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The Oldest Survivors Of Syria's Civil War

Dagha, 101

From her family’s little tent on a hill in Lebanon, Dagha, who is 101, used to listen to the shelling from across the border in her native Syria. Sitting quietly and mending clothes, she would try to figure out which part of Syria the shelling was coming from.

But a year ago she suffered a stroke, which left her partially paralyzed, and now she just squeezes the hands of visitors and family members who come up to her to give her a kiss.

News arrives every week of more people who've died in her home village - including relatives. Her family members try not to tell her the details anymore. But they say she knows. She often cries in her sleep.

"Her biggest fear is that she'll die in Lebanon," says Fatima, her granddaughter. "Before her stroke when she was still able to talk as clearly as a teenager she'd say, 'Bury me elsewhere when I die. Bury me in Syria...please promise me you'll bury me at home.'"

Saada, 100

Saada lies on the little mattress in the small house she occupies with her son and his wife near Baalbek, in the Bekaa Valley. "Is it time to pray? Did the Athan begin?" are the only words she utters. Blind for 14 years and almost completely deaf, her days are an unwavering routine that revolve around praying, occasional eating and nostalgic reminiscences about life in Syria.

Before fleeing from her hometown with her son two years ago, Saada enjoyed small luxuries like walking along the terrace of her home, or having a fridge right next to her bed so she could eat fruit without having to get up. Now her only activity is getting up for ablution so she can pray five times per day.

Hamda, 106

A lot has changed in the 45 years since Hamda, 106, was last in Lebanon. Her husband, whom she lived with prior to Lebanon's civil war in the Bekaa Valley town of Bar Elias, has since passed away. She's also lost her eyesight, and now she is a refugee.

"Maybe it is a good thing that God took my eyesight before I saw the destruction of my country," says Hamda, from the small rented home she now shares with her youngest son and his family.

She returned to Bar Elias after the destruction of her hometown near Syria's Lebanese border.

"At first, we only heard bombing in the distance, but within a few weeks they were upon us. That is when we ran...they picked me up and put me in the car. I didn't grasp what was happening: where they took me, how, why, I didn't know anything."

At 106, Hamda's memories reach all the way back to the French administration in Syria. She recalls how French expatriates used to visit the Orontes River to swim, "I remember how they used to come as a large group, perhaps 40 to 50 people. They would sit in the shade, drink coffee, and swim all the day."

When Hamda speaks she evokes a lost age when people were honest and loving, but now, she says, everything has changed, "even if the war ends and we rebuild our homes, there are many things that can never be rebuilt. Syrians were never divided.. alas, now they will never be the same."

Ahmad, 102

"They say that if God loves you, He will let you live a long life. But I wish that He loved me a little less," says Ahmad, who is 102. "I wish that I didn't live long enough to see my country in ruins."

Ahmad fled Syria for his health: the war had made it impossible for him to get the prostate surgery that he needed so he came with his family to Lebanon. He got the surgery but now he can no longer go home. "Syria is my home, my country, and I worship its soil. Now, the only place I can call home is this small tent."

He and his family live in a plastic shelter his son built on a remote hillside in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley.

The war in Syria, he says "makes me sad..to see my country destroyed and to know that all of these people are dying for no reason." But he finds he gains some strength from his memories and from his family. Today he has 11 children and more grandchildren and great grandchildren than he can recall. "I surely can’t remember all their names," he says, laughing.

Bahira, 100

"Syria is a masterpiece created by God," says Bahira, who is 100 years old. "You feel wonderful when it is in front of you." She is recalling her homeland from her family's new refuge just south of the Lebanese capital, Beirut, where she fled last year.

Today she lives in a fourth floor apartment, surrounded by children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren, too many, sometimes, to count.

When asked recently exactly how many descendants Bahira has, all those present gathered around and a great debate ensued. Many different numbers were put forward but none could agree. Eventually it was decided that the only way to be sure is to draw a family tree.

A small notebook appeared, and branch lines drawn in many directions. The results were announced by a grandchild, now grown: Bahira, married at the age of 12, had 8 children, 32 grandchildren, 62 great grandchildren, and 6 great great grandchildren for a grand total of 108 descendants.

