Refugees Syria Quotes

A nation ringed by walls will only imprison itself.

I said to you, "Hold my hand. Nothing bad will happen." These are only words. A father's tricks, It slays your father, your faith in him. Because all I can think tonight is how deep the sea, and how vast, how indifferent. How powerless I am to protect you from it. All I can do is pray.

The refugee in Syria doesn’t benefit more if you conserve your kindness only for her and withhold it from your neighbor who’s going through a divorce.

For a start, people who traveled for so many miles through such horrific conditions in order to find work cannot accurately be portrayed as lazy benefit-scroungers

They only see us when we do something they don't want us to do, Mahmoud realized. The thought hit him like a lightning bolt. When they stayed where they were supposed to be - in the ruins of Aleppo or behind the fences of a refugee camp - people could forget about them. But when refugees did something they didn't want them to do - when they tried to cross the border into their country, or slept on the front stoops of their shops, or jumped in front of their cars, or prayed on the decks of their ferries - that's when people couldn't ignore them any longer. Mahmoud's first instinct was to disappear below decks. To be invisible. Being invisible in Syria had kept him alive. But now Mahmoud began to wonder if being invisible in Europe might be the death of him and his family. If no one saw them, no one could help them. And maybe the world needed to see what was really happening here.

Sea Prayer was inspired by the story of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea trying to reach the Safety in Europe in 2015. In the year after Alan's death, 4,176 others died or went missing attempting that same journey.

It's so weird to live in this world. What a bizarre tension to care deeply about the refugee crisis in Syria and also about Gilmore Girls.

The opposite of scarcity is not abundance; the opposite of scarcity is simply enough. Empathy is not finite, and compassion is not a pizza with eight slices. When you practice empathy and compassion with someone, there is not less of these qualities to go around. There’s more. Love is the last thing we need to ration in this world. The refugee in Syria doesn’t benefit more if you conserve your kindness only for her and withhold it from your neighbor who’s going through a divorce. Yes, perspective is critical. But I’m a firm believer that complaining is okay as long as we piss and moan with a little perspective. Hurt is hurt, and every time we honor our own struggle and the struggles of others by responding with empathy and compassion, the healing that results affects all of us.

Most recently, these people have been emigrants trying to get into Italy, not emigrants trying to leave, and their passage is no easier or safer than that of their antecedents. Thousands of refugees from Syria, Libya, Eritrea, Somalia, Ghana, and Nigeria have died off the coasts of Italy in the last ten years, capsized, drowned, sunk in flames. History marches on, and names and destinations change, but not the injustices we let one another suffer.

As politicians weigh courses of action against their political agendas the death toll weighs heavy on the conscience of the world. The once vibrant Syrian streets are now haunted by the souls of the innocent and the historic monuments that told of an unrivalled Arab civilisation no longer stand tall.

If Syria is to rise from the ashes it needs a united Arab world which has one thing on its agenda, not the falling of a dictator for we have seen many of those fall, but the reemergence of a prosperous Arab nation, one that is not reliant on foreign aid but is self-sustained and set on its way to become powerful once again.

You know a bomb crater can be made into a swimming hole. You have learned dark blood is better news than bright.

Never forget Syria. Or Iraq, for that matter.

It's been so long since I heard that someone died of natural causes.

Many people aren’t happy with the refugees coming to their country. Maybe we came illegally, but every other door was shut in our faces. What do they expect us to do?

But that life, that time, seems like a dream now, even to me, like some long-dissolved rumor. First came the protests. Then the siege. The skies spitting bombs. Starvation. Burials. These are the things you know.

