Meet the Syrians behind the music that impressed a revolution

HOMS, Syria — His face is in every single place in Syria. It is plastered on the nation’s new flags, on sweaters and on the aspect of buses.

His voice, untrained and unfiltered, is ubiquitous, too: utilized in cellphone ringtones and blared from loudspeakers.

His identify is Abdel Basset al-Sarout. As soon as the goalkeeper for the nationwide youth soccer staff, at 19 years outdated, he turned one of many best-known protesters demonstrating in opposition to Syria’s autocratic Assad regime.

Solely now, with ruler Bashar al-Assad forcibly ousted final December, can Sarout’s singing be performed publicly in Syria. Kids, some born through the revolution and who memorized his lyrics in secret, belt his songs jubilantly on the streets.

NPR needed to seek out out about him — however he was killed in 2019, at age 27, in battle with Assad’s forces.

Touring within the northern metropolis of Homs earlier this yr, nevertheless, NPR discovered of a person that folks stated had written Sarout’s songs.

The unlikely revolutionaries

The lyricist is known as Ayman al-Masri, 52. He’s largely unknown inside Syria, regardless of the recognition of his songs.

Earlier than the revolution started, Masri offered automotive components and owned a cake manufacturing unit. When anti-regime protests started in 2011, he threw himself into organizing demonstrations.

A music-lover and beginner author, he additionally started authoring verses for numerous activists and singers in his hometown Homs, one of many first cities to stand up in opposition to the Assad regime.

However Sarout was his greatest singer.

“Al-Sarout had a rare charisma and kindness,” he says. The trace of a uncommon smile arches Masri’s lips. “He understood me, and I him … sometimes just from a look in our eyes.”

As he tells it, he and the singer met after Sarout tumbled in by means of his entrance door within the revolution’s early days.

It had been round noon; the singer was fleeing authorities troopers after a protest. Early within the rebellion, Masri’s dwelling in Homs was identified a secure haven. Sarout got here searching for a spot to cover. Masri acknowledged him instantly because the well-known soccer goalkeeper.

Masri had reams of lyrics written, however he was searching for the appropriate individual to present voice to them. That very day, in his front room, the 2 males cast a artistic partnership.

If Sarout was the revolution’s saint, Masri was its scribe. He ended up writing all the singer’s 130 or so songs and chants.

Their most well-known track, “Janna, janna, janna,” — Arabic for “paradise” — turned a protest anthem that would rouse 1000’s of demonstrators at a time.

Its lyrics go:

Heaven, heaven, heaven. Heaven is our homeland.

Oh, our beloved homeland, and its gracious soil

Even your fireplace is heaven.

The track is now inextricably linked to the Syrian rebellion. “I memorized ‘Janna’ in grade two or three, but we did not dare sing it out loud,” says Marwan Jnani, 14. He was born in 2011, the yr the revolution started and discovered the signer’s most well-known track in secret. His mother and father warned him: “If somebody heard you singing it, they would take you underground, and you would never see the light again.”

Throughout Homs, protesters linked arms and sang out their defiance by means of the track, even within the face of regime snipers and artillery strikes that turned more and more widespread on any pockets of resistance.

“Those days were the pinnacle of happiness, the sweetest of my life,” Masri remembers.

Going underground

Because the pair’s renown grew, so did the hazard they confronted. Regime forces tried a number of instances to assassinate the 2 males. Masri says they by no means spent various nights in anyone place, sheltered by sympathetic Syrians who risked arrest for serving to them.

In 2012, Assad’s forces started a siege of Homs. The town was generally known as a bastion of among the earliest and fiercest resistance in opposition to the Assad regime. In retribution, regime forces — assisted by Russian airstrikes — focused the town with vicious bombardment and street-by-street city battles.

Most civilians fled as artillery strikes decimated an estimated 60% of buildings and meals provides dwindled. The singer and the songwriter have been among the many Homs residents who selected to remain, retreating into the warren of alleys in Homs’ outdated metropolis.

Masri’s lyrics — as soon as triumphant and upbeat — took on a extra mournful tone as hunger and loss of life turned endemic in Homs. After two of his colleagues have been killed in an artillery strike, he wrote the next track, together with his personal mom in thoughts.

Oh mom, in a brand new gown

Have a good time my martyrdom.

I come to you a martyr dressed within the Eid’s clothes

And heaven is my new dwelling.

