One Simple Fact About Syrian Refugees

They would return home if they could

One Simple Fact About Syrian Refugees One Simple Fact About Syrian Refugees
For all the fearmongering over Syrian refugees, here is one simple but obvious fact — no refugee is happy being one. For the most... One Simple Fact About Syrian Refugees

For all the fearmongering over Syrian refugees, here is one simple but obvious fact — no refugee is happy being one. For the most part, the refugees want to return to their country, the main obstacle being many don’t have one to go back to.

“I’m not happy at all that I had to leave,” 15-year-old Nibal Al Ahmad said. “We left everything behind — our homeland and our relatives. Thanks to Allah, we are still alive. Life here is hard, but we managed to adjust to our new conditions.”

Ahmad, who is originally from the Syrian city of Dara’a, lives in a refugee camp in Mafraq, Jordan.

Khadija, a 16-year-old Syrian refugee, worries that her education in Jordan will prove worthless once the war ends and she returns home. “I can’t feel that [Jordan] is my country, because only my family is here and my other relatives are still in Syria. And I miss them so much.”

“It is not good for me just to say that I was in [a] UNICEF school in Jordan.”

For UNICEF, the goal is to stabilize the refugees’ living situation and establish routines, patterns of life and a sense of normality — all to ease the return home once the war ends. It will, eventually.

“The Jordanian government has been extremely welcoming for a massive number of refugees,” Toby Fricker of UNICEF told War Is Boring. “It’s really it’s now providing as much support as possible to the children, to families, to ensure that when they go back they can regain their lives, they can move on and play a key role in rebuilding Syria.”

Jordan has absorbed more than 1.4 million Syrian refugees. Germany, which is experiencing a political crisis over Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policy, has accepted fewer than 500,000. The United States has taken in fewer than 3,000.

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