OKLAHOMA CITY — Imad Enchassi will never forget seeing a mother throw her child over the side of a mountain.

He was working at a Syrian refugee camp when he spotted the mother sprinting for the border, her 3-year-old daughter in tow, as bullets whizzed around them.

When the woman got close enough to the border, she threw her child over a mountainside and the border separating Syria from Lebanon, apparently in hopes that her child would find safety even if she could not.

Enchassi and other volunteers rushed over and brought the toddler to safety.

They still don’t know who was shooting.

They never saw the toddler’s mother again.

“That probably was one of the scariest moments — but at the same time one of the most gratifying but also saddest moments,” said Enchassi, a professor of Islamic studies at Oklahoma City University, an imam and founder of the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City.

For the last four years Enchassi has volunteered at Syrian refugee camps through Islamic Relief USA. Four years ago, he traveled into Syria to help. These days the situation is too dangerous.

He instead works in refugee camps in Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon.

Enchassi was himself born in a refugee camp in Lebanon after his father fled Palestine in 1948. Though his father long hoped of returning to his homeland, Enchassi’s family never did, and they ultimately immigrated to the United States when he was a child.

Enchassi said few people are interested in volunteering at the camps in Lebanon, where locals consider a wave of Syrian refugees to be interlopers from “the other side of the mountain.” They worry that 1.5 million refugees will steal their jobs, he said.

It’s not uncommon for those who volunteer with refugees to get threats, he said.

While refugees in Turkey and Jordan are recognized — if not tentatively welcomed — those in Lebanon don’t have official status, he said. Despite that, refugees now constitute a quarter of Lebanon’s population, he said.

Many of Lebanon’s refugees live in tents held together by plywood and tarps, he said. They were typically Syria’s poorest residents — farmers and laborers — who fled the chaos of civil war and an ISIS invasion where, they say, both sides shoot and bomb indiscriminately.

(Enchassi’s own sister still lives in Syria, where her home was destroyed in a bombing. Some of his distant cousins — civilians who chose no side, he says — were killed.)

Sometimes Enchassi stays in the refugee camps. He distributes food, blankets, mattresses, tents and kitchen items. He’s built makeshift roadways and delivered diesel, heaters and blankets to camps deep in the mountains.

Once he came across a little girl who didn’t want food, but rather shoes. Touched by her request, he bought her a pair and personally delivered them.

Enchassi said he once spoke with a Syrian grandmother who told him of the day she lost her husband, two sons and daughters-in-law in a single bombing. They were waiting in line for bread. The grandmother — the only surviving adult — was left with a host of hungry mouths to feed.

“A lot of them cry for their home,” he said of refugees, “for the safety and stability. While it wasn’t much, it was a secure home.

“Deprived from that very basic human aspect is very hard for them,” he said. “All they want is a place to call home, a simple life.”

Syrians have an average of 5 1/2 children per family, he said. Half of the refugees are under age 6.

They cannot return to Syria because their homes are gone. They also fear persecution should they return.

Meanwhile, politicians in other countries, including the United States, are reluctant to take them amid fears that extremists are hiding among them.

“So they sit and wait,” he said.

Enchassi said he hopes that Americans will open their hearts and accept Syrian refugees. A screening process already in place takes anywhere from six months to three years, he said.

“It’s funny how we forget that we were all immigrants at one time,” he said. “We were people fleeing from religious persecution, from famine, from war — for a better life.”

An interdenominational group already meeting in Oklahoma is ready to help should they get the green light, he said.

Enchassi believes those who close their eyes “on fear and conflict” give the terrorists just one more victory.

The refugees’ only hope, he said, is “manipulated by the politics of fear.”

“The terrorists have won,” he said. “This is exactly what the terrorists want.”

As for the little girl who he helped rescue, Enchassi said she was taken to an orphanage where she was adopted by a woman claiming to be her grandmother.

No one knows if the two are actually related. The woman has taken in six or seven orphaned children.

The girl turned 7 last summer, he said. She still lives at a refugee camp.

Janelle Stecklein covers the Oklahoma Statehouse for CNHI’s newspapers and websites. Reach her at jstecklein@cnhi.com.