From Hell to Purgatory

James Burgess
Aug 28, 2017 · 16 min read

Portrait photos: Shannon Ashton

www.shannonashtonphotography.com · Facebook · Instagram

The refugee camp in Serres, northern Greece, is one of many small camps scattered through the country, another site that has become a more permanent fixture than expected. The rows of air-conditioned portacabins are home to around 300 Yazidis, a religious minority from northern Iraq. Like many refugees in Greece, they have been stuck in the country for over a year, waiting for the creaking bureaucratic systems and political standoffs of the EU and Greece to play out.

Many groups have suffered at the hands of ISIS, but few have endured such unique horror as the Yazidis — the majority of whom lived in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Yazidis have an unusual religion, distinct from others in the region. They believe in a single god who created seven guardian angels to watch over the earth. But ISIS, applying their warped interpretation of Islam and twisting the Yazidi faith, call Yazidis polytheists and devil-worshippers, using this as an excuse to systematically kill their men, rape their women and sell them as sex slaves, abduct and indoctrinate their children and train them to kill.

The 3rd of August 2017 marked the third anniversary of the start of the genocide of Yazidis by ISIS. ISIS fighters swept through the majority Yazidi town of Sinjar in northern Iraq on that day in 2014, rounding up Yazidi civilians, killing men, older boys and older people and imprisoning women and children. Women and girls were sold into slavery within ISIS networks where they were, and continue to be, raped, beaten, sexually abused and forced to work in ISIS fighters’ households. Young boys were separated from their families, indoctrinated and trained to fight for ISIS. Some women and children have been freed following the recapture of Mosul by Iraqi forces, but thousands more remain in captivity in ISIS strongholds around Raqqa, and the physical and emotional trauma of their ordeals has done lasting damage.

The Yazidis in Serres camp are among those fortunate enough to have escaped, many fleeing from Sinjar as ISIS closed in. But they all have frightening tales of fleeing to Sinjar mountain or to Iraqi Kurdistan, before making long journeys across Syria and Turkey. And they all have family or friends left behind, killed or held in captivity.

Soswil, a refreshingly young-looking 17-year-old (many of the people in the camp look old beyond their years), whose name has been changed to protect her identity, told me:

The day of the genocide I was with my family, except for my father. He was at war fighting for us. We fled to another village and we were hiding in a house. There were a lot of old people and children, and at 2 o’clock in the morning we wanted to flee, but we realised the old people and children couldn’t. At 4 o’clock in the morning we knew they were coming and so we waved a white flag. They took the guns from the men, and separated the children, women and men from each other. Then they took the girls at 7am, and the IS soldiers said ‘let’s do something with the girls.’ One of the IS commanders came and said ‘no, no, no, they are in my hands, so you don’t touch them.’”

Soswil and her family managed to escape from a house where they were being held, when the ISIS troops fled fearing the Kurdish PKK were advancing. But many were not so fortunate.

Guli, a middle-aged mother of 11 children, said “My brother’s daughter was captured, and they took her seven children with her. After three years now we just found out she got freed again. My uncle, poor old man, he couldn’t hear. He was stuck in Sinjar and they caught him, and we still don’t know what happened.”

Kordi, a 33-year-old mother of six, whose husband is in Germany, came face to face with ISIS.

They took the men from us and took them to the streets to kill them there,” she said. “My three cousins, my husband, and my uncle had to put their hands on the back of their heads, and we were praying to God and said, ‘We know you will kill us right now, and God is seeing it.’

“Then another Arabic man came, and we knew that these people were neighbours and our friends in the past, but we couldn’t see their faces because they all had black masks on. One of them put his hand on another’s gun and said, ‘Put it down because they can’t flee, because if they do they’ll try to walk past us. Let’s first take care of the others.’

“They went to the other houses and took all the men outside and killed them in front of us and took all the bodies and piled them on each other in a huge pile. When they killed our men, women were screaming and running through the dead bodies and trying to wake them up. The soldiers pulled them by their hair and threw them into cars. Then we fled inside and hid in our garden. We waited until 6 in the morning and then we tried to escape.

