by Nick Thorpe
‘It was so cold. We have never seen weather like this before, so rainy, so foggy, so deadly!’ Did the weather, and the hardships of the journey make her regret setting out? ‘No,’ she laughed! ‘I want so much to see my father!’ Could she imagine ever returning to Syria? Now her voice fell, to almost inaudible. The sound of the generators swelled. The rustling of the anoraks of all the people, shuffling forward, the coughing of children and adults. ‘Never,’ she said. ‘I lost my brother there.’ She could hardly speak with grief. ‘Now I want to start a new life. The life that we deserve.’
On the far side of the border, the Austrians were getting organised, at both an official and volunteer level. Among the police, men and women with Dolmetscher – interpreter – written on their jackets, moved through the crowds. There were regular loudspeaker announcements in Arabic, Farsi and Pashtu. Buses were being prepared to take them on to the nearest refugee camp in Salzburg. All under the watchful eyes of the Austrian police. One had the impression that Austrian order was being imposed on a weary, huddled mass of people. Everyone was being registered, some for the first time since Turkey. But the priority was humanitarian. They were treated as refugees seeking help, with a right to be here, not economic migrants.
Petra Leschantz was an Arabic-speaking lawyer from Salzburg, who organised a volunteer group called Border Crossing Spielfeld.19 I met her at Spielfeld on 21 October. ‘There are so many stops, so many collecting points on the journey,’ she explained, ‘it’s true many people lost track of each other, but they find each other again. The Red Cross is helping with that a lot.’ Over the coming months, Border Crossing Spielfeld became one of the most motivated, best organised groups on the whole route, shepherding people into Austria, keeping track of refugees once they were there, or on the road to Germany, and fighting the push-back in the courts, when Austria started sending refugees back to Slovenia and Croatia. But all that was still to come.
‘The grape-harvest is long gone,’ I wrote in one report:
But the Balkan grapevine the migrants use to find out where they can go, what they might expect, and even who is bombing their country now, buzzes with news, and rumours. Europe is having second thoughts about accepting more migrants, they realise. They are in a mad rush, before the drawbridges are drawn up in front of the gates of all the castles of Europe. Before the archers appear on the battlements.
It was time to go back to Hungary, for a rest. I had hardly slept a night at home in Budapest since 21 August. Before leaving Slovenia, Gergö Somogyvári, a friend and documentary film-maker with whom I had been working, asked us to record a short video message for his friend Sara, who was about to marry Daniel, a journalist at Le Monde newspaper in Paris. We recorded it in the style of a news report, in front of a police station in Maribor, and sent it to the happy couple. That weekend, it was played among many others at their wedding, which Gergö missed because he was working with me.
*
On 25 October, Balkan leaders gathered in Brussels for a mini-summit on the refugee crisis, attended by Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Romania and Slovenia.20 They agreed a seventeen-point plan of ‘operational measures’, designed to stop them blaming each other. In numerical terms, big refugee or holding camps were to be set up through the Balkans, administered by the UNHCR. On the eve of the gathering the Bulgarian prime minister Bojko Borisov announced that ‘Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia will be ready to close their borders to migrants if Germany and Austria do the same.’ On 29 October, the Austrian interior minister announced that a small fence would be built at Spielfeld, either side of the border crossing, to better control those entering the country. On the refugee issue, Chancellor Werner Faymann and Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz were rapidly moving away from Angela Merkel and closer to the position of Viktor Orbán.
*
13 November was a Friday. At about twenty to ten in the evening, Daniel, the groom for whom we had made our wedding video, was standing by the window of his second-floor flat in Paris, which overlooks the back of the Bataclan concert venue, when he noticed crowds of people pouring out of the emergency exits, running and shouting. He assumed it must be some kind of fight. Following his journalistic instincts, he started filming them with his mobile phone.21 Then he heard shooting inside. Outside in the street, some kept running, some collapsed in the narrow street. He saw people coming to the aid of those who were lying on the ground. He shouted from the window – ‘What’s happening?’ But no one replied. He rang a colleague at Le Monde, who told him that the Bataclan had been taken over by armed men.
