Syria's shadowlands: 'He wanted to go home. When he died, I felt I'd failed him'
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Version 0 of 1. On 21 April, I took my sixth trip to a besieged area in Syria – a place called Rastan, half an hour’s drive north from Homs. I was part of a joint team dispatched by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Syrian Arab Red Crescent to bring humanitarian aid to more than 120,000 people for the first time in over a year. We crossed the frontline during the day – in contrast with previous visits to besieged areas, when we have generally only been allowed in after dark – and stayed deep into the night. All such trips have unique challenges, but they are nothing compared to the daily hardships faced by people in besieged areas. Sadly, places like Rastan, where civilians are trapped between the warring sides, have become a common reality of the Syria conflict. People pay a huge price, struggling to survive in dangerous areas where food, water, healthcare and safety are all scarce. Rastan is a beautiful, green area, its hills covered by agricultural land famous for its olives trees and vegetables. The town’s trademark black stones stretch as far as the eye can see, all the way to the mountains on the horizon. Before the war, people here lived their own settled lives. Not any more. Rastan’s farmlands have become frontlines. Olives, once a source of income, have instead become a dietary staple. For locals who decide to continue farming, life has become a perilous battle to survive under siege. One local doctor described the siege as a life without a life: you wake up, go about your daily activities, but don’t really live. You don’t develop; there is no access to books, no seminars or symposiums with colleagues. You work to save lives, if you have a chance. Very often you don’t. Then you just wait – for a year, two years, five – hoping the ordeal will end. In early February, we waited for hours at the gates of Moadamiyah, another besieged locality close to Damascus. Thousands of people had gathered on the edge of the buffer zone outside the town, waiting for us to bring in food and medicines. Once inside, I met Salam, a 14-year-old girl suffering from liver problems for which treatment and medicines are all but impossible to find in a besieged area. Her voice cracking, she tearfully described her feelings, her sense of life’s futility. She questioned why she was going to school when she saw no future. Such hopelessness is a common thread among people I meet in areas under siege. People often look to international organisations to lift the sieges and relieve their suffering. They are angry with us for being slow, for not bringing enough, but we try. They are right, however, that lifting the sieges is the only answer to their problems. The only solution to the Syrian conflict is a political one. As humanitarians, we do as much as we can, but it will never be enough as long as the sieges last. The town of Madaya is a few dozen kilometers from Damascus, but security checks mean reaching it takes many hours. Madaya is among the dozens of towns where the fight for control between Syrian government forces and armed opposition groups has been ongoing for the past few years. In January, I was part of a convoy that took six hours to reach the area. It was bitter cold and getting dark when we entered Madaya. There was a mixture of hope and disbelief on the faces of those who greeted us. They had one main question: “Did you bring food”? Even a piece of bread or a cookie had become a luxury in Madaya. One mother told me she didn’t know how she could explain to her children that they would only eat once today. Madaya is home to more than 40,000 people. Destruction is all around, and there is no running water or electricity. People there were reliant on a solitary, partially functioning and ill-equipped health facility, run by one doctor and a few medical staff. There, a very sick old man who had suffered a stroke held my hand and mumbled that he wanted to go home. As the medical staff explained in whispered tones, he didn’t want to die in the hospital. A few days later, I received a call from the doctor in Madaya. The man had died at home. Yet he needed specialised medical supplies, and all I had been able to do was hold his hand. I felt I had failed him. We spent an entire night in Madaya, unloading our life-saving cargo of food and medicine. We spoke to dozens of people; each told us a story of grief at being trapped. All feared that, next time, we would not be allowed to come back. In the event, we did manage to return to Madaya, but it took weeks of negotiations and required the same synchronisation with deliveries to other areas that makes aid operations particularly hard. There is a lull in the fighting in Syria today, but life has changed little for the half a million people residing in areas that are either besieged or hard to access. The aid that has reached people is too little, and spread over too few areas. Some of those places are towns reduced to rubble such as Zabadani. Some, like Moadamiyeh or Madaya, are largely deserted but never abandoned towns that we could only enter at night. Others, like Deir ez-Zor, are densely populated urban areas. Rastan, Houleh, Foua and Kefraya, meanwhile, are among the many small towns or villages surrounded by unused farmland. All are different yet similar. They are like little prisons lost in the midst of war. Brave and resilient, the people in these places have a voice, a soul; they just need a fair life. |