to nine months last year in Malaysia — seven in the Kuala Lumpur International Airport and two more in a detention centre. The bearer of an expired Syrian passport, Al-Kontar was unable to leave the country and, because he had overstayed his visitor visa, he was also unable to re-enter Malaysia.

Hassan Al-Kontar looks out a window at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport, where he spent seven months waiting for a new home. - Courtesy Hassan Al-Kontar

Had he returned to Syria, Al-Kontar said he would have faced compulsory military service at best, death at worst. Bureaucracy and politics made him the highest-profile persona non grata on the planet, and Al-Kontar’s story was covered by virtually every media outlet in the world.

“I will always be the man from the airportfrom now on,” Al-Kontar says. “Even if I forget about him, he will not forget about me.”

Al-Kontar’s path to Canada came by way of private sponsorship from Whistler resident Laurie Cooper and a group of her friends and online contacts. He arrived in the resort town late last November and moved to Vancouver in mid-May.

He spoke to the Courier exclusively days after his arrival in what was a wide-ranging discussion that touched on virtually every facet of the human experience: love, betrayal, trust, birth, death, war, renewal and hope.

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Al-Kontar was born in Dama, Syria, a small town in the country’s southwest region where his family still operates an olive farm.

His late father was an engineer, his mother a teacher. The home Al-Kontar grew up in had no electricity