The Girl From Aleppo: Nujeen’s Escape From War to Freedom. Christina Lamb

and when a delegation of United Nations observers arrived from Damascus to see what had happened, they came out in even bigger demonstrations, maybe 10,000 students, and streamed the rally live on the internet so that everyone could watch. The next day, after Friday prayers, they took to the streets again, holding up pictures of the dead under the words ‘Heroes of Aleppo University’. Over and over came the chant ‘Assad out!’ and ‘The people want to topple the regime,’ the slogan used in Egypt.

      Yaba had told Nasrine not to go. ‘What, do you think that a few students will make this regime roll over?’ he asked. ‘They will roll over you instead.’ But I knew she would go. She came back very quiet and she didn’t go again. I know my family were selective in what they told me as they thought I wouldn’t be able to cope, but I found out later that many people had been beaten and forced to kiss posters of Assad. Nasrine herself had seen one of the students dragged away, a second-year architecture student called Ibrahim who was grabbed by security forces and tortured to death with electric sticks. The boy was from Hama. Many of the demonstrating students were from Hama and had lost parents in the massacre of 1982.

      Also, in her department was a boy so smart everyone called him Pythagoras. He disappeared and when he came back he was all in bandages, even his face a different shape, and the authorities wiped out his grades so he had to repeat a year.

      But the protests didn’t stop. Girls and boys who had only cared about music, clothes, studies and their friends now found themselves trying to bring down a dictator. The university was split with half the professors supporting the revolution and half with the regime. The head of the university protected the student protesters, so a week later he was removed and replaced by a regime supporter. In the end all opposition professors were kicked out. The students were split too. Girls and boys who had been friends were now reporting on one another. In Nasrine’s physics class of sixteen, they were divided into two sides, while the Kurds had their own side as they couldn’t trust anyone.

      Apart from demonstrating, some students were volunteering, taking supplies to protesters and sending out reports on social media. Makeshift field clinics were set up to treat demonstrators, because if they went to government hospitals they might be arrested and killed. It was very risky. In June a burnt-out car appeared in an eastern suburb of Aleppo called Neirab inside which were found three charred and mutilated bodies. One had a gunshot wound and his hands tied behind his back, and his arms and legs had been broken. The corpses turned out to be students – Basel, Mus’ab and Hazem – two medical students and an English student who had been giving first aid to injured protesters and been picked up by Air Force Intelligence a week earlier.

      Even though my family didn’t tell me things, once I saw pictures of a boy whose head had been cut off lying on a street with a bloody stump where his head should be. When the wind blew in the right direction I fancied I could hear the sound of protests chanting over and over like a drumbeat. Ayee and Yaba were always like tightly strung instruments until Bland and Nasrine came back through the door.

      The main protests were in the east of the city. The west was under the tight control of the regime. In Sheikh Maqsoud scary new figures appeared on the streets. These were what we called shabiha which means ghosts, criminals paid as paramilitary by the regime to stop people going to protests and make us feel there were eyes everywhere.

      We admired the revolutionaries and like them wanted change, not wanting to be ruled by the same family for more than forty years, but mostly we wanted to stay alive. Mustafa said the revolution was interesting for people aged seventeen to twenty-one but not for people like him who were older and working to earn a living for their families. He also told us that some people in Kobane had been given money to go to the demonstrations. Nasrine had a pro-revolution song on her phone and, remembering what she had said to Yaba about who would look after me if they died, I worried that maybe my brothers and sisters would have done more if they hadn’t had to think about me. Sometimes when I look back on those days, I wish I had been older at the time and able to make a difference. All I could do was listen to the protest songs. I didn’t even get to tear down an Assad poster!

      As we had seen elsewhere in Syria, where there was revolution there soon followed war. Assad had stepped up military action and at the beginning of the year had really concentrated force on the central town of Homs, like he was making an example of it, his forces raining mortars and artillery fire on rebel strongholds and bombing centuries-old buildings to dust with people inside. Children were killed, foreign journalists were killed, and the town kept under siege, trapping without food, water or medicines those families who hadn’t fled.

      Though the regime eventually pushed the rebels out, many other Syrians were revolted by the way they had done it. Like the Aleppo students, people felt they couldn’t stay quiet any more. Instead of being cowed, more cities joined the fight.

      Mustafa said that Assad was losing swathes of Syria as he concentrated on holding Damascus, Homs and the two coastal provinces on the Mediterranean, and that the rebels were taking much of the countryside. They had also captured border crossings with Turkey and Iraq. But it was at a high cost. Maybe 10,000 people had been killed. He told us people were buying gold sovereigns because they worried that the Syrian pound would become worthless.

      Yaba clacked his worry beads and said it was only going to get worse. As front lines hardened into stalemate, the rebels got hold of more effective weapons, some seized from Syrian army bases and others smuggled from Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon and funded by Qatar and Saudi Arabia, while Assad was backed by Russia, China and Iran. It was clear that the rest of the world wasn’t going to stop him.

      Our war started during Ramadan – the fasting month when everyone becomes tetchy – in the heat and dust of July 2012. It happened quite suddenly. Almost overnight the rebels poured into Aleppo from the countryside. Initially they made quick gains, seizing control of districts in the north-east, south and west within days. Our neighbourhood, Sheikh Maqsoud, was under the control of Kurdish militia, the YPG. But the offensive was not decisive and it left the city divided. The rebels controlled the east and the regime forces the west, some parts changing hands daily. Soon fighting even reached the gates of the Old City.

      We were scared. With the FSA inside the city, the regime would send in its tanks. Also people were a bit unsure of the FSA as all sorts of groups had joined, including criminal gangs. My eldest brothers Shiar and Farhad, who were watching what was going on from Europe on YouTube and Facebook, kept calling and telling my parents, ‘Just go, leave this miserable place Aleppo, it’s dangerous!’

      On streets where rebels had not taken over, the shabiha appeared and at once spread terror. Often people fled when the shabiha came, which was the idea. Some of our neighbours told stories in hushed voices about them raping women which I wasn’t supposed to hear. I worried about Nasrine. The university was in a government-controlled area but had become a centre for anti-government protests and many people took refuge there. It became impossible for Nasrine to go to her classes because to get there she had to cross the front line, so she stayed at home.