Tag: Syria

The Road to Germany : $2400

JAN/FEB 2016

Each of the millions of Syrian refugees who have fled their brutalized, unrecognizable homeland did so for uniquely personal reasons — the regime bombarding cities, the Islamic State threatening a return to the dark ages, the loss of jobs in a crumbling economy. Yet their quests cohered around one purpose: They all wanted better lives.

Some set out on a complicated journey to Europe with a crude graphic — a flowchart of the route from Turkey to Germany — as a guide. In its rudimentary geometry, refugees saw an impossible dream. In its illustrated stick figures, kicking their heels upon reaching the final destination, they saw themselves. They allowed an image, powerful and meditative in its simplicity, to shape their personal stories.

FP has done the same. In the following story, the odyssey of several refugees — men, women, and children — is presented in the form of a nonfiction comic. Each panel is based on firsthand reporting gathered by journalist Alia Malek:   [full story]

Enduring Exile

OCT 14, 2013

Two years ago, in September, Anto’s neighbors warned him: it was time for him to go. He would no longer be safe in these hills above the city of Idlib in northwestern Syria. He knew better than to doubt them.

A descendant of Armenians from Ottoman Turkey, he had inherited a dormant vigilance that now came to life. Anto’s father used to tell him, repeating what had been passed down through four generations: “Like we came from Turkey, we may also one day leave from Syria.”

With his neighbors’ warnings in his ears, Anto scrambled to secure some cash. He started to quietly sell off whatever he could from Abu Artin, a restaurant and inn that his family had operated every spring and summer since 1938. His grandfather had built Abu Artin, named for Anto’s great-grandfather, high in these hills as an escape for Syrians living in the swelter of those months in the cities and towns below. The land offered fresh air, their kitchen delectable food, and the men—Anto and his father and grandfather before him—impromptu musical performances that had made them famous with customers.  [full story]

The Syria the World Forgot

JUNE 8, 2013

LAST month, while we waited at the Lebanese border for our papers to be processed so that we could return to Syria, a woman traveling in our shared taxi pointed at the clouds gathering in the sky and said, “The Orthodox will be happy.”

She was referring to the annual contest between Syrian Catholics and Orthodox Christians — whose religious calendars diverge at Easter — that looks to meteorology to settle which church crucified and resurrected Jesus on the right weekend that year. The winning combo is a rainy Good Friday with a perfectly clear Easter Sunday.  [full story]

The Hills of Alawistan

MAY 27, 2013

TARTOUS, Syria — Above the Syrian coastal town of Tartous, groups of Alawite men and boys were amassing at different landings along a road that winds higher and higher, away from the Mediterranean and into the hills. We saw them assembling as we traveled the same path, taking advantage of a day off to get out of the city.

On this new spring Sunday, they were waiting for the corpses of Alawite soldiers — conscripts in the Syrian Army — to arrive from below. A funeral procession was building, one motorcycle at a time, one open-cabbed truck at a time, each laden with several passengers. The mothers and wives were recognizable in their black clothes with sheer white scarves draped around their necks, which have become public uniform once a family has been anointed with loss.   [full story]

Armenians Fleeing Anew as Syria Erupts in Battle

DEC 12, 2012

YEREVAN, Armenia — At the newly opened Cilician School in this former Soviet republic, the textbooks are in Arabic, photocopied from a single set flown out of war-torn Syria. The curriculum is Syrian, the flag on the principal’s desk is Syrian, and the teachers and students are all Syrians.

They are also ethnic Armenians, driven by Syria’s civil war to a notional motherland most barely know.  [full story]

Syria: When Official Memory is Amnesia

NOV 9, 2012

With those who would kill him waiting at each of the gates of Damascus should he try to escape, Saul of Tarsus, the man who would come to be known as Christianity’s St. Paul, fled nonetheless.  Crouching in a basket, he was lowered over the city’s walls by his supporters, and he fled into the Syrian night.

It was nearly two thousand years ago that Saul, a soldier, came from Jerusalem to Damascus, dispatched and hell-bent on a mission to arrest followers of Jesus Christ—a man who, among other things, had led an affront to the ruling regime of Rome and the Jewish clergy. But instead, along the road to Damascus, his journey was interrupted by what Christian lore describes as the appearance of Jesus (post-crucifixion) in a light so strong that Saul was blinded.  [full story]

Syrian Arrests Are Said to Have Snared Tens of Thousands

JUNE 27, 2012

DAMASCUS, Syria — After Syrian secret police officers spotted Azam at a peaceful demonstration in the heart of this city, he said, they chased him down and dragged him off to prison, where he was tortured during his 40 days in confinement.

“They take people and forget them because there are so many others coming in,” said Azam, who asked to be identified by only his first name. He said he had been detained by air force security officers, members of one of more than a dozen secret police services in Syria. [full story]

Syrians Defy Leaders to Aid Those in Need

MAY 14, 2012

DAMASCUS, Syria — For 48 hours, the two Damascus residents struggled to reach the besieged city of Homs by car, trying to deliver boxes of blood bags so surgeons there could operate on the wounded. But gunfire made the roads impassable.

Finally, they strapped their contraband to their backs and, led by a shepherd through back roads and dirt paths, hiked 65 miles to the city.

As the violence across Syria reaches a treacherous new phase and the numbers of displaced and injured swell, such individual and ad hoc efforts have grown into an increasingly organized underground network of volunteers willing to brave injury and arrest to deliver relief supplies to those trapped, wounded or displaced by the fighting.  [full story]

When did we become like Syria?

NOV 14, 2007

When visiting my grandmother’s house in Damascus a few years ago, I never could have imagined sitting one day in a U.S. court, listening to the U.S. government defend its covert transfer of a Canadian citizen to Syria to be tortured.

Yet, that’s precisely what happened last Friday in a U.S. circuit court in New York, with the beginning of Maher Arar’s appeal of a decision last year by a district court to throw out his suit against the U.S. government. Arar’s case was the first to challenge in court the Bush administration’s use of rendition — the process of secretly handing over people to other countries where torture is used during interrogations.  [full story]