Out of Syria: ‘My wife and children are trapped back home’

The last few weeks have been difficult. I haven't really wanted to write about them. Curiously, it has been the most challenging period since I found refuge in Europe.

That might seem strange because of what I have previously had to endure and because I had been made so welcome under the French resettlement programme.

We have had extraordinary support from social workers and the community in Beauvais and I have good friends with me among the 40 refugees who have been resettled in this small town. All of that is good and I'm so grateful for it.

There is, however, one unsettling complication. I have completed all the paperwork with the French authorities to allow my family to resettle with me here. France is ready to welcome them. People in Beauvais who know my circumstances are excited about their imminent arrival.

How imminent, though, is in doubt. The necessary documents are with the French embassy in Ankara but, for the last few weeks, my wife has been prevented from re-entering Turkey in order to present herself and the children at the embassy.

Serious circumstances had dictated that my wife had to risk a return to Syria from Turkey. Our region has been relatively quiet and my brother escorted her. Now, with everything resolved for her and the children to join me, returning has proven difficult.

In fact, to date, it has been impossible. My brother is with them but so far they have not been permitted to cross the border into Turkey. At first I had imagined the problem would be resolved easily but with each passing day my anxiety has grown.

It is now approaching a fortnight and despite appeals to agencies of the Turkish government here in France and at the border itself, it has not yet been possible to resolve the matter.

Remarkable journey

Ours has been a remarkable journey up to now. It’s approaching a year since I last saw my then pregnant wife and our little girl. We had fled Syria together. Our family, two grown-ups and a toddler, had literally and metaphorically scuttled under the cover of darkness from our home.

It was a choice that you don’t expect to ever to have to face but we were becoming ever more fearful. The destruction of our city had continued and our world, our normality, had been eroded to the point where we had come to believe it would never return.

There was a moment – an evening – where, consumed by our own needs, we realised our future could no longer be of that place. We talked about what had unfolded but I don’t think we thought beyond that most basic of conclusions around what we must do.

The conversation was heavy, borne of a sadness that the riches we had experienced as kids could never be open to our children as long as we lived in Syria. When you’re having such a conversation you’re focused on the practicalities and immediate challenges. Later, when you reflect back on it, you layer on the emotional enormity of what it was you had been deciding.

What had underscored our decision to flee was how our life had been shattered. The heart of our beautiful country had been ripped out so brutally and violently that Syria could never breathe again as it once had. Not in the lifetime of our children. The pulse of energy, of community, of progress had been first stilled and then replaced with one of a different beat that fuelled only distrust and dissent.

The enormity of the decision to leave was masked by that simple fact: there could be no prospect of rearing a family in Syria. It wasn’t spoken of then but we shared a certainty that the city, the country, the culture which had contributed so handsomely to our upbringing, had evaporated in a cesspool of bitterness and violence and ultimately a brutal and bloody war. We did not believe it would be recoverable in our lifetimes.

Many species migrate because their environments change and their instincts and their animal intelligence tell them that to survive, they must move. They would not do so otherwise.

Our choice was as stark, our decision as instinctive. We were abandoning our natural habitat because we knew that we had to. We knew it was paramount to move if we were to survive.

Fresh start

That’s the fate of millions of refugees in Europe now – Syrian, Afghani, Iraqi, Eritrean – women, men, children, families and, most tragically, tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors, all of whom are desperately hoping for a fresh start.

This is why my current hiatus is unsettling. After weeks in and out of a Syrian jail, my little family and I had fled home in the dead of night. On foot we made our way to Turkey.

From there I had pressed on alone, paying smugglers for transport to Greece where, after months in a tent in the camps, I had had the good fortune to be chosen under the French relocation programme.

All of that went by in a blur. Then, here in Beauvais, life slowed to a more normal pace. Now, with the very last piece of the journey and what should be the easiest to effect, we have met an immovable force . . . for now.

Mustafa is a pseudonym adopted to protect the identity of the author, who is a refugee from Syria. He spoke to Fintan Drury