Ukrainians have been living,
suffering, and dying under
withering Russian air,
artillery, and missile strikes.
Their plight, and resistance, is
perhaps nowhere better
understood than in Syria's idlib
province.
There, Syrians who oppose
president bashar al-assad are in
their 11th year of resistance
against him and his closest
ally, Russia's Vladimir Putin.
Producer and videographer Abdel
razaq el Shami calls idlib home,
and he worked with our own Ali
rogin to bring us this report.
Ali: I thousand miles from
Ukraine, Syrians in idlib
province commemorated 11 years
of war, perpetuated by a common
enemy, Vladimir Putin.
For much of the last decade,
Putin's punishing air campaign
has propped up Syrian president
bashar al-assad, and his
murderous campaign against his
own people.
>> Of course there is one
criminal, whether in Russia,
Ukraine or Syria, and that is
Putin.
It was Putin himself that
targeted hospitals and schools,
infrastructure and educational
buildings in Syria and in
Ukraine.
Ali: Idlib's people are under
constant threat of Russian
airstrikes.
But their province is the only
one still controlled by
anti-assad rebels and islamist
insurgents.
After 11 years of war, sparked
by peaceful protests against the
arrest of teenage graffiti
artists who were inspired by the
Arab spring.
The demonstrations began in
March 2011 and were met with
vicious force.
The crackdown grew into a
full-on civil war, pitting
levels, including military
defectors, against the regime.
Putin began airstrikes to
support Assad in late 2015, and
they continued today.
So does their close
relationship.
Syrians in idlib fear history is
repeating itself in Ukraine.
>> Because the world was
ignoring what's happening in
Syria and this is repeated in
Ukraine and this is will be
repeated everywhere.
Ali: Almost half a million
people have been killed,
including more than 40,000 women
and children.
It's also the source of the
world's largest refugee crisis.
Almost 7 million Syrians fled
their country.
An additional 6.7 million are
internally displaced.
They've ended up in places like
the kafr lusin camp, just north
of idlib city on the
syrian-turkish border.
Here, a spring snowfall brings
disaster and must be cleared
from tents to avoid collapse.
And tiny hands have no way to
stay warm.
Many of the residents here are
from cities long ago captured by
Assad.
Ahmed al-khalif, from the
northern city of hama, has been
here 11 years.
>> [Translated] To this day we
live in camps because of the
bombings by the Russian planes.
This is our reality now, snow,
bitter cold.
We just want to go home.
Ali: But as long as these camps
remain home, residents look for
ways to pass the time.
Lately, they've been following
news of the war in Ukraine.
Abdul Salam Yusuf is among them.
He supports the Ukrainian
people but resents how the world
seems to classify Putin's
victims by race.
>> [Translated] We wish to stand
in solidarity with the Ukrainian
people who share the same sad
fate as us because of this
criminal.
But at the beginning of the
Russian war against Ukraine, we
got a sense of some of the
attitudes of world leaders.
They call Ukrainians "Ukrainian
citizens," while Syrian migrants
are called beggars and refugees.
Ali: But that anger is for
heads of state, not the
Ukrainian people. For them,
there are messages of support,
spoken in the universal language
of art.
Painter Aziz al-azmar takes
homes destroyed by Russian
bombs and turns them into
canvases.
>> [Translated] With the Russian
invasion of Ukraine, we have
felt that this scene is very
similar to what happened to us
in Syria.
We also saw Ukrainian children
and Ukrainian citizens fleeing
from their villages and homes,
just like what happened in
Syria.
If we don't put a stop to this
, Russia will go further and
invade all the weaker states it
can.
This is why we have come to
paint on the walls of our
destroyed homes, pictures of
Russian jets, a Russian bear
invading Ukraine, to send a
message to the world that this
killer is uniting us, in Syria,
and now in Ukraine.
Ali: As war in Syria surpasses a
decade, its people still pray
for peace and for Ukraine's war
to be measured in months, not
years.
For the pbs newshour, I'm Ali