Comparative suffering is a function of fear and scarcity. Falling down, screwing up, and facing hurt often lead to bouts of second-guessing our judgment, our self-trust, and even our worthiness. I am enough can slowly turn into Am I really enough? If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past decade, it’s that fear and scarcity immediately trigger comparison, and even pain and hurt are not immune to being assessed and ranked. My husband died and that grief is worse than your grief over an empty nest. I’m not allowed to feel disappointed about being passed over for promotion when my friend just found out that his wife has cancer. You’re feeling shame for forgetting your son’s school play? Please—that’s a first-world problem; there are people dying of starvation every minute. The opposite of scarcity is not abundance; the opposite of scarcity is simply enough. Empathy is not finite, and compassion is not a pizza with eight slices. When you practice empathy and compassion with someone, there is not less of these qualities to go around. There’s more. Love is the last thing we need to ration in this world. The refugee in Syria doesn’t benefit more if you conserve your kindness only for her and withhold it from your neighbor who’s going through a divorce. Yes, perspective is critical. But I’m a firm believer that complaining is okay as long as we piss and moan with a little perspective. Hurt is hurt, and every time we honor our own struggle and the struggles of others by responding with empathy and compassion, the healing that results affects all of us.

Even if the Syrian Civil War ended today, there isn’t enough water and oil to feed the population. Syria will not—will never—recover. Rivers of Syrian refugees into Turkey are the new normal, for they’ve nowhere else to flow.

It's so weird to live in this world. What a bizarre tension to care deeply about the refugee crisis in Syria and also about Gilmore Girls. It is so disorienting to fret over aged-out foster kids while saving money for a beach vacation. Is it even okay to have fun when there is so much suffering in our communities and churches and world? What does it say about us when we love things like sports, food, travel, and fashion in a world plagued with hunger and human trafficking?

For many Syrians, the start of a new life in Europe was the third in a succession of traumas. The trauma of war was followed by the trauma of a death-defying journey, only to be eclipsed by the trauma of disappointed expectations upon arriving in the West.

Today, the word “refugee” is used in a horrible way. It’s something either to be pitied or blamed for everything. Overpopulation? It’s the refugees. Rents going up? It’s the refugees. Crime? It’s the refugees. If you label people refugees, they remain refugees for the rest of their lives.

It is far easier for a Muslim to immigrate to Germany than it is for a Christian to immigrate to Saudi Arabia. Indeed, it is probably easier for even a Muslim refugee from Syria to immigrate to Germany than to Saudi Arabia, and since 2011 Germany has taken in many more Syrian refugees than has Saudi Arabia.

What about all the poor brothers and sisters across the city and the shit they had to deal with? Fuck, what about all the poor brothers and sisters in Syria for that matter? They sure had their hands full. What do you even call depression in a refugee camp? Depression felt as much a luxury as veganism and fair trade coffee.

Many people aren’t happy with the refugees coming to their country. Maybe we came illegally, but every other door was shut in our faces. What do they expect us to do? Isn’t it enough our government destroyed us and we lost everything? We would prefer to stay in our country. If you don’t want refugees, help us make peace in Syria.

The regime has turned us into monsters so it can justify killing us by saying that it's fighting monsters... I imagine this man who loses his kids- the one thing that defines his future. I completely understand if he turns into a monster. But even a monster has hope. He hopes that someday he'll go back to being a normal human being.

Empathy is not finite, and compassion is not a pizza with eight slices. When you practice empathy and compassion with someone, there is not less of these qualities to go around. There’s more. Love is the last thing we need to ration in this world. The refugee in Syria doesn’t benefit more if you conserve your kindness only for her and withhold it from your neighbor who’s going through a divorce. Yes, perspective is critical. But I’m a firm believer that complaining is okay as long as we piss and moan with a little perspective. Hurt is hurt, and every time we honor our own struggle and the struggles of others by responding with empathy and compassion, the healing that results affects all of us. 8.

I can barely muster up enough empathy to cover the humans I know. Every day we’re asked to feel sorry for refugees from Syria and gay men in Chechnya and Muslims in Myanmar. It’s too much. The human mind wasn’t built to assimilate so much suffering. It was designed to produce just enough empathy to cover its own little community. So please don’t ask me to expend my dwindling reserves on an owl.

