The Indefinite Abyss
A young man’s incredible story highlights the human cost of Europe’s migration crisis.
The balcony of Action For Education’s apartment offers beautiful views of Chios, a small Greek Island in the east Aegean Sea. Mountains in the north-west roll down to meet turqoise waters, enclosing the island’s main town where most of the 50,000 people on Chios live and work. Picturesque beaches and an 11th century monastery at Nea Moni, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, have attracted tourists from all of the world with the promise of curing their wanderlust. Just seven kilometres across the Chios Straight, the wind turbines that dot Turkey’s Anatolian coast are visible on a clear day. It is Chios’s proximity to Turkey that makes the isle a gateway to the rest of Europe for migrants fleeing war-torn countries in the Middle East.
The weather here is turbulent. Sunny days are often interrupted by heavy thunder storms that pass as quickly as they arrive. Much like the weather, the island’s soul has two faces. The calm serenity of the place masks a deeply disturbing horror, a manifest symptom of Europe’s greatest challenge in the modern era. For tourists, Chios is an idyllic get-away, but for the thousands of people who have survived the long journey here in search of a better life, these 325 square miles of wind-swept earth are a prison where harsh living conditions and an overbearing sense of hopelessness sour almost all aspects of life.
Note: The following are true events that took place between October, 2015, and February, 2018. The protagonist’s name has been changed to protect him and the names of smugglers have been withheld.
Najibullah had not been home to his small village outside Herat, Afghanistan, in more than a year. He missed the beautiful gardens where he had grown up and played as a child. It was in these same gardens that Najibullah and his father met with the Taliban when they came to ask for his father’s support in using the village as a staging base for their operations in Herat. The Afghan government had prioritised restoring order in Herat, Afghanistan’s second largest city, which borders both Iran and Tajikistan, due to the region’s economic importance. Now the Taliban needed a new place to conceal themselves.
Najibullah’s father, like his father before him, was the leader of their tribe, and his word with his people was law. The Taliban could not possibly hope to find comfort and aid in the village without his support. At first, the Taliban had tried to persuade him by appealing to his sense of religous duty as a Muslim. Najibullah’s father knew that to refuse the Taliban was a dangerous act, and a decision that he should not take alone. He told the Taliban he would speak with each family in the village before answering them. The village people shared their leader’s values, and all parties arrived at a clear consensus: if we help the Taliban, we are no different from them. When the Taliban later returned to the village to receive their response, Najibullah’s father told them that their actions were not worthy of Islam, and that he would communicate their comings and goings to the police if they operated in the village. The Taliban’s initially friendly demeanour quickly soured. They threatened Najibullah’s father’s life, but he calmly responded, “Allah brought me into this world, and he will take me away.” Although a good leader may be prepared to die, the Taliban knew a good father would not let his son be killed, and their gaze turned to Najibullah. Recognising the danger, Najibullah’s father forbade him from going to the village again.
Najibullah’s father wanted his eldest son to be a well-educated leader one day. The family had moved to Herat so that Najibullah could attend private school and university there. By the time he was in his early twenties, Najibullah had graduated with first class honours from one of Afghanistan’s top universities with a degree in Business Administration. His senior thesis examined the role of small and medium-sized banks in supporting small and medium-sized businesses in Afghanistan. He then went on to pursue a second degree in Computer Science with a focus on database security. He was top of his class and one semester away from graduating when he became homesick. After pleading with his father to allow him to return to the village, he was given permission for a quick visit under the guard of two of his cousins.
