by Tima Kurdi
“, Shoo haad? What is this?” he asked, wincing after his first sip. “, Hay moo qahwah. This is not coffee. It needs more than sugar to be any good.” My father takes his coffee very seriously, but I knew that he was talking about so much more than coffee.
“I wish you would stay in Istanbul,” I said. “We’re so worried about you in Sham, so far from everyone. You could live with any of the kids. Or I could pay for you to get your own place.”
“You and your brothers and sisters are already burdened enough. They don’t need the extra expense of an old man. I’m going back home. , Beddi mout bil Sham. I will die in Sham. Or wherever I am when God decides it’s time.”
I did not want to think about that. “, Inshallah al umar altaweel. God willing you will live a long life,” I said. But I was starting to understand that a refugee’s life was in many ways just as brutal as life in a war zone.
“At least take my old iPhone,” I said. “That way we can all keep in touch on WhatsApp.”
Baba treated that phone like a creature from another planet. Even trying to answer a phone call was bewildering to him. Abdullah made it even worse when he prank-called Baba, disguising his voice and pretending to be one of Baba’s friends in Sham. We sat in the other room, trying to hold our laughter, until the giggles burst from our lips.
“You and your technology can get lost!” Baba yelled at Abdullah.
On his Saturdays off, Abdullah took me and Baba to the flea market, where I shopped for clothes and toys for my nephews. Abdullah saw a bouzouki, an egg-shaped Middle Eastern lute, and he said, “Ghalib would love to play that. The boys love Kurdish music.” I bought the bouzouki for the boys, among other things. When I helped Abdullah pick out a red T-shirt, jean shorts, and black sneakers for Alan, I thought nothing of their significance.
During that trip, I began to see the world through a refugee’s eyes. You are there, wherever you happen to be, but you can’t shake the feeling that life is going on without you. That you are a ghost among the living. We discovered that Istanbul has throngs of laughing doves just like Sham. They congregate in Taksim Square, and people love to feed them. But I felt as if I were looking at those birds through a telescope, as though I were far away.
I learned that this estranged state of mind is common to refugees. Everywhere I went, I talked to Syrians living on the streets and in the parks. Sometimes their children had to beg for food or sell tissues or sing to the crowds to earn a few coins. Syrian refugees had the same struggles in Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt—everywhere. It wasn’t the exclusive fault of Istanbul or the country of Turkey and its many fine citizens. The government had many pressing concerns of its own. The people of Turkey, like the citizens of any country, had their own lives to worry about first and foremost. They didn’t write the restrictive laws concerning asylum seekers, and they were also adversely impacted in many ways by the huge flood of refugees. Despite that, many people were very kind to my siblings.
When I visited Maha in Izmit, I was shocked to see that she had barely any furniture.
“Why don’t you reach out to your neighbours for help?” I asked.
“I’m too ashamed , ekhti, sister,” she said.
I talked her into going to the cafe on the ground floor of her building to see if the locals might be willing to help out. Maha explained to the cafe owner that she was a Syrian refugee living upstairs and that she needed furnishings.
“I’ll ask around,” the man responded.
Within hours, a truck pulled up at Maha’s house, filled with furniture.
Their Turkish neighbours were also generous during the holy Eid al-Adha, Feast of the Sacrifice. My brothers and sisters couldn’t afford to uphold the tradition of giving meat to the poor and needy. They couldn’t even afford to buy meat for themselves as an occasional treat. Some of their neighbours understood this, and when the time for Eid came, all my siblings received offerings.
“Did they bring lamb like in Syria?” I asked Hivron.
“Here, they bring cow meat. That beef was divine. It melted in our mouths. But it’s another reminder that life has changed so much since the war. Remember when we were the ones helping the needy?”
War destroys lives. It leaves behind terrible wounds that turn into scars—on the flesh and in the mind. It also steals pride and dignity. And it steals the most from the people who can afford it the least.