But there was a pulling back in the Middle East, and it had two major consequences: it abetted the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria, and it contributed to the massive outflow of refugees from that region into Europe. That outflow in turn helped to create the anti-immigration backlash that fueled the British withdrawal from the European Union and the rise of populist/nationalist politics inside almost every EU member state. It

If there was any part of the global crisis that the United States owned, it was the chaos that was unfolding in the Middle East. The United States had not played a direct role in the ethnic cleansing that had taken place in Southeast Asia, or the wars that had broken out across Africa. But the United States was directly responsible for the chain of events that led up to the destruction of Iraq and the related dissolution of Syria. If there were any refugees this country might have felt a moral obligation to accept, it would be people from some of the very countries listed in the ban.

When you practice empathy and compassion with someone, there is not less of these qualities to go around. There’s more. Love is the last thing we need to ration in this world. The refugee in Syria doesn’t benefit more if you conserve your kindness only for her and withhold it from your neighbor who’s going through a divorce. Yes, perspective is critical. But I'm a firm believer that complaining is okay as long as we piss and moan with a little perspective. Hurt is hurt, and every time we honor our own struggle and the struggles of others by responding with empathy and compassion, the healing that results affects all of us.

Together the top ten refugee-hosting countries account for only 2.5 percent of global income. 5 They are poor or at best middle-income countries. Turkey has 2.9 million registered refugees; Pakistan, 1.4 million; Lebanon, 1 million; Iran and Uganda, around 1 million apiece; Ethiopia, 0.8 million; and so on. 6 In Lebanon one in four people is a refugee from Syria, Palestine, or Iraq. 7 This is the reality of the global refugee crisis today: it is concentrated in the poorer parts of the world. Europe, accounting for more than 20 percent of global income, has 11 percent of the world’s refugees. The United States, with 25 percent of global income, has 1 percent of the world’s refugees. 8

You know,” he says, “in Syria, we are always having coffee together. Almost every day I went to a friend’s house and we sat for two hours, for three hours, drinking coffee together, talking about things. Why do you not do that here? Everyone stays here, here, here.” He frowns and jabs at the air. “No one knows their neighbors. No one has coffee.” “You’re right,” I say. “You’re right.” “I tell this to Moradi,” he says, giving a reluctant smile. “I tell her I will start having coffee with people. Soon everyone will come to my house and we will all know each other and talk together. She says, ‘Mohammad, Americans do not want this! They do not want!’ But I tell her I will show her. I will start. We will meet here, there. Maybe at a coffeehouse. It is good this way, for us to drink coffee together.” He laughs. I laugh too, but the truth of what he says reaches me. We as Americans are very good at being independent. I struggle to think of the last time I needed someone, truly needed someone. We are so busy. Too busy. There is very little time for that kind of community, where we meet

There’s not much risk that it will conquer Iraq’s Shia-majority region or Kurdistan, now that the first shock of its expansion up to their borders has passed, for both could count on strong Iranian military support if required. Syria is a more worrisome case, for a jihadi victory in Syria would bring Islamic State (and, in the north, perhaps also the Nusra emirate) right up to the borders of Lebanon and northern Israel. Millions more refugees would pour across the borders into Lebanon and Jordan (which have already taken in several million Syrian refugees), possibly with Islamist fighters in hot pursuit. This would create a high probability of a direct military confrontation with Israel, even if the Islamists would really prefer to concentrate on killing Shias first.

