7 years ago, before the uprising and the civil war – and the refugee exodus and the terror and the hatred that have sprung from it – a 14-year-old boy stood giggling with his five friends, a can of black spray paint in had pointing it as the wall of his school in southern Syria.
Fast forward 7 years, what started as simple teenage rebellion ended up tearing Syria apart and setting in motion the events that continue to rock the Middle East — and the world.
The onset of the Syrian civil war has left the country in ruins. The once friendly neighbourhoods of small towns and cities are a ghost of their former selfs. The dust settles on the ruins of the ancient city of Aleppo, once home to 2 million people. Stray cats mull about the old covered markets, ancient mosques and traditional streets. In Homs, the high rise buildings, bombed and shelled, look as though they had been trampled by giant elephants. Its streets are piled with burned-out cars and television sets, and its biggest hospital is so wrecked that barely two of the 10 floors are usable. Its oxygen tank is punctured.
The lives of millions of Syrians have been destroyed by the horrific war that has killed hundreds of thousands and forced millions to flee their homeland. Many Syrian children have never known a time of peace. They have had their childhoods stolen from them. Most are deprived of education and even a place of safety. Traumatised by what they’ve lived through, they spend their childhoods simply trying to survive: dodging bombs and snipers’ bullets, constantly on the move to escape hostilities, while earning to support their families.
Out of all civilians, Children are the most innocent, the most sensitive and perhaps the most effected. Is is the stories of the children who have cheated death, which provides a grim snapshot of the unparalleled damage what seven years of war have done to the country and its future.
LAILA, 5, was born into war. Her hometown of Hassehkeh has been reduced to frames of bombed buildings loom over ghostly streets as a result of the relentless airstrikes. Unfriendly and inhospitable, the city is inadequate to be even be inhabited but despite all this there is still life behind the grind walls and the peoples lives and dreams are destroyed much like the homes they once cherished.
Families have headed into basements and dank tunnels, with small cookstoves, flour and warm clothes. Laila brings what she loves; her dolls, fearing the missiles that threaten her life could take theirs.
“She loves her dolls, each of them have their own names.” Her mother said. “When I asked her to keep them in the house, she refused and asked me to bring them with us to the basement.”
“It was my responsibility to protect my children from the bombing,” she says. “She’s determined to protect her children, too.”
“But I can’t tell her that her toys will stay safe, just like I cant tell her she will stay safe.”
HASSAN, 9, was only seven when he lost his father during shelling. The corpse was brought back to the family's home. He and his sisters didn’t talk for several days after seeing it, later moving to another village after being forced to flee due to heavy bombardment. During one attack, Ahmed became separated from his mother and one of his sisters. While they crossed into Turkey, Ahmed and his sister ended up following a relative to Isis’ de-facto capital of Raqqa.
The little boy was forced to watch the group’s beheadings, seeing dead bodies, heads on spikes, lashing and several other brutality in the streets. When he was reunited with his mother in Turkey he was stammering so badly that she had difficulty understanding him. He was wetting himself, had trouble sleeping, and would lash out at his family – beating his sisters and even his mother.
“I like to be alone, to be able to go out and no one hurt me. And for there to be no fighters or anything, and no bombing.” He said.
YASMINA, 11, last saw her father 5 years ago, when he left Syria to find work in Egypt. It was the only chance he had to support his family.
“I drew myself seeing my father off at the airport, it’s my saddest memory. I look at a photo of him every night so I don’t forget what he looks like.” she pauses, “I hope he is okay.”
ALI, a parent of four, watched his wife die and feared for his children as the barbaric fighters of the Islamic State group drew ever closer to the district in which they lived. It was then that he decided, as any decent father would, that the time had come to spirit his loved ones to safety and make the journey to Europe where he would join his mother and sister already settled in Switzerland.
But for two of his four children that odyssey came to an end one night in the cold winter waves of the Aegean Sea as the raft in which they were sailing foundered and sank spilling all on board into the waves. For the next two hours Ali trod water, his three youngsters clinging to him for dear life. A fourth and eldest child still only 10-years-old had struck out for shore on his father’s orders, a swim that would save his own life.
During that interminable time in the water Ali watched helplessly as his youngest boy, Irfan, only six-years-old drifted off in the night sea. As if this was not horror enough to contend with, later after struggling onto the beach frozen and exhausted with his two daughters, nine-year old Marwa and youngest child four-year-old Fatima, he would have to confront the fact that the ordeal had proved too much for Fatima who died shortly afterwards.
A few days after his son Irfan went missing at sea, Ali steps on board a motor launch in Kos Harbour in Greece, on what was to be a fruitless quest to find any clue as to the fate of his son.
“It’s not that he expects to find the boy, just that he feels a sense of guilt that he couldn’t save him and cannot leave without at least looking for Irfans’s body before he can continue on his journey to Switzerland,” said Yusef Syed, who accompanied Ali on the boat.
That afternoon as they scoured the isolated beaches around Kos and Ali’s hopes rose and fell with every sighting of what might have been the body of Hussein, there is still no trace of the boy.
“My baby, I must go.” Ali whispered, out to sea, in arabic, after scouring the isolated beaches around Kos for hours, “I’m so sorry.”
Ali ’s children were victims of a war, whose scale of its violence, and destructive power is something scarcely seen in decades. His dream of a new life in Europe has become a nightmare that will haunt him till his own dying day.
As the Syrian civil war enters its eighth year of bloodshed, no child is spared the horrors of war. They can’t escape the violence, not in schools, hospitals, playgrounds, parks or even their own homes. Thousands of children continue to lose their parents, their education, their homes and their lives. Many remember nothing before the brutal conflict, which is leaving invisible scars on those fleeing and living through the fighting, bombardment and the atrocities of war.