Bahira aches for her homeland, a mythical place in her imagination: "Where we lived there was no mention of Sunni, or Christian, or Druze, no-one asked about religion and no-one was discriminated against," she said. Bahira does not complain but her son admits that sometimes, in the middle of the night, he wakes to find her crying alone on the couch.

Saada, 102

Saada is 102 years old and without a home. But surrounded by her family and neighbours, you can easily tell why everyone enjoys her company as she recalls her earlier days in Syria: "Nobody had time to make wars back then," she told an interviewer recently. "We used to wake up before the sun and go work in the fields. By the end of the day I used to be so exhausted that I'd fall asleep on the donkey’s back on my way back home," she laughs.

Saada is a resilient woman. She lost seven of her ten children at a young age, her husband thirteen years ago and now, her country. She was reluctant to leave at first. Even when the bombing started in her home region, she just continued with her daily routine: "I was sitting outside, sorting the olives and the plane was above me. They called and yelled from the house for me to come inside, but I told them 'why? The plane doesn't want anything from me; I am not going to fight it with olives!'"

Eventually, her 21-year-old grandson, her favourite in the family, persuaded her to flee but only after promising that he would carry her body back to Syria and bury her next to her brother when her time comes.

"If I had a car, I would have never left Syria," she says. "I would just drive around in it all day. I wouldn't care where I went as long as I was still in Syria... I'd rather live in a pile of rocks in my home country than be a refugee in someone else's."

Abandoning your home has been difficult. "You know, without the help of UNHCR (the United Nations Refugee Agency) most of us would starve here," she says. "But you need more than just a box of food: you also need interaction with other people so you know you are still a human being and not just a number."

Mofleh, 103

Mofleh is reaping what he sowed. During the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, he and his family willingly played host to a refugee family from Lebanon that had fled to his area in Syria. Six years later, when Mofleh's family found themselves homeless, fleeing the Syrian civil war to Lebanon, the same family whom they had saved, saved them. Bilal, who was a boy at the time when his family fled to Syria, is taking care of Mofleh full time.

"I'm just returning the favor," he says. Bilal's own father died when he was younger. "We are all family now."

Even so, Mofleh is having a hard time accepting his fate as a refugee. He cannot stop dreaming of Syria. He keeps his old ID, issued 70 years ago, in his shirt pocket. "I am going back to Syria, so I must not lose it."

He speaks of a "beautiful, beautiful" woman named Fattoun, his deceased second wife. She proposed to him and they all say he still calls her name in the middle of the night.

His daughter, Sobha, says he's tried to run away twice in Lebanon to go back home to Syria. Once, he tried to escape the apartment by climbing off the balcony. Since then, she's hidden his passport for fear he'll wander back into the conflict zone and get himself killed.

Khadra, 104

In Syria, Khadra lived in a house of her own where she cooked, cleaned, ran errands and walked up to two kilometers every day. According to Khadra’s son, with whom she now lives as a refugee in a shelter in Lebanon’s West Bekaa, his mother was a strong healthy woman with lots of energy.

All that changed when the war came to her town.

"Can you see inside one’s heart?" she asks.” I can’t see inside yours and you can’t see inside mine. But if you could, you would see a black heart; one that constantly weeps for my children and their future.” At 104 years old, Khadra was forced to flee from her village in central Syria, an experience that has now eclipsed everything that went before. She recounts how her neighbors grabbed her from her home just as planes started to bomb her village, “I did not want to leave!” she exclaims.

"My son took his family and left for Lebanon and I stayed behind, I told him if this house falls I fall with it. I refused to leave, I wanted to die in my own home, but when the bombing started two of my neighbors came in and carried me out.”

Fatoumeh, 102

Back in her home village in Syria, Fatoumeh, 102, is a bit of a legend. Her husband had three wives. But she was the youngest and his favorite, family members say. Before the days of heavy machinery, she was the strongest person in the village, her son boasts, often beating men at various outside chores. Though women would taunt her, she rode camels and horses with the men, who could barely keep up.

