Through Hala's Eyes
From Aleppo to Anatolia: A Syrian Girl’s Life in Exile
On a winter morning in 2014, as the Syrian war entered its third year, a young couple and four of their children approached the Turkish border after days of walking from Aleppo. Turkish soldiers shouted warnings and leveled machine guns, ordering them to turn back.
In the chaos, the blanket swaddling the family’s youngest, three-month-old Hala, snagged on a coil of barbed wire. For a moment, their flight stalled. Then, with a sharp tear, the fabric came free. The family slipped through a hole in the border fence, leaving behind the ruins of their old life for the uncertain promise of a new one.
By the time I first met Hala in 2018, she was four years old, living with her parents, two brothers, and sister in Gaziantep, a bustling Turkish city 60 miles from the Syrian frontier. The family’s small apartment sits amidst a region framed by olive groves and pistachio orchards, scenery far removed from tanks and front lines, though the war was never truly out of reach.
Her father, Abu Mahmoud, still carried the trauma of 2011, when he was imprisoned by Bashar al-Assad’s regime, subjected to torture, starvation, constant beatings, sleep deprivation, and threats, leaving deep physical scars and unrelenting nightmares.
Three of his children, including Hala, face serious medical challenges. Hala was born with congenital glaucoma and cataracts, leaving her able to see only a few inches from her face. In 2023, she underwent surgery intended to relieve pressure in one of her eyes. Instead, she awoke from the procedure with only one eye.
Her older siblings, Sabiha, now 23, and Bashir, 21, suffer from Epidermolysis bullosa, a rare genetic condition that causes the skin and even the linings of the mouth, throat, and digestive tract to blister and tear at the slightest friction. The wounds are excruciating and slow to heal, if they heal at all. Treating these conditions consumes much of the modest stipend the Turkish government provides the family as “guests” of the state.
“This is what keeps me up at night,” Abu Mahmoud told me during an early visit to their home. “It opens the scars on my heart and makes them itch.”
And yet, in the years I have known her, Hala has grown into a child whose laughter routinely rises above the weight of her family’s troubles. She is imaginative and stubborn, curious and quick to challenge anyone who underestimates her, a spirit that seems to resist the label of “refugee.”
In 2023, earthquakes devastated parts of southern Turkey and northern Syria, displacing thousands more and shaking an already fragile sense of security in border communities. The Güls’ building survived, but cracks in the walls and a flood of sewage forced the family onto the streets for several days—an unsettling reminder that stability here can shift overnight.
Today, Hala is 11. She has never seen the city where she was born, she speaks fluent Turkish unlike her family who speak only Arabic, and as anti-refugee sentiment grows in Turkey and economic hardship deepens, her family’s future is again in question.
For Syrians like the Gül family, exile has stretched into a second decade. While borders remain closed, the war at home continues in fragmented form and the welcome in host countries grows more fragile with each passing year.
What began as an escape from immediate danger has become a long negotiation with uncertainty and a test of resilience measured not in days, but in years.
With Bashar al-Assad gone from power, the Gül family speaks openly of returning to Syria. But their old home no longer stands and the medicines their children depend on are scarce or impossible to find.
For now, they wait.
The end of Assad has not yet meant the return of peace, but a new phase in a long and complicated search for stability. As the conflict continues to evolve, so too does the reality for Syrians like the Güls.
Their story is not about the frontline, but about what happens after: the years of limbo, the resilience of memory, and the formation of identity in exile. It is a portrait of a family, how parents and children shoulder trauma differently, and what it means to raise children under the constant threat of war.
Theirs is a story that echoes the experience of millions who remain in search of a place to call home.
