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13 Maybe the Children Will Forget Antakya, Turkey: February 2013 Classmates Moutasem and Sarah watch their breath steam in the frigid February air. We are in the principal’s office of Muhammad al-Fatih, a secondary school for teenage children of Syrian refugees in Antakya, Turkey. The school has no heat. Still, it is better to freeze here than to be in Syria right now, my Syrian translator, Hazim, tells me. In Syria the army patrols villages and cities, killing suspected activists. Men, women, children. No one is safe. If the army could arrest the air it would. Hazim is a Sunni Muslim, as are the students here, as are the rebel fighters in the Free Syrian Army, which has been battling the troops of President Bashar al-Assad since March 2011. Syria’s Alawite minority and Sunni majority have been at odds for hundreds of years. The minority Alawites, of which Assad is one, dominate Syria’s government, hold key military positions, and enjoy a disproportionate share of the country’s wealth, much to the bitterness of the majority Sunni. Moutasem and Sarah and other children whom I will meet in the coming days have had their lives upended by a war made more complicated by centuries of ethnic rivalry. Moutasem is fifteen. He wears black shoes, pressed blue jeans, a red wool sweater. He slouches in his chair, has an easy relaxed way about him. His eyes stare intently. When he sees me shiver in the cold, he offers me his coat. His father, Wahob, was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and opposed the regime of Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad. The regime 213 214 lost and gone tried to kill Wahob in the 1980s, and he fled Syria with his family to Jordan. When Moutasem was seven, he went to Syria with his mother and two brothers to renew their passports. A Syrian border guard arrested them. When they entered the jail, they were stripped of their clothes, given gray prison garb, and put in the same cell. On a table Moutasem saw electric cords, stakes, ropes, hooks. At night he heard screaming. After the screaming stopped, his mother warned him, “Don’t say anything about Assad, or we won’t get out.” They were released without explanation after twenty-eight days and returned to Jordan. When Moutasem’s father heard about the revolt against Assad, he said the regime must fall. He moved his family to Antakya. “The Alawites hate the Sunni,” Moutasem says. “My father tells me the Alawites think Sunni are worse than Jews. They love to kill Sunni more than they do the Israelis. But, my father says, we will kill them now.” “You understand,” he says to Hazim. “Of course,” Hazim says. He watches Moutasem leave. “Fuck this war,” Hazim whispers under his breath so Sarah doesn’t hear him. I had met Hazim a few days earlier by chance. I was walking in downtown Antakya, trying to find a store where I could replace my broken cell phone. I had just returned to Turkey from a reporting assignment in Syria. No one I spoke to understood even the slightest English and I knew no Turkish. Then I saw a thin young man in a leather coat cleaning his glasses at a bus stop. On a whim I asked if he spoke English. “Of course, why wouldn’t I?” he said. He was Syrian, he explained, and had learned English in school. He spoke Arabic but was studying Turkish in the hope of finding a job. I told him I was a reporter and about to begin work on a story about the children of Syrian refugees. I not only needed a phone, I needed a translator too and offered him a job. Hazim told me he had fled to Antakya in December 2012. He was a twenty-five-year-old medical student in Taybet al-Emam, a village near Hamma, Syria, when the revolution started. He did not participate in the Maybe the Children Will Forget 215 demonstrations. He never felt oppressed by Assad. To him the government was like the mafia. If a Sunni man didn’t get a job, he said, “Oh, it must have gone to an Alawite,” and that was that. No big deal. And everyone knew not to discuss politics. Since he was a child, Hazim’s family told him, “Don’t talk politics.” He thought the rebels should not have resorted to arms...

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