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Many Kurds in Syria don’t have ID cards, and without those orange cards you can’t buy property, get government jobs, vote in elections or send your kids to high school.
Here is another fact about Kurds. We have our own alphabet which Turkey does not recognize, and until not long ago you could be arrested there if you used the letters Q, W and X, which don’t exist in the Turkish language. Imagine going to jail for a consonant!
The worst thing about being disabled is you can’t go away and cry somewhere on your own. You have no privacy.
Their desperate parents went to the authorities and were told by General Najeeb, ‘Forget your children, go and make more.’
President Assad sent an official delegation to offer condolences to the relatives of those killed, and sacked the governor and transferred General Najeeb. It was too late. Now it was our turn. Our revolution had begun.
Predictably (dictators are so uninventive), Assad’s first response was to send tanks into Deraa to crush the protests. Maybe because our army is mainly Alawite like the Assads, they didn’t hold back as the Egyptian tanks had done. Instead they attacked the mosque, which had become a kind of headquarters for protesters, and they did so with such force they left its ancient walls splattered with blood. The funerals of the people killed then turned into mass rallies. These in turn were fired on and more people killed, so there would be more funerals and even more people would turn out.
He told us that in Hama there were so many people it was like a human wave had taken over the central square. Hama was the town where all those people had been massacred in 1982, and many of the protesters were orphans of that massacre.
They had sent someone to Baghdad to meet Jalal Talabani, the President of Iraq, and also a Kurd, to ask his opinion. He said the Assad regime wouldn’t fall. That wasn’t what people wanted to hear, so they said, ‘Oh, Talabani has got old.’ It turned out he was right – he knew what was going on.
Homs is our third largest city, and Sunnis, Shias, Alawites and Christians had lived side by side there, just as in Aleppo.
But it’s Stalin and Hitler I can tell you about, not any of their victims. In fifty years is it going to be the same with Assad? People will remember all about him and not the good people of Syria. We will just be numbers, me and Nasrine and Bland and all the rest, while the tyrant will be engraved in history. That is a scary thought.
Makeshift field clinics were set up to treat demonstrators, because if they went to government hospitals they might be arrested and killed.
It was an awful feeling, to know that in those places people were almost certainly dead, families like ours buried under concrete. It was a feeling mixed with relief that it wasn’t us.
so people could know that once there had been a girl who couldn’t walk but knew a lot.
‘One day, in fifty or a hundred years, everyone will read about our war,’ I replied.
Then the power went off. This was annoying as it was almost time for Masterchef, the American version, which had become very exciting as one of the contestants was a blind girl from Vietnam called Christine Ha and I wanted her to win.
Now the funeral had turned into five more funerals.
Also the regime had cut off our internet,
Not long after that, in April, we heard that regime jets had dropped chemicals on Sheikh Maqsoud – canisters that exploded and left people foaming at the mouth and narrowed their pupils into pinpricks. Among the dead were two babies.
All that was missing was Farhad, but he was far away in a town called Sheffield in England making pizzas. That’s what he does, even though he trained to be a dentist.
The next day our family left.
‘Your homeland is not a hotel you can check out of if the service is bad’.
Yet somehow I knew that Gaziantep wouldn’t be the end of the journey. Shiar had mentioned Germany. I didn’t tell anyone, but one night when everyone was sleeping I borrowed Shiar’s laptop and Googled ‘Germany cures for cerebral palsy’.
I hate it when women give up their true natures; you should be crazy, fall in love, cry over movies and sing in the rain, however powerful you become.
As for Assad, he had held elections and got himself re-elected for a third seven-year term. The regime kept bombing. There isn’t a good side in this story.
‘There’s no life left in Syria,’ agreed someone else. ‘It’s like being in a burning house – it’s risky to jump out of the window, but what’s the alternative?’
we also bought a pack of party balloons. They’d told us that the best way to protect the all-precious phone on the boat crossing was putting it inside a balloon. As
Often they turn us away or charge more because we don’t have papers. It’s like they think we are dirty or criminals – we are just the same as everyone else but we have lost our homes.
On Facebook you could see secretly filmed footage of guards treating people like animals, throwing food at them. It’s funny because actually it costs money to be a refugee. Among us were lawyers, doctors, professors, businessmen. We were human beings, we had had homes before.
But I was worried that people were just interested in me because of the wheelchair. ‘Maybe that’s what attracted them,’ she said, ‘but it’s because of your personality they wanted to speak to you.’ Sometimes
There was one girl whose two brothers had been killed by Daesh as they fled the mountains and her sister kidnapped. She and others who escaped had scratched their faces to make themselves ugly to Daesh so they wouldn’t be taken.
‘There is nothing good for us in Iraq,’ she said. She had tattooed her name on her wrist in case she was killed and no one knew who she was. We
As they told the story they laughed a lot. Refugees are resilient people.
Secondly, it was where seventy-one refugees had died the previous month, suffocated inside a truck meant for transporting frozen chickens.
‘Where is Germany?’ I asked a policeman. He smiled. ‘Welcome to Germany,’ he said.
This is an old Nujeen principle: if you want to stay happy and healthy, don’t watch the news.
Yes, I am in a wheelchair and my school is a special school, not something out of High School Musical.
Even Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian refugee.
The teachers here think I need to be realistic and accept how I am and get on with it, learn to eat by myself and move my chair, not keep talking about being an astronaut or walking. But I can’t get out of my head once seeing Nasrine sitting in my wheelchair when we were in a park in Turkey and how ugly I thought that looked. And
‘There is something fundamentally wrong in a world where attacks on hospitals and schools … have become so commonplace that they cease to incite any reaction,’
when doctors can administer lifesaving treatments without the fear of imminent attacks, when Yazidi girls don’t have to scratch their faces out of fear of being bought and sexually enslaved. That is the disgusting reality in Syria today.’
