Displaced huddle in basement as winter grips Syria
After washing up her family’s dishes over a plastic basin, 11-year-old Cedra sits on the floor of the dank basement in Syria to tackle her day’s studies.
A dark staircase leads from a street in the town of Al-Bab to the gloomy space the young girl, her blind father and some 40 other families have the misfortune of calling home.
“There’s a single room which we use as a kitchen, a bathroom and a bedroom,” said Cedra.
She scribbled in her notepad, while crouched against a wall of bare cinder blocks and under a line of laundry trying to dry in the humid cellar.
The residents of this underground camp were displaced by the Syrian war, sometimes several times, mostly from the eastern province of Deir Ezzor.
Cedra’s family fled the city of Deir Ezzor in 2012, in the early stages of Syria’s conflict.
They took refuge in Raqqa, further west, but the city soon became the Syrian capital of Daesh’s self-proclaimed “caliphate.”
The subsequent bombardment of Raqqa, which was almost completely levelled, killed her mother and brother. The girl and her father fled once more and eventually found their way to Al-Bab, an opposition-controlled area near the border with Turkey.
Cedra does not go school because she needs to help her blind father, but one of the other adults living in the basement has organized classes for her and a few other children. The war has set her back years in her education.
“I’m learning how to write the letters, it’s only been a few days,” said the girl, wearing a thick, red sweatshirt and a black headscarf.
Each morning, Cedra makes the bed, tidies the room, makes tea and prepares breakfast before studying. Then it is time to prepare lunch, after which she plays with the other children before getting to work on dinner.
Blankets are piled up near a flimsy foam mattress in one corner of the small room. A handful of cooking utensils and a plastic broom are tucked away nearby.
“Life in this basement is not easy,” said her father, Mohammed Ali Al-Hassan, who hopes to return to Deir Ezzor. “There is nothing to do here and no money,” said the greying father, who used to sustain his family by selling fruit and vegetable from a street cart.