Since Daniel eight suggests that the Antichrist will come from a new small and insignificant country, I personally believe that the Assyrians will soon create their new independent country. This new country will probably be born within the region of the Nineveh plains of Northern Iraq. This region is at the heart of the ancient Syrian division of the Grecian Empire. Perhaps this new small Assyrian country will encompass parts of modern Syria since the Nineveh Plains of Northern Iraq are near the Syrian border. The idea of an Assyrian independent state is not new.                              In 1931 and 1932, the League of Nations received at least five petitions from Assyrian groups. The first two petitions were dated October 20th and 23rd, 1931. These came from representatives of Assyrians in Iraq including Mar Eshai Shimun XXIII, the Patriarch of the Church of the East. They requested that the Assyrians in Iraq be transported to land under the rule of one of the Western nations or, failing that, to Syria, which was still a French Mandate. Neither Britain nor Iraq objected to this idea, but no country volunteered to take the Assyrians. Britain argued that creation of a homeland was unnecessary because once Assyrians abandoned their quest for an autonomous homeland; they would become an integrated and "useful" part of Iraq. The third petition sought the recognition of Assyrians as a millet (nation) within Iraq and the creation of an Assyrian region within Iraq by redrawing Iraq's border with Turkey to include within Iraq the Turkish regions that Assyrian refugees in Iraq had lived in prior to their expulsion from Turkey. Failing this, the petition requested a special homeland within the existing borders of Iraq, made up of the whole of the district of Amedia plus adjacent parts of Zakho, Dohuk and Aqra, for the Assyrian refugees from Turkey then in Iraq. The fourth petition, dated September 21, 1932, was signed by 58 people claiming to represent 2,395 families. The final petition, dated September 22, 1932, is another from Mar Shimun. It alleges that the Assyrians have a right to claim their original homes or suitable substitutes from the United Kingdom, for whom the Assyrians fought in the First World War. It requests the return of the Hakkiari province or resettlement along the lines sought in the third petition. The petition noted that the Assyrians had voted for Iraq in the plebiscite for the Mosul Liwa based on the League's 1925 recommendation that the Assyrians be given local autonomy.26 (Emphasis mine)

It should not be a secret to any independent and conscientious thinker, writer, or journalist that what has been happening in Syria since 2011 is nothing but complex and dirty attempts by multiple regional and global powers to 'Iraqize' Syria by other means.

Back in Syria, we’d never gave anything directly to anyone. We’d give to a charity and then they’d make sure it got to people in need. That way no one felt looked down on. I remind myself how lucky we are to have found such a generous new friends. I try to push the uncomfortable thoughts away, but I can’t help it. It’s charity and it hurts.

hello -------------------------------------------- signature United People Money >>> To Buy Farm 1 Donum >>> Refugee Camp انا الجامع 25,000 $ X 200 people = 5 million ------------------------------------ Vision Board = 1- my mentor is : David DeAngelo = Eben Pagan 2- ENCYCLOPEDIA OF TAEKWON-DO 15 VOLUME 3- ANIME jap [ MODEL ] 4- 6 ABS + TOTAL FITNESS ---------------------------------- CURRENCY = 1-MONEY 2-WORK 3-TIME ( TIME = SLEEP TIME ) PERSUADE people to get to there RESULT = 1-FAST 2- EASY 3- LOW COST 4- LOW RISK ################################################ unitedfarm@protonmail.com Syria Damascus

If you don't want refugees, help us make peace in Syria.

One of the most fascinating studies of differential susceptibility took place in a refugee camp in Syria. The researchers measured by self-report the level of war trauma in 579 children, the level of their sensitivity, and the level of functioning of their family before the war. Surprisingly, HSCs (highly sensitive children) with bad childhoods were less traumatized by their experiences in war zones than those who were not HSCs, and amazingly, HSCs with poor childhoods were also less distressed than HSCs with good childhoods.

The immigrants have come from across the Arab and Islamic world. They often arrived as pilgrims or refugees, took up Saudi nationality, and found a place in the kingdom’s expanding business community. The most notable were the Hadrami community, which moved to the Hejaz from South Yemen in the first part of the twentieth century. Based largely in Jeddah, families like Bin Mahfouz, Bin Laden, and Bin Zager became leaders in banking, construction, and retail. Others arrived from Palestine, Syria, Egypt, India, and Iraq.

But generosity of spirit is not enough: our responses must be grounded in wisdom. The headless heart may lead to outcomes little better than the heartless head. So we need to be a little more specific about what generosity of spirit implies. What shoud it mean in the context of Syria, and, by extension, what should it mean more widely in the global context of refugees?

