Four years ago Tareq was an ordinary university student, who left the neighborhood of Jobar in Damascus for the Engineering Faculty in my city, Homs. He had light-colored hair and blue eyes «that could melt the hearts of virgins,» which gave him an advantage over other young men. He would spend all his time chasing the pretty girls at the university, and they would chase him as well. At the time, I was like his conscience, which would try to restrain him while he was a jolt of energy that helped me do away with my rural shyness.
When the protests began in 2011 the wall of fear collapsed quickly for me, as it did for most residents of Homs and its surrounding countryside. The only place I could see myself was among the demonstrators; I later became a media activist with the Coordination Committee for Baba Amr, which overnight went from being a small, neglected neighborhood, in a neglected country, into an Arab and foreign media center. While the neighborhood was besieged, army defectors and the civilians who joined them waged the fiercest battles on its outskirts; it was pounded by rockets whose names we had never heard of before, and Tareq was watching, and sympathizing with us… but from a distance.
But his fear of taking part in what was going on didn’t last long. He was quickly forced to, by the regime. He was detained arbitrarily when he happened to be in the vicinity of a demonstration. A few days of torture and insults were enough to move him into the center of the opposition. He helped form a coordinating committee dedicated to writing slogans on walls and organizing demonstrations calling for freedom while his neighborhood in Damascus, Jobar, was in the firm grip of the regime.
Jobar was 200 kms from Baba Amr, but this didn’t prevent Tareq from keeping in constant contact with us. He used satellite internet, to avoid the government network, which was under the surveillance of the intelligence agencies. We were now in the same position - that of opposition activists calling for a free Syria for all its people, without dictatorship.
A few months later, our paths began to diverge. Baba Amr fell to the army and I ended up in Beirut. Jobar, meanwhile, was now out the control of the regime and Tareq ended up as the leader of the «Freedom battalion» group, which promoted «securing demonstrations, liberating Syria and establishing a state of justice and equality.»
Tareq and I remained in touch, but it became more difficult. Jobar and most areas of the neighboring eastern Ghouta were now at the mercy of the regime’s blockade, and death. The pace of killing accelerated, as the air force deployed various types of weapons while the Arab world and the international community remained lethally silent about the daily holocaust. Tareq’s ideas became more extreme and his rage grew; more and more, he sought vengeance against the «hypocritical» international community.
With every opportunity for us to discuss things, I felt that Tareq’s ideas and political stances had experienced a bigger change. The idea of democracy that I thought united us a few years ago had become «a fetish used by the west to confront the possibility of Muslims coming to power, as in Palestine, Egypt and before it Algeria,» as he put it. This increased his conviction that the only solution was Islam, and depending on the west and its «false aspects.»
At the end of 2013 the Syrian army shelled rebel-held areas in the eastern Ghouta with chemical weapons, massacring 1,300 people. The west made its threats but did nothing as the days went by. Tareq survived this massacre, but the soul of a peaceful person searching for freedom had died. He was against everything.
A few months ago, one of the opposition factions in rural Damascus detained Tareq on the charges of belonging to ISIS, according to what some mutual friends told me. Some said that he declared his allegiance to the group, while others said the militants had approached him, but failed to attract him to their ranks.
The Tareq I know is not part of ISIS. He’s an ordinary university student who went from the Damascene neighborhood of Jobar to the Engineering Faculty in my city, Homs. He had light-colored hair and blue eyes «that could melt the hearts of virgins.» He would spend all his time chasing the pretty girls at the university, and they would chase him as well. But it seems that he died, several times, with the last of these deaths came during the chemical attack. All that remains of him is a ghost named Tareq, who only wants out of this life to take a brutal revenge that «heals the hearts of the believers.»