Upon learning that Syria’s dynastic dictatorship had fallen, Iman Mohammed, a Syrian refugee living in Germany, felt a surge of elation at the idea that she could return to her homeland.
But that joy quickly faltered as another thought occurred to her: Going back to Syria could mean giving up everything that she and her family had built in Germany since making the dangerous trek to arrive there nearly a decade ago.
“In the cold light of day, when we really looked at everything that had happened, we realized, not just yet,” Ms. Mohammed, 41, said of the idea that her family might permanently return to Syria.
The decision may not be hers.
After rebel groups toppled President Bashar al-Assad’s government on Dec. 8, the prospect of returning home opened for the first time in more than a decade for the many Syrians who fled during the civil war that ravaged the country, including 1.3 million in Germany.
Many of them worked hard and overcame immense challenges to improve their circumstances. Some, like Ms. Mohammed, are not keen to give up their new lives.
It is European governments that will have the final word on whether the refugees are allowed to stay.
Within a day of the rebel victory, far-right and even some mainstream politicians in Germany began floating chartering planes to Syria and giving 1,000 euros, just more than $1,000, to any Syrian refugee willing to return permanently.
Other European countries with Syrian populations have made similar suggestions. Denmark is already offering a repatriation package of roughly €20,000 to any Syrian refugee willing to go back home and has suggested that it could double that amount to attract more interest. Austria has already sent letters to Syrians who have been in the country for less than five years, asking them to detail the reasons they are seeking asylum now that the situation in Syria has changed.
So far, Germany has not taken steps to review the asylum status of Syrian refugees, and the European Union has advised member states against rushing to deport people, stressing that the peace in Syria is fragile and that its future is uncertain.
“The situation is still volatile altogether,” Magnus Brunner, the European Union’s migration commissioner, told reporters in Brussels on Dec. 13.
Many Syrian refugees are still apprehensive about the nature of the conversations that have begun so soon after Syria’s civil war ended.
“It is very uncomfortable,” said Sulaiman Abdullah, a journalist who fled Syria more than a decade ago. “We are not some people who just arrived in Germany. We have lived here for 10 to 12 years. We are part of the society.”
Syrians make up one of the largest refugee populations in Germany, and they have become an integral part of the country’s work force. Many run their own businesses. Some work in the service sector or as drivers, delivery people or in warehouses. Others account for a significant share of the doctors and other medical specialists working in the country, and officials have warned of dire consequences for the already strained German health care system if they were all to pick up and leave.
Those Syrians who have learned the language, taken on jobs and made lives for themselves in Germany have felt disappointed in and humiliated by the swiftness of discussions about their status in the country.
“We had not really finished celebrating when the politicians first started talking about our return,” said Anas Modamani, 27, who became the face of the 2015-2016 migrant arrivals after taking a selfie with Angela Merkel, the chancellor at the time.
Even before the collapse of the Assad government, Ms. Mohammed had spent days in tears, worrying about the visas for her two oldest children. The authorities had refused to recognize their newly printed Syrian passports, needed for them to renew their residency permits.
The problem, one of the many the family has encountered over the years, has not yet been resolved. Ms. Mohammed is hopeful that her husband, Baha Mefleh, will soon receive a German passport — he has an appointment to submit his application next year — which would allow the whole family to stay in the country.
Mr. Mefleh shares his wife’s nervousness over Germany’s uncertain position on Syrian refugees, but he still holds out hope that one day he can return to his homeland. He would happily trade the family’s home in Gross Schönebeck, a village of 1,400 people about an hour outside Berlin, for the chance to go back to his old life in Daraa, Syria.
When Islamist militants first arrived there, Mr. Mefleh was forced to give up his job as a photographer specializing in weddings, leaving behind all of his equipment and a business he had built up over years.
“I would love to go back,” he said, looking sheepishly at his wife. “But, the children.”
They were the reason the family decided to leave. After four years of near misses with bombs, Ms. Mohammed decided she did not want to see one of her own among the maimed or dead boys and girls in the streets.
She hopes one day that the family will even be able to buy the two-story duplex in Germany that they now call home, with its wood-burning stove in a cozy living room and a garden in the backyard where they grow cucumbers and zucchini from Syrian seeds.
Their two oldest children have already graduated high school and are enrolled in vocational school. One is studying to become an optometrist, the other a hearing aid specialist, with the aim of opening a business together in the area. The younger two, who still have nightmares from the four months they spent crossing southeastern Europe on foot, are in high school.
Although they long to meet the cousins whom they know only through video calls, Syria has become a foreign country for them, and neither of their parents would consider uprooting them once again.
Dr. Hiba Alnayef, an assistant pediatrician in a town 40 miles west of Berlin, said she would also be reluctant to take her young children out of Germany, where they were born, to live in Syria. She wants to stay, despite the hate and discrimination that she says she has faced since arriving in 2016.
“I have experienced racism in my job, from the people around me and even from my neighbors, not all, but some of them,” Dr. Alnayef said. She once felt so threatened by a neighbor who was upset that her toddler had touched his Mercedes-Benz that she called the police.
She has also fought a surge of guilt, seeing people suffering in Syria and knowing that she has skills that her homeland desperately needs. But for her children’s futures, she is determined to stay in Germany.
In an effort to help her homeland from afar, Dr. Alnayef has set up social media pages in Arabic, where she answers questions and offers advice to her 92,000 followers about nutrition, treating minor illnesses or filling out German medical documents.
“Right now, we need to build bridges,” she said. “We need to work together to support the people in Syria.”
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