Ahmet Sait Akçay
30 December 2016•Update: 03 January 2017
By Musa Samur
ANKARA
Kosovar football player Vedat Muriqi compared his childhood memories during the Kosovo War of 1998-1999 to the Syrian civil war, pointing out the similarities between the two tragedies.
“I am the one who can understand best what's going on in Syria now as we are watching on the TV. They are in a far more dire situation [than we were]. And there is only Turkey embracing the Syrians,” the 22-year-old striker, who plays for Turkey’s Ankara-based Genclerbirligi football team, said during an exclusive interview with Anadolu Agency.
Muriqi recalled his memories from the days of Kosovo War when he was a child. He said he remembered when he together with his parents had to leave their home and immigrate to a different place.
“We used to stay at one house with 50-55 people, but after we migrated, we started to live in a single room together with 50-55 people. We had to sleep on the bottles in the basement for two days,” said Muriqi.
Kosovo Albanians and Serbia fought a war between February 28, 1998, and June 11, 1999 during which more than 10,000 ethnic Albanians are estimated to have been killed by the then Yugoslav forces. Another 1,700 others remain missing.
“We used to have 2 litres of milk every day for 50 people. We were kids and when we asked for food, our mothers cried because they had nothing to give,” he added.
Syria has been locked in a devastating civil war since early 2011, when the Bashar al-Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests -- which erupted as part of the Arab Spring uprisings -- with unexpected ferocity.
Since then, more than a quarter of a million people have been killed and more than 10 million displaced across the war-torn country, according to the UN.
