Syria ten years on: Everyone wants to go home

 

 ' “I hope that the world can do something in order for us to get back to our villages and homes…is that possible?”

 Ten years have passed since the spark of the Syrian revolution ignited, several pages have turned, each containing stories of pain and suffering. A people confronted with the bullets of tyranny, writing with blood the first words of the revolution's tale that narrates a struggle between right and wrong.

 On March 15, 2011, the Syrian people stood up to the face of tyranny and broke the bars of silence behind which their freedom was being held. The genie had been let out of the bottle and will not return.

 On March 15, 2021 in the centre of the Northern Syrian city of Azaz, people once again gathered on the streets to raise their voices and protest.

 Free Syria flags hung everywhere and those original revolutionary chants "the people want the fall of the régime" sung out in the air.

 Within days of the start of the peaceful movement, Bashar al Assad's prison cells were filled with hundreds of peaceful demonstrators demanding the restoration of their dignity and their right to human life.

 The decade-long war that’s followed has been brutal. Hundreds of thousands have died, were detained or disappeared.

 Still, in the early days of the revolution many Syrians dreamed of a breakthrough, a chance to see light at the end of the tunnel, but instead the Assad régime cracked down harder, putting people in prison for defying the régime and subjecting them to some of the most severe forms of torture documented this century.

 In Molham camp, not far from Syria’s Azaz, volunteers there are trying to provide better housing for Syrians displaced by war.

 To date, more than half the Syrian population has been displaced internally in Syria or had to flee the country and are now living abroad, often in dire circumstances.

 To get to Molham camp you drive past an endless sea of blue and white tents, that make up the vast majority of unofficial displacement camps in the area.

 We stopped along the way and met some of the children from the camps who were eager to tell us what they were learning at school and how they wanted to be teachers, one wanted to be a doctor another an engineer.

 Small children, in desperate circumstances, with big dreams.

 The accommodation in Molham is higher quality, brick walls and a roof over their heads.

 Ahmad Hamra lost both of his legs in a bombing in Aleppo four years ago. When we meet him, he’s cementing in a small plant in front of his new accommodation.

 “We are tired,” he says, “the régime have spent ten years of war and bombing. All my family were killed, all of them were martyred by war planes in Aleppo. My father, my mother and my only brother, all of them were martyred. I’m the only one left, but I lost my legs.”

 Ahmad’s story of loss is familiar to millions of Syrians who have faced a decade of bombardment, detention and siege.

 In over ten years of reporting the war, I’ve spoken to people who were starving and so desperate during the siege of Eastern Ghouta, they told us that they were forced to eat leaves.

 I’ve been inside Idlib and witnessed the terrifying silence that comes and how everyone looks to the sky when there’s the sound of an airplane overhead.

 To this day, Idlib comes under air attack by the régime and Russia.

 Futaim Hammadeh and her family fled Idlib “Our homes were destroyed by warplanes, when warplanes were roaring in the sky my son was a kid and used to shiver and cry from their sound. Many people were killed, all of them were tragedies.”

 But despite the well documented killings carried out by the Assad régime, effective intervention was absent from the start. Arab League Monitors, UN monitors, Kofi Annan’s peace plan - all failed.

 Calls from Syrians and their supporters for serious intervention, after the chemical attacks on Khan Skeikhoun, demanded a no-fly zone over Idlib where today civilians are still at risk from the Assad régime's barrel bombs - all ignored.

 Yusuf Al-Hajjii expresses the anger many Syrians have at the lack of effective intervention, “the intervention of western countries wasn't enough, we saw nothing from the western countries.”

 There have been many complicating factors throughout the war in Syria.

 The rise of ISIS (Daesh), whose barbaric killings were stained in black ink on the bright pages of the revolution.

 But still, despite ten years of apathy from the international community, Syrians are calling on the world to intervene.

 “I hope that the world can do something in order for us to get back to our villages and homes," Futaim tells us, “is that possible?”

 In Molham camp and during the Azaz protest young children were making victory signs.

