In a boat with murderous smugglers in balaclavas: A Syrian writer’s journey to Europe

Sun streamed on to the deck as Yusuf sat hunched at a folding trestle table, writing page after page. He was committing to words some of what he had just been through: the years of uncertainty, months of confinement, and hours on the dark waves of the Mediterranean, only to end up on the Médecins Sans Frontières Geo Barents ship, after an early morning rescue operation by the charity.
Yusuf says he spent two months and 10 days in one room in Libya with three other people, all waiting to cross the sea to Europe. There was a toilet, a water supply, and a TV. Every two days, food was delivered. They were given no information about how long they would wait.
The 34-year-old is a writer from near Syrian capital Damascus. He was among 73 people taken on board MSF’s Geo Barents ship in two rescue operations off the Libyan coast in August.
Yusuf asked that his real name not be used as he still doesn’t feel safe.
His story underlines the continuing tragedy of Syria. Since war began, in March 2011, more than 12 million Syrians have been displaced, according to UN Refugee figures. Close to six million were being hosted in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey in 2023. The UN Human Rights Office estimated that more than 306,000 civilians had been killed by 2022.
Yusuf left Syria in 2021. He said there were multiple reasons, including the “incapacity of movement” because his area was surrounded by checkpoints at which he could be caught and detained. Another reason was “liberty of expression”, he said. “I’m a writer, I need to write, it was impossible for me as they were oppressing all writers.”
In 2014, writers’ association PEN International called Syria “one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a writer or a journalist”, saying “arbitrary detention, torture, enforced disappearances and killings have become commonplace” and “writers are among those to be particularly targeted”. This year, Syria ranked 179 out of 180 on the 2024 Reporters Without Borders press freedom index.
Yusuf has written multiple books. Usually, he forced himself to self-censor, but one, he said, proved particularly controversial, about a subject “not aligned with culture”.
His escape was not because of a “sense of danger”, he emphasised. He “lived the danger”, including by being kidnapped and held for months in 2018 by a pro-Assad militia.
To cross the border to neighbouring Lebanon, he had to pay smugglers. In Lebanon, he said, he was able to get psychological help, but he didn’t feel safe. He supported himself through savings and writing freelance articles for an Arabic-language website. He also appealed to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) for resettlement to a safe country, though the UNHCR officially stopped registering refugees in Lebanon in 2015, at the request of the Lebanese government.
“Of course you could feel they were trying, but nothing was coming out,” he said. “I stayed for three years and maybe I should have stayed longer but I know people who stayed 10 years and didn’t get an answer. I was in danger.”
“If the system worked,” he said, he would not have risked his life at sea. “That’s why I wanted to speak to you. I asked for protection with UNHCR, to have resettlement where there is asylum, a right to be a refugee … [I] tried, I don’t understand their criteria.”
According to UNHCR, while more than 777,000 Syrian refugees were projected to be in need of resettlement across the region in 2023, only 30,000 departed – and this was an increase on 22,700 in 2022. There is a consistent shortage of adequate spaces in stable and safe countries. Even when pledges are made, they are not always met.
In 2019, the Irish Government committed to resettling up to 2,900 refugees between 2020 and 2023, with most supposed to be Syrians coming from Jordan and Lebanon. Only 576 were resettled, 486 of whom came from Lebanon, UNHCR says.
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A spokesman for the Irish Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, which has responsibility for resettlement programmes, said “the target for resettlement made in December 2019 was significantly impacted by Covid-19, given travel restrictions impacting the capacity to carry out selection missions. More recently, the increase in arrivals of international protection applicants, the significant number of arrivals of those fleeing war in Ukraine and the overall pressures on available accommodation have all impacted the programme.”
The spokesman said the department remains “committed to the successful resettlement of all those who have been identified and accepted to the programme” and that Ireland has committed to resettling up to 1,200 refugees in 2024 and 2025.
Lebanon – with a total estimated population of about 5.3 million people – received roughly 1.5 million Syrian refugees in the first years of Syria’s war, making it the country with the largest number of refugees per capita. About 90 per cent of Syrian refugees were living in extreme poverty there in 2023, the UNHCR says. But another risk had emerged.
