Erdogan Rising

by Hannah Lucinda Smith

  Two years later I met with another old Aleppo activist, a graffiti artist I had watched paint revolutionary slogans and smiley faces on the rubble in 2013. He had been held in the same Isis prison as Soheib. Finally, I got the last piece of his story: an Isis court had found Soheib guilty of sedition, and his punishment was a bullet to the head.

  Summer 2015

  The refugee highway

  There were times in Aleppo when I could kid myself that I really understood the torment of the people I was writing about. I would stay in their homes and sit with them as Assad’s jets howled over, our conversation ebbing and flowing as they came and went. Sometimes, as they approached, someone would turn the lights out and everyone would stop talking, as if we could hide in the silence and darkness. As the din subsided we would unclamp our tensed muscles and smile at each other, trying to cover our fear as we anticipated the next one. At first there were patterns to where the bombs struck – hospitals, schools and crowded markets were the most dangerous places to be. But once the regime, whether for sadistic or logistical reasons, switched to using barrel bombs instead, death became horribly random. When Mahmoud and I returned to Aleppo in April 2014, after the rebels had pushed Isis back to the city’s eastern borders, we drove in silence through deserted neighbourhoods that had been turned into concrete skeletons, the remains of apartment blocks jutting like broken teeth from a ruined mouth. In the quarters that were still inhabited, everyone on the streets turned their eyes to the sky. Barrel bombing happened in evil slow motion, much more agonising than the quick whoosh-blast-death of the jets. The grace with which the barrels tumbled from the helicopters, arcing towards the ground like swooping birds and then morphing into huge mushrooms of smoke and dust, gave you the feeling that you could escape them if only you ran fast enough.

  Each time I left Aleppo I felt overwhelming relief and a fierce stab of guilt as I said goodbye to the people who had to stay. No way could I ever know what this was like for them – not even close. A few days in that city was enough to make me chain smoke and fixate on my own mortality, desperate to wash the stink of the generator diesel out of my hair and the dust off my skin. So what was it doing to these people who stayed there for years, and to the kids born into a world where buildings exploded at random around them?

  But my Aleppo dissonance was nothing next to the night in May 2015 when I stood on the deck of a small pleasure boat and watched a huddle of people pray as their sagging dinghy started to take in water. It was only a month since Abu Laith had talked about shifting his route north to the Aegean coast, and all the other middlemen had hit on the same idea. The long and expensive route to Italy dried up along with the local smuggling economy in Mersin, so the smugglers started organising short hops across the Aegean to Greece in rubber boats designed for children’s playtime. The retail price of a route into Europe dropped overnight from more than 6,000 euros per person to around 1,000, and the trickle of people taking the journey turned into a flood.

  I was working alongside a British television news crew when we spotted the slowly sinking boat. We had decided that the best way to witness this new Aegean smuggling operation in action was to persuade a Turkish captain to take us out just beyond a bay that we knew to be a smuggling hotspot, drop anchor, and wait. We faked a party as the sun went down, blasting out cheesy music and dancing on the deck. As the last wisps of light faded, we saw pinpricks of light sparking up in a wooded hill that dropped straight down into the sea 500 metres away from us – the picturesque backdrop to a beachfront honeymoon resort. The lights were people picking their way down to the shore having been dropped off by the smugglers in the middle of a mountain road, told where to go and ordered to keep their mouths shut. By 2 a.m., in the pitch-black silence and waiting for the flotilla of small dinghies to arrive, most of us had fallen asleep.

  I woke up at 3 a.m. to an urgent whisper from the news crew’s reporter. He had spotted the first boat, drifting just a few metres away from us. We turned on a camera light and started shouting out questions – and saw for ourselves the reality of this journey, sold by the smugglers as a short and easy hop across to the Greek island of Kos.