Refugees are not a homogeneous group of people. Some are attracted by the prospect of succeeding in a high-income society; others, a majority, hope to return to Syria.

Certainly, what was true for the refugees and exiles of Shanghai remains true for people fleeing catastrophe in contemporary times. Whether these migrants are driven from Syria, Myanmar, Bosnia, Sudan, Somalia, Guatemala, or too many other places. These refugees have all faced the agonizing choice of whether to stay, or to flee.

Erdogan has focused on building up Turkey’s profile as a pivot state in its region, coupled with a reaffirmation of moderate Islamist views that have become much less favourable to EU membership. While he was willing to reach an agreement in 2016 with the EU on supporting refugees from Syria and on enforcing stronger border controls on movement towards the EU, this was driven by the access to funds that it provided, rather than any desire to use it as a basis to advance the stalled membership negotiations.

So we, God’s servants, go, our Master’s invitation in our hands, out to the highways and hedges. We walk through squalid refugee camps in Syria, fetid open-air trash dumps in Mozambique, drug-infested smoky brothels in Bangkok. We go because deep in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan and out on the dusty plains of Iraq, there are people whom God wants to come to His feast. There are people hidden away in small villages in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan who belong at God’s table. There are women in Somalia; street kids in Portland, Oregon; girls in northern Nigeria; and men in Chechnya and a thousand other places who belong in God’s house. God sees them, every one of them, people drawing water from open wells, drinking tea in mud houses, scheming evil in dark camps, hiding from violence in rough caves. He knows their names and faces and voices and laughter and tears. He knows their fears and dreams and joys and sorrows. He was there when they were born, when they fell down, and when they got up—and He wants to share the blessings of all He has with them. This is the heart of God—generous, loving, kind, patient—always ready to bless. He’s prepared His table from the foundations of the earth, and there is still room.

أرى الأمل في عيونهم الهاربة متشبثاً بحبل ليتسلق خارجاً من بئر همومهم المختنقة بين جدران صدورهم المعبّقة بدخان النيران والطلقات الرصاصية، ليصطدم بالأمواج المنكسرة ما بين عيونهم والحياة... يبحثون عن جواز سفر... اسمه جواز سفر... ولسخرية القدر وتناقض المسميّات فهو وثيقة "قد" تسمح بكل شيء إلا السفر، ربّما أخطأوا في هذه التسمية، كان من الأجدر تسميته "جواز حياة"، لأن من قرر تقسيم هذه الأرض إلى حدود ... قرر معها تقسيم حق الإنسان في الحياة. أيُعقل أن يهرب الأطفال والرجال والنساء من موطنهم إلى بلاد أخرى تفصلها حدود يحرسها من حالفهم الحظ وحصلوا على "جواز سفر" ذات "قيمة حياتية" أعلى؟ أيُعقل أن يحاول اجتياز البحار مئات الأبرياء... ويدفعوا آلاف الدولارات ليصادقوا المهرّبين آملين بأن تُفتح نافذة جديدة لهم على الحياة... ومع هذا ورغم القوارب الخائبة... يصل منهم حيّا بضعة عشرات والباقي أضحى مفقوداً أو جثثاً لا قيمة لها في الحياة... وكأنهم أرواحاً غلفتها أجسادٌ مكروهة ومنبوذة في كل بقاع الأرض الموحشة. أحياتهم ليست جديرة وذات أهمية كبيرة بما يكفي بأن نشاركهم الحياة؟ بأصواتهم المبحوحة... غنّوا للحياة والحرية وبقلوبهم الموجوعة أحبّوا الحياة ولسوء حظهم جواز سفرهم قتلهم...