 Small moments of hope, yes. But it’s small victories like this that are a message to the Assad régime - you haven’t won yet.

 It was those voices that have proven to be Syrians' most effective weapon - words that shook a dictatorship and scared the régime.

 But the price paid by the Syrian people for demanding those basic human rights, freedom and dignity, has been a desperately high one.

 Bashir Abazid was one of the original group of boys that were detained by the régime accused of writing anti-régime graffiti in Daraa - ‘Your turn doctor’. He was just 15 years old at the time of his detention.

 Bashir tells us how detained in Assad’s prisons “we were statistics. We were identified by numbers, not names.”

 The conditions were so bad inside the prison Bashir tells us ‘I would have preferred to die than stay alive”.

 Put in solitary confinement he says “I didn’t want my captors to open the door, because that meant more torture, humiliation and beatings.”

 When Bashir was released, the story of what had happened to him and his friends (who have been called the Freedom Boys) had ignited the revolution.

 He says now “many Syrians ask me if I have any regrets after seeing what’s happened to the country. The situation there is dire. But what happened is not our fault. We regret nothing. The people took to the streets peacefully. We held olive branches and chanted for Syria and for freedom. The Assad régime fired live bullets at peaceful protesters. Those killers are the ones who should have regrets.”

 So many Syrians we’ve spoken to inside and outside the country have told us they still believe in the revolution, still believe the régime will lose and Assad will fall.

 But everyone, every single person we speak to, says exactly what Ahmad Anferse told us on the tenth anniversary of the war, “every person wants to go back home.” '

How Assad is preventing the return of refugees

  'The régime led by ruler Bashar al-Assad is seizing and expropriating the homes of those who have fled on a massive scale. The move appears to be linked to a targeted demographic policy. The régime clearly wants to be rid of a substantial segment of its population for good. A glimpse at the affected cities and districts shows that the intention is obviously that above all Sunnis – or members of the majority population – will lose their property. President Assad is a member of the Alawite religious minority.

 Aiman ad-Darwish fled to Germany in 2015 with his wife and four children. He comes from the world-famous desert city of Palmyra whose ruins were partly destroyed by IS. Aiman ad-Darwish now lives in a cramped refugee flat in the town of Osterode am Harz.

 In Palmyra, the family owned an impressive house: "312 square metres of living space and an Arabian courtyard with a pool and pomegranate trees," says Aiman ad-Darwish. He shows photos of the inside and outside of the property and a video of his children splashing about in the pool. "I worked and saved a long time for it," reports the interior decorator, "we moved there in 2009. In 2015, we had to leave this little fatherland."



 Aiman ad-Darwish is under no illusions. As he sees it, his house in Palmyra is lost forever, seized by the régime, essentially expropriated. "I'm in contact with my former neighbours, who fled to Saudi Arabia and Turkey. They're all saying the same thing: access to the entire neighbourhood is blocked for former residents," he says. Aiman ad-Darwish, his neighbours and the overwhelming majority of the residents of Palmyra are Sunnis. "This expulsion policy is aimed at the Sunnis. Everyone knows that," says ad-Darwish.

 The first signs that the Assad régime planned to use the war for its demographic new order came in 2012. Even then, refugees were already being prevented from returning to their homes. When Assad recaptured the strategically important and predominantly Sunni rebel-held city of Al-Qusayr close to the Lebanese border with the help of the Shia Hezbollah in 2013, the Sunnis were banished from the city.

 Assad has made no secret of his long-term goal to permanently marginalise undesirable ethnic groups as a key outcome of the war. He made his intentions especially clear in a speech to parliament on 20 August 2017. For sure, the country had lost many of its "best sons" and suffered the destruction of infrastructure, he said, adding: "but we have gained something in return: a healthier and more homogenous society." Speaking in the same place back in 2015, he emphasised: "Living in a country or holding a passport does not entitle anyone to the fatherland." According to Assad, the way to earn the right to participate in the Syrian fatherland is to fight for it. Those who don't: "don't deserve any fatherland at all."