‘It was only then that I realised that this is not just a brawl, but something terrible. I went downstairs to open the front door, so people could take refuge. But no one wanted to stop, they just kept running.’ The shooting seemed to have stopped. There were several bodies lying in the street. The nearest was a man in a red T-shirt lying face down, groaning. Another man in black clothes went up to him. Daniel and the man in black began to pull the wounded man towards the shelter of the doorway of his block of flats. Once he was inside, Daniel went back to close the door. The street looked deserted now.
‘Then I heard what sounded like a firework, explode in my arm. I didn’t hear the shot. I realised that I’d been hit. Someone was firing at me, but I couldn’t see them. I felt a terrible pain in my arm and blood starting pouring from it.’ Thinking back later, he realised that whoever had shot him must have come out from the Bataclan, which is on the first floor, seen two men helping an injured one, and wanted to kill all three of them.
The bullet went right through his upper left arm and lodged itself in the digital doorbell of the house. He tore his shirt, and made a tourniquet above the wound, to slow the flow of blood. Then he attended to the other injured man. The man in black clothes, who had helped him get the other into the doorway, had disappeared. A neighbour helped Daniel and the man in the red T-shirt, who had a bullet in his leg, into the flat. They rang a doctor for advice on how to treat their wounds till the ambulance arrived.
‘It took a very long time. The police had blocked off the road. I felt awful, to be in the centre of Paris, bleeding to death, and no one could come to help us.’ In the next room, a small child slept through the whole drama. Neighbours tried to make Daniel, and the man in the red shirt, an American called Matthew, more comfortable.
Three heavily armed men had entered the Bataclan venue at 21.30, on either side of the bar, and opened fire indiscriminately into a crowd of about 1,500 young people watching a concert by a California-based band Eagles of Death Metal. The Eagles were a widely respected rock band, while their name was a parody of death metal music. Those whom Daniel encountered managed to escape through the emergency exit to the left of the stage. A video shot by a fan shows guitarist Eden Galindo suddenly stop playing as the bullets crackle through the crowd. A witness watching the concert from the balcony above said the crowd was swept aside ‘like a gust of wind through the wheat’. Eighty-nine people died, and hundreds were injured. The three gunmen who carried out the massacre then took a hundred fans hostage. A little after midnight, French anti-terrorist police stormed the venue, and the killers blew up their suicide vests.
The attack at Bataclan was just one of a carefully coordinated series across Paris that night. They began at 21.16 when a suicide bomber, denied entry to the stadium where a French-German international soccer match was taking place, blew himself up outside, killing one person. The plan had been to blow himself up inside the packed football stadium, provoking a stampede to the exits, where two other suicide bombers were waiting.
Three more terrorists opened fire at three different cafés in central Paris, around the same time. The total death toll for the night reached 130, with 368 others injured. It was the highest loss of life in France since the Second World War.
All nine of the perpetrators had fought in Syria.22 The probable ringleader, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was a twenty-eight-year-old Belgian-born citizen whose father had emigrat
ed to France from Morocco in 1975. He had been imprisoned three times for violent crime. Saleh Abdeslam, twenty-seven, was also born in Belgium to Moroccan parents who came to France in the 1960s. The two men were friends, who may have first met in prison, living in the predominantly immigrant Molenbeek neighbourhood of Brussels. Abdeslam ran a bar called Les Béguines and was known to be fond of drugs, motorbikes and chasing girls. According to Hungarian and Belgian press reports, published months after the attacks, Abdeslam made two or three trips to Hungary in early and mid-September 2015 in a hired car, to pick up other perpetrators, travelling with false papers up the Balkan route.23 Omar Mostefai, Samy Amimour and Foued Mohamed-Aggad allegedly stayed in the Grand Park Hotel in the Zugló suburb of Budapest from 9 to 16 September, under the names Jamal Salah, Fooad Moosa and Husein Alkhlf. Abdeslam arrived in Budapest on 17 September, rested a few hours at the Hotel 30, just down the road from the Grand Park, then at ten that evening set out across Austria and Germany back to Belgium, with the three men.
