Six messages of hope from six years of conflict

On 15 March 2011, major unrest broke out in the Syrian cities of Damascus and Aleppo, escalating a civil uprising triggered earlier in the month in the southern city of Daraa. No one could have foreseen that six years later we would have witnessed so much death and destruction and yet, still not see an end in sight.

Here’s a small piece of six individuals’ stories:

When Fahed grows up he wants to be an electrical engineer because he loves to fix his toys when they break. Fahed lives with his family in a camp for displaced people in Lebanon.

Basma works as a trauma care trainer for a Tearfund partner in Jordan.

Badly traumatised by their experiences of war in native Syria, Ahmad and his two siblings attend a school run by a Tearfund partner for refugee children, and have made great progress. He wants to be an engineer so he can rebuild his country.

Lucas works for a Tearfund partner caring for displaced families trapped in Lebanon.

We met Tahira in 2012, living with her husband and four children in an abandoned building, which had been destroyed by the Lebanese war some years before. The family had been forced to flee Syria with only the clothes on their backs, and they had already struggled through one winter with plastic sheeting hanging in place of the missing walls.

Raya works for a Tearfund partner in Syria managing aid distributions through a network of Syrian churches.

God is present in the midst of the pain – he sees and knows each individual. He hears their cries and ours on their behalf. Will you join us in praying for Syria?

Names have been changed to protect identities.

What Tearfund are doing

Tearfund have been responding to the crisis in Syria for several years by working through a number of local organisations and church networks across the country.

We serve around 7,000 people a month by providing food, basic needs such as blankets, cooking utensils, and health and hygiene requirements, such as soap and women’s sanitary items. In addition, 1,500 people took part in our peacebuilding programmes in 2016.

We have recently been involved in distributing food and clothing to 820 households in Aleppo. Aleppo was once Syria’s largest city, with about 2.3 million people living there. Since the middle of 2012 it has been a major battleground in the civil war. In December 2016 government troops took back control of the city.