When the Furies were released in the Middle East, an evil emerged beyond my worst imaginings. The joy of the Middle East has been replaced by fear, pervasive in Iraq and Syria and darkening the lives of people throughout the region. This is why refugees have been flowing out of the Middle East by the millions for Europe. If President Bush’s seeds of democracy or the Arab Spring had bloomed, these families wouldn’t be risking everything to leave. Many in the region have simply lost all hope, which is understandable. If you lived in Libya after the fall of Gadhafi, you’d be terrified. You can’t work, you can’t sell your goods, your children can’t go to school, you can’t even drive around without fear of being kidnapped by bandits or terrorists. It’s not a place where people can be happy and even marginally prosperous. It’s pure chaos. It’s worse in Iraq and Syria.

As Dr Tino Sanandaji has pointed out, it costs more for 3,000 migrants to be housed in temporary accommodation tents in Sweden than it does to fund outright the largest refugee camp in Jordan (housing around 100,000 Syrian refugees).

Yet, the present dangers in the Middle East are a substantial result of the failures of recent American foreign policy. The Obama administration failed to negotiate a status of forces agreement (SOFA)5 with Iraq when U.S. forces withdrew from Iraq in 2011.6 Obama also refrained from engaging in significant military action in Iraq and Syria when such action had the chance of success. These omissions led to the removal of U.S. forces, leaving a power vacuum in the region.7 Iran, Russia, and ISIS have seized the opportunity, and all have grown stronger due to America’s withdrawal from the Middle East. The civil wars raging in Iraq and Syria—in which Iran, Russia, and ISIS are currently embroiled—illustrate the resulting power struggle. The instability in the Middle East has also led to a rise in refugees displaced from their homes, especially in Syria.

In 2015, an exhaustive study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that rising CO2 pollution had made the 2007–2010 drought in Syria twice as likely to occur, and that the four-year drought had a “catalytic effect” on political unrest in the area. Herders were forced off their land, seeking food and water elsewhere. More than 1.5 million rural people were displaced, causing a massive migration into urban areas, where they bumped up against an influx of Iraqi and Palestinian refugees. When researchers asked one displaced Syrian farmer whether she thought the drought had caused the civil war, she replied, “Of course. The drought and unemployment were important in pushing people toward revolution. When the drought happened, we could handle it for two years, and then we said, ‘It’s enough.

Refugees are the best weapon of the 21st century and Erdogan a master of it!

You know,” he says, “in Syria, we are always having coffee together. Almost every day I went to a friend’s house and we sat for two hours, for three hours, drinking coffee together, talking about things. Why do you not do that here? Everyone stays here, here, here.” He frowns and jabs at the air. “No one knows their neighbors. No one has coffee.” “You’re right,” I say. “You’re right.” “I tell this to Moradi,” he says, giving a reluctant smile. “I tell her I will start having coffee with people. Soon everyone will come to my house and we will all know each other and talk together. She says, ‘Mohammad, Americans do not want this! They do not want!’ But I tell her I will show her. I will start. We will meet here, there. Maybe at a coffeehouse. It is good this way, for us to drink coffee together.” He laughs. I laugh too, but the truth of what he says reaches me. We as Americans are very good at being independent. I struggle to think of the last time I needed someone, truly needed someone. We are so busy. Too busy. There is very little time for that kind of community, where we meet together regularly, unrushed, to simply drink coffee.

Churchill was right on both counts. Between 1922 and 1939 more Arabs had entered Palestine than Jews. These were Muslim immigrants, including many illegals, from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Iraq, Iran and Syria–as well as from Transjordan, Sudan and Saudi Arabia.37 These immigrants were drawn to Palestine by its opportunities for work and its growing prosperity–opportunities and prosperity often created by the Jews there. In 1948 many of these Arab immigrants were to be included in the statistics of ‘Palestinian’ Arab refugees.

