My wife has a college degree in French language and used to be a teacher at a public primary school. Three months after our marriage, my wife told me the best news of my life — that she was pregnant. This was a different kind of news than we were used to watching every day, about either massacres in Syria or the desertion of officers from the Syrian army.
Two weeks later, the Syrian government began going after young men who escaped the compulsory military duty. To enforce this decree, the Syrian forces started searching neighborhoods without prior warning and looking for these young men at any time. They searched homes and whenever they found a young man, they forced him to an unknown destination — either to participate in oppressing a demonstration or searching houses. Everybody knows the current circumstances in Syria.
I used to live in the ground floor with my wife, my mother and my two younger brothers; however I was the only one in the house required to perform compulsory military service. Whenever the army started a search in our neighborhood, the neighbors would alert me and I would escape into the back yard, then jump the wall to hide at the neighbor’s house. When the officers asked my mother about me, she would tell them I was in Damascus. In this way, I survived two searches.
By the time my wife was eight months pregnant, the situation became unbearable. I did not want my newborn to die from a mortar or unguided missile. So on 21 March 2013, we decided to leave for Jordan and seek asylum there.
We took rural roads to avoid the Syrian army checkpoints — they would have immediately arrested me if they saw me. We traveled by car to a Syrian town called Dara, which is only 8 kilometers away from the Jordanian border. The car then drove us to the closest point to Jordan — 3.5 kilometers after that — and from there, my 8-month-pregnant wife and I walked to the border.
Finally, we crossed the border and entered into Jordan.
To be continued….
Age: 26
Country of Origin: Syria
Host Country: Germany
Civil Status: Married to Alaa, with two children (wife and children in Jordan)