Fadi spent a year trapped in an airport - now he lives near one
AUSTRALIA: After spending a year in the detention room of Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport, Fadi Mansour smiles when he sees a plane passing at his new home in Australia.
His arduous journey spanning over a year and several countries underscores the lengths he went to in escaping the worsening turmoil in Syria, the source of the largest number of refugees worldwide.
The Syrian asylum seeker, 28, was resettled in Melbourne in June after the Australian government granted him a humanitarian visa.
‘‘I saw so many take-offs and landings from the airport and would think how it is amazing that people have the freedom to fly,’’ he tells Fairfax Media at a busy Essendon cafe as he takes sips from his coffee.
He had flown on several planes himself. Carrying a fake Brazilian passport for which he paid a smuggler nearly US$10,000, he was deported from Lebanon, Turkey and Malaysia while trying to reach Germany.
Turkish authorities apprehended him in the ‘‘Problematic Passengers Area’’ of Ataturk Airport in March last year before transferring him to a detention centre in Adana, south-eastern Turkey. After a sustained international campaign that human rights group Amnesty International spearheaded, he and his family made it to Melbourne.
Finishing compulsory military service days before the start of the revolution, he took to the streets of Homs to call for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s removal.
Events quickly turned bloody when Assad forces starting firing on protesters and rebel groups started receiving weaponry and funding from power brokers.
Since the start of Syria’s descent into a grinding civil war, nearly 300,000 people have been killed and over 4 million displaced.
He was called up to join the reserves of the Syrian national army as Assad forces were facing off against the rebels. With groups such as Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra and an offshoot of al-Qaeda, adding to the carnage, he decided to take off to Lebanon in August 2012.
Lebanon hosts more than 1 million Syrians, who comprise the largest refugee population globally at about 5 million.
Mansour recounted how a gang kidnapped him in southern Beirut. He was released after paying a ransom to his captors.
‘‘We couldn’t live properly with our dignity intact as Syrians. If you are a Syrian there, may God be with you’’.
In November 2014, after receiving news that Jabhat al-Nusra had killed one of his closest friends in Homs, he boarded a plane for Istanbul planning to go to Kuala Lumpur. He wanted to seek asylum in Frankfurt but was deterred from boarding a boat by the many deaths of refugees in the Mediterranean Sea.
‘‘Half die on the sea, sadly, and I thought a plane would be safer. Every method of travel has been thought of by a Syrian to get out of that hell.’’
After months in Istanbul and Kuala Lumpur waiting for his smuggler’s go-ahead to board a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt, Malaysian authorities kept him under arrest for four days in abhorrent conditions at KL airport.
He was then deported to Istanbul in February 2015, where Turkish authorities housed him with Islamist sympathisers who he claims, were foreign fighters heading to Syria.
‘‘One of them assaulted me violently three times because he found out I was Christian. He tried to convert me incessantly. I felt vulnerable and alone.’’
After a year in detention and a series of deportations, he took to social media to tell of his struggle and, in the meantime, applied for asylum in Australia, where he already had a relative.
Australia agreed to take 12,000 Syrian and Iraqi refugees as part of its humanitarian program last year. A Department of Immigration official declined to comment on whether Mansour was included in the government’s oneoff commitment.
Mansour’s waiting drew comparisons in international news coverage with Tom Hanks’ movie The Terminal, which he watched for the first time while in detention. The movie was based on the case of Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian refugee who had spent 18 years at Paris’ Charles De Gaulle Airport.
‘‘I wanted to tell Tom Hanks, come and watch me. If he only knew half of what happened to me’’, he recounts.
After raising the alarm about his year in detention, Turkish officials told him he was being released.
‘‘We were going through passport control but I had to wait for hours for the border guards to process the dogs of passengers from other flights going before me - couldn’t help but laugh.’’
On March 23, he was handcuffed and transferred to Adana Removal Centre, which he compared to a jail, with different cells housing foreign fighters and children.
‘‘There was no hope anymore. I was completely shattered at this point. The waiting had taken a toll on me and things were getting from bad to worse.’’
Australian immigration officials were following his case and had met with him in Adana assuring him his application was on track, taking photos and fingerprints.
In June, Mansour was granted asylum and was boarding a plane for Melbourne in Istanbul when a border guard jokingly asked him to take him on the flight.
‘‘I felt like I was at home in the plane because I had taken so many flights. What was another two hours transiting in Dubai in a year of waiting? I had become an expert at navigating life.’’
Mansour was reunited with his family a month after landing. They had escaped from Homs via Beirut to Melbourne after being granted humanitarian visas.
Until he can find employment, he has enrolled in English classes with the aim of getting back into studying law. ‘‘I want to work as soon as possible and give back to Australia,’’ he says.
For now, his days are spent going to various physicians who are helping with his personal trauma: ‘‘I don’t watch TV for my own mental well-being. I feel helpless that I can’t do anything for my people suffering.’’
He has settled into a rhythm of voluntary work with his local Orthodox church and has been familiarising himself with Melbourne’s sporting culture, playing basketball at an outdoor court near his home.
Mansour loves walking for hours in town to familiarise himself with his new home’s geography. ‘‘I experience moments when I pinch myself that I am really here,’’ he says.
As he slowly adjusts to life in Australia, trying to move past his ordeal, Mansour is mindful that his second home, the airport, is never too far away. ’’The plane is a part of me now.’’ - Fairfax I