"in front of my eyes...there were peaceful demonstrations & then the army came & killed the people"
What It’s Like To Be A Syrian Refugee In America
BY JACK JENKINS NOV 22, 2015 11:27AM
DEARBORN, MICHIGAN — The young woman paused, her face tightening as she forced herself to recall the nightmarish memory. Three years after leaving Syria for asylum in the United States, dark circles still hang under her eyes. She fidgeted with her red, white, and blue hijab for a moment, then reached for her infant daughter, who sat beside her playing idly with a smartphone.
“I saw it — it was under my balcony,” the young woman, Ghussoun al Hasan, said in Arabic. “It was in front of my eyes. I saw what happened. There were peaceful demonstrations. And then the army came and killed the people.”
“And it happened to my family, not just strangers—” she said, stopping herself mid-sentence. She held her elbows tight as her eyes welled with tears, biting her lip as she waited several seconds before continuing. “I had a 27-year-old brother. He was photographing the protest and downloading it to YouTube. People were filming the army with their phones until…They killed him.”
“They killed him,” she repeated. “After that, we didn’t go outside.”
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The Muslim faith of al Hasan of millions of other refugees has become a flashpoint in the United States, where anti-Islam sentiment is on the rise. Al Hasan and her family live in Dearborn, Michigan, one of the highest concentrations of Muslim Americans in the country. The town is often a target for anti-Islam activists, many of whom claim that the community is a hotbed for extremists or is home to “no-go zones” where religious police enforce harsh interpretations of sharia law — none of which is true. Some have even threatened to attack the town to “send a signal to ISIS,” even though three Dearborn residents were themselves killed in the recent ISIS-affiliated bombing in Beirut, Lebanon.
MORE:
http://thinkprogress.org/world/2015/11/22/3724370/syrian-refugee-story/
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Al Hasan’s brother is one of more than 200,000 people killed so far during the Syrian civil war, a horrific conflict that has ravaged the country since 2011. Birthed out of the largely nonviolent protest movement often called the Arab Spring, the ensuing clash between government forces and rebel militias spilled into other parts of the Middle East, creating a power vacuum and sparking the rise of murderous militant groups such as ISIS.
Although none of the Paris attackers were actually Syrian refugees, 31 Republican and Democratic governors in the U.S. have publicly sworn to stop accepting Syrian refugees in their states, a threat they lack the constitutional authority to enact but which most justified as a necessary precaution to maintain security. Others, including GOP presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush, have suggested only accepting Christian refugees. By contrast, the French government announced last week plans to welcome some 30,000 refugees in 2016 — more than initially promised — and President Obama chastised the governors and other politicians at the G20 summit in Turkey.
At the time, both thought the distance would be temporary. Arab Spring demonstrations had already toppled authoritarian regimes in Egypt and Tunisia for brief periods, and there was hope that Syrian protesters could unseat Bashar al-Assad, the country’s notoriously oppressive leader, and usher in a new era of democratic change.
“[I thought I would] stay for 6 or 7 months, that tomorrow the war will end and a new president will come — like in Egypt or Tunisia — and we’ll go back,” she said.
But change did not come; only more violence. Eventually, after the death of her father in Turkey, al Hasan realized that returning home was unlikely, if not impossible. Frightened and out of options, she became determined to find a way to remain in America.
