No jeans, no cigarettes on the bus from Beirut to Raqqa
Samya Kullab, May 25 2016.
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Syrian
refugees talk about their ordeal as they travel back home to see
their families in ISIL-held territory.
BEIRUT –
In Umm Mohamed’s suitcase there is a neatly folded black abaya and
niqab, while to the side of her seat she has piled a pair of shoes
and socks. “All black,” she smiled, holding up her handbag,
also black. “I got it to make the trip, just to be on the safe
side.”
The 70-year-old woman
firmly holds the bus fare that will take her from Beirut’s Charles
Helou bus station to Raqqa, the de facto capital in Syria of the
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
Before arriving to the
first checkpoint manned by ISIL fighters, somewhere between Damascus
and Palmyra, the bus driver will allow Umm Mohamed, the only female
passenger on the bus, time to change out of her leopard-print hijab
and into the black garb, then he will ask her to move to the back of
the bus.
“I’m going to see my
son and his family,” said the elderly woman. “I want to go
back to my own house; Syria might be finished but it’s still my
home.”
She is not alone; there
are at least 10 other passengers on the 50-seater bus making the
same trip. Moneychangers walk around
carrying wads of Syrian currency, as passengers smoke argileh, drink
coffee and wait for departure time. Bus drivers shout “Damascus!
Aleppo! Raqqa!” to entice passers-by. A poster advertising the
bus station reads: “Feel safe with us.”
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At around 7:30am, the
engine roars; driver Abu Hamad calls on passengers still ambling
outside to take their seats. A few minutes later the bus is gone,
beginning a journey that spans anything from 20 hours to
three days, passing by government-held territories and opposition
armed groups-manned fronts, til it reaches the heart of ISIL-held
territory.
In some ways, those who
make the trip are the first to witness Syria’s changing borders.
Charles Helou bus station, completed in 1974, was meant to transform
public transport in Beirut at a time when rural migrants, coming from
different parts of the country, were moving to the city in hordes.
Located under the main
highway connecting Beirut to the coastal road north, the station was
designed to ease the flow of traffic in the downtown district. “The
highway and the station were built across a bay, connecting two
seaside outcrops,” said Abdul-Halim Jabr, an urban planner. “The
area was basically a cliff.”
With the start of
Lebanon’s civil war in 1975, plans for the station came to a halt.
“During that time we heard stories of people being thrown from
the upper highway to the lower street,” he said. “This bus
station has a gruesome history.”
Fifteen years after the
war ended, and despite plans to rehabilitate the station, it appears
to be a phantom of its original, buoyant, purpose: Bathrooms are
unhygienic, management of the station is in disarray, and its most
dedicated patrons are not Lebanese migrants, but Syrians returning to
their embattled towns.
A ticket to Raqqa costs
around $50. To stop off in Aleppo on the way, passengers pay $30.
cheap because the people who go are often poor,” Ghassan, a
manager in the ticket booth, said. “All buses go to Damascus in
transit.”
Umm Mohamed, most passengers are Syrian nationals, typically workers,
going to visit their families.
another passenger, said he had spent a week growing a beard to make
the trip to see his mother. “Without it, they [ISIL fighters]
won’t let me in,” he said. He works in construction outside
Beirut and sends his mother some of his earnings every few months.
there is hard, but she doesn’t want to leave,” he said. “But
life in Lebanon is hard too.”
to Ibrahim, men, too, will change into loose fitting pants before the
bus reaches the first ISIL-manned checkpoint, knowing the disdain the
ISIL fighters have for jeans.
several occasions, young men wearing tight-fitted pants were ordered
out of the bus and told to “walk back to Aleppo,” according
to Abu Hamad, the driver.
who was sitting on the pavement chain smoking, will have to throw out
his cigarettes. The bus driver is already prepared. A heavy smoker
himself, Abu Hamad is armed with air-freshener to spray the bus
before entering ISIL-held territory.
we have no problems with Daesh [the Arabic acronym for ISIL], because
we come prepared,” he said. “I pull over, they come into
the bus, and check everyone’s ID, and if they don’t Haysam Sinno, is
another bus driver. “Every time I go, I feel like it could be my
last,” he said. “You see the destruction, in the main
roundabout you see the severed heads.”
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seemed unperturbed by the reception they might receive by ISIL
fighters manning checkpoints; it’s the sporadic shelling along the
road that terrifies him most.
there is fighting, the Syrian regime soldiers make us stop the bus
and wait until it ends,” said Abu Hamad, speaking casually of
the clashes, as though they were an inconvenient rainstorm barring
his path.“It’s
dangerous to go there, for sure,” he said. “But what can I
do? I have to make a living, don’t I?”
bus departs from the station every other day and Abu Hamad makes the
trip every Sunday. At most, he has 14 passengers at a time. It’s a
route he’s been driving for 13 years.
Before ISIL’s rapid
advances in Syria, he recalled, the journey would take far less time.
“We would leave Beirut by 10pm and be in Raqqa by 3am, now we
leave at 7:30am and arrive around 3pm the next day,” he said.
The important issue, he
stressed, is to avoid driving at night. “That’s usually when
there are clashes.” Instead of the direct route from
Damascus, Abu Hamad must drive up to Homs, then to Aleppo, and from
there take the road to Raqqa. But it’s rarely a smooth ride.
several occasions Abu Hamad’s bus has been shot at while crossing
frontlines; he has had to replace the windscreen twice and the side
is still pockmarked with bullet holes.
keep driving straight,” he said of such moments. “Sometimes
I see checkpoints manned by gangs with a dangerous look about them,
so I keep driving, I don’t stop.”
Last year, heavy fighting
near Safirah, on the way to Raqqa from Aleppo, forced Abu Hamad to
park on the side of a road for three days. “Regime soldiers
brought us food, and the passengers slept on the bus,” he said.
sudden road closures on the way back to Beirut are the greatest
challenge for a bus driver in Syria. In such cases, Abu Hamad tries
to take an alternative route via Salamiyah, in Hama, or worse, a
convoluted path requiring a drive further north near the Turkish
border.
Despite such
circustances, some passengers still go further.
Ahmed, a Syrian
worker in Lebanon, is accompanied by his elderly mother.
He plans to drop her off
in Mayadeen, a town in Deir Ezzor, eastern Syria, near the border
with Iraq, where she will be reunited with her sister and son. “I
told her to stay, but she misses them too much,” said Ahmed.
Ahmed’s oldest brother is
in Germany. He was among the thousands who took the dangerous sea
voyage from Turkey to Greece. His other brother is stuck in Aleppo,
too afraid to brave the risk of air strikes to visit his home in
Mayadeen.
“We are all
divided,” said the elderly mother. “But I came to Lebanon
because my son was getting married.”
Ahmed is accompanying
her, knowing that he might not be able to return.
He recently
heard that ISIL was not permitting men between the ages of 15 and 45
to leave his town.
“She can’t enter
without a male companion,” he explained. “Daesh has made it
very difficult for us, but we can’t protest, if I did my head would
decorate our roundabout, along with the others who spoke up against
it.”
Additional reporting
by Nazih Osseiran
