By Younes Mohammad
The mother had come all that way to save her daughter. By the time she reached us, the girl no longer moved in her arms.
We had been waiting for hours. We had been told they would arrive that night, but midnight had passed and there was still no sign of them. We did not know where along the way they had been delayed. To reach us, and to escape the war everyone was saying would soon come, they had to walk for hours in complete darkness, stay out of sight of ISIS, cross areas where there was a risk of mines and, above all, remain as silent as possible.
I had been staying on that front line for several weeks, taking photographs. On many nights I had watched people emerge from the darkness. At first something moved in the distance, then shadows began to take shape, until gradually you realized they were people. Exhausted people, sometimes carrying everything they had brought from their lives in their hands. Some cried. In the eyes of others there was only relief. They had made it. That was enough.
That night, something finally moved in the darkness and slowly came toward us. Before they reached us, a woman’s wail tore through the stillness of the night.
She was carrying a little girl, about five years old. She was crying, beating at herself and pleading for help with her gestures. When she came closer, she laid the child on the ground. The girl did not respond.
They called for the doctor. Between sobs, the woman explained what had happened as the doctors questioned her. Slowly, I began to understand what this mother and daughter had been through during those hours.
On that journey, silence was the condition for every step that followed. A single sound could give them away. A child’s cry could expose people who had spent hours moving secretly through the darkness. The mother had to find a way to keep her daughter quiet.
She had given her a sedative syrup. The girl had not fallen asleep. She gave her more syrup, then several sleeping pills, until at last the child closed her eyes.
The mother carried her and kept walking. For hours she tried to wake her daughter, but there was no response. By the time they reached us, the child lay motionless in her arms, as though she had been asleep for years, and the mother was afraid she might never wake again.
She had set out to save her daughter, and now, with her own hands, she had brought her to the edge of death. Something almost unimaginable for a mother anywhere else had become, in that darkness, a way to survive. Between a sound that could expose them all and a silence that might save them, the mother had chosen to make her daughter sleep.
The doctors gathered around the child, their hands working one after another over her small body. Beside them, the mother cried and beat at herself. There was nothing more she could do. She cried until her voice fell silent and she lost consciousness.
They carried the mother a few meters away. The doctors stayed with the girl. They washed out her stomach and tried to bring her back. On one side lay the unconscious mother. On the other, several doctors were trying to make her daughter open her eyes again.
Eventually, the girl began to improve. We were all relieved, and almost immediately we thought of her mother. We wanted her to know that her daughter was alive. But she had still not regained consciousness, and as her condition worsened, she was taken away by ambulance.
It was still dark. One of the family’s companions lifted the girl into his arms and carried her away. Hours earlier, her mother had carried this same child all that way to bring her somewhere safe. Now the girl was alive, passing in front of me beside someone else, but her mother was no longer there.