RBSS
For the first time, I was driven out of my beloved city after being stripped of my house and exchanged it with my life which may has ended with an air strike, a landmine or a bullet during the last seven days in Raqqa’s northern countryside.
I have never experienced the displacement, I have read about it, saw it in people’s faces. Here, even your body does not belong to you, we do not even know if we will get a tomb when we die. No one will visit your grave in holidays and no one will put roses. Maybe, this is the better option if we thought about losing an arm of a leg. This is how the war works.
Despite all of that, my life was not the issue, when I see a woman holding her six kids, a young man holding his mother on his back and young girls in their twenties walking barefooted. The blackness covers everything.
The tent is now our land, house and home. This tent is now the most precious thing we have. A seventy years old man trying to convince his wife and children to accept their fate:” Today we have a tent, we will sleep on ground and tomorrow God knows what happens, we might find blankets! But we will never go back home, at least me” A few days later, he died.
Asayish patrols surround us from all sides, one of them leads us to the (camp), this is what they call the detention camp which is like the Nazi camps. People started to enter the camp after they have been checked and left only with their clothes and tents. This is the reality, not the shared photos of holding our children or lighting up cigarettes to our women. The camp will become a city and our grandchildren will curse us and start their own revolution.
It has been long days now, harder than I have ever heard about. No one can get out of this dead camp unless getting a sponsor from them, I am from here! Why do I need a sponsor?! I got out of the camp a few days ago, people inside still in my mind with their stories which break the heart and steal the mind.
Thousands of people still trapped, all over the governorate, from east to west and from south to north, where ever you go you find camps and detainees, women and children. This is how the war works.
