By
Fulvio Scaglione
Aleppo, January 8th 2017. He lets us film
him, but Mahmud Fahrad is not his real name. He’s afraid of
retaliation in this devastated city of Aleppo, where few people think
that all of the jihadis have really left for good, on the coaches
supplied by Assad to get to Idlib. Because this bricklayer who lost
his job years ago and has had to make ends meet with a wife and four
children, wants to let people know what life was like in East Aleppo,
under the rule of the rebels and jihadis.
“We were
trapped there since March 2012, when it all began,” says Mahmud,
“And they were four years of horror. For example, they starved us.
In these years I never ate either meat or fruit, it was almost always
lentil beans and burghul (split wheat). Even bread was scarce. And
all the while, they had plenty of everything and ate all they wanted.
Their deposits were full and they mocked us: when there was a
holiday, they would slaughter sheep and cows and sell off the scrap
pieces, such as the shins or the entrails, at 10,000 Syrian liras a
chilo, i.e. the price of the choicest meat.
And what
about the hospitals? They say that the army bombs killed a lot of
people….
“Bombed hospitals? Maybe. All I know is that they
were off-limits to us normal Alepins. They were reserved to them and
to their families. When one of us got hurt or had some health
problem, they would shut the door on us even if we died. I never saw
anyone, in the entire four years, being admitted to a hospital”.
Who
exactly are these “they” that you are talking about?
“There
were loads of foreigners, almost from everywhere in the world.
Especially after the army started to get closer. We could recognize
them, as they went around the streets on in the marketplaces, Because
they needed someone to help them with the language. So we heard them
say that so and so was French, this other one was American, another
Turkish…. There were also many Saudis, Egyptians, some Japanese.
But at the end of the day, they all resembled each other.”
What
do you mean?
“Look, these people here don’t pray to Allah.
The God they pray to is the Dollar. The various groups had divided
that part of town among them and first and foremost they tried to get
as much money as possible out of it, at the expense of the
defenseless people. Every so often they would kill each other on
account of money. Say one of the heads got too daring, and went
beyond his allotted area: a bomb under his car would take care of
everything. Politics…. Maybe. But these people had three main
passions. The first one, like I said, was money….”
And
the second one?
“Sex. They went crazy, also because they
felt omnipotent. Any one of these guys could do you in with impunity,
no one would have lifted a finger to save you. There were two ways
they used to try to get women. They tried to buy them, by taking
advantage of the people’s poverty. There were families who gave a
daughter away for 100 dollars, or even for just a few bags of rice
and lentils. Or else they took them away by threatening them with
violence. For example by threatening to kill their parents. Today
Aleppo is full of so-called “widows”. Women who were forced to
marry a militiaman who died or ran away, women whom nobody wants now,
not even their original families”.
And the third passion
…
“Shooting, killing. Before starting out for a raid they
took some pills that were rumored to come from Turkey. I don’t know
what they were, but after swallowing them their eyes opened wide and
they became frenetical. Among them there was a great deal of trading
going on in hashish and other drugs”.
And what about prayer?
Islam?
“They forced us to go to the mosque but that stuff
had little to do with our religion. There were Pakistani and Egyptian
preachers and the only subject they ever broached in their sermons
was war, jihad, the duty to fight the apostates. In sum, all they
ever talked about was killing people”.
(traduzione in inglese di Alessandra Nucci )