 Whenever he makes any statements on demographic policy, the dictator is always careful to avoid using the word "Sunnis". The régime continues to describe itself as "non-denominational" and committed to religious pluralism. It is indeed true that many Sunnis populate the middle and upper social strata, for example wealthy businessmen in Damascus and Aleppo who are loyal to the régime. And yet it is clear that the dictator's aim is to reduce the Sunnis' majority share in the population. Of Syria's population of over 20 million, some three quarters are Sunnis. The proportion of Sunni Syrians fleeing the country is even higher.

 More than 10 million Syrians are no longer living where they did in 2011, at the start of the conflict. Around half of all those displaced have found refuge in the few areas of Syria that the régime has not been able to recapture to date, primarily in the northwestern province of Idlib. The other half – around five million people – fled abroad. The régime wants to prevent their return.

 As well as strategically important smaller places such as Palmyra and Qusair, the expulsion and expropriation policies are affecting densely populated neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the large cities of Damascus, Aleppo and Homs. These districts were home to a concentrated number of poorer Sunnis who moved to the cities' peripheries from rural areas before 2011. Over the years, neighbourhoods such as Goutha to the east of the capital Damascus grew to become strongholds of the rebellion against the Assad régime. Now that the régime has recaptured these areas, it plans to distribute the real estate among its supporters: officers, soldiers, militiamen, loyal members of the business community.

 The German government is aware of the Assad régime's purging policies. Several confidential Foreign Ministry reports on Syria from the years 2018 to 2020 provide evidence of this. Each of these reports has a separate section titled "expropriations". The Foreign Ministry refers to "credible reports" from returned refugees who were prevented from repossessing their property. Some were even "detained" as they attempted to do so. The reports claim that the expropriations took place "on a large scale".



 Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) addressed the issue in May 2018 during a meeting with President Vladimir Putin. Speaking at a press conference in Sochi, Merkel said that "Concern" is raised in particular by "Law Number 10 in Syria, which means that people not reporting to the authorities within a certain period of time lose their homes". The decree, she went on, is "bad news for all those wanting to return to Syria one day," Merkel emphasised that she would "ask Russia to do what it could to prevent Assad doing this."

 At the time, Putin was unmoved. He countered with the telling suggestion that the Syrian question should be viewed from "humanitarian standpoints". It was clear that Putin was demanding a price before exerting any pressure on his ally Assad. To date, there has been no progress. Putin is standing firmly by the Syrian leader and wants Europe to pay for the reconstruction of Syria. Europe is demanding that Assad surrender power as a precondition.'

Syrian Journalists Reflect on Covering a Decade-Long War

 ' “When the revolution started, I was in 10th grade,” Hiba Barakat, now 25, says. “I couldn’t participate in any of the peaceful protests that started in my village, but I would watch my brother go.”

 Her mother was an avid photographer who filled many albums with family pics. Inspired by her mother’s creativity and her parents’ love of reading, Barakat started painting and writing in school—poetry and stories—and in her teens she began documenting what she saw around her. After she and her husband, a journalist, divorced, she contributed to the Al Jazeera blog and other outlets. Her passion for photography didn’t go away. “I realized later that I can tell more stories and I can reach more people through photos instead of just writing,” she says.

 In February 2020, the photojournalist and her family were driven from their home in Urem, a village in western Aleppo, “because the régime launched this intensive military campaign against civilians in the province and our town.” They sought shelter in a nearby village, thinking it would be just a few days, but the bombing went on. About 10 days later, they took a chance and returned home. “I knew that this was the last time I was going to see home,” Barakat says. “We couldn’t take anything; we left all of our belongings at home. My mom was able to take only some of our photos.” She adds, “Our village was captured by the Assad régime forces four days later.”

 For a while after the relocation to Idlib province, she couldn’t work. “I tried to talk to people and to report on this humanitarian catastrophe, but it was such a hard crisis that you don’t know what to say anymore,” she says. “I remember the last day I was in my village, Urem. I shot this selfie video where I talked about what happened and that the régime is forcing us to flee and to leave our homes, but that was the only thing that I could do.”