“Our men ran back inside, and their skin turned yellow because of what they saw and because of what they experienced there in front of the door. We made ourselves small and tried to walk step by step. I held my children’s mouths so they wouldn’t scream. We were walking from village to village, hiding, until midnight.

“Our kids suffered a lot because they didn’t get anything to drink or anything to eat, and all the sand and dirt that got on their bodies was so much that after a while it was just too much for them. We saw cars going by, and we said, ‘We can’t let our kids suffer anymore.’ We had two possibilities: if these are IS, they should just kill us right away because the kids will die here. Or maybe they are people who can help us. So we got out in front of the car and said ‘Stop, please.’ And they said, ‘We will help you, we are Yazidis too.’

“From that day on my daughter didn’t speak anymore, still to this day.”

Smer Brahim Bajo, in his 70s, fled on foot from his village north of the Sinjar mountains, after putting his family in a pickup truck to escape. “We didn’t have enough space in the car,” he said. “It was a very small car, but we still tried to press 30 people in it.”

Many I spoke to told of how the Kurdish peshmerga fled before the ISIS attack, giving no warning to the civilian population in the area.

I heard that ISIS was coming when I got a phone call from people on the other side of the mountain who had been attacked,” Smer said. “They told me they killed a lot of people, and a lot fled, and that I needed to flee too, because the same thing would happen to me. The peshmerga didn’t give any warning at all.

“I and 20 other old men, we were staying in our town, and lived our life for four days. I was looking outside on the fourth day, and I saw a pickup driving outside and saw that it was an ISIS car with soldiers. There was another car on the other side of the street that shut the street down. Then I realised these people were from our neighbourhood in the village next to us, and they had just gone over to ISIS.

“We elderly men felt frightened and scared, so we tried to hide everyone in houses. There were still women and children who were hiding too, because they didn’t want to leave the town. We told each other we shouldn’t go all together in one building because they would get us all.

“We were hiding and we heard shots. They were killing old women and old men. We heard the shootings. We were always on the phone to others, asking where they were. They said the ISIS soldiers are on this street, and now they are on this street, and then out of nowhere they said they were on our street, and we were very frightened.

“There was a woman with her three or four children who was hiding in her house. The woman was washing her kids outside, and all the water ran from street to street. ISIS saw there was water coming from somewhere. They opened the door and looked at the kids who were with the mother, but didn’t say anything. There were five people hiding in one room. There were two other people hiding there too, Kamar and Qasem. These old people tried to flee but they captured them and killed them. They left the kids and the woman alone.

“NIght came and there were just three of us left. We found out that ISIS had captured three buildings that were the main checkpoints in the village. We three together saw there was a chance in the night. We went very silently, hiding behind walls, to the mountains of Sinjar.”

Life didn’t get easier once on the mountain, and many more died of dehydration and exhaustion, before the Kurdish PKK and international forces forged a path north to relative safety in Syria. Guli, who has only one kidney and high blood pressure, spent 7 days on the mountain. She had a small bottle of water and was trying to ration it.

There was a woman walking past with her three sons, and I realised how thirsty her kids were and I couldn’t do it any more, so I gave them my water,” she said. “She said ‘no, you need to take it.’ I said ‘no, it doesn’t matter. It’s just like I’m fasting today, I won’t eat and drink today.’ She gave a little bit to one child, and the other two went a little bit crazy, so I said to give it to all of them.

“There was a woman who was scratching her face, bloody, and the man was crying. I asked ‘why are you crying? What happened?” and they said ‘on the way when we were walking here they came and took our three daughters away from us.’

“On the mountain there was just a little water coming out, it was very dirty and full of diseases, but we had to drink it. We stayed there for 7 nights. All the time there were children crying and screaming, I didn’t know what to do.”

There followed months and years of waiting in camps in Turkey, Syria and northern Iraq, before families and individuals made the perilous journey to Greece, searching for safety or a way of continuing with their lives, paying traffickers thousands of euros in smuggling fees.

Haji Xelil, a former Iraqi military police officer in his mid-40s, whose name has been changed to protect his family, fled to Iraqi Kurdistan when he saw ISIS fighters approaching his village.

