'My body is in America but my soul is in Syria': a refugee family's journey to US

Faez knew it was time to get out of Syria the day a stranger saved his life as he made his way to work.

It was April 2013, and he was walking to his job at a healthcare company in the southern city of Deraa. Sometimes his mother would accompany him because then the soldiers were less likely to bother him.

On this day, however, Faez was alone. As he neared a government checkpoint, he found himself cornered by soldiers who were pursuing a young man.

“They thought that I knew the person they were chasing. They arrested four or five of us, and started calling us names. They threatened to shoot us,” he said.

That was when the stranger appeared and vouched for a man she had never met. “An old lady came by, crying and pleading with the soldiers to let us go. She said: ‘He’s my son,’” he said. Faez never found out who the woman was, but he is convinced that her intervention saved his life.

A couple of days later, Faez and his wife, Shaza, packed a suitcase and fled to Jordan. Their escape started a process that eventually saw them celebrate their fourth wedding anniversary last weekend in a small apartment in a Dallas suburb, watching TV news with images of Syrians crammed on European trains – and feeling at once distant from and deeply connected to the ongoing disaster engulfing their homeland.

Syria has dominated the United Nations general assembly this week, where Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin offered rival visions for a solution to the conflict which has killed about 250,000 people since 2011 and turned an estimated four million into refugees.

Meanwhile, Europe has struggled to cope with the largest influx of refugees since the second world war. As national governments and the European Union scramble to frame a common response to the crisis, aid groups and politicians have urged the US to take in thousands more Syrians.

The US has admitted about 1,500 since the conflict began, but only accepted 132 in 2014.

The Obama administration has said it plans to increase its annual intake of worldwide refugees from 70,000 to 100,000 by 2017, with at least 10,000 Syrians in the next fiscal year.

Faez and his family originally had no intention of moving to the US.

After they were smuggled into Jordan, Faez and Shaza entered the Zaatari refugee camp, which is currently home to about 80,000 people.

Conditions were so bad that Faez regretted leaving Deraa. The police insulted the refugees, he said. Anyone without documents was nicknamed a “throwaway” and returned to Syria.

But soon the pair were able to join up in Amman with Shaza’s parents, who had left Syria seven months earlier. Faez found a job and Shaza, 26, gave birth to a daughter who is now 14 months old.

They registered with the UN refugee agency and underwent a series of interviews and checks, before they were recommended for resettlement.

At first, it seemed they would be sent to Sweden. Then there was talk of Finland. “Then they told us, no, no, you will go to America,” said Faez, who asked to be identified by his first name alone because he still has family in Syria.

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Finally, after a further round of screening, the family was accepted as refugees by the US – a country they knew little about.

Before arriving in Texas this February, Faez was aware of the country’s reputation as a beacon for immigrants, but he wondered if the reality would match the hype.

“When they told us we would be sent to the US, I hesitated a little bit; I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go there,” he said. “The first thing I thought about is that we lost everything in Syria, all our money. I know there’s not a lot of cash assistance that the US provides to refugees. On the other hand, everybody told us that in Europe there is lots of assistance, they support your family.”

Faez researched online, checked out Facebook groups and made contact with a Syrian acquaintance in Dallas. When the family arrived, they were helped by the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian aid organisation which provided assistance with housing and other practicalities such as registering for social security cards.

The group has resettled about 800 refugees in Dallas this year, including about 15 Syrians, said Daley Ryan, the IRC’s deputy director for Dallas.

“I think that the US has an historic responsibility to provide refuge for as many people as we can … It’s a very American ideal,” he said.

“[The refugees] are middle-class people with families who had lives just like you or I or anyone else – and now they find themselves in these horrific circumstances where they have to flee for their lives,” he said.

At their anniversary this week, Faez and Shaza couldn’t afford to give each other traditional gifts, such as flowers or gold jewellery. But Faez has a car now – a battered old Mazda – and a job, working the overnight shift in the grocery section of a Walmart. His English is improving and the family is on the path toward green cards and eventually citizenship.

They live in a neat one-bed apartment in a large, well-maintained complex in Richardson, a 20-minute drive north of downtown Dallas. They have a second daughter, born two months ago.

It’s not hard to find Middle Eastern food nearby. Ornaments from home decorate the wall behind the sofa in the living room, next to a pink Minnie Mouse stuffed toy nestled inside a cot.

“My body is in America and my soul is in Syria,” Faez said.

He took out his phone and loaded an internet tribute page with a photo of two young men and the inscription “Friendship never ends even after death”.

The men were friends who never managed to escape Deraa, he explained.

“They went to the suburbs, which were supposed to be safer. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Syrian military bombed the area,” he said.

Initially, Faez was worried about his new environment. In May, community tensions were inflamed when two gunmen were killed by police at a “draw the prophet” contest in nearby Garland.

Other incidents have also heightened anxieties among the city’s Muslims in a state where politicians routinely spout anti-immigrant rhetoric. This month, a 14-year-old Muslim boy was arrested after bringing a homemade clock to school near Dallas.

Yet Texas’s big cities are some of the most diverse in the nation, and last year 7,214 refugees were resettled in the state – more than anywhere else in the country.

“I thought there would be some kind of discrimination because we are Muslim and my wife wears the veil, but I found the opposite: we walk in the street and no one bothers us. We’ve been all around town and no one bothers us, everyone is very nice,” Faez said.

“I’ve been here for a short time, but even in this short time you notice that America is a better place than many other countries. There is a real opportunity to start over and grow. America’s still the land of opportunity for many people who started from nothing and now they are successful. I know I can do something here.”