'In early October, a suicide drone ripped through a graduation ceremony at a military academy in Homs, Syria, killing and injuring dozens of civilians and cadets while delivering an equally devastating blow to the psyche of the Syrian régime and its embattled leader, President Bashar al-Assad.
Although no group took responsibility for the Oct. 5 attack, the Syrian army, without providing details, blamed the incident on “terrorist groups” in the northwest of the country, backed by “known international forces,” meaning the West, led by the United States.
Since 2017, northwest Syria has been loosely governed by the anti-régime Syrian Salvation Government, the administrative arm of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a “political and militant group” mainly operating in Syria’s Greater Idlib area. It is primarily populated by civilians who have been displaced, some more than once, by the civil war that began in 2011. Currently, the Turkish military, which is allied with Syrian opposition groups, has a presence there. The Turks say they are guaranteeing a cease-fire that was established in 2017. However, when I asked Syrians in Idlib why they think Türkiye has troops in the area, they said, “It’s complicated.”
On Oct. 5, as the blood-soaked bodies piled up in Homs and the Assad régime launched its response to the attack, I was on the ground in Idlib, a rebel-held city located a mere two-hours’ drive north of Homs.
What was meant to be a nine-day reporting trip in northwest Syria, shadowing a group of doctors (including a cardiologist, hand surgeon and pulmonary, emergency care and family medicine experts) on a medical mission arranged by the nonprofit MedGlobal group, was abruptly cut short when we were swiftly evacuated from Idlib back to the Turkish border, as the Assad government unleashed an aggressive military campaign on Idlib city and surrounding areas, targeting schools and hospitals, killing and injuring dozens of innocent civilians.
Although weeks have passed since the drone attack in Homs, the Assad régime, aided by its ally Russia, continues to bomb the northwest with barely a whisper of outrage from the international community, partly due to the world shifting its attention to the brutal war and humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces since Hamas massacred approximately 1,400 people in Israel on Oct. 7.
According to the White Helmets, a nonprofit organization that provides rescue and humanitarian assistance to people impacted by conflict and natural disasters in northwest Syria, its teams responded from Oct. 1 to Oct. 26 to more than “250 attacks on 70 cities and towns in the northwestern regions of Syria,” which left more than 250 civilians injured and more than 65 dead, including more than 20 children and 10 women.
Here, I share some of my reporting — including recorded interviews with Syrians living in internally displaced camps, field notes and snippets from a few casual conversations — during my abbreviated reporting trip to Idlib.
Around 9 A.M., after a quick breakfast of steamy sweet tea and fresh bread smeared with za’atar spices and olive oil, we drive north from our hotel in Idlib’s city center and near the Idlib Health Directorate, the health care supervisor in Idlib governorate, to the al-Wifak camp to visit a mobile health clinic, where more than 1,300 displaced civilians live in tents and concrete block houses. With us in the van is a local Syrian journalist and his colleague, a translator, who jokes that instead of going to the camp, we’re going to cross the border into régime territory. I laugh and ask the translator, sitting to my left in a white polo shirt and jeans whose left eye is swollen and freshly blackened from a recent soccer game, what would happen if we tried to enter régime territory. Without hesitating, he turns to me and says flatly, “We’d be slaughtered.”
Shortly after arriving at the camp, I meet Khaled Mustafa Abu Hasna, 70, and his wife, Ayoush Mohammad Mughlag, also 70 years old. They tell me they have been married for 55 years and have 14 children, 3 boys and 11 girls. The war drove them from their village in Syria in 2019, and they’ve been living in al-Wifak in a massive tent ever since. Their children, now adults with families of their own, fled the war and relocated to Lebanon and Türkiye.
In 2013, their son Ahmad was arrested by the Syrian régime in Damascus, Syria’s capital, and the family still knows nothing of his fate. They think he could be alive in one of Syria’s notorious military prisons, or dead, possibly tortured and killed by the régime. Khaled Hasna tells me that he suffered a stroke the day Ahmad was arrested and hasn’t been able to move his left arm or leg in years. He relies heavily on Ayoush, his wife, who carefully massages his left foot as we talk.
