Trapped between Ekremah and Al-Wa'ar

protest for Al-Wa’ar children, mourning Ekrema’s children

Tarek was a good husband to his wife, a good friend to all who knew him, and a good Syrian – so much good so that he gave his life for the sake of Syrian dignity and freedom.
Four days ago, after Tarek had been imprisoned for some time, an agent from one of the regime secret service’s branches gave Tarek’s family his ID card. This is a message that only Syrians understand – it means that another martyr has passed away under torture. Many non-Syrians know that in Syria countless peaceful activists have given up their lives as an offering in return for the freedom of Syria. But only Syrians know that three years ago, Tarek suggested to a group of activists – proudly enough i was one of them – that we could dye the fountains of Syria red as a means of civil protest against the massive amounts of Syrian blood shed by the regime on our land. This took place months before the launch of the FSA and long, long before the appearance of the ISIS or al-Nusra.

While many non-Syrians now summarize the Syrian situation as clashes between those parties, none of them knew Tarek or are aware of the deep pain left by his martyrdom – only Syrians know that.

On the other hand, just this Wednesday in the Ekremah neighborhood of Homs, at around the end of the school day as children were preparing to go home, two suicide bombers blew themselves up in two cars outside the school causing tens of casualties, most of them children. A couple of hours later, the children of Al Wa’ar neighborhood held protests to show their solidarity and mourning for the children of Ekremah. Nobody but Syrians knows what it means that the children of Al Wa’ar protested for and mourned their peers in Ekremah; only Syrians are aware of the sectarian sensitivities caused by the names of those two neighborhoods. Only Syrians know that some adults from Al Wa’ar were gloating at the martyrdom of the children of Ekremah, while some adults from Al Ekremah posted threats on Facebook pages threatening that for every martyred child in Ekremah they would kill ten children from Al Wa’ar, None ofall the others are aware of all this mess and lack of humanity, only Syrians are facing it daily,
Only Syrians know all of these details. For Westerners, these may be just more boring trivial details from a Third World country’s civil war; for Syrians, this is a daily pain. Only Syrians need to see all this information daily, not as news but as part of the nightmarish everyday reality.
Somewhere in between the men of Al Wa’ar and Ekremah I found myself trapped in the middle of their mortar shells, where every single bullet they shoot at one another tears into my flesh before rupturing the body of Syria.

Syrians and only Syrians know the meaning of being trapped in between without having any idea whether they belong to here or not, while Tarek is left as just another number on the lists of martyrs provided by the international organizations which deal with Syrians as numbers – nothing more, nothing less.

Profilo dell'autore

Mohammad Abu Hajar: Mohammad Abu Hajar è un attivista, giornalista e musicista siriano. Ha fatto il master in Economia politica alla Sapienza - Università di Roma. Scrive dal 2007.
Mohammad Abu Hajar is a Syrian activist, journalist and musician.
He had his master's in political economics from Sapienza university of Rome; he writes since 2007.
محمد ابو حجر، ناشط، صحفي و موسيقي سوري حصل على درجة الماستر في الاقتصاد السياسي من جامعة سابينزا في روما، يكتب المقالات منذ عام 2007