“Day after day, month after month and suddenly years slipped away while I was busy working. In the meantime, the war escalated with ISIS entering our village, the worst memory of all Syrians. They acted like monsters not human beings, it was hard even to imagine what we went through. At that time my children used to study in the same school that I teach in, we were informed by ISIS to split the students according to their gender although they were very young, around 7-8 years of age, so we had to do a 2 shifts, one in the morning for girls and another in the afternoon for boys, then they decided to split teachers according to their gender with one hour gap between the two shift so we would not meet, otherwise a great punishment will come our way. A week later, they made us leave the school by force of arms, when we raised our voices demanding our children regain their education, they broke down the whole school burned all books and desks then transformed the place into a weapon warehouse. After they took children out of schools, my elder boy who was 9 years old at that time, started working at an auto repair shop. One day he came back home and started telling me how they beheaded this young man in front of him and explaining everything in details. Another time we were coming back from my parents’ house and a bunch of boys was playing football at the roundabout. One of the young boys aged 24 said some bad word while playing, directly they beheaded him and left him hanging for three days with on the ground for the dogs to eat it. No one would dare to come close or they would face their fate as well. Even my dad who was a well posed gentleman got his piece from ISIS, because he used to smoke and sell cigarettes, they lashed him in front of his grandchildren and the whole neighborhood. Can you imagine what our kids have seen at their young age?”