It is October, 2015. The music in the car Najibullah is riding in is playing at high volume, and Najibullah is in festive spirits as he tears through the desert at 100kph towards his family’s village. Suddenly the lead car in front of his own swerves violently, prompting Najibullah to sit up straight. Alert to the fact that something is wrong, he turns to see two Toyota 4x4s marked by the Taliban’s white flag racing across the desert towards them. The sharp crack of an automatic weapon rings out and a voice shouts over a megaphone ordering Najibullah’s car to pull over. Najibullah tells his driver to accelerate just as a hail of bullets hits the car. Although the driver is shot through the back, he manages to keep control of the vehicle and drives to the next police station. Najibullah tells the police officer there that the Taliban are chasing and shooting at him, but when the officer asks him to provide more information, Najibullah gives him a look of distrust before rushing to the hospital where the driver has surgery. They survive.
The Taliban kill 20 important individuals in and around Herat in the month following the attempt on Najibullah’s life. Police and intelligence officers, and village leaders like Najibullah’s father, are assassinated by Taliban riding 125cc Honda motorbikes that can race down Herat’s narrow alleyways to escape police pursuit.
Najibullah is sitting outside a friend’s shop in Herat in December, 2015, when he hears a shout. He turns to see his friend running towards him. Najibullah’s friend shoves him to the ground just as a single shot rings. A bullet slams into the wall behind Najibullah’s head, and as he looks up from the dirt, he sees Taliban assassins racing away on a motorbike. After surving the second attempt on his life in as many months, Najibullah and his father agree that they cannot rely on police to protect them, that it is impossible for Najibullah to live safely in Afghanistan anymore, and that he, his sister, and his brother-in-law must leave the country. Only now does Najibullah begin his long and dangerous journey westward, leaving behind his mother and father in Herat. Najibullah’s father survives an assasination attempt on 5th January, 2018. He is shot through the knee while sitting on the ground. The bones in his leg deflect the bullet away from its intended target: his heart.
Acquiring an Iranian visa is very difficult if you are Afghan. The Iranian government is by now well aware that many Afghans use visas to travel through Iran to Europe. Faced with this reality, Najibullah begins speaking with smugglers in order to find a way to the west. Although the Iranian border is only 124km from Herat, it is too dangerous to attempt a crossing there since Iranian police shoot on sight. Nimruz, Afghanistan, also has a border with Iran, but it is guarded by a long, high wall. The smugglers advise Najibullah that the safest route will take him through Daesh-controlled terroritory in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran, before reaching Turkey, and from there, Greece.
Najibullah, his sister, and brother-in-law rent a private taxi to take them from Herat to Farah, where they join others attempting to cross the Pakistan border. At Farah, Najibullah and his family pile into a smuggler’s small, white pick-up truck, alongside 19 other people, to continue on to Nimruz Province. When they reach the Pakistan border, Najibullah pays Daesh 200 Afghani, worth about €2.36 or $2.88, the equivalent of one day’s hard work in this part of the world, for his family’s safe passage across the border. The Daesh fighters let the cars through their checkpoint three at a time. They shine a flashlight in each person’s eyes to look for Hazaras, a people native to central Afghanistan, who, if discovered, are summarily executed. During Daesh’s inspection of the pick-up truck, they rip some rags off of the brake discs. Najibullah suddenly realises that they have travelled for 14 hours and over 180km without brakes. He overhears one Daesh remark to another that a car without brakes crashed at the checkpoint a few days before and killed 48 people.
Once past the Daesh checkpoint, the driver of the pick-up truck waits for the dead of night to have a better chance of avoiding the Pakistan police. He turns off the truck’s lights and creeps very slowly along the road under the light of the moon. Once the truck is some distance inside Pakistan, it pulls off the road and unloads the passengers in the desert where they spend the rest of the night. Pakistani police patrol the roads, but the desert belongs to bandits, smugglers, and their passengers. Najibullah’s contact gives them a password — shaghayegh, the word for a corn poppy flower in Persian— so that they will be able to tell his team of smugglers apart from potential kidnappers. The travellers drink water and eat cookies for dinner. Wolves howl in the brush nearby.
