Syrian Kurd Bushra, who will only give his name, is pictured in Minsk, Belarus, in September. Bushra fled Syria when he saw no danger of staying at home. After a difficult journey, she reached Germany.
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Syrian Kurd Bushra, who will only give his name, is pictured in Minsk, Belarus, in September. Bushra fled Syria when he saw no danger of staying at home. After a difficult journey, she reached Germany.
AP file image
GIESSEN, Germany – She was walking 60 hours through the damp and dark forests of Poland, trying to find her way to Germany, when the 29-year-old Syrian Kurd twisted his knee.
It wasn’t the first setback in Bushra’s journey.
Before that, her road mate and best friend had fainted in panic as Polish border guards chased them. They hid in ditches and behind trees as her friend tried to catch her breath, but it was no good. They turned around and were thrown back across the border by the guards into Belarus.
They were quickly back again, drenched and drenched, on the same trail. After breaking his knee, Bushra persisted. For another two days, she dragged her right foot through the rain and freezing temperatures of the forests. They eventually reach a village in Poland, where a car takes them across the border into Germany – she hopes life will be free.
Bushra said in the town of Giessen, in central Germany, where she applied for asylum. “There is no future for us in Syria.”
Bushra, who asked to keep her last name for her own safety, is the face of the new Syrian diaspora. More and more Syrians are leaving their homeland, even though the 10-year civil war is over and conflicts have been frozen for years.
They are fleeing not from the horrors of the war that sent hundreds of thousands of people to Europe in the great wave of 2015, but from suffering of the consequences of war. They have lost hope for a future at home amid poverty, rampant corruption and crumbling infrastructure, as well as continuing wars, government repression and retaliation attacks. enemies of many armed groups.
More than 78,000 Syrians have applied for asylum in the European Union so far this year, up 70% from last year, according to EU records. After Afghans, Syrians are the largest single nationality among the nearly 500,000 asylum seekers this year so far.
Nine out of 10 people live in poverty in Syria. About 13 million people need humanitarian assistance, up 20% from the previous year. The government was unable to secure basic needs and nearly 7 million people were internally displaced.
Roads, telecommunications, hospitals and schools have been ravaged by war and increasing economic sanctions have made reconstruction impossible.
The combined coronavirus pandemic the worst economic crisis since the war began in 2011. Syria’s currency is collapsing, and the minimum wage is barely enough to buy 5 pounds of meat a month, if even meat is available. Crime and drug production are on the rise while foreign-backed militias run smuggling operations and control entire villages and towns.
This is far below 2015 levels, but desperate Syrians are racing to get out. Social media teams are dedicated to helping them find a way. Users ask where they can apply for a work visa or scholarship. Others seek advice on the latest migration routes, the costs of smugglers and how risky it is to use a hypothetical identity to get out of Syria or enter other countries.
At the same time, Syria’s neighbors, grappling with their own economic crisis, are calling for their land-based refugees to be brought home. Among the new migrants to the EU are Syrians who have left Turkey or Lebanon, where they have taken refuge for many years.
Belarus quickly opened its border with Poland to migrants this summer. That has created a rift with the EU, which accuses Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko of orchestrating illegal migration in retaliation for European sanctions against him.
Bushra was one of several thousand who made it across from Belarus, where 15 people died trying to do the hike.
She left for Minsk from Irbil, Iraq, at the end of September.
It was the beginning of a difficult journey. Bushra recounted how they survived on biscuits and water for days and how six of them slept sitting on a dry mat. The girl with a broken tooth was shivering from the cold.
After the ordeal, they had to hide in a ditch when a police patrol with sniffer dogs came to check on their car. Driving along the highway, Bushra removed her hijab to avoid suspicion at the checkpoints. She arrived in Giessen on 12 October.
“I surprised myself at how I endured all of this,” Bushra said.
It’s all worth it, she said. “When you lose hope, you take a more dangerous path than where you started.”
Bushra’s life in Syria has been turbulent over the years. She was attending university in the eastern city of Deir el-Zour when war broke out in 2011 and anti-government protests spread in the city. She quickly transferred to another university further north. Soon Deir el-Zour and the rest of the east were taken over by the Islamic State group.
Bushra and her parents are outside IS rule in the Kurdish-held northeast but still live in fear of violence. She barely left the house for two years.
Eventually, she landed a job with an international aid group. Since then, she has been saving to go, checking routes out of Syria.
Syria’s oil-rich northeast, which suffered years of neglect, has been ravaged by war. Drought destroys farmers’ livelihoods. The currency crash has cut off income. The salary of Bushra father, a government employee, is now worth $15 a month, down from $100 at the start of the war.
Moreover, the area is not safe. IS fighters were defeated in 2019, but cells continue to target the Kurdish-led civilian and security government.
Eight kidnappings were reported this summer in a town near her.
Threats were made against Bushra after she exposed a corruption case involving powerful local officials, causing her to fear for her life. She declined to divulge details because her family is still in Syria.
The harassment spurred her plans to leave and convinced her parents, who were worried about a single woman going on a solo journey.
The US withdrawal from Afghanistan this summer has raised concerns among Bushra that the US will also withdraw 900 of its troops in Syria’s Kurdish-administered northeast. The military conducts counter-terrorism operations alongside local forces, and their presence also makes rival forces inevitable.
If they withdraw, she fears that Turkey, which considers the Kurdish-led force in Syria to be a terrorist, could launch a military campaign against the Kurds. Syrian government forces will also move in, endangering Bushra as they consider people working with unregistered international aid groups in Damascus to be traitors.
“If I stay in Syria, I will be pursued by security for the rest of my life,” she said.
Applying for asylum and residency in Germany was her gateway to freedom.
She hopes to study political science to understand the news, which she has boycotted since the war began to avoid the brutal scenes in which she lives. She wants to be free to travel. “I’m done with the restrictions,” she said.
She said that going back to Syria was impossible. If she doesn’t get her papers in Germany, Bushra says she’ll keep trying.
“If I can’t get where I want to be, I’ll go where I can live.”
