SYRIAN REFUGEES; Congressional Record Vol. 161, No. 184

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SYRIAN REFUGEES

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, it is amazing some of the people we get to

meet in our lives as Senators. There is a medical doctor in Chicago who

I didn't know several years ago, but he and his wife have become dear

friends in a short period of time. His name is Dr. Zaher Sahloul. He

asked for an appointment in my office in Chicago a few years back, and

I agreed to it. He came in to tell me a story and to show me some

pictures. He is originally from Syria, and he is head of the Syrian-

American Medical Society in the Chicagoland area. Because of the

tragedy of the civil war in his home country of Syria, he has felt a

special obligation to help.

What he has done on many occasions now was to get as close to the

action as he could in Syria to provide medical assistance to the

victims. Many times he risked his life to do it. And other doctors--

some Syrian-American and some not--have joined him in that effort. He

would bring me back photographs of what casualties of war look like in

Syria. They were heartbreaking--pictures of children who had been

maimed and seriously injured by the barrel bombs of President Assad in

Syria and stories about parents killed in the bombings that continue

day after weary day.

Dr. Sahloul would ask me: What can you do, Senator? Can't you help

us? Can't you stop this?

Of course, that civil war in Syria, which has gone on for 4 years, is

almost intractable, almost impossible to define. There are so many

forces fighting one another that at any given moment, your ally today

may be your enemy tomorrow.

I tried, since meeting Dr. Sahloul, to do some things: to come out

for a safe

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zone, a humanitarian zone in Syria, where medical treatment and food

and a safe shelter could be found for families who are facing these

attacks. We have had some limited--and I underline \\\`\\\`limited''--success

in providing these safe zones, but it is a fact that the tragedy of

Syria continues even to this minute. If anything, today it is worse

because of the bombing by the Russians, which I am told has gone into

areas that previously had been protected because of the citizen and

civilian populations.

The result is obvious. Millions--literally millions of people in

Syria over the last 4 years--have fled. They are running for their

lives, and they are running from war, and they are running from

terrorism.

Dr. Sahloul recently wrote an article about his trip to the United

States. He arrived in 1989. He tells the story of coming to Chicago and

feeling very much alone. He graduated from medical school in Damascus.

He had a chance to practice medicine in Chicago, but he wasn't sure

that he could ever really fit in.

He tells the story of his first Thanksgiving in Chicago in 1989, when

a fellow doctor invited him to join her and her family for Thanksgiving

dinner. It was a gracious gesture--a gesture of hospitality. Dr.

Sahloul has not forgotten it to this day. This article, which I will

ask to have printed in the Record at the conclusion of my comments,

goes into some detail.

Dr. Sahloul really wrote this article not to just tell his story but

to tell two other stories--the story of immigration, which is literally

the story of America, and the story of Syrian refugees.

His most recent trip to the region was to the island of Lesbos, which

is part of Greece. I went there a few weeks ago with several of my

Senate colleagues. Thousands--hundreds of thousands of refugees--are

flowing into Lesbos from Turkey. They have left Syria and Afghanistan,

and they are working their way into Greece on their way, they hope, to

refuge and shelter in Europe.

It is impossible to describe, if we have not seen it ourselves, what

is going on here. But imagine for a moment that you were so frightened

of the prospect of your child or your wife dying in war that you said:

Tomorrow, pick up whatever you can carry. We are leaving. We cannot

stay here.

And if you look at these refugees as they travel--mothers and fathers

carrying babies, with toddlers and small children walking alongside of

them--you realize how desperate they must be to leave everything behind

and to head out on this journey of danger. One of the most dangerous

parts of it is that trip across the Aegean Sea between Turkey and

Greece. They have to pay smugglers 1,000 euros, which is over $1,000

for each adult, and 500 euros for each child. They put them in these

plastic boats. Some of them are given lifejackets. The infants, too

small for a lifejacket, are literally given plastic water wings that we

give to our infant children to play in the wading pools near our homes.

