Back in his mother’s arms: Boy left home alone 3 months ago in Syria

IT IS a rare story of fervent hopes realised amid the tragedy of the Syrian civil war, which ­activists say has claimed upward of 32,000 lives since the uprising to topple president Bashar al-Assad began in March last year.

When two-year-old Bushr al-Tawashi’s family fled shelling in Damascus, in mid-July, they managed to leave him behind in the confusion.

No-one knows exactly how long he wandered alone in the rubble of his family home in the al-Kaboun area of the Syrian capital, but eventually rebel fighters discovered him and handed him to another family to look after.

And yesterday, Bushr was reunited with his delighted mother in Cyprus, where his parents had sought sanctuary from the Syrian bloodshed.

His father Machhour ­al-Tawashi and mother Arin al-Dakkar said that, when they first realised Bushr was not travelling with them, they thought other members of their extended family staying with them had him in their care, explained Stella Constantinou, lawyer for the family.

Heavy fighting prevented the parents from going back to search for Bushr once they found temporary shelter at a refugee camp and realised that he was missing, she said.

“They could not go back nor could anyone else. The road was blocked and there was fighting,” said Ms Constantinou.

Believing he could not have survived the shelling, his parents and their other two sons, aged four and six, arrived in Cyprus on 6 August seeking asylum, some two weeks after they had lost track of little Bushr.

But word that the boy was safe eventually reached the parents, who now live in the Cypriot coastal town of Limassol.

Machhour said, through an interpreter, that someone had recognised Bushr, since everyone knows each other in their tight-knit community, and called the family in Cyprus to deliver the good news.

The family then sought Ms Constantinou’s help to bring him to the Mediterranean island, which lies 64 miles east of Syria’s coast. Machhour’s sister, who had joined the family in Cyprus, volunteered to return to Damascus on 9 September to take care of Bushr until arrangements for his return could be made for him to join his family. She is now being prevented from leaving the Syrian capital, the lawyer claimed.

The Cypriot foreign ministry expedited the process once Bushr’s parents provided proof that he was their son. Bushr’s father then travelled to the Lebanese capital of Beirut where he was reunited with the boy at the Cypriot embassy. He brought Bushr back to the island on Thursday.

“I can’t describe how I felt when I saw him, just overjoyed at seeing him again,” Machhour said yesterday. “At first he didn’t recognise me, but then they embraced and he started calling out ‘Father, Father”.’

Machhour said, although he still has relatives in Syria, his home was flattened as were half of the buildings in al-Kaboun and there was no way he would ever return there. “Absolutely not,” he said.

Ms Constantinou said Bushr was just happy to be in his mother’s arms again. She said she was driven to see the family reunited as she had family of her own. “As a grandmother of a two-year-old myself, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to get that boy back to his parents,” she said. “You can imagine how they felt when they were told their son was alive after bearing all this guilt thinking that he was dead.”