Her name is Aadila. For the past two years, she has been living in a refugee camp in Nizip, in Turkey’s southeastern province of Gaziantep. When a barrel bomb, the gift of the Assad regime, fell into the street where her house was, she deserted her hometown of İdlib, and took shelter in Turkey. She says, “We had everything; a house, a car, a shop. But now we have nothing.” She is trying to hold onto life within a 40-square-meter container with her eight children. Aadila says, “Still… When I think of Syria, this is Paris for me….”
Her name is Ciwan. Ten days ago, they told her that ISIL was coming. When she heard that, she deserted Syria with her five children, without taking any of her belongings, and arrived to Gaziantep by illegally passing the border. They are trying to live in a cold storage facility they had found in the suburbs of the city. The father of the children, who we encountered barefoot and dressed in some clothes donated by the neighbors when we opened the storage house door on a chilly night, had gone out looking for work, and he didn’t return yet. They are staying in a storage facility, whose rent is said to be maximum 50-60 Turkish liras, for 250 Turkish liras together with another family. There are no heaters or chairs. The area that is separated as a toilet and kitchen is the same area. However, they are still alive.
Her name is Beyan. When her father married her in Kobane in order to prevent anything bad from happening to her, she was only 15 years old. Her father sent a message to her, “Come back from school… You are marrying your cousin.” Ten days ago, when her husband had been killed by snipers, she had tagged along with her sibling and came to Turkey. In the back-alleys of Gaziantep, she is living with her baby in a room of a storehouse where she had taken shelter. Her space had been separated with a sack and nylon curtain. She says, “We had a grocery store, a garden and a farm. Now winter is coming. We don’t even have a blanket.”
Her name is Leyla. Half of her face is covered with a shrapnel scar. She had undergone a third operation in Kilis, and waits to recover. She had run away from Aleppo. While she was walking on the street, a bomb had landed not too far from her on the street, and the pieces of that bomb had killed her child standing next to her. Those same pieces had skimmed half of her face. The people who were next to her when the incident happened are shuddering when they are talking about the incident as if they are re-living that moment. Their eyes grow larger, they start looking down and their eyes swell with tears.
Gaziantep, the southern Turkish city to which we had travelled in order to participate in the Woman Victims of the War panel organized jointly by the Women and Democracy Foundation (KADEM) and Gaziantep Municipality, is full of thousands of heart-breaking, tear-inducing stories. Four women’s and all those people’s stories and sorrows cannot be fit into four paragraphs. Then, how much of the reality in Syria we can comprehend through the lives, which we encounter and hear in the outskirts of Gaziantep, in the suburbs of Kilis, in the back-alleys of Istanbul?
Nevzat Çiçek, one of the guest speakers of the “Woman Victims of the War” panel, is summarizing this with the following sentence:
“Syria is neither Rwanda, nor Bosnia… I’ve encountered a mother, who had gone mad through pain, for the first time in my life… And it was in Syria.”
This pain, which cannot be explained with anecdotes from history, old civil war allegories, spent dollars, euros and even with the death statistics, is being experienced in the world now.
Today, the world, which had shut its eyes to all these pains by talking about the “What kind of a threat is ISIL?” subject, is unable to see the tragedy of going mad from enduring too much pain. Today, the world, which is sympathetic for Syrian women being married at a young age by their fathers, is unable to see the fact that these fathers are clinging to this solution, while making the maximum effort to prevent their children from starving, being kidnapped or raped. The representatives of the United Nations, while saying that the solution for this can be provided by policies rather than humanitarian aid, are shifting the responsibility to the USA, Turkey, and Iran. And in doing so, are wriggling themselves out of this. They assume that we cannot see the fact that fundamentally the UN’s structure, mentality and policy are rendering Syrian people helpless, while rendering humanity inadequate.
Her name is Evin. She is waiting nervously at the border gate of Öncüpınar in order to go to Afrin, a district in Aleppo. It had been a long time since she had acquired her regime passport. With her ID photocopy in her hands, she is scared of not being able to pass the border. She decided to make the journey home after she received a message from her neighbors saying that strangers are living in her house. When we ask her, “Aren’t you afraid?” she replies, “I’m afraid. However, that is my house… After all, I’m crying every day, at least let me cry on the roads.” She has a son. He had gone to Lebanon. He told her, “After I go to Lebanon, I will have you picked up”. It’s been three years since she last saw him.
As the saying goes of the people, who are becoming alienated to the conditions of refugees by being ecstatic over being an Ansar (the people from Madinah who helped immigrated Muslims), “They will not go, they will not want to go, they will stay here.” Even though it is like that, what will become of this?... However, despite everything, Syrian women are saying, “It’s still my home land, no matter what”. Because there is only one place, where the open wounds will heal over in time and where they can dress each other’s wounds. Because of this reason, despite every kind of humiliation and scorn, those women are preserving their prides and hopes. They are saying “Syria…” and becoming silent, then, they are starting to pray.
