BATTLING THROUGH FLAMES
On the third day of my trip to the Medical Educational Centre (MEC), I met Noha. I had briefly seen her on my first day when I was given a tour of the MEC. She was struggling to walk, desperately grasping onto her walking aid, looking both frustrated and hopeful at the same time. This was the first time she had walked on her own since the ‘incident.’
The conversation I had with Noha opened my eyes to the extent of human rights violations experienced by the refugees of the Syrian conflict. It showed me that the violations they are subjected to as a result of the Assad regime’s barbarity do not end when the regime stops bombing. Rather, their vulnerability is permanently amplified, priming them for future abuse by anyone with enough power to do so. That was exactly what happened to Noha. Her experience was so detached from reality that I found myself subconsciously trying to cope with it by reducing it to a story in my mind. The reality is, however, that it is not a story. It is her life. Noha’s life. A life which was denied the dignity and respect it deserved.
“I felt the fire sizzling my skin, but I kept running, I had to save my children…”
After the Syrian Revolution began in 2011, Noha’s husband joined the Free Syrian Army (FSA), a group initially aimed at bringing down Assad’s dictatorship. They lived in a village in the suburbs of Hama, an area that was supposedly part of the safe zone. Noha often told her husband not to let his emotions control him. She urged him not to act recklessly for the sake of their two children who were in need of their father.
“He compromised,” she told me. Instead of fighting on the frontline, Noha’s husband began providing the FSA with tanks of oil that they needed for their day-to-day operations.
“It’s ironic,” Noha said. “It’s ironic that I endeavoured to protect him. Never did I think that I should have been searching for a way to protect myself from him.”
Despite their village being a safe zone, this did not deter Assad’s forces. The only thing that determined where the airstrikes will hit was wherever the military felt like directing them on any particular day. Noha was sat on her terrace with her one and three-year-old sons, Ali and Ahmad, when an airstrike hit her home, causing one of her husband’s oil tanks to explode over her entire body.
She instantly lit up in flames.
Despite the fire engulfing her body, her motherly instincts kicked in and she looked over to check on her children. Once she saw that the fire had not reached them, she began running to protect them from the heat of the flames. This only made the fire blaze more aggressively, but she kept running until she could no longer bear to.
At the time, her youngest started crawling towards her, towards the brightness of the flames. “I remember,” she said. “I remember the sight of Ali, my eldest, struggling to hold him back” she recounted.
“I tried to scream, to tell him not to get any closer, but it was useless, my voice was paralysed.”
By the time the flames had subsided, Noha had suffered 3rd and 4th degree burns over her entire body. She was a remnant of what she once had been. She had lost her hair, eyebrows and vision. The fire had eaten through her skin and bones causing her to lose the fingers in her right hand and initially experience full body paralysis.
During my visit, however, Noha explained to me how she was in the best state she had been since the incident. She had had various operations and medical procedures carried out on her to try to help her regain some mobility and vision. She could see, she was beginning to walk alone, and she could talk. But that does not change that her old life of independence is nothing more than a distant dream away.
As Noha explained her story to me, it initially felt like a she was recounting a detached series of events. It was almost as if she was reciting a list she had memorised. As she progressed with the events, however, tears began to stream down her face, but she was unable to wipe them away because of her muscle paralysis.
I wiped away them away for her, telling her that she did not have to continue if reliving the experience was too painful. Noha shook her head instantly, telling me that she had promised herself never to be silenced again.
“The level of humiliation was equivalent to the physical pain”
Noha continued, explaining how she felt most embarrassed by her domestic life after the burn. After the incident, Noha’s life was spent in the hospital between various lifesaving operations and procedures. Initially, her husband was sympathetic and helpful. He tried to bring her sons to come to visit her. Not long after, however, his sympathy turned into aggression and hostility.
Noha told me about the emotional pain she endured as a result of her husband divorcing her and remarrying. For a period of time, before the MEC took her in, she was forced to live with her ex-husband and his new wife. Her family had blamed him for her burns since he was responsible for the tanks which had exploded. Noha’s family were adamant that she was his responsibility, and that they were unwilling to deal with the consequence of his mistakes. As Noha told me this I could feel the embarrassment in her voice.
“Imagine,” she said. “Imagine being treated like a faulty product someone wanted to return. Imagine your parents refusing to take care of you. Imagine how worthless I felt as the people I trusted most in this world fought over not wanting to take care of me.”
Being completely dependent on her ex-husband and his new wife stripped Noha of all any dignity. The level of humiliation she felt was equivalent to the physical pain, she said.
“They would shout at me,” she recalled. “They tried to turn Ali against me, to make him scared of me. When that didn’t work, they became furious and stopped taking me to my physiotherapy appointments.” The abuses, however, did not stop there. The inhumanity of Noha’s ex-husband extended beyond the point of imagination. Noha described how he and his wife used to take the monthly allowance she received from the Red Cross and spent it on themselves.
“I didn’t deserve it, he said.”
“MY SON NO LONGER RECOGNISES ME AS HIS MOTHER” …
Listening to Noha speak about the experiences at a time when she was only a year older than me invoked a fierce feeling of anger within me. The worst part came, however, when she described how her ex-husband and new wife’s verbal abuse turned physical. How she was beaten by them and left for days without food. “Ali would try to help me sometimes, he tried to sneak food into my room. When he was caught, he would get beaten too.”
By this point, a puddle of tears was forming in Noha’s lap. As I wiped them away her tears once again, I hesitated about asking her about Ahmad, her youngest son. When I finally did, I regretted my decision.
Noha closed her eyes in sorrow.
“I don’t know how he is. I don’t know anything” she said. Noha explained how her youngest son now lives with her ex-husband’s parents in the Hama suburbs. After the incident, they took care of him for a while. When she asked to take him back after she began to recover, they refused. They claimed she has no right to him since they had basically been raising him for the past 3 years.
“I’ve only seen him once since that day. My son longer recognises me as his mother.”
As for Noha’s eldest son, Ali, he lives with his father and his new wife. Every Sunday, the MEC picks him up from his father’s house so that he can spend the day with his mother. That’s all the time that Noha’s ex-husband lets her have with him, however. When they divorced, he gained full custody of the child.
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Noha’s experiences are incomprehensible. The extent to which her rights were violated is harrowing. Her agony was a result of a number of people who callously capitalised on her vulnerabilities. The reality of the matter is clear, however. Assad’s incessant disregard of human life and dignity throughout the Syrian conflict unravelled a series of events which plunged Syrians into an unescapable pit of pain and despair. Entrenched deep within Noha’s experiences lies not only the ruthless violations of her own rights, but a symbol of the all-round Syrian suffering since the beginning of 2011.
Sarah is a third year undergraduate student studying BSc Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University College London. She has a keen interest in human rights - with a particular interest in Middle Eastern Affairs due to her Syrian origins.