The Syrian Nurse

‘Help me, Ammi Jaan’,

He yelled, as his mother’s lifeless body rested beneath the rubble of their fallen home.

His infant sister saw it all, before her long life was cut short by the airstrike.

He missed his father too, and remembered how he too had left him. The rockets crashed and took him away, he said.

And as the hospital nurse finished hearing his story, he softly spoke.

“Am I going to die as well?”

“Oh no. Not at all. Have faith is Allah, that’s what we all need right now.”

And while she knew that she herself couldn’t maintain her faith,

she wondered why her nation was trapped in yet another global misunderstanding between two major superpowers.

She felt privileged, about how she was blessed enough to save so many young lives, but secretly wished that they do not live to find out how their entire families have passed on.

And just as the boy began talking again after a moment of silence,

the air from the hospital room window smelled strange.

So strange, they started choking on it.

Exhausting all the few remaining oxygen tanks they had left, the kid finally breathed his last.

And so did the brave nurse who saved so many young lives.

Syria’s promising youth has been brought down to nothing but a cluster of people for whom the world feels a bit sorry for.

Wake up.

They do not wish for the third world war and neither does the innocent family watching TV at their suburban home in Brooklyn, or the elderly couple in London or the bustling officers of Moscow!

Wake up. Please wake up and help us out.