by Nick Thorpe
Most of the tracks up the mountain were overlaid with autumn leaves, but after diligent searching, we found one, hugging the contours of the hill, weaving in and out of the cover of pine trees, with the tell-tale signs we were looking for. Litter. Why did refugees and migrants, who had so little, always throw so much away? There were chocolate wrappers and empty cigarette cartons. The proof that these were not from careless Bulgarian youth were the plastic mobile phone cards, the SIM card pushed out of them, with Arabic or Farsi print along the bottom. Thrown to one side in the long grass and carefully cut up, I found one document in the Bulgarian script, issued by the Bulgarian authorities at Elhovo on the Turkish border, on 30 October. Waliullah Mohammed Hashim, born on 1 January 1997 – a sign either of a weary interpreter, or of a migrant who did not know his exact birthday – had recently passed this way. Caught inside Bulgaria after crossing the fence on the Turkish border, or going round it, it had taken him eighteen days to cross Bulgaria. There were also tyre marks in the mud, where the smugglers usually parked their cars.
I was back on the refugee trail – on what might be called the eastern branch of the western Balkan route, across the land border from Turkey into Bulgaria, then from Bulgaria into Serbia, to meet up in Belgrade with the ‘western branch’, which came up across the Greece–Macedonia border into Serbia. Refugees used Bulgaria in preference to Greece for several reasons. One was the fear of drowning. There were many stories of the dangers of the Aegean. During 2015, 805 people died crossing the short stretch of water in overcrowded dinghies between the Turkish coast and the five closest Greek islands.1 Another reason why the people came this way was money. It simply cost less to travel through Bulgaria. This meant that there were more Afghans, and fewer Syrians on this route. The Bulgarian smugglers had a derogatory word for them. They called the Afghans ‘Taliban’. This was particularly hurtful to people who were actually fleeing the Taliban.
On the Serbian side of the border, at Dimitrovgrad, the police were taking a break at six in the morning when I reached the refugee camp where refugees gather when they walk over the mountains. Ali Khaan had arrived with two friends just half an hour earlier, after a twenty-five-day journey from Afghanistan. He and his friends had reached Bulgaria by swimming across the lake at the point near where the Turkish, Greek and Bulgarian borders meet, probably either the Maritsa or Arda river. In Sofia they were caught sleeping rough by the Bulgarian police, who forced them to hand over €500, their mobile phones and their watches. Dropped by smugglers near this border, they lost their way but were helped by a villager, ‘a good guy’, to find the right path over the mountain. Once on the Serbian side, a taxi was waiting near a pine wood. They paid the driver to bring them just 3 kilometres to the refugee centre. Volunteers served hot tea and handed out survival blankets. Huddled in gold and silver, they looked like the angels on a Christmas tree, pinned against the camp fence. The containers, laid on for people to rest in, were all full. And the police, who had been working all night to register the new arrivals, were taking a one-hour break. Now the plan was to register, give fingerprints, then take one of the coaches laid on by the Serbian authorities, to Belgrade or to Šid on the Croatian border. The document they received gave them the right to stay in Serbia for seventy-two hours – either to seek asylum there or to leave the country. The vast majority chose to leave. Most spent only three or four hours in Dimitrovgrad. The bus trip to Belgrade cost €25 per person.
Željko Vostić, a local employee of the UNHCR, said many complained of mistreatment by the Bulgarian police. In October, a report by Serbian human rights groups detailed Bulgarian police violence against migrants.
‘We’re heading for Germany first, probably,’ said Ali Khaan. ‘Let’s see if they accept or deport us, it’s up to them. We were kids when the war was on, one war flowed into another. We went to Pakistan as kids, as refugees, to escape the war. Then we came back to our own country.’ In Kandahar he worked as transport manager for a company supplying fuel to NATO forces at the airfield. NATO troops first went to Afghanistan in 2003, after the 2001 US invasion.
