by Zahra Hankir
Abu Nawras paced the length of his new home, a caravan of a couple of yards. His eyes were bloodshot with anger. We had talked for hours by then, first courteously, then profoundly, on the course of the uprising-turned-war, life in Syria before, and what could come next. I remember offering my view as a reporter covering the conflict and its many players. This was something Syrians frequently and frantically looked to journalists for: insight into what the great powers of the world were doing with their country. It was as if we held a crystal ball or could somehow make the levers churn to produce a more favorable outcome, or at least less bloodshed.
Displaced Syrians often say it is even worse to watch their country crumbling from afar, helpless and detached, even if their displacement means they are alive. The word ta’teer, many would say, describes this surreal fate that has enraptured the Syrian people: destitution. T’atarna—we have become destitute. Syrians who shake their heads and cry at the ta’teer they and their country have endured are reflecting grief so deep it has barely begun to surface.
My notes from the end of my day with Abu Nawras are a scribble. But a few quotes are well formed:
“So we have a rainbow now. Great. Why does America like to give a red line, a blue line, what’s next, a green line?”
“Why did this happen to us in Syria? Why?”
“If I doubt America, I will doubt every journalist who works for America.”
I made the argument that the U.S. was less involved, less strategically calculating, in Syria than many Syrians assumed. “They’re not as powerful in this war as you think they are, sir,” I said. I remember using an Arabic idiom, “like a deaf person at a wedding processional,” to describe what I had seen of American policy in Syria so far—meaning the U.S. was often struggling to catch up in the chaos or to get a full picture of what was happening on the ground. In other instances, this analysis would usually prompt a sigh, even a chuckle. But Abu Nawras was silent, looking at the floor. Suddenly, he said: “Carry this message back to President Obama.” I saw my camera tripod hurled at me first, and then my scarf.
I had encountered plenty of rude people on the job before, but never once among the displaced and desperate families of Syria or Iraq, some of the greatest hosts I have ever known. His reaction was more surprising because I was bint el-balad—literally, a “daughter of the country”—and I thought we were talking on some kind of common ground. Abu Nawras said the interview was over and chucked my notebook at me next. I stood in the gravel-covered desert outside the caravan, stunned.
NASSEEB (FATE)
It had been two years since I had reported daily on Syria when my editors sent me to Germany to help track an unfolding migrant crisis. Those two years of reprieve had given me distance and replenished my resolve. I had moved to a new post in Baghdad, from which I had already reported on Iraqi migrants joining the fray, pawning belongings, and gathering life savings to get to the Turkish coast and, eventually, Greece and beyond. Dozens were already lost at sea, which is how the Iraqi mothers I interviewed described their missing sons, unable to process the eventuality that they could have died trying to make the crossing. It was a deeply miserable story, but I was excited to cover it in Germany, eager to learn the circumstances leading to this latest mass rush to sea. Syrians had been trickling into Europe for years; some kind of dam had broken for others seeking safety and better lives, too.
In Berlin, I visited a registration center that was the first stop for some migrants and refugees coming into Germany. On the sidewalks and under trees, they laid out on blankets, segregated into families and by the nations they fled. There was an Afghan corner, and one where Ethiopians and Eritreans gathered. Children played and cried. Young mothers propped babies on their hips. My mind flashed back to the impromptu refugee camps of northern Syria and the exodus at the country’s borders, although that parallel was inaccurate. Here we were in the safety of a European nation, yet it didn’t quite feel that way. The vulnerabilities and uncertainties of war seemed to trail the people trying to escape it.
I was talking to a young couple from Mosul in Iraq, Omar and Nadia, when a small crowd began to gather. Some assumed I was an aid worker, or perhaps an Arabic-speaking German bureaucrat. “We waited in line five hours yesterday but didn’t make it to the counter,” shouted an Egyptian man. Hala and Mahmoud, from Aleppo in Syria, had been sitting quietly on a patch of grass with their baby. Mahmoud stood up to join the group. “It’s been twenty-eight days and we haven’t registered yet,” he said softly. “Nasseeb” (fate), he said, shrugging. It’s just our fate, many Syrians say, giving in to what they describe as God’s designs for their lives. “We’ve been here for three months!” someone else yelled. They begged, one another and me, for answers: “What comes next?”
There should have been nothing unusual or unexpected about that scene, but it felt surreal, and sudden. I had watched and written stories as Syrians were displaced from their homes, then their cities. Then they scattered across provinces within Syria. And finally, they moved through borders and rivers to neighboring countries, where they struggled to adjust even in places where they shared the same language and history. They picked up and moved, starting anew again and again, landing now in Europe and pulling a much larger wave with them. Their arrival in Berlin could have marked a moment of hope and renewal, a breakthrough to a place of safety and perhaps stability. But all I saw at the registration center was sorrow and, mostly, overwhelming exhaustion.
Side by side with people from Afghanistan and parts of Africa who have been fleeing their own civil conflicts for decades, Syrians finally saw their future. There was a new sense of permanence to this exile, an inevitability to giving up on home. I hadn’t sensed this kind of complete resignation from Syrians before—or perhaps I had forgotten it, as I became distracted from my own distress by covering other stories. How did we get here? What had happened to my country? I cried as I left the registration center, and every night for a while.
