Free The Morning They Came for Us by Janine di Giovanni

only twenty-four years old and dressed in baggy dark trousers and a T-shirt; he had a shy, but gentle demeanour. He kept trying to give me packs of Winston cigarettes, but I kept refusing, and it became a kind of farce – he kept insisting, gently, that he must give me a gift. I kept saying that I do not smoke. He would push the cigarettes across the bed sheets, where he was lying. Eventually, I took them. When I did, I saw that there were cigarette burns on his hands and arms.
    On another bed, pushed against a wall, a fourteen-year-old boy sat listening. When I suggested that he leave the room for the duration of the interview, which I knew was going to begrisly and detailed, the boy explained to me earnestly that his father was killed in front of him, so he could take whatever else was about to come. ‘You can speak freely,’ he said.
    Hussein was Sunni and religious, but he still shook my hand – which surprised me – and got off his bed, limping, to fetch me a chair. He told me that he came from an educated family; his father was a civil servant, his brothers are all university educated.
    Then, without words, he began to tell his story. Slowly, he removed his T-shirt. A scar, thick and angry, began under his mid-breastbone and swam down to the proximity of his groin. He sighed, lit a cigarette, and started to talk in a low voice.
    Hussein came from Baba Amr, the shattered and symbolic district in the centre of Homs. Homs is by now iconic – it is Syria’s third-largest city and was under siege from May 2011 until May 2014. As of this writing – though this might change – it is under Syrian government control. But when Syrian government troops and paramilitary units initially overran Baba Amr in the spring of 2011, in the early days of the uprising against the government of Bashar al-Assad, the fighting was bitter, fierce and dirty.
    Homs’s population reflects Syria’s general religious diversity and it is home to a community of Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites and Christians who lived side by side, only to find that – in the collapse of the police state – any sense of common purpose had dissolved.
    Civil war came early to Homs, and it was fought in an urban and strategic way – one street, one building, one apartment at a time. The battle was like a seesaw: the oppositionwould gain ground, and then the government would take it back.
    Hussein said he was never a fighter. He admitted that he was one of the organizers of the initially peaceful demonstrations that sprang up. At that time, the protests were headed by renowned Homs figures such as the Syrian television actress Fadwa Suleiman, an Alawite of the same faith as the Assad clan. That was when the demonstrations were still about slogans, marching, and chanting, as a weapon against Assad – not guns.
    When the demonstrations took on a more violent nature, some of the peaceful demonstrators – like Suleiman, who now lives in France – left, disgusted by the violence. Others decided to stay and take up arms, forming the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Composed largely of disgruntled officers from Assad’s forces, plus a cadre of untrained, young and inexperienced fighters, they were bound by a desire to live in a democratic country that was not governed by one family for forty years.
    Hussein said he never was a member of the FSA; he swore that his allegiance to the opposition was always political and, in his case, not military. His inspiration came from the Arab Spring: watching the people of Tunisia, Libya and Egypt rise up gave him and his friends a sense of hope.
    â€˜It was about freedom and rights at first,’ he said, and paused. ‘Then came the bullets.’
    Going back into memory is difficult even for those of us who have not withstood war or torture. Going back into war memories, or memories of physical pain and deprivation, requires a kind of iron