6 min read

Speaking in code, displaced women in northern Syria contact loved ones in regime areas

In cautious phone calls and coded language, people in northern Syria displaced from East Ghouta reach out to the loved ones they left behind in regime-controlled areas.


30 September 2022

IDLIB — More than four years since Sahar* was displaced to opposition-held northwestern Syria, communicating with her siblings who live in the eastern Damascus suburbs is still “a red line,” she says. They worry that staying in touch could put them on the radar of the Syrian regime’s security services. 

After Sahar, 38, left for the north, her mother was the “messenger,” carrying messages between her, in Idlib city, and her family in the East Ghouta suburbs. Her brothers warned her mother that communicating with her was dangerous, but she said “let them arrest me,” Sahar told Syria Direct.

She kept in touch with her mother until 2019. One day, “I sent a voice message on WhatsApp in the evening, and the next morning I got a reply from my mother’s phone saying she died,” Sahar said. “I don’t know if she heard my message or not.”

Before her mother’s death, “I would send her voice clips, she would listen to them a week or 10 days later, depending on the network where she was,” Sahar said. But when her mother responded, “I’d drop everything to talk to her. It was a chance that wouldn’t come again easily.” 

Sahar is one of 78,000 people displaced from East Ghouta in March and April 2018, after a Syrian regime military operation against opposition factions there ended with a settlement agreement stipulating that fighters and civilians rejecting the agreement leave for northwestern Syria. 

Many of the displaced left loved ones behind them. In the years since, staying in touch has been difficult, not least because some fear security repercussions for their family members if regime security forces learn they are in contact with people in opposition-held areas.

So, some displaced people do not contact their loved ones. Others speak with them infrequently, and use code words for potentially sensitive topics. And a number communicate regularly, but are careful to keep their conversations vague, and limited to non-political subjects.

Memories of displacement

The day Sahar was displaced is still alive in her memory. When her husband decided to leave East Ghouta for northwestern Syria, “I wasn’t surprised, because I knew there was no way out of that,” she said. But saying goodbye to her mother was “hard,” Sahar added. “I couldn’t look her in the eye.”

Preparing to leave East Ghouta after five years of bombardment and siege, Sahar packed her bags while her mother made fatayer, small savory pastries. “The whole time, my eyes didn’t meet my mother’s. When it was time to go, we burst into tears.” 

She tried to persuade her mother to leave with her, but she refused. “We were stricken by the death of my brother in the recent attacks on Ghouta,” she recalled. “We hadn’t found his body, so my mother insisted on staying in the hope of finding him.” 

Nivin al-Hotary, who today lives in northern Aleppo and is the chair of the board of the Women Empowerment and Support Unit organization, was also displaced in 2018. She remembers “we were in a state of confusion, especially because we didn’t know if we were making the right call.” 

During the last days in East Ghouta, “we were in basements, separated from one another,” she said, and there was no contact between Nivin and her immediate family and relatives. “It hurt that we couldn’t plan or think about how we would leave each other,” she recalled. 

But none of her first-degree relatives stayed. “We left as one big family,” she said. But contact with the other relatives they left behind “was completely cut off.” None of them have tried to contact her since, “and I am not prepared to get in touch, for fear of putting them in danger.”

Careful contact

After Sahar’s mother died, she received “condolence messages from some relatives” living in East Ghouta. A few years later, at the start of 2022, communication resumed with her brothers and their children, “minimally, and with extreme caution,” she said. Sometimes, their calls are “punctuated by interruptions.”

In July, she received a message from her nephew, telling her that his friend’s mother was arrested “because of her communication with her brother,” displaced to northwestern Syria. Sahar’s nephew asked her “not to send any message if he didn’t initiate contact,” she said. One of her sisters “set up a specific number to contact me, so I wouldn’t communicate with her on her official phone number,” she said. 

Regime forces have reportedly arrested people in East Ghouta against the backdrop of them communicating with relatives in northern Syria, including the case of one couple in the town of al-Maliha last week. 

The few times Sahar has talked to her “loving, kind-hearted” brother, as she described him, the conversation has been limited to him asking about her husband and children. “We can’t talk more than that,” she said. And when speaking to him and other residents of regime-controlled areas, there are many words she avoids using. 

“We don’t say Idlib, Afrin or Ghouta,” she said. Ghouta was not a term commonly used by residents as a shorthand for the area before the Syrian revolution broke out in March 2011, and she worries using it in messages could put her family in danger. 

Sahar lives with her husband in Idlib, 70 kilometers from her in-laws, who came to the Afrin area via smuggling in 2011. But her family in East Ghouta “may not know that,” she said, because of the many details they avoid.

If Sahar wants to talk about Turkey, she says “our neighbor.” Instead of saying Ghouta, she says “where you are.” And instead of talking about opposition areas in northwestern Syria, she says “where we are.” 

When talking about the markets or prices, “I only mention Syrian currency,” she said. “I bought a dress for 200 Turkish lira, and when I told them, I said it cost 70,000 Syrian pounds.” 

Although her mother-in-law left regime-controlled areas, fear and coded language habits followed her. When Idlib is bombed, she has called to check in on Sahar and her husband, saying “we heard there was a wedding where you are, and they threw a lot of chocolates.” Civilians in regime areas use phrases like this as a metaphor for bombardment. 

But unlike Sahar, Amal* communicates with her family nearly daily. “I video call them every day on WhatsApp, and we drink our morning coffee together,” she told Syria Direct. But she avoids talking about politics and the economic situation. 

“What are you cooking today? Molokhia. You? Mtabaq, with minced meat, potatoes and onions,” she said, as an example of her usual conversations with family in regime-controlled areas. 

Amal came to Idlib in early 2021 to join her fiance, displaced to the north in 2018. While living conditions are difficult in northwestern Syria, they are better than in regime-controlled areas, she said, “so I don’t mention many details of my life, which is like a luxury for them.” 

When Amal got married, far from her family, she held a video call with them during the wedding party. “The call lasted for four hours, but the whole time, we didn’t mention that the wedding was in Idlib,” she said. 

She longs for a solution that will open a way back to see her loved ones in Damascus. “I would definitely be the first person to go back and meet my family,” Amal said. 

Sahar does not expect to return to East Ghouta anytime soon. “Even if we were given the offer to return under international reconciliations or promises, I wouldn’t go back. So long as the regime exists, it won’t let us be.” 

Still, she misses her family in Ghouta, and longs “to visit my mother’s grave.”

 

*Names have been changed for security reasons. 

This report was originally published in Arabic and translated into English by Mateo Nelson. 

Share this article!