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Artist Seeks To Memorialize Syrian Civil War In Artwork

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Watch Soulaf Abas explain what inspires her artwork and the work she is doing with Syrian refugees.



Soulaf Abas remembers the exact day she started painting about the civil war.

"September 5, 2012," she recalls. "My uncle was a Syrian activist. He was in the Syrian prisons for 15 years. He's a writer, a translator and the most incredible man I know. He died of cancer in France, and losing him was losing home. That was it for me. That day I started painting about Syria. That day it just all came out, and I haven't stopped since."

Abas had witnessed the conflict personally just a few months before.

She was back finishing her master's degree at Indiana State University when the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, four years ago this month. Â

"After I lost my uncle, I felt like I lost my home."

- Soulaf Abas



Homesick and worried about her family in Damascus, she left the comfort and safety Indiana and headed home.

"I think it's the most dangerous thing I've ever done. I stayed there for two and a half months," she says. "I was seeing. I was hearing all the bombs all the shelling, waking up to it – going to bed to it. My 5-year-old and 8-year-old nieces can tell you what kind of bomb it is from the sound of it."

During that time, Abas painted beautiful landscapes as a way to escape the horror of what she was seeing. But her uncle's death triggered another reaction.

Abas says she now paints and weeps for hours at a time in her Terre Haute studio, translating the heartbreaking images of Syria onto canvas.

Oil painting show bomb devastated neighborhoods. Black and white prints depict a parent carrying a limp child and people embracing in grief.

But out of all the pain, Abas has also sparked hope.

Early last year she also volunteered at the Ryves Youth Center in Terre Haute, where disadvantaged kids escape rough neighborhoods, drugs, or abusive homes.

Abas told them about the plight of Syrians. The United Nations estimates 9 million people have been displaced by violence, and 3 million are living in refugee camps in neighboring countries.

Wanting to help, the Ryves kids decided to write letters and share artwork with refugee children. Abas was planning to volunteer at a therapy center in Jordan, so hand delivered the art and letters to the young Syrians last summer.

"A lot of them had just anxiety issues, separation issues, PTSD. They had been raped. They would either not talk for a whole month or be a little bit aggressive," Abas says. "But then I also thought the whole time, 'If it is not easy for me I can only imagine how hard it is for them.'"

Despite their own struggles, the Syrian children wanted to write back to their new friends in Terre Haute.

After delivering the letters and artwork to the children in Terre Haute, Abas compiled everything from the exchange and put it into a book called "Me and You," and donated all of the proceeds to the families of the 30 Syrian children.

In one week Abas raised $10,000.

"What gives me hope the most is none of these kids in the book or any of the kids I had worked with said 'if' we go back to Syria," Abas says. "Every single one of the kids said 'when.' 'When we go back' made a world of difference to me."

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