People I know are shell-shocked at the prospect of an unknown future in foriegn shores and with pain to endure for at least a decade, many envision neverreturning.
And just as Arafat understood that after he said the magic words the West would ignore his bad behavior, so Assad knew that Washington and Paris would pay no attention when upon returning from Riyadh he announced that Syria's relations with Iran will never be weakened.
As it turned out, that was a false alarm: one of the ships at the center of the media firestorm never left port and the other carried out a normal training mission in the Black Sea before quietly returning to base a few days later.
"You can never be prepared for that - to tell 18 to 20 families that their loved one would not be returning to them that day or in the future, " he said.