Lucifer is Better Than Him
a guest post about Syria, by Jasmine
“He’s gone, he’s gone, he’s gone.”
She is talking about Assad. She is crying.
“She” is my friend whom I’ve written about, until now, as Jasmine. She is Syrian, and lives in Turkey, in my town.
Jasmine fled Syria for Turkey on foot in 2015, pregnant with her son, along with her daughter and (now late) husband.
She taught her kids not to speak Arabic in public. She told them to hide the fact that they are Syrian.
There is a lot of conversation right now about the fall of the Syrian regime being part of the workings of the American military complex, and I am certainly not going to challenge that.
But many of those conversations, even/especially from left-leaning folx, include the thought, “Assad was bad, but…”
Notably, few of the people saying those things are actually Syrian.
So I wanted to let Jasmine tell her story, in her words. We were going to use her real name, but have decided, for her safety, not to.
Here is an edited version of my conversation with Jasmine from earlier today, one day after Damascus fell from the regime. Please forgive any typos. I wanted to get it out as soon as possible.
On the Prisons
“There were lots of prisons in Damascus. Hidden prisons. We don’t know that.
In Sednayah prison, there was a hidden door. We know this is a prison, but there is another prison around it.
They cannot open the hidden door.
Only 300 people have been released, but there were maybe 100,000 in this prison. They are saying the door needs Assad’s face to be opened. Nobody from the government is helping. They’re hiding. They’re running away.
People underground are dying every minute—there’s no water, no electricity, no air. Civilians are going in with hammers. They’ve been trying to let them out for three days. They’e coming out without legs, without eyes. Some of them are children. Girls of 13 or 14 years old."
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One lady went in at 19 and came out at 33. She has lots of kids. She doesn’t know who the fathers are. That’s just one woman.
We just found out that in one of the prisons, there was a doctor. He removed human eyes and sold them for $200,000 per eye. He was taking kidneys, livers, hearts, and selling them.
One man who was released said he had spent eleven months in jail. The room was six metres square, and it held 120 people, wearing nothing more than something like underwear. Every week they killed so many people.
When the prisoners were released, they didn’t know what was going on. They thought Syria was being occupied by Iraq. They don’t know what year it is. They are scared. They thought they were all going to be killed at once. They didn’t know where to go. They have lost their memories, they have lost everything. 60% of them are in the streets in Damascus. Thousands of names are being called out, for families who thought loved ones had died.
One of them men who was trying to open the door said that just the smell made him sick. It’s the smell of bodies. A thousand bodies. They don’t kill them immediately. They say, ‘They do not kill us. They give us a little bit of food, just enough to survive. They are professionals at making us suffer.’
They use the technique from every war. German techniques. Israeli techniques. To make them suffer. They have a machine to press the bones, and a canal where the blood flowed. They pressed the body to be paper thin. Huge trucks full of bodies every day from Sednayah prison.
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I have a cousin, she lost her brother. They told her he was dead. She’s been in the streets for two days looking for one sign that he’s alive.
It helps that we’ve pushed Iran and Russia from our land. Now we will see with Israel.”
On Watching It Happen
“I thought, 'Oh my god. Is this happening?’ When I saw the Syrian army running away and leaving behind the small army, this is when I knew. When they got Aleppo, the economic capital of Syria, with all the factories. When they got Hama, then Homs. When they got Homs, I thought, ‘That’s it. Because that meant Damascus was next. That meant the government was falling.’
I don’t think they would have succeeded if Israel or Russia had bombed them.
I am so happy. I just want to scream, ‘FINALLY WE DID IT!’ In the beginning it was like a dream come try. When I see that they succeeded… it was complicated emotions. Like nothing you can describe. Happiness, so much happiness. Fear, because I don’t know what they will have after that. Scared about my situation here. Do I go to Damascus? I want to go. Will it be safe? Will my kids be okay?
The thing that’s affecting me the most are the prisoners we didn’t know about. We didn’t know their situation. This is killing me right now. We didn’t know what they suffered. We didn’t know how much and how awful it was.
We want to be happy but Israel is bombing and we’re scared. We want to be happy but still people need us. I’m scared. I need them to love themselves. Doesn’t matter if you’re Christian, Jewish, or any religion. We won. Syrians won.”
On Assad
“I remember when I was young, my father always said: his (Assad’s) father was worse. Because he killed 40,000 men in Hama, just in Hama. In 1980. And he got away with it. Nobody judged him.
He had the throne.
The whole family were all crazy. All narcissists. But you would’t see that. Because we weren’t allowed to talk about it.
Everyone must know this is what happened.
He let us suffer outside Syria. He let the people suffer inside Syria. He made people lie about who they were. Everything was destroyed. And he ran away with lots of money.
Believe me, Netanyahu, with everything he has done to Palestine, is not like Bashar Assad. And this, Assad did it to his own people.
Everyone is better than him. Everything will be better. They [the leftist critics] don’t know that. Lucifer he would be better than him. They don’t know what we see. He threw chemical bombs at people.
This is Just One Story
“They raped women in this prisons. The women had kids and raised them in the prisons.
Five years ago, a journalist from Al Jazeera interviewed a doctor who had been in the prisons. He said there was a 5-year old child whose mom was ill. And he said, ‘I’ll go check on his mom.’ And he sat with the mom, and she said, ‘Can you tell my son a story?’ And he said ok.
And he said ‘There was a forest.’
And the boy said, ‘What does it mean, forest?’
And he said, ‘There was good day.’
‘What does it mean, a good day?’
The boy didn’t know about anything. No sun. No moon. No tree.
The doctor froze. He couldn’t’t stop crying, and he left.
And this is just one story.”
On the Celebrations Happening Now
“I’m scared right now. But I can’t stop myself from watching. Because I feel they are my brothers. They’re happy. They’e wearing the Syrian free flags. Palestinians are wearing the flags and saying congratulations. One day we will be like you. It’s like your brother, in your own house. Could you stop watching?
People haven’t see their own children, wives, parents. They’re crying. This feeling was worth thirteen years of waiting.
And now I know, my auntie’s cousin, his wife’s brother is still searching in Sednaya. I’m scared he will be dead. There will be lots of dead people. But they burned all the documents before they left. So we can’t know anything about what they did.
There were plenty of prisoners we didn’t know. It’s like there was one Syria, and another Syria below it. And we didn’t know. People lived underground. And we lived above. I walked in these streets
I always hid that I’m Syrian. And now I’m saying, hold your head up. Say you are Syrian! Hold your head up high. You’re a free Syrian right now! I want to talk about it. I want to hug! I NEED SOMEONE TO CELEBRATE! I want to be happy! Go out!
I love Syria. I’d like to work there as a tour guide. I wish I could show the people my city. I would be happy if I could work for a tourism company. I would love to do that.”
Before We Left
“I was in the car with my mother, and my father, and my sister. I was engaged. My mom got some money from her father when he died, and she bought me and my fiancé a very tiny home—just one room and a salon. My husband spent lots of time building it, decorating it, making the kitchen. We just needed windows and the main door. And we chose the tiles for the bathroom, I chose purple and white. I still remember.
My father had a 7-seat minibus. We had just come from cleaning the house; my father was doing the wiring. A guard stopped us and searched us. He started shouting at my dad. He said, ‘You are guilty!’
My father said, ‘What did I do? I’m an old man with girls!’
And the solder said, ‘fuck you.’ We thought they would kill us.
They said, ‘Go, you are lying. You helped tourists against the government.’
Another time, we left our place in Zamalka and we rented a place in the capital, Damascus. It was winter, and we didn’t have enough money to buy new things to stay warm. We needed cushions, we needed duvets. We thought we would go to Zamalka and get stuff. They stopped us. They were laughing at us.
They said ‘WHERE ARE YOU GOING?’
My father said, ‘I need stuff for my home.’
They said, ‘Okay, go!’
A few hundred metres, they started shooting at us. From every direction. My mother was screaming. My father said, ‘GET DOWN!’ We didn’t know what to do. I was sure we would die in the car. There was nobody around. There were bullet holes near the wheel, near the windows. My father just turned around and sped back.
Somebody might have been trying to kill us. Or somebody might have been trying to warn us that there was a bomb further ahead on the road.
Being Syrian
Really, Syrian people have seen so many things. We would smile when we should have been crying.
I taught my kids don’t speak Arabic. Now I am saying to them, be loud, you are Syrian. Be loud! Hold your head up high! You are a free Syrian! They are shocked when they heard me singing, dancing. I said, I’m happy!
It wasn’t our home before. It was Assad’s home. He (Assad) said, ‘I am your god.’ Walla, walla. He always said that. He said, ‘You will bow down to me.’
Wallahi, you will see right now. You will see horrible things coming out. People are saying, now we can post. Now we can say now. Now we can say we didn’t accept it. Before they couldn’t. If you looked the wrong way, they would judge you.
It’s our present for new year. It’s the best ever news.
Thank you for hearing me. Do you have any questions?”
Jasmine gives me a glowing smile.
Hours after this conversation, she texts me: “Israel is destroying my country now. We are a poor people who did not rejoice.”
“I think I’m going to have a nervous breakdown.”
The US/Israel has bombed Syria 75 times in the past 24 hours, as of this writing (9:30pm Paris time).
If you’ve read this far, I ask you, please. Do not look away.
Natalie, thank you for bringing us Jasmine‘s account. Jasmine, thank you for sharing your story. We need first-hand accounts like this.
No words, only care.