  The dinghy was four metres long, and every spare inch of it was filled. The women and children sat in the middle, and the men on the lip around the edge. It was probably meant for eight people but there were at least twenty on board, and it was starting to sag beneath the waterline. One man tried to mop up the water inside the boat with a towel, wringing it out over the side every few seconds. They were only a few hundred metres from the Turkish shore, and they were already sinking.

  The reporter asked them whether we should call the coastguard as they passed us ten metres away.

  ‘Stay with us, please,’ shouted out one of the men, a Syrian who spoke perfect English. ‘Don’t call the coastguard, just follow us.’

  ‘What are you running from?’ I called out to him.

  ‘War,’ he replied. ‘Just war.’

  ‘And what are you looking for?’ I yelled as the boat pulled off towards Greek waters.

  ‘Freedom,’ came his response.

  The shores

  Turgutreis, the closest town to the smuggling point, is a tourist resort on the Bodrum peninsula, home to a gaggle of British expats and seasonal workers who throng there in summer. Signs of its burgeoning night sport were scattered everywhere by May 2015 – young Arab men with small backpacks hanging out in the main square by daytime, deflated and abandoned dinghies in the quieter coves and often, in the early mornings, the sight of the coastguard bringing in the people they had rescued or captured.

  ‘I come to the same sun lounger every morning,’ said Ann Davidson, a retired British nurse with pink hair who had lived in Turgutreis on and off for two decades. ‘And a few weeks ago I started to see the coastguard going out more and more.’

  When Ann first noticed huge groups of bedraggled people, including children, being brought in and herded into a lock-up at the end of the pier, her nursing instincts took over. She loaded the basket of her bicycle with water and biscuits and pedalled over to hand them out. As the coastguard and gendarmerie officers got to know her they started letting her into the cell, a bare cage with no seats but shaded from the sun at least. Talking with the people locked inside as she handed out her offerings, she began to realise the scale of what was happening in her adopted home town.

  ‘They were all telling me how they had escaped from Syria and Iraq and were trying to get to Europe,’ Ann said. ‘And most of them had already tried several times and been caught. They said they would keep trying until they made it to Greece.’

  One morning I walked down the Turgutreis pier with her to hand out refreshments and speak with the latest arrivals. The three dozen people sprawled behind the bars on the concrete looked exhausted, their fatigue turning to quiet amazement when they saw this middle-aged lady with candy-floss hair bustling in and handing out packaged cakes. A young Syrian man called Mohammed, his English polished to perfection over his career working as an interpreter in Dubai, started telling their story.

  ‘This is the second time we’ve been caught, we also tried yesterday,’ he said. ‘We’re not worried about what will happen. Yesterday we were held here for three hours, then they took us to the police station in Bodrum, took our fingerprints and photographs and released us. But this time we were only ten or fifteen minutes from Kos when we were caught.’

  The group would try again tonight and keep trying until they reached Greece, Mohammed said. They had got to know each other, become friends – at least, the Syrians had. Half of the men in the lock-up were silent, staring men with darker complexions and rounder faces than the others. When I tried to speak with them all they would say was ‘Burma, Burma.’ One of the gendarmerie officers told me the authorities guessed they were actually Pakistani, but they had no papers to prove it either way. This nightly dance with the coastguard and the police would not and could not stop them: they would repeat their ritual until they fina
lly passed over the invisible sea border to Greece. Each time, the smuggler would send four boats off in quick succession, and the coastguard might be able to catch one. They could not be the unlucky ones for ever. And Mohammed had nowhere to return to.

  ‘When things started getting complicated in Syria the UAE stopped renewing my residency,’ he said. ‘So I took my wife and three kids back to Damascus – and then the apartment I had bought there with my savings from Dubai was bombed. I came to Turkey a year ago and opened a cake shop, but I was mugged of everything by a business partner. We do appreciate Turkey very much, but it’s not easy to live here. I did my best but it didn’t work. It’s not easy to merge into the community here. The culture is similar but the Turkish people have started to feel angry about us being here. I told my wife that I’ll use our last bit of money to get to Europe, and then I can bring them after me.’