Those memories make Fatoumeh light up like a giddy school-girl. “Men would only harvest one area and I could do four in the same amount of time!” she laughs, her black prayer beads bouncing on her swollen ankle. “But look at me now.”

Fatoumeh arrived in Lebanon by bus in early 2013, fleeing northern Syria with her 66-year-old son Mohammed, his wife and five children. She is ill, but does not know with what exactly. “The sickness I have, the doctors can’t cure,” she says.

“She was queen of the world,” says Mohammed. “And now she’s here without a throne.”

Mohammed keeps all their family documents in a small black plastic trash-bag. He often brings out his deceased father’s identification card, letting Fatoumeh hold it in her hands. She kisses his picture whenever she sees it.

Ghetwan, 100

Ghetwan, 100, and his wife, Khaduj have a long marriage. The couple wed 72 years ago, at the height of the Second World War. When asked what Khaduj loves most about her husband, she replies: "When he was younger, he was very poor and had nothing. But he was a very strong man...a real man. He could kick the asses of 50 men!"

Today the couple is living with a son and daughter-in-law, three grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren in a make-shift two-room shelter below a mechanic's garage in the southern Lebanese town of Sidon. They fled their home in northern Syria after shelling destroyed their home.

The electricity goes out frequently. Most afternoons, his great grandchildren swarm around him in frenetically, even as he rests, still, in their midst: two generations bound in the same dim two-room radius.

The call to prayer echoes through their home. Sometimes, Ghetwan’s son says, his father believes that it is coming from his hometown mosque back in Syria.

Khaldiye, 103

Khaldiye, who is 103, has a favorite photograph. It is one of her twin-brother and mother standing together, hand-in-hand. Both have passed away. Indeed Khaldiye is the only one left alive of her immediate family and even this photo is now gone. It was left behind in Syria when she fled to Lebanon as a refugee. But, says Khaldiye, “I still see it in my mind every morning.” Her twin, Ibrahim, passed away years ago. She remembers and boasts of how Ibrahim was so very tall. And she, at barely five-feet, would vanish next to him.

Her late husband, ten years her junior - “They all used to make fun of him for having an older wife,” she proudly recounts, “But he loved me” - was a general in the military and used to buy her an orange every day. "He would then peel it for me," she recalls. "Men should always peel oranges for women."

Khaldiye arrived in Lebanon from central Syria two years ago. Sharp as a whip, she can still recite the names of 12 children, 30 grandchildren, and several great grandchildren. She lives near the Syrian border with her son's family, and has begged them to sell her gold wedding ring to help make ends meet. But they refuse.

When she and her twin brother were younger they used to climb fig trees and pick the fresh succulent fruit. Ibrahim, she remembers, would climb high and gather the fruit and drop them down to her and she would catch them with her dress. But sometimes no figs would fall. “Instead of dropping the figs,” she giggles, “That man would just eat them! So there I was, waiting and waiting to catch figs in my dress.”

And now, some ninety years later, she says: “Here I am waiting and waiting to see those fig-trees again.”

Tamam, 104

Tamam was born in 1910 and became a refugee over a century later when, along with her son, she fled her native country in 2013. Diminutive, she greets visitors with a warm smile and tells them to come sit close, she cannot hear well but assures us her memory is still as “good as a twenty year olds’.” She says she is deeply worried for the future of Syria.

Life in Syria was simple when she was growing up, she says. Waking at dawn, she would strap her youngest on her back and work in the fields: “We didn’t even have doctors in the villages because we did not need them,” she says. “We never got sick because we used to eat what we grew on our lands. It was so safe; we used to go out to get wood in the middle of the night..."

The heat of the day is building up in the tarpaulin shelter Taman shares with her son and extended family in Lebanon’s west Bekaa Valley. Sitting next to the small window in the hope of catching a breath of cooler air, Taman adds: “I do not know when my time to leave this earth will come, it could be any minute now. I don’t care where I spend my last days.

“I lived my life, a long one at that, but I am devastated for my grandchildren and for the children of my country, their future is destroyed. I lived my life, but they won’t get to live theirs.”

Text by Rawan al Kayat and Lauren Bohn/UNHCR, photos by Andrew McConnell.