Syrian activist escapes to Turkey - and to exile from the fight against Assad

ISTANBUL - This is a story of survival.

Two years ago, we first met Ameena working as an anti-al Assad activist in a rebel-held suburb of Damascus called Moahdimiyeh.

At night the whole area around her home came under constant shelling by the Syrian army. 

In August 2013, Ameena's neighborhood was attacked with chemical weapons. But the poison gas that killed more than 1,000 people blew away from her house.

And she lived to tell us - in a Skype call - how she ran to the clinic.

"I had to help," she said then. "The people were screaming."

It was risky, but life had ceased to mean very much by then. 

That fall, the Syrian military had cut off all food supplies to the suburb.

When the army lifted its siege long enough to allow the vulnerable to escape, Ameenah managed to slip out too.

Never sleeping twice in the same place, she was at last smuggled across the border to Turkey where we caught up with her.

"I just want to go back," she said. "I don't want to think about it, I don't want to think that this is going to last for a long time." 

She says she has no regrets about becoming an activist.

Survival for Ameena now means no bombs and bullets any more, but just a lonely exile from home and from the fight she had been willing to die for.