Bassel and Stella: a musician and his dog’s journey to safety in Belgium

Bassel is happy. In the seven years he’s been in Belgium, he has made three solo music albums and opened a successful café with his new friends. After fleeing the war in Syria and taking a difficult and dangerous journey, receiving asylum in Belgium was literally lifesaving.

But physical safety was just the start of his road to rebuild his life. Something or someone, a key part of his world, was missing.

“When you flee a country under the circumstances of war, that means you’re leaving everything,’’ Bassel says. “Somehow, you know, there is a whole thing about leaving a country and losing identity and not knowing who you are anymore.’’

Before the war in Syria broke out, Stella, a small white pup, came to live with Bassel in Damascus. Bassel was 12 years of age and Stella was just 40 days old. They were inseparable.

“Stella is my dog, but she’s also my best friend. I love my dog!”

One year later, when Bassel was just 13 and Stella about one, the war broke out. Four years later, in 2015, Bassel fled his home and the violence in Damascus to seek safety in Belgium. Bassel’s mom and sister also fled and later found safety in Ireland and Germany. His dad remained to take care of Bassel’s granny. And Stella had to stay too.

Bassel endured a long, difficult and dangerous journey in search of safety without his family.

Along the way, he encountered smugglers and travelled from Syria to Lebanon and then to Turkey, where he boarded a rubber boat to Greece. Train journeys and hours of walking followed before he reached Belgium where he later received asylum.

“At the time, everything was difficult.”

But things were about to change.

“I arrived in Brussels in 2015. (After a few months) luckily, I managed to move to a Belgian family that hosted me for a year and a half until I got my papers – Joannes and Anne, they’ve been great to me,” Bassel says with a smile. “That one year and a half I spent at their home was kind of a huge corner in my starting point in Belgium. And I am grateful for that experience.”

Knowing that he had to leave Stella in Syria and how much she meant to him, Bassel’s host family devised a plan to get her to Belgium and bring the best friends back together.

“I grew up with her. I kind of feel that she’s my life buddy. So, she kind of represents more than just a life.”

Stella’s journey was not as dangerous as Bassel’s but it was certainly complex. She was first taken by taxi to Lebanon where Bassel’s host dad, Joannes, met her. After a lot of questions and paperwork, he managed to take her back to Belgium on a plane.

Shaken by the journey, it took Stella some time to settle into her new home. But now Stella and Bassel are once again inseparable.

Stella’s renewed presence had a profound impact on Bassel’s new life, as did his new local friendships, and indeed his own perseverance. This set up allowed him to feel safe in his new home and thrive.

“For me, the most important thing that made me feel safe was creating that circle of trust between people. A circle of friends and people that supported me and I supported them back.”

With the right support, Bassel found his feet and picked back up his passion for music.

“Making music is part of who I am.”

Today, he makes his own music under the name Linear Minds. Bassel now has three solo albums under his belt, as well as a few chamber ensembles, and has worked with a range of film composers.

But Bassel’s skills and ambitions didn’t stop with his music.

“People who know me, my friends, they always say that one thing about me (is that) I’m super driven, always working. Never stop. Basically, they call me restless and in French they call me ‘la machine’,” says Bassel laughing.

Bassel wanted to combine his drive and business skills with his love of his new community by creating a space in his neighbourhood in Brussels for locals and newcomers to enjoy. Together with two of his new friends, Bassel opened a café.

“We kind of created this neighbourhood feel, where people who come, they come to see us. They come to talk to us. We love to get to interact, get to know them. So it’s kind of like a community.”

And of course the star attraction at the café is who it is named after – Stella.

As the saying goes, every dog has his day – Stella certainly has hers and with her help and that of new friends, as well as his own resolve, Bassel is having his.

Safety and the right support give people a second chance – to heal, work and thrive. That’s why UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, strives to ensure that everyone, everywhere has the right to seek asylum and find safety in another state.

Every person on this planet has a right to seek safety – whoever they are, wherever they come from and whenever they are forced to flee.

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To read more about Bassel’s journey with Stella, see the children’s illustrated book, Saving Stella: A Dog’s Dramatic Escape from War, published by Bloomsberg.

For further information on the situation of global forced displacement, please see UNHCR’s Global Trends report.