The Belarus route
Photo taken on the 28/11/2021
In the summer of 2021 my brother had just turned 17. He is the youngest of the family.
We come from a village in the north of Iraq in the Kurdish region. He did not want to stay there anymore. He wanted to go to Europe, like many of his friends.
Some of them had told him it was easy to get a VISA to travel to Belarus, from where he could then continue to Europe with the help of smugglers. From Istanbul it seemed it was only a matter of getting on the flight to Minsk. And getting a visa to Belarus had suddenly become very easy.
Once in Belarus he got in touch with a smuggler to reach Germany for 6.000 Euro. The night before going to the Polish border, my brother told me the smuggler was someone who came from a village close to our hometown in Kurdistan. He could tell from the accent. He met the smuggler in Minsk and reached the Polish border by bus.
The smuggler told him and the rest of the group that it was going to be a matter of hours to cross over. But they were unlucky. They had planned the crossing the day after Polish forces were sent to strengthen the border.
“Once across the fence into Poland a car will be picking you up” the smuggler had said. “It’s better if you leaving your bags behind and travel light”. He just kept his jacket and phone. The jacket got stuck on the barb wire as he was crossing. He left it there in order to free himself from the wire.
The Polish police caught him immediately after crossing the first fence and made him return back to Belarus. Now he had nothing but his clothes and a phone. He called me to say what had happened. He was scared, and unsure if he should just try coming back home. He tried to ask some Belarusian police officers directions to return to Minsk. They took his phone and said he could not return to Minsk. He had to go to Poland now. We lost all connection with him and didn’t hear anything for 11 days.
People from our village and friend started visiting my parents’ house, bringing their condolences. It was like if we had already had his funeral.
But then he called.
He had survived by eating grass and had found other people he could share clothes with. They were stuck at the border, he told me. The Polish soldiers would not let anyone in but also the Belarusian police was not allowing them to leave the border area and return to Minsk.
He had to share clothes and rotate blankets and coats at night with other people to make sure everyone got a little protection from the cold. My brother was a big muscly guy before leaving to Belarus. When he called, we switched on the camera and I saw his face I couldn’t recognise him from how thin he now looked.
The only thing I could do to help him was to track down the family of the smuggler and threaten them. A friend from my school recognised the smuggler’s name. He was called like a mountain close to our town.
After some more asking around we understood who this person was and I contacted him on social media. I am not proud of this, but I had to threaten him in order to organise a new passage for my brother.
My brother was sold from smuggler to smuggler over the next days. Finally, by the sixth smuggler, we found a new deal. When crossing the border, they made him carry a 60-year-old woman on his back for 9 kilometres into Poland.
When the car arrived to pick them up on the other side, they didn’t have enough space for everyone so my brother and other three young men had to wait for a second car. They waited for 6 hours. At a certain point the Polish soldiers patrolling the forest were so close to them that he could see their shoelaces.
Eventually a second card arrived. They drove them across Poland to a train station by the German border. He is now in the UK. He risked his life to get there.
Interview made in June 2022.
Süleymaniye, KRG.