Basmet Amal are one of four local relief and development organisations, each dealing with a region of the town, that feed into a broader council comprised of relief and social affairs, military-security, political and media-comms committees. The fire service consists of Free Army soldiers and locals legging it to burning buildings with whatever supplies of water they can muster. Ambulances have been targeted by the regime, with those donated from outside re-sprayed to disguise their function. These too are run by volunteers.

Basmet Amal have big plans and they want to see replicated these throughout the country. They’ve re-started a primary school for children who have missed two years of learning; they’ve opened a low-priced products supermarket to counter local over-inflation through scarcity and unscrupulous traders (inflation in Ma’arra is currently at 400%); they have managed composition and distribution of 30,0000 monthly aid packages of flour, cooking oil, dried milk, salt, sugar, and beans; they support widows through 500SP donations from overseas donors as well as development of crafts projects; they are building a shampoo and soap factory; sourcing low priced and free medicines; supporting the local field hospital and yet to come, – a womens’ recreation centre with gym and swimming facilities, to strengthen women physically and emotionally for generations to come.

Relief is revolutionary when it helps communities stand their ground and keep up the project of liberation. Basmet Amal’s goal is self-sufficiency. There has been a total transformation of society after ousting the regime. Sitting in the Shaheed Hassan Hossam Kamil school, Lateef*, a teacher, explains how regime text books had all hailed Bashar’s father, Hafez al Assad. He was made into an idol, with even simple maths exercises including references to him. ‘We had to salute him and sing the praises of the regime every day. We were not taught to think for ourselves, we were taught to fear, we were taught to obey. Now our text books are free of these references. We are bringing up a new generation to think freely and to have confidence in themselves and their community’.

It’s not lost on anyone running relief that different interests are competing for influence, local, regional and international. ‘Aid is being used to buy peoples’ loyalties’, explains Loay*. ‘That’s why independence and self-sufficiency are so important for us}. He is senior surgeon working on food relief. Loay rises early, daily, and sees his work as struggle against not just physical poverty but the spiritual and social poverty that this leads to, and which governed so many for so long under the regime. “A human being needs a full stomach. It’s hard to do good when you are empty. Hunger can lead to desperation and corruption. Feed a family and you feed a community”.

Solidarity and connection with organisations like Basmet Amal should be coming from our movements at a time when millions of Syrians are being dispossessed, losing their own agency and ability to set up their own initiatives. The new dictate is being told that it’s over, to give up, that the Syrian revolution has been overtaken by militias, al-Qaeda, Iran, Saudi Arabia. This blood-drenched chessboard is held up as their game, the game of the biggest powers in the world who control the rules. The message is the same to the people of Syria and the UK This is not your revolution – do not identify with this.

Self-representation, self-organisation, self-determination. These are universal desires driving democracy struggles all over the world, from Turkey to Brazil, Iran to America. We build for them here and people are building for them there. We have much in common. When people keep organising, despite cuts, repression, criminalisation or live fire, there is still everything to hope for.

*Some names have been changed
This is the final part of a six day serialization of Ewa’s trip to Syria. It accompanies Jon Sack’s beautiful reportage from the Syrian border in comic form: The Physio.
Ewa Jasiewicz is a journalist and campaigner. She is part of a small international solidarity initiative working to support grassroots groups in Syria. Please support these organisations:

www.facebook.com/JmaetBsmtAml
Karama Bus children’s relief project in Kafranbel
Juan Zero’s Jasmine Baladi studio in Bab al Hawa Camp

Photo above is of Ma’arrat al Numan: the sign says ‘liberated area’

We’re driving 160km deep into liberated territory in Idlib province. Our destination is the frontline town of Ma’arrat al Numan. Our guides are volunteers from the home-grown Basmet Amal (Smile of Hope) relief organisation. The road we’re travelling on, we are later told, was liberated by mostly Ahrar al Sham forces, a new fighting group, still under the wider umbrella of the Syrian Free Army, mostly made up of defectors. We pass Tafta Nas, a regime airbase that was liberated in January. Smiles spread around remembering the day it was conquered. It could have been from here that helicopter gunships had flown over Ma’arra to put down unarmed demonstrations.

Ma’arra was once a bustling, fertile, town of 120,000 people. When the regime started strafing the peaceful uprising, 90% of the population fled. 850 people have been killed, and 2000 houses, 20 schools and 15 mosques destroyed since November 2011, according to local relief organisations. Ma’arra was reduced to a dustbowl, sheltering a shadow population of 4,000-10,000. Infrastructure was decimated; the town’s main electricity sub station was leveled to the ground and there is no running water. Pipes were all bombed and repairing them would mean approaching an Assad forces base close by. Hospitals were destroyed, schools shut down, and up until only a few months ago, no markets or bakeries were open. Internet and phonelines are down. Communication between people is face to face or via walkie talkies.

