Five brothers, five countries: a family ravaged by Syria's war. By Michael Safi
The brothers haven’t
seen each other since 2012. Their story highlights the deteriorating plight of
Syrian refugees. The last time all five
brothers were together was in August 2012, inside a bomb shelter in
southern Syria. It was Ramadan, and
each night they broke fast to the sound of artillery and airstrikes pounding
their besieged neighbourhood above.
A few days later, the
Syrian army broke into the area, and each man fled. “We never expected it
would be the last time we’d see each other,” says Farid, the oldest of the five
men. “Even with the shelling and bombing, we never thought we’d end up the way
we have now.” Once it became too
dangerous to stay, each of the five brothers followed different paths, taking
some risks, avoiding others.
Now they find themselves scattered around the
world, living in five different countries, facing five different futures. Across the Middle
East, the situations of the more than 5 million Syrian refugees created by the civil war, already precarious, has deteriorated in recent months. In Turkey,
Syrians now face the prospect of
being resettled inside a “safe zone” prised from Kurdish control. Lebanon’s economy is reeling,
and as Bashar al-Assad’s forces tighten a siege around Idlib, Syria’s last
rebel-held province, senior
Lebanese officials say it is time for refugees who fled there to
return home.
For one family of five
brothers, from the southern Syrian province of Dara’a, this growing pressure on
Syrian refugees is widening the gulf between where each man has found himself,
nearly nine years since protests against the Assad regime erupted....
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/24/five-brothers-five-countries-a-family-ravaged-by-syrias-war
