oday is Dozkin and Serwan’s first wedding anniversary.
One year ago, the Kurdish couple celebrated their love surrounded by family and friends in a Kobani wedding hall. Today, they celebrate one year of marriage by waiting, hand in
hand, in line for deportation papers at a refugee camp in Serbia, just over the Macedonian border.
“What are we supposed to do?” asks 26-year-old Dozkin, a fourth-year law student, rubbing her round belly. “It’s our destiny.”
She’s nine months pregnant with a baby girl.
“Usually you get married and have a honeymoon,” says economics student Serwan, 29. “We were married for 20 days when [the Islamic State] came into our town. Our house was destroyed before our honeymoon was over.”
Clad in fiercely bright colors often worn by Kurdish women, Dozkin outshines her otherwise dreary surroundings of bare earth and canvas tents.
Three weeks after their wedding, the couple fled Kobani when the Islamic State took over large parts of the northern Syrian city. U.S.-led coalition airstrikes that targeted the extremists only added to their own misery, they recall, flattening their home and making it impossible to return even after Kurdish fighters pushed out the group.
It’s been a long trip from Erbil, Iraq, where they initially fled, but they won’t stop until they make it to Germany. Security is what they crave most, and the chance to finish their educations and find employment.
“People have made it before us,” Dozkin explains with hope. “There are opportunities to work. I just need to learn the language.”
But first things first: “I’ll give birth!” she says, laughing.
They need to cross two more borders before she can have her baby in a German hospital, where they hope to apply for asylum.
The night before, after heading out from the Macedonian village of Lojane, where less than two decades ago, thousands of Kosovars sought refuge, they crossed through fields into Serbia on a now well-worn footpath.
Buses coordinated by local volunteers and the UN were waiting within eyeshot of the border to pick up the exhausted travelers and take them to a Presevo refugee camp.
If it weren’t for the buses, people crossing into Serbia would be at the mercy of smugglers who force refugees to pay exorbitant amounts of money to drive them the otherwise hours-long trek to the camp. There are also rumors of mafias operating in the area, robbing and kidnapping refugees for ransom.
“I see the women tired and the children crying,” says one volunteer, Taulant Arifi, waiting near the buses as another volunteer speaks with a group of young Afghan men. “We try to make them happy.”
Once safely in the camp -- a joint effort by paid government employees and the UN, where there are several large tents and a medical facility -- Dozkin applauds Serbia’s humanitarian effort.
“The police in this country have treated us in a totally different way,” she explains, as her travel group waits for deportation papers that will allow them to take a train through Serbia. “When we fell asleep on the border, the Serbian police guarded us.”
A young Serbian man working at the camp walks past, overhearing the conversation.
“We understand completely,” he says. “There were a lot of wars here.”
The Anniversary
Presevo, Serbia
T
Left: Dozkin and Serwan celebrating their wedding in Kobani, Syria, last year just days before the so-called Islamic State raided the Kurdish city and U.S.-led coalition airstrikes targeting the extremists destroyed the young couple's home.
Right: Dozkin and Serwan wait in a refugee camp in Presevo, Serbia, on Aug. 2, 2015 after crossing over from Macedonia. They cannot board the train until they're issued official deportation papers that allow them to take a train across the country toward Hungary.
Iakovos Hatzistavrou/AFP/Getty Images
Braving The Border Fence
Subotica, Serbia
D
ozkin and Serwan exit the train station at the Serbian city of Subotica before most residents have even had their morning coffee.
The couple smiles weakly. The 12-hour train ride taking them across Serbia, from Presevo to this border city wedged up against Hungary, took longer than expected. And there’s still a full day’s hike ahead.
“Walk straight down to the other street,” a policeman waiting at the station entrance says in broken English to the group of 17 Syrian Kurds. He points in the direction of a bus that will take them closer to the border.
Serwan grabs Dozkin’s hand, and they’re off as quickly as they came.
Forty-five minutes later, the group steps off the bus in the tiny border village of Horgos. In the center of town, locals eat homemade pastries and tap their feet to the live folk band at a small street festival. But it’s a different world here, on this quiet residential road leading out of town. The group of refugees carrying tents, sleeping bags and bottled water is on edge, unsure of where to go next.
An argument breaks out. Some travelers want to pay a disheveled-looking local man who has walked up, claiming to be a smuggler -- but most insist against it.
“We ran into people like him in Serbia, too, but we made it here on our own,” a Syrian man pleads to the group. “We don’t know who these people are. We have GPS!”
“My son said not to use smugglers!” another man chimes in. “He told us to come to this village.”
The group decides to ditch the local man since he could try to rob them or lead them astray, instead choosing to rely on a map pulled up on a smartphone.
It’s a straight shot to the train tracks. From there, they should follow the railroad to a forest, and from there a farm field pathway cuts directly to the border fence.
“I’m OK,” Dozkin says, walking alongside a watchful Serwan, with one hand placed protectively on her bulging stomach. “Aside from being hot and hungry, I feel like I’m almost done.”