The story was trumpeted in the Hungarian government media as proof of the close connection between illegal migration and terrorism.24 The irony was that they travelled undetected because that was the period when Hungary unilaterally suspended registration, in response to the German decision to suspend the Dublin procedures.
Omar Ismail Mostefai was a twenty-nine-year-old French citizen, whose parents came originally from Algeria. He was one of the gunmen at the Bataclan who blew himself up when the anti-terrorist police moved in. Samy Amimour was the second Bataclan attacker, a Frenchman who had fought in Syria. In June 2014 his father visited the country, in a failed attempt to persuade him to leave IS and come home. The third Bataclan attacker, Foued Mohamed-Aggad was also born in France, to Moroccan parents.
A Syrian passport, in the name of Ahmad Al-Mohammed, born in 1990, was found among the bodies. The Greek authorities confirmed that they had registered a man of that name who arrived on a dinghy with 198 others on 3 October. The French justice minister, Christiane Taubira, suggested that the document was either a fake, or a genuine passport issued in a false name. IS conquests in Syria meant that legitimate equipment used to produce passports had fallen into their hands. Smugglers in Turkey also encouraged refugees heading for the coast to surrender their passports, as part of their fare. Many of those passports were then resold, especially since August, and the German announcement that Syrians were likely to get asylum in Germany. The going price in Turkey for a Syrian passport was $2,000. Back in Syria, the Assad regime was selling them to its own citizens for $400 a piece.
Even before the Paris attacks, the intelligence services of several European countries had compiled a list of the serial numbers of 5,000 genuine blank passports from Syria, and 10,000 from Iraq which had gone missing when IS forces occupied the cities where they were stored – Raqqa and Deir al-Zor provinces in Syria, and Anbar, Nineveh and Tikrit in Iraq. One source in the Balkans told me that President Assad’s secret services were working closely with German intelligence, with details of IS figures travelling to and from Europe. The list was being constantly updated.
On 20 November, the New York Times published profiles of some of the 130 victims.25 They included Kheir Eddine Sahbi, an Algerian violinist who had been in France for only a year, studying ethnomusicology at the Sorbonne, and Amine Ibnolmobarak, a twenty-nine-year-old Moroccan. Most of the victims were young French men and women. Antoine Leiris’s wife Hélène, a make-up artist and mother of their seventeen-month-old son Melvil, died at the Bataclan.26 He wrote an open letter to her murderers on Facebook:
On Friday evening you stole the life of an exceptional person, the love of my life, the mother of my son, but you will not have my hatred. I don’t know who you are and I don’t want to know, you are dead souls. If this God for whom you kill blindly made us in his image, every bullet in the body of my wife is a wound in his heart. So no, I will not give you the satisfaction of hating you. You want it, but to respond to hatred with anger would be to give in to the same ignorance that made you what you are. You would like me to be scared, for me to look at my fellow citizens with a suspicious eye, for me to sacrifice my liberty for my security. You have lost. I saw her this morning. At last, after nights and days of waiting. She was as beautiful as when she left on Friday evening, as beautiful as when I fell head over heels in love with her more than 12 years ago. Of course I am devastated with grief, I grant you this small victory, but it will be short-lived. I know she will be with us every day and we will find each other in heaven with free souls which you will never have. Us two, my son and I, we will be stronger than every army in the world. I cannot waste any more time on you as I must go back to my son, who has just woken from his sleep. He is only just 17 months old, he is going to eat his snack just like every other day, then we are going to play like every other day and all his life this little boy will be happy and free. Because you will never have his hatred either.
*
The February morning sunlight shone in through the windows of the Zastava weapons factory in Kragujevac, central Serbia. Ferns and rubber plants were arranged along the window sill. The delicate leaves of one fern framed the serious face of the former Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito, in his famous pale suit. In front of one table, where a pretty, dark-haired woman laboured with an AK-47 Kalashnikov, was an icon of the Virgin Mary. Despite the sunlight, a candle burnt on her desk – not for religious reasons, the manager explained, but in order to check for imperfections in the barrels of the guns. All six of the machine-guns used at the Bataclan were made here, he had already confirmed to French investigators, who presented him with their serial numbers. Mostly in the 1980s, just in time to be used in the wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. He shrugged – ‘We are not responsible for what happens to them after they leave our gates.’ Besides, they produce, at the moment, 1,500 Kalashnikovs a day. It is the job of others to trace them, if they can.
