ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The weather was getting cold and wet when Harem Osman (not his real name) arrived on the French coastline in late October, hoping to board a dinghy that would take him to the UK. He had set off from the Kurdistan Region in northern Iraq with a group of friends in October, taking a route which had seen him travel through Belarus, Poland, Germany, and finally France, where he says he could even see the white cliffs of Dover not far from where he was sleeping rough in northern France.
“Life was not easy in Kurdistan, the last job that I did was selling watermelon by the side of the road with my dad,” Harem said. “I wanted to come to the UK to work.”
Harem and his friends were determined to reach the UK but as he watched and heard the ordeals of so many migrants, mostly Iraqi Kurds, who would jump into inflatable boats from the coastline of Dunkirk before falling into issues and having to be rescued by the French coastguard, he made a promise to find another way to reach the UK.
“People stay in the camp and in the jungle for so long that they become desperate enough to try any method to reach the other side, including the tube,” Harem told Rudaw English on Wednesday, referring to the inflatable boat in Kurdish. Harem refused to get on the boats and eventually arrived in the UK after spending 30 hours in the back of a refrigerator truck two weeks before the doomed dinghy disaster which killed at least 27 people on November 24. He was one of around 26,000 migrants that crossed the Channel this year alone.
The French police say that they have foiled 19,000 crossing attempts using small boats in 2021 alone; three times the amount of last year. Nonetheless, 26,000 people have arrived in the UK this year from northern France, a figure that stood at 8,404 in 2020.
Harem agreed to speak to Rudaw English to offer a detailed account of how he travelled to the UK and explain the mechanics of how smugglers and migrants operate throughout the trip, and especially along the coastline of northern France. In return, Rudaw agreed to offer him anonymity and not disclose his name, age, or which city in the Kurdistan Region he came from, nor where he now resides in the UK.
Harem said that he was fingerprinted twice, both in Germany and France, and that the authorities let him go to make his way to the UK. He travelled with seven of his friends from Sulaimani province on a “guaranteed journey” to the UK which cost him 16,000 dollars. He would arrive in less than a month.
“We paid 4,000 dollars each for the visa to Belarus, the flight and two days stay in a hotel in Minsk,” Harem told Rudaw English via WhatsApp from a location in the United Kingdom. They travelled via Dubai to Minsk.
Motion graphics by Sarkawt Mohammed/ Rudaw
On the Belarus border
In Minsk, he stayed for four to five days with his friends and bought clothes for the journey ahead. The group of eight met up with another group of six from their region and decided to make the journey together. They found a smuggler who agreed to take them from Minsk to Germany for 6,800 dollars using his network of smugglers throughout the journey.
Harem and other friends deposited the money for each leg of the journey in a Havala shop in Sulaimani. Once that part of the journey was complete, Harem would make a phone call and the smuggler’s agent would collect the money from the Havala shop.
One evening in early November, the 14 friends travelled in three taxis to the Polish border. Two male Belarusian police officers looked on and “said nothing” as the three local drivers turned on their engines and set off to an area near the border city of Brest where the 14 friends walked for five hours before they reached the border fence in a remote area away from where other migrants congregated near the Polish border.
“It was a clear moon and [we] arrived at the fence at 4:30 in the morning,” Harem recalled. The group stayed there for two nights. On the evening of the second night they placed logs under the fence and a smuggler who had accompanied the group cut part of the fence.
Once they were inside Poland, the group walked non-stop for another eight hours to reach the pick-up point arranged by the smugglers. “Our smuggler was using GPS to find his way to the point,” Harem said. A white van picked up the 14 friends and they drove for around ten hours. Harem believes that the driver was German, and he was accompanied by a dark-skinned man.
Once in Germany, the relatives of four of the friends picked them up. “We were around 70 km inside Germany and handed ourselves in to police who fingerprinted us.” The ten friends stayed in a camp for two days, before making their way to Cologne from where they took taxis to Lille in France for 30 euros.
“We arrived at Lille train station. The police arrested us and they gave us a document saying that we had to leave the country within 21 days,” Harem recalled. The group of friends made their way to Calais and Dunkirk where all 14 were reunited.
Harem stayed in the Dunkirk area for 10 days but he decided not to attempt crossing the Channel. “I did not take the tube because I don’t swim and there is no guarantee of survival,” Harem said. “I saw people who would spend 10 hours in the sea and then would return rescued by the police or even a helicopter.”
Nest of smugglers
“Around 90% of the smugglers are Iraqi Kurds,” Harem said. “Every smuggler has its own point of boarding and if another smuggler tries to trespass on another smuggler’s turf, there would be war.”
“I have seen smugglers using pistols or knives when they are drunk,” Harem said.
