As Doaa watched him go, a sense of triumph and satisfaction filled her chest. After weeks of bowing down to soldiers and feeling helpless, she had won a small victory against the men occupying her home. She began to wonder what else she might be able to do.
During the eleven days of the siege and since the start of the uprising, the state-run news agency, SANA, announced that the government had completed its mission to “chase out elements of terrorist groups” and to “restore security, peace, and stability” to Daraa. General Riad Haddad, director of the military’s political division, announced that the army would withdraw its six thousand troops in phases and that the city would return to normal. But during those eleven days, while Doaa and her family had remained locked inside their home, the world had taken notice of their plight, and news reports began to release details of the more than two hundred deaths and one thousand arrests that had occurred during the siege. According to the Syrian state media, as many as eighty soldiers had also died. As the news spread around the world, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton warned the government of Syria that there would be “consequences for this brutal crackdown,” and European leaders began to discuss sanctions. Human rights groups reported that at least six hundred people had died across Syria in the seven weeks since the crackdown on demonstrators had begun, and eight thousand had been jailed or gone missing.
Doaa noticed with relief that the tanks outside their house began to leave their positions, and fewer armed soldiers patrolled the streets. Despite all this, it became clear that things were far from back to normal. Decomposing bodies of protesters lay uncollected in the streets, and the stench of rotting flesh filled the air. On top of the death, there was destruction. The girls had not gone to school since the siege began, and they were anxious to get back to see their friends and resume their studies. But the school remained shut, and the road they once took to get to school was now lined with pockmarked buildings, some of them abandoned, with doors left open revealing the intimate spaces where lives had once been lived.
Still, Shokri was determined to get back to work as his money had run out during the siege. But every day when he left for his shop, his family wondered if he would make it back home alive. They heard stories of cruel government snipers who seemed to make a game of shooting people, regardless of age or gender. As people came out of their homes to collect the bodies of the dead left in the streets, those people were shot at as well. No one was safe under all this madness, and Hanaa urged Shokri to be cautious, reminding him that she herself had witnessed a man shot dead as he was leaving the mosque. They had also seen a video of a pregnant woman lying dead in the street having been shot in the belly.
Scared but determined to support his family, day after day Shokri made his way through the checkpoints on his bike and opened his shop. But most of his clients were too afraid to come. His salon was in the heart of the al-Saraya neighborhood, the operations center of the regime in the old town, which had become a target for the now well-armed opposition. Sitting in his shop, he watched the battles between government forces and the opposition unfold around the courthouse and other government buildings.
“There’s a war going on in this city and you expect people to get their hair cut? Are you crazy?” his neighbors would ask him. But Shokri was sure that some of his customers would come for their ritual shave and trim, and he desperately needed their business to feed his family. “My death will come when God decrees it,” he would tell people.
One afternoon in late June, as he was cutting a client’s hair, Shokri heard gunfire. He left his client’s side to peer out the door and saw a group of men running from the shots.
“There they go again,” Shokri told his client, and went back to trimming his hair. By then, Shokri had grown accustomed to the sound, and he took pride in continuing his work in spite of the unrest around him.
“Another day in the revolution,” replied his client wearily. “But I still need a haircut, it’s been months. God damn them all.”
Suddenly, both men heard a loud rumbling noise. In the reflection in the shop mirror, they could see a huge vehicle approaching slowly, straight toward the salon. It looked as if it were about to roll right over them. The client jumped out of the chair, gasping in fear, and pulled the towel from around his neck, dropping it to the floor.
“I haven’t finished your haircut,” Shokri pleaded, trying to calm him. But the client disappeared around the corner, his hair only half-cut. The tank then suddenly turned and rumbled around the center of the square.