In the firing range of the factory, where new models are tested, we were invited to shoot machine-guns, sniper rifles – anything we wanted. We politely declined, so the chief engineer demonstrated them himself, while we filmed and took photographs. We wore headphones, to protect our hearing from the roar of the guns. The tinkling of the spent cartridges on the hard ground was more poignant. I remembered times in Sarajevo, at the beginning of the war, when bullets ricocheted off the wall beside me when a sniper opened fire. A policeman screamed at me to lie down. I did, in a puddle in the pouring rain, a few metres from the safety of the entrance of the Hotel Europa. The Kragujevac factory had the pleasant atmosphere of any craftsman’s workshop, with each stage of the weapons’ manufacture, the polished wood and gleaming steel, the precision instruments, and the end products, neatly stacked for the next shipment.
Our attempt to trace the guns used in Paris led us to the Serb entity inside Bosnia, known as Republika Srpska. The town of Višegrad on the deep blue Drina River was made famous by the Yugoslav Nobel Prize-winning author Ivo Andrić with his novel Bridge on the Drina. The Bosniaks – Bosnian Muslims – were mostly massacred or driven out during the war. It is a miserable city today, for all its physical beauty. The famous Serbian film director Emir Kusturica has tried to inject a bit of Serb nationalist life back into the town, with a series of new buildings along the river, culminating in a brand new Serbian Orthodox church. There are murals glorifying another terrorist, Gavrilo Princip, who assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo in June 1914, and sparked the First World War. In a café beside the Drina, we sat down with a Bosnian Serb army veteran, who admitted to smuggling guns regularly to Western Europe. It was a small-scale trade, he told us. The Serbs always had more guns than the Bosniaks, he explained, and when the war ended in 1995, instead of handing them in as they were required to do under the Dayton Peace Accords, a large number were hidden, under the floorboards of houses, in dusty attics, or buried carefully in oiled cloths in the nearby forests, to be dug up for u
se in the next war against the Muslims. As the years passed, and the war pensions of the veterans shrank or stagnated, more and more guns were traded on the black market. And the market led to the criminal networks, all with former Yugoslav connections, in Northern and Western Europe. The procedure was simple, he explained. A few guns and grenades in the boot of a car, close to the spare wheel. In more complicated – and expensive operations – built into specially designed compartments. He personally sold Kalashnikovs for €200 each, though he was aware they fetched over €1,000 apiece in France. The route was expensive to organise, and the risk of discovery not minimal. Long prison sentences awaited those who were caught. But what could he do? What could he afford with his pension of €200 a month? It wasn’t even enough to pay for firewood in winter.
What would he say if he found out that some of the guns he sold were used by Islamist extremists at the Bataclan, I asked. ‘I would shoot myself,’ he said, twisting his face into a grimace of pain and fury. Then took another swig of beer.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A WAREHOUSE OF SOULS
Exactly because I am an obstetrician, I am aware how difficult, how strenuous, how expensive, and how many hours it takes to give birth. For this reason I am very angry how many lives are being lost, in war, and at sea, in this flow of migrants.
Yannis Mouzalas, Greek Minister for Migration
A half-moon hung low in the sky over the Balkan mountains, west of the Bulgarian town of Dragoman. Hill paths and tracks wound steeply upwards to the left of the main road, towards the ridge which marks the border with Serbia. Wooden beehives, painted yellow, blue and white, glowed strangely translucent in the gathering dark, beside the old wells in peasant gardens, among the vines. Few houses boasted lights in the windows. The local people have grown old, and their sons and daughters have left for the city, or for Western Europe. They come back for barbecues in the summer, when the hillside wakes up to human voices again. A slight hum of traffic rose from the road below and I could make out a filling station, then the thin necklace of lights of the border crossing point in the valley. The mountains look down onto a corner of the Thracian plain, down towards the Bulgarian capital only 45 kilometres away.