Refugees: We are Syrian people
SACRAMENTO — They share a small two- bedroom apartment in Sacramento with few possessions, but for Syrian refugee Mohammad Abd Rabboh, his wife and two daughters, there is finally freedom from fear.
Just six weeks after arriving in the US, the girls are in school and no longer screaming in the night. Their mother, Dania, is not afraid for the first time in years to go outside.
“We witnessed things that are difficult to describe,” Rabboh, 36, told Reuters, speaking in Arabic through an interpreter. “You walk in the street and someone falls dead right in front of you.”
Theirs is a story that could be easily lost in the US political backlash against Syrian refu- gees that has been stirred by reports one of the militants involved in last Friday’s deadly attacks in Paris may have hidden among the migrant flow.
The Rabbohs are among a small group of about 1,700 Syrian refugees already admitted to the United States, including 179 in California, 189 in Texas, 179 in Michigan, and 111 in Pennsylvania.
“We have to be vigilant but we also need to have our heads on our shoulders and not just be ruled by fear,” said Debra DeBondt, head of refugee agency Opening Doors.
Kamal Mahrous, who moved his family to Houston from Damascus last January after spending a year in Egypt and undergoing an FBI security check, said being Muslim was not synonymous with being a member of Islamic State or the al Queda-linked Nusra Front.
“We are Syrian people,” he said. “We are not ISIS, not Jabat al-Nusra, not the Assad regime. We are people.”