This First Person piece is by Ali Kharsa, an international relations student at Vanier College in Montreal. His family fled war in Syria and he is now a Canadian citizen. For more information about CBC’s First Person stories, please see the FAQ.
I remember the day the innocence of my childhood ended.
My friends and I had decided that day to skip school in my home city of Aleppo in Syria. We were young, only 13, and sometimes we would go for lunch and come back. We had only been away for an hour or so when we heard the explosion and saw smoke coming from
