The 10-year-old Shahad is a displaced woman living with her family in a refugee camp in Idlib, the almost last stronghold of Assad’s opponents, where families with homeless children live in the freezing winter. Her answer to a question from Al-Jazeera reporter “What do you wish for the new year?” – is another pinching reminder of the atrocities on Syrian soil, since the outbreak of the civil war
In recent days, a video of a 10-year-old girl named Shahad, who lived in a refugee camp in Syria, broke Arab networks. This is an excerpt from a tour of the Qatari al-Jazeera channel in the northwestern province of Idlib, which is the last significant stronghold of Assad’s opponents.
“What do you wish for 2022?”, The reporter asked the girl – who answered with tired eyes: “I wish for a tent”. Shahad is displaced from one of the refugee camps in Idlib who, like many Syrians, including children, lives in harsh conditions – which become particularly cruel during the winter season. This is an area that has become a refuge for thousands of Syrian families, who live without shelter.
More than a decade has passed since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war. The main goal of the Assad regime is to “rebuild the country.” Bashar al-Assad himself won the presidential election again in May, and this is his fourth term in office since replacing his father in 2000.
In April 2020, a UN organization blamed the Assad regime, for the first time explicitly, for the use of chemical weapons in its war against the rebels. Sarin and Chlorine three times in March 2017. All the attacks were on a village in northern Syria and more than 100 people were killed in it.
In response to the chemical attack in early April 2017, two U.S. Navy ships fired 59 Tomahawk missiles at the Syrian Air Force base in Homs from which the planes carrying out the attack took off. It was the first time the White House had ordered a military offensive against Assad’s forces.