Aboud (59) prefers to let his wife Maria (51) do the talking as she has better English.
We lived in Homs. I taught in an intermediate institute – it was a very good job and I was very fulfilled doing it. Aboud was a tour-bus driver who worked with tourists within Syria and outside. He took them on tours of either seven or ten days in Syria or to Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan. Before the war, we had everything, good jobs, a good life, a big house and we were happy. We have two boys, aged seventeen and thirteen.
Homs was where the revolution started and we were besieged there. Everyone in the city endured a lot. Suddenly the regime soldiers made borders within the streets and there were tanks everywhere. In 2012, they came and told us we had to leave our home. They didn’t let us take anything with us. I forgot my identity card and my credit card. We went because they said ‘You have to go out now and you can come back after a few days.’ We left our home and never lived there again, because they besieged the old town in Homs and no one could enter. When we returned after two-and-a-half years, it was destroyed.
We left Syria on the 17th of September 2014 and reached the Netherlands on the 1st of December. Our children stayed with my mother in a village near Homs as it was too dangerous a journey to take them on. We now have permission from the Netherlands to bring them here, so that’s hopefully going to happen soon. We went from Damascus to Lebanon by car to the city of Tripoli (not Tripoli, Libya). And then from Tripoli to Turkey on a ship. It took fourteen hours, but it was legal. We stayed for about sixteen days in Turkey.
We failed with our first escape: the boat sank. That first time, we went from Izmir. The whole ordeal lasted eight hours. First the engine failed, then the boat filled with water. I thought I would die in every minute. I always prayed. I closed my eyes and caught every arm in the boat to pray with me. When the boat capsized, we were very close to the Greek coast, but we phoned the Red Cross and they came in two vessels but they didn’t take us because instead they informed the Turkish authorities. The soldiers arrived and took us back to Turkey and put us in prison for one day.
A week later, we managed to get to Kos in Greece – this time on a jet-boat. It took fifty minutes. Eighteen of us reached Kos at ten o’clock in the evening. That boat journey cost two thousand, three hundred euro for each of us. We gave the smugglers the codes to retrieve the money from an office in Turkey. We had reached an uninhabited rocky area of the island. My leg was in a cast. I’d had an accident in Syria. It was a very long, difficult trek, because I had to climb on the rocks. Some of the rocks were two or three metres high.
No one came for us because it was an isolated area. We called the Greek police, but they didn’t send anyone. The Syrian people with us carried me over the rocks. After four or five hours, we reached the beach and saw some people. A Swiss couple there brought us to the police station in their car. We stayed seven days in the camp at Kos. It was horrible. The people in the camp were selfish. When there was any food brought, all of them would run and grab it for themselves and the rest of us remained without food. There were three hundred and fifty people sharing one very dirty toilet. No electricity, no doors or windows and we slept on the floor.
After we were given our temporary travel papers, we went from Kos to Athens by ship. We were stuck in Athens for two-and-a-half months. We tried to fly out of Greece six times, five times from Athens and once from Thessalonika. The police in the airports were very polite and they treated us very kindly each time they caught us.
Finally we chose to go by sea and we went from Greece to Italy. It was very difficult and humiliating. The smugglers took us to the Albanian border and we stayed in a forest on a mountain. They told us we’d have to stay for only one night. But then every day, they’d bring two or three people more and we had to stay without water, without much food. They’d bring us some bread and a little bit of cheese. We stayed in the forest for seven days. There were four of them, an Iranian, an Albanian, a Turk and a Greek.
It was another jet-boat, this time with three engines. The man driving the boat was taking drugs and he insulted and hit people. It took about four hours to reach the Italian coast. There were fifty-two people on the boat. It was very fast with the three engines and was flying over the water. People were being tossed upside down. During the trip, four people broke bones. One broke an arm, two broke their legs and one, a doctor, broke his back. This journey cost nine thousand euro for the two of us. We had paid the money into an office in Greece – there are two types of these offices in Greece and Turkey – Suker and El-Sayyid. They worked with smugglers and took a lot of money from people.
We landed near a small village called Lecce. We walked, soaking wet, to a train station. We went to Milan and stayed one night there because we were very tired. Then the next day, we got a train south to Ventimiglia at the Italian-French border and from there to Nice. We went to Paris via Lyon and from Paris to Amsterdam. If we’d been caught in Italy or France we would have had to stay there. We were very afraid. No one asked us about our identities on the trains. Maybe it was because we are old. We then went directly to the main migrant reception centre at Ter Apel and gave them our papers, our passports, our identity cards. Altogether, we had spent nineteen thousand euros getting here.
We arrived after six in the evening so we weren’t given beds – that’s the rule. We stayed on the chairs and we only stayed the one night. But they were kind people. Then it was off to other asylum-seeker camps: three days at Veenhuizen, one-month-and-five-days in Budel, then to Wageningen, then to Arnhem and finally to Alkmaar. You could say we got to know the Netherlands quite well. We did the IND interview in Zevenaar, near Arnhem. When they asked us why couldn’t we go back to Syria, I told them our problem is that I am Christian and my husband is Muslim, so it’s become very dangerous for me from extremists – ISIS and the al-Nusra Front.
For Aboud it wasn’t safe, as he was stopped repeatedly at the regime borders because there are many problems with his nephews. One of them fled from the military service and he is wanted by the Government, the second one was killed by the al-Nusra Front in the street and the third one was taken by government forces and imprisoned. Nobody knows what’s happened to him. Everyone in Syria is now living in bad conditions. Every inch of Syria now is dangerous.
It is very hard to begin again when you are old. I’m 51, he’s 59. To learn a new language and to get to know other people. But in fact, all of those we’ve met until now have been very kind. We’ve met many Dutch people. We have many friends here in Heiloo and in Alkmaar and Budel. Nobody treated us badly.
Dutch is a very difficult language. English is a very useful language because I can manage everything through English, but we are trying our best to learn Dutch. Now we study at home but we will join a school next month. We’re delaying until the children get here.
ISIS and the al-Assad government are equally dangerous. They are both dirty and they destroy everything. If al-Assad hadn’t been in power, ISIS would never have come to Syria. At the beginning of the revolution, he let many dangerous people out of prison. He knew that they were al-Qaeda and they gathered and many people joined them and formed the al-Nusra Front. Why did he set them free? To create a reason for him to attack the peaceful rebels.
I interviewed Aboud and Maria at their home in Heiloo. These are not their real names. The picture – their own – is of where they used to live in Homs.