That is all they have. They cram them into these boats. They strap on a

Chinese motor. They put just enough gasoline in that engine that they

think will make it across--but not more--and try to find someone in the

boat who will steer it. They point to their destination, and they

leave. Sometimes these boats have 50 or 60 people in them when they are

only supposed to have 20 to travel safely.

They are warned that as they come up to the shore in Lesbos, Greece,

or other islands, they should immediately run into the rocks and

scuttle the boat so that it sinks. Otherwise, they are told they will

be turned around and pushed back to Turkey, and they may not have

enough gas to make it. And that is what happens.

Dr. Sahloul tells the story of what happens when these boats are

scuttled as they arrive in Greece. He tells of the drowning of little

children who don't make it off the boat onto dry land but literally

drown right there. We saw one of those photos just a few months ago of

a tiny 3-year-old boy who drowned just as he was about to make it into

Greece.

Dr. Sahloul tells that story so that some of us--all of us--will

understand the desperation of these refugees.

It is now very popular among politicians to blame the Syrian refugees

for terrorism in America. We have not accepted that many refugees in

our country. The numbers are about 2,000. At this point, not a single

person among those refugees has been arrested and charged with

terrorism. Yet one would think that these Syrian refugees are the

greatest threat there is to America.

I will include the article I referred to in the Record so that those

who follow this debate and follow the proceedings on the floor can read

firsthand and for themselves Dr. Sahloul's story and the story of these

Syrian refugees. I ask unanimous consent that the article be printed in

the Record.

There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in

the Record, as follows:

\\\[From Lobelog, Dec. 14, 2015\\\]

Today's Syrian Refugees Are Yesterday's Irish

(By Zaher Sahloul)

Immigrants have built the United States--and that includes

Syrians.

Four months after I arrived to Chicago in 1989, my

colleague at the hospital, Dr. Nancy Nora, invited me to her

family's Thanksgiving dinner. I was homesick in a new country

after graduating from medical school in Damascus. Nancy Nora

was an Irish American from a large Catholic family. Her

father was a respected local physician.

Nancy told me that it was a tradition in her family to

invite a newcomer to the city. After all, Thanksgiving, I

learned, celebrated Native Americans welcoming European

refugees who fled their homelands due to religious and

political persecution. I came to Chicago from the ancient

Syrian city of Homs to pursue advanced medical training.

Syrians look to the U.S. as the best place to pursue this

training. In fact, almost half of one percent of American

doctors are of Syrian origin. There are also famous Syrian

actors, playwrights, rappers, chess players, entrepreneurs,

scientists, businessmen, and even Republican governors. Every

Syrian American is proud that Steve Jobs is the son of a

Syrian immigrant. Syrian immigrant Ernest Hamwi invented the

ice cream cone during the St. Louis World Fair in 1904.

\\\`\\\`Everyone who enjoys ice cream and an iPhone should feel

indebted to Syrian immigrants,'' I remind my children. All

three have been born in Chicago. The eldest, Adham, ran his

first marathon this year--to raise awareness about domestic

violence--and aspires to a career in politics. Mahdi is

involved in his university's Students Organizing for Syria

(SOS) chapter as well as the Black Lives Matter campaign.

Marwa, a high school freshman, is a budding pianist and ran

for her school's cross-country team. They all volunteer in

local charity events and for Syria. My wife, Suzanne, the

daughter of a Syrian civil engineer and Canadian mother with

Irish-Scottish roots, founded the Syrian Community Network

(SCN) to help support newly resettled Syrian refugee families

in the Chicago area.

Darkness in Syria

To many Syrians, America symbolizes the values that we lack

at home: freedom, rule of law, and the respect for human

rights. In Syria, my generation knew only one president,

Hafez al-Assad, who ruled for 30 years with \\\`\\\`iron and

fire,'' as they say in Arabic. He detained and tortured

thousands of people who dared to speak out against his rule.

He committed massacres, the worst of which in the city of

Hama the same year I graduated from high school.

I still remember the atmosphere of fear in Syria. We dared

not speak. We were told that the \\\`\\\`walls have ears.'' My

family even prevented me from going to the mosque to pray.

Many of my high school friends and relatives disappeared into

the dark cells of the infamous Palmyra prison, the site of

another infamous massacre by Assad's ruthless security men.

