13.05.2020

From 23rd-27th December 2019 I embarked on a journey to Reyhanli, a small town on the Syrian-Turkish border. During that week I visited the Medical Educational Council (MEC) premises and was able to meet and hear the stories of Syrian refugees, all of which have been both physically and emotionally victimised by the Syrian Civil War. Although my visit was short, each day I found myself experiencing a constant wave of shock, disbelief and sorrow at the unimaginable experiences of the people in this town, while also being overwhelmed with admiration at the courage which shone through every conversation I had.

The Medical Education Council: An Unwavering Commitment

On the first day, I was taken on a tour of the centre so I could see the work that the MEC carried out. Before arriving, I believed that I had mentally prepared myself for what I was about to experience. I knew that learning about the struggles and hardships of the Syrian refugees was going to be difficult, but it was something that I thought I was ready for. The ability to listen to these stories, to find out, even marginally, about the journeys of these innocent civilians who were involuntarily thrown into the midst of chaos and destruction was invaluable. I would soon find out, however, that all my attempts would be fruitless. There is nothing that could have prepared me for the stories that I was about to hear. 

When I arrived to the MEC, the feeling resonating through me was strange. I had always prided myself on my attachment to my Syrian heritage, but amongst the Syrian refugees I felt like an intruder. The types of trauma which they had encountered were so horrifying that they might have seemed like a bitter fabrication of the imagination had I not listened to the first-hand accounts of them. It almost felt like survivor’s guilt. But this feeling did not last long. As I walked around the centre, I was at awe with the work done to rehabilitate the victims of the Syrian War through physiotherapy and counselling, for example. I was impressed by the dedication of the volunteers and the personal investment they had made in each of the patients’ lives. Beyond that, however, I was struck by the smiles of the people I crossed paths with. They were not normal smiles, however. They were a type of smile which I had never seen before. It was a timid smile which held the heavy brunt of betrayal but also clung onto small fragments of hope. This resonated with me. Despite the years of pain and difficulties, they were not broken in the full sense of the word. As the head nurse showed me around the centre, she introduced me to the different patients, giving me their quick backstory. She explained to me how the cases I was seeing now were incomparably better than when they had first arrived to Reyhanli. As I was taken around the centre, I realised that perhaps my expectations were nowhere close to what they should have been. I walked around the physiotherapy halls and educational centre where the men and women were given vocational training in fields such as computer science, coding, sewing and carpentry in order to help them become self-sufficient.

At the end of the day, I briefly met four courageous women: Jahida Al Saeed, Noha Mansour, Hiam Ramadan and Fatima Khadija. Despite being cheated by both the Syrian government and the international system, these women were not silenced. They came out strong enough to tell the truth of their stories to the world and to demand to be heard.  

“I lay there, helpless, like a lump of meat thrown onto the ground”

On the second day, I met Jahida from Idlib. Jahida’s story began when the attacks on Idlib had gotten so severe that she fled to Turkey with her husband, four children and pregnant sister. The first thing that Jahida told me was how grateful she was that in the chaos of war, she was able to stay with her family at the very start at least. As Jahida told me the beginning of her story, her eyes sparkled at the memory of her family. She told me that despite her family’s excitement to return to their homeland after having lived in Turkish Exile, for some reason she did not feel the same. She had a sinking feeling in her gut.

Jahida tried convincing her family that they should all stay in Turkey- it would be safer for them. Their response was that she was paranoid. She told me about how she gave her children their Identity Cards and told them to keep it with them at all times. She told them that if anything should happen, they should open the car door and run as far as they could until they found someone who could help. She told them not to worry or think about her or their father, just to look out for themselves and for each other.

It was not long after uttering those words that her fate was sealed by an airstrike which came down onto their car. One second Jahida and her family were sat down and the next they were launched what she claimed felt like fifteen metres up into the air before they thudded back onto the ground.

Initially, Jahida’s vision went black. All she could think about was getting to her children and pregnant sister, but she was powerless. She had been reduced to a lump of meat laying on the ground, motionless. The helplessness she felt both in the moment and as she recounted the story to me was palpable. She screamed in vain, calling out for her family, urging them to let her know that they were okay.

After some time, Jahida started to regain her vision. As she turned her head, she saw an arm and leg detached from a body. Her arm and leg.  But in that moment, she did not have time to dwell on the pain pulsating through her body. All she could think about was how she needed to find her children. As she kept turning trying to find them, her eye caught sight of a blood chilling sight.  There, a few metres away from her lay her sister, dead, with her still born baby just a few metres away from her. There on the ground lay the world’s victim of injustice and oppression.

