by Tima Kurdi
After lunch, we walked down the busy street and went to a supermarket, where I bought Mohammad sharp scissors and clippers so that he could cut his hair and perhaps find work at the shelter. They returned with us to the hotel and stayed there until curfew at eight p.m.
The next day Mohammad and Yasser came to the hotel again. We did two German media interviews and then we went out to eat. The weather was still chilly, but the sun had broken out from behind the clouds. We went to a Turkish restaurant and sat outside on the patio, just like we used to do in Damascus. I ordered way too much food, and when the restaurant manager found out that Mohammad and Yasser were Syrian refugees, the kind man piled the food even higher. We spent hours on that patio, talking about our family’s tragedy—it still didn’t feel real to us—and remembering life in Damascus before the war. We were there for so long that the waiters began to stack the seats up around us. We apologized for overstaying our welcome, but the owner insisted there was no need to rush; we could stay as long as we liked.
At the bus station, we said our tearful goodbyes and I watched my nephew climb onto his bus with his take-away bag of food. Mohammad decided to stay in the hotel with us that night; he got a friend to sign him back in at the shelter so that he would not get into trouble. Alan told Mohammad that he was welcome to sleep in his bed, but Mohammad insisted on taking the floor, saying, “I’m used to it. And everything is so clean here. I’m perfectly fine.”
As soon as the lights went out, Mohammad started to talk to me.
“, Ya Allah leish heik saar fina? Oh God, why is this happening to us, sister? Why to Abdullah? Why only to the poor?” He could not put his mind to rest.
“Brother, we can’t change it now. Inshallah, everything will get better.”
Despite Mohammad’s laments, I think I had my first sound sleep in many months that night, with my son and my well-fed brother in the same room. Mohammad and I had not slept in the same room since we were small kids in the house in Damascus. It was so hard to say goodbye to my big brother that next morning. I felt that I had failed him and Abdullah by not being able to secure them asylum in Canada. So much was still uncertain: I didn’t know when I’d see Mohammad again or when he would be able to reunite with his family. Alan was flying back to Vancouver that morning, while I was continuing on to Turkey and Erbil. I hugged Alan hard, feeling so blessed to have such a beautiful son, but I was also very uncertain about the next stages of my journey. As soon as Alan left my side, I felt unmoored all over again.
When I arrived in Istanbul, I texted Hivron and told her where I was staying. Shortly after, she arrived with her kids and a bag of food.
“Open this,” she said, her eyes sparkling with that old childhood mischief. The bag contained two pieces of “broasted” chicken with a delicious side of creamy garlic sauce, my favourite Syrian “fast food”—like KFC, but much, much better.
“Where did you find this?” I asked Hivron.
“A Syrian franchise just opened in Istanbul for all the homesick Syrians. I know how much you love it,” Hivron said.
I savoured that food while Hivron and the kids watched me, smiling with satisfaction, as if I were a refugee. I had a beautiful evening with my nieces and nephews. Then Hivron sent them home so that we could have time alone. She was sleeping over that night, and I was tired from the travel. But Hivron wanted to talk about her own horrific Mediterranean crossings, attempted during the same month that Abdullah and his family were trying to cross. On Hivron’s first try, the women had been separated from the men, loaded into different trucks, and then sent to a boat by themselves. There had been a frantic period when Hivron and her husband didn’t know if they’d see each other again. When they got to the boat, Hivron refused to board. After the family reunited, they tried to travel together by boat again. But they were forced to turn back—by patrol boats and then the elements.
On their third attempt to flee, they hid in the trees near the beach, and the kids had collected stones while they waited for the smugglers.
“What are you making?” Hivron had asked her kids.
“, Qabr,” they’d responded. “It’s a baby’s grave.”
My sister’s hair had stood up in fright.
When the boat showed up, it was just a flimsy dinghy. The smugglers tried to herd the refugees onto the boat with sticks, but Hivron held her ground and refused to go.
“I would never attempt that crossing again,” she said to me in the hotel room. “After that tragedy, never ever, even for a million dollars. It’s not worth the risk.”
