His name means "Free" - The Life and Journey of a Syrian Refugee (Part One)

Author's note: Some months ago I wrote about meeting and speaking with a Syrian refugee in Vienna, developing a friendship with him, and finally learning of his safe arrival in the UK. I went to visit him in Cardiff and he allowed me to record a conversation about his life, the circumstances that led to his flight from Syria, and his journey. The following post, and those that will follow, are the product of our conversation. I have made very few adaptions to his phrasing and grammar to preserve some relic of his voice's authenticity. As I specified in my original post, he has agreed for me to use his first name and to tell his story. Please refrain from comments advising me otherwise or discouraging me from doing so. Our Father in heaven delivers us from harm, but if that is not his will, then his will be done. 

Furthermore, my post is not about politics. It is about people. Racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and nativist comments are not welcome, not least because they do not reflect the character and conduct of Jesus Christ, nor do they fulfill the commission he gave to his followers - the main things promoted on this blog.

Now, without further comment, let me introduce you to Azad. Azad is an Islamic name, from Persian, meaning "Free."

My name is Azad. I am from Syria. There are fifteen members in my immediate family. I have six brothers, six sisters, and my parents. We were many in my family, not just one like here. This is an average sized family in my society. There are many other families that are larger - twenty people or more. Recently people are thinking about reducing. Three maybe, four children. We have a good relationship but sometimes you can’t avoid problems because you face many. My family is still in Syria, living in a village in the Al Hasakeh Province - the north eastern triangle that borders both Iraq and Turkey. It is currently controlled by the PPK, a Kurdish Marxist group [called in English the Kurdistan Workers’ Party].

There are not many events in my childhood to mention, because we had nothing to depend on and nothing dependent on us. No care was given to education, no care for children. We would just go outside and play with our friends. Of course sometimes we would play dirty games, but it didn’t matter because nobody cares. Our society has a lot of children so they can’t pay too much attention to you because you are not alone. So there are not many events to mention in my childhood.

We live in a difficult situation. There is no factory, no job opportunities in our region because we are Kurds, they deprive us from that so that we will leave our region and move to Damascus and go to Aleppo to avoid planning or making another Kurdistan, another country, apart from Syria. This is our background. We were deprived of our mother-tongue, which is Kurdish, so people left school in the early years. We could not leave Syria legally, because we had no citizenship, but still many of them left for Europe at that time. I was lucky to continue and go on in my studies. I learned Arabic, the main language in Syria. After that I entered Damascus University. This was a good chance for me to learn English. English, the first year, was very difficult for me but I tried hard, tried hard, because I knew that maybe later I would get some benefit from learning English and that’s what happened – now I am talking to you! This is how I learned English, with practice. I studied English language literature. We read about Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, we read about Christianity, we read many novels, Hamlet, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, many others – I forget their names, Charles Dickens, Anton Chekhov. They were very interesting. We studied about comparing theories: Feminism, Centralism, Marxism, many other things, Capitalism. We studied composition, how to write essays, how to research, translation, grammar, many subjects. We studied another language besides English. I chose the German language and studied it for about three years but as I did not practice I have forgotten everything. So we read a lot about English language literature and history. It’s a long time ago, many years, and I have forgotten many things.

I worked as an English teacher in an institution, a private school for about one year. Unfortunately the situation got worse in Damascus. I left Damascus and went back to my village where I worked as a volunteer teacher, teaching our village people, children, English for free. I was not alone – We, other Kurds and myself, thought that when we attended Damascus University we would have a weak education, due to our background and we felt shy asking our doctors or philosophers questions related to our subjects. So we tried hard to help our children within our village to get rid of that feeling, feeling shy to ask a question about a subject or anything you have within yourself. I was not alone. We made a meeting for those who were university graduates or still attending university. We were more than ten persons: three English teachers, two mathematics teachers, two geologists, three Arabic language teachers…We tried to help, and I think we could help them more when we were free because formal education was stopped in many regions of Syria.

The governing party in Syria was the Al Baath party. You have to be an agent or a spy for Al Baath so that you can live. For our family, this was like a shame to be a spy for Al Baath party, cheat your neighbourhood, your brothers, your uncles, your tribe, your society. They will deprive you of many things, such as our language, bad treatment within school. You have to live in Damascus, rent a house, sometimes work long hours, to afford a life for your family. Taking land from Kurdish families and giving it to Arab people has happened since 1963. So we have many Arabs living in our region, brought from Ar-Raqqah Province and Deir ez-Zor Province.

The education system was very bad. Al-Baath party teaches Arabs that “Kurds are our enemy” as they said we would leave Syria and join Turkey maybe, or Iraq. We know better than Assad. Thousands of Kurds are killed by those regimes within Turkey, within Iraq, by Saddam Hussein who used chemical weapons and killed 5000 people in 5 minutes…children, women. We Kurds, we faced a hard life because all of the societies near us think that we are enemies: Arabs, Farsis, Turks. This is historical. I think now that the situation may be getting better.

The regions where we live…we are not there suddenly. We have been there since a long time ago which is why we are there now. The education system in these countries, the Assad regime, teaches people that Kurds are the enemy. If you are the enemy, you will be deprived of many things, and people will have bad ideas about you so they will be careful dealing with you. This is what happened in 2004: many people coming from Deir ez-Zor Province bearing with them many pictures and signs insulting Kurds. We couldn’t bear that. Fighting happened. They killed about 32 Kurd guys. Thousands of people were imprisoned or forced to flee Syria after that.

So it is not easy to live in Syria as a Kurd. You have no job opportunities, no good chance to be educated, you will forget your mother tongue. Till now I didn’t get my class nine certificate for school, because I had a third grade citizenship.  I had an ID, the Arabic name of which is Maktoum. Literally translated it means: “Silence.” Silent. Nobody knows anything about him. He’s not a Syrian. I was homeless. I have no other country. I have no rights at all in anything. I can’t register an estate, or a home, or a car, or land by my name. I can’t get anything like that. In 2005 they gave me another card, which is a red one. I think 500,000 Kurds have this card. You are deprived from getting employment, you cannot register anything by your name, you can’t leave Syria at all. It is a second grade citizenship. In 2011 after the Syrian Revolution started there was like a plan to put Syrian Kurds aside from fighting or demonstrating against Al-Assad regime and they gave us Syrian citizenship. It was a political plan to put us aside so we weren’t enemies anymore and were appeased and side-lined.

I could not stay any longer.

To be continued.