BY SHRUTI MARIAN
In 2011, in a square outside the Grand Mosque in Douma, WS saw a man die in front of her for the first time. The man was a protester and was shot by government security forces. His death marked the onset of the Syrian revolution in WS’s hometown, a suburb northeast of the Syrian capital, Damascus.
A generation of Syrian youth has come of age as this war rages on. As witnesses to the war’s horrors, many like WS feel compelled to pursue humanitarian work. But the unending spiral of violence and intimidation meted out to Syrians engaging in humanitarian work has forced the country’s brightest and bravest including WS to flee. WS has been studying conflict resolution at Columbia University on a scholarship since 2018 and no longer knows when or even if she will ever be able to return to Syria. However, her parents remain there and she is afraid that speaking out may endanger them and therefore asked to be identified by her initials rather than by her full name.
In the early days when armed resistance against Bashar al-Assad was just beginning to intensify, WS was determined to not let it interfere with her life as a student. She continued to travel from her home in Douma, to university in Damascus, braving multiple checkpoints held by both the regime and the rebels. “It was scary. But am I just going to stay home? Surely not. I have a life and I am not going to waste a minute of it,” says WS who was pursuing a degree in feasibility studies to learn how to assess the practicality and profitability potential of business models when the revolution began.
Government forces and militiamen didn’t stop women at the checkpoints as often as they stopped men. But WS is also a Palestinian refugee. Her mother is Syrian but her father is Palestinian born in Syria and it is his nationality that she inherits. This made government paperwork more complicated and a decades-old administrative mistake on her identity document almost proved fatal.
According to her identity document, WS was registered as a resident of Yarmouk, Syria’s biggest Palestinian refugee camp even though she had never been there. In 2012 a rebel soldier at a checkpoint outside Douma ordered her to leave the bus she was in and began to question why she was attempting to enter Douma. “No one knows what happens after you get off the bus. He asks you questions and you answer them and you can go away forever or if you’re lucky, you’ll come back,” says WS. Another woman in the bus came to WS’s rescue and told the man that she knew WS and guaranteed that she was from Douma.
Eventually WS’s parents insisted that WS and her three sisters all move in with an aunt in Damascus instead of risking a journey to and from an increasingly unstable Douma everyday. Douma’s proximity to Damascus made it a battleground for clashes between the Syrian army and rebels. By 2013, the government imposed a siege around Douma, making it impossible for people to move in and out of the area except through tunnels controlled by militias. WS and her sisters had gotten out just in time. Even now, there are reports of the government launching a deadly chemical attack that killed scores of civilians in order to establish a decisive victory over any rebels still hiding in the town.
WS remembers a day in 2013 when she went to have lunch with some friends at the cafe attached to the Faculty of Architecture at her university. As she and her friends ate their meals indoors, a mortar shell hit the cafeteria building killing or maiming almost everyone who had chosen to eat outside on that bright afternoon. A man began helping those outside by dragging the injured indoors to relative safety.
After a few minutes, he staggered to WS and asked her if shrapnel had struck him. “I couldn’t tell because he was covered in dust. I was sure that there was something wrong but I couldn’t tell him what.” The man died the next day, which spurred WS to seek first aid training. W had already been volunteering with a Danish NGO and used her connections there to set up similar first aid trainings for other locals all over Damascus.
Like that man who died in the cafeteria, many Syrians have had to pay a terrible price for helping one another. One of WS’s friends Farah was ferrying medical supplies to people in Douma and other towns nearby was arrested because rebels tried to sneak weapons in with her supply of medicines. Even though she knew nothing of this, she was taken to a state prison and tortured for three months. “She is out but now she has a psychological issue. She is under treatment and her life has changed. She is afraid of everything.” WS says.
The guards in the prison burned her friend Farah with cigarettes and would starve her for days on end and then make her eat while being forced to watch other prisoners being tortured. “She would hear the screaming and everything,” says WS.
Despite the horror and fear that stories like this evoked, WS continued her humanitarian efforts, working to provide psychological support to children. “Once I made them draw their dreams, what they want to be in the future. 99% of them drew themselves holding weapons. One of those children was 9 and he tried to kill himself three times,” said WS. After working with the boy for a year, WS and her colleagues were able to help him begin to heal.
But safety for Syrians engaged in relief work continued to be an issue and WS’s parents, both in their sixties wanted their children to leave Syria for more secure futures. WS and all three of her sisters all received academic scholarships to study in the US or Europe through programs like the Chevening Fellowship and Columbia’s scholarship program for Syrian women.
WS is acclimatizing to life in New York, but it is a slow process. “I realized what normal life is really like after I came here. People care about things like getting promoted, if they have parking for their cars, taking care of their dogs, sports, music. And in my life I haven’t done that before. You don’t have the same opportunity that exists here.” says W.
Despite her newfound life in New York, WS still longs to go back to Syria. She wants to be with her parents, who left Douma years ago to move into an apartment in Damascus. And she wants to go back because despite the dangers that forced her to flee, she still holds on to the hope that there must be something she can do to mitigate the horrors that this war has wreaked. “I can go back to Syria, I just don’t know if I can come back to the US. It’s harder because I am a Palestinian refugee. But sometimes I still think about just risking everything and going back home. I want to be there and somehow help,” says WS.