Parents reunited with son they thought dead

NICOSIA, Cyprus – No one knows how long Bushr Al Tawashi wandered alone in the rubble of his home in the Syrian capital before rebel fighters found the toddler and handed him over to another family to look after.

Now, the 2-year-old is back with his parents – who believed he had been killed.

In their chaotic haste to escape fighting between government troops and Syrian rebels, Bushr’s parents had assumed the boy had been picked up by other members of their extended family who were staying with them when clashes broke out in the summer in the Damascus suburb of …

NICOSIA, Cyprus – No one knows how long Bushr Al Tawashi wandered alone in the rubble of his home in the Syrian capital before rebel fighters found the toddler and handed him over to another family to look after.

Now, the 2-year-old is back with his parents – who believed he had been killed.

In their chaotic haste to escape fighting between government troops and Syrian rebels, Bushr’s parents had assumed the boy had been picked up by other members of their extended family who were staying with them when clashes broke out in the summer in the Damascus suburb of Al Kaboun.

Fighting prevented the parents from going back to search for Bushr once they arrived at a refugee camp and realized he was missing, said Stella Constantinou, a Cypriot lawyer.

Believing he did not survive the shelling, the boy’s grief-stricken father, Machhour Al Tawashi, and his wife, Arin Al Dakkar, arrived in Cyprus on Aug. 6 along with their two other sons, ages 4 and 6, in search of asylum.

Word the boy was safe eventually reached the parents, who now live in the coastal town of Limassol.

“You can imagine how they felt when they were told their son was alive after bearing all this guilt thinking that he was dead,” Constantinou said.

The family then sought Constantinou’s help to bring him to this Mediterranean island 65 miles west of Syria.

The Cypriot Foreign Ministry expedited the process of reuniting the boy with his family after his parents provided proof he was their child. Bushr’s father then traveled to Beirut, where he was reunited with the boy at the Cypriot Embassy. He brought Bushr back to the island on Thursday.

“I can’t describe how I felt when I saw him – just overjoyed at seeing him again,” Al Tawashi said Friday. “At first he didn’t recognize me, but then we embraced and he started calling out ‘Father, Father.’ ”