A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea(21)
That night, while the children slept, Hanaa and Shokri decided it was time to leave Syria. It was na?ve to believe that their lives would return to normal anytime soon, and they knew how close they had come to losing Doaa that day. Shokri had already lost his livelihood and worried it was only a matter of time before he would lose his girls. Their neighborhood was emptying day by day. All the men of fighting age had disappeared, having either joined the Free Syrian Army, been arrested, or been killed.
In the morning, Shokri picked up the phone and called the only person he knew who had the financial means and connections to help them—his son-in-law Islam, in Abu Dhabi. When he answered, Shokri told him, “We’re leaving. Help us get to Egypt.”
FOUR
Life as a Refugee
Doaa knelt on the backseat of the car. Through tears she stared out the rear window as her country faded away behind her. Saja, Nawara, and Hamudi were crammed in next to her, making it difficult for her to take a full breath. Her parents shared the front seat with Khaled, her father’s friend who was driving them out of the country, staring steadily ahead. Out the window she could hear the muffled sounds of sporadic shooting, and her despair deepened as she realized that this would not be just a short family trip. Her sobs grew heavier as the reality that this departure might last forever began to sink in.
She did not want to leave. She’d promised herself that she would never abandon the revolution and had begged her father to let her stay behind. “Leaving Syria would be like taking my soul away from me,” she told him, her voice trembling.
“I am your father and I need to keep your soul alive,” he replied.
The night before they left, they had only a few hours’ warning. They had to quickly bid good-bye to friends and had a wrenching farewell with Doaa’s older sister Asma, who was staying behind with her husband and children. They also called Ayat, who had left several weeks before to join her husband in Lebanon. The call from Islam, the husband of Doaa’s other sister Alaa, came at 10:00 p.m. He said that he was transferring money to them for ferry tickets from Jordan to Egypt and advised them to leave for Jordan at once. Doaa, Saja, and Nawara sobbed as they packed and hugged Asma and their cousins again and again. “You will be back,” Asma assured them. But when? Doaa wondered, looking into her sister’s face, trying to memorize it.
The next morning at nine, they packed their suitcases into Khaled’s car trunk and piled into the car. At the last checkpoint on their way to the border, Doaa muttered aloud, “This feels like they are closing the lid of my coffin.” She looked out the window and began whispering good-bye to everything she saw. “Good-bye, streets. Good-bye, trees. Good-bye, Daraa. Good-bye, weather. Good-bye.” A tear dropped on the car seat as she leaned out the window for air.
Shokri twisted around in his seat to look at Doaa, his eyes filled with anguish as he took in her sorrow. He knew how distressed his family was, but he’d made the hard decision to leave behind the life they’d built together in order to protect them. He knew that Doaa and her siblings might not understand that now, but he wanted her to see that he was trying to do what was best.
“Do you think I wanted to leave Daraa?” he asked, fighting to keep his voice steady. He would have done anything to spare his family pain. “I don’t have a choice. I won’t risk you girls being kidnapped.”
By that time, all three girls were sobbing. Khaled chimed in to offer his support to his friend: “Your father is right to take you away from this madness. He is only thinking of keeping you safe.”
Doaa trusted Khaled, someone she had known all her life, and part of her knew that he was right. She was grateful to him for helping her father take care of the family and did her best to mask her disappointment. No one in the car could imagine it then, but months later they would learn that back in Daraa Khaled had been killed in the war.
There were seven checkpoints along the fifteen-kilometer route to the border. At one, security guards opened the trunk, then their suitcases, and tore through the family’s belongings. At another, they were interrogated. The soldiers demanded to know why they were leaving Syria. “My husband is sick,” Hanaa lied. “We have to leave to get medical care for him.” A small part of Doaa secretly hoped they would be turned back so that they could go home again, but at her mother’s response, the guard just shrugged and waved them on. When they finally reached the Jordanian border, Doaa looked over her shoulder at her homeland, taking everything in.
“I envy the mountains and the trees and the rocks because they will be able to breathe Daraa’s air and I won’t,” she whispered, taking one last, longing look at her home.
It was November 2012, one year and eight months since the violence in Syria first began. Though figures vary widely depending on who is counting, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks the death toll in the conflict, estimates that over forty-nine thousand people had been killed by that time. It was impossible to know how many had disappeared or were behind bars in government prisons. The war would only become more deadly, and by its fifth year, according to UN estimates, over 250,000 people would be killed and over 1 million injured. Meanwhile, 5 million Syrians, such as Doaa’s family, would be forced to flee across borders, while 6.5 million would be internally displaced, often forced to move several times to other parts of the country where they could find pockets of safety. By 2016, Syrians would become the largest displaced population in the world.