“Inshallah, the German government will approve your resettlement soon, and you’ll be reunited,” I said.
Just as I was about to fall asleep, Hivron started to weep. I shot right up in the bed and started to cry too.
“Fatima, I want to confess something about Abdullah,” she said. “, Ana nadmaneh. It’s my deepest regret. After Rehanna and the boys fled Kobani, Abdullah asked if they could stay with me until they found a place of their own. Even though it hurt, I said, ‘I’m sorry, brother, there’s no room for all of you.’ ”
My poor sister. I tried to console her. “If you had let them stay, both of your families might have been evicted. You couldn’t risk that.”
“I know. But I think I broke his heart.”
“No, sister. He understands. He’s not upset about it. He found a place to live eventually.” No matter what I said, it did little to ease her pain.
“Look at where we came from and where we are now. Why is this happening to us? , Wihyat Allah ta’abneh. I swear to God, I am tired.”
“Hada nasib. It’s fate. Inshallah, it will get better soon.”
Eventually, we drifted off to sleep in tears.
The next day, I had to do an interview with a Dutch broadcaster; then Ghouson and her kids came over with a million questions about their dad: “How is Mohammad? Is he skinny? How’s his health? How’s Yasser? What’s Germany like?” Maha arrived shortly after. It was a relief to have much of my family reunited under one roof again, but still, the visit was painful, with all of us asking one another “Why?” over and over.
I had another mission in Istanbul. I wanted to visit Abdullah and Rehanna’s home. I had seen many photos, but I wanted to see that place for myself. I wanted to sit down on their green couch and cry my heart out. The couch that my nephews had sat upon so many times—the one that I’d seen them laugh and dance upon; the one in the photograph with the white teddy bear between them.
Maha and her daughter took me there. A new Syrian refugee family from Aleppo was living in the home—a couple and their four-year-old son. We arrived and introduced ourselves, but they knew who we were and welcomed us inside right away.
“I’ve heard a lot about your family from the neighbours,” the women said. “Everyone said they were a loving family and talked about the father, how he used to take the two boys with him everywhere. , Allah yerhamon. God rest them in peace.”
My eyes were immediately drawn to the green couch. Maha and I sat down, putting our hands on the cushions, imagining the boys there. We were silent, overcome by grief, as we looked around. I could see the boys chasing each other and playing in the corners. I could hear them laughing and singing while Rehanna cooked their meals and sang along. The Syrian woman went to the closet and pulled out a plastic bag. In it was the big white teddy bear from the photo that Abdullah had sent me. The woman had hidden it away after she moved in, just in case Abdullah wanted it. Then she pulled out a box of my nephews’ toys—plastic dump trucks and a number of others that I had come to know well from photos and our video calls, including the Teletubby with a missing eye, a stuffed monkey (one of Ghalib’s favourites), and a stuffed dog sticking its tongue out (Alan’s favourite).
“Please, take the toys to your brother,” the woman said.
I didn’t know what to do, so I called Abdullah in Erbil.
“I know what it means for a refugee family to have toys for their children,” he said. “L
eave them for that boy. It would make me happy to know that he’s playing with them. I brought some of their toys from Kobani.”
“Hatta alkalib? Even the dog with the tongue?” I asked.
“Ahhh, mishan Allah geebih. Oh God, bring that. Alan loved that toy so much. He played with it all the time. He’d put his little hands on my cheeks and turn my head so that we were face to face, eye to eye. Then he’d hold out that stuffed dog and talk in his baby talk, like that dog had something important to say.”
Abdullah started to cry. “Please bring that dog. And the monkey. And the truck,” he said.
After I said goodbye to Abdullah, I had a final look around. Ghalib’s tricycle sat in the corner. The couch and mattress took up the majority of the space. The only festive decoration in the room was a birthday banner hanging on the wall, showing a big sparkle-covered birthday cake, and dangling below it, the multi-coloured words “Iyiki Dogdun,” Turkish for “Happy Birthday.” Abdullah had hung that decoration months earlier for Alan’s second birthday party, on June 6, and for Ghalib’s fourth birthday the following month.
