Tariq was born in the north east Syrian town of Ar-Raqqa back in 1958. At the time of his birth, the ancient and ethnically diverse town, which is now more commonly known as Raqqa, was the sixth largest city in Syria. Back then it was a quiet and comfortable place to live a happy and reasonable life. Tariq certainly enjoyed a carefree and simple childhood there. Gaining an education from a good school. Swimming in dams and rivers during the heat of summer; followed by lazy days spent in his family compound over the cooler months of winter.
When he grew to be a man, Tariq was lured to his country’s capital, Damascus, in search of better work opportunities. He spent a couple of years as a soldier in the army, before taking the plunge and starting up a business of his own - a cloth business in the labyrinthine depths of Al-Hamidiyah Souq, the marvellous market located inside the ancient Damascus city walls.
In time Tariq met and married his wife, Fatima, and fathered four healthy children. Everything was going as well as can be expected through the usual ups and downs of life in a society that didn’t always enjoy the freest of democracies or the most open human rights record. Things, however, changed for the worst in the year 2011. That was when the Syrian Civil War began. Inspired by the Arab Spring that had already swept around the African edge of the Mediterranean Sea, there came loud calls for regime change in Syria. The army’s brutal crackdown in response to the major uprising against the ruling elite was swift, destructive and uncompromising. Brutal violence continued to escalate rapidly and soon exposed cracks and divisions amongst fragile tribal, political and religious divisions. It all unhinged what had up to that point been a reasonably cohesive community.
Two of Tariq’s sons were badly beaten for their early involvement in the call for change. They fled in fear for their lives to neighbouring Jordan. As the brutality continued to widen, Tariq’s other two children also fled to the north. It was while he was still caught up in the dilemma of what he and his wife should do that Tariq was mysteriously contacted by an old army buddy. The now high ranking official made him what was a reasonable offer to sell his business. Tariq, who was scared and confused by all that was happening around him, reluctantly took the offer. He and Fatima decided to also pack up their lives and leave Damascus. They left their rented apartment and headed back to live in Raqaa, to live at his childhood home with his aged parents.
Although there were already signs of emerging unrest back in Raqaa, Tariq decided he needed to start a new business to ensure he and Fatima still had at least an income on which to survive. When they put their heads together about what they might be able to do, the couple decided to go into the food business, producing healthy and tasty take away Arabic food, of the kind that was commonly available in Damascus, but not so much in Raqaa. Using a street level space at the front of his parent’s home, the room was soon converted into a clean glass fronted shop with a good sized kitchen in the rear. Most of the ingredients they needed for their fresh cooked menu could still be easily acquired at the local market and the couple had already worked out what tasty offering they could easily produce, and which they anticipated might be desired by the good people of their neighbourhood. The next step in their planning was to produce a pamphlet announcing their products and advising of the grand opening day.
Tariq had an old school chum who owned a small but still operating print shop. They contacted him and decided to produce 10.000 pamphlets, hoping they would spread the good word about their new enterprise as widely as possible. The pamphlets were duly printed on a range of vivid coloured paper which had made its way to Raqaa from China, via Beirut many years before. Gillian Junkmail, who was printed 8,566th in the print run, was turned out in bright technicolour onto a bright blue piece of A5 paper.
Sadly, the peace in Raqaa took a severe turn for the worse, right at the time Tariq and Fatima were about to embark on their new venture in March 2013. Jihadist militants from a number of splinter fronts, as well as a mixed bag of other assorted groups overran government loyalists in what has since become known as the Battle of Raqqa. The rebels declared the city under their control after seizing the central square and pulling down the statue of the former president of Syria, Hafez al-Assad.
By June 2013, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant ,or ISIL as it is now more widely known, had established and iron fisted and disruptive rule over the city in their grand plan of converting the city into a renewed Caliphate, similar to the one which had been created by Abbasids in Raqqa during the 9th century. The city quickly became known as the “hotel of the revolution” as many supporters of from other places in Syria and Iraq made their way there.
