Shamikh Badra couldn’t hold the tears back when he got to hold his 79-year-old mother, Fatma, for the first time in 11 years.

Standing in the bustling arrivals hall at Sydney airport last Friday evening, as passengers streamed off a flight from Amman, Jordan via Singapore and were embraced by their families, he bent down to wrap his arms around her and planted a single kiss on her forehead.

Despite praying for the moment to come for weeks, months, years, Shamikh couldn’t let out a single word when it finally came around. “Today, after 11 long years, I finally held my mother in my arms again,” he later wrote on Facebook.

“She arrived as a survivor: a survivor of genocide, of loss, of loneliness.

“May this reunion be a seed of hope in a world drowning in injustice. And may every family s

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