{"id":35763,"date":"2019-03-16T18:23:19","date_gmt":"2019-03-16T18:23:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=35763"},"modified":"2019-03-16T18:23:19","modified_gmt":"2019-03-16T18:23:19","slug":"for-syrians-8-years-of-war-leaves-stories-of-loss-and-hope-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=35763","title":{"rendered":"For Syrians, 8 years of war leaves stories of loss and hope"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\nBAGHOUZ, Syria: War is personal. And in Syria, after eight years of a grinding conflict, there are as many stories of loss, dispossession and desperate hope as there are people.
What started as peaceful protests in 2011 asking for government change turned into one of the cruelest modern wars and left a trail of broken lives among the country\u2019s pre-war population of 23 million. Now half are displaced, nearly half a million dead and many live with permanent scars or have joined militias.
The years of war have left their mark on Dia Hassakeh\u2019s 45-year old face. The Arab fighter in the Kurdish-led U.S-backed Syrian Democratic Forces has seen his family suffer on the conflict\u2019s many fronts.
In the early days of the conflict, two of his brothers were wounded fighting in the government military against the armed opposition. In November, another brother was killed by the Daesh group. Now Dia is battling the militants at Daesh\u2019 last holdout, a speck of territory along the Euphrates River near the Iraqi border called Baghouz.
\u201cAs Syrians, every citizen has paid the price,\u201d he said, speaking just outside Baghouz. He took the name of his hometown Hassakeh as a nom de guerre when he joined the SDF.
While the Daesh group\u2019s territorial defeat will close one bloody chapter, Syria is still wracked by conflict on the eighth anniversary of its long-running civil war.
Syrian President Bashar Assad\u2019s government appears to have won the war against the insurgency trying to topple him. But much of the country is out of Assad\u2019s hands. The northeast and east, wrested from Daesh, is largely held by the US-backed Kurdish-led forces. But their fate as well is uncertain. Though President Donald Trump announced he would withdraw American troops, the US is apparently keeping a small force, hoping to encourage the Europeans to strengthen their presence to protect its Kurdish allies from their nemesis Turkey, and counter Iran\u2019s expansion in the region.
Militants are still a potent force. The Daesh group has planted the seeds to wage an insurgency. The northwestern province of Idlib \u2014 an opposition stronghold throughout the war \u2014 is home to other jihadists as radical as Daesh. Nearly 3 million Syrians live in the province, most displaced from other parts of Syria that fell under government control. A Turkish-Russian truce that averted a government assault on Idlib and took pressure off Assad is fraying, threatening new bloodshed.
Assad remains hostage to his massive need for cash to rebuild and his reliance on his allies, Russia and Iran, which are pursuing their own interests. Moscow wants to keep access to the Mediterranean and a position to challenge the West; Tehran is keeping an array of militias in Syria to preserve its domain of influence stretching from Iraq to Lebanon.
And public opposition is not extinguished.
Like Groundhog Day, protesters in southern Syria took to the streets of Daraa, the city where the 2011 anti-government rallies first erupted and where the government only finally managed to re-establish control last year. Men and children this month held day and night protests chanting against Assad after authorities planned to erect a statute for his late father.
\u201cThe people want a new president,\u201d protesters chanted, a 2019 version of \u201cthe people want to bring down the regime.\u201d
Within this maze of conflicts, players and interests, Syrians try to find their way.
Dia never liked the anti-government protests. When they erupted in 2011, he left Hassakeh \u2014 in the northeast of Syria \u2014 to live in northern Iraq. There, while two of his brothers fought in the military against the rebels, he ran a home appliances business and sat out the war \u2014 until the war caught up with him unexpectedly. The Daesh group, feeding off Syria\u2019s chaos, swept over much of Syria and northern Iraq. Dia returned to Hassakeh and found the militants closing in on his home province.
He volunteered to fight against them to \u201cprotect our family, land and country,\u201d he said.
He blames outsiders\u2014 militants and superpowers \u2014 for breaking up his country. Having fought in the SDF and served in his own government\u2019s army before the revolts, he still believes the country will be put back together and heal.
