Historical Background
The ongoing Syrian Civil War began in 2011. Many Syrians, in an extension of the 2010 Arab Uprisings, took to the streets to demonstrate and agitate for reforms from the country’s leader, Bashar Al-Assad. In March of 2011, Al-Assad chose to violently suppress these demonstrations and the conflict quickly escalated and has since led to the (internal and external) displacement of over twelve million Syrians. In 2015, the UNHCR estimated the death toll at 250,000. By some recent estimates, the death toll has exceeded one half million Syrians.
“In 2014, Syrian members of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience – Enab Baladi and The Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies– collected oral histories from Syrian refugees and displaced individuals in order to ensure that a range of civilian narratives from the Syrian conflict are represented accurately and incorporated into memorialization processes.”1
For the past three years, students in Allegheny College’s Introduction to International Studies have used these Sites of Conscience interviews to create projects to help narrate the herculean efforts of Syrian refugees as they have attempted to navigate the crisis.