THE Home Office tried to talk a Syrian family into returning to their home country despite death threats levelled against the mother and children should they go back, the Sunday National has been told.
Chafik Kazkaz, who is seeking asylum in the UK, said officials encouraged him to go back to his birthplace of Hama during a government “pause” on Syrian asylum applications that began in December 2024 after the fall of the despotic regime of Bashar al-Assad. The pause was lifted in late July, and Chafik said the situation in Syria had worsened during that time.
However, he said the Home Office had called and emailed his family and other Syrians during the pause “to try and encourage you to go back”.
Chafik said: “I think they have this strategy: he [the Home Office agent] said ‘there are thousands of Syrian people going back, why don't you go back?’
“I’m sorry but I shouted at the phone. They can't understand. For them, it's a case. Just standard. OK, OK, no, no [he mimes box ticking]. The result is no or yes.
“But for us it's not a case, it's life. It's a decision for my kids, maybe for their kids.
“You can't imagine how bad it is nowadays. Every day we have these cases happen in Syria, in Hama, kidnapping, asking for money, killing, torturing. It has reached an inhumanity. There is no law.”
Chafik alleged that the Home Office call came despite death threats against his wife, Shaima, and their three children: Ahmad, 14, Habib, 12, and Hashem, who’s 10.
“Can you imagine this?” he said. “My father-in-law, my wife's father, threatened his daughter, my kids also: ‘You moved to the country of the people who don't believe – infidels, or something like this. We can just kill you’.”
“If you know somebody in the government, you can do anything,” he continued, saying that the “new police” are predominantly young teenagers given just two weeks of training in Sharia law.
“They prefer to get people young, 17, 16, because they grow up in the camps,” Chafik said. “They have no education, no learning. They just know war.
“They have the right to arrest you, and to give you a punishment directly. Maybe they kill you. Maybe they fight you. Maybe they degrade you in front of your family. Maybe they take your car, your money, anything.”
He said that the police were one of “many, many different militia struggling together”, adding: “You have to be under one of these militia. You can't be free with your ideas, you're thinking, no. You have to be one of these.”
In Syria, the former head of militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), Ahmed al-Sharaa, holds the presidency. His new government is reportedly finding it difficult to exert authority over the country, with many religious and ethnic minorities resisting rule from Damascus.
Chafik said that the situation is worse than when he fled Syria in June 2024 – despite the UK Government “thinking we're going to become Switzerland in a few years”.
“In Syria, people are all talking about two things: every day they discover a new mass grave, thousands of bodies. And the other thing is about revenge.
“Everybody has guns, everybody,” he said. “It seems crazy, but there are WhatsApp groups just for selling different kinds of weapons.”
Chafik showed two groups he joined to get “an idea of what’s happening there”. “For example, this $475,” he said, pointing to what looked to be a Kalashnikov.
“They give you the whole description about it – it's semi-automatic, like new – and there is a free delivery service.”
“It's funny, somehow,” he said. “I had my first [Home Office] interview, then they gave me another appointment. But they moved me to Scotland, Glasgow, and they gave me an appointment in London.
“I had no money at that time at all and it was just 24 hours' notice. So I missed my interview.
“So, they gave me another – and it was here in Glasgow – but the day before, they cancelled it. Then they gave me another interview, and it was supposed to be December 12 last year. The regime fell on the 8th, so they cancelled again.”
Chafik, a dentist by trade who served in the Syrian army due to conscription laws, first left his home country in 2011 after arriving at his dentist clinic one October to find “five bullets in my chair, like a sniper”.
A friend working in intelligence warned him to “go outside the country as fast as you can because your name is on the list”.
He moved to Saudi Arabia, where he worked as a dentist for a full decade before circumstances changed and the family moved to Turkey, where Chafik worked in another Syrian dentist’s clinic.
“I had many patients from European countries because, you know, it's cheaper,” he said.
However, two years passed, and in 2023, the family took a vacation to Istanbul, where they were lifted from the street by Turkish authorities and sent back to Syria.
“They gave me a paper to sign. I refused. They said ‘OK’ and they signed for me,” he said.
“From the street they took us, me and my family, and they sent us to north Syria, to Idlib.
“Actually, when they sent me back to Syria, I had no money at all. I’d paid for my home rent for one year [in Turkey].
“The inhumanity dealing with us was so bad, but I saw many people worse.”
They began rebuilding in Idlib – Chafik found work and they rented a “partly destroyed” house (he did not know who bombed it) – until a cousin offered to help them claim asylum in Europe.
“Even when we went to go in the plane, at the gate, he [the cousin] took us. So we went on the plane without passports.”
After two months in an asylum hotel, the family was relocated to Glasgow, where Chafik said they would like to stay.
Unable to work due to Home Office restrictions on asylum seekers, Chafik instead volunteers with four different charities – the Maryhill Integration Network, the Red Cross, the Scottish Refugee Council, and Debra – as well as teaching Arabic on the weekends and taking English classes himself.
“I'll tell you a secret,” he said. “For this volunteering, we get some money for transportation. I'm sorry to say that sometimes I walk and save this £6, so I can pay, you know, you think about food. Can we eat today or not?
“As a father, you can't let your children down, even if you cut from your own body.”
He added: “I want to mention this: we were not poor before. When I worked in Saudi Arabia, my home was like a villa. I had a big car. I worked hard and earned good money. We didn't come here for money – or for the weather.
“I think the Home Office – I'm sorry for this – think that we’ve come here after a discussion at the coffee table. It's not just, ‘Oh, let's go to Glasgow’. It's not like this at all.”
The Home Office is currently processing Chafik and his family’s application, and the uncertainty is making life difficult.
“What will happen, nobody knows,” Chafik said. “Maybe you have the power to kick me out of this country, but you do not have the power to make me go back to Syria.”
The Home Office was approached for comment.