The smuggler returns early the next morning around 6am with two cars. Another car joins the convoy near Pankhurst, Pakistan, on the way to the border with Iran. The cars attempt to cross the Iranian border one at a time, but ten minutes after the first car sets off, Najibullah’s smuggler receives a call on his mobile phone saying that it has been stopped by police and that everyone has been arrested. A heated argument then ensues between Najibullah’s driver, who wants to proceed with the crossing, and the driver of the other car, who wants to turn back. Undeterred, Najibullah’s smuggler offers to go first to see if the crossing is now clear of police. Before leaving, he brandishes his Colt pistol at his passengers, telling them to make absolutely no noise. If they must pray, he says, they should do so in their hearts, and not even make a whisper.
Najibullah’s car approaches the border at a snail’s pace. After what seems like an eternity, the smuggler turns on the headlights and races deeper into the desert. Having managed to evade the border police successfully, the smuggler calls the other driver to tell him to make his attempt. A few minutes later, Najibullah sees his driver smash his phone on the ground—the third car has also been stopped by Iranian police. Najibullah’s car crossed the border between the time it took the police to take the first car to the police station and then to return to their post.
Once inside Iran, the group spend the night in Kuhak, a small village with fewer than 2,000 homes. The danger of being discovered is augmented by the heavy police presence in the frontier town. Najibullah and the other travellers sleep in the smuggler’s accomodation during the day and travel by night, first to Saravan, Khash, and Bam, and then on to Kerman and Yazd. There are ten passengers in the cramped car: one person on the floorboard of the passenger’s seat, one person on the passenger’s seat with their knees folded underneath them, six people across the back seat, and another four lying side by side in the trunk. During a rest stop in Yazd, the smuggler casually tosses a 2kg packet of cocaine that he had hidden under his seat onto the dashboard. Such a large quantity would receive the death-penalty in Iran, and Najibullah has no doubt that if the car had been stopped by police, the smuggler would have blamed one of the passengers for bringing it with them. From Yazd the group travel to Naein, where the driver has them exit the car once they reach the outskirts of the city. Naein is the capital of a province by the same name and there is a large police station in the city. A packed car raises suspicion, so they travel across the city at breakneck speed by motorcycle in two trips, six people at a time. From Naein they travel onto Kashan, and then to Eslamshahr in the outskirts of Tehran. The journey so far as taken 7 days.
The group arrives in Eslamshahr on 11th February, 2016 (22nd of Bahman in the Persian calendar), a day of celebration in Iran commemorating independence from the shah. Order is strictly enforced during the festivities, and the migrants are confined to the smuggler’s house with other travellers for a week. During this time, Najibullah notices a man from another group sitting in the corner of the house crying until his eyes are dry. Najibullah thought the man missed his family at first, but day after day the man does not move from the corner. Najibullah approaches the man to comfort him, and asks him what is troubling him. It transpires that the man came into Iran with his cousin and brother by a different, harder route through the mountains as part of a group of 85 people, mostly women and children. After passing the border, an Iranian-marked attack helicopter stumbled across them while on patrol. The smuggler told the group to hold their children up over their heads to show the helicopter pilot that they are not terrorists. When the helicopter passed over them, the group breathed a sigh of relief, but the helicopter then turned and began an attack run, strafing the group with its guns. The man saw bullets rip through the child his brother was holding up, before going on to hit his brother in the chest. The group scattered to take cover while the helicopter made a third pass to fire at the dead bodies strewn across the desert. The man was desperate to bury his brother’s body, but the other 12 survivors wanted to push on to the car that was waiting for them as quickly as possible. Torn between being left behind, and leaving his brother’s body to be eaten by the wolves he heard howling in the distance, the man was forced to leave his brother’s mangled body in the sand where he had fallen.
