A heartbreakingly honest story of a young woman’s escape from Syria during the war in 2011. Melissa Fleming is a UNHCR worker who hopes that telling Doaa’s story will educate and inspire action to create better experiences for other refugees. No person fleeing conflict or persecution should have to die trying to reach safety. Doaa was endangered many times and saw 500 people drown around her. She barely survived.
I think memoirs and recountings like this are crucial because they put a human face on such a faraway situation. Doaa’s story makes it pretty easy to imagine myself in her situation, with her close family bonds and her disbelief of what occurred around her. The fact that many nations experience this is tragic, something I wouldn’t think could happen in our modern age.
By the Syrian war’s fifth year, according to UN estimates, over 250,000 people would be killed and over 1 million injured. Meanwhile, 5 million Syrians, such as Doaa’s family, would be forced to flee across borders, while 6.5 million would be internally displaced, often forced to move several times to other parts of the country where they could find pockets of safety. By 2016, Syrians would become the largest displaced population in the world.
More lives would inevitably be lost at sea. Worldwide wars, conflict, and persecution had forced more people to flee their homes and seek refuge and safety elsewhere than at any other time since people began keeping track of the displacements. By the end of 2014, UNHCR would record close to 60 million forcibly displaced people, 8 million more than in the previous year. Half of those were children. Every day that year, on average, 42,500 people became refugees, asylum seekers, or internally displaced, a fourfold increase in just four years.
Half of the Syrian population (almost five million people) has been forced to flee their homes in order to save their lives. Another 6.5 million are internally displaced. Since March 2011, at least a quarter of a million Syrians have been killed in the fighting (some estimates double that number), and over one million have been injured. Life expectancy among Syrians has dropped by more than twenty years, and an estimated 13.5 million people, including 6 million children, are in need of humanitarian assistance. But half of those people in need are in hard-to-reach or besieged areas, making the delivery of aid very difficult, and in some places impossible.