Ma’arra appears to be around 60% destroyed. Everywhere you look you see half-standing apartment blocs with gaping living rooms and bedrooms, crippled mosques, giant piles of rubble and burnt out shops. The bombing continued while we were there, the front-line in the East just a kilometre away from ‘safety’. Wadi Deif military base – home to some 500 Assad soldiers we are told – is Ma’arra’s main threat. ‘They cannot invade us by land. Free Army forces outnumber them. But snipers can see us and the planes keep bombing’, we are told by local activists.

Ma’arra is slowly coming back to life though, with the help of local home-grown aid organisations like Basmet Amal which are co-ordinating physical and social reconstruction. It’s estimated that up to 40,000 people are now back.

The uprising that ousted the regime from Ma’arra began just like those elsewhere in Syria, through unarmed protests erupting in main town squares, spurred on by those in other towns, and the shakey mobile phone footage of children being shot dead and stamped on, crowds gunned down.

It was November 2011 for Ma’arra, when hundreds broke through their fear to protest and were broken up with live ammunition. They returned, with their dead, for the all too familiar event of funeral-turned-demonstration. They were again attacked in an attempt to break people at their weakest but instead this became a live fuse for even more incendiary resistance. The regime kept killing, first with snipers and security forces and then with war planes. Undeterred people kept taking to the streets, until the cycle of picking up the dead and returning with ever more, forced people to take up arms.

Some 200 people were reported to have been shot by snipers from the City museum that regime forces had used as a base. The killings happened between October 2011 and July 2012. It took nine months for local activists to muster the decisive armed strength needed to oust the regime from the base. This was no easy or rapid move.

The growing resistance bought or seized weapons from army officers by force, while many defected voluntarily taking their guns and skills with them. The latter was the most effective and common way to build up an arsenal. With ammunition running out, more ingenious if humble means of attack are being developed. We witness footage of ‘The Canon of Hell’ – a rocket launcher made out of a tractor except its’ ‘rockets’ are cooking gas canisters.

But it’s the social resistance that we have come to support. And Basmet Amal are a leading light in it. Made up of 30 volunteers, it was originally the idea of a young local woman, Leila*, who manages the organisation’s external communications, reports and planning. Her work could have even more impact if she could access the internet. One of the organisation’s aims is to secure enough funding to build communication masts in the city centre, re-starting mobile phone and internet access which would facilitate better co-ordination between people and organisations.

*Some names have been changed
This is the fifth part of a six day serialization of Ewa’s trip to Syria. It accompanies Jon Sack’s beautiful reportage from the Syrian border in comic form: The Physio.
Ewa Jasiewicz is a journalist and campaigner. She is part of a small international solidarity initiative working to support grassroots groups in Syria. Please support these organisations:

www.facebook.com/JmaetBsmtAml
Karama Bus children’s relief project in Kafranbel
Juan Zero’s Jasmine Baladi studio in Bab al Hawa Camp

Picture by Masoud Bashora – freelance photographer from Ma’arrat al Numman. His facebook page is here: https://www.facebook.com/Maarawe.Free.Lens

Juan is a Syrian activist and cartoonist who set up Jasmine Baladi Studio at the camp nine months ago. On any given day a hundred children can cram up to the tent door screaming with joy to get in. Groups rotate, 30 kids all sit round a long table, quietly drawing, gently encouraged by male and female youth volunteers.

The pictures are overwhelmingly positive: sunny houses, flowers, animals, birds. ‘We don’t let them dwell on the past’, explains Juan, ‘We want them to focus on the future. The past for many of these children is horrific’. There are some of the usual drawings of blunt bullets firing out of box-y tanks and out of clunky planes onto red-scratched stick bodies that could be from any war zone.

But the predominant image popping up across the gallery-walls is bizarrely Sponge Bob Square Pants. And not just any Sponge Bob. We’re talking Sponge Bob Jaish al Hurr (Free Army Sponge Bob), waving the new Syrian Independence flag, raising a rifle, wearing military fatigues even. The kids have adapted Sponge Bob into a symbol of the Syrian revolution.