While waiting in Eslamshahr, Najibullah befriends another family. The mother of the family had had a surgery recently and was weak from her recovery, and the father was walking with two canes. They had three children with them, two boys and a girl, aged two, four, and six years old. Najibullah decides to help the family and arranges for another smuggler to take them through Maku, Iran, into Turkey. The smuggler tells them that there are two ways to cross at Maku. The first way is through the mountains, and has a 90 per cent chance of success. The second, the smuggler says, is a 30 minute walk, but it only works every other time. Because the family Najibullah is travelling with cannot make it through the mountains, they decide to take the riskier route in order to stay together. At the last moment, the smuggler tells Najibullah that he will not make the crossing with them, breaking the agreement they had made. The smuggler gives them directions to walk for five minutes until they reach a dry river bed. After crossing the riverbed, the smuggler tells them to follow a concrete street until it reaches another river, which he says is only thigh-deep. A car will be waiting for them a short distance from the other riverbank.
After a brief argument, Najibullah decides to go on without the smuggler and follows his directions until the two families reach the riverbed. There they hear voices shouting and a gunfight with automatic weapons. Clouds cover the light of the moon and they take cover in total darkness. When the gunfire stops, they continue along the concrete road until they reach the river. The water is icy from the snowfall and fast-moving. Najibullah takes a two-metre long stick to test the depths up and down the riverbank but cannot find anywhere suitable to cross. Gunfire and shouting again erupt nearby and the families hide in the reeds along the riverbank. A silhouette begins moving towards them out of the darkness. Najibullah fears the worst, but the figure beckons them over—it is another group of about 40 migrants.
The women in the group tie their hijabs together to make a rope, and the men fashion a dingy from a tractor tire tube. The strongest in the group swims across the river to set up a pulley system to cross the river. At one point, a woman falls out of the tube, and without hesitation, Najibullah’s brother-in-law dives into the water to save her life, even though he cannot swim. One of the last women to cross also falls in the water, and this time Najibullah dives in after her, dragging her to shore. Despite these heroic acts, the group refuses to wait for Najibullah and his family, and moves on without them once Najibullah has made it to the other side to hold the rope. Exhausted and freezing, Najibullah and his family take a few minutes to catch their breath. They find the car that is waiting for them and set off for the smuggler’s safehouse in Turkey. Upon arriving at the safehouse, one man from the larger group of 40 people sees Najibullah and approaches him. He tells Najibullah that the group had run into police shortly after leaving him by the riverbank, and that all but five of them were arrested by Turkish police.
After staying in the safehouse for three days, the two families travel by bus to Istanbul on February 21st, 2016. Once in Istanbul, Najibullah agrees to pay a smuggler $3,000 for his family to be taken by boat to Greece. Najibullah has left all of his money with his best friend in Herat because his father cannot move around the city freely without attracting the attention of Taliban. Najibullah calls his friend and tells him to put the funds in escrow at a money shop. The smuggler then makes the first of what will become eight attempts to cross the Chios Straight to Greece. They try to cross at Anatalya, and Bodrum, and Didim, and Dilek, but each time the smuggler is stopped by police while preparing the boat on the beach. It begins to dawn on Najibullah that his smuggler is not a professional, but merely a connection between other smugglers who is trying his hand at making the crossing himself for the first time. Najibullah becomes desperate, however, after his so-called smuggler calls him to tell him that the European Union have signed a deal with Turkey that states that any migrants that arrive in Greece after March 20th, 2016, will be automatically deported back to Turkey. The smuggler says that he has spent all of Najibullah’s money on the eight failed attempts, and he gives Najibullah two choices: either wait until other migrants arrive to pay for a crossing and risk missing the March 20th deadline, or pay him in advance so that he can prepare another boat. Under time pressure from the imminent EU-Turkey deal, Najibullah discusses his options with his father before calling his friend to tell him to release the funds from escrow. The smuggler collects the money, switches off his phone, and is never heard from again.
