they were working with great care, fearing that the cement mass might collapse on those who might still be alive under the rubble.
To my awe, Jako was also removing pieces of rubble and continuously searching here and there for a remaining sign of life. In that moment, I felt how much I wronged Jako. He was pouring all his heart into the rescue work, as if the people under the rubble were his own family. He would not stop encouraging his fellow co-workers: “Come on, guys! Come here! You go there! Quickly, my brothers! Quickly!”
And then he shouted at the man who was pulling his beard and striking his head: “Uncle! Let God deal with it! God willing, we will get them out alive! Ask God and pray for us! We will get them out, we will!”. But more than an hour had passed, and we had not found anyone.
Then, when we lifted the remains of a wall from the street, a crawlspace opened before us. It led us to find the bodies of the grandfather and grandmother. Meanwhile, one of us saw the first girl, who’d been thrown to the neighboring roof, and was dead. Then, the walkie-talkies alerted us to flee from the place, as the jets were coming back to bombard the region again.
After hours of work, and running back and forth between the consecutive air raids, a staff member shouted for help from a corner that seemed, from his choked voice, located far away. We understood that they had found the other children, all three of whom had been sleeping next to each other, as though they had not yet woken up that morning. They died, suffocated under the crushed ceiling, before they even woke up from their dreams.
The image of that father will be carved into my conscience for the rest of my life. He was standing beside the pile of rubble that had been, only a short time before, his cozy sweet home. He followed us with his unmoving gaze as the bulldozer shaved away the debris, searching for any protruding limb that might appear with every shave. From time to time, he would come to count the dead bodies on his fingers as though he’d lost his mind while gesturing to the bags: “These are five, my mom, dad, Raghad, Abdo, Fatima, and Sahar, but where is Munir? Where…? These are five so there are still two left, in addition to my wife”. He would go back to counting again, forgetting that the first girl we found on the neighboring roof had been moved to a hospital.
In the depth of the rubble, near the remains of a circular staircase that I thought led to the first floor, I heard something similar to a moan. I tried concentrating on what I was hearing. It was a choked, intermittent moaning coming from below. We gathered to search for a way to reach the source of that voice.
After several minutes of digging, a hole appeared through the iron wires and masses of cement. The hole led to what looked like a kitchen. A woman was trapped inside. A gas smell began filling the place.
Abu Zaid replied to the woman’s moans: “Mother, do not be afraid, do not! We’ve reached you! We’ve reached you!”
But there was still a far distance to reach the woman, and the smell of gas was overwhelming us. Suddenly, the walkie-talkies began screeching:
“Russian warplanes have entered the area and are headed to their target… clear the area. More than one Russian warplane has entered the target area.”
I did not understand much of the message, but it seemed the area we were working in was a target. Like threads of lightning, we began evacuating the building from all sides. The warplane’s roar raging through the sky almost ruptured my eardrums. I saw the rest of the team opening a shop — they dragged its huge door up and, in seconds, we were inside and the door was closed. I was about to say that we had left the woman alive and she almost certainly would be suffocated by the gas smell, but I remembered Abu Zaid’s words from the day before:
“The safety of the team is the most important thing. If the team is injured, then everyone will die.”
We were inside the dark shop. It was not really a shop, but rather an empty warehouse. A three-wheeled vehicle and an old box were standing in the corner.
It had caught my eye, as we ran toward the shop to take shelter, that several people had been moving around the building. I said to the person beside me, “If those people helped us, we would have finished the work quickly. But they were just watching”.
He told me that, if I were to ask for help, they would definitely answer: “This is not our work, it’s the Civil Defense business.”
“But they can help, and God’s hand is with us.”
“No, my brother. They might help in the last moments to hold a woman or a girl, or maybe they’ll start helping after we finish our work to dig for what can be stolen.”
“I do not understand.”
“They’re thieves, thieves. They have no ethics, no humanity. They wait for a dead woman to be lifted from under the rubble, then they rush to her, pretending to help so that they can rob her of a bracelet or ring. They rescue gold, not souls. They are thieves, do you understand?”
Oh God, how great is the scale of human contradictions! While a team is risking the lives of its members to save a life, there are others waiting on a corpse to rob its gold. While the door was crackling under the bombing pressure, potentially falling into its wrecked destiny above our own heads, one of the team members got up in the vehicle and held his mobile screen as far as his stretched arms and laughed, saying, “We’ll take a goodbye selfie”.
I was not surprised by how they all laughed, as the horrors of death had no impact on them. Death had lost its force as they grew accustomed to its presence amongst them. They really were heroes. How I wished to stay with them!
The second bombing noise was travelling across the street, close to the door.
A split second before silence reigned, a team member tried dragging the door up, but the moment he heard fragments colliding on the street, he rushed to close it again.
The warplanes announced the end of their mission and headed back to base. Immediately, we were all jumping with joy and climbing the piles of the destroyed building as though nothing had happened. Abu Zaid was communicating with the second sub-team on the walkie-talkie, asking them to head towards our location immediately.