*Some names have been changed
This is the fourth part of a six day serialization of Ewa’s trip to Syria. It accompanies Jon Sack’s beautiful reportage from the Syrian border in comic form: The Physio.
Ewa Jasiewicz is a journalist and campaigner. She is part of a small international solidarity initiative working to support grassroots groups in Syria. Please support these organisations:

www.facebook.com/JmaetBsmtAml
Karama Bus children’s relief project in Kafranbel
Juan Zero’s Jasmine Baladi studio in Bab al Hawa Camp

One young lad with a beautiful, joyous whole-face smile has lost the ability to speak due to a brain injury. He’s getting it back but for now can only respond with nods and smiles, comprehension but no conversation. Another has been paralysed down the right side of his body. Another has lost a leg. Most are young – under the age of 30. Some sport beards that spell ‘Salafi’ to a prejudiced eye. All are covered in tattoos – considered ‘haram’ or a taboo in Islam.

The designs range from two swords crossed, names of loved ones, and sparsely sketched women’s faces with pouting lips and straight strips of hair (‘who is that?’ – ‘my mother’ deadpans one – to peals of laughter from the rest). ‘He; he’s a drinker’ points out one to a bearded, large man in his mid 30s – Abu Mohammed. He laughs. ‘They’re joking’ he says with a twinkle in his eye.

They’re working class guys – builders, brick layers, electricians, carpenters; but they’ve been through hell. Their families have too and not for the first time. In 1982 Hafez al Assad – Bashar’s father and ruler of Syria for 29 years sent his forces into Hama to put down Muslim Brotherhood insurgents. The result was a crackdown and massacre of as many as 40,000 inhabitants over a period of 27 days. Now again since the uprising, Hama has seen massacres reported in nearby villages of Qubeir and Tremesh, resulting in the deaths of over 250 people.

Torture

Abu Mohammed hands me a cigarette and shakes his head wearily. ‘You’ve been to Palestine yes?’ (I nod) ‘So you’ve met men who have been jailed and tortured yes?’ ‘Yes’ I reply, ‘Its almost a rite of passage there, most men from their mid teens onwards go through it, get rounded up, get arrested, go inside’. ‘Israel’, begins Abu Mohammed, slowly, ‘Is more merciful than the regime of Assad’. Pause. ‘We have been tortured with knives, slashed, we have been electrocuted, we have been drilled, with electric drills (he makes a drilling gesture with his hand) into our bodies.’ The boys around the room nod wide-eyed. ‘See this beard?’ says Abu Mohammed, pointing to his chin. ‘I’m shaving this off as soon as Assad is brought down’. It’s unclear how religious the guys really are. There are stories of some fighters growing beards to look more pious in order to secure funding from more religious Gulf state backers.

We eat: baba ganoush covered with mincemeat and tomato, pitta, omlette, and lentil and parsley soup. Our talk is about the first days of the uprising in Hama. I ask the guys how they felt. ‘By God’ says Abu Mohammad, ‘I started to cry.’ Another man in his 40s pitches in ‘Me too. I could not believe it. So many young people came out, they had lost their fear. Our town square was full’. ‘I felt such joy, we all did’ says Abu Mohammed, dipping his bread in olive oil. ‘Tears rolled down our cheeks with joy’.

Leaving the humble, overcrowded home with no running water, I see a young, clean cut, gelled-hair trendy guy of about 15 or 16 sitting talking to the other guys. I greet him in Arabic but they tell me he’s Turkish, a neighbour. It was good to see this friendship overcome the fear-stoked barriers being whipped up between refugees and locals. Would he be a man by the time they can go home?

*Some names have been changed
This is the third part of a six day serialization of Ewa’s trip to Syria, It accompanies Jon Sack’s beautiful reportage from the Syrian border in comic form: The Physio.
Ewa Jasiewicz is a journalist and campaigner. She is part of a small international solidarity initiative working to support grassroots groups in Syria. Please support these organisations:

www.facebook.com/JmaetBsmtAml
Karama Bus children’s relief project in Kafranbel
Juan Zero’s Jasmine Baladi studio in Bab al Hawa Camp

Syrian refugees – who are estimated to have swollen the town’s population from 90,000 to 120,000 – became targets for local Turkish residents angry at immigration and blaming them for the blasts. Syrian cars were torched and smashed and refugees attacked. Some NGOs and charities shut their doors and went underground.

A siege mentality settled over the stunned town. Our friend Masoud*, from Aleppo is telling us how he came to be here, remembering the first days of the revolution. It had started with text messages between students at the University of Aleppo. They would meet at a particular square at a set time, and observe. Who was here from the security services, who sent to spy and contain? And who was on their side. Could we find each other? A chosen comrade would kick it off, by watching and watching, before shouting at the right moment, ‘Allahuakbar!’ And they would reveal themselves, chanting freedom slogans, that multiplied, a hundred and then a thousand human microphones amplifying desire.

