Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 7630 Plough Quarterly • Summer 2015 “Every day more families joined us when their homes were destroyed. It was a large base- ment – almost a whole floor of the house. By the end there were over a hundred people, still with no food or water. It was desperate. When we realized armed men were approaching street by street, we decided to flee. Not all of us, but many. Our destiny was death if we stayed. We decided not to wait for death to come for us. “We went out to the street. It was six o’clock in the morning, a new day. We ran to our car. It was a small car, only two doors, and all the children crammed in. There were eight people in the car. My husband, who drove, was the only man. The rest were mothers and small children. “We turned down a side road to avoid snipers, but what we saw was horror. Whole families that we knew, who had lived in our street and played with our children, were stood against the wall and shot. They were being executed, even the children. We screamed and turned another way. We were shot at, but my husband knew the area and we managed to escape by going down a small track between farms. I don’t know what happened to the other families in the basement. “There are still many families inside the town. They cannot move; they cannot leave. There is nothing for them. Shops are looted and supplies cannot get in. There is no medicine, no food, no clean water. They cannot get to the farms to take fruit or potatoes. So those families are already dead. “When I think of Syria, all I can see is this – and the mountains of bodies. The night before we fled there was a mass killing; as we were fleeing, we saw bodies, piled up. We saw men using those digger machines to move the bodies because there were too many to bury properly. “I wish these men doing the killing were from another country, an enemy country. Not this. Not our own people doing this to each other. It’s too much to cope with. “I am telling you this because these men think there will be no evidence of these mas- sacres. They think the bodies will be destroyed and their crimes will never be known. “Tell me that you will tell everyone what you have heard here today.” One young woman, Roha, is too nervous to let me record the interview or name her country. She is twenty-three, soft- spoken but determined. We sit to discuss the conflict’s impact on her family, but the conver- sation quickly becomes darker. Roha fled an area in the Middle East known for its heavy fighting. When I assume that was her reason for flight, she shakes her head, and her eyes dart to the men in the room. She asks that they leave, and I feel a creeping sense of foreboding. I’ve had conversations – too many – which demand that men leave the room, and I know what it means. “Although the fighting was very bad, we could live with it, we could survive. What we could not live with was the constant threat of rape . . . ” Roha trails off. I wait. Roha says the sexual violence escalated swiftly in her village. One day she emerged after a bout of heavy fighting to find the naked bodies of five girls, all between ten and twelve years old, laid out on the ground – a warning to the community to make no more trouble. It was clear, Roha says, that they had all been sexually assaulted. I don’t ask how she knew. I don’t want to know. The stories keep coming – one leads to another, and another, and another – a torrent, “Tell me that you will tell everyone what you have heard here today.” Jemilah, a mother