At some point, Jahida felt a blanket cover her and she was rushed over to the back of a truck. As she lay down, she saw another leg detached from a body- but the pain in seeing this was different, more powerful. Not for herself, but for her little Zaido. She tried to concentrate, to speak to him and calm him down but he lay there, motionless. He was gone. If that was not enough, as she moved her head to see if she could find anyone else, she locked eyes with her young daughter, Aalia. Her eyes were slightly open, looking straight at her. She was smiling. Jahida explained how for a split second, she felt hope. Surely if she was smiling, she was not in pain. After a few seconds of trying to speak to her, however, she realised that she too was gone. The same words she had said to her just moments before resonated through her brain. “We’re in the homeland Mama, why aren’t you happy?” But even a moment of grief was deemed too much for Jahida. As the grief surmounted her another strike came down on them and she blacked out.

When she woke up in the hospital, she immediately asked about her family. The Doctor told her she was the only one who had survived. Her entire family was gone.

I was lost for words at this point- unable to find the right thing to say in this situation.  The next thing she said to me, however, moved me in an indescribable way.  Jahida described how the supposed dignity and respect for human life that she had always heard about was a myth. It was a dream neither she nor her family were granted. But when these feelings begin to overwhelm her, she remembers that they ended up in their homeland just like they wanted, and that none of them are alone. “My arm was buried with my three daughters. My leg was buried with my husband and my son. So, I guess it isn’t so bad. A little part of us will always be together…”

“The Humiliation was as Unbearable as the Physical Pain”

On the third day I spoke to Noha from the Northern Countryside of Hama. Noha’s story is one which is detached from reality; the human rights violations she encountered knew no boundaries. When the Syrian Revolution began in 2011, Noha’s husband started supplying gas tanks to the Free Syrian Army. In 2016, an airstrike came down onto Noha’s balcony as she was playing with her two sons causing the gas tanks to explode over her entire body. She instantly lit up in flames. Despite this, her motherly instincts kicked in and she looked over to check if her children had been affected. Once she saw that the fire had not reached them, she began running in order to protect them from the heat of the flames. At the time, her youngest son who was a year and a half started crawling towards her, but the three-year-old held him back, telling him not to get any closer.

By the time the flames had subsided, Noha had suffered from third and fourth degree burns over her entire body. She was a remnant of what she once had been. She lost her hair, eyebrows and vision. The fire had eaten through Noha’s skin, bones and muscles causing her to lose the fingers in her right hand and initially experience full body paralysis. During my visit, however Noha explained to me how she was in the best state she had been since the accident. The MEC had arranged for various operations and medical procedures to try to help her regain some mobility and vision. She could see, she was beginning to walk alone, and she could talk. But that does not detract from the fact that her old life of independence is more than a distant dream away.

As Noha explained her story to me, it initially felt like a she was recounting a detached series of events. As the story progressed, however, tears began to stream down her face at the memories. Noha’s disabilities meant that she was unable to wipe them alone, however.  As I wiped them away for her, she explained how she felt embarrassed by her domestic life after the incident. Her parents blamed her husband for leaving the gas tanks on the balcony, they told him that it was his fault and that she was his responsibility, not theirs. Noha explained how she felt completely stripped of her dignity, like an unwanted pest being thrown from one place to another. “Imagine,” she said to me, “imagine the people you thought were closest to you arguing over not wanting to deal with you”.

In the end, Noha ended up with her husband. During her time in the hospital, however, he had filed for a divorce and had remarried. Before the MEC took her in, she was living with her ex-husband and his new wife in Reyhanli. Being completely dependent on her ex-husband and his new wife stripped her of all her dignity. The level of humiliation she felt was worse than the physical pain. “They would shout at me”, she said, “they tried to turn my son against me, tried to make him scared of my appearance. When that didn’t work, they became angry at me and stopped taking me to my physiotherapy appointments. Every month they would take the allowance I was given by the Red Cross and spent it on themselves- my husband said I didn’t deserve it”.

Listening to Noha speak about the experiences at a time when she was only a year older invoked a potent feeling of shock and anger within me. The worst part came, however, when she told me how her ex-husband and new wife’s verbal abuse turned into physical abuse, how she was beaten by them and left for days without food. Her son would help her when he could but when he was caught, he would get beaten too.

By this point, a puddle of tears was forming in Noha’s lap. Before I was able to ask about her children, she began telling me about her younger son who she has only seen once since the incident. He no longer recognises her due to the extent of her physical deformations. He currently lives with her ex-husband’s parents back in Syria who refuse to return him to her because they claim she has no right to him seeing as they raised him after her injuries. As for her older son, he lives with his father and his new wife. Every Sunday, the MEC picks him up from his father’s house and brings him to the centre so that he can spend the day with his mother. That is all the time that Noha’s ex-husband lets her have with him, however. When I asked her why she did not fight for custody she shook her head, an action laden with defeat. “My husband’s family has already denied me from one son, I can’t risk losing and being fully denied from the other as well”.

