By Raja Abdulrahim and Muhammad Raj Kadour
As rebels swept through towns and cities across Syria on their push to the capital, Damascus, displaced people followed close behind.
Roads and highways where tanks and armored vehicles had driven just a day earlier were packed with bumper-to-bumper traffic Monday as thousands of Syrians who had been displaced inside their country for years tried to get back home. They drove in cars and trucks piled high with the belongings they had accumulated — mattresses, and bags of clothes and blankets.
“We were like fish out of water when we left,” said Yasmeen Ali Armoosh, 30, speaking this past week from the dilapidated home they have rented for years in the town of Binnish, in northwestern Syria. “We felt suffocated.”
She and her family had withstood years of airstrikes from Syrian and Russian warplanes, she said, and had refused to leave their home in Saraqib, a town in northwestern Syria that became an opposition stronghold soon after the civil war began. But once government forces captured Saraqib in 2020, Armoosh’s family fled — fearful, she noted, of what living under a brutal dictatorship again could mean.
The 13-year civil war in Syria caused one of the “largest displacement crises in the world,” according to the United Nations. Some 7.2 million Syrians were displaced from their homes inside the country, mostly to rebel-held areas, while more than 6 million fled and became refugees.
The rebel offensive that ultimately drove President Bashar Assad from power Sunday has prompted an untold number to start making their way back, crowding some border crossings with neighboring countries.
In Binnish, Armoosh, a teacher, was only around 10 miles from her hometown for around four years, but she said that it felt like living in another country.
On Nov. 29, she was feverishly messaging with dozens of friends about the rebel advance. One friend wrote, “Yasmeen, they liberated Saraqib, you’re finally returning home.”
The day after, as rebels pushed on from Saraqib toward the city of Aleppo, Armoosh went with her brother and two friends to see what had become of their hometown.
Driving on the road leading to Saraqib was a familiar comfort, she said.
Armoosh was relieved to find her house is still standing — many homes have been destroyed during the war — but government soldiers had used it as some kind of outpost, she said.
Pro-Assad graffiti was written on the wall, and the floors were littered with bullet casings, she said.
Armoosh and her family will need to work to make it habitable again, but it is still home.
“A person’s homeland is where their home is, where their friends are,” she said.
Commenti