What the People of Idlib Teach us about Resilience during Times of Apocalypse
Walid Abu Rashed and a fellow actor entertain children using puppets among the rubble of collapsed buildings in the town of Saraqib.
Photograph by Amer Alhamwe. Source: AFP/Getty Images.
Since April 28, 2019, nearly one million people have fled the region of Idlib, Syria and northern Hama. This is one of the worst humanitarian impasses in the Syrian crisis. Almost four million people are now trapped at the Syrian-Turkish border. The people of Idlib have been enduring a collapse of infrastructure, while gathering skillsets and community resilience that can teach us a few things.
The Syrian “crisis” began as a nonviolent revolution exactly nine years ago on this day, in a town called Dera’a when parents and thousands of community members flooded the streets on March 18, 2011 to demand accountability. Children in their town, aged 9–14, used markers to graffiti “the people want the fall of the system” on their school walls. The children were tortured in Assad regime prisons. In Syria, a struggle for dignity and freedom blossomed, despite the regime’s response — first shooting down protestors, then barrel bombing their neighborhoods, using chemical weapons such as chlorine, sarin, napalm, and committing crimes against humanity.
A rural-led, working class, largely women-organized movement emerged, one that continues in many areas to this day. It is their creative efforts that have kept society together when infrastructure has collapsed; in global media on the Syria crisis, it is their efforts that have been erased. As Hassan and Omareen write in Syria Speaks, an anthology of art from the Syrian Revolution, “Ordinary people…started discovering their artistic natures in a country where free expression was controlled and government regulated… for Syrians it was a radical departure from a 40 year long history of silence.”
For years, Idlib has gained a reputation as the mother of the revolution, a place where activists come to political consciousness. It became a liberated area before extremist forces seized the city. In Sept. 2018, it was agreed that Idlib would become a “deescalation zone,” where refugees could be guaranteed safety, and many were bussed into the Idlib zone from Ghouta and elsewhere. Assad began bombing Idlib again in April 2019 and his Russian allies shelled forty rural districts in Hama, Homs, and Idlib regions. Assad’s airstrikes began to target hospitals, including maternity hospitals, and schools. Assad and its Russian allies agreed to a ceasefire in Idlib during the Astana talks back in 2017. The ceasefire was reinforced by the Sochi deal in September 2019. Russia agreed to ceasefire again on January 9, 2020. But from February 1-Feb 4th 2020, there were 200 Russian airstrikes in Idlib alone. Since April 2019, the Assad regime and Russian forces have bombed 67 medical facilities under the guise of targeting “terrorism,” when in reality, it is civilians who are in the crosshairs of these invasions.
My mom’s activist friends in Idlib sent her videos in their Whatsapp group of their neighbors’ houses completely destroyed and pulling children out from piles of rubble, which I will not show you here because no video can fully convey to you the terror of having to pull a small child out from under rubble and glass. Many of these videos are available in full on YouTube as documented by civilians. Assad and Russian allied airstrikes destroyed blocks of neighborhoods in a strategy of theirs I call incremental death. The Assad regime and allies kill 1–30 people everyday for months, so the world cannot catch onto a full blown massacre. (If you kill 200 in a week, suddenly people become alarmed. But if you kill 10 every day, for 20 days, few can follow it.) They wanted us to not mourn, they wanted the events to be indecipherable and chaotic. Still, the people of Idlib documented their everyday losses and circulated them so that the world would know.
Turkish forces then occupied Afrin and blocked Syrians from fleeing to their borders, leaving 4 million people trapped with literally nowhere to go. Most of these people were already internally displaced refugees from Aleppo, Hama, countryside of Damascus, and other areas, so many are doubly and triply displaced.
I’ve included a list of the individual bombings from May 2019 that I compiled earlier this year so you can understand what two weeks in Idlib look like under siege, during a time of apocalypse. So what do the people of Idlib teach us about how to survive near total collapse?
- A spirit of collectivism and community-minded care. In Idlib, civilians are no strangers to mobilizing networks of care to rescue each other from under rubble.
Even under siege, the White Helmets, a volunteer task force of people who pull children out from under rubble, are diligently at work sanitizing local towns in preparation for corona virus. When the Syrian regime has already targeted hospitals, childcare centers, schools, as Waed el Khatebi and her husband put it in the documentary For Sama: Syrians are learning how to rebuild themselves, from scratch. Like Yasmeenat Souriyat, Syrian Jasmines, a group of displaced women in Maarat al-Numan, Idlib who provide psychosocial support for internally displaced people into their communities, and distribute meals during Ramadan. And Women Now for Development, a grassroots women’s collective whose center in Idlib has been targeted multiple times, reopened, and was recently bombed again.
When the government is not adequately equipped to care for its vulnerable populations because it is invested in deliberately targeting them, it is the everyday people who sweep the streets, distribute food, and provide basic relief. And devastatingly, those people become targeted again and again because they are doing exactly what the system does not want them to — insisting on life in a political system that operates on their death.
