Messoud

I was a first year college student. I was studying economy. When the war began in Syria I was studying in Aleppo University. One day there was an explosion in one of the university's departments so I had to drop out.

Everything has changed between March 15, 2011 and January, 2014, which is when I left to Turkey. I'm originally from Derbasyeh. The region where I'm from is under the control of the YPG. I know that it's more organized than other areas. Even when they were fighting ISIS, they were able to maintain order and law in my region.

At the same time, I think they are getting ahead of themselves trying to separate the Kurdish regions from other parts of the country. When we first started to demonstrate, we were saying that Syria is for all Syrians. Now we separated ourselves the first chance we had. Our dream of seeing Syria united doesn't exist anymore. We all dreamed of united Syria but as soon as the Kurdish people had power they decided to take over their own land. The same happened with the Alawites and the Sunnis.

When the Kurdish people decided to be responsible for their zones, we faced a lot of difficulties, especially when it came to the hospitals and providing medicine.

I really want to go to Europe to have a better future for my children. At least they have human rights there. No one is going to force you to work long hours without getting what you deserve. This happens in Turkey: they just use the Syrian people. In Europe, on the other hand, such a thing doesn't even exist. Even if you wanted to build a future in Turkey, it's very hard because everything will work against you. In the end, though, we want to thank the Turkish government. They did their best. We hope our next destination will be Europe, but we hope this will not be the last destination. We hope our last destination will be Syria.

I want to ask people out there to stand up for us and put themselves in our position. No one would like to see their children suffer like ours have. In the end we don't want anyone to suffer, not even our enemies: not the Shia, the Christians, or the Sunni.