Refugees Daily - Internal Global Press Review

She wore her finest green velvet dress and chatted about her grandkids over doughnuts and coffee at a house of worship in New Jersey.

In many ways, she's a typical, doting, 60-year-old grandmother. But she's also a Syrian refugee.

The woman was forced to flee her war-ravaged country and rebuild her shattered life after her son got caught in a barrage of sniper fire amid a brutal five-year civil war.

"The young men from the village, they put him on a stretcher, just two sticks and a blanket, and carried him 7 kilometers to Jordan," the new resident of Elizabeth, N.J., told the Daily News last week.

She recalled leaving nearly everything behind and racing across the border to be by her wounded son's side. After the escape, the Jordanian border sealed shut, with three of her adult daughters still trapped in their hometown of Daraa.

While most fellow New Jersey grandparents get to take their loved ones' safety for granted, she worries about bombs dropping over her grandchildren's heads and gunfire crackling through their streets.

She worries they could end up like little Omran Daqneesh — the 5-year-old Syrian boy photographed alone and covered in blood in the back of an ambulance following an air strike in Aleppo last month.

"When we left, the bombing was all around us. There was always shooting, always bombing, every day," she said while attending a support group held at the Darul Islam Mosque in Elizabeth.

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"Every day I worry about my daughters. They're still there. Their children are young," she said.

Concerned about possible reprisals on her relatives still living in Syria, the mother of nine asked to be identified as only Om Awad, a variation on one of her cultural names.

She arrived in New Jersey six months ago with her 80-year-old husband, one of their other daughters and the son who still has a bullet lodged in his back.

They're some of the more than 10,000 Syrian refugees resettled in the U.S. in the last 12 months, meeting a goal set by the Obama administration.

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Om Awad — one of 306 Syrian refugees settled in New Jersey in the last year — spoke to The News in Arabic translated by Huda Shanawani, 63, a Syrian-American woman who's lived in the U.S. for 47 years.

Shanawani works with the International Rescue Committee, local organizations and other New Jersey mosques and synagogues to set newly arrived refugees up in independent apartments with all the food, clothes, phones, furniture and services they need to get back on their feet.

"Nobody wanted to leave Syria," Shanawani explained. "But to have their kids watch this killing in front of them, that's what made them leave."

She gathered 25 refugee women and 10 of their children Thursday for the monthly get-together at Masjid Darul. Toddlers crawled on the ornate red and gold carpeting as the moms shared their harrowing stories.

One young mother recalled fleeing Aleppo with her husband and four daughters amid devastating warfare at the end of 2012.

"A part of the building where we lived was hit by a bomb," the woman who asked to be identified only as Rana, 32, said. "We didn't take any clothing, any belongings, nothing. We left everything behind."

She said her daughters — now 13, 11, 10 and 1 — were terrified.

"When we left, that was the beginning of the bombing. The area where we lived, that was the epicenter. My children were very young, they were very tense," she recalled. "We couldn't sleep from fear."

She said her family first fled to the southwestern city of Daraa — the cradle of the 2011 uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad that sparked the civil war — but more bombings erupted about eight months later.

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Desperate and determined to survive, they walked across the border to Jordan and ended up in a refugee camp, she said.

"It was very, very hard living in the camps. We slept on the floor, on stones. The water was very far for us. The bathrooms were very far. If you wanted to cook it was very far. My husband was not allowed to work or drive a car," she recalled.

"Everything was forbidden to us. We had to live by whatever they handed out to us and even that was very limited. My daughters and I would cry, (asking) where are we going to live?"

They eventually paid a smuggler to get them out of the camp and later got in touch with the United Nations. They arrived in Elizabeth about six months ago, she said.

"They picked our file. We had a lot of meetings and they accepted us, thank God," she said. "Here things will be better. Here we will be able to do what we need to do to survive, to live. The most important thing is for my girls to get their education and to study."

In New York State, 637 Syrian refugees have been settled in the last year, according to the U.S. State Department. Of that group, 21 are in New York City, including 12 in Brooklyn.

Avigail Ziv, the International Rescue Committee's executive director for New York and New Jersey, said the city is mainly a destination for Syrian refugees who already have family or friends in the Big Apple due to the high cost of living.

"There is nothing quite like seeing people who have fled the worst circumstances imaginable restart their lives in this great city. It's incredible to watch them become New Yorkers," Ziv said.

Chris George, the executive director of Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services in New Haven, Conn., said his group has helped resettle dozens of Syrian refugee families in Connecticut over the last year — double the number from the previous year.

"They come because of their children," he told The News. "I'd say 99% of the Syrian refugees we've resettled are families — sometimes single moms whose husbands have been killed."

He and his group made headlines last year when they helped resettle a Syrian husband and wife with a 5-year-old son who were blocked from entering Indiana by Gov. Mike Pence, the Republican later picked as Donald Trump's running mate.

George's group works directly with the U.S. State Department and either places families directly in housing with supportive services, or matches them up with community groups who raise donations to sponsor a family.

He said the refugees are expected to "hit the ground running." The vast majority — about 90% of employable adults — find work in the first six months, he said, mostly in minimum-wage positions that don't require much English such as hotel housekeeping, landscaping and dishwashing.

He said the Syrian refugees sometimes struggle with posttraumatic stress disorder and high anxiety over the language barrier, but they often express relief "they no longer have to worry about snipers, bombings, kidnappings and torture."

George was critical of the Republican governors who've publicly opposed the resettlement of Syrian refugees in their states due to national security concerns.

He said applicants are thoroughly vetted, in his opinion, and quickly give back to the communities that help them.

"Welcoming persecuted people from all over the world is in our DNA. It's as American as apple pie," George told The News.

Back at Darul Islam Mosque last Thursday, a 34-year old married mother of four described fleeing Daraa in 2012 and arriving in Elizabeth last week.

Holding her 10-month-old daughter Asmaa in her arms, she recalled hearing the bombs at night, seeing the smoke and knowing she had no choice.

"When it reached our village, I took my children and I went to Jordan. We went illegally, we were smuggled into Jordan. I didn't have a passport. I didn't have anything. Nobody helped us, no one gave us anything," she said.

After a year and a half, they had their last interview in their rigorous screening process and finally boarded their flight to New Jersey.

"Everyone here is helping us. Everyone wants to help. It feels great. The children are so happy they don't want to go back. They said even if the war stops they don't want to go back," she told The News.

"We can't even think about what has happened there since we left. We can't even think of the horror. We are praying for our people," she said.