I thought he wanted them to come and help, but later I understood that three other houses on the same side of this street were just hit. The street outside was empty, except for the dirt that blocked our vision. What amazed me was the man we left in the destroyed home. Despite the rockets that dropped around him, he did not move from his place, and yet his fate was not to be injured. He was trying to reach the window to get to his suffocating wife.
We helped him stand afar so we could finish our job. He went back to the bags of corpses to count them again: “Sahar…my mom, dad……”
The first thing the team did was to drop an oxygen container so the woman would not asphyxiate.
It was difficult to reach her, especially that the use of an electric device to cut through the iron was not possible at the moment because any spark would ignite the leaked gas. Regardless, the team managed to cut the wires with regular saws with nothing but their rigid persistence and strong insistence. They cooperated — every one taking a turn without stopping for a second — -to move the iron away and managed to eventually reach the woman.
She was still alive, but her pelvic bones and legs were broken. They held her in a specific way and participated in carrying her through the crawlspace. I heard her husband following her, saying in a soft voice: “Cover her up, my sons. Cover her up.”
At that moment, the men who were hovering around us came to help us carry the woman and the corpses to the car. I heard my friend Abu Zaid, who has just spoken to me about thieves, roaring at them:
“Thank you for your help, but kindly stay away for your safety’s sake! May God reward you for your goodness.” One man approached the team as if he had not heard my friend, so Abu Zaid reiterated, this time with a hint of acerbic irony: “I told you to go away. We do not want your help.”
“Let me help you!”
“Go away, or I’ll behead you with this saw and put you in a bag and carry you with them… Do you understand?”
Then, I saw the man retreat, frightened,: “We only wanted to do a good deed.”
My friend turned to me and saw me listening to their discussion. “I see this man everywhere I go to rescue people. I know him well. Very well. He would even steal kohl from a person’s eyes.”
I heard the injured woman whisper in a scarcely audible voice: “My children, my children! Where are my children?”
“They’re okay, auntie!” a voice said. “They’re waiting for you!”
I asked myself where the children were in fact waiting. No doubt, they were waiting for her in heaven, and she might follow them soon.
While we were passing debris in the corner of a room, I saw what looked like a boy’s foot buried under the shards, except for its naked toes. I began digging around the foot until the soft cold body appeared. Half of the back head was smashed. My friend lifted the little body, and I stood behind him.
For the first time, I was face to face with the Death that I feared. I saw it embodied in a girl whose head was smashed, her bones broken. I was the nearest one, so he handed the body to me to continue his way amidst the rubble. He called out: “We got the girl. Anyone else here?”
“Take her outside.”
I turned away and stumbled on the piles of stone. My legs slipped right and left, but they kept moving, while my heart beat intensely up to an extent I thought it would wither in my chest. I avoided looking at the girl’s face. I did not know if it was her body pulsating or my hands carrying her.
One colleague saw me confused, hardly seeing my way forward, so he swooped in like a falcon and got the girl from me.
“Give her to me, give her to me.”
I not only felt that her weight moved off my forearms, but I also felt a mass of debris moving off my chest as I handed her corpse to my colleague. My heart beats began calming little by little. Then I knew that my hand was the source of the pulse, and not the girl’s dead body.
It was the first time to hold a body from which life has departed up to the heavens.
The ambulance set out, with the father attached to it. My heart was broken at his sight, and I appealed to God to avenge him.
I saw the team heading towards the side of the street where rockets had been fired. We met up with the rest of our team members, who had left us in the morning to put out a fire.
They told us that the strike did not steal any lives, fortunately. They also checked the three other houses, and they all were empty single-story buildings. Out of caution, the team members stood next to the entrance of every building and loudly called: “Anybody here?”. When no answer came but the echo, they would move to the next building.
Before comfort perched in my heart at the thought that all the residents have fled, I heard an answer from the fourth house. A handful of men emerged and invited us to rest with them and eat the breakfast they’d prepared over another story about God’s kindness in protecting unarmed citizens from the barbaric aircraft. These people were accustomed to death, and no longer feared it. The men ate their breakfast after they replaced their dishes with new ones clear from dust.
Apparently they were brothers who had bought the land then built their houses adjacently to continue being one family. Only a low wall separates the houses from one another.
They got used to eating breakfast together in one house every Friday. And that day, it was the turn of the oldest brother, whose house was at the beginning of that side of the street.
When the warplanes came, carrying what is known as “sea mines,” they planted them along the street. The four men were sitting with their wives and children at the breakfast table. They were more than 30, a mixture of women, children, and men. The mines dropped on the first three homes, while the fourth survived. The breakfast table was still intact in the big dining room.
The eldest brother among them said: “For he whose destiny is to live, nothing will kill him. It’s our fate and yours to eat this food. Please, come on and join us!”.
Oh God! In which world are these people living? They have grown so used to what is going on! Their belief in fate is their support system.
When our car was heading back to the headquarters, the firefighters were telling their heroic story, which ended with: “We saved seven people from a fire and the eighth died.”
I said to myself, “Oh God, we saved one and seven died.”
What kind of world is this?
Why all this killing? Whom does it benefit?
Read more:
Available by Amazon and I Was Born Twice
https://www.amazon.com/Was-Born-Twice-Stories-Syrias/dp/109557342X
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(Author )by Hasan Almossa
