Khatchik Amen may be watching nervously as events unfold in his native Syria, but the Midland man doesn’t expect the dust to settle for several months.
“It’s very complicated,” Amen said. “After 15 years, everybody’s happy the president’s gone, but from a bigger picture, what’s going to happen next?
“It’s a hot mess.”
Amen, who left Syria in 2011 before spending four years in Lebanon before finally arriving in his adopted Canadian homeland, says there are just so many competing interests now at play.
Besides Russia, Iran and Turkey “waiting in line,” there’s also Israel and the various rebel factions that had been fighting against the government troops of now deposed president Bashar al-Assad.
Following Assad’s overthrow this past weekend, Israel has carried out a wave of heavy airstrikes across Syria as its troops advanced deeper into the country, a Syrian opposition war monitor. As well, the Israeli defence minister announced that his forces had destroyed Syria's navy.
But Israel is just one player in the country that also features heavy involvement from Russia and Iran, which trade weapons for fuel, according to Amen.
“The future’s very unknown,” he said, noting the head of the insurgent rebels Abu Mohammed al-Golani that stormed Damascus was once a jihadist.
Al-Golania, who has since dropped his nom du geurre in favour of his given name Ahmad al-Sharaa, was once a member of al-Qaida, but has since renounced those ties and depicted himself as a champion of pluralism and tolerance, according to an Associated Press report.
It’s that kind of uncertainty that worries Amen.
While Amen and his family are Christian, he said Syria is home to multiple ethnic and religious communities, which are often pitted against one another.
“I don’t think anybody can sit here and say what’s going to happen,” he said, noting that some Syrians fear Sunni Islamist extremists will take over and may outlaw a number of things that those living in the Western World take for granted.
And Amen knows how dangerous that can be, pointing out that when ISIS earlier entered areas of Syria, they gave people three choices: “You fight, you leave or we will kill you,” he recalls.
Amen and his family decided on the second option and took shelter underground from the bombs overhead after the civil war in Syria broke out in 2011.
His sister Zarmik left the country first, followed a couple of months later by Khatchik and later their parents Zafik and Ibrahim .
They arrived in Lebanon where their older brother Sevag was already living with another brother, Sharl, choosing to remain in Syria.
After living in Lebanon for a time, the Amen family applied to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for resettlement. There, they waited three years until they heard that Canada was accepting refugees. They eventually made it to Canada in 2016 and settled in Midland.
While he is very happy to be in Canada and has a son with his wife Kenady Clement, he worries a great deal about the safety of his brother, his wife and their children who remain in Aleppo.
“I talk to my brother (Sharl) every day,” Amen says, adding the family is desperately hoping his brother and family can somehow get out. “It could take just one idiot to kill him.”
While his parents have been back to Syria since leaving, Amen says he has no desire to return unless it’s to see his brother.
“It’s not like what you see on the news,” says Amen, who’s been told by friends just how much Syria has changed and not for the better.
“There are no rainbows and sunshine.”
