Francesco Tosto/BBC”Even now, I look back and wonder how we survived this nightmare,” Baraa quietly reflects.Now 20 years old, the university student joined the joyous celebrations engulfing the streets of Syria last Sunday at the end of Bashar al-Assad’s rule. Her two sisters, Ala and Jana, nod in agreement as we sit, squeezed together on this cold winter’s day, on an old lumpy sofa in their humble home in Homs.Their white-bearded father, Farhan Abdul Ghani, sitting cross legged on the floor, chimes in. “We did not want war. We did not want a forever president who builds monuments to himself.”Nearly a decade ago, we first met in the worst days of that war, waged in their president’s name. Baraa, a deeply traumatised little girl whose eyes darted wildly back and forth, struggled to speak then. “Sometimes people killed cats to eat,” she blurted out as she sat in a disused banquet hall milling with aid officials, Syrian security forces, and distraught families. For months, many had little to eat except grass pulled from the ground, leaves from the trees, boiled in water with salt and sometimes cinnamon.”Instead of learning to read and write, I learned about weapons,” Baraa told us then so matter-of-factly.Getty ImagesHoms was once called the “capital of the revolution” by peaceful protesters who first took to the streets in the spring of 2011 to call for change, before it turned into all-out war. Baraa and her family were among a thousand civilians rescued from the Old City during a rare UN-supervised humanitarian pause in February 2014. They somehow survived the agonising two-year-long siege of the old quarter where Syrian troops enforced their first “surrender or starve” cordon in this merciless war. This medieval torture tactic turned into one of their cruellest weapons, unleashed against one rebel-held stronghold after another.Months later, more civilians were also given safe passage out of the Old City, as well as the fighters who moved on to continue their fight in other parts of Syria.The years until this week have been hard on this family and so many others.”I felt as if I was asleep and I lost hope,” Baraa recalls as she adjusts the white headscarf worn by her and her sisters. “We were always afraid of saying the wrong thing, even at the university.”Now, like so many Syrians, she is brimming with palpable joy and optimism in these early heady days of a new start.”I am dreaming of so many things now, to finish university, to do a master’s degree, to improve my English.” Her voice trails off as her big goals fill this modest little room. A frightened little girl whose name means “innocence” had matured into an impressively confiden …
