PHOTO: Funerals in Korin in Idlib Province after a regime attack, February 22, 2015 (Timo Vogt)
As Syria’s conflict continues and shifts, people across the country are trying to find a way to maintain life in their communities.
Writing for Spiegel Online, Christoph Reuters profiles one of these “mini-republics” and how it faces an uphill battle with a declining population.
The St. Lucie cherry trees were in bloom when the calamity began. It was not unexpected. Indeed, the men of Korin and surrounding villages had done their part to bring it about. Since winter, after two years of an almost static front line, they quickly overran several of the Syrian army’s last outposts in the Idlib Province. And soon after regime troops fled the eponymously named provincial capital at the end of March, the bombs arrived. It is a pattern that has often been seen in Syria: Soon after rebels take an army base, an airport or a city, the air force arrives to pound them from above.
For weeks, regime helicopters circled at an altitude beyond the range of rebel weapons and repeatedly dropped half-ton barrel bombs on Korin. On at least one occasion, a cylinder full of chlorine gas outfitted with detonators was dropped on the village, which is located some 40 km (25 miles) south of the Turkish border. Sukhoi jets appeared between the clouds and fired rockets at those buildings that were still intact. Thirty-one people died — a number smaller than it might have been because the residents of Korin, accustomed as they are to fleeing violence, had retreated to the olive groves that surround the village when the first bombs started to fall. For a while, they lived in tiny shacks among the trees — shelters that had been built in more peaceful times.
The airstrikes began to wane around the time when the olive trees bloomed. The jets were needed elsewhere; additional villages were in need of punishment. And in Korin, the villagers returned from the olive groves. Soon, around three-quarters of the erstwhile population of 11,000 were again living in the town, collecting stones and organizing cement and tarps to repair their homes. If the war weren’t still going on, one could almost have called it a peaceful summer.
It was the calm between the storms — a fragile calm, not unlike that of a tiny boat on the high seas. After all, Korin and the entire region surrounding it, with hundreds of towns and villages, have been living for almost four years in a state of anarchy.
It is almost as though someone had devised a wicked experiment to see what happens when everything that serves public order is suddenly removed. When police, courts and indeed the entire state simply disappears without a new one replacing it. And when the old state reappears periodically to spread death and destruction. It is a situation reminiscent of End Times science fiction tales in which marauding hordes find themselves in a constant battle for fuel, water and women. But what is it really like?
“Mad Max” in Idlib
Locals celebrated in the spring of 2012 when the army pulled out of their last Idlib Province strongholds and cities under their control following bitter fighting. They mistakenly believed that the collapse of Bashar Assad’s dictatorship was at hand. But it wasn’t. For the next two years, the army would occasionally launch artillery salvos at Korin from its position some eight kilometers away. Ultimately, the regime troops were driven away, but then death began falling from the sky for a time. Aside from that, residents were largely left alone in their succulent green landscape of gently rolling hills. “Mad Max” in Tuscany, if you will.
The others live behind the hills. The distance is not great, and they aren’t really enemies, says Aziz Ajini. But “it’s not completely safe.” Ajini used to be an English professor in the provincial capital but is now the village’s chain-smoking éminence grise. At the end of 2015, it was quiet in Korin. Everyone here knows everyone else. If the late autumn sun comes out, a few people emerge to sit in front of their homes. When the wind picks up, one can hear the flapping of the plastic tarps people have used to cover up their shattered windows.
Instead of simply crumbling, public order has merely contracted. “Korin has become a state,” says Ajini, “just like all the towns here.” A collection of rump states formed in self-defense. For years now, the media has portrayed Syria as being entirely consumed by horror and destruction, by explosions and black-clad barbarians who behead their victims on camera. But there are countless places that — like islands in a storm — are doing all they can to survive the fighting.
Traveling from one town to the next “is today like crossing an international border,” adds the Korin village council member who is responsible for ensuring the town’s water supply. “Each area has different rebel groups, some towns are more religious, others are bitterly divided.” Fear of the others grew automatically, he says, fear of those one doesn’t know so well and who don’t offer protection. People began staying away from each other, preferring to stay in their tiny, but halfway safe surroundings.
Village Solidarity
The calm is astounding given the fact that it is simple for people to arm themselves. It is easier than ever to kill someone should one so desire, and it has become virtually impossible to hold criminals accountable without risking a blood feud. There are no police, and even if there were, it is no longer possible to call them. Not that a trustworthy judicial system existed under Assad, but there was a state. Today, there is merely a fragile balance that can be disturbed at any time. Everything must be negotiated. The authorities have been replaced by personal relationships and village solidarity.
When a young man was found beaten to death near Korin in May 2014, the 10-person village council — elected out of a pool made up of a representative from each family — began investigating to the extent that it could. Who was the last person to see the victim and had somebody been with him? One witness had seen him in an argument with two distant cousins. The two confessed, but that was only the beginning of the problems. How could a blood feud be avoided?
“We referred the case to the Sharia court in the city of Binnish,” Ajini explains. “It has a good reputation in the entire province” because it is home to one of the region’s ablest judges. Ajini says the court is not a practitioner of the strict Islamic jurisprudence often associated with Sharia, but the label, he adds, increases people’s acceptance of its verdicts.
The murder case was a difficult one. A prison sentence was not possible because are are no prisons and the death penalty could have torn the village apart. So the court negotiated a compromise in the form of 7 million Syrian pounds of blood money, equivalent at the time to roughly €32,000 ($36,500). It was a fortune, and the family of the perpetrator had to sell gold and land to be able to pay it. Furthermore, the two murderers were forbidden from entering the village for a year.
Banishment, of course, sounds not unlike the Middle Ages, but in other aspects as well, life in the village republic feels like a reenactment of the past. Once again, for example, it is surviving almost exclusively from the food stuffs it grows and harvests — mostly olives, figs and mahleb, a substance that smells not unlike marzipan and is made from the seeds of the St. Lucie cherry. It is used in cakes, sweet dishes and ointments. Other villages situated at a higher altitude, or which have more water, plant peaches, melons, potatoes and peppers — and the settlements trade among themselves. Korin’s most valuable product, though, the seeds of the St. Lucie cherry, brings in roughly €8 ($9) per kilo and is still exported. Brokers transport the seeds through the frontlines all the way to the Gulf States and Sudan, where they are essential for the production of a traditional tincture for women that ensures they smell nice even in the extreme heat. The harvest was good this year, the farmers say. There was enough rain and, beginning early this year, they once again feel secure enough to travel to their more distant olive and St. Lucie cherry orchards, which were once mined by the army. A few farmers paid for that strategy with their lives.