I’m from a village in the middle of the Sinjar area, and we saw at 2 in the morning a lot of fighting in a village on the outskirts. I looked out the window just by chance. We thought the peshmerga were behind us to support us. Then at 11 in the morning we found out that they had already fled.” Haji left his village that morning with his family in a pickup truck. “It took from 11 in the morning until 4 in the morning the next day to reach the Kurdish border. We ran out of gas. My mother was sick.”

But they couldn’t stay long in Iraqi Kurdistan. There were no prospects of peace and security, and they felt still too close to the conflict.

The Kurdish people living there helped our people a lot. The government didn’t take care of us. I left Kurdistan after 17 days because I couldn’t handle it any more. We were trying to reach Turkey through the Kurdish border mountains, and I felt I would fall down and die, that I couldn’t do it any more. We were walking for 8 or 9 hours. I was walking with my mother and always putting her on my back to carry her. The PKK helped us, and put the disabled and elderly people on donkeys and horses to help us reach the border faster. Some of them fell off the animals and onto the mountainside and died there.

“I went to a PKK camp in Turkey. They told us, ‘don’t go out, because there are ISIS people here in Turkey and you have to watch out.’ We waited there until the 20th of February 2016, then we left. A lot of people went to try and go to Europe, so we said to ourselves we would do the same.”

Haji told me they had borrowed money to pay the smugglers, as they couldn’t afford the fees to get on a smuggler boat to Greece.

*

Hashim, a bright young student with an interest in engineering, had been making model boats and diggers with hydraulic arms in camps in Turkey before having to leave to continue his journey with his family to Greece. Now 18, he is with two of his sisters, but the rest of his family is still in Turkey.

After the living hell of fleeing ISIS, and enduring the hard journeys through Syria and Turkey, people made the perilous crossing to the eastern Aegean islands of Greece, trying to reach what they hoped would be the safety and freedom of Europe.

“We were in a boat, the size was 1 metre wide and 8 metres long, and there were 60 people on the boat,” Haji said. “We were on the water for 4 hours, and the boat was filling with water so our feet were wet. It was hard for us, but we reached Greece.”

Many had endured a similar ordeal. “The smugglers called us and told us we needed to inflate the boat we were going with,” Smer said. “There was something like a board,” he indicates the wooden bench we’re sitting on, “that we needed to put inside the boat so that it would stay flat. It was built for 25 or 30 people, but there 60 people in it. We were like chickens in a coop, pushed together on top of each other.”

As with so many thousands others, what they have found after risking their lives yet again crossing to Europe is a confusing, bewildering limbo land of scant information, painfully slow bureaucracy and an uncertain future. Many have waited for over a year in camps in Greece. They are safe, they now have shelter and basic provisions, but the freedom to continue their lives is absent.

I don’t like it here,” Soswil said. “I miss my father a lot. He left one year earlier than us to go to Germany, and I was so happy when I heard about it in Turkey that we are going to my father, and now we are stuck here. I’m with my mother and my siblings. I have one sister here and a brother, and my other two sisters are already in Germany. They got transferred over there.”

The Yazidi community was transferred to Serres last year following tensions with other communities in Nea Kavala camp.

We were again in tents, and we made our food on fire here,” Soswil said. “They brought us to apartments in Nea Vrasna and said ‘you will stay here for four months, then we will take you back to boxes that will look like your home.’ But they weren’t like our homes. They were still bad, but better than the tents that we used to live in. I remember before when we lived in tents when it was raining our clothes got wet, it wasn’t very good for us. And I’m still here. It’s been around a year and eight months that I’ve been living in Greece.”

*

Some are more positive about their present situation. “I like my situation a lot, it’s very good here,” Hamo, a 21-year-old former student tells me. “I wish all my family members could be here in Serres. Our plan wasn’t to stay in Serres, it was to move on, but Serres is still good.” His younger brother is alone in Germany. Most of the rest of his family is going through the family reunification process to move to Germany, but he and two brothers have separate files with the Greek asylum office because they are over 18.

But the frustration with the reality of existence as a refugee in Europe is palpable. “I thought we were coming to Europe to see human beings, and wanted our kids to see these human beings that we’d heard about in Europe,” one man said to me. “And until now we are in camps.”

