This Syrian girl fled civil war. Now she's carrying the Olympic torch.
Hanan Dacka, a 12-year-old Syrian refugee, proudly held the Olympic torch over her head. Dressed in a crisp white uniform, she had a grin across her face as she made her way through the streets of Brasilia on Tuesday.
Cheering Brazilians lined the city streets as Dacka ran through the crowd.
But the scene is a far cry from the past few years she has spent as a refugee, pushed from her home by the bloody Syrian civil war.
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The young girl and her family fled Idlib, Syria, when fighting first broke out there four years ago. Then, they spent two and a half years living in limbo in Za'atari refugee camp in Jordan, staying in temporary shelters under the brutal desert sun.
Now, they have begun to rebuild their lives in Brazil, the country that will host the 2016 Olympic Games this summer.
On the first day that the Olympic flame touched down on Brazilian soil, Dacka took part in the relay, carrying the flame down the Esplanade of Ministries shortly after it left the Presidential Palace.
She joined Olympic athletes and local leaders in the relay through the city.
"The most important thing in sport is to have fun and make friends," said Dacka told the UN Refugee Agency UNHCR on Tuesday. "By carrying the Olympic Torch, people from all over the world will know that refugees are real people, and that we can do positive things."
Her family arrived in Brazil last year as part of the country's humanitarian visa program, which offers those fleeing the Syrian conflict a chance to relocate.
The family now lives in São Paulo, where Dacka attends school and speaks fluent Portuguese.
“I love being in Brazil,” she told reporters for UNHCR earlier this year. “I’m so happy to be here. I have my friends here and my teacher is the best.”
“You turn back into a human being when you arrive in Brazil,” Her father, Khaled, told UNHCR. “I’ve never felt so good.”
According to UNHCR, of the 8,700 refugees who have settled in Brazil, more than 2,000 are from Syria.
And the International Olympic Committee, alongside Brazil, are making a clear statement on the value they place when it comes to highlighting the refugee crisis.
The Olympic Games have shown a clear commitment to having refugees represented in the 2016 games, an important sign of solidarity as the world grapples with the largest refugee crisis since the end of World War II.
The refugees crisis has been driven in large part by the five-year conflict in Syria that has forced more than 4.8 million people to flee the country.
Soon after the Olympic flame was lit in Greece, it was carried by Syrian refugee Ibrahim al-Hussein through a camp in Athens housing some 1,500 asylum-seekers.
This is also the first year that a refugee team will take part in the games. While the team has yet to be announced, it is expected to be made up of five to 10 athletes from who have been displaced from their homelands. The team will be announced in June and walk under the flag of the "Team Refugee Olympic Athletes."
The team will get its own welcome ceremony at the Olympic Village and will be housed like all the other teams.
The refugee team will also be given a place of honor during the game's opening ceremonies in August, marching behind the Olympic flag and before host team Brazil.
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Topics Olympics
Megan Specia was Mashable's Assistant Real-Time News Editor and joined the team in September 2014. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism & Mass Communications from the University of New Hampshire after growing up in the Jersey 'burbs. She made her way to New York via a four year stopover in Dublin. Megan previously worked as a journalist and editor at Storyful in both Dublin and New York. Before all of that, though, her claim to fame was as head cake arranger and purveyor of all things sweet at Queen of Tarts cafe in Dublin, where she developed a serious addiction to macarons.
