When the bombs started coming closer, Nur Daghestani knew her family would have to leave Syria. The war had been raging for one year when they fled their home in Damascus, Syria’s capital, in 2012 to the neighboring country of Lebanon. With their United States passports, the Daghestanis returned to life in Colorado after six years of living in Nur’s parents’ birthplace.
A year before they fled, a teenager armed with a can of spray paint scribbled, “It’s your turn [Assad],” on his school’s wall in the southern Syrian city of Daraa, referring to President Bashar al-Assad as the next ruler to be overthrown as part of the uprisings in the Middle East which toppled governments in the 2011 Arab Spring. The government detained and tortured the boy, along with his friends. Additionally, the government confronted other peaceful protests with bullets.
As the protester body count grew, so did the number of Syrians flooding the streets demanding that Assad end the more than 40-year reign his family held over Syria. Assad responded with routine violence that became a part of everyday life for millions of Syrians, and ended hundreds of thousands more.
“It started with explosions every Thursday, then every Thursday and Friday, then Thursday, Friday, Monday,” Nur said.
Soon the crackling of machine gun fire and mortar blasts constantly echoed through her city and across her country. Electricity and water in their house became sporadic, leaving them without basic utilities for large parts of their days.
As life in 2011 continued for Nur in Damascus, Assad’s tanks rolled into the city streets of Homs, Aleppo and Daraa, killing thousands of civilians. As a result, then-President Obama announced economic sanctions against Syria and later attempted to pass a U.N. resolution condemning the Syrian government. The resolution did not pass, in part due to Russia — Assad’s only international ally — vetoing the measure.
In 2012, as the U.S. embassy closed in Damascus, bombing from rebels and the regime crept closer and closer to the Demascus suburb of Qudsaya, where Nur lived.
One morning, Nur’s mother woke her and she was greeted to the pre-dawn air in her apartment. It was stinking from spoiled milk from their electricity-less refrigerator. Handing her a backpack, she told Nur to pack her things. Nur stuffed her Fulla (an Islamic version of Barbie), a comic book and her few clothes into her bag and ran out the door with her family.
Outside two men carrying guns and wearing what Nur described as “sketchy clothes” stopped her family at the gate.
The men put a gun to her father’s head, screaming, “Where are you going?” in foreign accents. Pleading their way out of their home, Nur’s family escaped to their grandmother’s house for a final goodbye before driving to Lebanon. Stuck behind a government checkpoint, Nur heard the man in the car next to them pleading on the phone with his family to leave Qudsaya. The rebels, and even more fighting, inched closer to the residential neighborhood.
Qudsaya, along with many other parts of Syria, had been targeted by armed rebel groups. Many of the hundreds of rebel groups operated as local militias, seizing control of areas where Assad’s legitimacy had been destroyed. Ranging from large, organized armies, like The Free Syrian Army, to fundamentalist Islamic terror groups, the factions began to splinter.
For the next four years, rebel groups held the neighborhood. The government blocked U.N. aid and food from entering, while sending bomb after bomb into their own capitol’s suburb. Eventfully, Assad regained control of Qudsaya and its 2,000 residents.
Safely back in the U.S. after spending the summer of 2012 in Lebanon, Nur began high school in Broomfield, Colorado. By the end of that year, 500,000 Syrians, without the fortune that Nur had of securing a U.S. passport, fled the country as refugees. At the time of this story, the number has ballooned to over 5 million.
In 2013, the conflict escalated as the Syrian regime used a banned chemical weapon, sarin gas, against thousands of its own people.
With powers like the U.S., Russia and other neighboring countries increasing involvement in the country, Syria became a proxy war. The U.S.-supported groups they claimed were “moderate rebels” fighting Assad. Russia backed Assad by launching attacks against many of the rebel groups the U.S. supported.
Some of the groups who had used the fractured state of the country to advance fundamentalist Islamic principals both faced airstrikes from all three rival powers, Syria, Russia and the U.S. One of these groups declared a caliphate in Iraq and Syria that later became known as the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS.
By 2014, ISIS controlled large swaths of war-torn Syria and Iraq. The swift and brutal rise of the terrorist group lead to a uncommon mix of alliances in Syria. Russia and Iran — who propped up Assad — along with the U.S., its western allies and Turkey — who oppose Assad — joined forces to fight the common enemy of ISIS. Yet internal strife among allies plagued the fight against ISIS.
The jigsaw puzzle of Syria further deteriorated as civilians continued to bear the bulk of the war’s effects. Millions fled to neighboring countries, escaping violence that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
For Nur, whether it is the government or the rebels, she prays that “the good will come and the bad will go.”
On April 4, the bad that Nur had prayed would go away came raining from the sky over rebel-held Idlib province. Banned sarin gas filled the lungs of hundreds of men, women and children, a possible war crime many Western governments blame on the Assad regime.
The Trump administration responded late Thursday night. An airstrike of 59 tomahawk missiles targeted the airfield that the gas attack reportedly came from.
The strike expanded U.S. interest in the region beyond just the fight against ISIS. It could complicate U.S. relationships with Russia, as the Washington Post reported.
For many like Nur, Syria still is home, one that, to her heartbreak, has an uncertain future.
Contact CU Independent Multimedia Managing Editor Jackson Barnett at jackson.barnett@colorado.edu and follow him on Twitter @JacksonWBarnett.
