The last bastion 20181/19/2023 ![]() Someone loaded a cassette by the local singer Ahmed al-Tellawi into a tape deck, and the poll workers and Hossein began to dance.īy the early evening, voting lines were spilling onto the street. Plates heaped with roasted chicken, potatoes, and rice were passed around. The three-star flag of the 2011 Syrian revolution hung between pillars. At noon, Hossein returned to Idlib Gate, which was now crowded. Hossein saw friends, relatives, and a steady stream of people he didn’t know, including a seventy-year-old man voting for the first time in his life. A dizzying realization set in: people were actually coming. He then visited al-Salam school, where a few women were forming a line. After an hour, the first voters trickled in. ![]() When he was done, he waited outside al-Baneen High School, the streets droning with generators. Hossein hauled eight glass ballot boxes to schools that were serving as polling stations. No campaign posters hung on the town’s walls, because the candidates could not afford them. The sun was already powerful, but the streets were empty, the iron shutters on storefronts not yet drawn. ![]() Danger emanated not only from the sky but also from the concertina-wire-crowned berms and highway checkpoints ringing the town-areas under the control of Al Qaeda. Thousands of voters had registered, but nobody was sure how many would turn out. Hossein and other volunteers had conducted a local census, distributed pamphlets, and recruited poll monitors. He’d helped organize debates, live-streamed on Facebook, in which five candidates sparred over the breakdown of the local electricity grid and over rapidly escalating food costs-some argued for price controls, others for the free market. He later admitted to me that, given the circumstances, holding a popular election was a “crazy idea.” He had attended campaign meetings for his preferred candidate, a lawyer named Ibrahim Bareesh, inside a makeshift bunker, sitting near a wall of sandbags. Before the war, he’d been an accounts manager at a cement company, but in recent months he’d been volunteering to organize the polls. Hossein, who was thirty-five, had the deeply lined face of a man well acquainted with long nights of coffee and cigarettes. Poll workers checked their phones for reports of air traffic: Syrian and Russian jets were known to attack public gatherings, and activists had posted sentries around the province. The election was meant to choose the leader of the Local Council, a civilian body that governed the town. A small crowd was milling about: local journalists, election monitors, and suited dignitaries who, in international circles, represented the Syrian opposition. He soon headed to Idlib Gate, a former department store that had been turned into a meeting hall. On the morning that polls were to open, an activist named Osama al-Hossein woke up at five o’clock, feeling anxious. ![]() In the summer of 2017, for the first time anywhere in Syria since 1954, the residents of the town of Saraqib decided to seize control of their future-and hold a genuinely free election. Idlib residents, in the meantime, must continue to live on a capricious battlefield with no rule of law and no clear governing authority. This could spark a refugee crisis of historic proportions, driving millions of people into Turkey and Europe. special envoy Brett McGurk called Idlib “the largest Al Qaeda safe haven since 9/11.” Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, has vowed to launch an invasion of Idlib, which could subject its cinder-block towns and villages to rockets, barrel bombs, cluster bombs, even chemical weapons. ![]() They live in the country’s last remaining opposition enclave, amid a chaotic assortment of rebels, the most powerful of whom are religious fundamentalists. The province of Idlib, a pocket of rolling olive groves and shimmering wheat fields in northern Syria, is home to three million people who, since 2015, have been effectively trapped. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. ![]()
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