Our friend recalls the time when there were hundreds gathered in the main square. The person whose turn it was to shout cleared his throat and did it, only to be pounced upon by a dozen police officers who began to beat him ferociously. The disparate soon-to-be-a-crowd began to find their voice. ‘Get Off Him! Get Off Him! Get Off Him!’ they began to shout, one, two, ten, fifty, one hundred, one thousand, voices surged at the officers. Nobody touched them. The officers backed off. The sheer will and power of the crowd urging and urging and defending their comrade had forced back the regime. Masoud laughs and shakes his head at the memory. ‘It was incredible’ he says.

The demonstrations continued in Aleppo and the University became a battleground. All public spaces became full of possibility, threats, tensions but to Masoud, a new beauty, the beauty of people finding each other. He became known. His name went on a list. Wanted, he went into hiding. Now the security services were coming to his home, threatening his mother, his sisters, his brothers. If we can’t have you we will take them was the message. We’ll hurt you through them, we’ll stop you through them.

All he could do was just keep running…

Masoud ended up leaving, his ID card burning in his pocket at every junction where a checkpoint could loom ahead. He managed to hide until the last hurdle and then there was no turning back. Assad soldiers were beckoning him to come forward. Cold sweat. His name, his name. It was a rebel attack on a target behind him that saved him. The gunfire and grenades tore the soldiers’ attention away from him. They began to mobilise and cordon off the area, halting all movement, regrouping, talking fast over radios, withdrawing to go back to their counterparts. This was his chance to move and he took it, stealing through. Others did the same, including someone zooming through in a car. A tank was coming round the corner. Masoud shouted at the car to ‘Stop!’ but it was mown down fast, crushed under the treads. Screaming and blood; shelling and crashes erupting all around him. All he could do was just keep running…

He ended up in Reyhanli, caring for the wounded. If he couldn’t fight then he’d heal. And there was no shortage of the sick and injured streaming through the border. Broken bodies, some caught in the crossfire, some deliberately targeted by regime snipers. Others were fighters. The traumatic injuries were such that it wasn’t just the large volume of emergency cases that needed attention – but the complicated months of intensive therapy needed to get people back on the mend. These were not patients you could just discharge and let go – they had no homes to go back to, they had no legs to walk on, some no mouths to speak with, no eyes, no arms, they all needed long-term rehabilitation. A second to lose mobility, months or years to regain it.
*Some names have been changed
This is the second part of a six day serialization of Ewa’s trip to Syria, It accompanies Jon Sack’s beautiful reportage from the Syrian border in comic form: The Physio.
Ewa Jasiewicz is a journalist and campaigner. She is part of a small international solidarity initiative working to support grassroots groups in Syria. Please support these organisations:

www.facebook.com/JmaetBsmtAml
Karama Bus children’s relief project in Kafranbel
Juan Zero’s Jasmine Baladi studio in Bab al Hawa Camp

There is still an ongoing revolution and broadly speaking, the left/anti-war movement in the West is undermining those struggling to keep it alive by focusing on political posturing and lobbying rather than practical solidarity. An ongoing map of grassroots social resistance as compiled by Amnesty International shows the breadth and creativity of some of these movements mostly unheard of in the West. Together, it’s worth noting that participation in these groups outnumbers those participating in armed resistance groups, which challenges the idea that all resistance to dictatorship and imperialism in Syria is militarised.

The popular narratives about Syria hand responsibility to ‘the big boys’ to sort out the ‘mess’ – the USA, UK, Saudi Arabia, the EU, Israel, Iran. These big powers control the message and representation of the Syrian struggle; they demonise, confuse, order and alienate any kind of solidarity with the Syrian people. When states tell those watching the conflict in Syria that ‘there’s nothing you can do’ what this really means is ‘keep back, leave it to us’. ‘Everybody wants to eat from Syria’ is a common phrase inside Syria. But not enough people are feeding the grassroots struggles for self-determination.

If we on the UK left believe in people’s capacity to self-organise then we need to find examples of this capacity and support them. That’s why I travelled to Syria in May with a German activist friend I’ve known for ten years as part of a nascent international solidarity initiative called ‘Witness Syria’. So far, since January 2013, a Turkish comrade, two Danish activists and ourselves have been over to identify what is possible solidarity-wise. We are part of a wider group of around 20 activists from Poland, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Sweden, Germany, Denmark, America and the UK who have experience of longterm solidarity activism in the Middle East over the past twenty years and want to support Syrian liberation struggles.

