Syrians and Ukrainians share the same enemy

An enemy who has displayed complete disregard for civilian lives. An enemy who seeks to kill and destroy, to terrorise civilians and break their spirits.

On July 22, Russian warplanes attacked a poultry farm in Aljadida village in Idlib province, northern Syria. Seven civilians were killed, including four children. The injured were rushed to the hospital by my colleagues in the White Helmets, Syria’s civil defence team.

In more than eight months since Russia invaded Ukraine, the world has witnessed the same atrocities that Syrians have experienced — the indiscriminate bombardment of cities and the deliberate executions of civilians.

During the first few weeks of the invasion, we Syrians watched the news terrified, knowing full well what Putin is capable of. But we also felt a glimmer of hope. The whole world came together to take a stand against Putin and show solidarity with Ukrainians.

I wanted to believe that Putin’s war would be stopped. I never imagined that, instead, the horrors would continue to unfold with no end in sight.

Over the years, Syrians have documented and provided extensive evidence of crimes and violations, but our calls on the international community to take real action toward accountability were met with silence.

And it resulted in what is happening today in Ukraine. The failure to hold Putin accountable over the atrocities in Syria helped embolden him to attack and invade another country, a neighbouring country.

I want to tell the civil defence teams in Ukraine: “Stay strong, your work is valuable and you are on the right side of history.”

We in the White Helmets rush to pull civilians from under the rubble, evacuate the injured to hospitals and ease the suffering of displaced families living under the hardest of circumstances.

On one of the cruellest days of my life, I had to carry the body of a little girl I found beneath the wreckage of a destroyed home — she died alone after losing most of her family to the bombing. I kept her in my arms at the hospital until her relatives identified her.

We have been targeted by double-tap strikes — warplanes would retarget an area they just bombed in order to kill the first responders who had arrived on the scene to save lives and document evidence of war crimes. The White Helmets were also the targets of a Russia-backed online disinformation campaign trying to distort the truth about Syria with vicious lies.

As we approach seven months since the invasion of Ukraine, I think about the millions of people who were forced out of their homes, the cities burned to the ground, hundreds of schools and hospitals targeted with bombs. It feels like watching the last 11 years of Syria’s history condensed into six months.

We’ve lost our homes, hospitals and our kids’ schools to the Russian bombs. And now we have seen the same thing happening to Ukrainians. It’s heart-breaking.

I want to tell Ukrainian civilians that I share their suffering. I feel their despair and agony. I understand how hard it is.

World leaders must use all the leverage they have to pressure Putin to stop the horrors he has inflicted on Syria, Ukraine and elsewhere. Our children deserve to have a peaceful life. We are dreaming of the day we can wake up in the morning to enjoy a cup of coffee without worrying about losing a loved one to a bombing or a warplane.

This is what our life is like today. We worry every morning because the Russian warplanes are still roaming in our sky.