Between April and May 2023, international organisation Human Rights Watch said thousands of Syrians, including unaccompanied children, were arrested and deported, with some later facing torture, detention or forced conscription. Being registered as refugees with UNHCR did not protect them, Human Rights Watch said.
Despite this, in May, EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen visited Lebanon to announce a €1 billion aid package, in what was largely perceived as an effort to encourage Lebanon to stop Syrians from migrating towards Europe. That same month, Lebanon’s parliament issued more recommendations around increasing the returns to Syria, including through working with the Syrian government.
“I witnessed people being deported from Lebanon to Syria,” said Yusuf. “Two trucks of people were given to the Syrian Army’s Fourth Division.” Human Rights Watch describes the Fourth Division as an elite military unit led by president Bashar al-Assad’s brother that has participated in the extrajudicial killing of thousands of protesters and the arbitrary arrest of tens of thousands of people.
“That was one of the reasons I left,” said Yusuf. “I didn’t want to wait for the next one.”
Yusuf managed to secure a work contract in Yemen, a country that the European Commission describes as having “one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises”. It took him a year and a lot of money to get a passport, a difficult and sometimes dangerous task for many Syrians. He travelled there in January 2024 and stayed four months.
“But I couldn’t adapt. I was isolated as a writer also. I decided that the only way was to cross the [Meditteranean] sea from Libya. Personally, I didn’t know anyone who had taken it but I knew that was a route.”
Yusuf found it difficult to get information about how to make this journey. He went first to Dubai, then paid what he called an online travel agency to facilitate his onward journey. “You contact a person who says when you arrive at Benghazi airport they’ll pick you up, you don’t have to talk.”
Once he got to Libya, he said, he regretted everything. “It’s true I had no other alternative but I perceived it like I was committing suicide. I tried and will try to tell everyone not to go there and not to do what I did.”
Along with being locked in one room, he said he could “feel and sense the treatment and lack of humanity. They treated you like you were not human”.
After that, Yusuf was twice told he would have to pay more money than agreed as “the situation has become more difficult”. He did not want to say what his initial payment was, but each time they added an extra $1,000.
Eventually, he was told he had a maximum of five minutes to prepare himself. “I left everything. I was the only one taken from the room.”
He was moved to another room with dozens of Bangladeshis. There was no window, toilet or water.
In the first six months of 2024, Syrians made up the second highest nationality arriving in Italy by sea, with more than 3,830 people. The highest was Bangladeshi, with 5,728 people, or 22 per cent of the total.
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Yusuf said they stayed a day without eating before they were put in vehicles and taken to a beach. At that point, a man ordered them to run, then stop, then run again. This continued for about 30 minutes before they reached more people and a fibreglass boat, which they were told to enter one by one.
He said he knows little about the people who were smuggling him. The boat was driven by two men in balaclavas who carried a satellite phone. After MSF’s crew spotted the boat in the Mediterranean, and helped the other people on board off, the two men drove the boat away again. The MSF’s crew said they informed Italian authorities about this.
“You don’t have the freedom or liberty to discuss or to ask [and] they stay silent,” said Yusuf about the smugglers. “As soon as we got off from that boat to this boat the feeling changed radically: you were in a boat with murderers, then to a boat where you are a bit safe and you can talk freely to people, and it’s a beautiful feeling.”
After disembarking in Italy, he was hoping to travel on to Germany, where he has friends and plans to claim asylum.
Official figures say the number of people in Germany with an immigration background from Syria, including German citizens, now exceeds 1.2 million. Last year, about 75,500 Syrians received German citizenship, after spending an average of 6.8 years in Germany (the usual waiting period of eight years can be lowered for those with “special integration accomplishments”, including good language skills and civic or professional achievements).
For Yusuf, reaching there feels like “more than a plan, it’s the beginning of a safe life”.
Despite that, he said, his decision to travel to Europe is “full of errors and regrets … Of course, I want people to know not to risk their lives in this way. But there’s no other way. [Legal] resettlement [was what I wanted]. The whole interview is to say that if the system worked for refugees no one would risk their life like that.”