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Title: The Dispossessed
Author: Leila Al Shami
Date: 19 December 2016
Language: en
Topics: Syrian civil war, refugees
Source: Retrieved on 4th June 2021 from https://www.aljumhuriya.net/en/en/aleppo/the-dispossessed

Leila Al Shami

The Dispossessed

Evacuation. It sounds like a humanitarian operation. The word conceals

its brutality. Haunting drone footage shows a seemingly endless convoy

of ambulances and green buses snaking their way through a destroyed and

desolate wasteland. Those who leave their homes, the city of their

childhoods, may never return. This is the Syrian Nakba. It’s a trauma

both individual and collective. And its impact will be felt by

generations to come.

Shocked and shaken, men, women and children emerge from green buses. The

injured and the elderly. They tell stories of horror, of humans left

behind, trapped under the rubble, with no one to help them. They are

thin and gaunt, and reports emerge of rebel groups hoarding food,

criminally withholding it from besieged and hungry residents. Yet still

they chose to go to Idlib and the western Aleppo countryside, under

rebel control and constantly targeted by airstrikes and barrel bombs,

rather than return to Assad controlled territory to be silenced and

humiliated once more.

Inside eastern Aleppo, on the bombed-out walls, Syrians graffitied their

final messages to be read by a victorious incoming occupation army. ‘Our

destroyed buildings are a witness to our perseverance and your

criminality,’ said one. Another read, ‘Under every destroyed building

are families buried with their dreams by Bashar and his allies.’ And

simply, ‘We will return’.

The international community’s response to Assad’s crimes is forced

population transfer. Again, it sounds very clinical, this word which was

described at the Nuremberg Trails as being both a war crime and a crime

against humanity. It doesn’t capture the horror and heartache, the

dislocation as families are severed from their lives. In Aleppo people

overthrew a tyrant for a dream. They struggled to build a society free

from the grip of the state. Now all their gardens have turned into

graveyards.

This is Assad, Russia and Iran’s ‘peace plan’ for Syria. The systematic

cleansing of all communities that oppose the regime. In recent months

there have been forced population transfers around the capital and in

Homs; in Zabadani, Darayya, Al Tal, Moadamiya and Al Waer. Assad’s

‘surrender or starve’ policy placed these communities under siege,

implemented by Russian airpower and Iranian-back militias. Under

relentless bombardment, and in desperate need of food and medical

supplies, they were forced to capitulate. In some cases, as they were

‘evacuated’, a new generation of settlers, foreign Assadist loyalists,

were moved into their looted homes.

Six years ago Syrians rose up because they wanted democracy. They rose

up because they wanted a say in their country which, for half a century,

had been run by a family dictatorship and a mafia clique. It was a

revolution which contained all the beauty and hope of the world in its

dances, chants and songs. No one stood with them. They were abandoned.

They were slandered, shot, tortured, bombed, gassed and starved. And now

they are exiled from their homes, against their will.

Maybe some will wash up on the shores of your home town, and you will

call them ‘refugees’. Meanwhile the tyrant still sits on his throne.

This bearer of death and destruction.