 Women have borne the brunt of this war, she says. “There are so many painful stories about young girls and women in Syria. I’d need a book to tell them all. The stories of Syrian women’s struggles are of forced marriages resulting from wartime pressure, of loneliness and displacement, of having to leave school and abandon their dreams. This war is a curse that women have suffered from the most. It has made some of us stronger, but it has also broken many of us.”

 As for her mother’s hobby that started Barakat on this path, she says, “My mom lost interest and stopped taking photos since my brother was detained by the Assad régime in 2014. We haven’t heard anything about him since then.”



 Photojournalist Nabiha Taha is only 22 years old, but she has already lived several lives. “When the revolution started 10 years ago, I was only 12 years old,” she says. “When the régime invaded my city and started bombing it, there were a lot of injured people who needed help.” At 13, she learned first aid and worked as a medic. In that role, she did a few things that didn’t sit well with conservatives, like working in ambulances and field hospitals with male colleagues. “This was frowned upon by ISIS members,” she says.

 She also violated the ISIS-imposed dress code for women. One day, the jeans she was wearing under her black abaya cover-up were visible. A carful of ISIS members picked up Taha and a few friends. “They took us to their center. It’s called al-Hisbah. It’s where they do trials and they judge people,” she says. “They whipped us. Me and my friend got the most lashes. Our other friend who was pregnant got the lashes on her feet, and then they let us go.” She went right back to work at the hospital. At 18, she volunteered with the White Helmets. But after a year, she decided she wanted to be a journalist.

 Now she’s studying journalism and is scheduled to graduate from Syria’s Media Institute this year. She writes and produces reports for local outlets like Ayni Aynak (a.k.a. Women of Syria, a blog for female Syrian writers), online news platform Furat Press, and a humanitarian NGO. “Of course female journalists face so many hurdles that our male colleagues don’t,” she says, “especially in northern Syria because it’s a conflict zone; so many other groups are taking control of this area. We are always at huge risk—not just me, but all of my female colleagues. We face harassment in the streets sometimes. Also, because the community here is very conservative, it’s not usual for them to see a girl outside in the street holding a camera in her hand, so sometimes I face bullying or harassment. Someone once attacked me and tried to break my camera while I was working.”

 Kidnapping is a real threat. “When I want to move to other places that are controlled by extremists, it’s very dangerous for me,” she says. “I can’t go because there are checkpoints on the roads and I might be subjected to kidnapping or intimidation by those armed groups. Some of my colleagues were assassinated during the past years by those groups because they don’t want the truth to come out, but that didn’t stop us, and we continue to do our work.” She adds, “I hope that the U.S. and the international community will play a [bigger] role in protecting civilians and journalists. Because a journalist here in northern Syria is [not valued] and anyone can kill them with one bullet.”



 Ramia Akhras, 34, had a business and accounting degree when she was married, but her “very conservative” husband did not want her to work, she says. They lived in Kafranbel, a town in Idlib province known for its activism against the régime. After her husband joined the rebel army and was killed by a bomb in 2017, she says, “I had four children and I didn’t want to wait for charity or for help; I wanted to be financially independent.” She worked as a mosaic artist for a craft store. After the photos she posted of her creations received compliments, she decided to sign up for some photography and journalism courses.

 She has worked for the past several years for an online platform called SY+ that tells stories about Syria and Syrians using creative video. In 2018, she lost a son in a house fire; she and her other children had burn injuries and needed multiple surgeries. “All of my managers and my colleagues are my role models,” she says. “They’ve always supported me. And when I had the accident—the fire accident when I lost my son—they took me to Turkey to do the operations, and they stood by me, and they really took care of me, and I’m forever grateful for them.”

 The next year, a military campaign by Syrian forces forced her family to flee to a town in northern Syria, near the Turkish border. It’s harder for female journalists to safely get around, especially alone, Akhras says, but they do have access that men can’t have in the conservative culture. “Male journalists weren’t able to have access to the women in our communities,” she says, “so me and my female colleagues are able to go and meet more women and cover their stories and interview them.”

