Olympian Yusra Mardini on returning to Syria after 10 years in exile

Refugee swimmer who found fame with film of her life hopes to see her nation rebuilt

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Yusra Mardini, the star swimmer who fled the Assad regime and competed as a refugee in the Olympics, plans to return to Syria and pick through the remains of the demolished home as she begins to move on with the next chapter of her life.

Speaking to The National at an event in Dubai, Ms Mardini, 26, said she looks forward to embracing her grandmother for the first time in a decade.

“This is a sad one, because the plan for me is to immediately go see my family and friends. That's the first thing I'm going to do,” Ms Mardini said.

“I didn't see my grandmother for 10 years, so I'm going to see her. And then I'm going to see my 100 per cent destroyed home … destroyed in the first year of the war.

“I'm hoping that I walk around my building and find some pictures of myself or something.

“And I'm going back to the pool as well. It still stands," she said of the facility near Damascus, where she reached world-class swimming standard.

I want to go back and I want to see how can I help as a female to shape the government, and to shape swimming in Syria

Yusra Mardini

"The first visit is going to be very private, just trying to do it for myself.”

Ms Mardini, a UN Goodwill Ambassador, expects she will meet officials at a later date and hopes to see more of the country as the situation stabilises.

Ms Mardini and her sister, Sarah, left Syria in 2015 for Europe, through Lebanon, Turkey and Greece. The overladen boat they were on sank, and the girls kept the dinghy afloat for three hours, saving two other people.

She and Sarah were named in Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2023.

Ms Mardini said the people of Syria need time to process the horrors of what happened under president Bashar Al Assad. Even now, after the regime was overthrown, little is known about the 100,000 prisoners who vanished and are believed to have been buried in mass graves.

Hundreds of thousands more died during the civil war.

Yusra Mardini during a training session for the 2016 Rio Olympics. Getty Images.

“It's gonna take me a long time to recover from this … knowing how the bodies were just shipped in bags in huge trucks. I'm just imagining I was in the car as a child and there were trucks full of bodies.

“The stories that came out are really, really, really sad. And the Syrian people need to heal for a very, very long time.”

Despite a decade in exile and new horrors of the civil war emerging now, Ms Mardini says she is grateful for all of the opportunities she has had to train, and later study at university in Los Angeles, and more recently mentor athletes at the Paris Olympics. She mentioned how thankful she was to Germany for taking her in and giving her a new life.

“The title for the next chapter is healing, and I really want to help in Syria. I want to go back and I want to see how can I help as a female to shape the government, to shape swimming in Syria.

“I want to be someone that people in Syria can look up to and say 'hey, she made it, so can I'.

“90 per cent of the Syrian population relies on humanitarian aid, and it's really sad that 40 per cent of schools are destroyed. There's so many kids in the streets selling cigarettes right now. So for me it's about healing, and it's about going back.”