Bribing Food into Daraa

Daraa, June 22,

At one of the check-points in the village of Horan, a member of the security forces stopped a woman heading to the besieged city of Daraa, asking her sarcastically, “Do you still want freedom?”

“I do not want freedom, but I want the regime to fall,” she said, and spat in his face. A volley of shots rang out and she slumped to the ground.

Daraa, the birthplace of the Syrian revolution, is surrounded by the security forces – but there is silence from Syrian and Arab politicians.

The authorities are preventing the delivery of food to the city as part of efforts to bring its inhabitants to their knees.

So far, locals have withstood bullets and missiles – their punishment for demanding an end to the Assad regime. Smuggling food into the city has now become a crime.

Abu Mohammed has been trying to get food into the city. He takes advantage of the rampant corruption in the security forces, bribing soldiers on check-points to smuggle goods through the blockade.

When a bribe doesn’t get him through there are alternative roads used by local farmers that he can use to enter Daraa.

“The evening time is the best to smuggle food to the houses under siege – the members of the security forces are by that time tired from their long day of murdering, demolishing, looting, and are bored monitoring the empty roads,” he said.

“We would  send a pickup loaded with some food to a military checkpoint that we knew, then the goods would continue on their way secretly in complete silence.”
Abu Mohammed and his comrades have vowed to continue, and are not put off by failures such as when some security personnel threw a shipment of food on the floor and trampled it with their legs.

One tactic for outwitting the security forces is to send a car containing food to a checkpoint and some motorbikes loaded with food down an agricultural road.

“If the car doesn’t pass then at least we can get something through on the motorbikes,” he said.

While smoke rises above the houses of Daraa, Abu Mohammed remains determined.

“We will defeat those dogs; we were and shall remain free in spite of Assad and his supporters. We shall smuggle food despite them. And in many cases we shall use their cars – there are a lot of members of the army who are nationalists and loyal people who help us,” he said.