Unbeknownst to Najibullah, another smuggler was watching their failed attempts. He approaches Najibullah and offers to take him to Chios on March 19th, the day before the deal goes into effect, for $800 per person. Najibullah readily agrees, but the sea is rough on the 19th, making any crossing impossible. On the night of the 20th March, at the last possible moment, the fourth smuggler succeeds in crossing the straight. The boat touches European soil at 11:30pm. Despite his elation at finally arriving in Greece, Najibullah wastes no time celebrating, and rushes to take a taxi from the beach to the island’s migrant camp at Vial. Once he arrives at the camp, he runs to the camp’s office to register before midnight. The office is in a chaotic state, and no one is sure how the law applies to new arrivals in these final minutes. Najibullah has a short interview with Frontex (Europe’s border patrol) to determine his place of origin. The interviewer asks him to speak in his local dialect, and to name the major of Herat, and Herat’s representative in the national government, and to enumerate some local customs. After passing the interview, Najibullah is fingerprinted and photographed. He sees a sign hanging in the office enumerating the process for new arrivals: (1) wait in line, (2) have your interview, (3) have your fingerprints taken, (4) have your photograph taken, and (5) file an application for papers to be able to travel throughout Greece. After being photographed, Najibullah goes to ask for the papers that will allow him to leave Chios, but he is told that it is too late. The deadline has passed and migrants are no longer allowed to leave the island.
At the time of Najibullah’s arrival at Vial, the camp was closed, in the way that a prison is also closed. Migrants could not come and go from the camp freely, and had to have special permission to leave its confines. Barbed wire, squalid living conditions, and a lack of security created desperation and disease in equal measure inside the living containers. The situation was, and to this day is, exacerbated by as many as 2,400 migrants living in housing designed for a third of that number.
40 days after arriving in Chios, Najibullah and the other migrants in Vial were told by Greek officials that they would either have to apply for asylum in Greece, or else be deported to Turkey. Najibullah had planned to travel from Greece onto Sweden where he has family who would have been able to provide him with a job and a support network. Many other migrants similarly did not plan on staying in the country. The vast majority of Vial’s inhabitants rejected the ultimatum and refused to apply for aslyum in Greece. A few days after issuing their demand, the Greek authorities brought two police buses to Vial to begin deporting those who had refused to apply for asylum. After witnessing a few dozen unlucky migrants being rounded up and put onto the busses, Najibullah joined others who fled through a hole in the camp’s fence to hide in a nearby forest. After speaking with UNHCR officials at the camp the next day, Najibullah realised that he had no choice, and accepted that he would have to apply for asylum in Greece.
Some migrants began using the hole in the fence to walk to the city where they would buy alcohol to drink in the forest. Three or four times a week, a group of troublemakers would come home late at night to play music loudly, while banging on garbage bins and dancing around the camp. These shenanigans would regularly turn violent after midnight, and fights would develop between rival gangs of Arabs and Afghans. Towards the end of April, a massive brawl broke out in the camp along ethnic lines. While the police and army stood by watching, 1,000 people threw rocks, destroyed living containers and NGO offices, beat each other with metre long iron rods, and stabbed each other with knives. After four hours of violent madness, riot police dispersed the crowd by firing live rounds into the air and corralling people back into their living quarters. When the dust had settled, Najibullah looked out of his container’s shattered window to see that the entire camp had been destroyed. The blood-soaked earth reminded him of a war-zone.
The authorities stopped food from being brought into the camp in the 24 hours following the brawl in order to deprive the inhabitants of the energy needed to fight. For the next ten days, the police distributed food to the migrants a few containers at a time. The queue to receive lunch would last for three hours, and by the time Najibullah received his lunch, it would already be time for him to wait in line again for dinner. The authorities went so far as to limit access to medical professionals to two hours per day, denying desperately needed care to hundrends of migrants who had nothing to do with the violence. This maltreatment prompted the migrants to organise themselves in protest, which resulted in the chief of police opening the camp to allow Vial’s inhabitants freedom of movement around the island.
