The group told Rudaw on Wednesday that smugglers told them to identify as Syrians to avoid deportation.
Halmat Abdulrahman, 26, from Ranya, comes from a family of eleven. He lived with his three siblings and his parents before he and his brother Mohammed left the Kurdistan Region and arrived in Turkey on June 30, hoping to go through to Italy and France before reaching the United Kingdom.
“I was a glazier, but the market was weak because of the economic crisis… I was jobless for around three to four years,” Abdulrahman told Rudaw English in a voice message. “We’ve sold properties to be able to go abroad.”
Members of the group said at least 54 male Kurdish immigrants between the ages of 16 and 30 were detained in Istanbul and deported to Syria.
“We were 70 people at first, there was a family with us - a woman and a child - they were freed in Turkey,” Abdulrahman said. “We had Kurds and Iranians with us too, but [authorities] separated the Iranians from us on the Syrian border.”
The migrants were detained in Istanbul for three days and sent to jail in Gaziantep for another 10 days.
“We first introduced ourselves as Syrians because the smugglers had told us that Syrians won’t be deported - they will be secure,” Mohammed Abdulrahman told Rudaw over the phone.
“After that, we tried hard through officials in Gaziantep prison to register us back as Iraqis…. We told them we have photos of the passports, but they didn’t do anything for us and deported us to Syria directly.”
Mohammed Abdulrahman said that he and the others are currently in Azaz, a city in the northern part of Aleppo province. It’s an area under the control of the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army, also known as the Free Syrian Army (FSA).
“Now, we are under the control of the Free [Syrian] Army,” Mohammed Abdulrahman said. “We can’t do anything.”
Safeen Sargalwyi, another migrant, told Rudaw that moving to other neighborhoods is a risk. “There is danger on each and every one of us,” he said. “We can’t be free, we can’t go to another neighborhood. There was a lot of shooting tonight.”
The International Federation for Iraqi Refugees in a Facebook post warned migrants “not to believe smugglers or anyone at all who say you won’t be deported if you register yourself as Syrian or Afghan.”
Iraqi and Kurdish migrants similarly ran into trouble earlier this summer when smugglers promised them unrestricted travel into Western Europe on arrival in Belarus. Hundreds were stuck in camps in Lithuania, facing possible deportation home.
According to data provided to Rudaw by Summit (Lutka) Foundation for Refugee and Displaced Affairs in June, 26,972 Iraqi citizens have sought asylum in Europe in 2021, and five people have lost their lives on the way. Ari Jalal, head of Lutka, explained those numbers do not include people who traveled legally and have not returned, as well as those under 18.
On June 20, more than 140 Iraqi and Kurdish immigrants in Turkey directed a message to the UN's refugee agency (UNHCR) through IFIR, saying they were forced to immigrate “due to the instability of the Kurdistan Region and Iraq in terms of security, politics and religion.”
“No family likes their sons to go abroad, because they like to stay with them and make their own living, to take care of their families, and be closer to each other,” Halmat Abdulrahman said. “They took the road abroad because of lack of jobs and their bad situation. We have people here that have families, and they have small children they have left behind in Kurdistan.”
The Syria Justice and Accountability Centre (SJAC) reported last year that Turkey deported more than 16,000 Syrian immigrants to Idlib. A number of those deportations violated international law, according to SJAC. In 2019, Turkey came under fire for its deportations of Syrians.
The country hosts 3.7 million Syrian refugees - the largest refugee population in the world - and is facing the possibility of a new wave of people looking for safety. In the wake of the Taliban takeover of Kabul, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has said that Turkey is unprepared to handle an influx of Afghan refugees, saying in a news conference Sunday that taking on an additional refugee “burden” is “out of the question.”
Additional reporting by Dildar Harki and Snwr Majid