One of their grandsons, a toddler, is rolling around on a rug nearby, watching an episode of the famous Western cartoon series “The Smurfs,” on a mounted television — Internet in some camps is available for a fee — while their granddaughter Aya, 15, sits quietly in a corner. I notice her vibrant green eyes, perfectly framed by her hijab, and ask the translator, Aisha, to say hello for me. Aya’s father was shot dead by the régime in front of his father-in-law, Khaled, years ago. Since moving to the camp with her grandparents, Aya, an only child, hasn’t attended school and is unlikely to return under the current circumstances.
Camps for internally displaced people in northwest Syria are serviced by a hodgepodge network of global humanitarian organizations, including the UN, which works through local partners, focusing foremost on providing civilians with shelter, food and sanitation. With limited resources in some camps, education gets overlooked. Before we leave, I ask Aya, who likes to paint, if she has any dreams, and she says no. “The war destroyed everything,” she say in Arabic, “all the dreams.”
Al Fan Alshemali camp is a short drive from al-Wifak. It’s home to approximately 2,600 internally displaced civilians. According to the Camp Coordination and Camp Management cluster, an agency that “supports people affected by natural disasters and internally displaced people (IDPs) affected by conflict,” there are more than 1,500 camps of various sizes for internally displaced people in northwest Syria.
As we arrive, we see a group of women and fidgety toddlers waiting outside the camp’s mobile health clinic: a stout, grubby cement-block building baking in sunlight and stocked inside with a table and two chairs. The group is there to see the pediatrician, a retired doctor from California volunteering with MedGlobal. Standing outside the cement block, I hear him inside treating countless sore throats, prescribing medications and checking for signs of malnutrition. Later, the doctor tells me that sore throats are common in camps as the air inside the tents tends to be dry. He said that if the parents smoked inside the tent or burned wood, it worsens the conditions.
Meanwhile, the waiting women, dressed in black niqabs, a veil that covers the entire face except for a horizontal slit for the eyes, don’t want to be interviewed. However, Aisha, the translator who is provided through MedGlobal, is eager to share information about herself.
Petite and soft-spoken, Aisha, 27, lives with her mother and six-year-old son, Yaser, in another camp. They fled their village, which is south of Idlib city, in 2019, when the bombings escalated. Aisha, who says she’s divorced, now lives in Sarmada city, a camp 120 kilometers, or 75 miles, north of Idlib city.
“When I was displaced, I was in my third year at the University of Idlib, but I didn’t give up,” Aisha said, “and I graduated this year from the English department in faculty of literature.” Aisha tells me that girls like Aya, whose dreams have been destroyed by the war, make her sad.
“I remember myself when I was displaced and I lost any hope to live and continue my study,” Aisha said. “So, yeah, I feel sad about it but I have a dream . . . to continue and continue and arrive.”
As for her son’s future, Aisha said there’s nothing for him in Syria. “We have no options in our lives here. I feel that we are living in a prison,” she says. “For me, I wish that I leave this area and travel to any country that I feel I’m human in it.”
We return to Idlib city and the health directorate, where we are lodging, around 6:30 P.M. After dinner, I take a quick walk around the city center with Aisha — who kindly helps me pick up a cotton cap to wear under my hijab — where drivers on motorcycles whip through the streets, pedestrians crowd fruit carts and the neon signs hanging above the spice shops and bakeries splash pops of color across the sidewalks. The city and its people are alive. But at any moment, it could all go black.
Dr. Ahmed Ghandour is a surgeon and the general manager of the al-Rahma Hospital in Darkush, a city roughly 55 kilometers, or 34 miles, west of Idlib city. He studied medicine at Aleppo University in Syria and graduated in 2009 before the régime began its lethal crackdown in 2011.
Dr. Ghandour, dressed in faded green hospital scrubs, says he was arrested, like countless other Syrians, by régime military forces who converted public hospitals and schools into prisons.
