The Ukrainian-Syrian high school student missed the last three months of classes in Homs, Syria, out of fear of getting shot. The school grounds are between Syrian army and militia posts in one of the most violent cities in the uprising to topple President Bashar al-Assad.
Yet more than a year into the Syrian conflict, Idris Suleiman – the son of a Ukrainian mother and a Syrian father – has only two exams to go before he graduates from high school.
And that is one of the reasons his mother, like hundreds of other Ukrainians in Syria, has decided not to leave with him for Ukraine despite the violence in Syria. The civil strife, which began in March 2011, has left over 14,000 dead, according to opposition groups cited by the Associated Press. Many of the victims were killed by government soldiers loyal to al-Assad, who says his regime is being attacked by terrorists. However, an international campaign is mounting to oust the dictator.
Two Ukrainian citizens have been victims of the violence. A woman was
killed by a sniper in Homs in October, said Yuriy Grinivetskiy, the
Ukrainian acting consul in Syria. Another woman suffered minor injuries
and was repatriated to Ukraine, wrote Oleg Voloshin, director of the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Information Policy.
Idris’s mother, Tatyana Protsyk, said she hears shooting and shelling every day, yet doesn’t see a reason to leave the country. She will only leave if there is a “real” war in Syria and if “the earth will burn beneath our feet,” she said.
A rocket hit the corner of her apartment building in February, but there were no casualties, she said. A pipeline near her area of the city has been blown up multiple times, Prostyk said.
Many Ukrainian citizens refuse offered assistance because of family reasons, Voloshin wrote. There are currently about 1,300 Ukrainians registeredwith the consulate, and 637 have left in 2011 and 2012, Voloshin wrote.
“Seeing as we’ve come here – we have our husbands here, we have our children here – that doesn’t mean that at the slightest danger we have to drop everything, that I should leave my husband, leave my child without an education,” Protsyk said.
Protsyk said she also doesn’t want to leave her husband, whom she met as a student in Moscow. Now he teaches chemistry in a state university.
Grinivetskiy said it is hard to determine the exact number of Ukrainians who have left – not all of them inform the consulate before they leave Syria. And some go to Ukraine for the summer, making it difficult to determine whether they’re leaving because of the conflict or just to rest.
The Syrian ambassador to Ukraine, Said Akil, estimates there are 3,000 Ukrainians in Syria, and said he thinks that few have left the country since the conflict started. “I think that if they wanted to, they would have left. But seeing as they haven’t left, the situation isn’t all that bad,” Akil said.
Nonetheless, 85 Ukrainians have received free tickets to Ukraine from the consulate, and more are waiting in line. From the moment the consulate is informed that a Ukrainian wants to leave the country, it can take about two weeks before the flight, Grinivetskiy said.
Ukrainian citizens shouldn’t travel to Syria unnecessarily, and those who do should register with the Embassy of Ukraine, Voloshin said.
Neither Grinivetskiy nor Voloshin could give details concerning evacuation plans, although Voloshin wrote that evacuation would begin in the case of a “critical aggravation of the situation.”
As for how the conflict will end, Protsyk said she hopes for the best. Before the conflict she had no problems in Syria, she said. She could go out in the middle of the night and fear nothing.
“I’ve lived here for 20 years and I’ve never had problems because I don’t have the right religion or because I’m a foreigner or because I don’t speak their language very well,” she said.
Kyiv Post staff writer Fedor Zarkhin can be reached at [email protected].
