Türkiye as the last ray of hope 

There are some life stories that, as you read them, bear witness not only to a personal journey but to the darkness of an entire era. The story of Syrian orthopedic surgeon Dr. Mohamad el-Khatib and his wife, Ruba, is exactly one of those stories.

To dismiss the half a million people killed by the Assad regime as mere statistics prevents us from seeing both the true scope of that darkness and how our country rose over it like a sun.

It all began in Eastern Ghouta. While the world watched the news of the siege on television screens, the people of Ghouta woke up and went to sleep with death every single day.

Houses, schools, bakeries and hospitals were targeted; starvation was weaponized. El-Khatib served as a surgeon in field hospitals. While he fought to save lives in operating rooms under bombardment, the hospital itself was targeted multiple times.

The chemical attack on the night of Aug. 21, 2013, became one of the darkest pages etched into human memory. Children poisoned in their sleep, mothers gasping for breath, hundreds of lives extinguished in a single night.

Yet war did not just bring death. It slowly tore people away from their homelands, memories and futures. After the family’s home was struck multiple times, it was completely destroyed.

To protect their children, they dug an underground tunnel. But the reach of war found them there, too. In one bombardment, the tunnel entrance was hit; health care workers and children lost their lives. El-Khatib’s daughter was wounded, and his brother was martyred by a sniper’s bullet.

When Ghouta fell in 2018, el-Khatib managed to evacuate to Idlib via buses monitored by the United Nations. However, his wife, Ruba, and their seven children were left behind. They were arrested. Their youngest child was only seven months old. The mother and her infant were torn apart.

The mother was tortured to force a confession stating that “terrorists used the chemical weapons.” She refused. Months later, they found their children placed in an orphanage. Eventually, the family reunited, but this time they found themselves in the midst of the Idlib bombings.

They faced two choices: either remain within the circle of death or embark on an escape route full of unknowns. When they reached Türkiye, they had no wealth, nor did they have a standing home to look back on. But they had hope. And the name of that hope was Türkiye.

They restarted their lives in Türkiye. The children went to school. They learned a new language. They integrated into a new society. His wife continued her education and successfully completed her Turkish language courses. The children stood out in their schools through their achievements. The children who grew up in the shadow of war could finally dream of a future.

Years later, when they decided to return to a liberated Syria, they did not find the cities they had left behind, but rather ruined neighborhoods. Demolished homes, burned clinics, and the deep scars left by war. Yet, the most striking part of this story is not the magnitude of the suffering. What is truly striking is that despite all these disasters, they never lost hope and were able to start anew.

The fact that a family, who lost a brother, whose home was destroyed, whose children were wounded, arrested and forced into exile, can still talk about education, hard work and the future shows just how resilient the human spirit can be.

The story of el-Khatib’s family reminds us of this once again: A person can lose their home, their city and their years. But as long as they preserve their hope, they are never truly defeated.

In that darkness, the name of hope was Türkiye. While the opposition in our country clamors to “deport refugees,” President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has not taken a single step back, even as he is targeted once again these days by genocidal Israel.

I wanted to remind everyone that there are hundreds of thousands of such examples among those who sought refuge in our country from Assad’s atrocities. I hope our country will also be the catalyst for a new beginning for Palestine.