On the trail of the smugglers shipping refugees to Europe

Still a couple of hours to while away in Istanbul’s Ataturk International Airport before Flight 1983 departs for London Heathrow. I check that my boarding pass is still tucked into my passport. We’ve just flown in from southern Turkey. The inflight snack was pretty grim, I didn’t get my aisle seat and the legroom wasn’t great, frankly. But tonight, after 10 days on the road, I will, at least, collapse into my own bed in London.

To the Syrian refugees we’ve spent time with this past week, what I’ve just described is the ultimate dream ticket. Tonight, probably around the time I tuck in for a good night’s sleep, their treacherous, passport-free voyage will be getting underway in the icy moonless blackness of a wind-whipped smugglers’ cove somewhere along the rocky southern Turkish coast.

‘One-way ticket’

Even now, I know that tonight I will be dreaming of their nightmare.

The chill wind, the churning surf, the darkness. I fear for them. The children I have met have no concept of what they’re about to face; they trust their parents, but their parents are in the dark themselves. No reclining seats for them; no smiling flight-attendants. Theirs will be rain-lashed winter odyssey, cattle-crammed into some condemned and rusting scrapheap freighter: destination Europe and no firm ETA.

And for this pleasure, each one of them has paid more than ten times as much my flight back to London costs.

Unlike me, they’ve sold their homes, their cars and their family gold to pay for this. It’s costing them upwards of £5,000 per one-way ticket. There is no safe or legal means by which refugees from Syria’s civil war can reach the safety of western Europe. They are forced to turn to criminal gangs. And sprawling Mersin is where organised crime meets humanitarian plight.

They pour into Mersin Otogar, the central bus station, every hour, from towns along the Syrian border. And there, to prey on them, are smugglers, middlemen and mafia.

The Mersin underworld advertises its services on Facebook. “Take a boat to Europe! All your needs catered for.” They offer packages that include hotel and full board. The procedure is simple: you ‘Facebook friend’ the smuggler, agree the price, terms and conditions, and then, there he is at the Mersin Otogar to meet you. And much to your relief, he welcomes you in Arabic, not Turkish. The people smugglers here are Syrians and they claim they’re doing their compatriots a favour.

My work is humanitarian… I am helping the citizens of Syria to get into Europe. Ali

“Are you a smuggler?” I ask Ali, who is a smuggler. Ali is not his real name. “No,” he says. “My work is humanitarian and I am on the side of my people. I am helping the citizens of Syria to get into Europe. OK, maybe I am part of a smuggling operation, but I am helping the people who come from my homeland. I provide everything they need until they get to Europe.”

Until a year-and-a-half ago, Ali lived in the town of Zabadani, just west of Damascus. He hinted that he’d worked for the Syrian Mukhabarat – the secret police – before defecting and absconding. He did “some bad stuff” he confides, sitting in his grand apartment. As a man of faith, he says, he wants to make amends.

‘Turkish mafia’

Ali is a strangely conflicted character: a sharp black-market profiteer who also, it seems, has a heart. As we talk, a steady stream of children comes in to say hello. “They’re from Zabadani too,” says Ali. “They’re staying here. They just came yesterday.” He tells me he is providing blankets, food, medicine and accommodation to Syrian families trapped in Mersin without the funds to travel.

Ali was introduced to us by Abu Laith. That’s not his real name either. He’s another Syrian, but he’s a middleman, or point man for the travellers, matching them up with the agents who will actually make it happen. But Ali and Abu Laith, sitting smoking with the windows shut in Ali’s over-heated living room as they argue the moral case for what they do, are travel agents from hell. Together, they pose an illegal immigration migrane for the European Union.

Tomorrow night, if the storms relent, Ali will stack another ship with human cargo. It will be his third big freighter; over the past six months, Ali claims to have singlehandedly shifted 1,000 Syrian clandestini into Italy, front doorstep of a continent. And he and Abu Laith will have made a fortune out of fleecing fellow Syrians.

They claim to be ‘philanthropists’, aiding their compatriots. They say that it’s the Turkish mafia, the owners of the cargo vessels, who are the ones minting US dollars. That, they say, is where two thirds of the money goes. But they clearly take a healthy cut. They live in large marble-floored apartments. Both have swimming pools.

Their clients, on the other hand, are so desperate to escape the ruins of their homeland that they don’t really care if they get fleeced. There’s an acceptance of the going rate and a rationalisation of the risk. They don’t give a thought to comfort. They just want to get there. In an out-of-season seaside town, we sit in our car outside a corner shop, which sells cigarettes, chewing gum and life vests.

There’s a steady flow of anxious Syrians doing last-minute shopping. Across the road from a cheap hotel, we meet a former Syrian army defector-turned-rebel fighter. He’s a refugee in a wheelchair now, paralysed from the waist-down by an Islamic State jihadist’s bullet. He’s on standby for his exodus. To him, smugglers like Ali are a necessary evil. “They make their business out of humans,” Hassan tells us, as he shivers in the freezing wind. Hassan is not his real name either.

“They don’t care about us at all,” he says he desperately needs specialist medical attention for his spinal injury. He reckons Germany or Britain are his best bet. He’s hopelessly under-dressed for what he’s about to go through, but Hassan’s a survivor. In Mersin, we arrange to meet a group of fellow travellers, also poised for imminent overnight departure. Two mums, two dads and children.

They’re Syrian Palestinians from Yarmouk in Damascus. They’ve survived siege and bombardment and hatched their family escape plan six months ago. In 1948, another generation was forced to flee to Syria from Palestine. “When we were in Syria, they were in permanent danger,” says Hiba, the mother of three children, Yousef, 10, Abdul Rahman, 9, and Yasmina, 5. “They call this the journey of death,” she continues, talking of the perilous voyage ahead.

I know that tonight I will be dreaming of their nightmare.

She looks fondly at her children, stroking Yasmina’s hair. “In the end, no one will take their souls apart from God, but I am not going to wait for death to come to me. I will try to save them.” Those fleeing say they cannot stay in Turkey; life’s impossible there as well, they say, without papers, jobs or money.

Tonight, hundreds of Syrians will likely trust themselves to the godfathers of the Mersin underworld, unable to stay where they are, unable to go home. They are vagrants in a twilight zone, destination Europe. In Istanbul, my plane is on “last call”.

I grab my boarding pass, my passport. I have a home, a family, a job, a life.