His selfie with Angela Merkel went around the world. Nine years later, Anas Modamani has a German passport and does not want to return to Syria, even after the fall of Bashar al-Assad.
“I am a Berliner, I have my life here,” explained the 27-year-old videographer, who arrived in Berlin at the age of 18 during the great refugee crisis in 2015, of which he became one of the symbols after his photo taken at the time with the German Chancellor all smiles.
“He experienced terrible things there”
Having left Syria because “he did not want to do his military service”, Anas Modamani says he does not want to return there because “he experienced terrible things there”. “I lost friends there. Members of my family died because of the regime,” he says.
With a communications diploma in hand, after studies which he financed by working two days a week in a supermarket, Anas Modamani is now a freelancer for the German public radio and television channel Deutsche Welle in Berlin, which broadcasts internationally.
“I have a wonderful apartment, a very beautiful wife, I have everything I need here,” he notes. Anas Modamani now lives with his Ukrainian fiancée, who arrived in Germany a few months before Russia invaded his country in February 2022. Between them, they are a symbolic couple: Ukrainians and Syrians constitute the two largest communities of refugees in the country. Like him, his fiancée works, she has been a mechanical engineer since finishing her studies in Berlin.
“A voice for people who come from Syria”
The selfie with Angela Merkel immortalized Germany's welcoming policy almost a decade ago. It had opened its borders to nearly a million people, the largest Syrian diaspora in the EU.
Since this photo, Anas Modamani has become, by his own admission, “a voice for people who come from Syria”. He now even has a TikTok channel with more than 50,000 followers.
Celebrated as a hero by his compatriots, he was then the target of the German far right who hijacked his photo, pushing him in 2017 to sue Facebook to delete fraudulent images. But he lost to the American giant.
“Forever in History”
Even if he never met Angela Merkel again, the latter did not forget him. In her memoirs published on November 25, she says she “still cannot understand how anyone could have supposed that a kind face in a photo would be enough to incite entire legions to flee their homeland.”
For Anas Modamani, seeing his photo in the chancellor's 700-page book was “wonderful”. Because “His photo is forever in history”.
