The barrel bomb crippled my legs. Now, we live in cold ruins…

We are kindly invited into a room with a small stove, which was donated by a Syrian charity organization along with some fuel, medicine, and basic food. Wind blows through the foil that covers the windows, and there are no doors. You can feel the ever-present cold even through the mattresses on the floor. After a while, our limbs start to shake. There are muffled voices in the dark. There is no electricity or water, and there never will be. We light candles to see each other and the room.

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In the weak light, we can see that there are five children huddled around the stove. Aisha, Sedra, Rama, Muhammad and the youngest, four-year old Abdo, could not curtail their curiosity and came to look at the unusual visitors. “This is a bad place- drunks and junkies used to hide here. We found it by pure luck. Before, we had to sleep alongside the children in parks and gardens for three months,” their father, thirty-seven year old Abo Abdo, remembers.

I just remember being pulled from underneath the ruins…

Abdo’s wife, twenty-eight year old Om Abdo, stares blankly into the flames. She hides her crippled legs under a blanket and after a while tells the story of an ordinary family from Aleppo. “Before the war, my husband was a fruit vendor. I took care of our household. We did not have much money, but we lived happily,” says Om Abdo. When the fighting started, their modest income got even smaller and food prices increased.

But they had no idea that the war was going to reach their home in the neighborhood of Bustan-Al-Kasr. “It was around the end of May, my husband was going to look for work in Turkey,” Om Abdo remembers. “I was going to bed around midnight when I heard the roar of government helicopters,” she says, and first tears appear in her eyes. Everything happened very quickly afterward.

“I ran out of the house to protect my youngest child,” she explains. Her house was quickly hit by a barrel bomb. “When I woke up, I heard the cry of my children and saw the faces of people who came to rescue me from the ruins.” Her legs were severely wounded and there was no chance of a decent treatment in the bombed-out Aleppo.

I am not happy, but it could be worse…

Abo Abdo decided to flee to Turkey with his family. “I paid 900 USD to the smugglers. We arrived in Gaziantep on May 28th and my wife spent the next three months in the hospital. They had to amputate part of her leg,” he said. After she recovered, they decided not to return to the refugee camp. “She could not stand the fact that someone would have to carry her to the toilet every day in front of all the other refugees. There is no privacy,” he notes of the conditions in the refugee camps.

They have called the ruined building home for months, enduring both the cold and the noise from the busy main street nearby. Without doors or windows, they are an easy prey for thieves. “Our relatives already have their passports-the most precious thing-  stolen, I cannot keep my family here for much longer,” says Abo Abdo. “I would love to go back to Aleppo, to have water and electricity again, to send the children to school,” says Om Abdo. She falls silent for a while, gives us a sad look and finally says: “I am not happy here, but it could be worse…”

The conflict in Syria enters its fifth year this Sunday. The worst humanitarian crisis in the world grows more and more dire each day. More than 12.2 million Syrians are in acute need of humanitarian aid, and more than 7.6 million people are displaced inside the country while 3.8 million people have fled abroad.

People in Need’s aid in Syria

Since the fall of 2012, People in Need directly supported 1.4 million people in Syria and another 1.2 million people indirectly. We provide mostly food and material aid , distributed by a voucher system. We also support schools, teachers, and local services including garbage removal and water distribution.