Syria’s children, having known only war, adjust to a sudden peace (original) (raw)

DARAYYA, Syria — The children of Darayya, scattered across Syria by war, grew up with secrets: why only their mothers ever came to the school gates; that their fathers had been killed, and who killed them.

It wasn’t that other people couldn’t guess the answers. But to speak them out loud under the regime of President Bashar al-Assad was to risk a similar fate. He’s gone now, but 14 years of conflict have wrought a heavy toll on the country’s children, and families say it was often their hidden loss that was most unbearable.

As Syria’s new Islamist rulers reshape the way schools teach the nation’s history, students who have known only war are struggling to navigate the traumas of their own pasts. Educators and mental health professionals are trying to assess their needs and how to address them.

“If you don’t have space to recognize your sadness,” psychologist Yara Alashtar said, “it won’t come out naturally in the later life.”

Darayya and other suburbs southwest of Damascus were the beating heart of the 2011 uprising against Assad. In the civil war that followed, the regime’s troops besieged and bombarded many of them, smashing homes to rubble and starving out the rebel fighters and civilians who remained.

By 2012, most families had fled for their lives to eke out new ones in unfamiliar districts. They often left without male relatives, who stayed behind to fight or had been disappeared by security forces.

At the time, Abir al-Kishik, now 44, was still breastfeeding her daughter Sadeel. She escaped Darayya with the baby in one arm and her 7-year-old, Nadia, clinging to the other.

Kishik’s husband, Ghayith, stayed to fight. He was dead within the year. She took much longer to find the words to tell her children. Assad’s surveillance apparatus was so far-reaching that when people said the walls had ears, they were only half-joking. Parents worried that if they spoke too freely at home, their children might repeat what they’d heard outside the home.

“It was too dangerous for them to talk at school,” Kishik said. “If someone asked what happened, she couldn’t tell them.”

Sadeel, now 13, would stare silently at fathers walking with their daughters in the street and ask her mother why she couldn’t have one, too.

“It was always there,” Kishik said. “You couldn’t escape it. We couldn’t speak of what happened, but nothing I did was good enough — it was never like being her father.”

Without language to express the loss, children are often unable to process its scale, said Alashtar, who works with INARA, a charity founded to support children affected by war. Now that the regime is gone, she is working to build child-friendly spaces in Darayya.

In the days after Assad fled Syria, Damascus erupted with the joy and rage of the long oppressed. Many families learned that missing relatives were probably dead. People divided by conflict lines were reunited. Ghayith’s brother, Rami, who had lived for years in rebel-held territory, came to see the girls.

“I didn’t know they had that many emotions inside of them,” Kishik recalled. They hurled themselves at him as he walked through the door and sobbed from deep inside their bodies, hugging him so tight, Kishik said, that she thought they would never let go.

Psychological impact in the suburbs

More than 7.5 million children across Syria require humanitarian assistance, UNICEF estimates. The psychological toll of deprivation hangs heavy over the broken suburbs of Damascus.

In Jobar, there are barely homes to go back to. In Darayya, children play in the spaces between rubble and bomb craters. Small boys wear puffer jackets but no socks, burning tires to keep warm. De-mining charities warn that children still risk death or injury from unexploded munitions.

Syria’s economy has been strangled by sanctions and corruption. Displaced families have been hit hardest of all. Kishik moved the girls to Jdaydet Artooz, another southwestern suburb, where they found an apartment with little furniture and bills they could barely afford.

Kishik took two jobs but still struggled. After sunset, with no money for a generator, she said, the family lived in darkness. She sometimes cried from sheer exhaustion, but she tried not to. Sadeel, in particular, felt like a sponge for her emotions. “She picked up on everything,” Kishik said.

In Douma, 15 miles away, teachers said their students were withdrawn or overly boisterous. Their self-esteem was low and they had difficulty focusing. When a 7-year-old this week tripped and broke his arm, doctors concluded his bones had been weakened by malnutrition.

Before the war, almost all of Syria’s children were enrolled in school. Today, the enrollment rate is among the lowest in the world. The quality of education has plummeted, educators say, and students as young as second-graders face pressure to drop out in favor of paid work, or to take on caregiving roles.

In suburbs that were held by rebels, and consequently attacked by Assad’s forces, teachers suffered their own trauma — and worried they were imparting it to their students.

“When the regime was bombing schools, parents would be scared to send their children here,” said Dalal Mohammed Aqeel, 54, the principal of one of Douma’s primary schools. “I’d tell them that we wouldn’t let the kids come to any harm, but I know my face probably told another story.”

After regime forces retook the area in 2018, Aqeel was detained on suspicion of sympathizing with the rebels. She was interrogated four times, she said, and still carries paperwork showing that her family’s assets were frozen and their movements subject to travel bans. “At school, I had to pretend it wasn’t happening,” she said. “The children were traumatized. The people who were meant to look after them were traumatized. All of us just had to keep going.”

Every year, the government held national essay competitions for Syria’s students. Aqeel remembers her anxiety over what children might commit to paper. “The students were encouraged to write about what their lives were like, but one of our girls had written a story that was too honest,” she said. “I had to tell her to focus it differently, talking about friendship and family values.”

The rewrite was selected for a prize.

In Jdaydet Artooz, Kishik said, Sadeel was asked last year to write in praise of Assad and his army. The girl became so angry that she said she would no longer go to school if they made her.

Now the Islamist-led government is rewriting school curriculums. The rebels who forced Assad from power have said they’ll remove all content that glorified his family’s decades-long rule. More concerning for some educators, their initial messaging suggested they might also cut teaching on evolution, civics and pre-Islamic history.

What comes next

The speed of the regime’s collapse has been surreal and bewildering to children who grew up with the fear it instilled. In Darayya, a group of INARA volunteers and psychologists have opened a play space for children so they can begin to assess the extent of their unmet needs.

As children crossed the threshold, their bodies visibly relaxed. The charity had installed a heater, which made the room warm enough that they could remove their coats and scarves.

They played in small groups, with colorful blocks, and almost always built houses. A 10-year-old told psychologist Rahaf Bayat that his creation was intended for only a few people, so that they would all have space to live comfortably. “I’m giving them a swimming pool,” he said.

Nearby, Sadeel frowned in concentration as she used felt-tipped pens to color the roof of a cardboard building. Her friends Fatima and Sireen were neatly stippling the walls. “A lot of their homes don’t have windows anymore,” Bayat said. “Most of the kids here have lost their parents and really just need so much care now.”

Kishik was proud that Nadia, now 19, had made it to Damascus University. In phone calls home, Kishik said, Nadia told her that she was proud of her and that she wanted to find a way to repay her for the years of sacrifice. “Thank you,” she told her mother. “I love you.”

It was a comfort, Kishik said, but worries about their looming eviction, and how she and Sadeel would cope, still consumed her thoughts.

Across the city, schools and charities were compiling daunting lists of what children would need in the months ahead, from basic necessities to long-term investment in the kind of education and economic recovery that could improve their chances in life. Families, meanwhile, said they were doing their best to make sure their children finally found the space, at least, to express themselves.

Reporters asked Aqeel what she wants to see her students writing in their essays now. She smiled.

“Everything,” she said. “I want them to grow up knowing themselves. I don’t want them to feel fear anymore.”