One Saturday, we had a picnic just as we always used to do in Sham as kids. We went to a local park, spread a blanket on the grass, and barbecued some beef kebabs. While we prepared tea, we realized that we’d forgotten to bring sugar. There was another family picnicking nearby, so we sent little Rezan to ask if we could borrow a few spoonfuls of their sugar. He came back looking humiliated. They had waved him away like a beggar. The bias against Syrian refugees was even more apparent when I tried to find a home for Abdullah’s family. I scoured every street for rental signs; some had signs that read “No Syrians.”
Abdullah was worried that he wouldn’t be able to find somewhere for Rehanna and the boys, and the situation in Kobani had gone from bad to worse.
“I couldn’t go home for the last few months,” Abdullah told me. In that time, the terrorists had inched ever closer to Kobani, bombing nearby towns and beheading citizens in the surrounding region as they closed in on the city itself. Now, it was not just small skirmishes or suicide bombers that threatened the citizens of Kobani; the city was under the threat of all-out war. The border crossings had become overwhelmed with more desperate people trying to get into Turkey. The situation got increasingly dangerous during my visit, and it became dire in mid-September 2014, when ISIS launched the Siege of Kobani.
ISIS tanks crushed many villages as they steamrolled toward the city, raping, murdering, mutilating, and beheading innocent civilians along the way. Their forces, numbering as many as five thousand, captured hundreds of villages surrounding Kobani, and the terrorists were leaning on the city from all three sides. We watched the news on TV and couldn’t believe the images of Kobani residents fleeing their home and massing at the Turkish border.
Abdullah called Rehanna right away.
“What’s going on? You need to get out as soon as possible,” he told her.
“It’s so scary,” Rehanna said. “We’re leaving in a few hours.” She was rushing to finish packing. Alan was laughing in the background.
Rehanna left Kobani with her entire family as thousands of other residents and the neighbouring villagers also fled for their lives. We were on pins and needles watching the footage of the siege. The commentary was in Turkish, so I had to get the iPad and look at the Arabic and Western media coverage so that we could figure out what was going on.
“I’m so scared for my wife and kids. I need to go get them,” Abdullah said.
“Don’t be crazy,” my dad responded. “Rehanna’s father and her brothers are with her. They will get her and the kids across the border safely. Be patient. Maybe you can go to the border and wait for them?”
Abdullah asked his boss if he could take a few days off, but the boss told him it was too busy at work, and Abdullah couldn’t give up his job if he wanted to put a roof above Rehanna and the boys’ heads. Abdullah periodically called Rehanna on her cell, but she had no way to charge her phone, so conversations were brief.
“You can’t look anyone you meet in the eyes because the terrorists are like wild animals,” she told Abdullah.
There were so many threats facing Rehanna and the boys. Not only were the terrorists and checkpoints all around them, they also had to be wary of land mines. At one point, Rehanna tripped while carrying Alan and he hit his head. She had to carry him and keep him awake in case he had a concussion. Her arms ached. The boys were hungry, starving, and dehydrated. When they reached the border, thousands of desperate Syrians were there, yelling, “Please open the border!” and “Please give us some water!” The Turks wouldn’t open the border, but eventually they threw water bottles over the fence.
&nbs
p; I was due to leave Istanbul and fly back to Vancouver on September 20. I so wanted to meet Ghalib and Alan in the flesh, but the hours were ticking by, and they were still stuck at the border, with no sign of when they might get through.
Finally, on September 19, after ISIS had advanced to within fifteen kilometres of Kobani, the Turks opened the border. Rehanna, Ghalib, and Alan were among sixty thousand Syrians that managed to cross and make it into Turkey. The majority of Rehanna’s family stayed near the border; they planned to go back to Kobani as soon as they possibly could. As I was boarding the plane to return to Vancouver, Rehanna, Ghalib, and Alan were boarding a bus and settling in for the day’s travel to Istanbul. I missed seeing them by a handful of hours. I should have changed my flight, but I had spent so much money already, providing each of my siblings with rent and necessities. It’s okay, I told myself. They are safe now. And you’ll see them when you visit next summer.
When I arrived home in Vancouver, I called Abdullah.
“I’m in heaven,” he said. “My family is with me. We’re together, and I have the whole world.”
“Did you find a place to rent?” I asked Abdullah.
“Not yet. We’re still looking, , Allah ma biyinsa hada. God won’t forget anyone. We’re staying with Rehanna’s friends for now.”
