Refugees desperate to save son from Syrian war

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This article was published 16/08/2018 (2072 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After just two months of living in Winnipeg, Syrian refugee Hasan Alkhalaf said this place is like “paradise.”

He, his wife and four of their children have a safe place to live. Nobody confronts them and demands to see their papers. The former farmer and commercial fisher from Raqqa has an angler’s licence and loves to fish at Lockport. Their kids will soon start school and he and his wife are preparing for English classes. They’ve got everything they need except peace of mind.

Their adult son, who is still in Lebanon, where the family fled from Syria, has just been told he will have to leave for the front lines of the war in Syria in less than six months.

“I love him so much — he’s my son,” an emotional Alkhalaf said of his son Mohammed, who is married with a 10-month-old daughter. Through an interpreter, the father talked about how young Syrian men who took refuge in Lebanon are being used as cannon fodder in a losing war against Syria’s Assad regime.

“It’s very, very hard,” said Mohammed’s mother, Amina Al Issa, who hasn’t slept much since they found out about their son last week.

Her family has survived a lot. Until a few years ago, they had a simple, happy life in Syria before the war broke out and fighting moved closer to them.

“When ISIS came, I took my family and went away,” Alkhalaf said. “I expected to come back.”

They made it to Lebanon with their four younger children and three older children, including Mohammed and his two older sisters, who are also married now with kids of their own. They were all living in a refugee camp when the middle-aged couple was offered refugee protection in Canada for themselves and their four children under 18.

They’re very glad they accepted the invitation to Canada.

“People are very kind,” Al Issa said. She knows her four youngest sons — twins aged 17, a nine-year-old and a five-year-old — will be OK and so will her grown daughters with their families in Lebanon.

But the woman with seven kids has a sick feeling about her eldest son being sent back to Syria. She shared that gut feeling with a friendly Canadian woman she met at a community event in St. Boniface last week. Her new-found friend, who did not want to be identified, told her that the only way they could bring their eldest son and his family to Canada was for a group called a Group of Five to sponsor them.

Someone with a lot of experience with privately sponsored refugees and Group of Five applications said it requires a commitment of money and time.

“It’s five people who are all permanent residents or Canadian citizens, and between them they have to pledge enough money to sponsor them for one full year,” said Karin Gordon, settlement director at Hospitality House Refugee Ministry.

It requires more than money, Gordon said. The group finds and furnishes a home for the family, gets them winter wear and things like health cards. “It includes a lot of running around,” she said.

Gordon said Mohammed’s parents are not alone in asking for refugee sponsorship. Hospitality House has been overwhelmed with pleas from refugees whom they can’t help because the federal government is allowing so few private sponsorships.

“We have to send out these heartbreaking letters of refusal to four or five new email inquiries every day,” Gordon said. She said the government “closed the door” on private sponsorships and “opened a window” in allowing Group of Five sponsorships. In Winnipeg, there’s still interest in helping sponsor refugees — for now, Gordon said.

“There’s still lots of people who want to help, but the public attitude is souring — much more than it was four years ago,” she said. She thinks the “souring” began with the election of U.S. President Donald Trump and his anti-refugee rhetoric pushing asylum seekers in the U.S. to cross into Canada.

Having lived only two months in Canada, Mohammed’s Syrian mom doesn’t know anyone with time or money to form a Group of Five to sponsor her son and his family. Aside from worrying and praying, Al Issa doesn’t know what to do but ask for help.

“I want someone to help me see my son.”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca