Sailboats used by smugglers to transport migrants and refugees are parked on Le Cannelle beach in Isola Capo Rizzuto, Calabria region, southern Italy, Saturday, November 13, 2021 .
Alessandra Tarantino / AP
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Alessandra Tarantino / AP
Sailboats used by smugglers to transport migrants and refugees are parked on Le Cannelle beach in Isola Capo Rizzuto, Calabria region, southern Italy, Saturday, November 13, 2021 .
Alessandra Tarantino / AP
ROCCELLA JONICA, Italy (AP) – When the Taliban took over Kabul in August, Zakia was six months pregnant and a freshman in college while her husband, Hamid, was working as an auditor. They decide to run away, and together with five relatives, embark on a two-month odyssey that takes them through Iran and Turkey.
When it was time to cross the Mediterranean, they did so in an expensive sailboat that came ashore this month on a beach in Calabria, southern Italy.
They are dehydrated, but relieved to have survived the lesser known European migratory route increasingly used by wealthier Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians and Kurds. Entire families are paying the highest price to travel from Turkey on new or almost new sailing ships that can easily avoid detection by the authorities. Investigators said they were caught by smugglers, usually Ukrainians, who may have been in crowds of Turkish and Italian drangheta clans on shore.
While aid workers call these “first-class” crossings, there’s nothing elite about them. Hamid and Zakia were packed with 100 people below deck for a week when food supplies ran low. After two days without fresh water, Zakia could no longer feel the baby moving inside her.
“It was the worst experience of my life,” Hamid said in an Italian gymnasium as he and his wife waited to be processed COVID-19 quarantine sites after their boat sailed, “Passion Dalaware”, came ashore on November 10.
For years, most of the political, humanitarian and media attention has focused on the hundreds of thousands of migrants, most of them African, who cross the Central Mediterranean on air-conditioned ships. trusted by smugglers from Libya and Tunisia.
The Calabrian route, which brought migrants from Turkey to the “toe” of Italy but not Sicily and its islands further south, has seen arrivals increase nearly 4 times by 2021 and now accounts for 16% of sea water. to Italy this year.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is monitoring the situation closely, although the increase in arrivals from Calabria is reflected by a similarly dramatic increase in migrants arriving at Sicilian ports. Overall, the number of sea passengers to Italy this year is up to 59,000 compared to 32,000 at this time last year. The Calabrian route had 9,687 passengers on November 14, compared with 2,507 last year.
“We are seeing the Afghans. We are seeing the Iraqis. We are seeing the Iranians, the Kurds,” said Chiara Cardoletti, UNHCR’s representative in Italy. While single men used to make up most of the migrants, “right now across all the routes you’re seeing an increase in the number of families coming in with lots of children. And that’s what. the same is true of the route to Calabria.”
The Calabrian route is just one of countless ways refugees from the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Africa attempt to reach Europe, a stabilizing crisis that has fueled anti-immigrant sentiment on the continent. and strain the solidarity of the European Union.
Hamid and Zakia have an adventure that’s much more thrilling and costly than most: After escaping from Kabul with Hamid’s sister, husband, and their three children, the family travels to Turkey and pay 8,500 euros ($9,600) per adult and 4,000 euros ($4,500) per child to get to Calabria. Hamid’s parents in Sweden financially supported the trip.
Hamid’s 29-year-old sister Tooba, who speaks good English, said the family decided to risk their lives on the journey because life in Afghanistan under Taliban rule is no longer safe, especially as she makes the law. monk.
“I couldn’t live in Kabul, and because of them I had to leave Afghanistan,” said Tooba, as she hugged a sleeping child.
Like Hamid and Zakia, she requested that her last name not be used for safety reasons.
Hamid said the smugglers provided enough water for the first four or five days, but after running out of water, the passengers drank seawater with sugar for the last two days.
As the sailboat neared shore, the passengers on deck saw only the two captain smugglers, both wearing ski masks, fleeing the scene in a black boat.
Vittorio Zito, mayor of Roccella Jonica, a small town on the Calabrian coast, a small town on the Calabrian coast that was once a major destination for smugglers, said: “The traffickers, the obvious guys. has no concept of human plunder, even attacking 100 people per sailboat.
Sailboats are difficult to intercept because even when patrolling in the air, they look like normal pleasure boats. The “Passion Dalaware” even hangs a plastic American flag from its sails.
Zito said smugglers can make around 500,000 euros ($565,000) per trip on a stolen sailboat that costs around 100,000 euros ($113,000). Red Cross officials counted 101 people on Hamid’s boat, and the smugglers pocketed 858,500 euros ($969,000).
There have been so many of these abandoned sailboats lately that their bodies lie along the coast of Calabria. Others were piled up in a boat cemetery near the port in Roccella Jonica.
This route is also being used by smugglers bringing in fishing boats from Libya. On November 14, 550 migrants arrived at Roccella Jonica, the highest number in a single day. The migrants, including at least 100 Egyptian minors, were rescued from two fishing boats off the coast from Tobruk, a town in Libya near the Egyptian border.
Italian police have arrested a number of Ukrainian smugglers who have been convicted of aiding and abetting illegal migration, but they are but cogs in the wheel of an operation. greater crime.
Giovanni Bombardieri, chief prosecutor in the capital Reggio Calabria who is leading the migration investigation, said: “We have to go beyond the individual boats and the arrest of the smugglers to understand the reasons behind it. after an exponential increase.
“It is clear that our work requires an assessment of the ability of the ‘ndrangheta’ clans to participate,” he told the AP.
Hamid and Zakia’s adventure is not over yet. The extended family was taken to different locations in Calabria to complete a two-week virus quarantine. They can then start the asylum process or can find a way to reach relatives in Sweden.
There is also some good news.
“I am very happy,” said Zakia. “Italian doctors checked and my baby is fine.”
