Hadi Daia took a deep breath, and recited the list of casualties back home in Syria. He spoke effortlessly, without hesitation. For him, brutality has become all too familiar.
A brother-in-law’s uncle, son and father, knifed. A neighbor shot by a sniper for peering out a window. A friend tortured and stabbed with a hot metal rod. A friend’s father and sister shot. A friend’s father shot – on his way to morning prayers.
“But I can’t do anything,” said Daia, shrugging.
The small community of Syrians in Buffalo is feeling that same sense of helplessness, as they watch further bloodshed unfold in their country – and, for many, in their home cities of Damascus and Aleppo. Recent reports of President Bashar Assad’s regime’s massacre of people in the country’s two main cities have caused Syrians here to fear not just for the safety of their country, but for the safety of their families.
Daia, a resident of Damascus studying orthodontics in Buffalo, is permanently anxious. He just arranged for the evacuation of his 14-year-old brother, who will stay with him in Buffalo until he completes his studies.
He worries about his parents – still in the chaos-ridden capital – who tell him how scared they are. How any innocent person can expect a sudden death at the hands of a terrifying regime. How their hearts pound at every security checkpoint.
Buffalo resident Abdulfatah Hanoun grew up in Syria and moved here with his family and three daughters, the oldest of whom is 9. He lost his father the first time the Assad nation was threatened in 1982. He was 7 years old at the time.
The Buffalo News first spoke to Hanoun in March regarding the Syrian situation. The situation has grown worse since, and is now directly affecting him and his family, who reside in Aleppo. In March, Aleppo was among the safest cities.
“Before, the danger was just arresting people. But now they’re shooting people down from airplanes,” he said. “Airplanes can’t recognize who’s with or against the government.”
He worries about his family, and talks to them as often as he can reach them. He believes the Assad government is monitoring phone lines. He fears that anytime, he may hear he’s lost a brother or sister.
Syria is currently the fifth country steeped deep in the Arab Spring, following Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. Revolutionary efforts have brought down dictatorships that have ruled these countries for decades, bringing them inequality and poverty.
Syria’s revolution has been the bloodiest – with about 200 citizens dying each day, according to reports from the country. Thousands more are subject to imprisonment and torture.
And the death toll is on the rise.
Kofi Annan announced his resignation earlier this month as a peace envoy to Syria, ending the dramatic, failed six-month effort to achieve any sort of temporary cease-fire. He blamed the strength of the Assad regime, the increasing aggressiveness and most of all, the divided United Nations Security Council.
But Feraas Jabi, a Syrian who now lives in Buffalo, said it’s not the U.N. that can provide the solution – it’s the United States.
“We are a beacon of democracy here in America,” he said, “and it’s a crying shame we don’t support the people who want it. We supported Libya, but now, nothing.
“This bloodshed can end tomorrow,” he said. But he isn’t hopeful about that intervention coming, especially during an election season.
Jabi, who said his relatives are still in the city of Homs, said his grandparents are “old and depressed,” unable to do anything about the horror surrounding them. Whole families are getting massacred, and one of his friend’s were “beaten to a bloody pulp.”
Besides the torture, Jabi said, the cost of living and electricity has gone up. In cities across the country, people are waiting in line for bread, gas and other necessities.
Othman Shibly, a professor at the University at Buffalo, is active in efforts to help his people back home in Syria, which he left in 1991. But there’s only so much he can do.
“We witnessed this with the Holocaust. We witnessed it with Rwanda. We witnessed it with Bosnia,” he said. “And every time we say, ‘We should’ve acted sooner.’?”
“Why aren’t we?” he asked.
Shibly, like Hanoun, said the situation grows worse with the escalation of fighting in more and more cities. He blamed the increased violence on the regime, and said the Free Syrian Army had to bear arms in retaliation to the regime’s violence.
He talks on the phone a lot with his brother, who said he doesn’t know if he’ll come home each time he leaves the house in the morning. Shibly can hear the shelling outside his brother’s building through the phone.
Those wishing the best for Syria and its people need to focus not on bringing about Assad’s fall – which the Syrian community in Buffalo says is inevitable – but rather how to spare a post-Assad Syria from even greater murder and chaos.
There are great risks of sectarian bloodshed between Sunni and Alawite Muslims, loose chemical weapons and tides of refugees. Syria could become the focus of problems between Iran, Turkey and the rest of the Middle East.
The anarchy of a new government could be controlled, though. Money, planning and regional diplomacy with Turkey and the Arab League can help. Above all though, the Syrian community of Buffalo says the situation would benefit, just as with the current violence, from the presidential diplomacy of America.
Shibly is doing whatever he can to help the innocent people. He traveled in July to Syrian refugee camps in Turkey, where he hopes, through the university, to establish dental clinics to provide free care as part of the university’s “dental missions.”
Two dental clinics will cost about $50,000, which Shibly is trying to raise. Through the program, dentists can treat the refugees, who may experience dental issues through improper nutrition. Additionally, many experience dental damage from being beaten.
For other Syrians in Buffalo, they’ll help by increasing awareness. Jabi said that if he can get people to Google “Syrian revolution,” he’ll feel like he’s done his part.
It’s simple, he said. “If we don’t help them, they keep dying.”

email: meltagouri@buffnews.com