INSIDE SYRIA’S MASS EXODUS
A report on the plight of millions of refugees
“Everybody has his own story about how he escaped,” says Ahmad Odaimi, a Syrian doctor from Homs, now in exile in Turkey.
His began in the early days of the civil war when he covered shifts at a government hospital for a friend, a fellow doctor who would crawl through 100 metres of an excrement-filled sewer pipe to reach rebel territory and treat wounded fighters there.
Another friend with connections inside Syria’s security services warned Odaimi that his ruse had been discovered and he was wanted by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad. Taking nothing, he fled immediately to the opposition-controlled neighbourhood of al-Waer in central Homs, and eventually made it to Gaziantep in southeastern Turkey.
His father and two brothers are still in Syria. When the regime renewed its attack on the neighbourhood where they live, Odaimi found the stress made him lash out at his two small daughters. He took up smoking again to calm his nerves.
Jomah Alqasem escaped after his father died in a Syrian government prison.
He wasn’t an activist. “He was just an old man,” Alqasem says in a restaurant in Gaziantep, where he, too, now lives.
Alqasem’s father was arrested after visiting Alqasem’s older brother in prison. The family paid bribes to keep Alqasem’s father alive but learned he had been tortured, suffered from severe diarrhea and collapsed dead in an overcrowded cell. Guards dragged his body into the hallway and left it there to terrify other prisoners.
Before his arrest, Alqasem’s brother did not even take part in demonstrations against Assad’s rule. He joined a rebel group after his release. Vengeance may be too simple an explanation. He was broken inside, Alqasem says. He appeared schizophrenic and said nothing for six months, only staring at the ground and smoking cigarettes. He’s still alive, and perhaps in that sense only is lucky.
“In Syria, a life is half a dollar,” Alqasem says. “The price of a bullet can end the life of someone who has a wife and kids, a position in the community, whose parents brought him up. Half a dollar wipes him out.”
Mohammad’s deliverance came because his parents feared what might become of him if they stayed in Syria. They lived in rural Aleppo province under the control of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, a violent Islamist group that stampeded through eastern Syria and western Iraq and in 2014 declared the establishment of a caliphate, meaning a state governed by Islamic law and ruled by a political and religious leader known as a caliph.
IN SYRIA, A LIFE IS HALF A DOLLAR. THE PRICE OF A BULLET CAN END THE LIFE OF SOMEONE WHO HAS A WIFE AND KIDS, A POSITION IN THE COMMUNITY ... HALF A DOLLAR WIPES HIM OUT. —JOMAH ALQASEM
IF YOU HAD LONG PANTS, THEY WOULD CUT THEM. THEY WOULD FORCE US TO GO TO THE MOSQUE AND PREACH JIHAD AT US. WE COULDN’T CUT OUR HAIR. (A FRIEND WAS TAKEN AND MADE TO ATTEND THEIR CLASSES.) WE LEARNED HE EXPLODED HIMSELF. HE WAS 14. — MOHAMMAD, 15
Though now in retreat, ISIL still controls territory in Syria and Iraq roughly the size of Belgium.
“If you had long pants, they would cut them,” Mohammad says. “They would force us to go to the mosque and preach jihad at us. We couldn’t cut our hair.”
Mohammad, now 15, and safe in a dilapidated tent settlement in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley, says ISIL’s religious police would pick up kids they saw on the street. A friend was taken and made to attend their classes. “We learned he exploded himself,” Mohammad says. “He was 14.”
Hosam, who lives in a poor quarter of Jordan’s capital of Amman, left Darraya, a Damascus suburb and once a centre of opposition to Assad, in December 2011, after he was arrested following a demonstration against the Syrian government. He says he did not take part.
“They tortured me. They broke my nose and ribs. I couldn’t see what they were beating me with because I was blindfolded,” he says. “And they were swearing at me as they hit me: ‘You want freedom? Take this freedom!’ ”
After three months, Hosam was released, barefoot, from prison. He stayed in Syria for almost two more years. During this time, Darraya was the scene of intense fighting between government and rebel Free Syrian Army fighters. Government planes bombed their neighbourhood, damaging his wife’s hearing. They fled with their extended family to Jordan. Their son, seven, still wets the bed from the trauma.
