‘We don’t want to live like this’: Syrian refugees dream of fresh start in Australia

THESE Syrian refugees are broke and living on charity. But they want Immigration Minister Peter Dutton to know they’re hard-working and ready to call Australia home.

A child refugee at Camp 002 in the Baalbek valley in Lebanon, near the border with Syria. Picture: Ella Pellegrini

THEY’RE broke, hungry and living on charity, but they want Immigration Minister Peter Dutton to know they’re also literate, hard-working and ready to call Australia home.

Mr Dutton sparked headlines on the election trail when he said many Syrian refugees were illiterate in their own language and any increase in humanitarian intake could “take Australian jobs” or swell the ranks of the unemployed.

But News Corp Australia travelled to numerous refugee camps dotted along the Lebanese-Syrian border and found people who not only were literate, but spoke English. In some cases, just enough to beg to be taken to Australia.

Hussein Abu Ibrahim says he dreams of moving to Australia. Picture: Ella Pellegrini

In one refugee tent city on the border, known simply as “Camp 035”, 100 families had recently been accepted as part of resettlement programs to Australia and Canada. Most were from middle class, university or trade certificate backgrounds.

“There are many here like this, one was a friend of mine Ghassan who was an accountant and he left for Australia last week,” camp elder Hussein Abu Ibrahim said.

Ibrahim has three sons, one of whom had travelled by boat to Germany recently and was already resettling with German language courses and a trade, while another was still in Damascus at university.

Amina, Soumaya and Sakina work on a mint field near the Camp C035 camp. Picture: Ella Pellegrini

“There are 3000 families in this camp, most from Idlib and we all want to work, we all realise we cannot go back to Syria, there is no future there especially for the youth, but we can go somewhere else like Australia and start again,” he said.

At “Camp 002” most of the 55 families were forced to flee from Raqqa, the self-proclaimed ISIS capital in northern Syria, and were now living in abject poverty.

“We don’t want to live like this, we don’t even have water and we live just off UN food vouchers,” a man named Khalid said.

Most of the 55 families were forced to flee from Raqqa and are now living in poverty. Picture: Ella Pellegrini

He wanted all Australian politicians to know they were smart and could offer the country something if they were given a chance; to prove it he asked eight-year-old Hussein to recite all the words he knew in English.

“He could speak more if he was able to go to school again. The children want to learn, the adults want to work and we just want someone like your government to believe in us,” he said.

They also produced UNHCR certificates to show they were registered and ready to go to Australia.

There are more than 1.5 million refugees living in camps, some less than 10km from ISIS held territories on the Lebanese-Syrian border, looking for resettlement abroad or eventually back in Syria if and when the five-year-old conflict ends.