Will the thousands of Syrian refugees who settled in Metro Vancouver return to Syria after the historic ousting of dictator Bashar Al-Assad?
Local Syrian Canadians say the toppling of Syria’s dictatorship this week left them with a dizzying mix of emotions — shock, happiness and sadness — and at least one young man is now eager to return to the country he left as a child to help it rebuild.
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“People have been really happy that it’s all over,” said Khaled Alderwish, 21, of Surrey, who fled Syria via Lebanese displacement camps when he was just seven or eight years old.
“But at the same time, they’re really, really, really sad because they’re seeing people being released from prisons where they spent years and were under torture.”
Those scenes keep Alderwish glued to his phone “every hour, every second, every minute” and have helped him to make up his mind to return to Syria as soon as it’s safe to help the country rebuild after more than 50 years of rule under Bashar Al-Assad and his late father.
“I was in shock,” said Alderwish when he learned that Damascus had been taken over by rebel forces, a swift revolution that sent Assad and his family to seek refuge in Moscow. “I was not ever thinking that Syria was going to be free anymore. It’s a feeling I could not explain — happiness, tears of joy.
“When this is over, I want to return to Syria because, especially right now, it needs every Syrian person to go back there and start building.”
He said he plans to save up money from his job at a sawmill to buy a plane ticket and return to his hometown of Deir ez-Zor in eastern Syria and to stay for a month to assess the viability of returning for good. He has no family in Syria.
But he knows not everyone shares his view of a duty to return. His brother, Hussein, 20, wants to stay in Canada. He also has four other brothers aged 10 to 17 — the youngest was born in Canada — and a 14-year-old sister, who were mostly too young to remember Syria.
“I love it here,” he said at the time. “I don’t ever want to leave this house.”
A year later, when he was 14, Khaled was quoted saying he wanted to get an education and help to build Canada and also to return to Syria to help build his home country.
“I feel the same way now,” he said this week.
His family was among thousands of Syrian refugees who settled in B.C. between 2015 and 2018. Canada took in an estimated 100,000 Syrians and 4,300, as of the 2021 census, immigrated to B.C.
Majd Agha, 30, was among the earliest Syrian refugees to settle in Canada. With support from the UN Refugee Agency, he came to B.C. in 2014, when he was 17, after spending a few years in various countries, including Russia and Turkey.
He says he has a strong connection to his adoptive country and is content to stay here.
“Most of the people, they want to go home, they want to fix it but I’ve lived in Canada longer than I’ve lived in Syria,” said Agha, who left his parents and sisters behind in Damascus with hopes to sponsor them eventually.
Agha, who now works as an accounts manager in a signage company, said, “I consider myself a Canadian.”
Days after watching Damascus topple to rebel forces, he still can’t believe how quickly it happened.
“I can’t believe what I’m seeing,” he said, referring to the day rebel soldiers were shown on video around the world breaking into prisons holding women and children.
“I can’t believe what kind of animals we were living with.”
Syria is “barely standing. It needs of a lot work, it needs a lot of love,” he said. “It’s a completely new Syria now, a country for everyone.”
Canada said on Tuesday it will continue to evaluate its remaining asylum claims from Syrian refugees even as some European countries are pausing those claims after Assad’s fall.
But Immigration Minister Mark Miller said Canada has only 1,600 such claims while Germany, for instance, has 47,000. In comparison, claims from India in Canada number 30,000.
With files from The Canadian Press