A Syrian refugee celebrates the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Ohio: NPR

When Syria’s dictatorship fell in early December, celebrations were held nearly 6,000 miles away in Toledo, Ohio. Families danced and sang to Syrian music in the parking lot of a Kroger supermarket. Women cheered and men wrapped their country’s flags around themselves. People leaned on car horns to express 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 drove millions into refugees.

I first traveled to Toledo to meet Syrian refugees almost 10 years ago, on my first reporting trip as host of All Things Thoughted. At the time, a 22-year-old named Mohammed al-Refai had just arrived in the city of 265,000 people. His situation was unusual. After his family fled Syria across the border to Jordan, Muhammad obtained a visa to come to the United States. His parents and siblings were not. No one could explain why. The State Department typically keeps families together.

So in Toledo in 2015, Mohammed settled in a group house with American roommates who had just graduated from college, and they took him under their wing and called him Mo. He started learning 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 feet, chicken breast, goat, steak, and lamb.”

Mohammed had dreamed of visiting his family in Jordan, but after Donald Trump was first elected president, leaving Jordan seemed like a bad idea. Trump ran on the platform of preventing Muslims from entering the United States. Muhammad feared that if he went to Jordan, he might not be allowed to return. “I want them to be close to me and my family and safe, but there’s nothing I can do,” Trump said shortly before his first inauguration in 2017. “It’s a shame they’re not with me.”

Later that year, I received a call from the people at the group house to update me on what was going on. “I have a green card!” Muhammad said. His roommates threw him a party with green cake. When he called Jordan’s parents to tell them the good news, they cried. “Come now!” said his mother. But President Trump had just banned travel from several Muslim-majority countries, and Muhammad sadly told him that he could not safely visit until he obtained a U.S. passport.

He became eligible to apply for US citizenship in February 2020. But when the coronavirus shut everything down a month later, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services followed suit. It will be another two years before he finally takes the citizenship test in February 2022. That afternoon, he happily called me from outside the Anthony J. Celebrese Federal Building in downtown Cleveland. “Yes! Yes! Yes! I’m so happy to be an American citizen!” he said.

Then, a few months later, I received a voice memo from Mohammed. “Hello, friend. I’m in Jordan with my family. I’ve been here for two weeks,” he said. It was the first time in seven years that he had seen his family. One of my roommates from Toledo came on the trip with him.

So when Bashar al-Assad’s regime fell, I immediately remembered Muhammad and called him in Toledo. When asked where he was when he heard that rebels had taken Damascus, he replied, “My father and mother were watching the news.” I didn’t understand at first. “Did your family just come from Jordan? Do you live in Ohio now?” I asked. He explained that his entire family, including his parents, brother, and sister, received visas to come to the United States about a year ago. They all live together now. They still often see their roommate, who Muhammad lived with for years.

Mohamed’s family cried tears of joy as they gathered to watch people dancing in the streets of Damascus. He called McDonald’s, where he currently works as a grill manager, and told them he wouldn’t be coming that day. A WhatsApp group of Syrians in Toledo quickly planned to gather in a Kroger parking lot for an impromptu celebration.

Mohammed said his family has no plans to return to Syria anytime soon. “I don’t know how long it will take to fix everything,” he said. “It’s safer here…but I might end up visiting there again.”

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 uncle and aunt who fled their home during the war. “Now I can talk about anything about Syria,” he says. “They are not afraid of anything.” They recently returned home. “They opened the house and cleaned it,” Mohammed told me.

After years of anxiety and being separated from his family, it feels surreal to be living with his parents and siblings in Ohio. “We got here and we were safe. We didn’t kill anyone, we didn’t put anyone in jail. That was the dream,” he says. “And we found a good life in the United States.”

Mohammed said he may return to Syria within 10 or 20 years. But even if we do, “we will love America because America saved us and took care of us.”