Arwa Damon
@IamArwaDamon • 138,332 subscribers
5x Emmy winning Ex-CNN Senior Correspondent. Founder @inaraorg Director award winning doc https://t.co/rxXBszbPKl on Amazon & Apple TV.
Shorts
Videos
How such grace and kindness exists is beyond me. Would you share what little coffee you have with a stranger? Be able to laugh at how common dishes are an unaffordable luxury? Or be so kind in your words when really we’re not able to provide for most people’s needs because so little aid is getting in. Its deeply painful that people – rightfully – feel so abandoned that just knowing we’re there provides a level of comfort even when we’re not able to actually give that much. I often wonder how I would react if I were in the same situation. Would I be able to hold on to my moral compass? (The last part, about children is because earlier she had asked if I was married and if I had kids. No and no and always a source of amusement.) I haven’t just witnessed this in Gaza, I have in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere … its extraordinary how people who have the least are willing give the most. Help us do more by donating to my charity INARA holiday campaign:
Arwa Damon166,319 views • 1 year ago
Many of the children of Daraya have never seen a space like this. They were born into war, into the barren and blown out landscape that the Assad regime & its Russian backers turned the Damascus suburb Daraya and huge swaths of Syria into. For years this area was under siege, its population starved, bombed, and forcibly displaced. The kids were timid at first, the soft flooring, the different toys and activities all something of a novelty, such a contrast to their world outside. They were so polite, repeatedly asking “Can I play with this? Is this all for us?” This space will have playtime, a reading corner, all sorts of fun activities and also many related to the children’s mental health. We will conduct group and one on one sessions for those who need it. One of the jarring things I heard was that in this area alone some 15,000 men were disappeared by the regime. We will also be conducting activities and mental health sessions for the mothers. Women are carrying the burden of both mother and father. Children constantly ask “where is Daddy?” Mothers used to say “Daddy is with the regime”. But they can’t say that anymore, the kids are responding “the regime is gone, why isn’t Daddy home”. Mothers don’t know how to explain that Daddy disappeared, that he’s either in a yet to be discovered mass grave or one of the corpses that was dug up, that he was just a number for the Assad regime. The traumas across this country are deep, raw wounds. In Daraya, we are also in the process of setting up a mobile primary care medical van. This is just the start of our work in Syria. We travelled to other areas pinpointing where we need to expand to, what sort of programs are needed. There are so many kids who never got the medical treatment they need to physically recover from their war injuries or whose parents can’t afford the cost. There’s a lot of work to be done in the mental health and access to education space, needs ranging from hygiene to nutrition. We’re trying to raise as much as we can this holiday season, so please donate here: And if you can’t please please do share.
Arwa Damon65,665 views • 1 year ago
GAZA DIARY: This is just one day, condensed into two and a half minutes. We were at Aqsa hospital delivering pediatric tracheostomy tubes when we heard a loud explosion, some tents on the compound burst into flames. Lives saved, lives lost. It’s hard you know, to describe in words what it’s like here, the degree to which it defies logic. Even driving around, when you talk to friends, colleagues, people – no one here can really cope with or comprehend what has happened to them. It’s been over a year and it still doesn’t feel real. No one is “used to” the apocalyptic scenes, how hard it is just to survive. Conversation openers are “what did you eat”, jokes are made about the last time there was chicken (a month ago), there are cynical celebrations at the arrival of tomatoes (insanely overpriced) for the first time in weeks. Within minutes of meeting a stranger you immediately know who has died from their family, that’s the sort of information that is shared after “how are you holding up”? There is a massive shortage in pediatric sized tracheostomy tubes (ie children sizes, used mostly to decrease dependency on ventilators), without which often children don’t stabilize enough to be taken off the machines in the ICU. We met Mahmoud who was stabilized enough from tubes I dropped off last time I was here. It’s hard to see in the video, but in that part where we’re talking about his head – it’s his brain pulsing that you see, where his skull bone was removed and the skin stitched together. As we were walking through, darling little Aseel came running up to me. She’s unrecognizable in the video her mother showed us, of her just after the Israeli strike that also injured her sister and father. I promised her I’d be back and we’d paint our nails together. We’re also looking for the creams the doctors said she, her sister, and father need for their burn/injury scars. A loud explosion startled everyone, someone shouted it was in the hospital compound. As I write this, the latest death / injury is two killed, one in critical condition, and 27 injured. The strike hit one of the tents and the fire spread quickly, but after the last time there was a strike here – the one where we saw the horrific viral images of a teenager burning to death, there was a firetruck close by. Earlier we dropped off a portable ultrasound to Dr Lubna whose medical tent we support. Its in the garden of what was her home, now a blown out carcass, although she and her family still live in the inner rooms on the top floor. And lastly, Dr Mohammed who you see in this video, he’s the head of the ICU in Aqsa, he’s “used to” people coding, but the other day it was his mother. He managed to save her life. He’s exhausted, physically, mentally, in all ways imaginable. Everyone is. Background: I'm back in Gaza on my 4th humanitarian mission with my charity INARA
Arwa Damon65,664 views • 1 year ago
There are so many detractors when it comes to Syria, so quick to write off exactly what it is that Syrians accomplished by bringing down their dictator at a time when most of the world had written them off. Syrians know that this “next phase” will be messy and ugly and quite possibly violent. No one who I have spoken to thinks that this next phase is going to be easy, nor that the core cries that launched the revolution back in 2011, those calls for freedom and democracy, are guaranteed. But do not dismiss what Syrians have learned over the last 13 years and more. And do not dismiss what Syrians have lost to get to this point. I remember as far back as I think it was 2012 or 2013, when we first saw HTS’s predecessor and other more conservative/Islamist groups emerging hearing Syrians say “we know that we will probably need a revolution after the revolution”. A lot has changed since then. HTS itself has morphed and changed. Or at least it appears to have. And yes it could just be lip service, but if Syrians are willing to give this process and HTS a chance to do what it claims it’s going to do – who is anyone to take that agency away from them? There are plans for the day after – plans that have been worked on for the last years and years, that need to be modified since no one thought Assad would disappear just like that. But Syrians inside and outside of the country who still held hope that the day would come did not stop working towards it, towards the Syria they want to live in. And they will keep fighting for that.
