by ALIA TURKI AL-RABEO
“It is her right to give the nationality to her children as much as his.” PHOTO/Razan Ghazzawi at Flickr
Every morning I start my day with the sight of our block’s cutest child Nour rushing to catch a bus to school. This nine-year-old wakes up at dawn as his school is an hour’s drive from home.
Nour speaks Arabic better than I do and in a Syrian accent. He loves Syrian food and sings Syrian national songs. Yet he cannot enroll in any government school. Sawsan, his mother, must renew his residency every year because according to the Syrian Nationality Law she cannot pass on her nationality to her husband or child. Nour inherited this discrimination because Sawsan chose an Iranian to be her husband and his father.
“Nour has neither visited Iran nor speaks the Persian language,” Sawsan tells me with a grim face. “He is deprived of basic rights of a citizen because his father is a foreigner.” Besides being ineligible for admission to a government school, she explains that her son cannot travel outside Syria and also cannot buy property here. Identity-less “Syrian” children are deprived of free education, jobs, and the right to own property or travel abroad.
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