As a person of Syrian descent, the issue of the Syrian Civil War has always affected me and my family personally, as we have seen friends and family back in Syria who have been hurt or even killed because of this conflict. I lived in Syria- Aleppo to be exact- and I hold it very dear to me. Syria is extremely rich in history, with its many beautiful mosques, churches, fortresses, and UNESCO World Heritage sites, and to see its beautiful buildings, from ancient to modern architecture, destroyed, and its wonderful people die continues to sadden me. Syria was home to many empires, religions and cultures, and each of them added their own distinct flavor to what is ultimately a melting pot of history. Even if this gruesome bloodshed ends, and Syria is rebuilt, it will never be the same Syria that I grew up in and learned to love.
Thankfully, I live in the United States, where nobody has to fear for their homes or for their lives. However, as I live in the United States, I still wonder: What if I was living in Syria at the time of the war? I immediately thought of the people my age, who had hopes and dreams of one day becoming doctors or engineers (everybody wants to become a doctor or engineer over there). They have had their dreams crushed by this pointless conflict brought upon them by their own government. I also began to think of the younger children, who had their childhoods ended by the never-ending airstrikes and shelling. To think I could have been one of these children, who were denied the right to live out their childhoods like other children, makes me feel grateful, yet I can't help but feel uncomfortable, too, because I often imagine myself amid the constant bombing, and what I would have done in that situation. That is why, when given the freedom to choose any topic I wanted, I immediately chose to write about those who were affected by the Syrian Civil War. When trying to narrow down the subject of the Syrian Civil War into a specific aspect of people's lives that was affected, I wanted to shed light onto something many people had never considered when assessing the effects of the war. Mental health seemed like the obvious answer to me, since I had never heard a single word spoken about in the everyday news, but I knew that a conflict of this caliber would cause severe mental health issues. Typically, one would hear about things like the number of casualties in an airstrike, but never about how it affected them mentally. How do little children cope with this? Could they ever recover from these experiences that have been burned into their memories? These questions intrigued me even further, so I decided to settle on the issue of mental health. The research process was no easy task- people had begun to get tired of always writing about what was happening in Syria. After six years of constant war, media outlets didn't want to keep writing about Syrians, because it was the same thing over and over again. It was for this reason that I struggled to find recent articles about the mental health of Syrian children- most of the research had already been done in previous years. Luckily, Save the Children had conducted a study in early 2017 on the mental health of Syrian children, and the surprising statistics caused a chain reaction. The study spurred the media to start reporting on their findings and interviewing various psychiatrists, and many medical organizations and colleges started conducting research of their own to confirm Save the Children's findings. This was the material I used for my project. From then on, I encountered almost no difficulty in my research, and was able to produce a well-supported argument on a highly important topic. |
Header borrowed from The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2013/04/syria-in-ruins/100488/
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2013/04/syria-in-ruins/100488/