Syrians, amid civil war, resettling in Georgia

15 live in state; clergy group seeks revival of effort to bring more.

The shouting and crying are still fresh in the young Syrian refugee’s memory of the 11 days he was detained by militiamen loyal to President Bashar al-Assad.

Yamn — who asked that his full name not be used and that he not be photographed to protect relatives still living in Damascus — assumed fellow captives were being beaten in 2011. He also recalls the car bombs that rocked his town. One killed two of his friends after he fled Syria the following year.

Yamn is among 15 Syrian refugees who have resettled in Georgia since Syria’s civil war began in 2011. In all, the U.S. has welcomed 512 during that time.

Refugee aid groups say the U.S. should be taking in far more amid the humanitarian crisis in Syria. Meanwhile, a small group of clergymen is seeking to revive efforts to resettle refugees from Syria and other countries in Athens after objections from local and state officials.

Yamn said the militiamen set him free after wrongfully accusing him of opposing the Assad government. Fearing for their lives, he and his family fled to Lebanon. Yamn continued on to the U.S. in November and now lives in a modest apartment in Decatur. He works as a carpenter and hopes to one day go into business management. Yamn worries about his parents and siblings, who returned to Damascus after Lebanon wouldn’t issue them visas to remain there. He hopes they, too, can come to the U.S.

“There are bombings, there are killings, there are shootings everywhere,” Yamn, 23, said of his native country, speaking through an Arabic interpreter. “I had to live in a basement all the time, or I had to leave because there are a lot of dangerous things.”

Other nations at ‘breaking point’

The death toll in Syria’s civil war has topped 191,000, according to an August report commissioned by the United Nations. Millions of others have been displaced by the revolt.

The International Rescue Committee, a refugee aid organization that helped Yamn resettle in Georgia, released a statement this week calling on the U.S. “to do its fair share and offer resettlement to at least 65,000 Syrian refugees over the next three years.” Parts of Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey have reached their “breaking point” after absorbing the brunt of the Syrian refugee crisis, the IRC said. At the same time, Syrian refugees have become the target of discrimination and harassment in the region, the IRC said, and some governments there have begun to restrict their access to health care.

“The number of Syrians resettled to the U.S. since the Syrian conflict began is extremely low,” J.D. McCrary, the executive director of the IRC’s Atlanta office, said in a prepared statement. “The U.S. has gotten a slow start while other countries far smaller than ours, such as Germany, have already accepted many thousands.”

A U.S. State Department official said one reason for the “modest number” of Syrians brought here since the conflict began is that the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees did not start referring them in large numbers to this country until midway through last year.

Larry Bartlett, the director of refugee admissions at the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, disclosed that his agency has received nearly 11,000 referrals of Syrians for resettlement since then. He expects between 1,000 and 2,000 will arrive in the U.S. this year and that more — though still in the “low thousands” — will arrive next year.

“The United States is deeply committed to assisting the Syrian people, and we are a major participant in the Syrian refugee resettlement program coordinated by the U.N. refugee agency,” Bartlett said.

Bartlett added that the U.S. accepts more refugees for permanent resettlement than the rest of the world combined. In the fiscal year ending in September, for example, 70,000 refugees resettled here, he said.

To resettle in the U.S., refugees must first demonstrate they were persecuted or have a wellfounded fear of persecution based on religion, political opinion, race, nationality or membership in a particular social group. They must also undergo security and medical screenings.

The federal government provides them with funding that partially covers the cost of rent, furniture, food and clothing. Private contributions supplement that funding. Refugees may work in the U.S. They are required to apply for permanent residency after a year and are eligible to apply for U.S. citizenship after five years.

Resettlements in Athens put on hold

In October, the State Department shelved an IRC plan to resettle 150 refugees — including Syrians — in Athens after objections from Mayor Nancy Denson and Gov. Nathan Deal’s administration. Denson raised concerns that the refugees could strain public resources in Athens-Clarke County, which is home to about 120,000 residents. In an interview this week, she cited the region’s high poverty rate, estimated Ahmed Syrian refugee at 37 percent by the U.S. Census Bureau.

“You can water soup down to the point that everybody starves,” she said. “We are struggling in Athens-Clarke County to take care of the needs that we have now. We are just not physically and fiscally able to take on additional responsibilities.”

Georgia Human Services Commissioner Keith Horton sent the State Department a letter in August saying he did not want the IRC’s plan to go forward then, saying the “degree of cooperation, communication and consultation is not where I would like for it to be.”

A small group of ministers in the region is now hoping to get the mayor and the State Department to reconsider their positions, noting the Bible talks about loving, clothing and feeding strangers. They met this month with McCrary at Athens’ Covenant Presbyterian Church.

The ministers worry people in Athens have wrongly conflated the issue of illegal immigration with the resettlement of refugees, who are admitted by the federal government and given legal status here. They also point out many refugees who come to the U.S. quickly become self-sufficient, start their own businesses and contribute to the economy.

“We feel like this is part of our moral imperative as a country to welcome people from other countries here in order to find home,” said Mark Harper, the pastor of Covenant Presbyterian. “That’s to me part of the national narrative, even a patriotic narrative, that we can be proud of and embrace.”

The first Syrian refugees started arriving in Georgia in August. In an interview that month in Atlanta, Ahmed — who asked that his full name not be used and that he not be photographed to protect his relatives in Syria — said bombs flattened his neighborhood near Homs. He fled to Jordan in 2012 after militiamen aligned with Assad’s regime wrongfully accused him of attacking them. In 2013, he said, the Syrian army kidnapped his father — a taxi driver — at a checkpoint, bound his hands, beat him and shot him twice in the head.

“I don’t have any positive hope for Syria, even if Bashar al-Assad will go,” Ahmed said through an Arabic interpreter at the IRC’s office in Atlanta. “There are so many parties fighting and everything is destroyed.”

Ahmed, who now works at a chicken processing plant in Georgia, said he was grateful to be in the U.S., where he feels safe. His countryman, Yamn, has similar feelings. Asked what he could have in the U.S. that he couldn’t have in Syria, he responded simply: “Life. I can live here.”

‘I don’t have any positive hope for Syria, even if Bashar al-Assad will go. There are so many parties fighting and everything is destroyed.’