Resettlement Committee brings two more Syrian refugee families to island

By Anneli Fogt • September 26, 2017 1:30 am
Top: The Alati family: Safa Jneidi (back left), her husband Iyad Alati (back right) and their daughters JuJu, 4 (front left), and Huda, 6 (front right). Bottom: The Al-Salkini family left to right: Brothers Nabil Al-Salkini and Yazan Al-Salkini, their father Mohamed Raed, his wife Nahed and daughter Rawan (front). Not pictured: Mohamed and Nahed’s daughter Noura. (Anneli Fogt/Staff Photos)
Top: The Alati family: Safa Jneidi (back left), her husband Iyad Alati (back right) and their daughters JuJu, 4 (front left), and Huda, 6 (front right). Bottom: The Al-Salkini family left to right: Brothers Nabil Al-Salkini and Yazan Al-Salkini, their father Mohamed Raed, his wife Nahed and daughter Rawan (front). Not pictured: Mohamed and Nahed’s daughter Noura. (Anneli Fogt/Staff Photos)

After months of fundraising and networking with the local Muslim community, the Vashon Resettlement Committee has brought one man and three families who have fled unrest in Syria, to the island. This piece is the second in a series about the refugees and will tell the story of the Alati and Al-Salkini families.

On the final day of summer last week, in a home just a short walk from the south-end ferry, two families laughed, talked and shared coffee while their daughters played outside.

The girls, 4-year-old Juju Alati, 6-year-old Huda Alati and 7-year-old Rawan Al-Salkini, have befriended a neighbor’s pets — a Rottweiler-mix named Daisy and a cat named Stewie — and discovered a secret hideaway in the brambles of some overgrown blackberry bushes. Watching them play, it seems they have no memory of the life they had in Syria before war tore through the capital and surrounding areas forcing them to flee as refugees.

Rawan was entranced by the airplanes flying into and out of SeaTac via routes above the island.

“I took a plane to come to America,” she said matter-of-factly.

The Al-Salkini family moved to Vashon two weeks ago after two years in Tukwila and, before that, five years in Jordan. They left Homs, a city in western Syria on the Lebanon-Syria border in 2011 after an encounter with government officials that left Rawan’s father, Mohamed Raed, with three broken ribs. Raed talked about the incident in a recent interview for PBS’ KCTS 9.

“The people from the government came around the houses to search cars. Suddenly, the sergeant put his phone in his pocket and started hitting me,” Raed says in the television interview. “He kept kicking me, I fell to the ground, and he continued hitting me. Meanwhile, my kids were watching. They were still kids at the time.”

Raed’s son Nabil, now 16, explained in the interview how he wanted to help his father, but was told not to to avoid being hurt himself. That was the final straw for Raed, he said he did not want to live in a place where he would be hit in front of his children.

“In about one or two weeks, we escaped from the country,” he said.

In an interview with The Beachcomber last week, Nabil said that two weeks after they left Homs, their house was bombed and the supermarket Raed owned was destroyed.

“We left because it was dangerous,” Raed said.

Now, the family is starting over for a third time. Raed and his wife Nahed have four children: Rawan, Nabil, 21-year-old Yazan and 15-year-old Noura. Rawan, Nabil and Noura have all started classes in Vashon schools, and Nabil wants to become a software engineer and work for Microsoft. Meanwhile, Raed and Yazan are continuing to work at Syrian-owned restaurant Mamnoon Street in Seattle. Nahed is taking ESL classes on Vashon.

It was a fellow refugee family living on the island that brought Raed and his family here: the Alati family. Iyad Alati, his wife Safa Jneidi and daughters, Juju and Huda, have been living in a home near Tahlequah for seven months. Alati just recently completed a cooking apprenticeship at Seattle’s Project Feast and is now looking for a cooking job. Juju and Huda have started school, and Jneidi is taking ESL classes and working toward an accounting certification, which she had in Syria.

The family had also been living in Tukwila before coming to Vashon and went to the same mosque as the Al-Salkinis. Before that, they were in Turkey, but Aleppo, Syria is home.

The family left Aleppo in 2012, when the first major clashes of the civil war between Syrian opposition groups (including the Free Syrian Army and other Sunni groups, such as the Levant Front and the Al-Qaeda) and the government of Bashar al-Assad began.

“We left because it was dangerous,” Jneidi said. “Of course it was hard to leave, but we had to.”

Now, the family’s focus is on learning English, working and making a future for themselves.

“For people who have a bad feeling about Muslims, they should know we just want to live and have a good life because we love Americans. They are wonderful people. We want to make a good future.”

The two families join the Al-Mustafa family that has been living in a home on Maury Island since August.