Kurdish mother desperate for news from her missing son

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Endless anguish haunts Najiba Rahim, a Kurdish woman in her fifties from Sulaimani, who has not heard from her son for four months after he embarked upon the risky journey to Europe last year.

Despite refusing to let him go plenty of times, Rahim says she finally agreed for her son, Aram, to make the trip to Europe seven months ago, because he was unemployed without a sense of hope in the Kurdistan Region. 

"He was always threatening to leave, but I never let him go. I never allowed him to migrate. For a long time, he has wanted to leave [to Europe]. But I had never allowed him to leave us. Eventually I agreed for him to go because he had surgery [for his back]. He never found a job here," the distraught mother told Rudaw on Wednesday.

Aram, along with his cousin, Mardin, traveled to Istanbul in June 2021, where they worked at a Kurdish restaurant in Istanbul for three months. They have not been heard of since September.

Karim Rahim, Aram's uncle, told Rudaw that they have information that they disappeared on the route between Turkey and Greece.

"We have followed up on their whereabouts and fate from relatives and friends [in Europe and Turkey]. We have not been able to obtain any knowledge about their fate," Karim Rahim, uncle of Aram, said. "He [Aram] had worked at Erbil Restaurant in Istanbul for three months, but it has been four months since he disappeared. Seven months ago, he left Sulaimani."

Now, his desperate mother sits at home, eyes glued to the screen of her smartphone, hoping to receive a piece of news from somebody about the fate of her son.

"We demand that the Kurdistan Regional Government help us to discover him," Najiba Rahim, Aram's mother, pleaded.

A Greek-based Kurdish activist believes that part of the reason families do not hear from their loved-ones when traveling is because the migrants themselves sometimes intentionally do not send news.

"Some of the migrants missing or presumed dead may not have not been heard from because they originally fled home due to a  family issue," Ranj Pshdari said.

“Others, charged with smuggling or any other accusations, might end up in prisons. Some of them are sometimes jailed for six months or over a year and they cannot contact their families at all.”

"Sometimes a migrant who arrives in Europe changes their address and name when they turn in to the police in order to make up a good case for themselves in order to receive a residence permit. Therefore, if they end up in prison or disappear en route to Europe, it becomes very difficult for us to locate them," he concluded.

Kurdish migrants have suffered a catastrophic fate this year. A boat carrying 33 migrants, most of them Kurds, capsized in the English Channel on November 24, in what the International Organization for Migration (IOM) has called the "worst disaster on record" in the Channel.

The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said last week that at least 31 have died in three separate incidents between December 21 and 24, with dozens remaining missing.

The Kurdistan Region, mostly known as a safe haven within Iraq, is facing crises of its own, with high unemployment, corruption, political instability, and an economic downturn during the coronavirus pandemic driving many of its people to migrate in recent months.

The KRG has acknowledged the existence of systemic problems and financial hardships and says it is working to address these issues, although it has also on several occasions claimed that the large waves of migration are mainly due to people being taken advantage of by smugglers.

Thousands of other Kurds have traveled to Belarus in recent months with the help of Kurdish smugglers, hoping to reach western Europe where they have suffered deaths, beatings, hunger, and sickness by border guards between the three countries of Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland.

Reporting by Peshawa Bakhtyar