'Just hours before embarking upon the gruelling journey that would change his life, Mouhyedin Alkhalil was told by his beloved parents that arrangements had been made for him to flee Syria and there was no time to say goodbye.
He was just 18 and had spent much of his adolescence in the shadow of war, forced to move from house to house as bombing raids destroyed his city.
In faltering tones, he speaks of a day-to-day existence where there was no escape from the bombs, the death and the destruction wrought by a war that has left a country decimated and its people dispersed.
Mouhyedin’s childhood home was the family seat for more than 100 years before it was flattened in the conflict that ravages Syria to this day. He moved home repeatedly but there was no escape from the bombs that continued to rain down upon Homs, from the bullets and the atrocities of war. As a teenager, Mouhyedin lost friends, loved ones and life as he knew it, forced to abandon his studies when bloodthirsty snipers lined the streets that led to his law exams, “shooting at everything they see, dogs, cats, people".
“Every day was different,” he says, with an intensity at odds with his usual sunny demeanour.“You never knew what would happen, people would go to work and not come home – dead. People would stay home – dead. You would be laughing and joking with friends and then the next minute, bombs.”
The evening before he fled the country, the student was facing the threat of forced enlistment into President Bashar al-Assad’s army, where: “I would be killed or have to kill others.” His pleas to stay in Syria, where he could help his family, fell on deaf ears as his loved ones insisted he leave for Lebanon, fearing he would die otherwise.'
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