Harem said that the smugglers often stay with their passengers in the jungle until the time comes to board the dinghy. Harem noticed that the smugglers generally initiate the departure around 10pm, but he says that he had seen people leaving at 5 or 6 in the evening too. The migrants use a local bus to reach the closest point to the nearest point of departure, accompanied by a ‘rebar’ - a person who shows the way and is an assistant to the main smuggler.
“We are seeing that small boat arrivals are becoming the route of choice for facilitations by evil criminal gangs. These smugglers are becoming more audacious,” Minister for Justice and Tackling Illegal Migration Tom Pursglove told the Home Affairs Select Committee on November 17. “We are seeing a wider array of crossings originating from a wider stretch of coastline. For example, in the earlier days of this happening, we were seeing crossings being mounted from around a 50-kilometre stretch of coastline. We are now seeing that from a much wider stretch of coastline, around 200 kilometers.”
Most often, the smuggler and his aides hide the boat near to their point of departure the day before the passengers depart. It takes around ten minutes for the boat to be inflated using pumps. Then they walk the boat into the water and the passengers have to walk in the water, sometimes up to their neck, before they can hop into the dinghy. The dinghies are generally sourced from Holland and Belgium, Harem says, but they can sometimes come from as far as Greece.
Harem believes that smugglers in Dunkirk can pay as much as 13,000 dollars for a boat around eight meters in length. But there are smaller boats too.
“The smugglers tell the passengers that it would take four hours to reach the UK but they are lying, it takes at least 6-8 hours, if not more,” Harem told Rudaw English. The smuggler often finds someone among the passengers who knows how to motor a boat and provides a compass and, in return, the passenger will go to the other side for free and even receive some money.
Harems says the waterway is busy, and the currents created by the larger vessels slow down the boats. On top of that, the smugglers sometimes place as many as 40 people into a dinghy, which makes its journey even slower - and more dangerous.
“People pay somewhere between 1,800 pounds to 4,000 pounds,” Harem said. “But If you know the smuggler you pay less. For instance, Albanians pay up to 4,000 pounds and the Kurds pay on average around 2,000 pounds.” “I could have gone for free the first day I arrived because the smuggler was known to me,” Harem said.
Harem says that using a tube is a relatively cheap way of travelling and that is why many people try it because once on the other side, the loan they have borrowed is less to pay back.
After around ten days staying in Dunkirk, Harem decided to pay extra to travel in a ‘guaranteed’ way in the back of a lorry to a smuggler to reach the UK.
While the smugglers in Dunkirk may stay with their passengers in the jungle, there are others who charge far more cash and in return they tell the passengers with certainty that they will get to the UK.
Harem decided to reach out to a smuggler on the French coastline near the Spanish border.
British response
UK immigration enforcement has arrested 46 people for small boats-related crimes, according to Tom Pursglove, Minister for Justice and Tackling Illegal Migration. A joint intelligence cell set up by the UK and France in July 2020, has resulted in the arrest of 400 facilitators of small boat crossings up to October 18.
“So far, in 2021, there have been 50 NCA investigations into immigration-related crime with 140 arrests. There is very comprehensive collaboration going on, on both sides of the channel, to try to bring these individuals to justice,” Pursglove told the Home Affairs Committee.
“We have to do better on this, and I will not rest until we get to a far better place on this issue. We have to render this route unviable,” he said.
On Wednesday, Pursglove told the Joint Committee on Human Rights that he felt a huge weight of responsibility as the minister for tackling illegal migration, and that there is a profound duty to tackle the “evil, criminal gangs that are responsible for this human misery, that treat human individuals as cargo, and are only interested in making a profit.”
Harem remembered a 17 year old boy who recalled a similar incident to the story of the migrants who drowned in the Channel on November 24. He said the event happened on November 3, and that the 17 year-old-boy was a recognised sportsman from Erbil who became stuck in between French and British waters as both parties passed them on to each other.
“No one came to our rescue,” Harem recalled the 17 year old boy saying. They were luckier than the November 24 boat; after spending ten hours in the sea, the French responded to their call.
A week before Pursglove testified in the British parliament in November, Harem completed the final leg of his journey, with his entire trip from Sulaimani province in Kurdistan to Dover taking less than one month.
Harem sat in the back of a refrigerator truck for 30 hours driven by a Spaniard before he arrived in the UK. “It was very cold and I fell ill for two days after I arrived,” Harem said.” I did not fear for my life because it was a guaranteed route. “
“It was a first class job, it was full VIP,” Harem is seen speaking in a video in the back of the refrigerator truck which took him to the UK along with four other people.
Out of the 14 people that travelled together, only three are in Calais waiting for their chance to cross the channel.
