Scottish Syrian refugees tell their tales of survival

SCOTTISH Syrian refugees tell their tales of survival to Jane Bradley

Omar was celebrating his 21st birthday when his life changed. A second-year computer science student in his hometown of Homs, Syria, he had a bright future. His parents, a bus driver and a sports team administrator, had good jobs and the family lived a comfortable life, owning two houses in different parts of the city.

An uprising against the government, part of the Arab Spring, had broken out a year earlier, quickly evolving into civil war. For many people, however, life continued as normal. But on the day of his birthday, Omar attended the funeral of a friend who had died at the hands of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

Within minutes, protests against the government had broken out and the army moved in to curb the uprising.

Amer Masri and his sons Taym and Elias. Picture: TSPL

Omar and a friend were caught up in gunfire and his friend sustained an injury to his arm. He was taken to hospital, while Omar, along with around 70 other young people attending the funeral, was thrown into a windowless prison cell in the country’s notorious Palmyra prison.

His cellmates were taken away for nightly beatings by prison guards – and not all of them returned. Omar himself was badly beaten, his back a lattice of scars.

Sitting in an Edinburgh cafe, Omar, now 24 and granted refugee status in the UK, recalls his parents’ faces when he  appeared at their home a month later, half-naked and malnourished.

“They were in a very bad way. They didn’t know what had happened to me,” he says. “Every day, my brother and father went out looking for me and everywhere they went, they saw bodies.”

Omar was lucky. His friend, who had been hurt during the protests, never returned from hospital. “Who dies of an arm wound?” Omar asks. “He disappeared. He was killed.”

Terrified he would end up back in jail, Omar quit his studies and moved to a city in another part of Syria, where he worked at a steel factory.

“I was there for four months and I didn’t see my family,” he says. But while he was away, his parents’ house was destroyed and they were forced to move. His parents were living under a strict curfew, electricity and water cut off for all but three hours a day.

Worried, Omar travelled to Homs to visit his family, but was stopped en route by a soldier who told him that he was wanted by the regime to join the army. “I knew then I had to get out of Syria,” he said.

In the south of Syria, Sam, a young accountant, also had a good life before his opposition to the Assad regime left him forced to flee to Scotland. “I had my own job with enough money to enjoy life, my own car and a house,” he says, the smile replaced with a hint of bitterness. “I had it all.”

But the area of Damascus in which he lived was under government control. Sam was told he had to join the army and kill people opposed to the regime. He refused. “I was stabbed in the street, four times in my back,” he says.

Now, Sam, 27, is living in temporary accommodation in a hostel in Edinburgh. He is learning English, but knows he is unlikely to get a job as an accountant in the near future.

“I want to work,” he says. “My English is not good yet, but I want to find a job.”

His parents and two siblings are still in Syria, but Sam cannot go back in the foreseeable future. “Syria is finished, over,” he says, slamming the table.

His journey from Syria involved walking through ten countries in just five