The Morning They Came for Us Read Online Free PDF Page A

and that the opposition was dead. ‘I sank into a dark place.’
    When she asked for water, they would bring a male prisoner, make him urinate into a bottle, and try to force her to drink it. When she spat it out, they would throw it back in her face. The male prisoner, equally humiliated, would avoid her eyes.
    â€˜I remember every single one of their faces,’ she says bitterly of her tormentors, of that memory. ‘I will look for them. I AM looking for them.’
    The stripping led to beatings. The beatings led to further abuse.
    She was relentlessly interrogated for names, dates and occasions where she met her fellow Syrian Youth Union colleagues.
    There was always at least one interrogator, sometimes more. She would sit; they would circle her like wolves.
    She was continually threatened with rape.
    â€˜They would say “Talk or we will strip you”,’ she says, covering her eyes with the swipe of a hand. ‘That was their line, their threat.’
    One day, when she was not telling them what they wanted to hear, they brought her to an all-male cell where the prisoners were in their underwear.
    The men stared at her lustfully. She was one of them, but they were men, and they had been locked up a long time.
    â€˜It was horrible,’ she says. ‘Humiliating. They told me they would leave me with these hungry men and they would take care of me.’ She felt like a rabbit surrounded by wolves.
    â€˜I am a conservative Muslim woman, I thought I was being given to these men for them to rape me,’ she said. ‘And so I started screaming. I think I screamed for three hours. Until my throat was stripped raw. They wanted to break me. And they did. Finally, I said, “Okay, I will tell you the truth”.’
    She said she talked. She told them things. But what she told them was not enough. After several hours, they moved her – the first of many moves – and brought her to a place that she calls ‘the horror room’. The room was only as wide as ‘a man’s body’. They tied her hands to an iron bar behind her back.
    Then a man entered with a whip. ‘Every time I said something he did not like,’ she says, beginning to break into sobs, ‘he whipped me.’
    Her bloodied and bruised body was then handed over to another interrogator, who was told, ‘Okay, now really take care of her.’
    â€˜Now the real beatings began,’ she says sombrely, ‘and the terrible things.’
    For more than four years, I roamed refugee camps, safe houses, cities and towns in Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Syria, Kurdistan and Iraq, talking to women who had been raped during the war. Initially I did it as a journalist and analyst; later I worked for the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) working on reports about Syrian women who were left alone owing to the war, and were susceptible to sexual predation.
    They were hard to find, these women, for most direct victims did not wish to talk with me. I often had to rely on friends or family, who would whisper about such-and-such a woman, and I would do my best to track them down. I never forced them to talk, and if they did not want to see me, I did not push them. I believed they had suffered enough.
    Eventually, working near the Turkish–Syrian border in 2013, I was told about a ‘safe’ house in Northern Syria, near Aleppo, where nearly a dozen women were hiding. All had allegedly been raped by Shabiha, and were being tended to and cared for by a religious woman. But when I finally tracked the safe house down, they had moved – the women were not safe, and they had gone to another village.
    Once I had identified the victims, and if they agreed to talk to me, I still had to decipher their language of shame. I tried to explain that I was not going to identify them or expose their terrible secret, and that speaking might, in some way, eventually bring the perpetrators to