By Stephen Kalin
Abu Baraa knew it was time to leave Syria in June 2011 when state security asked him to become an informant against the revolution. To refuse that offer, he reasonably feared, would invite imprisonment and torture if not certain death. Abandoning his home in the suburbs of Damascus, the site of the harshest initial fighting, he shuttled his wife, Um Baraa, and their two children onto a plane to Egypt and joined them there after a month in hiding.
Days later in Cairo, the family attended an anti-Assad demonstration at the Syrian embassy. "It was the first time we felt comfortable enough to participate," said Um Baraa. "I wanted our chants to reach Syria." More than a year later, the fighting back home persists while she and her family continue to wait in Egypt for the day when they can return safely to a free Syria.
Thousands of Syrians have come in the past year to an Egyptian exile that is safer than their war torn homeland, but still full of hardship. Intensifying violence in Syria this summer has accelerated that forced migration -- the United Nations counts more than 1,300 registered refugees while unofficial estimates exceed 10,000. This is smaller than the diasporas in the countries bordering Syria where unofficial estimates exceed 200,000, but for many Syrians who can scrape together the money for a flight, Egypt is preferable to crowded refugee camps in Jordan and Turkey or the sectarian streets of Lebanon.
However Egypt's government, mired in its own tumultuous political transition, has been able to do little for these refugees. Instead, Syrians rely on the charity of others and their own ingenuity to survive. They have banded together to form small communities that secure basic needs like food, shelter, and medical attention. Yet while they hold out hope for the situation back home to improve, and sometimes even participate in the opposition from abroad, their collective frustration continues to mount. more
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