‘I was continuously threatened by the insurgents [Taliban]. Either I should help them or they would kill me and my family.’ They wanted to get their hands on his company’s trucks. He had to leave very suddenly. Unlike many Afghans I met, he had only positive memories of Western intervention in his country.
They came to rebuild schools, to support female education, brought business, but what I most liked about them, they came to support our culture, our education. We had an educational system only for males before. And they came to help girls go to school too. Once when I was a kid, I read in a book the phrase ‘Give me a good mother and I’ll give you a good nation.’
He thinks it’s from Shakespeare. In fact the words are attributed to Napoleon.2
The Taliban are getting back into power, and it’s hard to survive there now. So those who can leave, do so. Mostly the young. The government is not able to protect us. So that’s a tough and a sad thing. I feel bad about it, but life is more important. You have to live.
Would he ever go home? I asked.
‘I can imagine going back one day, as soon as I feel safe there, when my kids can go to school without any fear. Or my sisters can go to school without fear in their hearts, that we’re going to be killed, or have acid thrown in their faces.’ That was what the religious fundamentalists did to girls who they saw walking to school in the morning, he explained. So his sisters no longer went to school. His parents taught them what they knew at home, but it wasn’t the same. He left his parents, his older and younger brother, and his sisters behind in Kandahar. He was afraid they would be targeted by the Taliban, when they heard he had gone.
He had heard fragments of news about the Paris attacks, not the full story, while he was trying to dodge Bulgarian police in Sofia.
I feel bad about what happened. I have my selfie with their flag, that’s a sad incident, and it’s happening everywhere – what more can I say?
The terrorist does not have any religion. That’s the message that I have for everybody. Muslims would love to have peace, our book is all about peace. True Islam teaches us to respect life. We believe that if you kill a human, you kill all humanity, if you save a human you save humanity. I am a modern Muslim, and I follow what our religion says, not what the scholars say, or what the Taliban or the elders say. My family taught us not to follow that. Just follow the book, that’s the right thing.
I believe it’s true that some of the attackers came with the migrants, because we came all the way here, and nobody searched us. Not once. I also understand that people are afraid of so many refugees in their own country. Among the refugees there are a lot of illiterate people, uneducated people, from different cultures, going to a different environment, and of course they are going to create a mess. We all believe that. But still, I’m thankful to the European community that accepted so many refugees. Everyone is leaving their home and their country because they have to. It’s not because people are in a ‘mood’ to live in Europe, it’s because they have to.
Of course there are also people who just wish to live in Europe, to have a good life, and being a human everyone deserves a good life. You can’t say, ‘I’m a European, so I can have a good life, but you’re not European, so you can’t.’ A good life is for everyone. The thing is, we need to help each other, ignoring religions, and in the meantime respecting religions, still we are humans and we have to have a good humanity between us, a good brotherhood.
That day in Paris, twenty-eight-year-old Abdelhamid Abaaoud was cornered by 110 anti-terrorist police in a flat in the Saint-Denis district. Police had left no stone unturned since the attacks on 13 November. Now, thanks to a tip-off, they surrounded the flat where he was hiding with his cousin Hasna Aitboulachen and several others.3
Abaaoud’s family came originally from the region of Sous, in south-west Morocco, in the fertile river valley between the High Atlas and Anti-Atlas mountains. The R
iver Sous flows into the Mediterranean near Agadir. Mohammed Awzal, a Sufi poet and author of ‘The Ocean of Tears’ (died 1749), was the region’s most famous son, before Abaaoud.4 The Sufis have been the first targets of extreme Islamist groups affiliated with Islamic State in many countries, from Afghanistan to Mali. Sufis condemn the jihadists as heretics, because they claim to know the will of God by ordering suicide bombings, for example. The Salafi extremists of IS regard Sufis as heretics because of their mystical attachment to the tombs of their sheikhs, which they destroy where they come to power. Their battles may sometimes look like an attack on the West, but, more often than not, this is actually a war against their fellow Muslims. The West is a sideshow.