Although opening the camp was a step in the right direction, Vial remains a dangerous and dirty place to live. Women in particular face a horrendous amount of gender-based violence. Systematic oversights, such as a lack of lighting in bathrooms and no guards, have resulted in frequent and widespread abuses. Instead of addressing these failings, the European Union seems to be more interested in sweeping problems under the rug, and may even be significantly underreporting the number of migrants in official tallies to hide the true scale of the crisis.
It seems as if the Greek and EU asylum processes are designed to create the worst possible outcomes for migrants. A successful claim to asylum in Greece now requires that migrants prove that they have a threat to their life in Turkey, not just in their home country. Interviewers ask migrants to begin their stories from the moment they enter Turkey, and consider all else to be irrelevant. They are interested in how a migrant was treated by Turkish police, and the local population, and whether they had any other problems living in Turkey. Such an approach is designed to exclude systematically the maximum number of people from obtaining asylum in Greece. Migrants who are being smuggled through Turkey to Europe, usually over the course of only a few days, rarely leave their smuggler’s house, almost never speak to any Turks due to language barriers, and of course have no interest whatsoever in engaging with Turkish police since they have entered the country illegally. These circumstances create an absence of evidence of abuse in Turkey, which is then treated by asylum officials as evidence of an absence of abuse. This lack of abuse is then used as a pretext to justify deportations back to Turkey, regardless of any problems migrants will eventually, and inevitably, encounter there.
Najibullah learned about the legal process by translating for other migrants in Vial. When he arrived, he initially thought the local authorities were discriminating against Farsi speakers as it seemed as if Arabic speakers had their asylum applications processed quicker. He soon realised that the discrepancy was not intentional, but rather the result of a dire lack of Farsi translators on Chios. Between all NGOs, health, and legal services on the island, Najibullah estimtates there were three people who spoke both Farsi and English when he first arrived. As a result, he began volunteering as a translator for families visiting the local hospital, and established an informal classroom in Vial to provide some form of education to the children there. Najibullah’s hardwork and dedication resulted in him gaining full-time employment in various roles with world renowned organisations like the Norwegian Refugee Council and Médecins Sans Frontières. In the course of his work, Najibullah learned that migrants with certain specific vulnerabilities were fast-tracked for asylum. Medical disabilities that could not be adequately treated on Chios, such as cardiovascular or psychiatric problems, as well as victims of gender-based violence, and women who were pregnant, or families that needed to be reunified with minor children already living in Europe, were all more likely to receive asylum compared to others. Because Najibullah’s brother-in-law had heart problems, the family was able to receive a special designation in July, 2016.
Najibullah was told to travel to Athens to register for asylum in Greece on December 12th, 2016. He was then informed that his second appointment would be on January 31st, 2018. After waiting for more than a year for the second interview, Najibullah returned to Athens on the scheduled date only to be told that the Greek-Farsi translator that was assigned to his case was ill that day. As a result, his second stage interview has been postponed until March 6th, 2019, almost three years to the day that Najibullah arrived in Greece. It is hard to believe that the timing is coincidental; if an asylum seeker’s application has not been processed within three years from the day they arrived in Greece, then it is automatically granted.
Despite the incredible hardship that Najibullah faced in Afghanistan, in his travels to Greece, and in Greece itself, and despite having to live for years with the uncertainty of whether he will eventually be allowed to remain in Greece, his story is actually one of success, comparatively speaking. The other family with whom he had been travelling did not pass the threshold of vulnterability for asylum in Greece, even though the father was found to have three fractured vertebrae. Many others do not have the resources to make the journey west; many others do not survive the journey; many others survive the journey only to be sent home or to Turkey; many others commit suicide after becoming disillusioned with life in Greece; many others do not have a strong educational background, or opportunites for employment, or the ability to speak English. Most migrants have none of the tools necessary to exercise even a modicum of control over the events happening to them, and so become victims of circumstance, going from one day to the next without any of the practical means by which they might escape the dark reality that is imposed on them.