They are so close to making it to Germany. Only Hungary stands between them and asylum, as they believe they can pass through Austria with relative ease.
At the train tracks, the crew meets Balazs Szalai, a 34-year-old Hungarian computer programmer who has been volunteering on the Hungarian side of the border for several months.
Balazs Szalai, a 34-year-old Hungarian computer programmer who has been volunteering on the Hungarian side of the border for several months, walks with a group of refugees to the Serbia-Hungary border on Aug. 23, 2015 to ensure their safety. Armed with a video camera, he's prepared to document any police abuse toward refugees that he witnesses.
“I wanted to see what’s happening on the other side [of the border],” he explains, hands on hips and with his hair pulled back into a low bun. He is armed with a video camera in case Hungarian authorities use violence or try to force people back. “Two days ago, I saw police sending back people to the Serbian side,” he explains angrily. “But this is illegal. We called our lawyer.”
As they walk along the train tracks past leafy cabbage fields and old farmsteads, a man crouched down half-hidden in the woods yells "Go, go!” in Arabic. It’s unclear if he’s trying to help them or lead them into danger.
“Everyone be quiet!” instructs Serwan, looking around cautiously. Silence. Nothing happens. So they continue on for another hour, one foot in front of the other, holding out for rest until they reach a patch of forest.
In the cool leafy shade, people spread out sleeping bags and mats, pulling tins of tuna and loaves of bread from their packs to share family-style. “We forgot our silverware!” Dozkin says, laughing at the sorry state of their lunch scattered across the forest floor. She grimaces at the packaged toast -- it’s not the soft pita-like bread they’re used to back home.
The adults eat, while the children -- undeterred or perhaps unaware of the terrifying nighttime border-crossing ahead -- play euphorically between the single-file rows of slender trees that tower overhead.
“Hello! How are you?” a voice calls out from a passing horse-drawn cart with three local women onboard. “Are you OK?” Everybody looks around but nobody answers, worried that danger could be disguised with a friendly face.
It’s time to pack up and head closer to the border. This is where the trip could get sticky.
“We are so stressed,” Dozkin explains as she trudges through the muddy path, flanked by cornfields and pumpkin patches. “[We are afraid] the police will capture us and force us to fingerprint.”
Dozkin’s fears are not unfounded. Germany declared in late August that it was relaxing restrictions for Syrians under the controversial Dublin Regulation -- an agreement that says refugees seeking asylum can only apply in the first EU member state they enter. But applause for Germany by Syrians and aid groups was short-lived. The country reinstated border controls with Austria in mid-September, blocking thousands of asylum-seekers from entering.
But Dozkin and Serwan are willing to take the risk. “Honestly? I’m going there for the baby in my womb, not for myself,” she explains. “It’s too late for me. I want a better life for my baby since there is no life in Syria anymore.”
“Peace!” a smiling teenage girl lagging behind the couple screams out, overhearing their conversation about the road ahead. Peace is what she dreams is waiting for her in Germany.
The group carefully uses their phone maps to follow the mud path. Under cover of darkness, they walk silently and slowly, terrified of making even the slightest of sounds. A spiraled barbed-wire border stands menacing ahead. But not even Hungary’s flesh-cutting fence will stop them. They’ve come too far.
“It was all fatigue and hunger and unbearable thirst,” Dozkin recalls later. “A struggle in every sense of the word.”
The young men use their fingers to dig into the cold earth under the barbed wire fence. Dozkin, with her pregnant stomach, struggles as she climbs underneath.
Not 50 meters away, Hungarian police are waiting for them with heat sensors. There’s no way the group of 17 people can make it across without being caught.
The guards surround the group moments after they cross the border. Dozkin, overcome with exhaustion and despair, falls to the ground in heaving sobs.
Aggressive police detain them there for four hours before finally allowing them to sleep in a tent until morning, according to Dozkin. Then, it’s two days in a Hungarian refugee camp in the border village of Roszke, where police force them to give their fingerprints. Now in the system, they fear immigration authorities in Germany will deport them back to Hungary because of Dublin rules.
“I have never in my life encountered such horrible people,” Dozkin says of the Hungarian authorities, adding that the detainees did not receive food or water for two days while in the barbed-wire-lined camp. “They treated us how people treat animals.”
This tight-knit Kobani tribe would eventually get their ultimate wish. Less than a week later, they make it across Hungary, Austria and Germany in a smuggler’s van with 30 other people, arriving safely in Bonne. But their arrival was bittersweet.
“Oh how I miss my mother’s scent,” Dozkin posts from the hospital in Bonne, where she’s been admitted for exhaustion and waits for her baby girl to be born. “And my father’s kind looks.”
A Syrian mother and war widow from Kobani embraces her child on the long walk to the Serbia-Hungary border on Aug. 23, 2015. She hopes to provide her two sons with a better life far from the horrors of war back home, where her Kurdish city lies in ruins.