David Pratt looks at 10 years of war in Syria, in his own words and photos

The human cost of war can never really be told in statistics, but some of those in this report make for sobering reading. On average, 86% of Syrian refugee children surveyed in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and the Netherlands said they would not want to return to their country of origin. Of those children displaced inside Syria, one in three would rather be living in another country.

Who can blame them? As Bo Viktor Nylund, Unicef’s representative in Syria recently told journalists in Geneva, ever since 2011 when those first deadly nationwide protests descended into a deadly conflict, nearly 12,000 children have been verified as killed or injured in Syria. Or to put this another way, that’s one child every eight hours over the past 10 years.

This, too, alongside the hundreds of thousands of other Syrians who have died, the millions displaced and countless more that remain illegally detained, disappeared or living in uncertainty. For those journalists who, like myself, first ventured to Syria all those years ago, little could we have imagined that the suffering and bloodletting would still grip the country today. During that time as a reporter, I saw the plight of many who told of what it’s like to be trapped in this hellish maelstrom.

David Pratt with Syrian rebels

It was 10 years ago, during one bone-chilling March day as patches of winter snow still lay on the surrounding windswept hillsides, that I followed my guide into a pine forest just inside Syria over the border from Turkey. His name was Abu Fahdi, a grey bearded but sprightly 61-year-old elder who himself had then recently fled from his Syrian hometown of Latakia. It was a comparatively short march to our destination, the rebel camp hidden deep in the woods.

The men there were an assorted bunch, some foreign fighters but mostly Syrians. Almost all used a nom de guerre to hide their identity for fear of reprisals against relatives still living in government-controlled areas. Some too had even taken the precaution of wearing balaclava ski masks in the presence of this visiting foreign journalist.

One man, who simply introduced himself as “Khalil”, was a former Syrian soldier who had defected to the rebel side. Another named “Mazzan” had worked for a shipping line on the Black Sea, before taking up the Kalashnikov rifle he was holding, to fight the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

“We tried to hold them back, but we have no real weapons, only rifles and pump-action shotguns,” complained Khalil, as the men recounted to me their hasty retreat after being routed the day before in a battle with government forces. Syria’s revolution was in its early days back then but already there were ominous portents of things to come. As Khalil spoke, his agitated eyes – peering out from holes in his ski mask – told of the traumatic experience he and the others had undergone. As the men milled around, I couldn’t help noticing that their boots and clothes were still caked in mud after the trek from the battlefield.

Today, it’s hard to comprehend that 10 years have passed since that encounter with those rebel fighters in Syria’s Idlib Province. It’s harder still, as most certainly it must be for most Syrians, to accept that in a world preoccupied with a pandemic few outside Syria pay much attention to the hardship and pain still endured by so many both inside and outside the country.

IN the years following that initial foray into Syria’s war, I would meet too those that suffered most, innocent civilians, women, children, the elderly, and those who were already impoverished even before the ravages of war descended.

On night time beaches in the Greek islands I would talk to fathers and mothers clutching their children who had stumbled ashore, soaked, frozen, exhausted, and frightened. Sometimes too we would hear of those whose sea crossings in search of sanctuary had come to a lonely unimaginable end in the waves of the Aegean. In the sectarian and ethnic cleansing, proxy wars, and Islamist extremist rule that have been the hallmarks of Syria’s conflict, everything imaginable has been used to kill its people: Sarin nerve gas, barrel bombs, airstrikes, shelling, siege, starvation.

In the city of Raqqa, once the stronghold of the Islamic State group, I found that death was everywhere. Sometimes it lurked beneath the mountains of bomb-blasted rubble and pancaked buildings. Other times it peeked out from beneath the earth in the form of bones, hair, and decomposing flesh the colour and texture of ancient, dried parchment.

Often it moved around the city, its stench drifting on the humid breeze, creeping into the nostrils and psyche when you least expected it. IT was in Raqqa, too, that I met 30-year-old Mahmoud Jassm, leader of the Civil Defence Team, whose grisly and dangerous job it was to clear away the dead before disease took its toll.

“Such a waste of human life and the terrible destruction of the place in which we once lived, it makes me so angry,” Mahmoud told me one afternoon as he and his team uncovered another mass grave.

“Sometimes at the end of a day, I feel no good,” Mahmoud confessed shaking his head, his whole demeanour that of man on the edge of despair. None of this, the killing, the atrocities, the destruction, and displacement happened in the shadows. For those journalists like me, Syria often proved a difficult conflict to cover, the dangers profound and access all too often limited. But cover it we did, and the world therefore cannot pretend that it didn’t know. This, however, has not stopped a growing sense of collective amnesia about Syria or claims that what goes on there is not “our fault”. As Save the Children’s report starkly reminds us, Syria’s crisis remains almost a complete and utter international failure in terms of protecting the innocent.

“I wish to live in any country other than Syria, where it’s safe and there are schools and toys. It’s not safe here, the sound of dogs scares me, and the tent is not safe,” says seven-year-old Lara, one of the children interviewed for the report who now lives with her family in Idlib, that very same province that I journeyed into those 10 long years ago.

What a sad thing it is that the suffering of people like Lara still goes on. Just as sad too, is that more than ever the world looks the other way.