The stories of these Syrian refugees, in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, are not unlike those of the 40,000 Syrians who have come to Canada since the election of Justin Trudeau in October 2015, or of the approximately one million Syrian refugees in Europe.
Except for this: In the Middle East, there are so many more.
Canadians take pride in their country accepting the refugees it has. Private sponsorship groups clamour to host more. And the Trudeau government has trumpeted Canada’s intake of refugees as an example of Canada’s rediscovered internationalism. Trudeau has also pledged more than $1.1 billion in humanitarian and development assistance to be spent over three years in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, much of it related to the Syrian refugee crisis.
But for Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, 40,000 is a rounding error. Jordan, a country with a native population of only 6.5 million, hosts at least one million Syrians. Lebanon, with an even smaller population, hosts some 1.5 million refugees, about one-quarter of the population of the country. And Turkey is thought to have close to three million Syrians on its soil. With illegal border crossings and many refugees not registering, no one is sure of the exact figures.
Kilis, a small Turkish town on the border with Syria, has a Turkish population of about 94,000; it hosts 135,000 refugees. Hasan Kara, the mayor of Kilis, is proud of this.
“As the people of Kilis, we ask everyone, what is the cultural heritage of world? You could say the Seven Wonders or the waterfall in Canada. But for us, the most important cultural heritage is spiritual. It is mercy toward people,” he says.
Kara won’t outright criticize Canada for accepting a comparatively small number of Syrians, but he does make a joke that suggests Canada could house all the Syrians it has admitted in one hotel. “I’ve seen Canada,” he says. “It is empty.”
All told, the displacement of Syrians, both inside the country’s borders and beyond, represents the biggest forced migration of humanity since the Second World War and its aftermath. What Canada and Europe have encountered is only a fraction of that odyssey. And our shelter from the true scale of the Syrian exodus blinds us to its repercussions.
These range from the spiritual to the political to the mundane. Across the Middle East, municipalities hosting refugees struggle to deal with the pressures refugees have placed on services such as garbage collection or sewage treatment. Jordan, short of water before the Syrian war, must now provide it to one million Syrians.
Such challenges preoccupy local politicians and refugees, but many of them can be solved or mitigated with money. Others are more profound and difficult to address.
There are Syrian refugee kids who will come through their exile unscathed. Some, despite the dire poverty of their families, seek an education with a determination that is humbling and that may result in a personal foundation on which a future might be built — in Syria one day or abroad.
But others, hundreds of thousands of them, have had childhoods derailed in ways from which they may never recover.
What chance does a 12-year-old boy — who was six when the Syrian war began and has never been to school — have of catching up to his peers elsewhere or even learning to read? What does it mean to come of age in a refugee camp, to have no memories of a time when you lived somewhere without a fence, and to see no path to a future elsewhere?
What of a young girl whose nights are spent sleeping in a tarpwalled shelter in a makeshift settlement among other refugees, and days pulling potatoes out of the mud to provide money for a family instead of going to school? What future does she have save early marriage and children who will likely suffer in the same fashion?
Such stories seem tragic now, but we are only at the beginning of them. These boys and girls, an entire generation of Syrians, will one day be men and women who will shape Syria and the Middle East. They will have a far more consequential impact on the region than now.
So far, the social fabrics of Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan are mostly holding. While there is tension and resentment within local populations, in all three countries there is a sense of solidarity with the Syrians who have come to live among them. And yet this goodwill is surely not endless — especially as it becomes clear that many, perhaps most, of the Syrian “guests” will not soon leave.
Then the real ramifications of Syria’s great emptying will start to take shape. Despite six years of war, we don’t know what that will look like. Collectively, Syrian refugees are reshaping the region in a way that will have echoes around the world. But at its heart, this exodus consists of millions of individually shattered lives.
At 13, Faisal Hamdan doesn’t know this will be the last year he attends school.
“At some point, we’ll have to tell him,” his father, Mohammad Hamdan, says. “It’s not a matter of whether I want my children to leave school. It’s necessary. Bread is more important than education at this point.”