Have a good time and be proud of me, and forgive me for leaving you.

And he continued to collaborate with the singer. He paid to acquire a map of the town’s sewage system. The singer and the songwriter traversed the frontlines of the city guerrilla warfare that had consumed the town of Homs by that time, with one half of the town overtaken by regime troopers and the opposite half managed by insurgent teams.

The pair needed to cross enemy traces by means of the town’s sewage tunnels, rising from drainage grates at nighttime to satisfy so Masri may give the singer his latest lyrics. Starvation stalked civilians and insurgent fighters. Masri says they boiled wool rugs to eat and stripped bushes of their leaves for sustenance.

By this time, the 2 males, as soon as so in synch with each other, had diverged of their views.

Masri, a dedicated pacifist, believed his pen was his strongest weapon. Sarout had picked up a gun, turn into an opposition fighter, and was fixated on releasing Homs from regime management. As his closest family and friends died one after the other, the singer more and more advocated for violence, over singing, as his most well-liked device for regime change.

“Abdel Basset had to protect himself. All Syrian people, especially in Homs, were forced to turn to weapons,” says Raed al-Khalid, 34, a former highschool soccer teammate of the singer.

Ultimately, Sarout was compelled to desert Homs. Proper earlier than sneaking out through an underground tunnel, the singer gave a controversial endorsement of the extremist group Islamic State, or ISIS, providing to work with them.

Khalid spent nearly seven years preventing alongside Sarout. He watched as his joyful, big-hearted buddy grew extra weary and extra hardened: “Sometimes, he would tell me, I just want to rest. I am so tired. But everywhere he went, people wanted to spend time with him and hear him sing his songs.”

“A chapter is missing”

Khalid says Sarout typically prayed that he would die preventing. By the top of the warfare, his father and 4 of his 5 brothers could be killed battling the regime.

In 2019, Sarout obtained his want.

“I was the last person to see him alive and to bid farewell to him,” says Mohammad al-Sarout, 24, the singer’s nephew, who turned a insurgent fighter alongside his uncle in northern Syria. “He was going out, and I told him, be careful; there is a drone in the sky.”

Shortly after, the singer was badly injured in a strike.

Khalid, his former teammate, was among the many troopers who evacuated him to a hospital in Turkey for therapy, however Sarout died of his accidents the subsequent day, aged 27.

Khalid buries his face in his palms when he thinks about his buddy’s final moments, his unhappiness blended with pleasure at witnessing final December the top of the regime that they sacrificed a lot to topple.

“There is an entire chapter to this story that is still missing,” says Khalid. “Abdel Basset is missing.”

Masri, the lyricist, is now a songwriter with out his singer. As we speak, he wanders the town the place he and the singer made their identify and sees sparkles of the previous.

“Sarout’s scent, his presence, is everywhere in Homs,” Masri says surveying the destroyed streets, most of which nonetheless haven’t been rebuilt because the regime’s siege of the town. “There is no street here that we have not walked down together.”

The regime demolished a lot of the singer’s former dwelling — and that of his uncle’s close by.

However the reminiscence of the singer may be very a lot alive on his outdated road. As we method what stays of his household home, a gaggle of youngsters — some born after he died — encompass us. I requested them who lived right here, and guffawing, they reply instantly: “Abdel Basset al-Sarout.”  

Masri is with us, immersed in his personal recollections. He factors to a nook of the home, subsequent to a lacking window; that was the place the singer could be sitting, ready to greet his songwriter, each time he entered, he says.

On this go to, Masri is carrying a spiral-bound A4-size pocket book the place he hand wrote a lot of the first songs the singer sang. There is no such thing as a written anthology of their songs, nor does his identify ever seem in credit as their creator, however this skinny, dogeared pocket book is the place his connection to his favourite singer is preserved.

Opening the pocket book, Masri begins to recite certainly one of his outdated verses. The wall has been blown huge open, so he faces the setting solar. Close by, a mosque begins its name to prayer.

Oh mom, my brothers, my associates, and most of my companions have gone forward.

We are going to stay on, for this world is fleeting.

Gown me within the gown of martyrdom and ship me off in honor.

Now with the regime he opposed gone, Masri says has quite a bit to stay for once more. He has began writing once more because the regime fell, he tells me. His new songs are totally different; they’re about life and hope and rebuilding.