Headchopping scum:
“They stole the Revolution from us!” exclaims Majd, an early actor in the Syrian Spring, now a recent refugee in France. Since the popular uprising in March, 2011, networks of resistance have formed in the continuum between militants in exile and those working in Syria’s liberated zones. Ignored by the media that favor endless geopolitical analyses, these networks have had to endure ferocious repression and to cope with the rapid militarization of the uprising, caught between the development of Islamist and jihadist movements backed by Western and regional powers. Finally, they see themselves betrayed by an official opposition of stay-at-home, corrupt, and disembodied notables in exile. Despite all this, these networks try to hold on to the revolutionary spirit they had at the beginning. Even when they find themselves driven back to struggling for survival in the beseiged zones, not surrendering is their last hope of one day seeing the tyranny fall.
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Oussama, an ex-functionary of the Foreign Ministry who is now in Beirut, witnessed this tipping point in Douma, a “liberated” town located northeast of the capital in eastern Ghouta (the agricultural countryside around Damascus): “In 2012, we began to feel under siege. At this time, I lost close comrades who were summarily killed at the checkpoints. There was no arrest, no trial, nothing. We were afraid to move. The first person I lost was my nephew. A university student, he was arrested and tortured for 70 days. Next, I lost my cousin, a Douma shopkeeper, killed by government soldiers. After that, I lost my childhood friend who lived in the same area; he was killed by a sniper. At the end of 2014, there were 24 snipers in Douma who covered all the streets.” Majd also participated in Douma’s popular uprising by acting as a reporter: someone from an illiterate family, who had never before engaged in political activity: “The political discussions which emerged out of coordinating the revolution ceased to exist; the level of violence reduced discussion to zero. The territory was divided, marked off by snipers’ locations. All demonstrations disappeared; the activists were caught up in the humanitarian emergency that the repression imposed. The militant spirit changed, we had just lost the initiative of the revolution.”
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Hani, Salma, and Majd are part of one the largest networks still active around Damascus, a network attached to the local coordinating committee and organized around the personality of Rasan Zeitouneh. This young Damascus lawyer, along with her husband Wael Hamada and two of her colleagues (including the wife of the writer Yassin al-Haj Saleh) were kidnapped. Everything suggests that a local warlord, whom the regime’s forces had liberated from jail, committed the abduction.1 Rasan Zeitouneh had contributed to the Violations Documentation Center which works on documenting the regime’s crimes and which demands that all political prisoners be freed. At Douma, she started a women’s protection center where more than 300 women regularly distribute survival baskets: for Douma’s residents, survival has become a means of resistance.
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Hani, formerly a restorer of old houses, an occupation he had to give up in 2012, recounts the first steps of the collective of activist engineers that he helped found in Damascus: “In 2013, you could go back and forth in the free zone. Cut off from basic needs like water, electricity, gas, another world was taking shape. We began by testing models of solar-powered stoves, of liquified gas tanks, in Damascus, then distributed them to other districts, in order to find alternatives to state-run energy sources. A Douma peasant agreed to put our tests into practice. This network has been active for two years. In the beginning, it operated from contributions, but the local population became impoverished. We are looking for outside support. This is our way of participating in the revolution. But it has a frustrating side, because today the reality of the resistance is at the front.”
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Around the same time, south of Damascus in the Palestinian camp of Yarmouk, Abou Selma, a teacher of Arabic at the university, established the first free school there since the dictator put the village under embargo. This former militant of the Palestinian Communist Party has since distanced himself from the school because of its relations with the regime. With the air strikes in July 2012, Yarmouk definitely entered the revolution. “Since the first bombing raid, shelling has occurred on a daily basis and they have targeted the schools. The Yarmouk schools that depended on UNRWA (the UN) closed. I, my wife, and a niece found a wedding hall in a basement called ‘The Golden Hall of Damascus;’ it became ‘The Damascus School.’ We had two half-days of school and around 1,200 pupils—the numbers fluctuated.
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These activist networks in Douma, as in other zones in Syria, depend more or less upon the local councils, through which the resistance attempted to structure itself across the country. In October 2011,
Oma Aziz, an anarchist militant who died in prison in February, 2013, founded the local committee of Berzeh (a municipality north of Damascus). He called upon Syrians to organize themselves into self-governing bodies, independent of the state, by means of horizontal and collaborative practices. Today, every province has a council except Damascus, the heart of the state’s security system.
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Most of our contacts understood organizing at the local level, including the purely humanitarian and survival missions, as a form of resistance to Bashar al-Assad’s scorched earth policy for the besieged zones. In the beginning, it was necessary at all costs to prevent Assad’s policy from carrying everything away in its path and at the same time to create a replacement administration to take over the important public services (justice, water, sanitation). Salma clarifies the importance of these local councils: “In certain towns, the local councils succeeded in persuading public sector employees to remain at their posts, notably in schools and power plants, even after the regime cut the salaries of civil employees in the free zones in order to incite them to quit.” She continues: “Derraya, that’s the most advanced project since the revolution. It has always been the most open city with the first political initiatives starting in 2002 – 2003, such as the municipal library and organized street cleaning to make up for the state’s shortcomings. It has really frightened the regime. The city has remained mobilized despite the intense bombings undertaken by Maher al-Assad, the president’s brother and commander of the fourth division. Life under the blockade is hard: there is no agricultural land to help withstand the siege. But the residents are not giving into Assad’s pressure, even when he dangles a cease-fire.” Derraya, located in the Rif near Damascus, is considered to have the most experienced local council. While it has become one of the hottest fronts of the conflict, since 2012 armed groups have to submit to the local council’s authority and military operations have to be discussed with the civil authorities.
Oussama recalls Douma’s local councils: “This city has been under siege for at least two years, but it continues to look for alternatives and to be united without returning to a hierarchical system. The residents have succeeded in creating a civil system, and while they live under exceedingly difficult conditions, it is systematized and organized. We have a democratically elected local council, which ensures municipal work. Military groups remain outside the town; it is forbidden to bring weapons into town.”
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Of course there's a parallel theft with the military strongmen and obsessive parroters of former US generals going on above.