Syria in particular emerged as an example of what could go wrong: hundreds of thousands of Syrians had lost their lives and more than half the population had become internally displaced or refugees, in the process threatening to overwhelm not just Syria’s neighbors but Europe as well.

veteran Turkish smuggler claimed in November 2014 that he had sent “more than ten” Islamic State jihadis into Europe. His claim couldn’t be proven, but it was eminently plausible: he said he charged $2,500 for every person he brought out of the Islamic State and into Europe through Turkey, and that the jihadis he had helped get to Europe were pretending to be refugees. But according to the smuggler they are actually jihadis biding their time: “They are waiting for their orders. Just wait. You will see. . . . The Western world thinks there is no ISIS in their countries—that all the jihadis have gone to fight and die in Syria.” He recalled that one of the Islamic State jihadis he helped get to Europe told him about Muslims from Europe who had been killed in Syria, “We are sending our fighters to take their places.” He told the smuggler, “We want you to bring our brothers too.” The smuggler noted that it was easy for them to go to Europe. “They can come to any smuggler and say they are refugees.

The motivating force behind the UNDHR and the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees was a desire to ensure that never again would there be such suffering as that experienced in the wake of the Second World War. Unfortunately that is exactly what is happening now.

In 1857, in response to the massive numbers of forced migrant Muslim Tatars from the Crimea, the Ottoman Sublime Porte promulgated a Refugee Code (also translated from Ottoman Turkish into English in some texts as the Immigration Law). Responding to the grave need to provide shelter and food for its subjects, expelled initially from the Crimea but also from other border-land regions with Russia, the Ottoman government set out to swiftly disperse and integrate its forced migrants. It aimed to provide ‘immigrant’ families and groups with only a minimum amount of capital, with plots of state land to start life anew in agricultural activity. Families who applied for land in Rumeli (the European side of the Ottoman Empire) were granted exemptions from taxation and conscription obligations for a period of six years. If, however, they chose to continue their migration into Anatolia and Greater Syria then their exemptions extended for twelve years. In both cases the new immigrants had to agree to cultivate the land and not to sell or leave it for twenty years. Ottoman reformers were eager to see the largely depopulated Syrian provinces revived by these new migrants after several centuries of misadministration, war, famine, and several pandemics of the plague (Shaw and Shaw 1977: 115). The twenty-year clause also meant that these newcomers were released from the pressure of nineteenth-century property developers, as there was a kind of lien on the property, prohibiting its onward sale for twenty years.

As requests for plots of state land from forced migrants and potential immigrants rose, in 1860 the Ottoman authorities set up a refugee commission (the Ottoman Commission for the General Administration of Immigration) under the Ministry of Trade. The following year it became a separate public authority (Shaw and Shaw 1977: 115). The commission was charged with integrating not only the Tatars and Circassians fleeing from lands conquered by the Russians north and west of the Black Sea, but also the thousands of non-Muslim immigrant farmers and political leaders from Hungary, Bohemia, and Poland, Cossacks from Russia, and Bulgarians from the Balkans (Shaw and Shaw 1977: 116).

The Guardian further notes, in an unintentional rebuke to Cyrus Vance who claimed to Archbishop Romero that the Carter Administration was seeking “peaceful and progressive solutions” in El Salvador, that “the arming of one side of the conflict by the US [which began under Carter] hastened the country’s descent into a civil war in which 75,000 people died and 1 million out of a population of 6 million became refugees.” And, while Vance in his letter decried the violence on both sides of the political spectrum in El Salvador, it was in truth the forces which the United States funded which carried out the lion’s share of the violence. Thus, as El Salvador’s Truth Commission would later conclude, “85% of ‘serious acts of violence’ were attributed to the state” which the United States backed throughout the conflict. In truth, the United States’ “Salvador option,” or option of creating, training, and arming indigenous paramilitary death squad units to destroy local insurgencies, really began in Colombia in the early 1960s, was then carried out in Vietnam, and continues to this day in countries such as Afghanistan and Syria. And so, Romero’s words to Carter shortly before his death ring as powerful and true as they did then, and they continue to be ignored by successive US presidents.

I wish you remembered Homs as I do, Marwan.

To know that someone had thought to prepare halal food, that someone had taken my religion into account rather than ignore or be afraid of it, it felt like such a blessing. Before leaving Syria, everyone had warned me not to lose Islam—as if moving to a non-Muslim country would wipe out my faith—but here, people wanted to honour it.

