Henry Akubuiro

 
The rebel boss guffaws amid mortars flying overhead. I am unnerved by his baritone voice more than the wheezing mortars. Nobody can predict their temperament. ‘Mojaheed said he didn’t work against us,’ he says aloud to his lieutenants, who giggle. Turning to the Syrian journalist, he says, ‘You said you didn’t work against us, but you were revealing our secrets and information about our positions to the western media,’ as the timbre of his voice continues to rise. ‘You’re from Aleppo, aren’t you? Yet you were reporting about our countless losses to the regime, forgetting that they were capable of demoralising our soldiers at war fronts? Why, Mo? Why?’

Mojaheed explains that his reports were not targeted against his people but a way of projecting the atrocities of the regime to the world and win their sympathies. ‘I couldn’t have turned against the land of my birth and its brave defenders. I was doing my duty as a journalist, telling the story as they occurred. Reports such as mine have been the reason why the West is sending help to you.’

The boss isn’t completely satisfied with his explanation as he says, ‘The Western world hasn’t done enough! It doesn’t want to come all out to help us. What we’re getting is limited assistance. Tell them to give us what we want.’ At that moment, I begin to think Mojaheed will be left off the hook. They ask him where we are headed for, and he tells him we are going to Turkey to give talks on the atrocities of the regime forces in Aleppo to an international audience. ‘My sister has a heart problem,’ he adds. ‘She is going to Turkey to receive treatment. She has run out of medical supply.’

We thought they would let us go after that, but they didn’t. We are locked up in a store as the regime mortars explode with ferocity at intervals. We can’t sleep a wink, and our ears are shut with our index fingers.  We can’t eat the bread they offer us or drink the bottles of water. We are terrified. No wonder we are delighted when morning creeps up. Nobody is yet to tell us our crime.  By midday, the masked men announce we are free to leave, but advises us to wait till 1 p.m. when the mortars would fall silent –the regime forces usually stop firing momentarily as the afternoon heat picks.

By 1:15 p.m., the masked men hit Castello Road in three trucks; they are going to fortify a particular location. We wish them good luck and follow closely behind as we negotiate an escape route to Turkey, avoiding the main road and taking a parallel street to avoid being targeted. The road itself is littered with decomposing bodies and burnt-out cars. It is the highway of death in which the Red Crescent dare not ventured because of the rampant bombs.

The trip lasts for twenty-five minutes –it is the longest twenty-five minutes of my life, of which my heart beats accelerate. I am surprised I didn’t suffer a heart attack. Mojaheed’s sister has to blind herself with a hanger to avoid seeing those awful corpses. She throws up twice as the smell of rotten flesh chock her up. At Kafr Hamrah, the first village after the Castello Road, the masked men go another direction, and we continue our journey to Idlib, a major town in north-western Syria near the Turkish border. At Idlib, we get in touch with a smuggler to get us across the Turkish border, along with a group of other Syrians fleeing the country. Mojahed auctions his car to the smugglers to raise more money for an uncertain future in Turkey.

We meet a Syrian family who went through hell to get to the border. They tell us the smugglers turned out to be no better than the regime forces. They had held them and a few other helpless families captive, huddled in an abandoned building on a bitterly cold night as heavy rains poured down and animals howled near the carcasses of burnt-out vehicles. At a point, they thought they were not going to make it to the border alive, for there were stories of smugglers killing desperate Syrians and selling their organs. Some others trafficked the ladies as sex slaves. Worse still, they walked in the dark and cold through the jungle. Some aged women and children dropped off the road, tired and hungry, and nobody waited for them. It was the survival of the fittest. The cold was biting to the marrows, and they felt we were going to die of the cold. As they approached the border, the smugglers turned on them and demanded each person to offer hundreds of dollars on top of the fees they had already paid. Those who couldn’t meet up with the extortion were abandoned to their own fate.

We are delighted at last when we cross over to Antakya in Turkey. Mojaheed has a Turkish friend in Gazintep, more than forty kilometres from the border he intends to put up with. He says it is better than living in a refugee camp. In a restaurant at Antakya, I am thrilled to reunite with the Mizipahs, a Jewish family that had known no other place than Aleppo as home until now. They owned a bakery in Aleppo, which we patronised. I once did a story on the Jewish family who sold loaves of bread to people at no extra cost aside production cost. They were born in Syria and their forefathers had lived in Syria for thousands of years.

‘We travelled thirty hours to the border,’ the seventy-six-year old Mizipah tells me, ‘and we were assisted by Muslim Syrians,’ he said as a teardrop plummeted to the floor. Unknown to me, the story I did on them had drawn the attention of the Israeli Ministry of Absorption, which, I was told, facilitated their rescue from Aleppo, using their contacts with the rebels. 

Mizipah had told me in that interview that Aleppo had one of the world’s oldest Jewish communities in my previous interview. According to a Jewish lore, one of King David’s generals was said to have laid the foundation for the city’s great synagogue, and many Jewish had lived there from generation to generation.

‘I’m a Jew, but I haven’t been to Israel for once,’ he says as I ask her where she is escaping to. ‘Aleppo is the home I knew. I didn’t want to leave the city, but I had to. Though we were losing water and electricity, we were willing to endure; but we were scared when we learnt Isil was closing. We could be kidnapped or killed.’

I interrupt his narrative to ask him how his family escaped. At first, he doesn’t want to give the details. There are two unknown faces in their midst, perhaps their driver and a guide, whom he first communicates with his eyes for approval before he starts speaking. ‘In the middle of the night, we awoke to the sound of fists pounding on the door. When I opened the door, I saw two men standing. I was scared. I didn’t know them from Adam.  Have they come to kill me? I asked myself. But, much to my relief, they weren’t bad people; they were two good men –these gentlemen,’ he said, pointing to the strange faces in their midst, who had come to conduct us to safety. ‘They’re Syrians.’

Forgetting our own trauma momentarily, we thank the two men for saving their lives. With Mizipah are his wife and forty-year old daughter, Hannah, her three children and her Muslim husband, who appear excited to be ferried across Turkey. Meal over, we ride with them in their chartered bus, alighting at Gaziantep before the Mizipahs continue their journey to Instanbul.

‘You can visit us any of these days before we move to Israel,’ says the old man and his wife, scribbling their temporary address in Instanbul, as they wave us goodbye. ‘Thank you.’ We return the gestures. I will surely include them in my memoir when I return to Cairo in a few days’ time.

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