ALMERE, the Netherlands — Take the rickety city-link train from the center of Amsterdam for 30 minutes and you reach Almere, a drab suburb town which hosts many of the Netherlands’ asylum seekers in a 1,000-strong camp on its outskirts.

The identical bedsits in two-story, Lego-like blocks of red brick set in featureless fields have an atmosphere of impermanence and reluctant schedule, housing a collection of people with radically different backgrounds thrown together for a common purpose. Around the camp wander Eritreans, Afghans, Egyptians, young mothers pushing prams, bored adolescents, middle-aged men carrying shopping bags. The ground floors are reserved for men and the first floors for women, two rooms to a unit, two people to a room.

These are the lucky ones. Over the past year, and especially since the November 13 terror attacks in Paris, it has been increasingly hard for those fleeing the war in Syria to seek asylum in Europe. This week on the border between Greece and Macedonia, young men have sewn their lips together in protest against the barrier recently erected by Macedonian authorities. Others carry wounds on their arms and heads, self-inflicted in despair at the road — and future — closed to them.

Even the countries which were once the most welcoming to refugees from Syria are closing their borders. In September, Austria, Slovakia, Denmark and The Netherlands were among EU states that introduced border controls, and two weeks ago they were followed by Sweden, where refugees reportedly sleep outside reception centers in the snow as winter descends.

Since the Paris attacks, debate has raged over the future of EU refugee policy — what to do about unrestricted passage in the Schengen area, the difficulty of vetting possible terrorists and whether or not to pay Turkey to keep refugees out of Europe altogether. Meanwhile, those who were fortunate enough to leave Syria earlier and whose claims are now being processed, are grateful but wary of their increasingly reluctant host countries.

* * *

I visit the Almere camp near Amsterdam to meet Samer, a former businessman from Syria who shows me into the flat he shares with three other Middle Eastern men — an Egyptian, a Yemeni and a Christian Syrian from Aleppo. A traditional Arabic breakfast is in full swing, and we are called over to join them — flat Lebanese-style bread, labneh and yoghurt with mint and olive oil are spread over the tiny table, and I wonder where they have managed to find these Middle Eastern ingredients. Everything is spick and span, despite the absence of women.

In honor of my arrival a shisha pipe is brought from a nearby unit and “top-quality” apple tobacco is produced by the Yemeni man, Maagdi, who translates for me. Words spreads of a visitor in Block D and at various stages of the interview, new faces appear, take a puff on the shisha pipe and offer their stories.

Samer is a tall, grizzled 43-year-old man from Idlib, a small town just across from the Turkish border and one of the first seats of the Syrian rebellion in 2011. His journey out of Turkey was typical: Istanbul to Izmir, a boat to Mytilene and then on to Athens. In Athens, he tried 10 times to board a flight to Europe, each time with a new ticket and a new ID.

Samer tells me the fake ID cards made in Athens are usually Bulgarian or Romanian, which means there is no need for a visa, and some Syrians have the luck of looking plausibly Balkan, with pale skin and green or blue eyes.

Samer was not one of them. His typical Arab looks had him repeatedly turned away and eventually he gave up and decided to take a boat to Italy, where he was arrested immediately on landing. He and 17 others were finger-printed. Samer, aware that according to the Dublin Regulation asylum seekers in the EU must be registered in their first country of entry, was the only one to refuse to have his prints taken. “They tried to persuade me, but I said no, no, no. They didn’t use force. I said to them, ‘I didn’t come all the way here to get registered in Italy! I am doing this for my children.’”

Samer laughs off the close shaves he had during his journey but his narrative is saturated in retrospective anxiety: about being stopped by police, imprisoned or taken back to Greece. Now, more than ever, he is mindful of the dangers awaiting friends and family still to come — he says he is constantly in contact with his relatives in Syria, giving advice, sharing experiences and contacts. Now he is waiting for his children to be allowed to join him.

* * *

In camps in Greece, Austria and now in the Netherlands, every Syrian I have interviewed has said they would have stayed at home, if at all possible. I ask Samer the question I ask everyone: “When the war ends, will you return to Syria or would you prefer to stay here in Europe?”

His answer is immediate:

“The day Assad leaves Syria, I will return, even if that is tomorrow — or today!”

I press him: “But if there is still fighting among rebels? What will be left, after years of war?”

Samer doesn’t budge.

“I will return.”

I remind him of the presence of ISIL in large swaths of the country, and he gives this serious consideration. “If Assad and ISIL leave, then I will return.”