 Akhras often goes to the displacement camps for her work. “Everything I went though, from losing my husband to losing my son a year [later], I carry this pain in my heart,” she says. “And I always look for stories that I can relate to or I can share this pain with others. I think that I was blessed to get this job because it makes me forget a little bit about my suffering and think about other people’s suffering.”



 As a seventh grader, Sarah Kassim was living in Homs, the country’s third-largest city and the so-called capital of the revolution. “I was displaced from my city, but before I was displaced, I lived for two years under the siege,” she says. “I witnessed how the war planes were targeting us as civilians, without [being] careful of the children, women, or even the medical centers.” She and her family scrambled to find food and other basic necessities such as fuel, clean water, electricity, and medicine. Her school closed.

 Kassim, now 22, and her family went to Idlib, where she’s studying English literature. Her favorite book is George Orwell’s 1984. “The message that he has is the same that we have now. It’s about totalitarianism,” she says. Learning a second language has helped her journalistic work. She’s doing video reports on SY+, including an online discussion last July hosted by Kelly Craft, then the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., about the Security Council’s vote to consider cross-border delivery of humanitarian aid.

 Growing up under the shadow of war, she says, “was an awful experience for me.” But it taught her not to give up. “I have a message, and I have to share it, no matter what the difficulties I’m going to face or no matter what will happen.” She adds, “What I want you to know about me is that I am a person like anyone else, but a person who has witnessed the most painful tragedies and images, pictures of a war that feels endless. And this war, you know, no one wins.” Her message, she says, is “to keep fighting for the right things, and be a good example for society, and fight to change your society for the best. [It is] to be a good woman and not to give up your dreams, no matter the difficulties you have in your life, and to fight for freedom, fight for justice.”



 In Syria, going out to report on a story can get you arrested, abducted, or killed. But Yakeen Bido, 27, doesn’t let fear stop her. “I believe that even if I left journalism and just stayed at home like a lot of people want me to, any time a rocket or a missile can come and be dropped on my house and I could just die. So why sit at home doing nothing?” she says. “At least by my career in journalism, I’m an active citizen. I’m doing something. I try to leave a legacy. I try to make a difference in people’s lives and to elevate their voices and to tell their stories.”

 Reporting on scenes of war shocks some in her culture. “Sometimes I would report on battles, bombings, or massacres,” she says. “The community here is not used to seeing women as military reporters. Very few dare to appear in front of the camera on the spot where there’s a bombing or there’s a battle happening. So I think this is why there was so much spotlight on me.”

 Bido was the target of a smear campaign and anonymous threats last year. In early 2020, Assad’s forces launched a military campaign to capture the town of Saraqeb, strategically located on the Damascus to Aleppo highway. Saraqeb was under siege by régime forces when the rebels took it back briefly in early March 2020. “So the régime was trying to advance to this town, and they invaded this city for only like 24 hours. Then the rebels fought back and they got the city back. And during the early hours of when the rebels got the city back, I was able to go there, and I filmed myself in a video standing in the city center, saying, ‘This is our land; we want freedom. We are challenging the régime that’s using brutal force to kill us and to silence us, but we won’t be silenced.’”

 When the régime saw the video, “it blew their minds,” she says. “They couldn’t stand that a woman is challenging the Syrian régime from the middle of a city during a battle; the battle wasn’t even done.” As payback, she believes, a prominent official spread the rumor on social media that Bido was raped by extremists. And the next rumor was that when her father found out she was raped, he killed her. “So I was having breakfast with my friend and I started getting all these calls and messages from my friends saying, ‘Are you okay? Has something happened to you?’ And I couldn’t believe how low they went to attack me, because I’m a woman. What helped me to overcome all these threats and obstacles and challenges is that I believe that I have a goal. I won’t stop and just give up. I need to continue even though I know that the path of journalism, especially for women, is not an easy path, especially in somewhere like Idlib.” '