Now NGO services are being withdrawn, as EU funding is redirected from international NGOs to the Greek government. Gaps are starting to open up, as NGOs pull out before a replacement is in place. Save the Children, who were providing education in the camp in Serres, left at the beginning of August as their funding came to an end. Now, parents have no activities in the camp for their young children through the hot summer weeks.

Language lessons and music activities provided by the small grass roots organisations We Are Here and Lifting Hands continue in the park nearby for adults and teenagers, with the camp managers refusing camp access to them.

It was very hard for me,” Said tells me. He’s in his mid-30s, a single parent of 3 young girls. “Very hard. Because they took a lot of care of my children. In the morning Save the Children came and took care of my kids, and I had some space for me. But suddenly I have to take care of them all the time. I bring them to the park with me, because there’s no one else to take care of them. My kids still can’t sleep, because they are still afraid and they still see so much. They still think someone is coming.”

Clear information is in short supply in the camp, and everyone tells me they don’t know when their asylum case will be heard or when they can expect to receive a decision. Translation services are in short supply, especially for the Kurdish dialect that the Yazidis speak, and paperwork is often in Greek and English. It is also clear that psychosocial support and counselling services are badly lacking, given the trauma people have experienced.

Zaid, a young man in the camp who has brothers in Germany, tells me, “I know I have got psychological issues. I’m always going to the psychiatrist in the camp, and they tell me, go over here and get some classes. And I’m trying to, but I can’t sleep at night.”

“Nobody is there anymore from the NGOs,” Kordi said. “I come sometimes to the German classes here. I like the teacher a lot.” But she is still worried about her children, and doesn’t know when she’ll be reunited with her husband in Germany. “We’ve taken my daughter to a specialist here in Greece twice, and they said, ‘she will get over it, she is traumatised and that’s the reason why she doesn’t talk,’ but she still to this day hasn’t started speaking.”

Every few weeks, more of the Yazidis are finally transferred to Germany, or sometimes another country, giving an opportunity for new starts. But the rate of transfers is painfully slow, and Germany has imposed a lower limit on the monthly quota of refugees it will take.

Kordi’s husband has been living in Germany for a year. “We spent a lot of money to get transferred, because in Germany we needed to get our papers together and our marriage certificate translated into German and the documents showing that these are my children translated into German,” she said. “My husband even borrowed money to get all the paperwork ready for us to go there.”

*

In the park I met Zidane, a confident, smart 18-year-old who had come from Germany to visit his family stuck in Greece. He had gone with some other family members overland from Turkey, first to Bulgaria, then through Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia and Austria before finally reaching Germany. His family paid a smuggler €6,000 to take him as far as Serbia, and from there they were on their own. His family should be reunited with him in Germany when the application process is finally completed.

Sometimes I think about my journey from Iraq to Germany, but I don’t really want to think about it any more,” He said. “Because that was part of my childhood, and I want to focus on my future. I’ve closed that part. In the beginning I still had pain thinking about it, but right now I’ve given it a place in my life, and I just live right now.”

I ask him what he wants to be when he finishes his studies. “I want to be a lawyer, but for the people, not for the government. Because in my former country we don’t have law and order or rights that you can enforce. I really want to make a difference in that. We didn’t have rights and I want to help people.”

Others express hope for the future too. Family and community is a recurring theme. “I just wish to see my son again, and that we are all family together,” Smer said. “This is what I wish for us, that we are all together again.”

Some things are lost forever. Some things cannot be undone. The occasions when people are resettled give hope. Some of the people are saved, but the culture is threatened. Yazidis do not marry outside of the Yazidi community, and conversion to the religion is not possible, so the scattering of the diaspora — with families strung out between Iraq, Turkey, Greece and Western Europe — is devastating.

“One thing I want to let the world know about Yazidis,” Zaid said at the end of our conversation. “I just want to let the world know that we exist, that we are not hiding.”

A version of this story was first published by Are You Syrious on 27 August 2017.


Originally published at jamesjburgess.wordpress.com on August 28, 2017.

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