‘We didn’t expect the world would look at us without doing anything’
Few nations other than Germany and Sweden have offered help to refugees
ISTANBUL— Jihad Rahmoon sips his single-shot espresso at a Starbucks adjacent to Taksim Square, surrounded by Turks on their laptops and smartphones surfing and chatting with their friends.
“I am wanted in Damascus,” he begins. Rahmoon, 32, speaks softly in near-perfect English. He runs his hands through his thick, curly hair and stares forward.
“I joined the revolution when it started. I worked with some networks inside Damascus to organize demonstrations and provide relief aid to those who suffered from the shelling and the killing,” he says.
“Us activists, we were so busy in Damascus. We had planned to hit the regime with demonstrations in neighbourhoods that they didn’t expect to get hit with protests . . . Someone saw my face. He knew me. He was, like a spy, a double agent, and he reported my name to the Syrian intelligence services.”
Rahmoon cannot return to Syria as long as Bashar Assad remains in power. “If I go back, I will be thrown in prison or I will be killed.”
He remembers the night he and his friends met to discuss his options. “I had a choice. I could join the Free Syrian Army, but all of us refused that as we didn’t want to carry weapons against each other. The decision was to go out of Syria.”
Rahmoon left Damascus on July 3, 2012.
He said goodbye to his parents, his younger brother and sister, his friends, his job as an English teacher, his Mazda and all his belongings.
Like so many fleeing Syrians, he started walking in the dead of night. He eventually joined two women, their children and an elderly man. They hiked over the mountains and crossed into Turkey.
“I’m not legal here. I work as a freelance translator. Work has slowed down. Technically, it is not good to stay in a country where you don’t exist. Where you have nothing,” he says. Rahmoon worked for the Star as a translator.
It is estimated that nearly one million Syrians live in Turkey’s urban cities and rural villages. Another 220,000 live in temporary camps and containers run by the Turkish government along the southern border, according to the International Crisis Group.
In Istanbul, Syrians are everywhere. Families live in parks, in crowded apartments, abandoned buildings, with friends or friends of friends. Children in pyjamas ask for sweets in the stores lining Taksim Square. Fathers, hauling their children, beg for spare change from tourists in cafés. Other kids are put to work along Istanbul’s main roadways, selling packages of Kleenex to cars stopped at the traffic lights.
“Turkey is the best place for Syrians to stay. But we are not refugees. I will never say I am a refugee. We are visitors,” Rahmoon says. Istanbul is the first stop of Rahmoon’s intended journey. His plan is to cross illegally into Greece and settle in Sweden. There are few countries willing to give Syrians a chance at a new life. According to Eurostat and United Nations data, from 2011, when the conflict began, to August 2013, Germany granted asylum to the greatest number of Syrians, taking in 19,360, followed by Sweden at 15,480. Canada only accepted 512 Syrians from 2011 to the end of 2012, the data shows. “I will not go there to work. I will go there to study. I will get legal papers and then come back to Turkey,” Rahmoon says. He will return to Istanbul to be closer to Syria so that he can rescue his 13-year-old sister, Shaza, and give her a chance at having a life. “My sister needs education. Her future is so vital for me. This is the main reason why I’m going to Sweden. I want to provide my sister with a decent future. Not like my future. Not like my life,” he says. Rahmoon’s hometown is Yabroud, about 80 kilometres north of Damascus near the Lebanese border. In March, Yabroud came under intense artillery and air attacks. It was the one of the last rebel-held cities to fall to Syrian government troops, aided by Lebanese Hezbollah fighters. “When the military campaign started . . . my family fled to Damascus. They are there now,” he says. Rahmoon begged his father to leave with the rest of his family but he refused. “He says, ‘I want to witness.’ I asked him, ‘What do you want to witness?’ He said, ‘I want to witness what will happen to Syria,’ ” says Rahmoon. Everyone thought the international community would have stepped in by now, but that has not been the case. Except for a few nations, none has stepped up to help.
“We didn’t expect the world would stay and stand and look at us, without doing anything,” he says.
The journey to Europe is perilous. Rahmoon has two options: he can cross the Aegean Sea on a raft until he hits one of the Greek Islands, or he can leave via the northwestern Turkish city of Edirne and walk, run and hike through the forests of southern Bulgaria until he reaches Sofia.
Both options are dangerous. Hundreds of Syrians have drowned trying to get to Greece.
Every Syrian has heard the stories of the crossing.
“A smuggler, who does his job by land, told me that there was a yacht full of Syrian refugees crossing the sea and they were forced by the coast guard to come back. The captain refused and so (the coast guard) started to shoot,” he says.
There is the story of someone who made it to Greece, only to come back to Istanbul.
“There is the possibility of drowning, of being captured by police and put into a camp. Someone tried it. He was captured and put in a camp. The next day he was served food. It was stinky food. He complained and said, ‘What is this? It is bad, I refuse to eat it.’ And the answer was, ‘You Arabs are lower than dogs. So, you deserve such food.’ ”
The man was sent to Athens. From there, he returned to Istanbul of his own will, because Rahmoon says he was “humiliated.”
Rahmoon figures he will have to pay smugglers between € 1,300 and
€ 2,500 ($1,980 to $3,800 Canadian) to leave by boat.
“I just feel it is not fair to be treated like this. Where is the humanity? The dignity of being a human? Just because I have a Swedish passport or a Canadian passport I can go wherever I want? But because I have a Syrian passport nobody wants me?
“There are hundreds of thousands like me. They want to go to Europe but they don’t want to stay there. The majority of them want to go there to have a normal life, like human beings, they want to study and then they want to go back to Syria and build a better country.”