Mick Hartley

Amir Tibon talks to Syrian refugees in Serbia:

During my first Syria reporting trip, back in 2011, I heard gut-wrenching stories of mass shootings and cruel torture techniques used against children. In late 2012, people were already telling me about entire neighborhoods being razed to the ground, and there were also the first rumors that Assad had used chemical weapons against his own people. When ISIS took over large parts of the country a year and a half later, I heard about institutionalized human slavery and about 10-year-olds being taught how to behead living people.

All of that was before Russia joined Assad in bombing Syrian civilians in the fall of 2015. By the time I reached the camp in Serbia last month, you could see and taste depression, like nothing I’ve seen or felt before. “The people getting out of Syria right now are those who had the nerves to stay there for the last five years,” one Syrian man from Aleppo, aged 66, told me as he was waiting for his wife to receive medical treatment in the transit camp. What makes a person run away now, after surviving everything these people have already gone through? What makes tens of thousands do so? “We stayed there for five years because we thought things will eventually change,” he says. “People kept saying—at some point, it will get better. It has to. The world will intervene. But today, nobody believes it anymore. So everyone is running away now. Everyone! This is only the beginning.”…

One man in his 50s, who presented himself in perfect English as a university professor from Aleppo, added: “I’m running away from Da’esh (the Arabic name for ISIS), but there are many different kinds of Da’esh operating in Syria today. There isDa’esh-Da’esh, the people who cut off heads and burn prisoners in cages. There is also Da’esh-Assad, which is actually much worse, and Da’esh-Iran, the Iranian militias who rape and murder women in front of their children’s eyes. They have much more money and capabilities, and they don’t film themselves while doing their atrocities. They are smart enough to hide it from the world. In addition to all these, there is also Da’esh-Putin. I’m coming from Aleppo; I’ve seen the results of his bombings. It’s a massacre. People are killed like cockroaches under a shoe. And then there is Da’esh-the West, which I think is the worst! I mean the civilized world, doing nothing to stop all of this.”…

“America wants Assad to win,” said Hassan, a 30-year-old teacher from Aleppo, who talked to me while waiting in line to receive painkillers at a clinic in the camp. Why do you think that, I asked him. After all, they have been saying “Assad has to go” for a long time, before recently starting to broadly hint otherwise. “I don’t care what they say,” he replied. “I lost my brother. He was killed by the regime three years ago, when he went to buy bread in the street. Many of my friends have also been killed. What did Obama do? Even when Assad used gas against us, they did nothing. Now we know why.”

The conversation brought up painful memories from my first two reporting trips covering Syria, in 2011 and 2012. Those trips took place before the 2013 “red line” debacle, in which America retreated from its promise to punish Assad if he ever used chemical weapons against his own people. Of course, he eventually did, but punishment never came. The world was a different place before that episode, because people still believed America would, at some point, stop the horrendous massacre taking place in Syria. That’s why people from Syria were eager to talk with the “international media,” to make their voices heard. “Please write this down,” complete strangers would tell me upon seeing a notebook and a pen in my hands. On a number of occasions, when I was walking around with a camera, I suddenly felt a touch on my shoulder, turned around, and saw a person who had something urgent to say (“Tell your people we are not terrorists;” “See what Assad did to my baby girl;” “Obama! Help us!”)

My 2012 visit to Syria took place shortly after Obama had won re-election. One fighter for the (real) moderate Syrian opposition asked me, after we filmed a short interview, “Now that Obama doesn’t need to win another election, he is going to stop this, right?” I said I have no idea what will happen, but the man was convinced he had the answer to his own question. “Yes, he will have to do something now. There are no more excuses,” he said, adding, “I want his aides to watch your movie. If they watch your interview with me, they will understand.”

Hoping that the world will do something was the main reason people from Syria were so glad to talk with journalists like myself during the first two years of the war. Very few Syrians I met in 2012 refused to talk with me back then. But last month, in the freezing-cold camp in Serbia, dozens of people I approached said no: Men and women, young and old, Arabs and Kurds, well-dressed and wearing rags. I didn’t try to change their minds. What could I possibly tell them? That talking to me would make a difference? That public opinion could create a sense of urgency? That the world needs to know what they’re going through?

The world knows.