A Wheelchair View of the Syrian Civil War

It’s bad enough to be forced to run for your life.

Many Syrians experience that on a daily basis, fleeing an attack from one side or the other in the civil war.

Now imagine not being able to run when an attack comes.

That’s what happened to Thaer Bilal.

When his village near Aleppo was bombarded, he watched through a window as neighbors ran down the street for safety.

Wheelchair bound, he couldn’t join them.

“I crawled on the floor to the bathroom as since we were children they told us the bathroom is the safest place in the house,” Bilal says. “So I stayed there for a while. I can’t tell you how long it was but it felt very long, until the shelling quieted down.”

I feel that fear and death surround me. There is nowhere for me to go, and I am staying and I am scared. And since then I get this fear attack, panic attack that makes me shake like a leaf, and I just sit and wait for death to come by. I have since left my village, and now I’m homeless.

I feel lost, and I don’t know what to do. I can’t describe you in words my state of fear, being afraid for my life, being afraid of the next attack, being afraid of the next Syrian Air Force assault, and there is nothing I can do.”

Bilal’s interview first aired as part of the BBC World Service program “Outlook.”

Chavia Ali was also interviewed on the program.

She contracted polio as a child in Aleppo and, like Bilal, she’s now in a wheelchair.

In 2004, Ali created an organization that fights for the rights of people with disabilities in Syria.

She now lives in Sweden.

But she says her friends still in Syria have suffered because of the war.

“I know more than 25 of my friends with disability,” she says. “They face what [Bilal] faced, and some lost their lives at the end of the attacks.”

Ali says that’s what it’s like for disabled people trying to cope with Syria’s civil war.