13-year-old Veh Christ Harboyan attends football practice in Furn al-Shubbak. Sept. 15, 2023. (Credit: João Sousa/L'Orient Today)
More than two dozen people have been struck by stray bullets in Lebanon so far this year, according to a count by L’Orient Today. The below testimony is part of a project by L’Orient Today and L’Orient-Le Jour to document the endemic problem.
Click here to see our ongoing stray bullet tracker and read other testimonies.
FURN AL-SHUBBAK — Sometimes, when automatic gunfire starts its metallic pops in the distance, the coaches at Beirut Football Academy (BFA) send their trainees to shelter under the thick concrete bleachers.
Luckily, today the sky is quiet.
A few dozen boys teetering somewhere between childhood and teenage years line up in their football jerseys for sprints and practice drills.
“Keep your head up!” one coach shouts, while the boys dribble footballs across the field managed by BFA in a dense residential neighborhood just south of Beirut. “Offsides!”
Among the boys is a curly-haired, lanky 13-year-old Veh Christ Harboyan, a hardcore Cristiano Ronaldo fan who effortlessly sprints around the astroturf. Outwardly, there’s nothing to suggest the life-threatening injury he suffered earlier this year. Yet lodged behind his right shoulder, jammed up next to his lung, is a bullet.
13-year-old Veh Christ Harboyan attends football practice in Furn al-Shubbak. Sept. 15, 2023. (Credit: João Sousa/L'Orient Today)
“It’s more dangerous to open it and take out the bullet than to keep it inside his body,” his mom, Hasmig Harboyan, explains from the bleachers. “It will be there for the rest of his life.”
It all happened so fast.
In January, after Veh Christ’s BFA team lost a match in Bir Hassan, the boys were lining up to board a bus back home. Suddenly Veh Christ’s teammates heard him crying and saw the then-12-year-old on the ground. One of them ran up to their coach, Elie Haber, and told him something was wrong.
Haber says he didn’t hear any bullet sounds. “I thought at first he was upset because we lost the match. I asked him what was wrong, and he couldn’t speak.”
Somehow, Veh Christ managed to tell Haber his back was in pain. When Haber and a physiotherapist checked him to see what was wrong, he found blood — and an unmistakable tiny round bullet hole in the boy’s t-shirt. “What else could it have been?”
“He asked me, ‘it’s a bullet, am I going to die?’” Haber remembers.
“I told him ‘no, no, you’re not going to die.’”
‘Mom, why are you crying?’
According to what police told the Harboyans in the days after the incident, the bullet came from a group of about a dozen men in a nearby neighborhood who had shot into the air during a funeral.
Bullets in Beirut. (Credit: João Sousa/L'Orient Today/File photo)
There was no way to know which of the men shot the bullet that landed in Veh Christ’s back, so the family decided not to press charges. An ISF spokesperson said they were unable to provide more information on the case by the time of publication.
Meanwhile, Veh Christ had a long recovery ahead of him, even after the week he spent in the hospital.
“He had all these machines on him,” Hasmig remembers. She spent those first, nightmarish few nights at the hospital with him, afraid to leave his bedside.
“I used to cry sometimes in silence after he went to sleep, and sometimes he would say, ‘Mom why are you crying? Look, I’m good, I’m fine. Don’t cry.’”
“So he gave me a lot of support. He’s my hero.”
Two months later, Veh Christ was back on the field, though “not playing fully,” Haber, his coach, says. It took longer until he could sprint at full speed, or play a full game of football. Even now, sometimes it hurts a little to breathe heavily with the bullet still lodged next to his lung.
Still, with characteristic calm, Veh Christ dismisses it as “nothing.”
A bullet-ridden street sign in Tayyouneh, near the football field where Veh Christ attends practice. (Credit: João Sousa/L'Orient Today/File photo)
Of course, there are the lasting mental impacts. “Sometimes when I hear sounds, I just wonder if it’s fireworks or bullets,” Veh Christ says. “And I get scared. I try to find a shelter to go under it.”
“He’s still scared,” Hasmig jumps in. “Still today, even his brothers, even me. We are all scared now, we have the trauma.”
Even so, Veh Christ looks antsy to head back down to the field, where his teammates are doing their practice drills. Eventually, he asks if it’s alright for him to be done with his interview, and out he sprints from the bleachers for a practice match, overlooked by the surrounding apartment balconies.
But just beforehand: “It should be safe for everyone to play wherever they want,” he says. “It’s their right.”