HOUSTON (AP) - When Ajwad Al Zoubi, a tall, stocky man who for years drove trucks across the Middle East, saw the emailed photo of his beloved home with the bountiful orange trees burned to the ground, he turned into a pool of tears. They come suddenly, even now, when he talks about it.
Before the war he couldn’t have fathomed leaving his hometown in Syria. It was here where he built up two stores and designed his dream house for his mother, wife and nine children. Then government forces came searching for him in a wider strategy to detain all adult men. Dara’a, the forefront of Syria’s protest against President Bashar al-Assad, was becoming a graveyard.
Today the family is part of roughly 5,900 Syrian refugees who have arrived in the United States since October under President Barack Obama’s plan to resettle 10,000 here this fiscal year, the Houston Chronicle (https://bit.ly/2at8z5D) reported.
Until only two months ago, however, facing a furious election-year backlash against them and a time-consuming vetting system, they had trickled in just dozens at a time. The sluggish pace spurred deep criticism of both the Obama administration and the United States, which comparatively to smaller countries has done little to relieve the Syrian refugee crisis overwhelming the world.
This spring, under orders from the president to meet his goal, the U.S. State Department ramped up its capacity to process refugees in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, including posting additional staff to interview Syrians abroad. Since May, about 3,500 have arrived to the United States, and the agency said it’s now on track to resettle 10,000 here by the end of September. Despite leading the charge against them, Texas received the fourth-most Syrian refugees in the nation, about 400, with roughly a third, like Al Zoubi’s family, coming to Houston.
It remains barely a dent, however, on the nearly 5 million Syrian refugees who have fled this century’s deadliest conflict, now going on its sixth year, which has also displaced almost 7 million people inside the country. More than 2.5 million have settled in Turkey and in the European Union, Germany received more than 447,300 applications for asylum, about 25 percent of them from Syrians. Tens of thousands more Syrians have streamed to the continent after risking dangerous voyages across the Mediterranean to Greece.
The humanitarian crisis has sparked instability and concerns over terrorism, even as all of the suspects identified in the recent Paris or Brussels attacks were born in France or Belgium. Though one of the suspects in the Paris killings entered on a Syrian passport and posed as a migrant, it’s unclear if he was actually from Syria. Many of the European-born attackers did, however, travel to Syria where authorities believe they were further radicalized.
In the United States, fear, hysteria and misinformation over Syrian refugees has likewise persisted. Though the number of Syrians Obama proposed to accept is a small fraction of the 85,000 refugees the nation receives annually, it ignited a panicked furor. More than half of the country’s governors, most of them Republicans, called to block the Syrians, saying they posed security threats.
In his nomination speech at the GOP’s national convention, Donald Trump criticized his Democratic counterpart Hillary Clinton, who has supported increasing the number of Syrian refugees the United States resettles to as much as 65,000.
“There’s no way to screen these refugees in order to find out who they are or where they come from,” Trump said. “I only want to admit individuals into our country who will support our values and love our people.”
According to the State Department, “only a tiny fraction of 1 percent” of the nearly 840,000 refugees admitted through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program since 9/11 have been arrested or removed from the U.S. over terrorism concerns. None of them were Syrian.
Of the Syrian refugees admitted this year, 60 percent are children, according to the agency.
Last month, a federal judge in Dallas tossed an attempt by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to stop the government from sending Syrians here, agreeing that it is Washington, not the states, which decides where and how to resettle refugees. The process is funded entirely by federal dollars.
A day after the ruling, the state’s health and human services commissioner sent a letter to the State Department saying the agency objects to the planned resettlement in Texas of about 11,000 worldwide refugees in fiscal year 2017. Commissioner Charles Smith said the state would only take refugees whom the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and director of national intelligence can “certify” to Congress don’t pose security threats.
Texas has no authority to make such demands, said Denise Gilman, co-director of the immigration law clinic at the University of Texas at Austin.
“It seems that Texas has not learned its lesson that it does not govern the admission of refugees into the country and cannot discriminate against and exclude refugees at the state level,” Gilman said in an email.
Moreover, contrary to Trump’s claims, refugees already go through the most stringent security clearance of any immigrant entering the U.S., said Sarah Pierce, an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington D.C.
