Of out sudden, everything has changed. For the first time in years, we found ourselves as a part of this world again!

My country, Syria, has been going through complicated political and security circumstances for almost a decade. You can call it a war, this seems familiar to everyone. But the missing link is that this war is not primarily among Syrians as it is promoted, but rather among different countries and blocs fighting and using the local parties politically.

As a result, for almost a decade, the world has closed its borders, services, airports and embassies before us. We were flooded with sanctions, sanctions on everything. Great countries have deluded everyone that these sanctions target the government and its apparatuses. This is definitely a hideous myth because every Syrian today suffers from these collective sanctions more than he suffers from the interactions of the ongoing war around him in Syria.


So what should be done?. During the past decade the Syrians have professed using spatial fraud programs technically to be able to get access to some services on the Internet. Including communicating with their families in camps and various countries, subscribing in movies and series watching services, attending free available and even paid educational online courses, creating accounts on some of the social communicating websites, and hundreds of suspended services!


Syrians also collected passports in every family and put them in a locked drawer. No travelling is allowed. No entry visas. To get a visa you have to cross the border to another country and fill a huge application with dozens of identifications and onerous papers, and after weeks it comes with rejection. Although that you had paid the non-refundable fees which are equal to one month’s work salary in Syria.

Have I mention to you that our currency collapsed in value for about thirty times?
Another Syrians also fled to the various parts around the globe. They boarded the sea, some drowned, and many were lost in the forests until they reached Europe, the beautiful Europe.

Which received hundreds of thousands of refugees, who had sold their real estate assets or borrowed huge sums of money to be deposited in the pockets of smugglers, but only received hundreds on planes in a humane way and this is incomprehensible. Why does Europe insist that millions of people pass the journey of humiliation and oppression? Why do you pay millions in relief aids and at the same time prevent Syrians and Europeans alike from working to move the economic cycle in Syria?


Covid-19. The pandemic was spreading in different countries of the world. At first, it was so far away that some saw it as a tribulation from God to these peoples. Others saw it as a transient crisis that will be resolved before it reaches us. Everything arrives here late, if it arrives. But things started to get worse.

The other day, for example, I saw a friend of mine shedding tears because people are already starting to die and this started to form a transboundary crisis. I do not know the reason beyond her crying but it is one of two things or the two together, fear for people and fear of the virus.


This may seem reprehensible, but for the first time we felt that we are part of this world. The world that closed everything in front of millions inside Syria has become very close, and it has become in a crisis like us. Does this carry any kind of gloating? Certainly not, and this argument is rejected at all because the virus doesn’t distinguish anyone. So how does it feel to us as we see it killing thousands of innocent people everywhere, as it is killing the good people and not killing their rulers who forced us to a compulsory prison.


Yes, we do not have advanced emergency systems, and we do not have the capabilities to maintain this path. But we survived and still surviving a continuous war, and that is why, for us, the virus is a new chapter in the novel of the Syrian tragedy and not a new beginning. The difference is that we have been living the experience for a decade and the world has been living it for only a month.


To be realistic, we are not able to anticipate the following scenarios. Everything seems foggy and everyone is worried. We have closed most of the government departments that include armies of bureaucratic employees working with exhausted energy. We have equipped hospitals with the remaining medical equipment.

We have repaired equipment and imported other poor ones from countries that still consider us as belonging to their humanitarian platoon. One of the European officials comes to you and say that there are no penalties on the health sector in Syria, it is a manipulative talk.

How would we be able to buy and import anything when the accounts of the ministries are frozen, and the sanctions is extended to all the banking operations and transfers, and all the clients in Syria even from other nationalities? These are troubling details, how do we explain it to people around the world? How do we tell them that we are tired as much as they wanted us to get tired, and we got more than enough!


We are alive until this moment, and we sympathize with all people as much we are sad for ourselves, all of us who remained and those who have died and who have been alienated. Covid-19 has returned us back to feel a global suffering, after a decade of individual suffering. And as we wish for an individual salvation from the wars on our land, we wish all humankind a collective salvation from the virus and its effects.

Which we are wandering that if it affected the developed countries in this way, what will be the case if it reaches us?
We are listening to the news constantly. Whenever the electricity is back after a long time of cutting due to the sanctions imposed on importing the fuel needed to operate it. We are following you on the poor internet because the speed in our country is very limited. We are glad that you are continuing your education and work via internet.

We are still trying to do so but we haven’t succeeded yet. We’re happy that you can manage your bank accounts and you can order your needs online. We are still a lot further from this. In the time you innovated and improved these things ten years ago, we were running away from death. From one town to another and from one street to another.


We love you, world. We are waiting for a collective communal salvation that will bring you back to us and return us to you.

Waseem Al Sakhleh – April 2020