Over 5,000 bullets were fired by police in the raid. Abaaoud blew himself up with a suicide vest, and his cousin died in the blast. Eight others were arrested, including the owner of the flat, Jawad Bendaoud. He lent it to two Belgians, he told reporters, as a favour to a friend. When he told them there were no mattresses, they said that was not a problem. They just needed water and a place to pray.
IS claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks, which they said were in retaliation for French airstrikes in Syria and Iraq.
*
Back at Dimitrovgrad, the police were registering new arrivals again. One was Erdhad Tanha Saadat, a radio journalist from Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, on the main road between Kabul and the Pakistani border at the Khyber Pass. While other Afghans suffered at the hands of the Taliban, Jalalabad and the villages around it were increasingly the target of IS. In April 2015, thirty-five people were killed and more than a hundred injured in the city in a suicide bomb attack on a bank where people were queuing to collect their wages. Even the Taliban denounced it.
Da’esh [IS] told me, you must leave journalism and come and work for us. They are not good people, and they want to kill people. They do not want peace in Afghanistan, or anywhere in the whole world. Every day in Nangahar province they kill ten, fifteen, twenty people. I want to go to Europe and Germany, because Germany makes Afghan people welcome. We want to go to Germany because there is peace there, and good people, and good government.
His first experience with Germans at Dimitrovgrad had definitely been positive. Martin was a volunteer who in normal times had his own travelling bakery, driving between the open-air markets of Germany to sell his bread. ‘I think it’s a kind of duty for me to come here, because in Germany we have a safe life, enough time, and here people are suffering. So I have no choice. My heart made me come here to help.’ When the UNHCR and the Serbian Red Cross packed up their stalls at the end of the working day, he and other volunteers stayed up all night, serving hot food and tea to new arrivals like Ali Khaan and Tanha Sadaat.
A month earlier he had been at the Croatian-Serbian border. ‘It was a disaster. We were cooking for 2,000 people a day, then the Red Cross arrived and said, “OK, we’re taking over now.”’ They worked for two hours then left, but his group were not allowed to start serving again, so they moved here. He was bitterly critical of all the ‘official’ charities. ‘They’re too close to the government,’ he said. As we spoke, an elderly local man in a pink cap wheeled his bicycle along the road and stopped to stare at the newcomers. I felt a wariness, not a hostility towards the refugees, from the local population.
Wiebke was another of the German volunteers, handing out clothes from the back of a red van. The clothes came from a huge warehouse in Preševo, the biggest Serbian camp on the Serbia–Macedonia border. Even she became exasperated as everyone crowded round, trying to select trousers, jackets and shoes that might fit them. Some of the refugees arrived barefoot, suffering frostbite. Their flimsy shoes had fallen apart somewhere on the long journey. Wiebke felt sympathy for Angela Merkel’s refugee policies, though as a conservative politician she didn’t like her. It was true that public opinion was turning against the refugees in Germany, she said, but there was still a lot of solidarity. At Dimitrovgrad at the moment, one German and one Czech group of volunteers were working. At the beginning, most of the volunteers worked in what they called ‘wild camps’. Now it had become more organised, and they were also forced to register with the authorities. There was sometimes tension on account of this, as well as because the volunteers tended to work much longer hours.
‘For me, every human should have the right to live where he or she wants,’ said Wiebke. ‘We make all these difficulties in the world. Germany is also an exporter of weapons. One reason we have a good life, is because we keep people elsewhere in the world poor.’
‘And Paris?’ I asked.
‘People say once again that all Arabs are terrorists. Maybe there’s one terrorist in a hundred thousand refugees. So for me there is no connection between terrorism and refugees.’
Most of the volunteers were young, pretty women from Germany, always smiling, handing out tea and warm food at all hours of day and night. Most of the refugees here were Afghan men in their late teens or early twenties. The women said they never experienced sexual harassment.