I found out much later that they weren’t actually staying with friends. They were staying with Mohammad and Hivron. Both of my siblings knew they couldn’t host the family for long: if their landlords found out, they’d be evicted. Abdullah had nowhere else to turn but to his boss at the clothing factory, asking if his family could stay in the factory during the night. “I promise it’s only temporary, until I find a place.”
His boss took pity and agreed. The family slept beside the workers’ toilet and day kitchen. The boss’s wife offered them foam mattresses and pillows, and for blankets, they used old cloth they found at the factory. In the early mornings, the family would roll up their bedding and personal items and stow them away. Rehanna and the boys spent the days in a nearby park while Abdullah worked. When work ended at seven p.m., Abdullah rushed to collect his family and bring them back to the factory. After a week’s time, one of Mohammad’s neighbours got in touch with them and told Ghouson about a potential rental property.
“I have a sort of studio apartment next door to the building where I live,” the woman told Abdullah. “It’s unfinished, but it has a Turkish toilet, a faucet, and electricity. I’m using it as a storage place right now, but I’ll rent it to you, as long as you take responsibility for clearing it out and setting it up.”
Abdullah gratefully accepted. He and Mohammad got to work hauling away the junk. When Rehanna and the boys moved in, there was a plaid couch, a mattress frame, a broken TV, a faucet sticking out of the wall, and the Turkish toilet, which was basically a tile slab with a plumbed hole in the middle. To say that it was less than ideal would be too kind to that “studio apartment,” but Abdullah and Rehanna didn’t care. They were in their own nest, the whole family under one roof.
Abdullah got an inflatable children’s pool and put it beneath the faucet so the boys could have a place to play and bathe. He kept his eye out for abandoned items on the streets of Istanbul. He soon found a decent mattress and some toys—a tricycle, a dump truck, little plastic cars, and some stuffed animals. He purchased a portable propane stove with one burner—the sort you might take on a camping trip—to cook with. Later, Abdullah had the broken TV repaired so that his boys could watch cartoons. Abdullah sent me some videos of the family in their new home. One was of the boys bathing in their inflatable “tub.” Alan sat in one corner, splashing and giggling, while Ghalib circled around him, saying “Move, Alan, move.”
“Careful, Ghalib. Mind your brother,” Abdullah said.
Alan splashed and splashed. That boy loved to be in the water.
Another video featured Ghalib strumming the bouzouki I’d bought him in the bazaar. And when he heard his favourite song—“Shamame” by Ibrahim Tatlises—he would make everyone stop what they were doing to join hands and dance around in a circle like Kurdish dancers. Alan would jump around through the entire song, clapping and laughing. Alan couldn’t pronounce all the lyrics—all he could say was “mame”—but he would sing it at the chorus with everyone else. Rehanna loved to sing too. “We are a family of musicians,” she said. “You don’t need instruments when you have a voice.”
I imagine that if you stood outside that family’s happy little house, closed your eyes, and listened, you would have had no idea that they were poor refugees barely surviving.
“When are you coming to visit us, , Ammeh, Auntie?” Ghalib asked me in one of our regular Skype calls.
“Inshallah, habibi. I hope to visit soon. Or maybe you will come to Canada; it’s beautiful here.”
“Do you have candy there, Auntie? I like nougat.”
“Yes, but the best candies are in Sham, at Souq Al-Buzuriyah.”
“Ghalib and Alan would love that,” said Abdullah. “Remember how they made candies right in front of our eyes and we were drooling while we waited?”
“My mouth is watering just thinking about the mlabbas,” I said.
“Inshallah, we’ll be able to take them there one day with our baba,” Abdullah replied.
Abdullah’s commute to the clothing factory was long—two hours each way. In the mornings, his kids would wake him up, smothering him with hugs and kisses, which fortified him for another grueling day of work. And as soon as he opened the door upon returning home, the hardships of the day vanished.
One morning, they woke up to the sound of meowing outside. When they opened the door, a skinny black-and-white cat was looking up at them. Little Alan started laughing and clapping and groping at that cat with his hands. Surprisingly, the cat didn’t seem to mind.