Arwa Damon52,391 views • 1 year ago
I feel like I’m in a daze , a kaleidoscope of past and present, I stare at the people celebrating, drive through neighborhoods that were off-limits, areas that I covered through the work of extraordinary activists and am now seeing for myself, listening to people speaking openly rather than in hushed whispers. It smashes into the past images and experiences I have of Syria, of barrel bombs and jets and the scramble to save people and burial shrouds, of bags of bones and emancipated bodies, of children shivering in the cold too traumatized to cry. It’s like shrapnel to the brain - ripping open the memories of the pain, suffering, and bravery I witnessed covering Syria for 13 years. That feeling of total journalistic incompetence, failure for surely, I would tell myself if we were doing the stories justice something would change. By 2013 I was in a dark mental vortex, I remember feeling like I was holding onto the edge of a mental abyss finger nails ripping about to fall. It was in that darkness that I realized I had to do something more. It was from that darkness that the idea for my charity INARA emerged. I never imagined that I would be able to start INARA’s work in areas that the regime controlled. I truly believed I would never set foot in parts of Syria again in my lifetime. How does one explain the enormity of what has happened here? It’s like being caught in spinning cycles of soul exploding joy and bone crushing pain at the same time. For so many it’s still impossible to comprehend that the Assad family and its cronies that ruled this nation in the most brutal and oppressive of ways is gone. You overhear it in conversations, a son who tells his elderly mother in a restaurant “no you can be happy, you can live your life, they are gone.” It’s not just that the regime is gone, but that it came at a time when many who lived in Syria describe themselves as not really being alive, their days spent moving through a fog of survival between where to get enough to eat, the lack of electricity and other basic services, the inability to hope or even see a bright future for themselves. The fall of the regime came at a time when the world was delivering those who fought and died for freedom another bitter blow, as if abandoning them to the violence and brutality of Assad and the Russians wasn’t enough, countries were willing to bring Assad back into the fold and “normalization” crushed any notion of “accountability” completely disregarding the more than 500,000+ dead, the more than 150,000 disappeared, the millions internally displaced and living in tents, the millions more made refugees. It's not that the path forward is going to be easy, there is so much that needs to be rebuilt from physical construction to rebuilding the fabric of Syria itself. The medical and mental health needs are enormous. There are no guarantees that Syria’s new rulers will put this country on the path of freedom and democracy that those who took to the streets in 2011 demanded. But what there is, is a willingness to give them a chance, an awareness and pragmatism learned over the years, a determination to keep fighting for their rights, and perhaps most of all, there is hope, even if it’s just a sliver.
Arwa Damon48,882 views • 1 year ago
GAZA DEPARTURE DIARY: Departing Gaza and seeing all of this is somehow more emotionally charged than other days. Its more painful, angering, as the sheer madness of what is happening here collides with the injustice of my being able to leave. Who sat in that armchair? My mind imagines a grandfather surrounded by little ones. My imagination tries to reconstruct stories. The little girl playing in the sand, where are her parents? Where is she from? Why does the father waving at me when he sees me filming out the window make my eyes burn with tears that don’t fall? Note: I left Gaza a week ago. As I write this I’m listening to Jake Sullivan out of Tel Aviv, saying that the US looking to close a hostage-ceasefire deal. A journalist is asking about Hamas taking the aid. Part of me wants to laugh that this narrative is still out there and a bigger part of me just wants to shake everyone and I am at a loss, how do we make people see reality? Is it even possible against the backdrop of the Israeli and US machines ? “Feeding starving children does not harm the state of Isreal” Sullivan just said. Except starving children are not being fed, and have not been fed. And in fact have been going hungrier and hungrier. Let me give you one example, eggs showed up my last few days in Gaza. A tray of two dozen cost $65. People are being suffocated at bread lines, while I was there a woman and two girls were crushed to death, that’s how hungry and desperate people are. Aid organizations are having to make the grotesque calculation – given the ridiculously low number of aid trucks getting in – to tell people “sorry we cant help with winterizing shelter, we have to prioritize flour”. Go cold and wet or go hungry. What sort of absurdity is that?
Arwa Damon30,370 views • 1 year ago
No more content to load