The living

Since the beginning of the Syrian uprising, which began in March 2011, over 100,000 people have been killed. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, it breaks down as 37,000 civilians including 8000 women and children; 43,000 Assad regime military personnel including special forces;13,539 rebel fighters; and 2,015 defectors from government forces. The figures could be much higher given that combatant sides prefer to downplay losses.

The media obsession with ‘what bleeds leads’ doesn’t really tell us what leads people to resist. Without context, texture or self-representation by Syrians, the uprising has been spun into a civil war, with barbarians in the lead, needing civilisation and discipline by an experienced West or a Strong Man dictator. Sectarianism is getting stronger, and factional and communal fighting is a reality but this is being encouraged and orchestrated by vested interests. There is a story behind the story, daily revolutions behind The Revolution which are being told by Syrians themselves, usefully and necessarily to one another around the country and in the diaspora. Facebook is the big info point internationally, and on the ground there’s a boom in underground newspapers and newsletters, explaining the latest protests not just against the regime but now against austere, authoritarian militias, Free Army corruption, local new government unaccountability, militarisation…

Much has been written about Syria, mostly in Arabic, by Syrians. Myself and Katrina* are sitting in a breezy flat in Reyhanli, Turkey, with some of our new friends there. They’re six young men from all walks of life crammed together in a small flat, removed from their families and partners. They work 24/7 to support refugees and communities inside and on the borders of Syria. They seem to sleep at their computers. Take-away boxes pile up in the kitchen.

One is a film-maker, one is an NGO co-ordinator, one is a writer with thousands of Facebook followers, another was a labourer for years around central Europe, and one plays the Oud intently in the corner, I didn’t learn what he does. All are in contact with other Syrians working to sustain the revolution. They’re weary of the postures and positions of much of the European Left. Debate and discussion between them is vivid, passionate and persistent. One tells us, ‘Last night we were actually on the verge of calling it a civil war’. Another explains: ‘My struggle is now evolving on two fronts, both against the regime and against the armed groups that are trying to control the society.’ They long gave up watching Al-Jazeera and mainstream media, and they long gave up on most of the anti-war European and US Left. Their allies are other Syrians and Arabic activists, in Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and the Gulf.

A German friend, who pioneered our visit to Ma’arrat al Numan, shakes her head as she re-tells the stories of speaking at Syria events back home. ‘I had people come up to me afterwards and shout in my face, that I am naïve, Assad is better, I am supporting imperialism’. A Syrian woman activist living in another Turkish town was assaulted at a lefty anti-war gig by a group of Turkish women because she was wearing a knitted Free Syria wristband. Our German friend continues. ‘I met this Swedish woman at one talk and she was like “What, you mean there are cool Syrians out there?’’’ Mohammed* is riled but calmly dismissive. ‘Why should I care if some activists in Europe think I am cool or not? All I care about is developing my society and rebuilding my country with justice’. Fickle grandstanding and misapprehensions as well as recent ‘Peace delegations’ are brushed away as ignorant and irrelevant. There is no justice, just us…

*Some names have been changed
This is the first part of a six day serialization of Ewa’s trip to Syria, It accompanies Jon Sack’s graphic reportage from the Syrian border: The Physio.

Ewa Jasiewicz is a journalist and campaigner. She is part of a small international solidarity initiative working to support grassroots groups in Syria. Please support these organisations:

https://www.facebook.com/JmaetBsmtAml

Karama Bus children’s relief project in Kafranbel

Juan Zero’s Jasmine Baladi studio in Bab al Hawa Camp

Organise!

Seven years ago Unite embarked on a culture-changing programme of organising through grassroots collective action, a return to shop stewards and sectoral national networks of elected representatives who meet regularly to plan strategy and action. Unite’s organising model is based on the US union SEIU’s model of issue-based organising. There are around 88 full-time organisers working for Unite’s national organising unit today. Most are from industrial backgrounds.
Issue-based organising works. It can start with standing outside workplaces stopping workers, getting their details, meeting them in their homes or cafes, and having longer conversations about identifying common concerns. A problem that affects a wide number of people and where action can be won is selected, and a collective action to resolve it is launched.
In the beginning this is usually a collective grievance – a mass workplace petition. As union membership and confidence grows, the actions can become more confrontational, leading up to strike action. Identifying ‘leaders’ – co-ordinators, people who care, stand up to management and are well respected – is essential to carry core organisation forward. Once union membership reaches over 50 per cent, by law the employer must sign a recognition agreement, which allows for the election and recognition of workplace representatives, time off for union duties and negotiations on pay and conditions. It is at this point that organisers withdraw, having helped to create sustainable organisation and a shift in the balance of power.