SYRIAN exiles used powerful images by children trapped in the conflict in their homeland in a West Kensington exhibition last week. GREG BURNS spoke to organisers to find out more about the chilling display.

A QUICK glance at the walls of the Bhavan Centre last week and you would have thought you were looking at colourful children's pictures.

The truth is that you would have been.

But as you moved closer it quickly became clear the drawings exhibited at the West Kensington centre were something far more harrowing.

In fact they were a shocking insight into the horrific atrocities of violence, torture and murder that are etching themselves into the psychology of the children of Syria.

To commemorate the first anniversary of the revolution and bloody crackdown by its brutal dictator Bashar al-Assad to suppress the uprising, Syrian exiles put on an exhibition to raise money for field hospitals and raise awareness of their plight.

Entitled 'Syrian Children Drawing Freedom', it was organised in co-operation with the Syrian Charter Movement, Idlib Co-ordinating Committees and the High Relief Commission.

It involved smuggling pictures out of the Syrian cities of Homs, Idlib and Damascus, while activists held workshops with refugees in Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan and encouraged British children to animate what they had heard about the conflict.

The result is a painful and heart-wrenching display of pictures.

Innocent children as young as six have picked up their crayons and sketched graphic images of tanks firing on crowds, bodies in the street and pleas for peace written in the blood of victims.

Mutasem Syoufi, one of the organisers, was forced to leave his homeland in 2010 for Saudi Arabia after refusing to take part in compulsory national service.

Now studying a masters degree, he has watched on in horror as thousands of men, women and children are slaughtered by al-Assad's brutal regime.

“When I left the country there was relative peace,” he said. “I could not imagine the horrors we have seen since. My family still live in Damascus and my brother was captured by the army and tortured.

“Luckily he was released but they beat him and burned him over Christmas and New Year. The situation is shocking and we want to keep the world aware of what is going on.

“The pictures are very powerful and it took us about two months to get them all out of Syria for the exhibition. We asked them to draw their experiences, their hopes and their fears and it is so sad to see how young these children are and how many terrible things they have seen.

“Art helps them express their anger and document historic events experienced by Syrians. It also presented the Syrian Revolution to the British public in a different light to media reports.”

The rule of al-Assad involves imprisoning, torturing and murdering critics, clampdowns on freedom of speech and shocking human rights violations.

Pro-democracy protests began in March last year with security forces opening fire on crowds and shelling populated cities where rebel forces are camped with no regard for civilian casualties.

And Mr Syoufi hopes the images coming out of Syria will soon be one of a new dawn and new era of peace and stability.

“There can be no future with al-Assad in power,” he said. “It is hard to predict the future for Syria but I hope and pray that this brutality will end quickly.”