For 37-year-old Habiba Amed Ahamed, life has turned into a hell for the past seven years. As a young girl just out of the Madarassa, she used to work as a sales girl in a sweet shop at Beirut in Lebanon. A young man who regularly visited the shop touched Habiba's soul, and she soon got married to him and moved to Damascus. Later, she moved to his home town Afrin.
Life was peaceful for Habiba at Afrin for three years until her husband, whose name she doesn't want to mention, left her after she insisted on going back to Lebanon for a good life. By then, she had two children—a son and a daughter.
When her husband left her behind at Afrin, she never thought that her life would turn hell in the coming years. She had reached Afrin at a time when the ISIS was fighting in North East Syria. Since then it has been long walks and long hours of waiting in queues for ration to support her two children. Her husband had taken away all her documents and papers so she could not afford to return to Beirut. Now, after Assad's fall, she believes that there is a way out to Lebanon. She has reached Qamishli, the capital of North East Syria, known as Rojava, controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) run by the Kurdish groups.
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In Syria, Bashar Al - Assad is gone. The capital Damascus and the neighbouring cities of Aleppo and Hama have been taken over by the leader of the Islamist militant group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), Abu Mohammed al-Jolani. A new government has been in place in Syria, since December 8, 2024. But the country, which is known to be the cradle of civilization is now like the hell of earth for the civilians. None of the rulers, be it the Arabs or Assads or the jihadists seem to care about the trauma the civilians undergo.
Habiba and her two children—Jan Jahangig Rasho, 8 and Saba Jhangig Rasho, 9—were terrorised and traumatized when they decided to set out of their homes after the Turkish-backed militant group Free Syrian Army (SNA) came to fight the Kurdish forces.
"Some of the civilians killed themselves. In the beginning of the fight, we arrived at Tabqa safely. We were caught between two attackers—the HTS and the Free Syrian Army. On our way to Aleppo, we saw people who were killed on the sides of the road. The next day we were very afraid but we arrived at Tabqa by walk. We stayed for 12 days at Tabqa, but fear started building up even there. So we came to Qamishli," Habiba narrates the story of how she got internally displaced as a refugee within her own country.
Clad in a Red shirt and a blue jean, she lives in a small room, sharing it with two families at the Arabsthan school in Qamishli. A dilapidated, old building, it could collapse any time, she feels.
Though she doesn't want to get reunited with her husband, Habiba is worried about her father who was recently arrested by the SNA as he had the photo of SDF on his phone. "I know he was injured after being hit on his stomach. I heard that he is in a prison in Damascus. But I cannot afford to leave my children and go search for him," Habiba says as tears fill her eyes.
Like Habiba, there are more than five million people who have become refugees and more than six million have been displaced.