“He looks hungry. Can we feed him?” asked Ghalib.
Abdullah let the cat in and gave her some of their breakfast, after which the cat curled up on the couch and fell fast asleep. She became the fifth member of the family. They called her Pisikeh, Kurdish for “cat.”
“Do you feed the cat milk or cat food?” I asked Rehanna when I called one afternoon.
She laughed. “She gets whatever we’re eating.”
“What are you eating tonight?” asked this nosy sister-in-law.
“I’m making a lentil stew and rice.”
“How can you do that with only one burner?”
Rehanna laughed again. “It takes longer, but it’s no problem. The boys love rice with yogurt, so I make a pot of that every day too.”
“Maybe you can buy a real stove one day.”
Her reply was classic Rehanna and typical of her continued optimism about returning home: “Why would I need a new stove? I already have a nice one in Kobani.”
Abdullah’s family got out of Kobani just in time. Many other citizens weren’t so lucky. By early October 2014, ISIS had control of much of the city. For the next few months, deadly battles continued on the city streets, but the allied forces—Iraqi Kurds, Turkish Kurds, the Americans—continually gained ground. By January 2015, they had regained control of much of Kobani, and by month’s end, ISIS admitted defeat and fled, though they vowed to return and seek vengeance. They were true to their word. The citizens who returned to Kobani in June of that year, during Ramadan of all times, would face another ISIS onslaught.
Many of our close relatives—fifteen in total—were massacred during those Ramadan attacks in June 2015. My family sent me photographs of citizens who had been beheaded by ISIS. One of them was Mary, my baba’s cousin. She was up early one day during Ramadan when she heard a commotion. She went outside. Terrorists were waiting for her with machetes. Her screams woke her two sons, who rushed out of the house. All three were beheaded. Other relatives from Aleppo who had fled to Kobani met a similar fate. One was blown up by a suicide bomb that left him recognizable only by the ring on his finger.
“Rehanna is shattered,” Abdullah said
when I called him in Istanbul. “What kind of men slaughter children and kill innocent people? It’s haram to do such evil things. Where is the morality? There is no religion anymore. Only greed for power and money.”
Kobani and surrounding villages were devastated by the siege and its aftermath. All the critical infrastructure was destroyed. Rehanna’s family home was hit by bombs and sniper bullets, but somehow it remained standing; many other homes and businesses were flattened. My sister Maha’s house was destroyed, and so was the adjacent house she had built for her sons and their future families. The dream that she might one day return to her home had become nothing more than that—a fantasy that lived only in her mind.
“Any of our possessions that survived were stolen,” Maha later told me. “Probably Mama’s sewing machine too.”
My baba’s trees of fat olives in Kobani—the ones that he had inherited from his father many years before the war—were gone too. We heard that ISIS had burned our olive orchard to the ground and destroyed our little property. When I spoke with my father back in our family home in Damascus, he said, “It’s like my heart has been scorched.” But then he continued, “, Al-shajar beynzra’ w berja’, Trees can always be replanted.”
Chapter 8
Allah karim, bithoon
God Willing, It Will Get Easier
My trip to Turkey changed me. As soon as I returned home in late September 2014, my first priority was to attempt to get my siblings asylum in Canada. But to do that, I would have to navigate the bewildering bureaucratic asylum-seeking process. The Canadian government had granted asylum to only 1,002 Syrian refugees since July 2013. Prime Minister Stephen Harper had a vague plan to allow about 11,000 Syrians to seek asylum in Canada over the next few years. Despite these plans, the Harper government had what seemed to me an indifferent attitude to their plight.
I wanted to bring both of my brothers and their families to Canada. Mohammad’s wife, Ghouson, was pregnant, and they had four school-aged children who had fallen years behind in their schooling. Shergo and Heveen were still working at the clothing factory; their teenage years had been stolen from them, and it seemed as if their young adult lives would be just as grim and hopeless as their adolescence. Those kids were smart, honorable, and hard-working, just like their parents. Shergo was becoming a handsome young man, and Heveen was a beautiful young woman, constantly eyed by men looking to marry a young Syrian refugee, even though she wore the hijab to cover her long curls every time she left the house.