'the swallows of Syria'

uma reportagem impressionante. não somos nada.

 “They were five, their faces covered with masks. They broke into the house and went upstairs. Few minutes later, they came down with my son Ali, handcuffed. They brought him away with no explanation. ‘Keep your mouth shut, or we will kill you’ was the only thing they told me.”

 Sitting on the porch of her new house in the Bekaa Valley, the Eastern Lebanese region bordering with Syria, Somaya struggles to hold back tears while recounting the last time she saw her son alive. Three days after his arrest, Ali’s corpse was found in a ditch near Talbiseh, a small village close to the Syrian city of Homs. “He had eleven gunshot wounds in the stomach, the left arm was broken and both kneecaps had been removed,” she says. Following her son’s death eight months ago, Somaya moved to Lebanon, where she is trying to cope with the nostalgia of her beloved country and the desperation of a mother that cannot get peace. “Ali was a simple taxi driver—he didn’t like politics,” she says. “During the protests against the regime he used to stay at home because he didn’t want to run into troubles. Since his death, I pray to God every day to rid us of Assad.”

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