Vreemdelingenrecht.com - het weblog

Dying wish is to stay in Canada. Shawn Pompey knows his liver cancer is terminal, but he wants to stay in Canada, where an oncologist is providing palliative care for free. Toronto Star photo TORONTO — Despite having terminal cancer, Shawn Pompey refused handouts and continued to wo...

ERBIL, Iraq, December 20 (UNHCR) - Most refugees flee their homeland to escape violence and persecution. For Ahmed,* leaving Syria was literally a matter of life or death. Ahmed, 43, had been fighting stomach cancer for six months before he fled last August to Erbil, the main city in northern Iraq's Kurdistan Region. Until then, he had been travelling to Damascus every two weeks to receive medical treatment. But it was becoming increasingly difficult to make the journey from his home in north-eastern Syria to the capital as the country's conflict worsened. "I had to travel for 12 hours from Al Hassakeh to Damascus every couple of weeks in order to get chemotherapy treatment. I had to drive in the middle of shelling and bombarding. I took the risk to survive," Ahmed said. Still pale and gaunt and holding a large package of medicine at his sister's house in Erbil, Ahmed explained that the violence in Syria eventually made it im...