Into Syria, Out of Syria

Near the Turkish–Syrian border

‘Ça va?” Sabri would ask periodically, breaking the tense silence with French. “Oui, ça va.” He would then return to his thoughts, taciturn, intense. The three of us sat in his idling car in the Turkish border village in the dark as the winter rain streamed down. After traveling and living widely in Europe, Sabri, an Assyrian Christian from Iraq, returned to the land of his birth to bring his fellow Christians humanitarian aid from the outside world. He had crossed into Syria several times but would do so this time against the wishes of his family, who called him even here at the border, pleading with him not to go. There we waited for Sabri’s contact, a Kurdish guide who would take us, over the next two days, by foot across la frontière — a muddy maze of fences, concertina wire, and possibly worse — into Syria.