Read Online The Morning They Came for Us by Janine di Giovanni - Free Book Online

living soldiers carrying the coffins of the dead, to the strains of a gloomy marching band, into a courtyard, where families and members of their regiment waited. There were sisters, wives, mothers, brothers, children, fiancées and friends, all of their faces streaked with tears.
    Soon enough, I thought, those who watch Syria closely will privately acknowledge that Assad is winning, his forces backed by Hezbollah, stronger and more determined to fight and win; his other backers of Russia and China and Iran more convincing than the opposition’s backers of Qatar and Turkey (and to some extent, though not completely, the US, Britain and France).
    But for today, I thought, this funeral of so many men, killed in a single day, is an acute reminder of how hard Assad’s forces are getting hit by the opposition. And how brutal war is, and how it comes down to the basics – that politicians argue but soldiers fight. And soldiers are always someone’s child, and that child is getting hurt. That child is getting killed.
    I met an official in his office – he wouldn’t give his name – but he was friendly and made me coffee. After he politely set down the sugar bowl and handed me a spoon, he pulled out a manila file and said that 105 government soldiers were dying every week. This was based on the figures of the menhe admitted to his hospital and the reports of others. He said he had been told to keep it quiet, that the number would be bad for morale, bad for the fighters, bad for the mothers who had to send their sons off to war.
    We sat for a while in the quiet of his office drinking the coffee. At last, he said: ‘No one likes to count the dead.’
    Upstairs, on the seventh floor of the hospital, was someone’s son who had been sent to war: Firis. He was thirty years old, a major, very handsome with long dark hair and sombre eyes. He lay under a sheet, and I could not see at first that his right leg and right arm were missing. He sat up when he saw me, smiled, and with his only hand, reached out to take mine. There was no self-pity in his demeanour. He motioned for me to sit and he began, carefully, to tell his story.
    At the end of May, Firis Jabr was in a battle in Homs. On an afternoon of which he remembers every detail – the position of the clouds in the sky, the feel of the warm air on his cheek – he was ambushed. Shot, he lay in a ditch bleeding profusely and says that the men who shot him at close range were not Syrians, but ‘foreign fighters: Libyans, Lebanese, Yemeni’.
    â€˜Are you sure they were foreign?’
    â€˜They were not Syrian. I promise – they were not Syrian.’ He said he heard their accents, that their Arabic was not the Arabic he knew. ‘They looked different, they fought differently – I swear to you, another Syrian would not kill his brother Syrian.’
    Firis is an Alawite, but he says he is not particularly religious one way or the other. His fiancée stood near the bedwhile we talked, anxiously shifting her weight from foot to foot. Firis, without a leg and an arm, spoke to me for more than an hour, and kept a smile on his face. ‘I am not going to be full of pity,’ he said.
    â€˜Even for war that might not have had to happen?’ I asked.
    He slumped back slightly on the bed. ‘I was fighting for my country!’
    He introduced me to his mother – ‘Mama’, he called her – and she made us coffee from a small hotplate in the corner of the room. She served delicate, rosewater-scented Arabic pastries with pistachios. She told me that she was a widow and that Firis was her eldest son. She was in tears as her son re-told the story of the day he was injured; her son was not. She said quietly that she did not see him as a soldier; she saw him as a small boy, playing football, walking to school with his friends – the child she carried, that she bore.
    Firis