I thanked the Syrian woman many times, and I took the decoration and the few toys with me. As I boarded the flight to Erbil, the toys felt heavy in my suitcase. I wondered if bringing the mementos to Abdullah would help him heal or cause him even more pain.
Chapter 12
Mitl raffit al’ain
In the Blink of an Eye
Abdullah was waiting for me when I got off the plane in Erbil. He looked frail and haunted. His clothes—khaki pants and shirt, like a military uniform—hung from his body.
“I’m so sorry” were the first words from my mouth, as I tried not to crush Abdullah with my hug.
“La ilaha ill Allah. God is the only deity,” he responded.
It was such a relief to be with my brother again. But I could not resist worrying aloud about his gaunt appearance.
“Don’t worry, sister. Lots of people are looking out for me here,” he said, even Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani, whom he’d met shortly after arriving in Kurdistan.
“We talked for an hour,” Abdullah said. “, Albo tayyib. He’s very kind and good-hearted, like a brother. He promised to help me with anything I need. I’m so grateful to him.”
The Kurdish Regional Government had generously provided Abdullah with a room in a posh hotel. The KRG treated him like a VIP, assigning him a jack-of-all-trades liaison, who acted as his driver and personal assistant. They had planned many activities for Abdullah, including a meeting with Masoud Barzani, the president of Kurdistan. But the luxuries were lost on Abdullah, once again forcing him to wonder, “Why now, when it’s too late?”
Abdullah and I visited President Barzani soon after I arrived. He asked Abdullah to tell him everything that had happened to his family since the war had started, and he sat quietly while Abdullah recounted his family’s story. When Barzani said anything at all, he was soft-spoken and kind. When Abdullah told him what had happened to his teeth, Barzani was upset and vowed to get him dental treatment.
“I can’t wait for you to have teeth again, so that you can eat and smile like you used to,” I told Abdullah after our visit with Mr. Barzani.
But Abdullah’s mind was elsewhere. “I don’t care about my teeth. I wish I had the power to help all the children in the world. All the things I couldn’t do for my kids, I want to do for those refugees. Can you take us to a refugee camp?” Abdullah asked the driver.
The KRG driver was happy to fulfill the request. In that first week of my two-week stay, we visited seven different refugee camps in various parts of Kurdistan. The Kurdistan camps didn’t receive much funding from global charities. But the Kurdish government did its best to accommodate and respect the displaced. They had opened the door to refugees, and by 2015, they said that 1.7 million refugees were living in Kurdistan. Some of the camps were quite large. I was surprised that many of them resembled typical Arab villages. They had refugee-run shops, including hair salons and marketplaces under billowing blue and white tents. At least some people could work and make a bit of an independent life for themselves.
The only time I saw Abdullah truly smile his toothless grin was when we met the children at those camps. Each time, he went straight to the playgrounds.
“Habibati. Sweethearts, what do you need most of all?” he asked them, as they clamoured around him.
“Uncle, we want to go to school,” one child called out.
“Yes, we miss school,” chimed in many other kids. “But we don’t have school supplies. We need backpacks with school supplies.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” said Abdullah.
When we got back to the hotel, Abdullah told his contact about what he had heard from the children. “I want to bring those backpacks to the kids, so I can see the smiles on their faces,” Abdullah said.
The government honoured the request. We returned to the camp with backpacks filled with school supplies. The kids came running and formed a circle around Abdullah as he handed out those backpacks.
“Thank you, Abu Alan,” the kids cheered.
Among them, Abdullah spotted a little boy, and my brother’s smile beamed.
“Oh my God, sister, doesn’t he look like Alan? Sweetheart, you are like an angel.”
The boy did look quite like Alan. But I think Abdullah was projecting the image he most wanted to see.
At another, smaller camp of approximately two hundred refugees, the kids told Abdullah that they couldn’t attend school because the camp was too far away. “We need buses to take them there and back,” said the parents. So Abdullah talked to the mayor of that city about it, and the mayor took care of it.