“Leave it to your imagination, and then more”

By this point, I thought that I could no longer be shocked by the stories that I was yet to listen to. On the fourth day, I walked into the same room I had become accustomed to since the beginning of the week. There I found Hiam sat on her wheelchair waiting for me. Hiam is sixty years old from Zabadane, the suburbs of Damascus. Like many Syrians who were forced to flee in the war, Hiam was at first unwilling to leave in even the most intensive periods of shelling. “It was suffocating”, she told me, “but it was Syria, and that is where I wanted to be”. In 2015, Hiam’s choice of staying or leaving was ripped away from her when a barrel bomb was dropped on her house, forcing her into a coma. When she opened her eyes in the hospital, she was relieved to find out that her two daughters had safely made it out and were by her side. Hiam’s injuries required extensive medical attention, however, which could not be provided by the hospital she was in. As they began planning the logistics of her transfer to a different hospital, their contemplation was cut short when Hiam and her two daughters were abducted from the hospital by government forces and thrown in prison.  Not even the realms of the hospital warranted the mercy of the Syrian regime. Hiam begged them to let them go, to have some mercy on her for her age and medical condition. She pleaded, told them that they had not done anything. Their response was to tell her that she had done more than enough, she had raised a ‘traitor’. I soon learned that Hiam was told that she and her two daughters would be imprisoned until they found her son who according to the police force had committed the crime of ‘having a critical opinion’ of the Syrian regime. The threshold of justice was so low that a mere opinion was enough to warrant such levels of tyranny.

Hiam and her daughters were imprisoned for two and a half years. As she described the conditions to me, she shook her head. Between every stage of the story she closed her eyes, almost as if she was trying to wipe the image from her memory. Hiam recounted how the prison room they were in held more than fifty women, all cramped up in a tight space, barely able to breathe. They were occasionally given bread and water. On some occasions, however, the respect for human dignity was so low that when they complained of thirst they were forced to drink from the toilet. Hiam lived for two and a half years on the prison ground. Two and half year without sunlight, without movement and without mercy.  Allowing her to sit down was the special treatment she received in light of her age and medical condition. The rest were so cramped that they would take shifts for standing and sitting.

We will never know the extent of the horror that Hiam and her daughters experienced, however, because at one point Hiam stopped talking. I asked her what was wrong, if her story had finished. She told me that even if she spoke for days the injustices she experienced during her years of imprisonment would never end. “There are some things that cannot be repeated”, she would say, “some things which cannot be expressed”.

 “Leave it to your imagination”, she said, “and then some”.

“As long as I have the choice of laughter, I will never let them take it away from me”

On the last day, I spoke to Fatima who is 18 years old, just 2 years younger than me but with the troubles of a lifetime already weighing her down. One thing about Fatima that will stay with me forever is her laugh. If you looked at her from only the waist up, you would think that she was a carefree teenager. As she told me her story, she paused between the different stages to laugh.  After a while, however, the laughter became unsettling. Her story was so heart-breaking that no form of emotion would be sufficient to express the appropriate level of empathy, so as she laughed, I found myself torn at an appropriate response.

In 2016, at the age of fourteen, Fatima’s life was changed in a way that no human, yet alone a child, should ever have to endure. Fatima had just finished school and had decided to go to the school playground with her friends. They were sat on the benches talking when before they knew it cluster bombs started falling down on them. Fatima told me how they started to panic, how she and her friends started to run around trying to find shelter under the trees. It was useless, however. There was no way they could have escaped the bombs which rained down on the school, indiscriminately targeting the children.  Fatima’s friends all passed away, their lives snatched away from them and their families in a cowardly act of brutality. Fatima, on the other hand, survived, but her injuries were severe. She had to have her right kidney removed and her spinal cord was damaged, resulting in initial full body paralysis. When I met Fatima, her mobility had slightly improved as a result of years of physiotherapy, but she still cannot walk on her own.

As Fatima was telling me these stories, she was laughing. It was hysterical laughter. I looked at her, unsure of whether I should ask or keep quiet.  When I finally decided to ask, she told me that if she did not laugh, she would cry. She would cry for her friends who were murdered in front of her. She would cry for her legs that are now limp and almost fully paralysed. She would cry for the childhood she can never reclaim.

“The day they dropped those bombs they stole every opportunity in my life, every possibility I had of a future.  As long as I have the choice of laughter, I will never let them take it away from me”.

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