Amman: It has been a hectic three days covering the Syrian refugee crisis.
Now on the fourth day as I sit on the plane waiting for it to takeoff for Dubai, all I hear are babies screaming and crying. However, these children are not in danger, just restless.
Yet there are many Syrian children now living in Amman, inside and outside refugee camps who shed tears of another kind.
On the day we managed to gain access to the barren and unwelcoming Zaatari Camp in Mafraq, one father surrounded by young boys vented his anger at his circumstance. I tried to ask the children what they were feeling and the father said, “If the adults have lost their minds, what do you think is going to happen to the children?”
To think there are children in this world, in this instance Syrians, who, firsthand, at such young ages have witnessed the horrific and traumatic images of war, rape, brutal murder and torture. Images others might never see or only come across in the movies.
While some children dream of Spiderman, these Syrian children have recurring nightmares of the sound of missiles and the images of people dropping dead in front of their eyes.
It is hard to imagine the psyche of a 10 year-old boy who said to me with conviction but with tears in his eyes, “I want to see Bashar hanged in Hussain square.”
The UAE field hospital in Jordan has a psycho-therapy unit to treat traumatised children; but how do therapists even begin to erase the disturbing images or deafen the terrifying sounds in these children’s minds?
On our last day at the field hospital, one child about seven or eight called Mohammad, lay on a bed in the recovery ward with a fractured leg. He had fled Aleppo with his mother and he had been injured for more than six weeks before he was able to get his fracture treated, which he sustained from a fall while dodging bullets.
No matter how much we or the doctors tried to coax Mohammad, he refused to speak. He lay there blankly staring at us with a haunting look that can only be described as, not a broken, but a shattered heart. A look most definitely too mature for a child to bear; but then all the Syrian children I came across bore the same sort of look. The young ones I came across can no longer be called children because they have been robbed of their innocence and youth, they have had their childhood snatched away from them.
