There are 12 Syrians on Nauru, and all have fled the same conflict as the 12,000 to be welcomed to Australia. But they will remain in a hellish limbo

'We suffer the same as them': the trauma and despair of Syrians detained on Nauru

In early 2013 Jafar Fakher and his five sons fled Damascus. The city was under heavy shelling. His eldest, Muhammad, then 23, and twins Ahmed and Mahmood, then 19, did not want to fight for the regime of Bashar al-Assad, nor for the militias, as their homeland descended deeper into the civil war that has now killed more than 200,000 and displaced more than 11 million people.

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Jafar, now 48, ran a money exchange and electronics shop. He started receiving threats that his elder sons would be kidnapped for ransom, or taken and forced to fight.

Like millions of others he and his sons fled for their lives to neighbouring Lebanon. But Jafar had to leave more than his home and possessions behind. His wife has severe asthma and could not make the journey. She remained with his 91-year-old father, the family hoping fate would somehow provide a way for them to reunite.

Jafar, Muhammad, Ahmed, Mahmood, then nine-year-old Salar and seven-year-old Salam flew to Indonesia and paid a people smuggler to reach Australia, winding up in the Christmas Island detention centre in July 2013 before being sent to Nauru in March 2014.

There they have remained for 18 months, among the thousands of humans who have become the collateral damage of Australia’s bipartisan determination to “stop the boats”, lives left in sanity-sapping limbo as an object lesson to any others who might think about seeking refuge in Australia by the same route.

We see our father crying and there is nothing more horrible than that Ahmed Fakher

They live a tent in the tropical heat, waiting, unsure for what. The young boys used to enjoy the school, run by Save the Children, but a few months ago it shut. They are sent to a local school, where some of the lessons are in Nauruan rather than English. Increasingly they refuse to attend.

Jafar and the three eldest sons just wait. Before the war they did various jobs. They’d all been extras in a television series. One wanted a career in journalism, another in IT. Now they sit out the prime of their lives in the heat.

“The first thing you have to do on Nauru is take sleeping pills and pills to calm down. If you don’t take those tablets you will certainly lose your mind,” says Ahmed. “One of my brothers and my father take antidepressants.”

“My little brothers miss my mother a lot … and they worry about our father. We see our father crying and there is nothing more horrible than that.”

The psychological strain, isolation and uncertainty are the hardest thing to take, but the family is becoming physically sick as well. Jafar had complications and infection after a hernia operation. His mental health has been assessed as “severe distress”.

One brother has contracted dormant tuberculosis while in detention. Salar suffers repeated ear infections leading to hearing loss. Salam has a persistent infection in his leg that multiple courses of antibiotics have not cleared.

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On an island 4500km from the Australian mainland, the Fakher family is suffering out of sight.

They are six of 12 Syrians on Nauru, they say – two released into the Nauruan community and 10 in the camps. When the immigration department asks how many Syrians there are in offshore detention on Manus and Nauru, they reply vaguely there are “fewer than five” in each.

When Australians saw the faces of Syrians fleeing from the war into Europe we were moved. We insisted our government act. Backbenchers told the former prime minister, Tony Abbott, the “heartbeat” of the nation had changed. And he listened. Now 12,000 will come here.

For a fleeting moment on Wednesday it sounded as though the new prime minister was listening to the plight of those we lock up, far away, to achieve our bipartisan policy aims – refugees fleeing exactly the same conflict for exactly the same reasons as the ones we are welcoming.

But by day’s end he was back on the smuggler-deterring script. None would be resettled in Australia. He repeated the existing non-options: the $55m program that has so far settled four refugees from Nauru in Cambodia and the still nonexistent plan to settle Manus refugees elsewhere in Papua New Guinea. He would look for “other options” he said, a daunting task in a world facing an overwhelming crisis of refugees.

The Labor leader, Bill Shorten, continued to recite similar lines. The most he has offered is extra oversight of the refugees’ lives in detention.

But we know the conditions on Nauru are unbearable, especially for children. Allegations of rape and sexual assault of minors were detailed in the Moss review. The psychological toll on children was detailed in the Human Rights Commission’s Forgotten Children report.

We know this situation is not sustainable for the detainees, but we have no solution other than resettlement in Australia, which both major parties rule out. And then there’s the cost of offshore detention – more than $1bn a year.

Jafar and his children don’t understand why they are different, why our compassion passes them by, or what we envisage will become of them.

“I do regret it,” Ahmed says of the family’s attempt to come to Australia. “We only want to be free to have some chance for a life. There is no future in Nauru. A few people went to Cambodia but we have never heard from them again.

“I am glad Australia is taking 12,000 Syrians. I think it is great. But we suffer the same as them. And we don’t know what will happen with us.”

I ask Ahmed whether he is sure he wants to tell his story.

“We have nothing left to lose,” he says. “We’re already jailed so they can’t do anything to us except keep us in detention more. I don’t know how it can be worse.”