That includes extensive Department of Homeland Security background checks, biometric screenings, multiple in-person interviews and an investigation by the National Counterterrorism Center and the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center in a process that can take as long as three years.
The Al Zoubi family applied for refugee status in October 2012 from Jordan, which is now home to more than 1.4 million Syrians, including over 600,000 refugees who have fled there since the conflict began in 2011.
The nation of 7.5 million people has an unemployment rate of more than 20 percent and Al Zoubi didn’t have a work permit, so he was juggling under-the-table jobs that were hard to come by. The children could only go to school for three hours a day. When he was accepted as a refugee, in January 2013, he looked immediately to the United States.
“America is the greatest country in the world,” he said. “Everything here is regulated by law. There is always electricity.”
But it would take two more years and multiple interviews before the Al Zoubi finally received clearance from the U.S. government. They were approved in January 2016 and arrived here in March.
Four months later, the welcome poster volunteers taped to the wall of their three-bedroom Memorial apartment is still there, hanging proudly in the center of the living room. Nine pairs of shoes line up neatly outside the front door, in keeping with their Muslim custom of removing shoes inside for cleanliness and as a sign of respect.
Six bikes, two with training wheels for the 4-year-old twins, are stacked on the patio. Inside the spotless home, cherries, bananas and peaches fill a platter on a coffee table, though it’s a far cry from the fruit tree-lined terrace they left behind in Dara’a.
For Al Zoubi, the nation’s opposition to Syrian refugees doesn’t fit with people like him who have lost everything.
“We came here from Syria to escape (such extremism,)” he said of safety concerns regarding refugees. “That’s not us. We ran away from what they are describing.”
The 42-year-old still remembers the March 2011 protests that sparked the war clearly, catapulting Dara’a into the “cradle of the revolution.” Following the success of protests in Tunisia, 15 teenage boys in Dara’a spray painted anti-government graffiti on a school wall. They were arrested and tortured, suffering beatings, electric shocks and having their fingernails ripped off.
The city of about 150,000 people roughly 8 miles north of the Jordanian border erupted in widespread protest. Al Zoubi attended some of them. Security forces cracked down, killing hundreds of people over the next month, including the nephew of Al Zoubi’s wife.
Life in Dara’a turned increasingly complicated. To punish the city’s residents, the government cut electricity and blocked telephone and Internet service. Water and bread became luxury items.
“The government started destroying the city,” Al Zoubi said.
For a time, the family tried to stick out the violence, huddling together at home. But with roads into the city blocked, Al Zoubi could no longer buy the items he sold in his stores and he resumed driving trucks.
During one such trip away, security forces raided his house, threatening his 63-year-old mother and violently pushing the diabetic to the floor with the butt of a rifle. They were searching for Al Zoubi. According to Human Rights Watch, which investigated the attacks in the city, security forces detained hundreds of adults and children in such random sweeps.
Fearing that he would be taken into custody too, Al Zoubi went to Jordan, where he thought he could work while the conflict tided over. But it only worsened. His children saw bombs erupt as they played outside and he said security forces drove through their neighborhood, shooting at random.
On May 28, 2012, his family piled into a taxi with just enough clothes to convince border guards that they were only visiting Al Zoubi in Jordan for the weekend. They never came back. After a friend later emailed him a picture of the charred remains of his house, it sunk in- finally - that he could never go home again.
Now his six younger children are enrolled in Spring Branch Independent School District, where they are shyly learning English and making American friends. Two older daughters remain in Jordan and another recently arrived in Houston.
This week, with help from the YMCA of Greater Houston which is resettling the family, Al Zoubi started his first job at a car wash.
“People here are very friendly,” he said in careful English. “If someone passes by, you should say hi or at least smile.”
His wife, Taghred Ahmad, has scouted all of Houston’s Arabic markets, discovering to her delight that she can find most of the traditional delicacies they were accustomed to at home. One of the kids, 17-year-old Mohammad, used to wake up terrified in the middle of the night, shaking from nightmares of the shelling of bombs. Now he is slowly learning to sleep through peacefully.
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Information from: Houston Chronicle, https://www.houstonchronicle.com
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