Najibullah had at first hoped to find a safe place to live, free from the threat of assasination by the Taliban. He was willing to forgo his privileged background and undertake janatorial work if it would mean that he could live a life without fear. Despite the setbacks he faced upon arriving in Greece, he has grown fond of his new home and intends to stay. He is learning Greek and intends to pursue first a Masters and then a PhD at a Greek university. Najibullah says he wants to develop himself in order to be like the sun, so that he can send help to others in all directions.
Despite the best efforts of many dedicated and highly-skilled actors, the situation in Chios is not improving materially. The NGOs that do tireless work here are a bandaid on a gaping wound, and while they succeed in changing lives one at a time, no wholistic solution to the migration crisis is in sight. The situation is compounded by Greece’s systematic difficulties with high national debt, inadequate infrastructure, and limited legal and governmental capacity. Many people see migrants as little more than a potential source of profit, and are willing to exploit the vulnerable for their own gain. Some, including those working directly on the front lines, are doing so not because of a higher calling, but simply because it is a pay cheque in a country where unemployment is still over 20 per cent. In tough emotional and physical conditions, burnout amongst aid actors is commonplace.
"It doesn’t matter. It is for refugees.”
— An employee of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, after being told that an apartment they are looking to rent is falling apart.
In truth, the situation is desperate by design. Mainland Europe’s initial open-arms approach has resulted in a significant backlash from citizens, many of whom are disenfranchised in their own right, and who have come to think that migrants only compound their existing problems. Public opinion polls suggest that a significant majority of Europeans believe that migration increases the risk of terrorism, that migrants from Iraq and Syria pose a significant threat, and that multicultural diversity does not make a nation a better place to live. These are the natural consequences of Europe’s deeply ingrained prejudices against Muslims, prejudices which have been enflamed by far-right political movements across the continent, biases in media coverage, and an over-emphasis by almost all politicians on the narrative that terrorism is an existential threat to western life. The EU’s unofficial policy of attempting to confine the migration crisis to Turkey, Greece, and Italy is bound to fail so long as destabalising western foreign policy drives more and more people from their homelands. It is clear that Europe is afraid, that its fear has become paralysis, and that its paralysis will only deepen the crisis over time.
Instead of blaming migrants for risking everything to escape death and persecution, the west should take a more self-critical approach. American four-star general Wesley Clark explicitly stated that his superiors in the Department of Defence were ready to invade Iraq within two-weeks of 9/11, despite there being no evidence of Saddam Hussein’s involvement in the attack, as part of a plan to topple seven Muslim countries: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. The false pretext that Hussein had WMDs is consistent with other public deceptions that have led America to war, such as Nayirah’s testimony to Congress that led to the Gulf War, and the Gulf of Tonkin Incident that resulted in the Vietnam War. It is also a well-known fact that America is covertly arming terrorist elements, some of which went on to become known as Daesh. In the great game of geopolitics, less euphmasically and more accurately considered a power struggle to appropriate natural resources, it should be clear that Muslims are some of the most downtrodden victims. This inconvenient fact can only obscured by portraying Muslims as the enemy, as part of a broader strategy to distract the People from the rampant corruption in their domestic economic and political systems, which does much more damage to their interests than terrorism ever will.
The solution to the migration crisis, in the absence of any meaningful European action or resolve, can therefore be traced back to recapturing the American political system, with the hope that the U.S. may once again act in the interests of the world. Only then will America be able to exercise the moral and practical leadership necessary to address the underlying factors that drive the migration crisis, international terrorism, domestic political divisions, and social and economic repression alike. America, for all of its failures, is still an unparalleled testament to the virtues of multicultural society, and living proof that a nation is made stronger by its diversity and inclusiveness. Ask yourself, how many of the huddled masses, how many of the homeless, how many of the tempest-tost who have been lost at sea, would flourish in Life if only they were given the same opportunities that we enjoy?
