Free The Morning They Came for Us by Janine di Giovanni Page A

strength. What Hussein rememberedmost was the physical pain, the primal sensations: cold, hunger, thirst.
    That first winter in Homs was cold. Food was hard to find. Water was cut, and so was electricity. Rooms were lit by candlelight. Hussein continued:
    Assad’s forces launched a full assault starting at the end of February 2012. They were trying to take back our neighbourhood, Baba Amr. But the fighting and shelling had started getting really bad even in the beginning of February. By the middle of the month, people were exhausted. On the last day of February, someone told my family that the regime was ‘cleansing’ Baba Amr of rebels, and it would be over in a few days. Meaning we would lose our land.
    I remember helicopters. I remember an entire family getting shot and killed, including the five kids. The Syrian Army’s 4th Armoured Division sent in tanks and infantry.
    The Free Syrian Army, the Farouq Brigades, were running away because they were afraid. People had said that they would defend Baba Amr until the last man was left standing – but they were already running away. You could not blame them – they had no weapons. We stayed in the house. By March 1st, the FSA had had enough; they made a ‘tactical retreat’. A neighbour came and told us that seventeen soldiers had been captured by Assad’s guys and killed immediately.
    We stayed inside for a week.
    On March 8th, at about 7.30 p.m. – I remember the time – I heard men speaking in a foreign language. I thinkit was Farsi, so they were either Iranian fighters working for Assad or they were Hezbollah . . . I don’t know.
    I don’t know. It’s so hard to remember what you wish you could forget.
    At first Hussein refused to open the door. He stood behind it, and tried to talk to them. ‘I said, “We are civilians! We have rights!”’
    But the soldiers – who he said were not wearing uniforms, meaning that they could have been paramilitaries – fired intimidating shots, and his brother finally – if reluctantly – opened the door. As he did, the fighters shot the teenager through the chest at close range; the force of the bullet threw him against a far wall where he fell, dying. Hussein could do nothing.
    They tore into the house like a swarm of bees. Hussein thinks there were about thirty of them. They immediately shot Hussein in the shoulder and hand to disable him. He was shocked, but he remembered the excruciating pain. He held up his deformed fingers, and touched the angry red circle on his shoulder blade. Once he was shot, the impact of the bullet made Hussein reel backwards, and he ended up lying next to his dying brother, looking him straight in the eye.
    â€˜I was watching the life go out of him,’ he said quietly.
    The men then picked him and his brother up by their hands and feet, and carried them – along with several dozen men from the neighbourhood – into a truck, throwing them inside, one on top of the other. They said they were going to use them as human shields. Some of the men in the truck were already dead; many were badly beaten and lay groaningin agony. Some were shot, others looked as if they had been beaten with clubs or rods.
    â€˜One guard pulled a man up by his ear and said, “Say Bashar al-Assad is your God.” The man replied “I have no God but God,” and the guard shot him and tossed him in the pile of bodies. The guard looked up at the others, defiantly. “Assad is your God!”’
    Hussein was bleeding, but his brother was closer to death. They took the men in the truck to a military hospital, but not to treat them. Hussein knew what the hospital was – a place of torture, not a place of healing. The minute they closed the doors, the men who had kidnapped them began to brutally beat Hussein with sticks made of plastic and wood.
    Hussein’s brother was