BEIRUT: At a recent protest in Riad al-Solh, family members of captive security forces each took a candle to light for their loved ones. Rana Fliti, the widow of policeman Ali Bazzal, took one but refused to light it. “I said I wouldn’t light the candle until he came home,” she explained.
Bazzal was murdered by members of the Nusra Front over the weekend after being held for more than four months. He was shot in the back of the head while kneeling somewhere in the no-man’s-land between northeast Lebanon and Syria. He was the fourth captive serviceman to be killed.
“Now I will never light the candle,” Fliti said, with a heaving sob.
In the wake of her husband’s killing, Rana Fliti shared stories of his life and, through tears and gritted teeth, slammed the government for its failure to save him.
From playing Playstation video games together to watching comedy movies after putting their young daughter to bed, Rana described a blissful domestic life that was abruptly cut short when he was kidnapped in August.
Bazzal, Fliti said, was a kindhearted jokester fond of slapstick humor. After the birth of their daughter, Maram, Bazzal put on one of his wife’s maternity gowns and stuffed it with pillows. “He made me laugh,” Fliti recalled, mustering a nostalgic chuckle.
But Bazzal was also deeply considerate, Fliti said, and loyal to his family. After Fliti lost her wedding ring, Bazzal started putting aside small bills to save for a new one, despite their tight economic situation. “He would save LL1,000 and LL5,000, a little at a time. Then he took me out to dinner and when we arrived, the juice was already on the table. He had put the new wedding ring in a cup of juice!” Rana recalled, fondly.
Fliti and Bazzal’s initial courtship was met with opposition by their families. The Flitis, a notable Sunni family from Arsal, were displeased that their daughter would marry a Shiite from the neighboring area of Labweh, where Hezbollah enjoys wide support. Despite their families coming to blows over the marriage, Bazzal sought to reassure his wife that neither religion nor inter-clan strife could drive them apart.
“He always told me that regardless of how many difficulties we faced, nothing would keep him away from me except death,” she said. “But death came, and now Ali is gone.”
Fliti recalled, with sadness and regret, the last time she spoke to her husband on the phone. The Nusra Front, the Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group that was holding Bazzal captive, allowed him to call his wife on Eid al-Adha last October. “He told me, ‘Rana, stand by me.’”
“I’m overwhelmed with guilt because I couldn’t do more for him,” she told The Daily Star.
With little progress being made to secure the release of the captive servicemen, Rana Fliti traveled to the outskirts of Arsal and met with Nusra militants herself in September.
Soon after her trip, the government took a more active role in the negotiations, but Fliti said officials didn’t do enough.
Fliti did not mince words as she criticized how Lebanese officials have handled the case. “The government procrastinated,” she said. “Officials kept saying: ‘There is nothing we can do.’ Well then someone should have taken their place, someone who could have gotten better results.”
“You lack conscience,” she said, addressing the government directly. “If you have an ounce [of conscience] left, you’ll bring these hostages back home to their parents.”
Fliti denounced the attacks against Syrian refugees over the weekend, ostensibly committed in revenge for her husband’s death. “I have said from the beginning that not all refugees are terrorists. Some of them are, and those are the ones who need to be held accountable.”
To her husband’s killers, Fliti had but a few words to say. “You are murderers, and your day will come,” she said. “There is no religion, no morals, no humanity that permits what you have done.”
Fliti said that she would shelter her young daughter as much as she could from the tragedy. “I will not raise her to have hatred in her heart. I will raise her the way Ali wanted.”
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