Jassim al-Khalaf, his wife and their children, at the village school of al-Mismiya, displaced from the province of Sweida. Photo taken on July 22. (Credit: Caroline Hayek/OLJ)
Soumou was nearly abandoned on the side of the road — or so says young Waad, who cradled the 15-day-old infant against her chest as she fled. The Bedouin woman and her four other children — ages 8, 7, 5 and 3 — fled alone for hours without food or water before they were captured last Thursday near the village of Shahba, north of Sweida, by fighters from Druze factions."In the panic, I thought about leaving my baby behind, because the others were lagging. What a strange idea to name him Soumou — ‘highness’ in Arabic. I should have named him Qassef, meaning ‘bombardment,’" she says, without irony.Her sister-in-law Nesrine carried nothing but the family record book, sealed in a plastic bag. “We’ve lost everything,” she says. “We didn’t have much to begin with, but that’s always the fate of the poor.”Nearly 1,000 Sunni Arabs like...
Soumou was nearly abandoned on the side of the road — or so says young Waad, who cradled the 15-day-old infant against her chest as she fled. The Bedouin woman and her four other children — ages 8, 7, 5 and 3 — fled alone for hours without food or water before they were captured last Thursday near the village of Shahba, north of Sweida, by fighters from Druze factions."In the panic, I thought about leaving my baby behind, because the others were lagging. What a strange idea to name him Soumou — ‘highness’ in Arabic. I should have named him Qassef, meaning ‘bombardment,’" she says, without irony.Her sister-in-law Nesrine carried nothing but the family record book, sealed in a plastic bag. “We’ve lost everything,” she says. “We didn’t have much to begin with, but that’s always the fate of the...