How long does he think the war will last?

“Unlimited.”

His Egyptian roommate, Magdi, who has been listening to our conversation, pipes up: “Assad will last one year more, I think.” But Samer dismisses this out of hand. “You only think that because of Mubarak,” he says. “The war in Syria is in fact a war between Gulf states and Iran. Syria is just the battleground. It could last for decades.”

At this, everyone in the room bursts in with their opinions, ranging from outlandish conspiracy theories to nuanced précis of the power struggles raging in Syria. It is clear that these men are grateful for the chance to let off steam, shouting their frustration at what has befallen their nation in this sterile, entirely un-Syrian environment.

Suddenly, a distinguished visitor arrives: Khaled Basha, a former general in the Syrian Air Force, who is living with his wife in an adjacent block.

Khaled clearly carries some weight in this small community of Syrian men. As he enters the block, Samer, Magdi and the other men get to their feet to greet him. He is a dignified man of 63, straight-backed and soft spoken, out of place here. He takes a chair and strokes his neatly trimmed gray beard as he tells me about his background in the Syrian Air Force and the story of his departure from Syria on December 27, 2012.

“I resigned from service in 1998. I was living off my pension in Daria, Damascus, where I lived all my life in fact. I was comfortable, not exactly rich, but comfortable.”

While appalled by the way Syria had spiralled into civil war, Khaled was not actually personally threatened or inconvenienced until early December 2012, when he was paid a visit by Assad’s men — “his monkeys.” They asked him, politely, to re-enter service on behalf of the government against the rebels. Politely, he refused.

“They said, ‘Fine, take your time, think about it and get back to us.’ I didn’t ring them back. A few weeks later, in the middle of the night [Boxing Day] they came back for me.”

Khaled tells me how they trashed his house and intimidated him in front of his wife and daughter until he promised to go and see their chief the next morning.

“Two hours after they left I had packed my bags and we left for Egypt.”

Khaled and his wife stayed in Cairo for a year, taking advantage of the relatively lax residency laws for Syrians at the time, before deciding to join his son in The Netherlands. He and his wife boarded a flight from Cairo bound for America via The Netherlands, having obtained a visa to visit their elder son, also a pilot, who lives in Texas. When the plane stopped in Schiphol Airport they got off and claimed asylum, preferring to settle nearer to Syria, with their younger son.

Khaled has few expectations of life in The Netherlands, beyond being close to his family. He has none of the life-building enthusiasm of the younger men here, and is much more interested in talking about Syria. I’m curious to hear Khaled’s professional opinion of the Syrian army’s current prospects. How long can Assad’s army last?

Khaled lifts his eyebrows in a characteristically Middle Eastern expression of negativity. “The army is weak, depleted. The soldiers are mainly Alawites now, many Sunnis have left. Also, after three years of war soldiers are psychologically damaged because there is constant fighting and they are not allowed home to see their families. I don’t think the army is in good shape.”

Speaking with a passion that was absent from his drily delivered personal story, Khaled starts describing all that is rotten in Syria. He looks at me almost imploringly.

“I will tell you why I hate Assad and his people. First, the Alawite elite is only 5 percent of population and they have a completely unfair monopoly of power. Second, they operate a regime of fear — do you think I can rest easy here, knowing my daughter is still in Syria? I cannot. Third, the secret police. They can do anything they like. Ministers can take money from the Central Bank whenever they want without consequence. It is totally corrupt. Fourth, obviously I hate the way they treated me, how they left me no choice but to abandon my home. Syria is unlivable.”

Would he return?

Khaled unwittingly echoes Samer’s answer to the same question.

“If Assad left tomorrow I would return tomorrow.”

* * *

Khaled believes that Syrians are fundamentally good at living together, “not like Somalia.” He hates ISIL, as does almost everyone I ask, but he thinks the al-Nusra front (another extremist rebel group) is OK-ish. “We could work with them.” His attitude reminds me of a seasoned security analyst in Istanbul who once described the difference to me between the two groups’ kidnap negotiation techniques as follows: “Nusra, you can bargain with them, they understand business. [ISIL] is a different story.”

Khaled is pleasantly surprised by how welcoming Dutch people are and Samer agrees.

I tell them not everyone feels the same, that I have heard stories of prejudice.

“Of course, racism is only natural, everywhere. But we haven’t seen it.”

As their countrymen leave a wrecked Syria in droves, undeterred by increasingly tough border controls, fearful hosts and the possibility of years spent in detention centers, Khaled and Samer are looking on the bright side.