“They couldn’t beat up his soul”. I keep repeating this to myself, because I need to find a part of this man which hasn’t been tortured. A piece of peace.
I was told his story a few days ago, and now that his wife is telling it again, I keep searching for an intact, pure part in this man.
I’m looking for a tiny fragment of peace, an untainted space, a fertile and uncontaminated soil.
At night, I cannot sleep because of the heavy rain tapping on the tent, and I keep thinking over him, and I keep searching for a silent and intact part in his story.
He was freed from prison after 6 years, and arrived in Lebanon a few weeks ago. But Lebanon doesn’t want him now, he could be arrested anytime and “deported to Syria in 4 hours”, as a recently approved Lebanese law states.
Six years ago, he was separated from his wife, pregnant with their first child, he was arrested, beaten up, isolated in a dark room, and he could only breathe violence, eat violence, experience violence for 6 years.

A few days ago Paola, Inès, Valerio and I went to Bebnine to visit a family that has just lost their baby.
One of our Syrian friends had asked us to visit them a few days before, in order to understand if they needed something, or even just to meet them. We had put the request in our to-do list of visits, thinking that sooner or later we would complete all the visits, despite our hundreds things to do and the frenzy of some days at the camp.

We get inside their house. The air is thick. The baby’s mother is constantly drying tears from her eyes. She is really beautiful, with freckles on her face. She is young. The baby’s father is down on his knees, staring at the floor. Their son was 7 months old and died in the hospital of Tripoli.

This is not a war, a word so far accepted. This is an industry of shit to create orphans, refugees and widows. Its next goal is Idlib. Four million people, run by the devoted forces of jihadist violence. Who run the industry has no idea of what he is doing, they will not pay the unacceptable and inhumane cost of such a love for violence. Of such an inability to find human solutions. There will be other deserts, other millions of refugees, new desperation to add the one already present in Lebanon, where we live since years. It is unbearable for the ones who suffer it; it is perfectly bearable for those who caused it.
It would be necessary to coagulate a world community that agrees on simple values such as “don't kill civilians”.

In one of the first spring days, we are sitting in a tent, in Tel Abbas. Winter seems far behind as well as the cold and the intrusive mud in the streets. Someone knocks at the door, we open and Abu Suliman from Homs appears at the entrance. He has a gloomy look, far looking over the border, in the lands where is still winter in the men’s hearts. “Look here”. He tells us of an attack with sarin gas in Khan Sheikkun, a small village at two hours’ drive from our position in northern Lebanon. Two hours distant as two centuries. In his phone, I could see horrible images, children piled one on another in dreadful positions. Their eyes wide open and a pale complexion. Some have a white slime coming down from the mouth. Eyes still full of terror, a violence to the heart and to the mind of any observer. Abu Suliman speaks in spurts, calibrating each word, without exaggerating and with no hurry in expressing his feelings. “How can you kill so little human beings in such a manner?”.