The long road to freedom

May the Peace and all of Allah’s Blessings be with you, my dear sisters. Up until now, in Syria and Irak there are still prison camps / refugee camps. There’s a huge number of women and children living there. Over time some of them, only a few, have succeeded to escape, and the ways to leave are also a few. I escaped that place, by Allah’s will, and I want to share with you all the story about the way I did it. For me and my family, the only way out was deportation. On the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic arrived representatives from our country, but they were not allowed to come directly into the camp and take us, therefore we had to leave the camp using a certain way. Thus, we were notified about the day, time and place where we had to arrive, in order to be taken over by the soldiers who, according to the agreement between parties, were supposed to bring us to a certain place, where the representatives from our country waited for us.
And here we were, preparing for the road we were supposed to follow and being aware that only a small number of suitcases with personal stuff will be collected. On the appointed day, we all gathered to the place we were supposed to be picked up. We were all 11 families and after us some soldiers came in pick-up cars. They loaded us in those jeeps and took us to a nearby warehouse, where a big bus waited for us.
Soldiers, men and women, who stood guard at the doors, asked us to sit and forced us to blindfold ourselves, screaming continuously to not look around and to keep our heads down.
When our country agreed upon taking us, the soldiers promised to hand us over, and thus we were supposed to go by bus home. But that’s not the way it happened, because, again, they didn’t keep their word, taking us to a prison where we lost any connection with the representatives of our countries for a long period of 10 days. They unloaded us and our personal things from the bus and took us in a small place, calling each family one after another, searching all our bags and shaking them out. Then, they checked us, forcing us to take all our outer clothing. Thank Allah Almighty, we were all women there. When the searches finished and they handed us back our stuff, we observed that some of our things had disappeared, also our money and jewelry. There was no pint to start complaining, as we could end up beaten. After all this process, we were put into two rooms. In the room I was placed, a pretty small one, there were 18 people, women and children. It contained a sink and a toilet, situated behind a short wall. We were all tired, hungry and morally exhausted, waiting for an end to all of the challenges we went through during our staying in this country and for an escape to freedom, by the will of our Allah, but it seemed that He decided to still put us through trials for a while.
The whole 10 days soldiers told us nothing – why were we there, when will they let us leave? It was a hard time – 5 people sleeping together on only two tiny mattresses, being fed with few bites of food, only two plates of soup for 5 people. The only thing we enjoyed was that every day we were taken outside for one hour walk and, in the last few days, the shifts got confused and we had the chance to breathe fresh air even twice a day.
Under these circumstances, it was very difficult. The water was available only during a two days’ time, after following almost a 24 hour break, while we could not slake our thirst nor use the toilet; moreover taking a bath was totally impossible. There were several times when the prison’s chief has entered our room, asking us with an innocent glance whether we were fine and answering every time “tomorrow” to our questions about when would they let us leave. When finally our so-called term of being there ended, we were loaded again in a bus one morning, when it was still dark outside, taken further, with our eyes covered. We were glad that eventually, we could reach our freedom, but that was not the end of our trials. When the bus stopped and we took the eye-blinders off, we saw that we had been taken into another refugee camp. We were shocked. And the dread increased even more, as from that camp there was no way out.
Asira