Jordan Ritter Conn - The Road from Raqqa: A Story of Brotherhood, Borders, and Belonging

I first met Riyad Alkasem one afternoon in January 2016, when I pulled up to a restaurant in a Tennessee strip mall, tucked down the street from gun shops and bait shops, near stores bearing the word Dixie and trucks adorned with Confederate flags. Above the restaurant, there stood a sign that said CAF RAKKA . This, Id been told, was where Id find the best Arabic translator in Middle Tennessee.

For my then job at ESPN, Id recently returned from one trip to the Syria-Turkey border, and I was gearing up for another. I was reporting on a soccer team aligned with the Syrian rebel forces, a team that hoped to harness the power of sport for the purpose of revolution. Before I returned to the border for my second trip, I needed someone near my home in Nashville to help me place phone calls to an Arabic-speaking source. A friend at the Islamic Center pointed me toward Riyad.

I walked inside and introduced myself. His eyes were dark, his hair curly. He spoke with the ease of a man who had settled into his place in the world and the accent of someone who had journeyed a long way to find that place. Together, we called my source, and I watched Riyad fight back tears as the three of us spoke about the war tearing apart his homeland, about the men and women who believed they were fighting to build a better Syria than the one Riyad had years earlier left behind.

Afterward, he took me to a table. We sat. He summoned two cups of pomegranate tea and mountainous plates of shawarma and baba ghanoush. Finally I asked the only question on my mind: What was a restaurant named after Raqqa, Syriaa city then known as the home of the worlds deadliest terrorist organizationdoing here in Tennessee?

His answer unspooled over many hours that day and for several years afterward. Much of it centered on his relationship with his younger brother Bashar. Both of them, Riyad explained, loved their hometown, Raqqa. But Riyad had chosen to leave it decades ago, pulled by the promise of America. Now Bashar was being forced to do the same, pushed by the brutalities of terror and war.

I returned to the Syria-Turkey border the next month to continue reporting on the soccer players affected by their countrys war, but even there, I couldnt get Riyad and Bashars story out of my mind. Together, they represented two faces of immigrationthose who leave home for a brighter future and those who leave because their original home has become unrecognizable.

This book is their story. It is nonfiction. It is based primarily on their own accounts of their lives, though dates, times, locations, and additional facts have been confirmed with other sources. The dialogue is reconstructed based on the memories of Riyad, Bashar, and others who appear in the book. Some names have been changed to protect safety and privacy. Details of some characters livesfor example, the Alkasems mother and sisterhave been omitted for the same purposes.

This is by no means a full account of the Syrian civil war, the rise of the Islamic State, or the story of immigration in America. It is simply a telling of the story that grabbed me so fiercely that afternoon in that restaurant, a story about family bonds that endure through war and terror, about a search for home that stretches across decades and oceans.

This is the story of Riyad and Bashar.