Three Years of Revolt: What Has Become of Syria's Revolutionaries

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http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/spiegel-revisits-syrians-it-has-met-over-the-years-a-959470.html



They have fled, they are hungry, they are doing what they can to survive: The Syrian civil war has caused great suffering since the protests agains President Bashar Assad began three years ago. We revisit some of those people we have met in our reporting.

Three Years of Revolt: What Has Become of Syria's Revolutionaries
By Christoph Reuter and Raniah Salloum
March 19, 2014 – 10:42 AM

Omar thought he would never leave his homeland. "Damascus is my city," the lanky young man with a furrowed brow said in May 2012. Even then, many of his friends had already left Syria, fleeing to places like Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Cairo.

Now, though, roughly two years later, Omar is sitting in a jail cell some 7,500 kilometers from Damascus in a Malaysian prison, locked up as an illegal immigrant. The 26-year-old's parents and siblings are still in Syria. They are among nine people from two families who share a room in the Syrian capital. Their own home, a house in the Yarmouk district of Damascus, was destroyed in a bombing raid.

Aside from the fact that Omar made it all the way to Malaysia, his family's story is far from out of the ordinary. At least every second Syrian has had to leave his or her home since 2011. They get by somehow, but for most of them, their situation becomes more precarious by the day.

It has now been three years since the protests began in Syria. Many of the people in Syria that SPIEGEL and SPIEGEL ONLINE has met with since then have had to leave the country in the meantime. But at least they are still alive. Since 2011, well more than 100,000 people have died in the fighting, according to United Nations numbers released last summer. Since then, the international community has stopped counting the dead.