Hello, everybody. Thank you for listening to our stories.
My name is Heba Sawan. I'm 24 years old. I studied English literature at Damascus University. I come from a small town called Moadamiyeh al-Sham. It's a Damascus suburb, just 15 minutes to the downtown. My town is surrounded by a lot of military forces, the military airport, and there's the 4th division, the famous 4th division.
The town joined the revolution at the very beginning of the revolution. It started with a non-violent resistance movement. It was all peaceful. I came also from a revolutionary family. My dad has all the time encouraged me to join the revolution, to do what I have to do for my country. I have a very good relationship with my dad.
In 2011, I was arrested in Damascus for three days by the security forces after a peaceful demonstration. The regime started killing people and doing atrocities in my town. At that time we weren't able to take the injured people to the hospitals, so we had to learn how to be nurses. We had to take courses at the Red Crescent and from some pro-revolution doctors.
At that time, my dad and I tried to help, and to help those injured people. At the end of 2011 my dad was arrested by the regime forces. He is still detained now, and we don't know anything about him. After he was detained, we continued our way.
Moadamiyeh's sons and other people were forced to carry weapons and to defend themselves. After one year of peaceful demonstrations and peaceful movements, with the atrocities and brutalities that the regime committed in the town, its sons carried weapons to try to defend themselves and their people.
In 2012 the regime entered Moadamiyeh many times and committed many massacres. Every massacre was sadistic. Every religious holiday and festival, every day, they entered the town and committed some atrocities and massacres in Moadamiyeh.
The people in the FSA, the Free Syrian Army, decided they would not allow the regime to enter the town again, so they liberated the town in October 2012. After that, the regime wasn't able to enter the town or break in, so they started a new policy called “kneel or starve” or “surrender or starve”. They blocked all the entrances to the city. No one was allowed to get into Moadamiyeh or to leave it. Also, food and medical supplies were prevented from entering the town.
At the beginning of 2013, I was engaged to my cousin. He was with the FSA, the Free Syrian Army, and I was a nurse at the medical field centre. January 25 was supposed to be our wedding day, but he died from the shelling. The next day I went to visit his grave, and the 4th division were also in the mountains. The graveyard was exposed to the 4th division. They shelled the graveyard and I was also injured.
I couldn't continue my job as a nurse. I stayed at home with my cousin Ameenah until I recovered. At that time, the suffering and the shelling every day were covering the whole face of the city. People were trying to survive. They planted every little area. They tried to find food, but they couldn't find anything. Some people tried to escape from the town, but the snipers were ready and killed everyone who tried to escape.
At that time, we started to work with kids, because for the kids, their childhood was stolen. Their whole environment was full of violence, bloodshed, and killing. In their minds, their dreams—everything—were destroyed. We tried to do some educational activities, some entertaining activities for them, because all the schools were being bombarded. There was no school in Moadamiyeh. There was also no electricity, so there was no TV, and they weren't allowed to play in the streets.
We did a wonderful job with them. We tried to help them survive, to keep them busy, until August 21, when the chemical attack happened. My cousin Ameenah will tell you more about that day. After that day, when 82 people died, we had to continue our lives. We had to survive, but the suffering was stronger than we were.
You would wake up in the morning hearing the sounds and the crying of the kids. They wanted something to eat. At night you couldn't go to sleep early also because of their cries. Pregnant women were giving birth to dead babies. We witnessed a lot of mothers cooking only water with spices and salt and feeding it to their kids as soup.
Also, you might hear a knock on your door, and when you opened the door, you would find a little kid holding a plate and asking for something to eat. At that time, you would have that difficult struggle and that conflict inside yourself. If you had something, some food, and you wanted to give it to that kid, you would deprive yourself and your family of that amount of food, but then you would close the door with your heart broken.
We had a lot of suffering there. People started dying. More than nine people in my town died of hunger. More than 1,500 were killed by the mortar shells, by the shelling.
In the middle of October 2013, and in a filthy game, the regime opened a way to those people who he himself was besieging, who he himself was killing and detaining. He opened a way and allowed only the women and the children to leave the town in order to portray himself as a hero, as a saviour for those people who were kidnapped and held like hostages by the terrorists, which is not true. At that time, the media and the whole world were watching this operation of evacuation so he couldn't arrest any of us, but the regime humiliated us a lot and they forced us to chant to Bashar al-Assad. I can't forget that day.
After that, the regime and his forces tried to capture and to detain all the activists who were in the town. They arrested some of our friends and our family members in order to reach us, so we realized that we had to leave the town. We had to leave the country. We fled to Lebanon illegally and then to Istanbul. Then we had this chance to come to America and tell our stories to these people.
Thank you.