Faisal has two sisters, Rukayah, 12, and Halima, 10. Together with their mother, Aayat al-Shibli, the family of five, originally from Homs, share a cinderblock shack behind a chicken coop in the backyard of a Turkish family’s home in Reyhanli, close to the border with Syria.
They live in a room divided by plywood and curtains. There is a second room that is too damp for anything but storage. The space is decorated with brightly coloured paper chains and paper dolls crafted at school by the two girls who say they like playing with their friends and, in Halima’s case, studying math and Arabic. The family pays the equivalent of $180 a month for the shelter. Before the war, it might have cost half that, but the volume of refugees in this part of Turkey has inflated rents.
Child labour is endemic among Syrian refugees. Poverty is the main factor. Parents without proper work permits also fear deportation and think their children are less likely to be questioned by authorities.
Sometimes the work is informal and part-time. Near Faisal’s home in Reyhanli, in a similarly cramped room, live Sulhiya and her six children, aged two to 14. Her husband has an injured neck and cannot work. She cleans houses with help from her eldest child. The others scrounge through alleys and garbage heaps looking for recyclables. On a good day, they can find fivedollars-worth of plastic.
Elsewhere, children work as if they were adults. The Turkish city of Mersin sprawls against the north coast of the Mediterranean Sea.
Its poorer districts, with their labyrinth streets, razor wire, graffiti and cats, are swollen with refugees. Many work in underground sewing factories, and some of those workers are children.
In one factory, found by chance because of a door left slightly ajar, the owner invites a reporter to return at 4 p.m. when his workers have a 15-minute break. At the appointed time, the machines stop, the 20 or so workers gather and tea is produced among piles of sweatshirts and pyjamas with sports logos and not-quite-right English slogans. The owner says his shop works to replicate established brands.
Abdul, 15, sports the first trace of a moustache. From Aleppo, he says he earns a little over $100 a month. He says he’d like to go to school but must support his family.
His co-workers include two 10-year-old sisters, Hasma and Murphad, also from Aleppo, whose job is to shuttle fabric from piles in the centre of the room to the sewing machines along its walls. Hasma’s hands drift nervously to her mouth when she’s not busy. Neither goes to school. Hasma says she misses it.
The owner is asked how much they are paid. “I give them something,” he says.
In Lebanon, refugee kids sell tissues and shoeshines or beg on city streets, as in Turkey and Jordan. But among the Syrian refugees in informal tent settlements in the Beqaa Valley, close to Syria and separated from Beirut by mountains, there also exists an almost feudal form of indentured labour.
The problem has its origins before Syria’s civil war began. Syrians would come to Beqaa to work seasonally in agriculture. Typically, a man known as the sheweesh stayed during the off-season and organized work for members of his family or village.
When the Syrian civil war drove thousands of Syrians into Lebanon, many relied on their sheweesh to arrange transport, pay smugglers and obtain a tent or shack in a camp on rented private land. In the process, refugees accumulated large debts to their sheweesh that must be repaid — through labour. Lebanese landowners in Beqaa still need workers, and the sheweesh hires out refugees who owe him money.
Awash, 37, lives in a cramped cinderblock hut with her extended family. The family grew when her father took a second wife who was widowed with five kids. Her own husband doesn’t work. “He’s old,” she says. Her husband is 45. “He’s also fat,” adds her teenage half-brother.
This leaves Awash and the children as breadwinners. Rent for residents of the camp, paid to the sheweesh, is about $900 a year per family, more for those who don’t have children who can work. Awash is breastfeeding her youngest child but is forced to leave her for seven hours a day to plant and harvest crops. Most of the children work, too. Twelve-year-old Hassan says the Lebanese farm owner shoots a pistol into the ground near his feet or over his head if he accidentally leaves a potato in the soil.
Even Manal, age 10, works in the fields. The bunny, heart and flowers on her zip-up sweatshirt cannot disguise the drawn look of exhaustion on her face that seems utterly out of place in a child so young. She’s never been to school. “I feel very tired,” she says flatly.
“I force her to work because the sheweesh needs to get paid and we need to live,” Awash says. She owes the sheweesh more than $1,000, and says she has no idea if she can ever pay the debt.
