Beauty amid the ashes: how a Syrian refugee transforms war into art

It's not the fighting that strikes you, but the cruelty for the sake of cruelty 

In the spring of 2011, mass protests broke out in Syria. The protesters demanded the resignation of President Bashar al-Assad. The government used tanks and snipers to suppress the rallies. The uprising then escalated into a civil war.

From May 2011 to May 2014, Homs, Ahmed's hometown, was besieged by the Syrian army, which tried to destroy the opposition military units located there.

When the war came to Homs, Ahmed had just turned 12. He was the eldest of six children in his family.

"I would compare what was happening in Homs then with the events in Mariupol last year. I recall the continuous bombardment, which hit our house too. We were constantly hiding in shelters. Our city remained closed, there was no food or electricity. Not to mention the inability to go to school."

Ahmed's father was a well-known orthopedic surgeon in Homs. At the time, there were no hospitals in the city, so Shamsaldin's house turned into a medical center, and his father taught his teenage son how to stitch up the wounded.

Two years later, when the family moved to Lebanon, the doctor continued to help war victims there. Ahmed continued to assist his father.

Recalling those years, he says that he deeply sympathizes with the Ukrainian "children of war." His younger brothers were two and three years old at the time of the siege of Homs. But even now, more than a decade later, the boys have not gotten rid of the habit of sleeping on the floor.

Ahmed finds the cruelty for the sake of cruelty in the war more striking than the actual fighting.

"Once an enemy sniper shot my cat's paw. I was very shocked because I did not understand why he did it. But I saw the sniper's eyes, he was enjoying it! Then there was more. My elderly neighbor was riding with his grandchildren on his bike, and he was shot dead in front of the kids. This is exactly the kind of cruelty that Russians are showing during the war in Ukraine - blind and senseless. And it is very scary."

Woke up from the explosions and started painting

Driven by his aspiration to pursue a medical degree, Ahmed Shamsaldin found his way to Ukraine. After exploring various countries such as Georgia, Malaysia, Sudan, and Cyprus, he eventually settled in Dnipro, where he has resided for the past four years.

He calls Dnipro a warm and friendly city. Ahmed is currently in his fourth year at the Dnipro Institute of Medicine and Public Health. He is currently choosing between orthopedics and plastic surgery.

On the day of the full-scale invasion, Ahmed woke up from the explosions and started drawing. He had never studied drawing on purpose. He just picked up a pencil at the age of two, and at seven he created his first political cartoon.

His style is reminiscent of surrealism, but the artist himself calls it middilism, a kind of bridge between surreal and realistic artistic movements.

He always has a piece of paper, a pencil or a pen in his backpack to quickly create a sketch. Sometimes the guy makes sketches on his hand, and at home, in the studio, he transfers them to the canvas. According to him, he takes all the images from his head.

Currently, Shamsaldin has over 50 paintings. Several of them are dedicated to the war in Ukraine.

He shows photos of his works on Instagram and says: "I created this painting called 'Hope is Born from Pain' on February 24. It shows the sun crying bloody tears. I combined red (pain, blood), black (darkness, night, war, death), and yellow (light, hope). The people in the painting are Ukrainians, but at the same time they are all people suffering from the war in Syria and other countries."

In the painting "Human Burger," the boy depicted how fascism, wars, and dictatorship squeeze a person "like a cutlet in a giant burger."

Arsen sketched the painting "In war, many people pay with their humanity for survival" at the train station, watching the evacuation of Dnipro residents in the first weeks of the war.

"The painting depicts a lifeline and the crushed soul of a person who is running away. To be honest, what I saw at the train station made a depressing impression on me. Everyone wanted to leave, and some did not think about others: the elderly, the children. People simply did not let my foreign friends on the first train. They said it was a train for Ukrainians. But bombs don't ask what color your skin is." 

Nurtured by hostilities

The war in Ukraine did not scare him. When the full-scale invasion began, his friends pushed Ahmed to leave for Europe, but he chose a different path.

"First, I wanted to help people. I didn't want to leave my cat and my home art studio. My mother was against it, she said: how can you achieve peace on the whole earth by yourself? But I'd rather do a little than nothing. One journalist asked me if this was a good practice for me. How could she think that these injuries are practice for me? I could have practiced in Europe, where my friends went. But I am here. When the war in Ukraine is over, I want to go to work in Palestine after graduation."

After the full-scale invasion, Shamsaldin joined the rescue of wounded soldiers. He helps doctors at the Rudnev City Clinical Hospital almost every day. He has even twice performed skin transplants on the wounded himself.

"Although I have not yet graduated from university, I am assisting a traumatologist. After all, since childhood I have been used to working in military field conditions and in conditions of shortage of materials. And now is the right time to work."

Ahmed Shamsaldin considers himself a citizen of the world and dreams of peace on the entire planet. Now he is waiting for Ukraine's victory, to which he will definitely dedicate a separate painting. He says it will not be a painting in bright colors - there will be blood and pain on the canvas. After all, the suffering of those who have experienced losses will not stop with the end of the fighting.

Author: Olha Zhuravel