How a Syrian War Criminal Was Brought to Justice — in Germany

January 25, 2022

When refugees won historic convictions against the Syrian torture regime, they also opened a new front in the global fight for human rights.

On the night of July 20, 2021, Ruham Hawash lay awake unsure of where she was, mistaking her hotel bed in Koblenz, Germany, for the cramped and filthy cell in Damascus where, in 2012, she was detained and brutalized. The next day, in a German court, she would see and testify against the Syrian colonel who oversaw her torture.

The trial was history-making. Two Syrian state-security officers had been arrested and charged in Germany for crimes against humanity, including torture, murder and sexual assault. It was the first time anyone from the Syrian regime would be tried for its crimes. [full story]

Her New Life Started With a Robbery on a First Date

This is the fourth dispatch from a project following a mother and her four children who fled Syria in 2015 and are now rebuilding their lives spread across four European cities. Read more about the project here.

On Maisam and Marvin’s first official date in June 2016, they were so at ease with each other that they fell asleep together on the riverbank in Heidelberg, Germany; neither of them woke as thieves robbed them in the dark.

Maisam, then 20, and Marvin, 21, had watched the sunset at the Neckarwiese, a riverfront park with a view of the picturesque city and its ruined castle, talking into the night. For Maisam, a Syrian who had arrived in Germany only nine months prior, and Marvin, a German from nearby Hoffenheim, English was their common language. (Out of concern for her family’s security in a new country and the safety of her relatives in Syria, Maisam asked to use only first names.) [full story]

He Didn’t Want to Lie in a Grave That Couldn’t Be Visited

Syria became a graveyard, where an aspirational vision of who we are and what we will tolerate now lies. We won’t be immune to the consequences of our failures.

Graves of people killed during the Syrian war, in the town of Qamishli in northeastern Syria.Credit…Baderkhan Ahmad/Associated Press

When my father died last April in Baltimore, he had finally given up the desire to be buried next to his parents in a cemetery in Damascus, Syria. That he had time to ponder where to be buried was the burden of knowing for several years that he was dying. It was also the luxury, especially for a Syrian, of still having some choice in the matter.

It is vulgar to even mention just one Syrian’s death and unfulfilled desires, when dying has become the Syrian way of life and unfulfilled desires have become life’s promise to Syrians. None have been shielded. Even the victors have lost. [full story]

War Made Her a Refugee. Now She’s ‘Home,’ in Amsterdam’s Counterculture.

In late June, Souad, 27, was looking for a spot to watch from as she wove through the crowd that showed up for “The Cunnilingus Comedy Show (Vol. 1)” at Amsterdam’s famed Vrankrijk, a former squat turned cafe and event venue. Any proceeds were going to a collective run by and for queer refugees. First to the mic was the organizer Mikaela Burch, 28, a financial compliance officer who hoped to become a professional comedian. As Souad listened, Burch told the audience that because she was a “poor black lesbian from Detroit,” she was officially President Trump’s worst nightmare. “He’s not going to come grabbing on this [expletive]!” she said to laughter. Burch was followed by acts that included comedians from around the world; the sole Dutch performer used a wheelchair and introduced herself as a lesbian with Tourette’s.This is the Amsterdam where Souad feels safe and a sense of belonging. (Out of concern for her security in a new country and the safety of her relatives in Syria, Souad asked to use only her first name.) “They’re fighting for things I believe in,” she said. “Because it still feels like a squat and it’s part of the alternative scene in Amsterdam, this means a ‘community feel,’ and for sure no racistAfter leaving Syria seven years ago in a displacement that took her first to Jordan, then to Turkey, Greece and the Netherlands — where she bounced between five different refugee camps — Souad is looking to find herself much more than she is hoping to find a home, a concept that has become so unattainable that she has learned to live without it. While she begins to finally process what she has been through and how it has affected her and the decisions she has made, she is seeking out spaces defined by their commitment to principles whose values she has come to appreciate more with each country she has had to survive in. And even if the places through which she has already passed so readily defined her as only one thing — woman, Syrian, Arab, Muslim or refugee — she’s still not sure who she is and might yet be. [full story]

Moving Beyond the Label of ‘War Refugee’

In August 2015, Suhair and her children, Naela, then 26, Maisam, 19, and Yousef, 13, fled Syria to reunite with her daughter Souad, 22, risking a dangerous journey across 15 miles of the Aegean Sea in a motor-powered inflatable raft. They had one main goal: to all live together again in safety. They were willing to bear the many indignities that would come with the journey and with being Arab and Muslim and Syrian refugees — if it meant being together. But in the end, the five of them would be scattered in four different cities, across two different European countries. (Out of concern for their security in a new country and the safety of their relatives in Syria, they asked The Times not to divulge their last name).

