When Syria's dictatorship fell in early December, a celebration broke out nearly 6,000 miles away in Toledo, Ohio. At the parking lot of a Kroger supermarket, families danced and sang to Syrian music. Women ululated, and men wrapped themselves in the flag of their home country. People leaned on their car horns, expressing their joy at the end of a regime that relied on brutality and terror as a means of governing Syria for more than half a century and waged a civil war that forced millions of people to become refugees.
The first time I visited Toledo to meet Syrian refugees was nearly a decade ago, on my very first reporting trip as a host of All Things Considered. At the time, a 22-year-old named Mohammed al-Refai had just arrived in the city of 265,000. His situation was unusual. After his family fled Syria across the border to Jordan, Mohammed got a visa to come to the United States. His parents and siblings did not. Nobody could explain why; the State Department usually keeps families together.
So in Toledo in 2015, Mohammed settled into a group house with some American roommates just out of college who took him under their wing and called him Moh. He began to learn English and got a job at a halal butcher shop. When I first met him, some of the few English words he knew were "chicken legs, chicken breast, goat, steak, lamb."
Mohammed dreamed of visiting his family in Jordan, but after Donald Trump was first elected president, leaving the country seemed like a bad idea. Trump had run on a platform of stopping Muslims from coming to the US. Mohammed was afraid that if he went to Jordan, he might not be allowed to return. "I need they be safe and close to me, my family, but I can't do anything," he told me just before Trump's first inauguration in 2017. "I feel bad for they not with me."
Later that year, the guys at the group house called me with an update. "I have my green card!" Mohammed said. The roommates threw him a party with a green cake. When he called his parents in Jordan to share the good news, they cried and shouted. "Come right now, visit us!" his mother said. But Trump had just banned travel from several Muslim majority countries, and so Mohammed sadly told them he wouldn't feel safe visiting until he had a US passport.
He became eligible to apply for U.S. citizenship in February of 2020. But as the coronavirus shut everything down one month later, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services followed suit. It would be another two years until he finally took his citizenship exam in February of 2022. That afternoon, he joyfully called me from outside the Anthony J. Celebrezze Federal Building in downtown Cleveland. "Yes! Yes! Yes! I'm so glad I am now American citizen!" he said.
And a few months later, I got a voice memo from Mohammed. "Hey my friend," he said, "I'm with my family in Jordan. I've been here two weeks." It was the first time he had seen his family in seven years. One of the roommates from Toledo made the trip with him.
So when Bashar al-Assad's regime fell, I immediately thought of Mohammed and gave him a call in Toledo. I asked where he was when he heard about rebels taking over Damascus and he said, "My dad and mom were watching the news." At first I didn't understand. "Was your family just visiting from Jordan? Are they living in Ohio now?" I asked. He explained that his whole family — parents, brother, and sister — received visas to come to the US about a year ago. They all live together now. They still often see the roommates Mohammed lived with for years.
As the family gathered to watch people dancing in the streets of Damascus, Mohammed's family cried tears of joy. He called the McDonald's where he now works as a grill manager to say he wouldn't be coming in that day. A WhatsApp group of Syrians in Toledo quickly planned to meet at the Kroger parking lot for an impromptu celebration.
Mohammed told me his family doesn't plan to return to Syria right away. "I don't know how long it will take to fix everything," he said. "Here it's more safe … but maybe we'll go visit back there."
His family is from Daraa, a city in southern Syria where the revolution began in 2011. He still has friends and relatives in the country, including an aunt and uncle who fled their home during the war. "Now they can talk anything about Syria," he says. "They're not scared about anything." They recently returned home. "They opened the house, they cleaned it," Mohammed told me.
After so many years of uncertainty and separation from his family, living with his parents and siblings in Ohio feels surreal. "We got here and safe. No one killed. No one in jail. That was the dream," he says. "And we find a good life in the United States."
Mohammed says he might return to Syria in 10 or 20 years. But even if he does, "We will love America because she is saving us, and she took care of us."
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