'You are Syrian and free': British imam hosts iftar for street cleaners in Homs

British imam Adam Kelwick sought moments of joy amid the desolation during his humanitarian trip to Syria which included an iftar in Homs.

The Liverpool-based chaplain who heads the city’s Abdullah Quilliam Mosque – the UK’s oldest – travelled to Damascus and other Syrian cities this week to give out food parcels and money as part of the charitable work that Muslims undertake during Ramadan.

On Thursday, he hosted 120 street cleaners from Homs, in western Syria, for the meal to break the Ramadan fast. “These are the people who work hard day and night in the service of others, and the people who cleaned up the city after the previous regime had left,” Mr Kelwick told The National.

They came in their light blue uniforms and danced at the end of the meal, singing: “You are Syrian and free.”

Mr Kelwick was struck by the hope and optimism of Syrians as they try to pick up the pieces and recover their homes in a country that was torn apart by civil war and the Assad regime for decades.

“The feeling on the ground is that anything is better than former regime. Even if people have issues with the new one,” he said.

This month, clashes in Syria's coastal region between fighters loyal to deposed president Bashar Al Assad and forces of the interim government resulted about 1,000 people – including many civilians from the Alawite minority – being killed. This has raised fears over how the government will treat the country's minorities.

The visible destruction and depopulation of major cities like Homs, which had remained under the control of the Assad regime, is overwhelming, says Mr Kelwick.

“I was expecting the situation to be bad but it’s much worse than I can ever imagine. You’re going past gutted building after gutted building,” he said.

Mr Kelwick travelled as a volunteer with Action for Humanity, a UK charity previously known as Syria Relief. Though the charity had received British government funding in the past, much of this has been “substantially cut and reduced”, he said, as priorities shifted to Ukraine in 2022.

He called for more aid funding to Syria, stressing that this should come “without strings attached”, despite Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s cuts to foreign aid announced last month.

Mr Kelwick is known for having defused far-right riots outside his mosque last summer following the Southport attacks, by inviting in some of the rioters.

Days before his trip to Damascus, he attended an iftar at Downing Street with Mr Starmer.

Mr Kelwick had been to Syria before during the civil war that began in 2011, but only to the north-western region that was held by the opposition to the Assad regime. He had worked for years with refugees in northern Syria, including on a project to build villages for people living in tents in the towns of Afrin and Azaz, in Aleppo governorate.

This week marked his first trip to areas formerly controlled by the Assad regime, where Mr Kelwick witnessed the thousands of people returning to their devastated homes.

Upon his arrival to Damascus, he went straight to the village of Jobar on the outskirts of the city, which came under heavy shelling by the Syrian army during the civil war.

“We didn’t see a single building suitable to live in. The population there was 350,000 and now it’s empty,” he said.

They met the cemetery’s caretaker Abu Fahd, who told them how he’d stayed behind after the bombing to bury hundreds of bodies, including his own father and son. Throughout the visit, women came to Abu Fahd to ask where they could find their husband’s burial place, said Mr Kelwick.

Another stop was the town of Kafr Zita in western Syria, north of the city of Hama and south of Idlib, where residents were returning after more than a decade of displacement. The Assad regime launched a chemical attack there in 2014, and most of the population fled to Atma tent camp in Idlib.

But there was very little left of the town for them to go back to. Raifa, a resident who lost her husband and son among other relatives during the war, told Kelwick that she felt “a mixture of happiness and sadness” about returning to her destroyed home. “Our homes are damaged and we’ve lost so much,” she said.

He compared the destruction to what he had seen in Mosul, in northern Iraq, which was seized by ISIS In 2014. Much of the city was destroyed in the battle by US-led coalition and Iraqi forces to remove the militants in 2017. Mr Kelwick visited in the aftermath of the war. “You feel like they’re playing a computer game where the aim is to destroy everything,” he said.

In Syria, residents told him how their applications for building permits to rebuild their homes were repeatedly ignored under the former regime. Regime forces would loot the steel reinforcements of destroyed homes to sell as scrap.

A silver lining is that this neglect serves as evidence today of the Assad regime's war crimes. “Now the evidence is everywhere,” Mr Kelwick said.

And though he has yet to meet any of the returning families he had known from earlier trips to north-west Syria, he expects to bump into them soon. “It’s only a matter of time,” he said.