\u201cAny country that goes through this needs time.\u201d
The irony is he is fighting in a force backed by a foreign power \u2014 the US \u2014 and led by Kurds determined to stay as separate as possible.
Sefqan, a 29-year old Kurd who commands an SDF unit of more than 200 special forces fighters, has no issues with his country breaking up and the central government losing authority.
\u201cThe Baath regime is no good for us Kurds,\u201d he said, referring to Assad\u2019s ruling party. \u201cOur rights were lost in Syria … Our war is to get out from under of this injustice.\u201d Sefqan fought against Daesh and prior to that other jihadist groups who threatened his hometown, Amuda, in Hassakeh province.
Kurds, who made of 10 percent of Syria\u2019s pre-war population, have long complained of discrimination and oppression by Damascus. Sefqan belongs to an even more disenfranchised community \u2014 he\u2019s one of thousands of Kurds who are stateless, because in the past they either failed to convince authorities they were Syrian residents or didn\u2019t take part in censuses in the 1960s and 1970s. Referred to as the \u201cforeigners of Hassakeh,\u201d \u201cthe muted\u201d or \u201cthe concealed,\u201d they were long deprived of basic rights like education and health services and were barred even from moving from province to province.
\u201cAny group has a state. Why do we the Kurds not have one? To go to schools. To speak our language. To have an airport and travel. I can\u2019t even go to Damascus,\u201d said Sefqan, who spoke on condition he be identified only by his first name in accordance with SDF rules for its commanders.
Now Sefqan and many of his people enjoy new found confidence and clout, with the Kurdish-led administration controlling northeastern Syria and bolstered by natural resources and good relations with the U.S-led coalition.
Sefqan and other Kurds dream of emulating the extensive autonomy enjoyed by Iraq\u2019s northern Kurdistan. He said the Kurdish-led administration has made strides in giving real representation to the community and praised its efforts to introduce democracy.
\u201cIf they continue this, it will be good,\u201d he said \u2014 though with a note of wariness. Rights groups blame the SDF and the administration for arbitrarily detaining critics, forcing military conscription and controlling what are meant to be representative political bodies.
The SDF has emerged as the most organized non-state actor from the war. It and its political arm have successfully established facts on the ground that will likely be hard to reverse \u2014 such as teaching the Kurdish language in schools and setting up parallel governing institutions and their own economic infrastructure.
Ali Ahmed Al-Hassan, a 29-year-old Arab, works trucking crude oil from one of the richest oil fields controlled by the SDF. It is a profitable, but highly risky business, because remnants of Daesh have threatened those helping the \u201cKurdish economy.\u201d
Al-Hassan lived for four years under Daesh rule after the militants took over his home province of Deir Ezzor. Two of his brothers died, one as a bystander when airstrikes hit an Daesh position and another when he was caught in a cross fire.
\u201cNo one has been spared. My two brothers. My two nephews. And about six cousins. All were killed in the war,\u201d he said.
Deir Ezzor has been freed of Daesh, but it\u2019s still insecure. He has to be home before dark because of IS sleeper cells lurking in the countryside.
\u201cWe need more than a year\u201d to regain security, he said.
Daesh has left its mark. The locals \u201chave become foreigners. Many of the (foreign militants) married locals. Our children have become Chinese,\u201d he said \u2014 his term for the many Central Asian fighters who joined Daesh in Syria.
Dia believes the militants\u2019 presence is a pretext for foreign powers to meddle in Syria.
\u201cEveryone is responsible for the creation of Daesh,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was created and put on a pedestal to ruin this country, like the Arab spring. \u201c
\u201cAll my family has taken part in this war. Five of us. Two were injured \u2014 one lost a leg, and another carries a cane \u2014 and one was killed. There is only me and another left,\u201d he said. \u201cSo long as we have life and our hearts are beating, we will fight to liberate this country.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BAGHOUZ, Syria: War is personal. And in Syria, after eight years of a grinding conflict, there are as many stories of loss, dispossession and desperate hope as there are people.What started as peaceful protests in 2011 asking for government change turned into one of the cruelest modern wars and left a trail of broken lives…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35763\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}