The young Hornsey musician has several identities. To his fans he is “Ahmz” the rap artist. To his bosses he is a London Underground engineer. The Metropolitan Police know him as a leading protester against the Damascus regime, who stormed the Syrian Embassy in London last October and smashed a picture of President Assad, an action for which he was banned from attending subsequent protests.
But now Ahmz, 22, has left his London life of music, trains and protest to join the revolution inside Syria, and waits in a hotel room in southwest Turkey to cross the border by night.
“I didn’t used to pray,” he says, staring out of a window to the mountains beyond, “but I’ve started to pray a bit now as I might be dying soon. Whatever will happen, will happen. But I’m up for it. I’d be a wimp if I wasn’t.” Ahmz, a tall, angular figure with ice blue eyes and London pallor, prefers not to use his real name. As the son of a prominent opposition activist who fled Syria in 1979 he knows better than to expect any mercy if he is caught by the Syrian security forces. Seventy-three of his family members who remained in Syria have been killed by the regime in the past 12 months.
“I would rather die than be caught and tortured,” he adds. “I’m a wanted man from a wanted family. There’ll be no welcome for me in prison.”
These are not the careless words of youth. He produces a laptop and shows footage of the fate of one of his cousins, Abdullah, who was arrested in January and killed in custody at a military base in Ibleen, northwest Syria. When family members regained Abdullah’s body he had been flayed and gutted with surgical precision, leaving his face, lower arms and legs perfectly intact. Clearly the work of a calculated and skilled torturer rather than the product of any battlefield weapon, the desecration seems to have been conducted so as to transmit a message of maximum horror.
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“How could they do that to somebody?” Ahmz says. “A hyena wouldn’t do that. And yet things like this happen all the time. Torture. Killings. Rape. But the world does nothing and satisfies itself with statements alone. For people at home the revolution just seems to be something on the news after EastEnders. I couldn’t stand it any longer.”
At first his parents tried to dissuade him from leaving London. “They called me and said: ‘Look, no disrespect, but what are you going to be able to do in Syria?’
Ahmz tried to explain. “With all that happened in Homs, Idlib and so many other places that people have never heard of, my wish to get involved hardened. I said goodbye to them a few days ago. They still weren’t happy but they understood that I felt I had to go.”
Though prepared to die, Ahmz is clear about his role in the revolution. “I’m not going to Syria to fight,” he insists. “There are plenty of people there who know how to do it better than me and who are familiar with weapons, which I’m not. In London now if you even carry a knife you might go down for four years.”
Instead he is about to join the revolution’s vanguard of media activists, whose reports and YouTube footage have illuminated so much of what is going on inside Syria, often at the cost of their lives, in the absence of any widespread presence of international journalists. Ahmz has amassed thousands of pounds’ worth of equipment — cameras, laptop, satellite phone — purchased with his own money and with that donated by the Syrian community in London.
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“I’m going in there as part of the Revolution Media Team to get stuff out on network sites, Skype forums and Facebook,” he says. “I want to show what is going on through my eyes, those of a guy from London living what the Syrians live through.”
He taps his fingers lightly on the table, his hand tattooed with the words of his first album, Grief In The Chest.
“I would have got a local phone but why bother?” he laughs. “I’ve kept my UK number. If I die, Vodafone can keep the bill.”
.President Assad is “making a lot of mistakes” despite repeated calls from Moscow for an end to the violence, the Russian Foreign Minister said, amid signs that the Kremlin could drop its support for the regime. “We believe that the Syrian leadership responded incorrectly to the very first manifestations of the peaceful protests,” Sergei Lavrov told Kommersant FM radio.