Yahia sits at his computer and, zooming into an image of Damascus on Google Earth, steers the cursor as if it were a car and he were driving a visitor through the streets.
“Here was our villa,” says the civil engineer, hovering over the stunted remains of the family home, the turquoise blue of the swimming pool visible in the garden. “Here’s the road to the airport, the one to Aleppo, and here’s the frontline of the war.”
To the left of the ruins of his house Yahia points out the stumps of the now-destroyed housing blocks he once built in Babila, his home town in the southern suburbs of the Syrian capital.
“How I dream of going back one day and rebuilding it all,” he says through a haze of cigarette smoke.
Instead, for now, he is sitting in a farmhouse in the village of Brodersby in Schleswig-Holstein, looking out through a drizzle over the flat plains of northernGermany, his adopted home.
Yahia, 61, his wife Amal, 50, and three of their adult children arrived in Germany in January 2014, having applied for political asylum at the German embassy in Amman two months before.
The family had initially wanted to go to the US or Britain, but both countries brusquely turned them down. “Germany gave us an immediate response. They called us and said: ‘Please come.’”
Mohamed, their eldest son, was especially elated. “Ever since the 1998 World Cup when I watched Jürgen Klinsmann, it was a dream destination for me,” says Mohamed, 26. “I dream of owning a BMW 750i one day. Since I was a boy I associated Germany with great teamwork and mechanical ingenuity.”
After the destruction of their villa, which took a direct hit from a bomb fired from government tanks in May 2012, the family were forced to move to the centre of the city. But their high-profile surname – they are related to a prominent leading opposition leader – meant problems when they tried to move around the city. Every time they came to a checkpoint, the men in particular faced the risk of arrest and interrogation.
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