Nisrine kept teaching
school for months as the siege tightened around the Syrian town of Madaya, but
had to give up a few weeks ago when her students got too weak from starvation
to walk to class. A local medic has been surviving on the rehydration salts he
gives patients, while a business school graduate makes soup from grass for his
70-year-old father, consulting shepherds about which ones their
long-since-slaughtered flocks liked best.
The people of Madaya
and neighboring Zabadani have tried, since the siege by pro-government forces
began in July, to keep society functioning and adjust to their surreal new set
of dynamics. There is the black market across blockade lines, for instance, and
the quiet or unexpected ways this type of warfare can kill: heart attacks,
stillbirths, a step on a land mine while foraging for food.
“I don’t go anywhere,”
said Maleka Jabir, 85, who inherited American citizenship from her father, a
World War I veteran, and is so disabled from hunger and heart problems she can
hardly walk. “I just crumple up and stay in bed.”
Convoys set off
Thursday to bring basic food, medicine and aid to three Syrian towns, for the
second time this week, as Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations
declared that “the use of food as a weapon is a war crime” and called on the
Syrian government and all warring parties to immediately lift their sieges. Aid
workers say hundreds of people in Madaya remain in acute need: at least 28 have
died since Dec. 1, according to Khaled Mohammad, the medical worker surviving
on salts, including a 37-year-old man on Wednesday, Ali Awkar, who was from
Zabadani and had taken refuge in Madaya.
Hanaa Singer, Unicef’s
top official in Syria, said that she was accosted during the aid visit to
Madaya on Monday by a woman with six malnourished children.
“She threw herself on
me and kissed my shoulder and bent down to my hands,” Ms. Singer recalled. “She
said: ‘My 17-year-old son died of hunger. Please keep the rest of them alive.’”
This portrait of life
in Madaya is drawn from interviews with more than a dozen residents, conducted
over several months and in recent days by telephone and over the Internet; many
spoke on the condition that they be identified only by first name, for safety.
While details of their experiences could not be independently confirmed,
international aid workers who have visited the town or been in direct contact
with groups on the ground provided accounts that echoed the residents’.
After nearly five years
of civil war in Syria, the United Nations estimates that 400,000 people are
trapped behind battle lines by the government, the Islamic State or rival
insurgents.
While parts of Homs and
the Damascus suburbs have been blockaded for years, Madaya managed to survive
relatively unscathed, until last summer.
Madaya and Zabadani lie
at the southeastern end of the Qalamoun mountains along Syria’s border with
Lebanon. Zabadani, where local rebels took control in 2012, became a haven for
insurgents driven from other border areas by Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite
militia allied with President Bashar al-Assad.
Both locals and
Hezbollah officials say most of the fighters in Zabadani are affiliated with a
Syrian Islamist group called Ahrar al-Sham, and smaller numbers with the more
moderate Free Syrian Army and the Qaeda-linked Nusra Front.
Weeks of bombardment
last summer by Hezbollah did not dislodge the insurgents. Pro-government forces
ramped up pressure by cordoning off Zabadani and Madaya, where many civilians
from Zabadani — including Nisrine, the teacher — had taken refuge. Looking for
leverage, allied insurgents began blockading and bombarding Fouaa and Kfarya,
two isolated Shiite towns in Idlib Province, in Syria’s northwest.
It worked, partly. A
cease-fire was struck in September, but with Russia’s new air campaign in
Syria, promises to evacuate the wounded and lift the sieges were never carried
out. Madaya residents say the siege tightened instead.
Nisrine stopped getting
her salary. Her school was bombarded. She sent her own son to school without
breakfast, and students began to lose focus.
“How can I ask him to
learn, and he’s hungry?” she said back in October.
The medical clinic in
Madaya, which works with Doctors Without Borders, was bombed, and thus was
moved to a basement. Mr. Mohammad, an anesthesia technician who has been acting
as a doctor, said he was overwhelmed with cases he could not properly treat:
broken bones, amputations, abdominal wounds. He performed primitive C-sections.
Lately, he has resorted to giving the most endangered children syrupy
medicines, for the glucose, further depleting supplies.
Once, Mr. Mohammad
said, medics persuaded Hezbollah guards to allow a 16-year-old boy with a
bladder infection to leave for treatment.
“We kissed their
shoes,” Mr. Mohammad said later.
“We’re ready to
surrender, but the regime has frozen everything,” he added. “I’m asking
Bashar’s regime to launch a rocket and end our lives.”
Hungry women’s breast
milk began to dry up. Rima, 25, said her newborn died for lack of an incubator
“I didn’t feed him,
didn’t give him warmth,” she said quietly in an interview days after his death.
“I only saw him in a photo.”
Finding food was
getting harder. Aid workers and residents said fighters on both sides profited
from smuggling it across the lines. There were bribes to cross checkpoints,
price-gouging, and regular merchants jacking up prices for scarce supplies.
Basic goods could cost $100 a pound.
An anti-government
activist named Firas has managed to smuggle in small batches of bulgur wheat
that he delivers door to door.
“Oh God, oh God, I hope
he’s bringing more,” Samar al-Hussein, 45, a traditional medicine practitioner,
said one recent evening as Firas came slowly up her street. A dozen other
women, she said by phone, were watching quietly from their doorways.
Firas, though, was in
shock. He had taken a meal to the house of Suleiman Fares, 63 and bone-thin, in
hopes of saving his life, only to find him already dead. Frustrated, Firas
declared that far to the north, rebels allied with those in Madaya ought to
resume shelling two pro-government towns — towns full of civilians who are also
suffering, tit for tat, a siege from the other side.
“Better to die
fighting,” he said that night in one of a series of recent telephone
interviews, “than to starve.”
Before Monday, only one
shipment of aid had made it through during the siege, on Oct. 18. But half of
the high-energy biscuits in that delivery had expired, making some people sick;
the United Nations blamed an error in the loading process in Damascus.
The business school
graduate, Hamoudi, who is 27, said his father sometimes refuses to eat, “saving
it for us.”
“We don’t eat in the
morning. We save the food until evening,” he explained. By food, he referred
mainly to water, spices and sometimes grass. “But nowadays there is no more
grass,” Hamoudi lamented. “The whole area is covered with snow, and some of the
grass is bitter.”
When a donkey was
slaughtered, he took home a few ounces of meat, though eating it is prohibited
by Islam.
“Starvation is
infidel,” he explained. “There is no more halal and haram,” he added, referring
to religiously permitted and prohibited foods. “We’re eating everything.”
Finally, in December, a
few hundred wounded fighters were evacuated from Zabadani, Fouaa and Kfarya.
Nisrine’s husband, Ahmed, was bused from Zabadani to Beirut, then flown to
Turkey, and from there shuttled into rebel-held Idlib Province.
His wife and
10-year-old son, Abdullah, remained stuck in Madaya. Ahmed, the evacuated
fighter, said he recently spoke to the boy.
“I know he’s hungry,
but he doesn’t want to say,” the father said in a telephone interview. ”Even
kids are acting like adults. He no longer asks me to bring sweets — just
bread.”
Their neighbors had
just slaughtered the last horse in town.
“I know that horse,”
Ahmed said wistfully.
“I don’t know what the
regime wants,” he added. “We are ready to leave, but they want us to die
there.”
Ms. Singer, the Unicef
official, said that when she arrived with aid on Monday, crowds of children
gathered around her in the dark, pleading, “Auntie, auntie, I’m sorry, I’m so
sorry, do you have a piece of bread?”
“That’s what killed
me,” she said. “That they were apologizing.”
In the food packs were
basics like bulgur and oil, a few pounds per person. But not flour. Or bread.
