Fleeing Syria: A Mother’s Wrenching Choice

“I kind of lost hope,” Abdulsalam Alaraj, on the tablet screen, tells his mother, Sawsan Ghazal. “After two years now, I don’t feel like I’m going anywhere. That’s killing me.” Sawsan is working to bring her family from Istanbul, Turkey, to join her in Sweden.

(Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

Sept. 25, 2015 11:02 AM PT

Sawsan Ghazal was convinced that the only way to save her children was to leave them, crossing the continent with a man whose real name she didn’t know. She had an assumed identity and a fake passport.

The January 2013 bombing that killed more than 80 people at Aleppo University convinced Sawsan Ghazal, whose son witnessed the destruction, that it was time to flee Syria.

(AFP/Getty Images)

A view of Aleppo in July 2015. Sawsan Ghazal and her husband had been dressmakers in the city, Syria’s bustling commercial hub. She had never lived anywhere else, and took an outsized pride in Aleppo’s history.

(Khaled Khateb / AFP/Getty Images)

“My life is just a memory. I carry it on my tablet,” says Sawsan Ghazal, who fled Aleppo, Syria, and is now in Sweden -- without the rest of her family.

(Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)