1/26/2024 0 Comments Instaling Urban TaleHassan explained that with no work opportunities and the high cost of living, on top of a constant risk of new villages being targeted by air strikes, families who saved some money would soon be left with few options: go bankrupt, engage in illegal activity, take part in the war, or use whatever money they had left to leave the country. Landlords are even starting to ask for advance payments”. I was paying 100 dollars, my relatives were paying 200, some 250. “When they know you’re displaced, the rent goes up. Hassan could initially send his wife to a village near the Syro-Turkish border, while he rented a house in a village 100 kilometres from Jarjanaz. Either we go into government-held areas and then risk our husbands and boys being forced to serve in the army, or we go into rebel-held areas and risk being bombed again sooner or later.” Marwa, mother of five daughters. “We tried as much as possible to stay near our village but it was unbearable anymore. Men snuck in the middle of the night to the closest villages that had not yet been struck, dozens of kilometers away to try to buy food or get it as charity. Returning to the village when the air raids stopped was impossible, because of undetonated cluster bombs and roving planes that would target the fields surrounding the villages as well as anything that moved. They had nothing to eat or drink for several days. Many families slept in the open at the mercy of the freezing cold weather. In the fields some families built makeshift tents, others sought refuge in underground shelters they had dug many months ago. For the next ten days, they stayed on the outskirts of the village. The shelling started without warning, explained Hassan, and most of the families escaped the village with nothing but their clothes on their backs. It was the last time I saw my house, and the last time I went inside the village. As soon as I arrived, the helicopters started bombing the village. I was heading back from the ‘Souk’ with my two sons. Marwa and Hassan tell the story of their family. After a month under the bombs, 200 families from Jarjanaz had to flee their village, reduced to rubble. In northern Syria, the Idlib region has been targeted by incessant bombings since the end of December.
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