By Rania Abouzeid
Khadija: "Some of our relatives are missing. I think they have been martyred. May God have mercy on their souls."
Salwa: "There is a woman, my neighbor, who forgot one of her sons. He's still in Syria. We left in such a hurry. Can you imagine? She forgot one of her children."
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It
was approaching midnight but many of the hundreds of Syrians who had arrived at
the Reyhanli refugee camp in southern Turkey just hours before were still
restless, even the toddlers. Most were concerned with where they were going to
sleep that night, and if friends and family members had reached safety. It was
difficult to get people to talk. Many were afraid to speak for fear of
reprisals against relatives still in Syria, others were clearly physically and
emotionally worn down. Nevertheless, some were prepared to share their
experiences, their fears and thoughts.
TIME
was granted vast access during the first week of April to the Reyhanli and
Yayladagi camps in Turkish territory to document, through words and pictures,
the travails of the thousands who were fleeing Syria. As photographer Peter
Hapak and his assistant took portraits of several of the refugees against a
white backdrop set up just beyond the tents, other residents of Reyhanli—both
newcomers and those who had been there for months—swirled about.
A
wiry young newlywed in a thin aqua blue zippered jacket was searching for his
wife among the families milling around the cramped canvas tents. His Syrian
border village of Kili in Idlib province was shelled and strafed by helicopter
gunships that morning, an account repeated by many of the other refugees from the
town. The 26-year-old with a thin mustache and enraged eyes was seething: “I
buried a man today. Two others and me, we buried a man who had half of his head
missing.” When the young man, who refused to give his name, returned to his
house after the burial, his wife wasn’t there. Believing she had fled across
the border, he headed for Turkey as well. “Now, I learnt from others who
arrived after me that my family was behind me, that they have reached the
border but haven’t crossed it yet.”
Like
so many others in Reyhanli that night, the young man had made a perilous
journey on foot through mountainous terrain to reach Turkey, guided and aided
by members of the rebel Free Syrian Army along backroads and mountain trails to
avoid Syrian President Bashar Assad’s troops. Some had walked for hours; others
for days; most brought nothing but the clothes on their backs and harrowing
tales of what they had fled. They spoke of mass killings, of homes being
shelled, burnt to the ground, of relatives marched in front of tanks as human
shields in the village of Taftanaz.
“Assad’s
army is trying to find us, they are hunting us down in these hills to shoot and
kill us,” the young man said. His group, however, was lucky. It did not
encounter Assad loyalists. Just days later, a Syrian refugee was killed and
several wounded after Syrian troops fired across the border at a refugee camp
in the Turkish town of Kilis after a skirmish with rebel fighters. It wasn’t
the first time the regime’s firepower had chased its opponents across borders
into Turkey and Lebanon, but where the Lebanese government has been pliant and
weak in its response to the attacks, Turkey’s patience is waning. The country
already houses more than 24,000 Syrians, and is expecting thousands more.
In
just one day last week, more than 2,800 Syrians streamed into Turkey from
Idlib, the highest 24-hour figure to date. The exodus belied President Assad’s
pledge to adhere to an internationally backed ceasefire agreement brokered by
joint United Nations-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan. The deal called on Assad to
withdraw his troops and heavy weaponry from besieged cities and towns by
Tuesday April 10, and for both sides to cease violence. But instead of winding
down, the regime’s muscle escalated operations to crush the year-long revolt.
Syria
has routinely ignored diplomatic deadlines and scoffed at half-hearted
international ultimatums, relying on its Russian and Chinese allies to shield
it from censure. But this time, Assad’s powerful friends signed off on Annan’s
initiative. His dismissiveness may yet chip away at their support, or at the
very least make it harder for them to insist, as they have, that the Syrian
president must be part of any diplomatic solution.
International
discord is one thing. The disunity among the opposition to Assad is another.
The Syrian National Council, the main opposition group in exile, remains
divided and beset by claims of corruption, personal pettiness, feuds and rising
suspicion that its secular leader Burhan Ghalioun is merely a front for the
powerful Islamists. The nominal military leadership of the Free Syrian Army
isn’t in better shape. Corralled in a camp in Apaydin, they have offered little
to the men fighting and dying inside Syria in its name.
In
the real struggle, within Syria, it has always been a revolution of ordinary
people, of farmers and taxi drivers turned armed rebels, of students and
laborers who have become community leaders. But, if the accounts of the
refugees in Turkey are any indication, these revolutionaries despair of
receiving the help they need to beat Assad. Early on, they had baptized their
uprising a “revolution of orphans,” bereft of support. As he scurried away with
a thin foam mattress tucked under his arm, one man said, “Before we thought
that the world didn’t know what was happening to us, now we realize that you do
and you don’t care.”
“We
only have God and our own hands!” said another man, who had been standing
nearby. It was a view shared by many. Said the young man searching for his
wife: “Tanks we can stand in front of, we can try and stop them, stand in front
of them, die as martyrs, but how can we stop a helicopter? We are now in
Turkey, we don’t want to be here.” Growing more agitated, he says, “We want
weapons, we want to fight… We want weapons, we want weapons, we want weapons.”
-This report was published in Time on 12/04/2012
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