In the next several weeks, two colleagues and I rode trains back and forth between Austria and Germany, meeting and interviewing refugees and migrants and following their paths. I focused on meeting Syrians, whom I thought I could spot even before they clambered onto the train, and easily by their accents once on board. The train was a cross-section of the Syrian conflict. Rebels who had given up on the fight shared compartments with army conscripts—quiet deserters, not defectors—who had once been their opponents in battle. Pharmacists and law school students sat near illiterate farmers and handymen. On the EuroCity train, they were equal in fate—nasseeb—and on the same precarious brink of an uncertain future.
* * *
—
One of the subjects of the story my colleagues and I eventually wrote was a Syrian man named Samer Kabab and his five-year-old son, Amer. I hadn’t planned to write about this particular family, but their journey kept unfolding in gripping ways. I also became wrapped up in it, resurfacing my struggle over how to cover the story without coming too close.
We had ridden the train several times by the time I met Samer and Amer, and still the anticipation of what was to come once we crossed the border into Germany was sickening. Most refugees and migrants hoping to reach farther destinations in Germany, or even other countries, weren’t aware of the regulations requiring them to declare themselves upon entry. German police would board the train and pull off migrants as commuters and tourists watched with heads hung low or covering their faces in concern. This particular time, I was also forced off the train by the policemen, who were arguing that journalists were not allowed to be there. That was when I ended up hand in hand with small Amer. I had seen him with his father on the train, and now he was alone on the platform. When his father, Samer, resurfaced, he asked politely if he could borrow my cell phone to make a call before he and Amer marched away in line with the rest of the group. In the chaos, we didn’t talk any more or exchange numbers.
The next
day, I received a WhatsApp message from a Syrian number. “My husband and son, a small boy with long hair, do you know where they are?” It was Samer’s wife, Amina, who was still in Damascus with their baby boy. I learned from her that Samer had used my phone to call his brother, who had arrived before him in Germany. The brother passed on my number to her. I had no idea where her husband and son had ended up. But I promised to try to find out and let her know. “Bless you, darling,” she wrote back. “Forgive me for the inconvenience. I am worried about my son.”
I tracked down Samer and Amer, who had settled into a temporary migrant center on the outskirts of Frankfurt. It was a community gym that had been turned into a holding and registration center. Syrians, accustomed to refugee camps, called it “the camp.” Until Samer managed to get a cell phone, I was his link to his wife back in Damascus. I would call other Syrians at the gymnasium, other families I had met on the train, to relay messages back and forth between Amina in Damascus, who was texting and sending me voice messages, and her husband.
“Thank you, dear, you are now like my daughter,” she once said. “You have entered our lives and my heart and I am grateful for you.”
I visited Samer and Amer at the center, discreetly. No reporters were allowed there, but no one asked me any questions on my repeated visits, during which I must have seemed like a relative or friend. Samer showed me his notebooks from German language class, and Amer introduced me to his new friends. He had become a handful for his father, who joked that he left the manual for raising his son back in Syria and hid the painful details of their life at the cramped gymnasium from his wife.
In Damascus, Amina was growing frustrated, and it showed in her messages to me. “Did you visit today? How are they doing?” She missed her little boy and wanted to join them in Germany, but wasn’t sure she could brave the trip on her own with a baby. Samer’s plan, meanwhile, was to better gauge the asylum process and settle in before planning to bring over the rest of the family. The waiting game was weighing on Samer and Amina. They stopped talking for three weeks. “We keep arguing over nothing,” Samer told me. “Sometimes it’s simpler not to talk.” He had given up everything back in Syria—a business and two homes—for a better life for his family, and now he worried he had torn it apart forever. “Nasseeb,” he said: fate.
ALHAMDILLAH (THANK GOD)
I was conscious of Amina’s discomfort at watching a reporter spend time with her child when for her, he was so far out of reach. One afternoon, Samer, Amer, and I went apple picking with a few other Syrian families, walking along the side of a highway and under a bridge to reach a vast field that had been first discovered by Afghan families at the camp. Parents were improvising to keep their children entertained, and the landscape outside Frankfurt was a delight. Amer crawled out of a cornfield, his long bangs shading his eyes, and climbed up my back.
“Auntie Nour,” he said, “will you live with us in the camp?”
The boy, missing his mother, was growing attached to me. I juggled the rest of my reporting on this story according to instinct and my best judgment. I started to spend just enough time with them as was necessary for the reporting. I sent Amina, back in Damascus, updates when she asked. I checked in with both Samer and Amina periodically on her plans to leave Syria, but didn’t probe.
When I left Germany, my communication with both of them trailed off. I turned to other stories and talked to Samer from time to time, but for a while, he didn’t respond to me. When our story featuring his family was published, I sent him a link and pasted the text and images, writing a note for him to make sure to flip through the beautiful photos—portraits of father and son. He didn’t reply. I felt sheepish, but hoped to hear from them soon.
PHOTO BY ELLEN EMMERENTZE THOMMESSEN JERVELL.