When Hafez died in 2000, his son Bashar, a classmate of

mine from medical school, was appointed to the presidency by

a token parliament. People expected change. After all, Syria

had a well-educated middle class, a diverse economy, and a

reasonably vibrant nonprofit sector. It also had a tradition

of democracy, which had its ups and downs between 1920 and

1970. Bashar, inexperienced but equally ruthless,

disappointed us all. When hundreds of thousands of young

Syrians demonstrated peacefully in 2011, thinking naively

that the Arab Spring had turned at last to Syria, Assad and

his cronies responded with what they knew best: brutality and

oppression. More than 250,000 people have been killed. Tens

of thousands have disappeared into the prisons. Half of the

population has been displaced. And barrel bombs, cluster

bombs, and all kinds of weaponry have leveled entire cities

and neighborhoods.

Besides meager humanitarian assistance and empty rhetoric,

the international community has stood by mostly idle,

watching darkness descend on Syria. It has become one of the

worst humanitarian crises in our lifetime. In the ensuing

chaos, extremist groups like the Islamic State (ISIS or IS)

and Hezbollah filled the vacuum. But the snowballing refugee

crisis only captured the world's attention when it reached

the shores of Europe. With the drowning of the Syrian toddler

Aylan Kurdi, who tried to flee with

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his family to Greece from Turkey across the Aegean Sea,

suddenly Syrian lives mattered.

With the Refugees

I just returned from my last medical mission with my

organization, the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), to

the Greek island of Lesbos. Tens of thousands of Syrian

refugees are making the desperate boat trip from Turkey to

Lesbos and other Greek islands. The unfortunate ones are

drowning, while the lucky ones must carry on through another

1,200 miles of borders, humiliation, and misery to reach

whoever opens the door to them. Germany and Sweden have been

the most hospitable, while others are building walls and

barbed wire fences along their borders. The Syrian refugees I

met were fleeing the recent Russian bombings and Assad's

barrel bombs, while some are fleeing the brutality of the

Islamic State. I saw several women, some with toddlers

Aylan's age, who lost their husbands to the war. One woman

was crying as she described a public execution by IS that she

was forced to witness with her five-year-old son. He has had

nightmares since then.

I heard from a Syrian volunteer doctor about a boat with a

capacity of 30 people that was stuffed with more than 80

refugees. Each refugee had to pay the smugglers 1,000 to

2,000 euros. It was a cold night when the boat crashed onto

the rocky shores and split in half. Children got stuck

underneath the boat. Many simply drowned. The Syrian doctor,

himself a victim of Assad's torture and now a refugee in

France, described to me how he performed CPR on two small

children. One was dead, and one died later. The U.S.

presidential candidates and governors who slammed the door in

the faces of helpless Syrian refugees should hear these

stories. These refugees deserve our sympathy and hospitality.

Since 1975, Americans have welcomed over 3 million refugees

from all over the world. Refugees have built new lives,

homes, and communities in towns and cities in all 50 states.

Since the war began, however, only 2,034 Syrian refugees have

been resettled in the entire United States. This is a

shameful number, considering that there are 4.2 million

Syrian refugees. The House of Representatives has passed a

bill that would impose additional security measures on

refugees from Syria, making it nearly impossible to accept

more refugees from Iraq and Syria. A similar bill is awaiting

a Senate vote.

Nancy Nora's father, surrounded by his large extended

family at the dinner table on that Thanksgiving many years

ago, explained to me how Irish Americans were demonized when

they first arrived to the United States as refugees. They

were maligned by politicians and by the public, and were

perceived as a threat. During dark times in our history, the

United States has treated newly arriving Jews, Italians,

Japanese, and Latinos as a threat.

As I was leaving the Nora household after that memorable

evening, her family wished me good luck with my studies and

my new life in America. Suddenly, the cold Chicago night felt

very warm. I felt at home.

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I have several colleagues on the floor who

wish to enter into a colloquy, and I yield the floor for that purpose,

and then I will wait until they are finished to reclaim my time.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alaska.

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