I took my brother's prosthesis with me to keep it with me. My brother is Shaheed, and I keep his prosthesis because he was an amputee before his dying. "The first thing I took out from my home my brother's prosthesis. On how she recovered things from her home before it collapsed "We lost them, but we didn't lose their faces, and their actions, and all of the things they shared with us." Ten students from Antakya are Karam House students. "I have my cousin, I have my friends, four. Eight members of her uncle's family died under the rubble. Shikhani says that in Antakya, every family lost family members. We lost them, but we didn't lose their faces, and their actions, and all of the things they shared with us. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Soon she'll be in a new home that the Karam Foundation has found for her in Reyhanli, Turkey. There she's staying with four other families in a friend's house. In a new conversation with Morning Edition, Shikhani spoke to Leila Fadel from Bursa, Turkey. Shikhani is a teacher at a school for other Syrian refugees, funded and run by the Karam Foundation. Arrest warrants were issued to contractors and others connected to the collapsed buildings. Her building was one of at least 173,000 that were reduced to rubble or severely damaged by the quakes in Turkey. She also gently walked through her damaged home to get things she needed before the building finally collapsed. And I don't belong here."Īlmost every day for the last three weeks, she returned to Antakya to help search and rescue workers recover the bodies of her uncle's family. "I look at the faces, the streets, all of these things. But I have the biggest pain that I don't belong to here," she said. “I want to send a message to Western countries to shoulder their responsibility and protect the lives of remaining civilians,” he said."I have a pain in my soul. As a well-known witness and survivor of the chemical weapons attack, he says he gets frequent threats from the government side, but says he’ll never stop talking about what happened. The Syrian civil war, now it’s in its ninth year, has left an estimated half a million people dead. My situation has become very, very tragic,” he said. I had already lost my children and now I’ve lost my country. “The final days felt like I was saying goodbye to everything I hold dear to my heart. As the bombardment got unbearable and the troops encircled the town, he decided to leave, fleeing with the masses to safer areas near the Turkish border. A new wave of civilian displacement began. He gradually found some happiness.īut then government troops began an assault on Idlib and the nonstop bombardment of Khan Sheikhoun returned. He decided to try and build a new life and a new home. Her hair is in curly pigtails and she is wearing a sleeveless yellow T-shirt with the words “Love” printed on it and a heart in the middle.Īl-Yousef said that after spending some time in Turkey for treatment after the gas attack, he then chose to return to Khan Sheikhoun, held by rebels. He sits on the floor and plays Lego with his 11-month-old daughter, whom he named Aya, after his first daughter. He stroked their hair and choked back tears, mumbling, “Say goodbye, baby, say goodbye.”Īl-Yousef keeps photos and videos of the attack’s aftermath on his phone that he flips through from time to time. In footage filmed by his cousin that was widely circulated later, al-Yousef, 29 years old at the time, is seen seated in the front seat of a van cradling his twins, holding them in each arm. They were among the 89 people who died from what experts have determined was an attack using sarin, an outlawed nerve toxin. He lost consciousness and woke up four hours later to be told that his twins and wife had died. He recalls how he ran to his brother’s house to find him and his family dead. The people he saw foaming at the mouth and nose. How he told his wife to take the twins to safety outside. How people started running out of their homes and onto the street, trying to help each other. It is a story he has told dozens of times, about how Khan Sheikhoun residents woke up at half-past six in the morning to the sound of explosions.
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