2. La Lucha Continua. The revolution continues. The crisis in Idlib has taught people to continue their struggle for freedom. Any crisis reinforces the necessity for social change, and that revolutionary spirit endures until we build a better world. Because there is always hope for a better future. The coronavirus has reinforced the inequalities and structural oppressions that many of us were already familiar with, and in our survival process, we recommit to a struggle for deep justice. There is always a reason to keep dreaming.
This is a group of activist women, mothers in Idlib and Hama, who held a protest against the bombings in May 2019 even while under threat themselves. Women and children hold signs that read “There is no other Idlib to flee to,” and “we are civilians, not terrorists.” One woman explains “Syrian women are out here standing today to confirm that the Syrian Revolution continues and we are the ones staying and carrying it on, like branches of the olive tree. Until victory.”
And today, in Idlib, these protests continue.
As one of the men in the video explains, (1:42) “This is a revolutionary spirit that no warplane and no weapon can destroy.” In the midst of one of the largest humanitarian disasters on this planet, the youth of Idlib are still dancing and singing revolution songs.
3. Humor makes life more bearable. This is something our revolutionary comrade Raed Fares taught us when he and fellow community activists in Kafr Nabel created humorous signs to challenge systems of violence. Remember that video of the child who would laugh with her father when the bombs came down?
That is the Syrian way. To be sarcastic, to make light of difficult situations, to laugh when times are bleak.
4. Children are the heart of our future. We must center the desires and wishes children have for a better world, and actually listen to what they have to say in these moments. They are the divine messengers.
In this video, a man in one of Idlib’s refugee camps asks the children: What do you wish for? The one in the green shirt says: I want to see my father released from prison, he’s been there seven years. All of the children in the video agree they want to return home. Children have the capacity to imagine worlds where prisoners are free, they return to their homes, and life is peaceful again.
5. Creativity is not extraneous, but a way to survive. You have to be creative when your basic rights to water, food, safety, and shelter are violated. To be alive when there are toxic chemical weapons, city blocks of rubble and destruction where children play, to be alive and use your creativity in that context, grow plants from earth and cultivate calm spaces and cradle loved ones when the world is on fire, that is a miracle. As Audre Lorde put it, “when children are given space for creativity, it is a way to pursue magic and make it realized.” When the school system has failed in Syria, hospitals are bombed and compromised, there are few supplies to work with. As a result, Syrians use bedsheets as theatre costumes, dirt and water to make clay pots, and survive through the use of art, using every medium they can to express themselves. Often these art forms move beyond the realm of the psychosocial and are used to communicate politicized messages to the world.
This youth group from the countryside of Aleppo created art magazines to teach children what to do when they encounter toxic debris or an unidentified body.
This collective toured a play across Douma while under starvation siege, and also create children’s magazines and theatre festivities to help children heal and challenge war trauma.
Another collective opened a school for disabled children in the rural countryside of Quneitra and use the arts — dancing, craft-making, and other forms for children to heal. As you read this, mothers in Idlib are finding creative ways to entertain and educate their children while under siege and while living with limited food and shelter in refugee camps. Mothers across Syria have been doing this for the past nine years. Instead of looking at refugees as populations who need saving, the rest of the world can be empowered and learn from their knowledges.
6. Survival depends on honoring earth and reconnecting with nature. Trees, plants, flowers, the soil itself carry healing properties with which we are meant to connect. Have you noticed during the corona virus people seek nature if it is around them? That is what will heal us as a people, from capitalism and other systems of consumption and oppression. Being around nature can not only provide shelter but also reduces stress, anger, and fear. It can lower your blood pressure and provide a range of therapeutic effects on the mind and spirit.
We can learn from the people of Idlib, the women and youth of Syria, who, crowded in underground shelters during relentless bombing, insist on creativity and connection when they are made to feel alone and scared. “The war zone,” Chela Sandoval says, describes “the metaphoric space where survival against all odds and the creativity of revolt under domination take place… The oppositional consciousness it generates travels differentially but with literacy across and through cultural spaces: it is a mobile, flexible, diasporic force that migrates between contending ideological systems.”
Sandoval theorized that Black and Brown women in the U.S. who creatively resisted systems of racism and sexism in the 1960’s-1970’s created a skillset, a methodology of the oppressed that embodied acts of prophetic love, decolonizing love. Syrian people today are engaged in a similar “multidimensional flow,” an oppositional consciousness that involves freeing the mind, body, and soul in a larger quest for decolonization and liberation.
They tell us again and again that our struggle for a better world in Syria has failed. But this struggle has only just begun. And in the U.S. and other countries, times of crisis exacerbate what we already know — a system that neglects the elderly, disabled, working class, a system built on slavery, anti-Blackness, Native genocide and xenophobia — is a system not designed to last.
The people of Idlib and the people of Syria, like so many indigenized and displaced peoples, have already survived the apocalypse. Instead of treating Syrians like objects that need to be saved, understand that Syrians have knowledge of how to survive the end of the world. And we do it with humor, compassion, and resilience. There is no need to despair when the brave people of Idlib, of Kashmir, of Oakland, of Gaza, global majority Black and Brown peoples, when all the brilliant, resilient, targeted mothers and children of this planet are fighting to hold on to their joy.