  One of Mohammed’s children had stayed in Damascus with his parents. The other two were living in Mersin with his wife. He laughed in anticipation of the stories he would tell his grandchildren one day, in their future life in Europe.

  ‘I am forty-one years old. I have lived the war and now I am living adventures at sea,’ he said. ‘I used to look at smugglers as criminals. But if they didn’t exist we would just die in other ways.’

  The smuggling business

  Mohammed and the others had each paid 950 euros for their passage, a price that bought them as many attempts as they needed, and a measure of security. By now people-smuggling had become established, organised and competitive – the agents, dependent on word of mouth and good references, had realised they needed to professionalise. I went back to Mersin armed with scraps of information I had collected from Abu Laith, Mohammed and others like them, and started deciphering how the industry worked. At every level, smuggling’s shadow economy was interwoven with Turkey’s legitimate one. The smugglers’ customers increasingly came into Turkey on official visas, stayed in tourist hotels, and paid their fees to the mob at the money exchange and transfer offices that litter every down-at-heel commercial district of every Turkish city.

  Behind the grubby white Formica counter of the al-Sayeed money-changing office in Mersin, a young Syrian called Mahmoud sucked on a cigarette and told me about his business. He had started with just one office, which he set up when he fled to Turkey in 2012. As the wave of refugees increased, so did his trade: new arrivals found their way to him when they wanted to change the stacks of Syrian notes they had brought out – their life savings – for dollars or Turkish lira. He was making a decent living, nothing out of the ordinary for a small businessman – just enough to look after his family and put away some savings.

  Then in 2014 Mersin’s smuggling middlemen came to him. They needed an interlocutor, they said, someone who could act as the guarantor between them and their customers. He would take the payments from people who wanted to go to Europe, and for a fee hold it in trust for them until they reached the destination they had agreed with the smugglers’ agents. On payment the customers were given two unique codes, known only to Mahmoud and themselves. They would give the first to the smuggler as they got on the boat as proof of their payment, and send the other back to him when they reached Europe. Once they texted the second one to him, he would hand the money to the smugglers and the deal was complete.

  Mahmoud was already reaping the rewards. His single office in Mersin had grown into a chain of twelve in cities across Turkey, and he was opening others in Italy, the Republic of Cyprus and Bulgaria – all smugglers’ entry points to the EU. Each month, he was holding payments for around four thousand people. His total fee for each customer was $180, $30 of it paid by them and the remaining $150 from the smuggler. That alone was bringing him an income of $720,000 a month. On top, he was dabbling in currency and gold speculation using the money he was holding. And Mahmoud was just the middleman of the middlemen.

  ‘People are selling their house, gold, land, everything to get to Europe,’ he said. ‘It’s the middle classes mainly. I started doing this a year ago, just informally for friends at first. And then one person passed my contact on to another, and it grew from there.’

  Of the six people working in his Mersin office, two were focused solely on the smuggling payments. The Turkish authorities, he told me, didn’t bother him.

  ‘The Turkish government doesn’t know about it,’ he said. ‘We don’t put any of our money in the banks, the intelligence would notice. And anyway, my business is not part of smuggling, it’s just for smuggling. I’m saving this money for them as a humanitarian act.’

  I struggled with that claim, and with the notion that the Turkish government had failed to notice what was happening. Over the next months I developed a fascination with these smoky, sparsely lit, shady money offices and visited dozens of them – in Istanbul, along the western coast, and down at the Syrian border. Throughout the whole of 2015, none of them ever said no when I walked in and told them I was a journalist and wanted to know how their businesses worked. All of them sat me down with a cup of tea and a cigarette, sometimes in a back room and sometimes just out on the shop floor, and told me as many details as I wanted to know.