Mawas Mohammad Araji, mayor of the nearby town of Bar Elias, has heard some Syrian refugees in the area are exploited, but says most refugees are quiet about it.
“Syrians are not slaves to their sheweesh. But the problem is nobody reports. If there is a report, we will act,” he says.
Ali al-Mohammad, sheweesh at another refugee settlement in the Beqaa Valley, is offended at the suggestion that there might be something about the arrangement deserving of censure.
“For two years now I’ve been paying for bread and medicine for families in the camp, even if they owe me money,” he says. He estimates he is owed about $30,000.
Mohammad lives among those who work for him, albeit in a nicer structure with frilled fabric on the walls and clean carpets and cushions on the floor. He has been in Lebanon for decades, managing seasonal workers and now refugees. Most in his camp are from Aleppo and Raqqa provinces. He describes his role in a way that makes it sound more like that of a godfather.
“A sheweesh is responsible for the camp and the workers. If they need money, I will provide it. I get them work and transport them. If they get hurt, I am responsible.”
Asked about kids in the camp, Mohammad says: “I only employ people who are at least 13 years old.
Early marriage, like child labour, robs many Syrian refugees of an education. While it was common before the war in some rural communities for teenaged girls to marry, poverty and social dislocation have exacerbated the trend.
Earlier this winter, Mona wed her cousin Abdullah in the mudfilled Beqaa Valley tent settlement where they live. A cellphone video of the wedding shows Mona in a white dress, a crowd of men and women, and snow falling like confetti. There was a musical band and pots of chicken for guests.
It was a happier affair than the sombre weddings held in ISILcontrolled Deir ez-Zor, from which they fled, she says. But she wishes it had happened later. Mona was 14 or 15 when she got married; Abdullah, 18.
“If it was up to me, I would have preferred to wait. But my parents decided and I agreed because it was the right decision. It’s to provide protection. There are a lot of people without morals,” she says.
“If I could have stayed in school, I would have loved to be a dentist. I really wish, but now that I am married, that becomes impossible.”
Abdullah’s explanation for why he got married is simpler. “I loved her,” he says.
Another young bride in the settlement repeats Mona’s explanation about the need for protection. They’re talking about their families’ fear of rape or premarital sex in an environment that is overcrowded, lacks privacy and where normal family structures may be upended by absent or dead fathers and brothers.
Sometimes the pressure to get married is financial. In a poor neighbourhood in eastern Amman, a Syrian woman heads a household of two daughters and three grandchildren, largely on her own because her diabetic husband stays with their son in a refugee camp where he can get medical care.
“That tea you’re drinking is the last food we have,” she says. She’s deep in debt and her family is often cold and hungry.
An unemployed Jordanian neighbour offered her about $15 to marry her daughter. She refused. Stories abound of Jordanian men seeking out Syrian refugee women — in part because Syrian women have a reputation for beauty, and in part because they believe it requires less money to marry them.
“I do prefer Syrian women. And they accept anything. Jordanian women want three to four thousand dollars,” says Mohammad Ameri during a life skills class in Jordan’s northern Irbid province that is funded by the Canadian government through the NGO Save the Children Canada.
“Even before the Syrian crisis there were no jobs. And now they’re marrying our men? It’s awful,” responds Manal Hennawi, adding that she also thinks Syrian women are particularly attractive. She’s half-Syrian herself.
Safa Zreiqi, another student, isn’t bothered that young men in her province look for wives among Syrian refugees. “Some of us don’t want to get married,” she says. “We didn’t go to school for nothing. What’s a shame is that we studied and got degrees and can’t get work.”
I WOULD HAVE PREFERRED TO WAIT (FOR MARRIAGE). BUT MY PARENTS DECIDED AND ... IT WAS THE RIGHT DECISION. IT’S TO PROVIDE PROTECTION. THERE ARE A LOT OF PEOPLE WITHOUT MORALS. IF I COULD HAVE STAYED IN SCHOOL, I WOULD HAVE LOVED TO BE A DENTIST. — MONA I FORCE (MY 10-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER) TO WORK BECAUSE THE SHEWEESH NEEDS TO GET PAID AND WE NEED TO LIVE.