“They said to each other, ‘Let them die; it’s easier for us and for them'”
Fidaa fled Syria with her five children, one of them disabled, to Jordan, Libya and then across the Mediterranean, where she was rescued by the crew of Humanity 1 in July 2024 along with 74 other people.
[Content Warnings: Death, Child Abuse]
Syria
In July 2012, I left my home in one of the suburbs of Damascus. I was still in the postpartum period, and my youngest son, Jalil, was only eight days old. My husband had died four months earlier. It was nighttime when I started hearing calls from the mosques, asking all the residents of the neighborhood, especially women, children, and the elderly, to evacuate their homes and flee the area.
My brother opened the door and rushed in and told me to get my children and come immediately because the militias affiliated with the Syrian regime were slaughtering people in nearby neighborhoods and they were on their way to us.
I picked up my toddler, my two daughters aged two and four, and my autistic son Adil and we rushed out of the house. In my haste, I forgot that my eldest son Faris, who was about eight years old, was at his grandfather’s house.
In the neighbourhood square, they were collecting all the women and children, putting them in cars, and getting them out as quickly as possible, because the news had reached us that the militias were killing everyone with bullets and knives and they do not discriminate between women, children or elders.
When we reached a safe area I realised that my son Faris was not with me. I ran towards my sister and her husband – who came with us – and I begged them to go back with me, but they told me that it was impossible to go back, saying that the regime’s militias would kill me and my children if I did. The next day, they took us to my parents’ village in Daraa, a city in southern Syria, and my son remained in Damascus without knowing his fate, whether he was alive or dead. I couldn’t get in touch with his grandfather’s house because communications were completely cut off. After three days of my brothers searching and asking about my son and his grandparents, they found them and sent my son to me with a family we knew.
One day, a shell landed in front of the cellar we were hiding in.
And after the fighting intensified in Daraa, which is a border province with Jordan, people were fleeing to Jordan, so we took what we could carry and left Syria.
Jordan
We arrived in Jordan at the Zaatari camp. When we arrived, we lived in a tent, there were no bathrooms or any of the necessities of decent living, the summers were unbearably hot, and the winters were bone-chilling cold.
In 2014, my son Adil was kidnapped from in front of the house at the age of six, for the purpose of sexual assault. The man did not realise that my son was disabled at first, but when he started to approach him, my son started screaming and making involuntary movements that were difficult to control easily, so the man threw him out into the street to get rid of him.
After that, my children and I managed to escape from the Zaatari camp to a Jordanian city and rented a house there for almost four years. The UNHCR in Jordan stopped helping us because we were not living in the camp. The Jordanian authorities prevented any humanitarian organisation from providing aid to those outside the camps on the pretext that they did not receive enough support from donor countries and the UN.
After that, I couldn’t afford to support the family on my own. However, I was hearing from people and seeing on the internet that lots of people were traveling to Libya and leaving from there to Europe, so I decided to make the journey, after having stayed in Jordan for ten years.
Libya
We stayed briefly in a house [in Tripoli], but soon the smugglers told us that we needed to go to the “warehouses” where they gather people before sending them on boats to Italy. We arrived with the understanding that we would leave the next day, but we stayed there for a whole year.
Every day they only brought us four pieces of bread and we were a family of six. We were always hungry. Clean water was almost non-existent. Every two days they would bring us a few bottles of water that we distilled so we wouldn’t die of thirst. The heat was unbearable, and we were forbidden to leave the place, as the outer doors were locked and guarded.
Eventually, they brought a boat of seven meters long, and they put 79 passengers in it, including us, stacked on top of each other. It didn’t take more than four hours of sailing before the Libyan Coast Guard caught up with us. Water was leaking into the boat, reaching a height of 15 centimeters.
When the Libyan Coast Guard arrived, they started beating all the young men. Three young men jumped back into the sea due to the severe beating they endured.
When we boarded the Coast Guard ship, my son Adil, who has autism, was looking at the armed men beating the young men with rifle butts and he was laughing at them. He didn’t understand what was happening, but the soldiers thought Adil was mocking them, so they started hitting him with the rifles, and he fainted.
I was screaming at them, telling them that the kid did not understand what was happening. Later, when I asked the smuggler to return part of our money since the journey had failed, he said, “No, I will not return the money. I will send you on another, better boat”.
The total number of attempts was eight, but with more than one smuggler and from different places. They treated us literally like animals, with beatings, insults, humiliation, and restrictions on leaving and entering, alongside continuous hunger.
Finally, we embarked on what was the worst journey ever, from Tobruk, near Benghazi. They put us on a large fishing boat with four hundred people and told us the trip would take six days to reach Italy. The waves were four meters high. Worse, the smugglers had built an iron canopy on top of the boat and placed a hundred people on it. After ten hours, due to the movement of the ship and the high waves, the beams of that canopy broke apart and fell on our heads, and the hundred people who were on it got crammed among us, even though we were already sitting on top of each other.
The boat was full of children, and everyone was screaming and pleading for help. They had told us before boarding that there were life jackets, lifebuoys, and other safety equipment in case of sinking, but all of that was a lie. The captain of the boat called the smuggler and told him all the families wanted to go back, and the water pump on the boat had broken down. The smuggler offered the captain 300,000 Libyan dinars if he continued the journey to Italy.
When the captain told him the boat wouldn’t make it in this condition, the smuggler told him to either drown us or continue on the path but under no circumstances should he return us to Libya.
Then the captain’s assistant came and persuaded him to return, so as not to cause the drowning of all these children and women. Because of the boat’s size, we had to stop a hundred meters from the shore. Although the area was full of patrols, coast guards, and militias, no one came to help us. The young men on the boat began helping all the families and children reach the shore. They would carry each person who couldn’t swim by themselves, taking them to the shore and then returning to take another person. I was the last to jump off the boat after putting my children one by one into the water.
The men working with the smugglers were waiting for the arrivals, beating people with sticks. After the boat was emptied and no one was left on it, they went to the boat in a speedboat, boarded it, and stole all the belongings left behind.
Rescue
The last time we tried to cross, the satellite phone the smuggler gave us for emergencies was empty with no credit, the engine fuel had completely run out, and water was leaking into the boat.
We saw a plane, but we initially felt pessimistic, because the last time when a plane came and filmed us, the Libyan Coast Guard immediately followed and took us back to the shore.
When we saw [your ship], at first, we were terrified because we thought you were the Libyan Coast Guard, especially since your fast boats look similar to theirs. But when you got closer and realised you weren’t, we couldn’t believe our eyes.
In fact, we still can’t believe we are safe even as we talk to you. It still feels like a dream. But thank God you found us. Here on board, I can see how different the treatment is from your crew.
[This interview was carried out by Lukas Kaldenhoff, Communications Coordinator during Humanity 1’s 13th rescue mission, and has been translated from Arabic.]
