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Delivery 604-942-3081 • Wednesday, June 26, 2013
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Divided by war:
Bringing Marwa home
Burnaby resident Wissam Nassar hopes his fiancé Marwa can escape Syria and join him in Canada. A Coquitlam family is hosting a benefit concert to raise money to sponsor Marwa as a refugee.
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issam Nassar hasn’t seen his fiancé, Marwa, in two years. He left her behind in Syria, after a former Burnaby pastor and his wife sponsored the Nassars as refugees. Now, they are working to sponsor her as well, and reunite the young couple in Burnaby. ◆ Wissam Nassar, 26, watches his former home go up in flames on a flat screen monitor in his Burnaby apartment. The shaky YouTube video shows a scene of panic at Al Tanf, a refugee camp in the middle of the desert on the ON MY BEAT border of Syria Jennifer Moreau and Iraq. One of the khaki tents has caught fire, and within minutes, the flames and billowing black smoke spread to adjacent tents. Men shouting in
For a video of the refugee camp fire, scan with
Jason Lang/ burnaby now
Arabic fetch water, desperately trying to squelch the rising inferno. Somewhere in the chaos are Wissam and his brother. “The people tried to put the fire (out), but they can’t,” Wissam calmly explains. “We just bring water, … to control the fire. … It was really hard. It’s hard
to describe. In that time, I was scared for my family.” No one died, and his family’s tent was spared, but fires like this were all too common at Al Tanf, a camp set up in 2006 in Syria for Palestinian refugees escaping Iraq. They had nowhere else to go. No country would take them.
Wissam is from Palestine, but he’s never seen his home country. In 1948, Israelis asked his grandfather to leave – just for one week, then he could return. “We are still waiting,” Wissam says with a laugh. Wissam and his 29-year-old brother, Wassem, were born in
Iraq, as were their parents. As stateless refugees, the Nassar family held no passports. As Palestinians, they faced discrimination and persecution in Iraq. “In that time, we didn’t have any rights to study or work. … everything was not allowed for
Syria Page 5
Residents hope for pipeline route info at meet A Burnaby group opposed to the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion plan is hosting a meeting tomorrow night to update the public on the latest expansion developments, including routing options for Burnaby. Burnaby Residents Opposing Kinder Morgan Expansion is organizing the meeting, and Burnaby-Douglas MP Kennedy Stewart will be presenting information
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on the latest project developments, the National Energy Board process, oil tankers and storage tanks, and, for the first time, information on routing options for Burnaby. “If it’s available we’ll bring it to the meeting, and we’ll talk about next steps,” Stewart said. The meeting will be held on Thursday, June 27, from 7 to 8 p.m. at the McGill
library branch at 4595 Albert St. June 27 is also the day Kinder Morgan is scheduled to release pipeline routing information online and hold an open house on routing options for Burnaby. Stewart said he plans to send the routing information to every household in his riding. Kinder Morgan wants to twin the 1,150kilometre pipeline, which has been running Alberta oil to the West Coast since the
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1950s. Much of the twinned line will follow the existing route, but in Burnaby, where development has increased significantly since the 1950s, the company is considering alternatives to the existing right-of-way. Kinder Morgan will publish “study corridor” information online next Thursday, and the public has until July 19 to offer feedback. – By Jennifer Moreau, staff reporter