A Serbian bus, with registration plates from the nearby city of Zaječar, started revving its engines to encourage the refugees to take their seats. A Yazidi family, from Sinjar in Iraq, showed me photos on their phone of Sinjar after the IS attack – street after street of homes in ruins. Their journey across Bulgaria had been rough. Five days in police detention near the border. Seventeen people kept by the smugglers in one small room.
In Sofia, Deputy Interior Minister Philip Gunev disputed the picture of Afghanistan descending into chaos which several of the refugees I met at the border depicted.
The reports and intelligence we get from Afghanistan and Iraq, is that there’s a sort of frenzy going on right now. That this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to leave and move to Western Europe. Every day, thousands of people from Kabul are trying to get passports and leave. Some even get fake threat letters from the Taliban in order to be able to prove they come from provinces which are eligible for some kind of international protection status.
In Iraq, the situation is slightly different. We’ve seen about 3 million internally displaced people as a result of the IS offensive over the past year. A great number of these people feel there is a unique opportunity to emigrate to Western Europe.
Turkish airlines have also increased several times the number of their daily flights from Iraq to Turkey. That also results in the change of migratory patterns, an increased number of Iraqi and Afghan refugees.
He was rather defensive about Bulgaria’s own record in handling refugees.
We saw a new trend in September, when our asylum centres emptied out. Since August we’ve seen declining numbers for the first time in two years. Clearly people felt invited to leave towards Western Europe. And nowadays it’s very difficult to keep anyone here, even though we offer them international protection, and fingerprint them. We are probably one of the few front-line countries that fingerprints and registers everyone, unlike the entire flow that goes through the western Balkans.
He would have been surprised to hear how diligent the Serbian police I met at Dimitrovgrad were, on the fingerprint front. By now, the fingerprints of one of the Paris bomb suspects, taken on the Greek island of Leros on 7 October, was proof that the Greeks had improved their registration procedures. Mr Gunev denied any systematic violence by the Bulgarian authorities but admitted that there were ‘isolated’ problems with both corruption and violence in the Bulgarian police force: ‘Bulgarian border guards have to follow EU approved training courses. In the past year and a half though, as in other countries, we have had to deploy other police officers who don’t have the same level of training. Migrants are being arrested throughout the country.’
Ten times as many migrants had been arrested inside Bulgaria in 2015 than in 2014; 30,000 had applied for asylum. Some officers were working twenty-hour days. The force was stretched to the limits of human endurance. One problem was that the migrants were in such a hurry to leave that they did not re
port abuses. And even when they did, they didn’t want to hang around for months, to testify in court against the officers concerned. Four police officers had been arrested and would now face trial for extortion, he said. ‘The excessive use of force in a situation is one thing; allegations of theft are another. We don’t need to train officers not to steal!’ The death of an Afghan migrant, killed by a ricochet from a bullet when he was trying to evade arrest on 13 October, was an accident he said. And in that case too, all the witnesses had immediately left the country.
I also put the allegations of theft to Nikolai, my contact who until recently served in DANS, the Bulgarian secret service.
In my experience, these are people who have already been robbed by the Turkish security forces. Out of 200 refugees I interviewed, 99 per cent had no papers. Most had already handed most of their money to Turkish traffickers or Turkish police. Out of fifty people, we only found more than €5,000 on one of them. Most are down to their last €500. In Turkey police took everything from them. The traffickers organise everything here. They pay the people who manage the trafficking channels.
Nikolai was equally specific, and critical, of the failure of Western intelligence services to prevent the Paris attacks.
The Turkish authorities said they informed the French that the ringleader, Abdelhamid Abaaoud was no longer in Syria. Yes, but they informed the French after the attacks – not before!
A database exists with all the clues, the needles are all there, in the haystack. But there is a lack of experienced officers to analyse the data, and to concentrate their attention on this one large terrorist cell which we now know had more than twenty people in it.
