WE ALL WANT TO SAY THANK YOU TO THE UK
TERRIFIED of a rocket landing on theirAleppo home,Yahya and Samah told their children it was time to run.
Mother-of-four Samah, 40, only had time to gather treasured photographs, including one of her wedding, before they boarded a bus to Beirut, seven hours away in neighbouring Lebanon.
They would live there for more than five years, enduring a daily battle to earn enough to eat and heat their single-room home.
The family’s nightmare began in early 2012, when dictator Bashar alAssad ordered an indiscriminate bombardment on Syria’s largest city.
Aleppo was blitzed with rocket attacks, helicopter assaults and shootouts between government forces and rebel fighters. The battle for the city claimed almost 32,000 lives before a final offensive in November 2016.
Yahya Kadib Alban and Samah Abdel-Hay, sitting safely in their home near Nottingham, cannot thank Britain enough for taking them in. They are among 25,500 refugees to have found sanctuary here.
Yahya now works as a fencer, having also helped set up homes for other Syrian refugees fleeing the war.
Samah is a carer and all their children can finally play safely outside.
Oldest sons Ahmad, 18, and Aymen, 15, have excelled at school and now plan to go to university. Dusama, 10, and Hala, four, are also flourishing. Samah told the Daily
Express of life back in Syria: “We were very scared for the children.
“They started using rockets. They were shooting from the sky as well.
“At night, you couldn’t sleep, because people were still shooting. There were explosions everywhere.
“We had to get away. We wanted to protect our children.
“We didn’t think. We just ran. I only took pictures with me from my wedding party. I still have it now. I had to save that.”
Yahya, who volunteered at a foodbank while learning English, added: “I was scared for Syria. I love Syria. But I was scared because of the fighting.
“We would have gone anywhere, Lebanon,Turkey, anywhere.We just had to leave Syria.”
Speaking of his recollections as an eight-year-old, Ahmad said: “There was a chance we could die.
We all just wanted to leave.” The family moved to Lebanon where a family friend had a home they could rent in capital Beirut.
There, they slept on mattresses on the floor, waking regularly due to the cold. Both parents worked, but with education costs intensifying and inflation rising, Ahmad, then 11, dropped out of school to work 12 hours a day.
He said: “I was still in primary school but I had to drop out to go to work. I had to work while my dad was also working because everything was expensive. I worked at
a barber’s shop, from 9am until 10pm. I had to be really skilled because there were so many other barber shops in the same street.” His mother added: “The school in Lebanon said it was only going to take the best five children from Syria. The rest didn’t have a school to go to. [Ahmad] went out because he wasn’t in the best five children. I asked him what we could do? And he said I just want to go to work and I can help my dad. It made me cry all the time. I wasn’t happy. When he came back from work, he was in
pain because he was standing all the time.”
In 2017, the family moved to the UK through the Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme. Ahmad, Aymen and Dusama enrolled at school and began learning English.
Ahmad, now at college, said: “I started learning words. Then I started talking normally. I had so much support from the teachers.
“I want to go to university one day. It seems like a very important thing, when you get a degree, it shows you’ve worked really hard to get where you want to go. It makes getting a better job much easier.”
Aymen is also doing well at school and hopes to win a place at Oxford or Cambridge.
Samah admitted she was scared her children would struggle to connect with their peers due to the language barrier. But she added:
“When we came here, all the children play outside. My children would play with them. I would look from the window and think ‘They are safe, why was I scared?’. My children didn’t speak a word of English. The children outside played anyway. I know I was wrong because I was scared.”
The family are now saving to buy their current home in Nottingham or a bigger property next year when they are given indefinite leave to remain in the UK.
Samah said: “We sleep well now. We don’t have anything to be scared about. My children are fine, my husband is fine, the house is very good. The children have school, they could go to university.
“I would like to say thank you to the UK.”