  Every second or third shop at one end of the main street of şanlıurfa, a city close to the Syrian border, was a rough copy of Mahmoud’s place in Mersin: a bare office with a desk, and a man sitting behind it with nothing but a laptop and a collection of mobile phones. Their windows were plastered with Arabic-language signs. There was no need for any in Turkish: almost all their customers were Syrian refugees from the cities of Raqqa and Deir Ezzor, which had been overrun by Isis. The terror group’s Caliphate started just thirty-five miles down the road; Isis had captured both the Syrian frontier town of Tel Abyad and its border crossing with Turkey in January 2014. The border was still commutable: down at the Akçakale gate I stood in an abaya and headscarf and watched bearded men and burka-clad women show their passports to the Turkish guards and pass on through to the town, where the black flag was flying. There were even new clothes stores operating right on the Turkish side of the crossing, selling the Islamic garb needed to blend in over in Isis-land. Barbers who had escaped Tel Abyad when the men with the penchant for long beards had taken over had set themselves up again in Akçakale town, a few blocks back from the crossing, their customers now mostly Syrians who had had enough of living under Islamo-fascism and had come out the other way. Once in Turkey, they immediately indulged in everything they had been denied – a cigarette, a drink and a beard trim.

  In those grimy şanlıurfa offices I saw how capital was flowing across the border, too. The main business of these exchange offices was hawala, an informal method of transferring money across borders – in this case, across the frontier into Isis territory. If a Syrian in Turkey wanted to send money to relatives back home in Deir Ezzor or Raqqa they would visit one of the agents on şanlıurfa’s main street. There they would hand over the cash, and send the agent photographs of their ID documents and those of the receiver. The hawala agent then passed instructions to their counterpart inside Syria, who would hand the money to the specified person once they had produced that ID. The confirmations and photos of documents were all sent via WhatsApp, an encrypted messaging service the authorities could not spy on. The hawala agents on either side kept huge stacks of money and a record of the transactions they made, and evened up the discrepancies when they met a few times a year. Usually the agents were relatives, their blood ties a substitute for the legal guarantees built into formal money-transfer systems.

  The hawala guys asked no questions about where the money was going. One, a brawny man called Ahmet whose arms were covered with scrappy homemade tattoos, admitted that his cousin in Raqqa was being taxed by Isis for each transaction he made – protection money, he said, to allow him to continue his business and help the people of the city to survive. With Syria’s banking system frozen there was no other way to get money in to the people struggling to make ends meet in the war zone. Aid organisat
ions often quietly use the hawala system to get money to their workers in areas held by rebel groups, although – unsurprisingly, given its usefulness for terrorists and money launderers – Western governments are keen to clamp down.

  As the conflict bit harder and the value of the Syrian pound (or lira) started plummeting, formal money changers in Turkey stopped accepting it. The refugees coming out of the country with their life savings in Syrian cash had no choice but to go to the unofficial hawala offices to change it into dollars, where the rate they were offered was derisory. The agents, left with stacks of notes useless inside Turkey, soon arranged a new system to transfer the money back into Syria, where the Syrian lira was still holding up as the street currency. They sent the money to another middleman in Kilis, who arranged for it to be smuggled across the border by ‘ants’, children and young men who would traverse the illegal routes several times a day carrying backpacks stuffed with cash. Inside Syria, they would trade it with money changers for the dollars flowing into the country in sponsorship for armed groups and aid projects.

  By 2015 the hawala agents were getting in on the business of holding money for the people-smugglers, too, the last link in a circular chain of misery. Syrians were selling everything in order to reach Europe through networks that were feeding money back to the very armed groups that had caused them to flee in the first place. The poorest, as always, were left behind in Turkey’s camps, together with the women and children who were waiting in agony for their husbands and brothers to complete the dangerous journey to Europe, so that they could come safely on a family reunification visa afterwards. And by welcoming refugees at their borders but not offering any safe or legal route to get there, the governments of rich Europe provided a never-ending stream of custom for the smugglers.