TIMELINE OF BOMBINGS MAY 1–19 2019 (In honor of those who have died and saw their lives destroyed before their eyes. Note: these were compiled from personal notes and friends’ Facebook pages when I was doing that every day. I am including this because I never shared it together, many of the pieces existed across the internet disjointed. The regime wants us to lose sight of these losses. This is also for the world to understand that even while under siege, the people of Idlib protest again and again. If you are familiar with Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower series, there is a part where the government attacks them with chemical weapons that burn their skin, and the government forces them into prison-like camps. That has literally happened here, and still our people gather and protest.)
May 1- A woman and her two children were killed after regime planes attacked their car near Abdin town, but their baby survived (pictured here). Their baby survived!
May 1- Assad regime sends five missiles that destroy a White Helmets center in Kafr Nabudah in Hama countryside. They destroyed a school in Qasabiya (pictured here.)
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May 2- an entire family is killed as a result of Russian airstrikes in Kansafarah town, southern Idlib.
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May 3- Assad regime killed 5 civilians in Ehsim town with barrel bombs. Russian warplanes bomb Furaykah village in Jabal Ziwaya. Villagers hold a protest in Maarat al Numan against Assad regime & Russian bombing.
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May 4- Twelve civilians were killed after Russian warplanes bombed Saraqib, Jabal Ziwaya, and Muhambal village in southern Idlib countryside.
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May 5-Russian forces bomb Orient hospital in KafrNabel. They also bomb Pulse of Life underground hospital in Hess village, South Idlib countryside (pictured here). Assad helicopters bomb al Faki village.
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May 7-Russian forced bomb Kafr Zita, Hama, killing a young man named Ziad Mahmoud al Raja (pictured here) & his wife (I couldn’t find her name). Assad regime & Russian forces bomb Ras al Ain, a town in Eastern Idlib countryside, killing four children. They also bombed Maar Tamater, killing two civilians in southern Idlib countryside. They bombed the outskirts of Ma’arat al Nouman city. On this day a rebel faction killed dozens of government soldiers in northern Hama countryside. I am mentioning it here because all sides of the violence must be documented. *Note that civilian protestors DO NOT EQUAL rebels.
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May 8- Assad regime forces drop barrel bombs on Heesh village in Idlib, killing three civilians, including Hana Jawhar as Saeed (pictured here). Four were injured, two women, two children.
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May 9- Assad regime bombs Abdin & Herash al Qasabiya villages with Phosphorous bombs in southern Idlib countryside. Read that again, phosphorous bombs, a self igniting chemical weapon that can burn the skin up to 4,800 Fahrenheit.
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May 10- a mosque in Marzita is destroyed by Assad warplanes. Assad & Russian airstrike on KafrNabel, three civilians killed, one of them a child, 12 injured with cluster rockets.
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May 12- a massive protest in Idlib City against Assad regime & Russian allied erupts at night.
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May 13-Russian airstrikes target a White Helmets center in Kafranbel. White helmets are the civilian volunteers who rescue civilians from rubble because no aid workers are allowed in.
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May 14-Russian warplanes bomb Hesh in the Southern Idlib countryside in the afternoon. Assad/ Russian forces bomb the town of Kafr Zita with PHOSPHOROUS bombs in the countryside of Northern Hama. Again, Phosphorous is an internationally banned chemical weapon also used by the U.S. in Fallujah, Iraq on children during the invasion.
May 14, 2019–6 civilians killed and 10 injured after a Russian airplane attacks a popular fish market in Jisir Shaghur.
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May 15, 2019- Russian airstrikes target Marat al Numan & killed a woman and man. Nine people were injured.
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May 16, 2019- Airstrikes bomb Kafr Roma in southern Idlib countryside injuring five civilians, including two children & a woman. Yazan Mohammad Shamali was one of those children (pictured here). Assad warplanes also bomb Ma’aret Humah & the town center of al Hass village, both in southern Idlib countryside.
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May 17, 2019- Assad regime bombs the civilian neighborhood of Maarat al Nouman. At least four civilians were killed including a child. People in the countryside of Hama held a protest for the world to see (picture here) (“To the international community: open the border for millions, or see us to our homes safely,” “we reject the Russian presence, Bashar al Assad & his regime”)
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May 19, 2019: A massacre took place in Kafr Nabel on this day in Southern Idlib countryside. 9 airstrikes. 9 civilians killed, including two women and five children. An aistrike also targeted Khan Shaykhun in Southern Idlib killing three brothers Abd al Razzaq, Abd al Qadir, and Abdullah Talawi, pictured here.
Rest in peace, and thank you Idlib for showing us what it means to survive. Please keep the people of Idlib in your prayers during this time, and world leaders: just as you mobilize to stop the spread of a deadly virus, listen and stop the regime’s violence so that the people of Idlib suffer no more. For more information, you follow these Syrian women journalists. Idlib lives.