“After my release from Aleppo in 2012, I insist to convert every place which the régime [is] using as a prison to kill the people and torture them [and] I insist to convert every place to [a] hospital to a place for relief for them,” Dr. Ghandour says.
Later, after a tour of the hospital, including its outpatient clinic and dialysis center, I sit outside with Dr. Ghandour, who admits he is worried about the future of medicine in northwest Syria. The civil war has caused medical professionals and students to leave the country in droves to practice in Europe. It’s an option that Dr. Ghandour says he has considered. “But I can’t leave my country,” he adds. “We have to prepare the new medical generation . . . we need them.”
A report from the International Rescue Committee, a nongovernmental organization based in New York City, published estimates in 2021 saying that in Syria, “70 percent of the medical workforce has fled the country.”
“When I started, I was young, but now I’m 46 years. Maybe [in] 10 years I will stop,” Dr. Ghandour says. “And if I don’t achieve my dreams maybe my son one day will come and complete my way.”
I am back in my room at the health directorate when, at 8:07 P.M., a flurry of text messages begins popping up in our WhatsApp group chat. The first one says, “Please all come to the basement,” followed by, “Only bring your passport and phones,” and then, “No more social media posts.”
If I had had Internet access there, which is hard to come by in Idlib, I would have known about the suicide drone attack in Homs earlier that day. Still, it wasn’t until we are all huddled in the basement and as the thuds from the falling bombs grow closer and the sounds of ambulances screeching past the directorate grow louder, when I realize the Syrian régime is responding to the Homs massacre.
Soon after, we learn that the medical mission is canceled and that we have to leave Idlib city at 6:30 A.M. the next day.
There are at least 20 of us in the basement waiting out the bombs, including members of the MedGlobal team and employees of the directorate. The room is filled with chatter as if we are one big group waiting to be seated at a fancy restaurant.
For many of the people around me, however, this day is like any other. They have made peace with the uncertainty of their circumstances. For civilians living in this part of Syria, who have been enduring conflict for more than 12 years, they have no other choice but to keep living there.
Standing to my left are two men in their mid-30s, whom I have not seen before. They’re talking to the hand surgeon, Dr. Ebrahim Paryavi, who works at the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage and is volunteering for MedGlobal. Afterward, Dr. Paryavi tells me that when the two men from the area — who were scheduled to meet with him the next day — learned that the mission had been canceled, they drove to the directorate, despite the bombing, to consult him.
“They both have complicated hand injuries from the war,” Dr. Paryavi says. “One of them has significant nerve injury to his arm, and the other has a blast hand injury, and his thumb is mangled. He wanted to know if there’s anything we could do to improve his hand function. And so I talked to him about a flap procedure . . . and I told him I would do it in the next couple of days if we’re still here, but then we heard that we’re being evacuated tomorrow. He was pretty disappointed.”
Dr. Paryavi adds: “I’ve seen a lot of war-related injuries here. There are so many people with blast injuries to their arms . . . shrapnel injuries, explosive injuries to the arms from bombings. Just a lot more than I’ve ever seen in my career.”
The bombing slows and then stops around 10:30 P.M. Most of us leave the basement and head back to our rooms to try to sleep. Upstairs, someone has left a huge tray of freshly baked knafeh, a sweet, cheesy Middle Eastern dessert, in the common room. I think to myself, Who the hell went out to get that?
We make it back to Gaziantep in the afternoon, having left Idlib around 6:30 A.M. After I book my return flight to New York City, I text Aisha, the translator who is still in Idlib. I want to thank her for all her help and make sure she is O.K.
She replies: “I am good, and my family is good, but artillery shells are still falling on Idlib and its countryside, and we cannot get out safely. For my helping you during your job here is nothing. I just did my duty to the Syrian people. The Syrian people and I would like to thank you for coming to hear us to convey our suffering for the world.
I am sad towards what happened yesterday because it forces you to leave. . . . I wish to meet you here again.” '
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