Omar Mande, 56, is a fighter in a unit in the Free Syrian Army in
northwestern Syria. He is seen here in an interview during a rare visit
to his family’s rented house in the Turkish border town of Hacipasa. —
SG photo by Daniel Lippman
Daniel Lippman
Saudi Gazette
HACIPASA, Turkey — Omar Mande had a normal life in the
town of Darkush in northwestern Syria, where he worked hard as an iron
metal worker and provided for his wife and six kids. But after
protesting peacefully for a year, he is now a seasoned member of the
rebel Free Syrian Army and uses a Kalashnikov to fight the regime in his
home province of Idlib.
About a year ago, he decided that demonstrating in the streets was not
enough and took up arms against the Bashar Al-Aassad regime. In
response, the regime henchmen burned down his house, destroyed many of
his belongings, and forced his family to flee to Turkey.
“The first time I used a weapon, I picked up just my pistol. I didn’t
have anything because I didn’t find meaning to live with this unfair
situation. To me it’s better to die than to see the regime continue to
humiliate my family and other villagers,” he says.
He and his group of 23 fighters, five of whom he says lack Kalashnikovs,
battle against the army in towns around Darkush, in Syria’s northern
Idlib province, and says his unit, which includes his two sons, has
recently “liberated” three government-held villages. Idlib is known as
one of the most anti-Assad provinces and is also militarily critical to
the rebels because supplies, food and weapons flow through the area to
Aleppo, the country’s second largest city.
Mande says his group has received no assistance from Western countries
and has to constantly scrounge for weapons and ammunition (he says a
bullet sometimes costs 200 Syrian pounds or two US dollars). He
specifically cites a lack of heavy weapons that hobble him and his rebel
colleagues when they face powerful tanks and fighter jets that drop
bombs.
Indeed at one point during an interview with him in Hacipasa, a dusty
poor and agricultural Turkish border town that has taken in around 1,300
Syrian refugees, including Mande’s wife and children, the faint
rumbling blast sounds of either artillery or bombs being dropped could
be heard from inside Syria. Mande had arrived four days before and was
seeing his family for the first time in five months.
Most Western countries have not aided the rebels militarily because of
concerns that Islamist groups like the Al-Nusra Front are becoming more
powerful and believe that adding more guns, ammunition and rockets into
the already weapons-saturated country would only add fuel to the fire,
ensuring that different rebel groups will turn on each other to secure
power once Assad is gone.
“Nobody is helping. But for us, there is no way we will give up,” Mande
says. “We can’t stop. If we stop, Al-Assad would rule the country even
if he would kill all the nation. It doesn’t matter. We would fight even
if we didn’t have weapons.”
The most shocking story Mande told was about how his house was burned
down five months ago by regime-supported Shabiha which is notorious for
heinous crimes against the civilians.
They left a hand-written note that he showed this reporter. It reads:
“You coward Omar, you are a dog, you think you are a man. Where are you
going to run away? You are going to Turkey?” The signature at the bottom
of the note roughly says Sons of Assad, which means lion in Arabic.
He later found out that he knew some of the people who torched his home.
“Before the war, we sometimes had food and meals together. But under
Assad, they got crazy and did that for him…They burned and broke my
furniture and stole from me.”
“My feeling was of betrayal because some of the men who did it, I had
had meals with and broke bread with and I asked: how could they be that
sectarian? Instead of when we used to laugh and eat with each other.”
He hopes to soon return to rejoin his unit and says his “soul is on the
other side.” He feels a special responsibility toward his fighting
colleagues because while not the unit’s leader, at age 56 he’s one of
the group’s elders, and likes to cook for his colleagues, give moral
support and solve problems for them.
“I’m worried about my group and other people. I want to go back soon,
but my family is trying to keep me here,” he says with a smile.
saudi gazette
