“Nothing lasts forever. After darkness comes the dawn,” she says.
“I knew I would never go back to Syria with Assad as president and that we would never have a chance to be a better nation with that man at the helm. We knew we would never find peace without him. And now that this chapter is over, I think the real challenge begins.”
Like René, she wants a country that is tolerant of diversity and takes care of people with disabilities.
“I don’t want to go back to a place where there’s no elevator and the only way up to the apartment on the fourth floor is the stairs.”
Being a Kurd, she knows well the experience of her people’s suffering in the region.
Now that Kurdish forces have been forced out of oil-producing northern cities, Nujin sees the danger posed by the new Turkish-backed regime.
“We know these people who have now come to power. We know the countries and authorities that support them, and they are not exactly pro-Kurdish. They don’t really love us. That’s our biggest concern right now.”
There is also the fear of a potential IS regrouping if Syria’s new leaders fail to bring stability to the country.
There are constant calls to families still living in Kurdish areas.
“They’re worried and worried about the future, like all of us,” Nujin says.
“We never stop calling and we always worry when they don’t pick up after the first call. There’s a lot of uncertainty about what’s next.”
Uncertainty is heightened by changes in asylum policy in Europe.
However, this is a young woman whose life experiences – the experience of being severely disabled from birth, witnessing the horrors of war, traveling across the Middle East and Europe to safety – have created a capacity for hope.
In the last ten years that I have known her, she has not dimmed. The fall of Assad only deepened her faith in Syria and its people.
“There are a lot of people who are waiting for Syria to fall into some kind of abyss,” she says.
“We are not people who hate, envy or want to destroy each other. We are a people raised to fear each other. But by default we love and accept ourselves as we are.’
“We can and will become a better nation—a nation of love, acceptance and peace, not a nation of chaos, fear and destruction.”
There are many hearts in Syria and beyond that will hope she is right.