Trying to get Abdullah to leave the camp was like pulling a child from a teeter-totter. On the car ride back to Erbil, he said, “I want to open a school for children in Kobani, and I want to name it after Alan and Ghalib. I want that school to be shaped like a big, colourful lifeboat. And I want to start a charity to help refugee kids everywhere. Children are innocent. They are the most beautiful thing in the world.”
When the Kurdish government said that they might be able to help sponsor Abdullah’s dream project, it became his only interest, aside from seeking a stop to the Syrian war, something that not even the biggest power brokers of the world had been able to do for more than four years.
“We need to be the voice of those people, Fatima,” Abdullah said to me. “We need to help them in whatever way we can.”
Life at the hotel in Erbil was a stark contrast to the camps. We returned from each day’s refugee camp tour to have tea or coffee among the many wealthy tourists and business people in the hotel’s lobby. Most of the time, Abdullah and I sat in silence, lost in our own worlds, drinking our expensive coffees. Every time an attentive waiter approached to refill our seemingly bottomless cups, we’d say, “Shukran. Thank you so much.” We’d say the same thing whenever someone recognized Abdullah and came over to offer condolences.
The Kurdish citizenry took the tragic deaths of Rehanna, Ghalib, and Alan to heart. I can understand why. Kurds have faced enormous hardship and persecution throughout history, including during Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror and genocide, which still haunted many of them. Naturally, they embraced Abdullah’s tragedy as one of their own. And the tragedy generated constant media coverage in Kurdistan. The Kurdish people were struck by the photograph of Alan, perhaps more than citizens of many other countries. And that photograph was everywhere: on the TV at the hotel bar, on posters throughout the city, at the refugee camps, and at every event we attended. We met many Kurds whose lives had been shattered by war, racism, and intolerance—at the refugee camps, and during the various excursions hosted by the KRG. Each of their heartbreaking stories could fill a book.
Some people asked Abdullah for financial aid, and he wanted to help all of them—to pay for a life-saving surgery for a child or grandparent, to get a family a house before the cold winter came. In their eyes, Abdullah was a rich and
powerful man now. They didn’t know that the food keeping him alive and the clothes on his back had been paid for by me and by the KRG. They didn’t know that the only money he had was the two Turkish coins in his pocket, which had survived that brutal night at sea and which he carried everywhere as a memorial to Ghalib. They didn’t know that if the KRG hadn’t taken Abdullah under its wing, he would have remained under the charge of his relatives in Kobani, who could barely feed and shelter themselves. They didn’t know that in many ways, my brother had less than nothing. He had the power of a man who had been drowning at sea for weeks.
Throughout that time, the local and international media followed Abdullah’s every step, requesting interviews. As with everything else, he felt obligated to accept any request. I accompanied him to a few of those interviews. The English and European media would sometimes bring Arabic translators, but too often they mistranslated Abdullah’s words. I had to keep interrupting, saying, “No, Abdullah didn’t say that. He said this.” The media continued to refer to the boat that had capsized as an inflatable dinghy, and Abdullah didn’t try to correct them. The only time he braced and spoke up was when the media called his son Aylan.
Abdullah was just like a wishbone, with everyone pulling at him. It was only a matter of time before the constant pressure broke him in half.
We had another goal on our agenda: visit the namesake of both of our sons. Alana is a tiny village in the Alana Valley, northeast of Erbil, near the Iranian border. The KRG kindly arranged for us to visit the area, and it was by far the most extraordinary of all the fairy-tale places that I would visit on that trip. The landscape was more beautiful than any masterpiece painting I have ever seen. Those mountains and valleys and trees had such varied shades of green. There were rivers and cascading waterfalls everywhere, luminescent, like silk. It was a heavenly moving picture. The village itself looked as if it had been carved out of the mountainside. When we got there, all the locals came rushing to greet our vehicle. We instantly felt at home. The mayor of the town escorted us around, pointing out the Alana School.
