Four youths picked up in Ankara on their way to Europe from Jalalabad are now penniless after being arrested by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. Nasrallah, is a 22-year-old Afghan stuck in Syria’s Idlib province. When four young Afghans set off for Europe from Jalalabad, they never expected to find themselves in Syria’s Idlib. But late last year they were picked up in Ankara, then deported by the Turkish authorities to the Syrian opposition enclave through Khirbet al-Joz border crossing into western Idlib.
“We told the Turkish authorities that we were Afghans, yet they deported us to Syria,” Nasrallah, one of the young Afghan men, told Middle East Eye.
The youths – Nasratullah, 22, Safiallah, 23, Khiyali Gul, 18, and Attaallah, 25 – decided to leave their eastern Afghanistan city when the Taliban took power last summer.
“It took a month to travel from Afghanistan to Turkey via Iran for $1,100,” said Safiullah.
“As soon as we got to Ankara, the police caught us and we were persecuted,” Nasrallah added.
“We begged them to send us to Greece. They said they would send us to Greece or Afghanistan but they sent us to Syria.”
Four Afghan youths in the Qah area of Syria’s Idlib (MEE/Bilal al-Hammoud) Today the young Afghans have largely run out of cash. None have phones, and MEE was only able to speak to them through a local intermediary.
When they were deported, the youths were immediately arrested by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a militant group that controls Idlib. They were held for a month and only released after convincing HTS that they were not connected to Iran and were supportive of the Syrian revolution.
For the past month, the youths have been living in a temporary shelter in northern Idlib’s Qah, under the supervision of a local people smuggler. The plan remains to cross back into Turkey and resume their journey to Europe. In Qah, they spend their days attempting to reach out to relatives and gather enough money to pay the smugglers to get them across the border.
But even finding work to earn enough cash to live in Idlib is proving hard. And if they are able to pay smugglers, getting across the highly fortified Turkish border is not only difficult – it’s highly dangerous.
Turkey and Syria are separated by a large border wall reinforced with thermal cameras, trenches, and barbed wire. Hundreds of Turkish border guards are positioned along with it.
On Wednesday, two Syrians were killed attempting to cross the border. Turkish troops are accused of directly targeting refugees trying to flee Idlib, with hundreds of deaths reported in recent years.
“We have failed to jump across the border wall without a smuggler, and the border guards shot at us twice,” Nasrallah said.
“When we crossed at the third time, the border guards arrested us and brought us back to Syria even though we told them we were Afghans.”
The safest routes into Turkey are inevitably the most expensive. Smugglers claim they bribe Turkish border guards and have dug tunnels under the fence through which people can pass safely. They charge $2,500 to $3,000 for those routes.
But risks remain. Turkish authorities occasionally seize smuggling tunnels and blow them up to prevent the influx of new refugees.
About four million people live in northwestern Syria, half of whom have been displaced by pro-Syrian government forces and are now living in tents.
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