Massar
“In Syria, they’re just waiting for their turn… because there’s nothing that they can do,” Massar, 19, talks about the fatal destiny of his friends and family still in Syria while sitting on the shore of the Pacific Ocean in Huntington Beach, CA, thousands of miles and 5 years removed from the country he has called home for 11 years of his life.
When I met Massar, one of the first things I noticed about him, apart from his goofiness and outgoing personality, was white hairs carelessly thrown up into a topknot on his head to match his easygoing personality. Later, as I got to know him and as he opened up about all the things the had experienced during his much too short life, I realized the reason why that careless topknot of his was adorned with so many not-so-careless white hairs.
Massar came to the U.S. with his family three years ago after waiting for resettlement in Turkey for two years. Originally from Baghdad, Iraq, he, along with his parents and two brothers, immigrated to Syria after his father was pressured to leak information by the U.S. that local insurrectionist groups would have rather had remain unshared. Later, they fled the war in Syria in 2012.
Here are some of his own recollections about his life back in Syria:
“Going out, out of your apartment or house, knowing that you are going to die, but then you come back safely. That’s how it is. You go out thinking, ‘Okay, this might be the last day of my life,’ but you make it back home, and you say, ‘Thank you, God.’
“I heard the bomb go off, and I saw my mom, and she was yelling and crying, and I thought, ‘What is going on?’ I started holding her. I didn’t know what was going on. And then the next day, they announced that three of my friends died. Two of them were bombed, and one of them got shot. They were sitting at a restaurant.
“There was a guy, that we used to play all the time, we almost spent at least nine hours a day playing with each other. He was younger than me. There was a day, when I went to Turkey, they posted a picture that he died. That he got shot.
“I keep it all inside. I never talk about this. The problem is, I keep thinking about it. Every time I’m by myself, I think about my friends in Syria, Syria itself.”