SYRIA — Four year old Syrian Samil Homsi and his family are hoping to be out of their war torn home country before the next presidential election in the United States.
Samil’s mother says that’s because they just can’t be sure if the next president will authorize massive bombing campaigns in Syria, campaigns that would almost certainly take place in and around the area that Samil and his family live. Samil was born during a war time, so he’s no stranger to loud booms, his mother says, but she also said she “knows for certain” if a Republican wins “they’ll have no problem turning this part of the world into a never-ending nightmare.” But recent rhetoric from a couple of the candidates has Samil wondering if he and his family should just stay, and possibly get a home upgrade out of the deal.
When Samil and his family watched the latest Republican presidential debate on CNN and heard Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio arguing over who would have the least problem intentionally bombing sites when they knew there would be high counts of child casualties, he says he “wasn’t sure at all what carpet bombing is.” But, he says, that if his family is going be stuck in Syria while it is battered by a civil war and as warplanes start flying over head, some new carpet for the small home they live in would come in handy.
“I just hope the carpet bombs match the drapes my mom put up last year,” Samil told our reporter through an interpreter. “I mean, we’d all like to be out of here sooner rather than later, because it really does suck watching radical Islamists and your government murder each other in the street,” Samil said with a surprisingly developed vocabulary for a four year old, “but if we’re going to be trapped here because the very same countries that meddled in this region for years are turning their backs on us when we want to flee the chaos they fostered, I hope it’s a nice, plush carpet we can take our shoes off and just feel the fibers!”
Samil said that in terms of color, he’s hoping the carpet bombs are “either a nice, deep green” or “a classy beige.” He told our interviewer that “stain guard is an absolute must” where he lives because “maybe you’ll be cleaning spilled tea, or maybe you’ll be cleaning your uncle’s charred corpse out of the fibers” so being able to quickly and easily clean the new carpet that will be dropped on them by U.S. bombers is “totally a deal breaker.” Samil told us the drapes his mother put up are a “really nice set of cardboard boxes” his father cut up and duct-taped to the windows that were blown out during a gun battle that was raging in the street just outside their home.
“We can’t afford ballistic glass, or really any glass,” Samil said, again with a surprisingly mature tone and command of the spoken word, “so he put that cardboard up so the sun coming up wouldn’t wake us up, just the bombs and automatic gunfire.”
Ultimately, Samil said he’s still hoping his family’s application for refugee status in either Canada or the United States is accepted, but he knows he may just have to take a “half-glass full perspective,” as he put it. “If we’re going to be stuck here in a place where our lives are in no way safe or secure,” Samil said as the interview was ending, “then I just hope that whatever carpets these planes drop in their bombs improve our lives enough to where we can suffer through it just a little easier. Ooh, maybe a nice, tall berber?”
