Revolution

Mheen was never on the margins of history. When the Syrian Revolution called for dignity, it was among the first to respond. The town paid a heavy price for its strategic location in the heart of the Badia, enduring suffocating sieges, systematic shelling, and repeated military incursions. Despite the brutality of the military machine, its people wrote epics of resilience. Mheen offered its finest youth as convoys of righteous martyrs who watered the soil of the Badia with their blood, in addition to hundreds of detainees and forcibly disappeared persons in the dungeons of prisons. Every house in Mheen now carries an unforgettable story of sacrifice.

With the intensification of military campaigns and the succession of military control over the town, the people of Mheen found themselves facing a single choice to preserve the lives of their children and women: displacement. It was not a single migration, but a series of forced displacement waves that tore the social fabric of the town. The locals left, leaving behind their memories, homes, and livelihoods, to face an unknown fate on the arid roads of the Badia, carrying with them faith in their cause and unhealed wounds.

A large portion of Mheen's residents headed south to escape death, only to collide with the harshness of the desert at the 'Rukban Camp' on the Syrian-Jordanian border. There, in that forgotten patch of the world, the town's people lived chapters of suffering that words fail to describe. They faced a suffocating siege, a lack of the most basic necessities of life such as safe drinking water and medical care, and lived under worn-out tents that provided no shelter from heat or cold. Despite the harshness of the sand and the scarcity of resources, the people of Mheen in Rukban remained an exemplar of patience and solidarity in the face of slow death.

The other portion of the residents took the path of suffering towards northern Syria. There, the greatest images of cohesion and belonging manifested; the expatriates of Mheen in the Arab Gulf states refused to leave their families and kin as prey to the cold of makeshift camps and the loss of exile. With high determination and generous donations from the expatriates, the 'Mheen Diaspora Camp' was established in the north. It was not just a camp, but a serious attempt to heal wounds and reunite families in one place that preserves their dignity and provides them with shelter and education, proving that geography may divide them, but 'bread and salt' and blood unite them wherever they go.