Amina messaged me two months later. She had decided to join her husband and son, and was texting me from the Turkish coast, where she said she was stranded after having been robbed by a smuggler. She wasn’t asking for money, she said, just a copy of my passport so she could receive a money transfer, but the desperation in her voice made clear she needed all the help she could get. Part of the ethical conduct of journalists is not to curry favors or buy gifts for the people you are covering; they should want to tell their stories for the sake of the historical record. These rules are smudged in reporting among vulnerable communities, when it is considered good practice to show appreciation to hosts who often offer journalists shelter and food—for example, donations of warm clothing or a meal.
In this case, I didn’t know what to do. Could I help Amina reunite with her husband and child? Would I be seen as overly sympathetic, or even unethical? Wary once again of my Syrian-ness on the job, I decided not to, and apologized to Amina for being unable to help. I didn’t hear back. Months passed by. It was the end of the year and I was spending the holidays with my family. I couldn’t stop thinking of Amina and her family. Why had I taken that stand? Why didn’t I ask an editor what was appropriate? What happened to her? Did she make it to Germany?
I wondered whether Samer and Amer were ever moved out of that smelly gymnasium. I wondered if Amer would see his mother and brother again. They had dropped off the map. How could this be, after I followed them so closely, that I could lose touch with them like this? I felt like a vulture—a journalist who swooped in, got my story, and flew out.
Another two months later, a voice message on WhatsApp from a German number I didn’t recognize confirmed my deep sense of guilt.
“Hello, old friend,” Samer said. “Amina and I wanted to let you know she made it here. We are waiting for your visit.”
I called immediately, and in between tears and apologies, Amina and I reconciled a problem we had never acknowledged. I apologized for not helping her. She, astonishingly, apologized for asking for a favor. “It’s just that you felt so familiar,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do or who to turn to.”
They had been moved into a small home and have a new baby girl. The boys were settling into school in Germany. Amer tells his parents he barely remembers me, which is a relief. When I ask how things are, they say, “Alhamdillah”—thanks be to God—though many pieces of a stable life, including work for Samer, are still missing.
I keep in touch with several families from the EuroCity trains, but not all, and not as consistently as I would like. I think of them and the many others still in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and, of course, Syria: Syrians with no other recourse but to be Syrian and live by the rules of tashreed, and the consequences of what that means in each adopted home. I think of our divergent paths and nasseeb, and of their grace and resignation to God’s will.
And I’m humbled by how these people, thankful for their own uncertain circumstances, are worried about mine: Where am I right now? Am I still traveling so much? Have I seen my parents lately? When will I get married? They ask after me with diligence and care, as if I am one of them—as if I am the one left behind. “See you back in the homeland,” we say sometimes as good-byes, mutually unwilling to set a date or define what that even means.
Hull & Hawija
Hind Hassan
When I was about sixteen, my father had some Iraqi friends over for dinner at our home in England. I walked into the living room, greeted the men, and shook their hands. When they left, I was severely scolded by my parents. Their insinuation was that a woman—especially a young, unmarried woman—shouldn’t offer her hand to a group of men. My behavior was the antithesis of what was culturally expected of me in such an environment: I was to be feminine, soft-spoken, and reserved.
This was a typical scene from my youth. I had spent years rebelling against certain aspects of my parents’ interpretation of the Iraqi Muslim identity that I was supposed to inherit. I didn’t want to shoulder the burden of my family’s expectations. But to them, what I had done was yet another example of how I’d lost touch with my religion, culture, and identity
.
* * *
—
We left Iraq when I was just three years old, in the midst of the Iran-Iraq War. My parents never intended to stay abroad: my dad had planned to finish his doctorate in England, after which we’d return to Iraq, where he and my mother would take up teaching jobs. In their ideal world, I’d study to become a doctor before marrying relatively young, preferably another doctor, and so would my brothers and sisters. But the conflicts ran into each other, back-to-back, without a breath in between. The United Nations imposed economic sanctions on our home country, crippling the economy. The then-strong Iraqi dinar crashed, and my father’s scholarship money ran out.
We lived in Hull at the time, a predominantly white working-class city in the north of England with a population of just over three hundred thousand. There were now five children, most of us were in school, and the aspirational dreams my parents had arrived at the shores of the UK with were drifting away. Instead, they worked anywhere they could to keep the family afloat: in the back of restaurants washing dishes; behind the till at newsstands; and on the floors at local clothing shops. In their spare time, they’d track the situation in Iraq by watching the news. When they had guests over, or visited friends, they’d watch together. For most of my formative years, news was very much a permanent fixture.
One of my earliest childhood memories is of my mother crying as she watched the bodies of Iraqis who had died in Iran during the war be returned to Iraq. In the years that followed, she cried often, particularly for her soldier brother, whose letters from an Iranian prison eventually stopped arriving in the mail. She cried again when news reached her that, after ten years, he was alive, and had returned home in a prisoner exchange deal. She shed tears during the Gulf War, followed by the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, and for the guilt she felt over not having been able to see her father before he died. The more distant she was from everything she knew, the more rigid she became at home, and the more I rebelled.