Resettlement Difficulties in Istanbul

“I am coming down in 5 minutes. No! Wait, I need to see you before we go to my family. He comes in and I expectbad news. What happened? My brother! Dead?! He cries and hands me his iphone to read a skype conference with his brother in Syria.”

His brother is serving in the reigme military in Damascus and is the only one left in Syriaafter the rest of the family fled Aleppo to Istanbul.

Aleppo, the business capital of Syria, is the oldest andmost populatedcity in Syria. Aleppo joined the revolution last year in 2011. Most of the migrants who flee the city go to Turkey because it is close and many Aleppians have relatives within Turkey.

He goes on, “They (the regime’s military) made him write his will today because he will be sent off on a “mission” to fight the Free Syrian Army in the countryside of Damascus.”

“What can I do? I can not tell my mum and dad! İf he tries to defect from the army he might be excuted like some of his friends in the division, and if he is sent off to fight the Free Syrian Army, he might get killed! Can you ask the Free Syrian Army to provide a safe escape for him? What should I ask from those who are sacrificing their life for our cause? Go save my brother’s life!?”

This is one of the most tragic aspects of the revolution. The martyrdom of hundereds of Syrian soliders trapped between two fronts.

He rests himself and we go to see his family. We all sat together to eat dinner. Aleppians are the most famous and the most creative with food in Syria. It is always a pleasure for me to eat along with the family. The mother passes me the chicken with eggplants, and I tell her I do not feel like eating meat. They all laugh at the table saying, “she turned veggie!” and I answer, No! I just had too much meat last week. It is very hilarious to say you are vegetarian to someone from Aleppo; you become a joke!

I take my tea and the mother tells me how she migrated with two other families in Ramadan, last August, to Turkey.

“We tried to enter Turkey from the main crossing points, but the borders were closed and they did not let us in. we sank into despair, we had been walking like 2 or 3 kilometers. We were fasting, too! At the end, we were about to go back to Aleppo when a Free Syrian Army member came across us while we were sitting on the sidewalks in a border village. He invited us to his home and made us dinner and offered to help us get smuggled to Turkey. During the night, someone came with a truck and we all got into the back. The truck was moving slowly with lights off until we got close to the border. We got off and started walking again with two other smugglers. We walked for almost 1 kilometer and there were two lines of mines and we were walking in between. When I reached the barbed wires, I crossed without noticing that my leg was hurt.Then a Turkish relative picked us up and drove us to GaziAntep, a city in southern turkey.”

She laughs while telling the story as if it is some kind of an action movie. She is knitting a scarf of the Syrian independence flag, the flag of the revolution,for her youngest son. The child is attending a Syrian school which has recently opened for Syrian kids in Istanbul. The boy tells me he has friends from all over Syria and that they are using the Syrian curriculum in the school. There was a bookthat mentions Asma Assad, “the first lady”, and he joyfully described the way everyone in class tore out the page of that book.

It is a torn page in history of the life of kids and their family, and in the history of Syria, too. The family is watching a Turkish program of young talented singers. Everyone seems to be a judge in the room and Ahmet says, “Syrians are experts in everything, and they all laugh out!”

The power goes off, which is something uncommon in Turkey, and they shout, “they are here, too. We are going to be shelled.” and start laughing. While the trauma seems to have passed since their fleeing to Turkey, it keeps coming back even if accompanied by laughter.

The mother lights several candles, and the room takes on a Syrian atmosphere. When the power goes off in Syria, families gather to find alternative entertainment. Here the mother starts to conjure up memories of family and friends back in Aleppo.

“We used to gather every Thursday. We are 8 sisters who are all married so you can imagine how crowded it was. We used to dance all night long until daylight. Those were happy days. We were happy together. Now, even if we go back, we lost several members of the family. Three of my sisters lost one of their kids. I ask myself sometimes whether the gatherings we used to have would be the same when we comeback now that things have changed and my family experienced the loss.”

The memories seem to be the only refuge of this family; a source of a glorious past and a place to escape the ordeal of change.

The power is on, we start watching some family videos of the good days in Aleppo.

By Rana Abdul, Contributor writer to Zaman Alwasl from Turkey.