Casualties of Conflict

"My wife and I [each] thought that Amal was with the other. Many children were lost that day [post-bombing in Nawa, Syria]."
"My wife starting crying [at news that their child was not with relatives]. She just wanted to go back."
"If a motorcycle passes by our home, she [8-year-old child] comes into the room crying."
"The people are nice here [Cyprus], but it's difficult. Life in Syria is a thousand times better. ... Hopefully the war will stop and we'll be able to go back."
Jaffar Ismail, Syrian refugee, Nicosia, Cyprus

AP Photo/Petros Karadjias     Amal Ismail, 8, left, is seen with her older sister Alaa, right, 18-month-old Aryam, right rear, and mother Maha at the International Organization for Migration office in Nicosia, Cyprus. Amal was finally reunited with her family after she was mistakenly left behind by her parents when her southern Syrian town of Nawa was bombed two years ago.

 

A Syrian warplane had just bombed the southern Syrian town of Nawa in the neighbourhood where Jaffar and Maha Ismail lived with their two daughters, Alaa and Amal. Jaffar reacted to the falling bombs by running out in the street with his older daughter Alaa, unable to walk normally as a result of a congenital back problem. It seems that Maha was under the impression that six-year-old Amal was also with her husband, along with Alaa.

When they connected it became clear that little Maha was with neither of them. And somehow, in their panic, they reassured themselves that Maha was in all likelihood with one of their extended family members, so they fled with only Alaa. And the decision was made on the instant to vacate their town with the assumption that their youngest child was safe with Jaffar's parents or perhaps with one of his siblings who had sought haven in another village.

It's difficult to imagine, even in the panic of a bomb attack that parents would make such a decision; to move on without their intact family, leaving behind a vulnerable child of six on the assumption that she would be safe, that some one of their extended family who presumably with children of their own to take care of,  would have taken their younger daughter with them. But this is precisely what this father and mother did.

They crossed the border into Lebanon and in a several months' time-frame decided to go on to Turkey where they arranged passage on a boat to the northern coast of Cyprus. Once landed in Cyprus someone guided them to the south of the island. Eventually they contacted one of Jaffar's brothers back in Syria who informed him that the family was under the impression that Amal was with her parents.

Later calls to cousins led to the discovery that the wife of a relative had found Amal wandering in the street, and had taken her in. Eventually Mr. Ismail made contact with the International Organization for Migration and they put into motion the process of reuniting the little girl with her parents. Jaffar's brother brought Amal to the Syrian-Jordanian border to meet up with an IOM official who provided a Cypriot visa for the child.

In that two-year interim where Amal had been separated from her parents another baby was born to the parents. 

AP Photo/Petros Karadjias    Amal Ismail with her 18-month-old younger sister Aryam.

 

An Arabic-speaking woman escorted Amal on a plane to Cyprus and reunited her with her family. Reuniting the family had been no simple affair. The family like other Syrians seeking haven from the brutal conflict being fought by the Syrian regime against its own people, are given subsidiary protection in Cyprus which means that though entitled to rights afforded asylum seekers they are unable to bring family members to the country to join them.

This is when IOM Cyprus chief officer Natasa Xenophontos Koudouna stepped in to see that an exemption was granted the Ismail family after reviewing the case, enabling the reunion to take place. Father Jaffar mourns the loss of his carpentry shop, his three properties, his spent savings, but he yearns to return to Syria where life was "a thousand times better", than how the family is living in Cyprus, on a 900-euro-a-month state allowance.

Little Amal who still asks her father and mother why they abandoned her however, thinks otherwise: "I don't want to go back home", she states with the conviction of one who knows better.