They joined one million others who also decided in 2015 to escape the catastrophes home had become. The overwhelming majority of them were Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans. While their countries had come apart in different and specific ways, their disasters shared some common origins, including the ruinous consequences of decades of American wars and sanctions. [full story]

To Stay or to Flee: A Syrian Mother’s Impossible Choice

At the end of her shift in January 2019, Suhair was listening intently to Bjorn Muller, a former line chef at the Michelin-starred restaurant Inter Scaldes, as he explained in Dutch to her and the other kitchen trainees what each did well that day and what they could improve upon. Though she was not 100 percent sure what was being said, Suhair laughed when the others did. She had been studying the language for more than a year, but those lessons about van Gogh and Rembrandt, Dutch birthday traditions, the Netherlands’ history and the requisite forms for navigating its bureaucracy weren’t proving entirely relevant here at Orionis, a work-placement agency in Vlissingen, a seaside town in the southern province of Zeeland. Muller was talking about menus, work flow and hygiene as he gestured to notes he had made in washable marker on the stainless-steel countertops, where they prepare each day’s lunch.

The kitchen at Orionis is a vocational-training site, the heart of a fully functional restaurant and a cafeteria for the agency’s employees and students. The goal is to make the people who train here, who now include Syrian refugees like Suhair, employable in any restaurant. “I’ve never done this before; all my life was house and kids,” Suhair said in Arabic. “The last thing I thought about was Suhair. But it’s not wrong to try new things.” (Out of concern for her security in a new country and the safety of her relatives in Syria, Suhair asked to use only her first name.) [full story]

When War Goes Off Script

JULY 26, 2018

What do we call the current phases of the wars in Syria and Iraq? And would any label make the world pay attention, more than just fleetingly?

For many outside observers, what happens in the two bordering yet very different countries are just rumbles from ongoing — even interchangeable — wars. Just wake us up when it’s over.

ISIS has been battered, routed from Raqqa and Mosul, its strongholds in Syria and Iraq respectively. But very little that traditionally marks the end of a war has taken place. With multiple armed sides in these conflicts, there’s been no unconditional surrender by all parties that leaves any one with definitive and permanent control over territory or people. No treaty has been signed, agreeing to peace. No transition to something new and viable has been birthed, despite the endless pangs.  [full story]

A Gallery Grows in Brooklyn

MAY 11, 2018

How do you open an art gallery of your own in New York City, where real estate costs defy gravity, and focus on emerging artists of color who don’t yet fetch the kinds of prices necessary to cover commercial rent—while also selling to people who don’t think of themselves as buyers or collectors of art?

It was a question that vexed curator and writer Stephanie Baptist in the four years after she returned home to the US from the UK, where she had been working as the inaugural head of exhibitions and public programs for Tiwani Contemporary, a London gallery specializing in artists from Africa and its diaspora. Baptist thought back to her work as a graduate student at Goldsmiths, where she had been interested in transforming unused spaces—from abandoned parking lots to city blocks directly under elevated subway tracks—as platforms for arts and culture in underserved communities.  [full story]

The FBI’s ‘Vulgar Betrayal’ of Muslim Americans

APRIL 21, 2018

In 2001, when Assia Boundaoui was sixteen years old, she woke up in the middle of the night, roused by lights shining outside her bedroom window. She looked out to find two men aloft fiddling with the wiring of the recently installed street lamps.

She ran to her mother’s room, afraid, telling her they should call the police. Her widowed mother tried to calm her down. “It’s not a big deal,” she said. “It’s probably just the FBI. Go back to sleep.”

By that year, the FBI had become such a ubiquitous presence in the small town of Bridgeview, Illinois—home to some 200 Muslim Arab-American families—that the residents attributed many extraordinary and unexplained occurrences to what the community suspected was the government’s surveillance of their every move. There were the unknown cars that sat for hours outside their houses; men who didn’t appear to be in need going through their trash cans; and odd clicking sounds and static on the line when residents spoke on the phone. [full story]

A Play About Syria as a Country in a Coma

JULY 23, 2017

When one’s entire life is spent waiting, how does one measure the time? In the play “While I Was Waiting,” which on Saturday wrapped up a run as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, Omar (Mustafa Kur), a former telecom worker from the less affluent and besieged Damascus suburbs, gives us the sum of his life in days—10,749 to be precise. We quickly learn, however, that these only account for twenty-nine of his thirty-one years, as he has spent the past two years no longer alive but not quite dead, suspended in a state of unconsciousness after the pummelling he received in Syrian prisons.  [full story]