However, with the declaration of the State of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent forced migration of Palestinians from their land, there was a small wave of immigration to Chile, although the vast majority remained as refugees in neighboring countries like Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. A similar phenomenon occurred in 1967 because of the Six Day War.

No one really knows how widespread this kind of fraud is. Inevitably, though, it casts doubt over the precision of UN data, which is the main source of information about the origins of refugees. If the UN gets its statistics from the Greek police, and if the Greek police themselves rely on people’s identification documents (and sometimes just on people’s word), then how can we be sure that so many of the refugees are from Syria?

Just as Hashem al-Souki found, the sheer act of leaving Syria was exhausting and financially depleting. Fattemah and Nasser headed north towards Turkey, which required going through a litany of regime checkpoints. At each, the soldiers always wanted bribes – sometimes as much as 1000 Syrian pounds. At the last one, Nasser had only 450 left, and the soldiers were satisfied. Others who had less were beaten till their teeth fell out. The Isis checkpoints weren’t any better: if the jihadists found any women who were travelling alone, they arrested them, perhaps to keep them as slaves. Travelling as a family, Nasser, Fattemah and Hammouda made it through – and reached Turkey in November 2014. Turkey shoulders a bigger burden of

Fleeing your home isn’t just physically draining, says Nasser, who knows better than most. It’s emotionally exhausting too, and no one does it unless they absolutely have to. ‘My father went out of Palestine, we had to leave another time from Kuwait, and now we’ve left Syria,’ Nasser says. ‘Every time you travel from one place to another you have to make new friends, find new houses, new memories.

A day before the November 2015 Paris attacks, President Obama was feeling a little more hopeful about the war against the Islamic State. Noting that the caliphate hadn’t made any significant territorial gains in some time, Obama said it had been “contained.”23 As we know now, this contention was obscenely countered the very next day. Terrorism has also come of age with the millennial generation. The Islamic State of today is miles from the Al Qaeda it grew out of. Its supporters aren’t coming from Afghanistan, Iraq, or Pakistan anymore. They’re living in Belgium, France, Britain, and, as we saw with the attacks in San Benardino and Orlando, even the United States. They’re not refugees or illegal immigrants. They’re legal, passport-carrying, Western-born or naturalized citizens of our countries. So what does bombing them do now? The more you bomb over there, the more the appeal grows over here. And there’s proof of that from the last three wars: the Islamic State itself is the visible result. ISIS isn’t just a geographical entity. There are kids sitting across Western countries, right here in our cities and neighborhoods, being inspired and groomed by the group’s wide-ranging social media expertise and slickly produced propaganda videos as we speak. These kids are not coming here from Syria. They’ve always been here.

Ramadan was one of more than a million refugees and migrants who took boats and flimsy dinghies to European shores in 2015. Along with forty-seven others, most of whom were Syrian, he crossed the Aegean in an inflatable raft that he estimates was made for a maximum load of twenty-five people. ‘There were so many children on it. We went out in the night. The kids were crying. We kept telling them, ‘See the light there in the distance? That’s where we are going.’” Four hours later, they landed, the boat already halfway full of water and on the brink of sinking. They emerged onto the rock shores and made their way back to solid land after, as Ramadan put it, seeing death yet again.

Amma, Make me an instrument of your fire. Make me the breath in the lungs that scream for justice. Make me the tears on a mother’s face holding the body of her child scorched by war. Make me a stone thrown at a tank. Make me the key to open cell doors. Make me the darkness to hide those fleeing across a desert. Make me the ocean that guides a refugee’s boat. Make me the scarf covering the face of Antifa. Make me a vaccination in a free clinic. Make me farmland never touched by chemicals. Make me a guitar played by a prisoner’s hands. Make me a song of joy on a child’s lips in Syria. Make me, make me, just keep making me, God, until there is nothing left to transform, and then let me dissolve into you.

In Italy we were placed in a refugee camp, but then managed to escape. We found a Syrian guy who agreed to drive us to Denmark for 500 euros per person.