Carrying a navy down jacket and carrying a small suitcase, Alikabor seems like some other common worldwide traveller, however early on Monday, he was queueing with different Syrian refugees hoping to move via Turkey’s Cilvegozu border crossing and return to his homeland.
“I am going again to search for my lacking brother. We have not had information of him for 13 years,” mentioned the 29-year-old with German citizenship who lives in Hamburg and declined to offer his surname.
Initially from Idlib in northwestern Syria, he fled on foot via Turkey in 2013, then caught a ship to Greece, lastly reaching Germany the place he was given citizenship.
Early on Monday, barely 24 hours after an Islamist-led insurgent coalition ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Alikabor was ready with a number of hundred refugees on the border beneath the watchful eye of Turkish commandos and police.
Most of these ready have been refugees who’ve lived in Turkey for greater than 10 years, who arrived on the border crossing weighed down with baggage, carrying sleeping youngsters of their arms and children trailing after them.
The one manner throughout is on foot with the crossing fed by a relentless stream of taxis turning as much as drop off households desirous to lastly return residence.
They’ve come from throughout Turkey: from Istanbul, from Bursa within the west, from Kayseri within the Cappadocia area, with the dream of returning to former properties in Hama, Homs, Aleppo and the capital Damascus.
“My brother disappeared whereas he was finding out in Homs,” defined Alikabor.
“We have been at college collectively, he was ending his fourth yr finding out English. I would been away for 2 days seeing our mother and father in Idlib when some pals rang to inform me he’d disappeared.
“We have had no information of him since.”
– ‘Lifeless or alive?’ –
It’s a state of affairs that has been repeated throughout Syria, with greater than 110,000 folks forcibly disappeared by the federal government, in accordance with a 2022 estimate by the Syrian Community for Human Rights (SNHR).
“We do not know if he is lifeless or alive,” admitted Alikabor, who’s planning to journey to Damascus to point out “the brand new authorities” a photograph of his brother, who would now be 33.
If unsuccessful, he plans then to journey throughout Syria to go to its numerous prisons to see if his brother was amongst these freed by the rebels.
“The one factor we’re sure of is that he was being held by Assad’s folks,” Alikabor mentioned, insisting that his brother was not politically lively nor had he taken half in any of the mass protests of 2011 that sparked a brutal authorities crackdown.
After information of Assad’s fall on Sunday, Alikabor jumped on the primary flight to Istanbul, then flew right down to Hatay and was among the many first refugees ready to cross the border again into his homeland.
Again in Hamburg, the place he runs a shifting firm, his spouse and three youngsters, all born in Germany, and his mother and father are ready for information.
“I’ll look in every single place, I am going to try to discover our pals and I am going to ask everybody,” he mentioned simply earlier than crossing the border.
