9

We heard a knock on our wooden door, suddenly my mother quickly covered her head, went down the wooden stairs and went to the yard, passed through the dusty yard and opened the wooden door of our house.

She saw a person she didn't recognize, the man asked if this was Muhammed's house, but she looked like she could barely stand, maybe this was the man she and her husband had been drinking with until the morning.

Yes, my mother said, you've come to the right place.

I know it's not right to wake you up at this hour, the man said, but I wouldn't forgive myself if I didn't tell him, my father called to the door from upstairs, now say whatever you have to say, the man hadn't fully woken up yet.

After passing through the dirt yard and slowly going up the wooden stairs from our side, he came to my father.

Right next to our beds were two wooden chairs and a table.

After twelve o'clock at night, accompanied by a slight chill, my mother would go up that wooden staircase step by step with a heavy teapot in her hand and bring tea.

My father told his friend to sit down, he wanted to drink a glass of cold water right away, the news is not good, Muhammed said, I don't think we will find the old peaceful days in our country anymore.

The Arab Spring has finally come to our country.

A street vendor was arrested and beaten by security forces in a North African country, which caused a rebellion.

This rebellion started to spread rapidly among countries.

As a result of this rebellion, Libya's dictator leader Colonel Gaddafi was lynched and killed by the people.

Now the rebellion had taken action against our dictator. In our country, where there was once a single-channel state television, our people who watched the black and white broadcasts and news would accept everything this state television said as true.

In those years, Hafez Assad was a source of pride for our country. After his death, Bashar Assad became the president of our country, just like a country governed by a monarchy, and he and his elegant wife Esma Assad were now giving speeches on color television. We were all admiring his wife's pink dress.

I noticed that my father's friend was lost in thought after the bad news he gave.

He was hoping that the conflicts would not come to our region so soon.

In order not to take part in the conflicts in the south, the people had chosen to remain neutral for a while.

The people did not support either the government forces or the rebels.

However, waking up to the sound of gunfire every morning had opened deep wounds in people's psyches.

They found the solution in putting a few items in their horse-drawn carriages and setting off for Lebanon.

Now the same thing could happen in the North.

A federal state had been established in the northern part of our neighboring country, Iraq.

Similarly, in our country, plans had been made for many years to establish a federal Kurdistan state that would be a puppet of the United States.

This situation meant civil war for us, the nights when we would try to sleep with the sound of bombs were near, and we did not have the strength to go all the way to Lebanon.

The nearest settlement was the city of Gaziantep in the Republic of Turkey.

We had to make a choice, the city of Hatay or the city of Gaziantep?

What were we going to share with these people whose language we did not know, whose streets we did not know, and whom we only believed in the same God?

How would we build a life there, where would we find shelter?

We had questions about the future that we did not know the answers to.

In the eleventh year of my life, it was time to say goodbye to the country I was born in. It was now clear that the games the West played on our country were successful.

America had previously promised to bring freedom to the people of Iraq, and had caused the deaths of many innocent people in the first Gulf War.

Our people should have learned by now that terror was not the way to get rid of dictatorship, but as people of the Middle East, instead of acting coolly like the Caucasians or Europeans, we were people who acted without thinking, only guided by our feelings.

If you formed a group of about a hundred people and could also receive arms aid from imperialist states, it meant that every opportunity to rebel was provided. In the north of our country, the majority of Arabs, other than Kurds and Turkmens, were Arabs.

In addition to ethnic differences, there were also differences in belief. Not all Arabs were Muslims, for example, there were Arabs of the Assyrian faith, and they had their own churches.

However, Muslim Arabs were divided into two due to the generation gap, especially in Aleppo, in the Hatay city of the Republic of Turkey, Alevi Muslims were the majority, however, the Turkmen people were also against the establishment of the Kurdistan Federation.

For this reason, our neighboring Republic of Turkey was providing all kinds of weapons support to the Free Syrian Army and they had started a covert war against the regime.

Their president was saying that if necessary, I would host all the Syrian people in my own country, as long as the dictator Assad lost his seat.

The situation was not very encouraging for my father, it was time to contact our distant relatives in Gaziantep.

My mother's aunt had been in the Ottoman Empire years ago.