Fictionalized depiction of the true story of photojournalist Hussein Jaber and his daughter, Salma Jaber. Based on videos and pictures.
His head was pounding. He was tired. Anxious. Most of all fearful for his small, but beautiful, family. His beloved wife, his eldest Sara, his second daughter Salma, and his youngest and only son Omar. Their home had been destroyed in a single airstrike weeks ago. Every time he remembers it, he thanks God for allowing them to have been elsewhere at the time. They had been moving from place to place since as the occupation forces continued to displace them, forcing them further south. There was no rest. No stopping. If they stopped for too long, they might never move again.
As he trudged through the broken parts of the city, unable to find a new safe place, unable to find food or water for his family and resigned to go home empty handed, he heard the unmistakable sound of a missile cutting through the air. He froze, his head shot up to the sky, spotting it immediately. Although his mind recognized it after weeks of running, his heart still stopped in his chest and his blood ran cold. Then his thoughts stopped. Started. Stopped again. His family. He burst into a sprint, quickly maneuvering between people running away from the imminent destruction as he ran towards it.
Even if the missile missed his temporary and makeshift home, he knew the tanks and soldiers would follow immediately afterwards, gunning down anyone, man, woman, and child, who dared to make it out alive. He refused to let his family be caught in the crossfire. As he turned onto his street, the momentum causing him to stumble and nearly sweep him off his feet, the gunfire began. People began screaming and running in different directions. As his eyes bounced around to look for his loved ones, the horrors of the massacre, the ones he had always previously just missed, settled in. He saw a father run past with his already dead baby girl in his arms, yelling for an ambulance even as his eyes shone with the grief his mind refused to accept. He saw a small boy kneeling and crying “mama, mama” as his mother lay face down in the mud with a bullet in her back, her growing pool of blood staining the earth.
“Baba!” His head snapped to the right and he saw them. His wife, Sara, Salma, and Omar all running towards him. “Baba,” Salma had cried out again as she ran towards him with her arms open. She always ran to him like that. As if it were unacceptable to greet him with anything other than a bear hug. His shoulders sagged with relief and he opened his arms for his darling daughter. Only a couple feet away now, he began to reach out, ready to hold her close. “Baba,” she sniffled. To nuzzle his head in her soft hair as he always did to make her laugh and squeal again. To wipe her tears away. Her small hands brushed against his arms, and suddenly her body jerked and she collapsed into his arms.
He frantically picked her up, pushing back her slick hair. Her slick hair…? His left hand came away bloody as he slowly looked down to find a bullet pierced into Salma’s delicate neck. The blood was coming out too fast, too fast. He began to shake, pressing his hand against her neck to try to stop the blood flow, but it only continued to gush through his fingers. “No, no, no, no…not my Salma, please, NO!” His heart pounded in his chest. He couldn’t breathe. All he could see was the redness that spread across her yellow shirt. Her favorite shirt. The adrenaline that was pumping through his veins had his mind running at a hundred miles an hour. Memories of her childhood flashed, and so did a newer one of another father with another dead daughter. His heart fractured. “Salma, habibit albi, the love of my heart,” he looked up at her face, the radiant face that had comforted him after long days at work, the mischievous grin when she would share a secret with him, the thoughtful eyes as she would mull over a difficult math problem, all of that had been replaced with a gray pallor, and open, vacant eyes. Eyes that stared past him at nothing. A grief so large swelled in his chest, climbing up his throat. His fractured heart shattered into a million pieces as he let out a gut wrenching sob and buried his face in her hair. Her soft hair that he had brushed into a ponytail this morning now soaked with her own blood. He didn’t care that it seeped into his shirt, his jeans. Her blood was his blood. Her soul, his soul. Her heart, his heart.
He raised his head, weeping, and saw the sniper at the top of the building across the street. The one that had murdered his darling daughter and had already turned his attention to others attempting to escape the war zone. As if his daughter, her life and her dreams and her thoughts and her laughter, merited no more than a second of his time, a second to aim and shoot and turn away all in the same breath. His eyes burned with a vengeance, but as they dropped back down to his lap, to the blood that had now cooled, he whispered “to God we belong, and to Him we will return.” He lifted his dead daughter into his arms and stood up. Tears streamed down his face as he hurried back down the way he came, the rest of his family by his side. His children in shock and his wife trying to muffle her sobs as she clutched her remaining children’s hands and urged them to move faster, to stay by his side, so if they survived, they survived together. And if they died, they died together.
He met his wife’s eyes for a brief moment, and the abyss of sorrow he found in them was enough to drown him and the world, but the spark of resilience, the one that never left, shone through, and he knew he had to stay strong. For her. For Sara. For Omar. He murmured words of reassurance as they continued to run. He didn’t know how long they would need to run for. He didn’t know where they could run to. He only knew they looked to him and he had to keep moving. They couldn’t stop. He looked down again at Salma, at her lifeless body bouncing in his arms. “Baba” had been her last words. He looked back up to scout the rubble ahead of him. They couldn’t stop. If they stopped, they might never move again.