In taking control of the city, ISIL embarked on more widespread killing of religious minorities as well as the destruction of a range of historical monuments. The ensuing mayhem prevented Tariq’s shop from ever getting off the ground, and he and his family were left to simply try and survive in the city as best they could. We leave Tariq here, along with the hope that he and his family eventually survive the modern day catastrophe.
We turn our attention instead to Gillian Junkmail. After the print run had been completed, she was taken, along with 500 other pamphlets, to the eastern outskirts of Raqaa. Many of her companions were distributed by hand to citizens in the street. Others were placed in the letter boxes of those homes which had one. The remainder, including Gillian, were left in a small pile on a table in a local tea house.
A young man who worked cleaning dishes in the tea house ended up taking Gillian home to show his mother at the end of one of his shifts. After a quick scan by the mother, Gillian was left on the dining room table in a small room which served as both dining and bedroom for the boy’s family. Gillian remained on the corner of that table for several months, until one day a mortar shell blew up just outside the second story apartment. The shell, and the several others which followed, totally destroyed both levels of the building, in the process knocking the table over and causing Gillian to fall onto the floor.
Fortunately nobody was at home at the time of the shelling, but the young man from the tea shop and his family were forced to abandon the house and seek whatever shelter they could find elesewhere.
As the fighting and killing in Raqqa continued to intensify, Gillian was left abandoned on the floor, blown here and there by whatever eddies of breeze ha made their way in through the broken walls. She remained there until one day a young woman dressed in combat fatigues and carrying an expensive and high powered rifle over her shoulder entered the room. The woman, who had been a crack rabbit hunter during her childhood, had been sent out by one of the warring factions to set up a sniper position overlooking the street below where a dusty Gillian had been laying for the last several months.
The street was by then well known in the Raqqa community as sniper alley. Several other snipers had also set up in other building along the street. Because the street was a known no-go area, very few people ever ventured out onto it, neither during the day or the night. The lady sniper, however, remained diligent in fulfilling the task she’d been allocated. She lifted the upturned table and dragged it over to the window as a support for steadying her aim. When she got the table over to the window, she noticed it was uneven and lopsided. In order to make it more stable, the woman looked around to see if there was anything that she might put under the offending table leg to lift it back up to an even keel. That was then she spotted Gillian. Moving swiftly she picked Gillian Junkmail from the floor and folded her several times, until she was about the same size as the gap between the floor and the table leg. Gillian did her job well, and the table was soon stable. The woman set up her stand and rifle on the table and then waited.
Nothing happened for weeks. There was little or no movement at all on the street below. After several days, and when some of the other snipers out of boredom had started taking pot shots at buildings, she decided to join in the distraction. At the end of the street, opposite to where our female sniper lay in wait, somebody had drawn the outline of a human body on a wall. The head had what appeared to be an apple drawn on top of it. This apple became her target over the next few days. Shooting off regular shots whenever she became frustrated or bored, our female shooter was a dead eye when it came to hitting the apple. Her bullets, aided by Gillian’s stabilizing influence, hit the apple so many times that a hole was eventually blown right through the cement breeze block.
The sniper post was eventually abandoned after the Syrian Airforce began regular bombing raids over the town. Gillian was left abandoned and contorted under the leg of the family dining table.
It was only when some soldiers from other warring factions were conducting house to house searches, looking for what they considered sinners, that Gillian was once again discovered.
A young man who spoke with a European accent lifted Gillian out from under the table leg, curious to see what the suspicious looking piece of paper might have been. He glanced quickly at the front of the pamphlet, feeling immediately hungry when he spotted the sumptuous array of foods shown in the graphics.
When he turned Gillian over, the man found and read the weekly shopping list that the tea house boy’s mother had prepared for herself and her five children.
• Flat Bread
• Tomatoes
• Onions
• Parsley
That was it. The young man then screwed Gillian up into a ball and threw it out the window. The breeze was strong that afternoon. It soon picked Gillian up and caused her to roll right out of the city and into the surrounding desert. Gillian was eventually pinned to the spikes of a plant which tended to thrive in the arid conditions. As time progressed and the elements continued to erode her organic cells, Gillian was eventually turned back into the dust from whence she had come. In the process she at least provided a modicum of chemicals and other organic residue to help sustain the plant with which she had spent her last days.