As airstrikes intensify, we follow the refugee trail from Syria to the Greek islands

FOR more than two hours he treaded water, his three youngsters clinging to him for dear life.
A fourth and eldest child still only 10-years-old had struck out for shore on his father’s orders, a swim that would save his own life.
It was barely a few weeks ago in the cold, nighttime inky blackness of the Aegean Sea that Ali Chadan’s dream of a new life in Europe became the nightmare that will haunt him till his own dying day.
Sitting next to Ali on board a motor launch owned by a caring local Greek-Australian businessman who offered to help the father of four search for his missing son, I could scarcely imagine what was going though this former Iraqi policeman’s mind as we pulled out of the small picturesque harbour on the Greek island of Kos last week.
For most who come here, including myself as a child years ago on holiday with my parents, this will always be a paradise of sorts. For Ali Chadan however, it has become his living hell.
That afternoon as we sailed out into open water leaving the Kos shoreline in our wake it was clear that this thirty-three-year-old father was about to undergo another emotional roller coaster ride.
Ali is no stranger to such things. Long before arriving here he had watched his wife die and feared for his children as the barbaric fighters of the Islamic State (IS) group drew ever closer to the district in which they lived.
It was then that he decided as any decent father would, that the time had come to spirit his loved ones to safety and make the journey to Europe where he would join his mother and sister already settled in Switzerland.
Setting out on the motorboat that afternoon searching for a trace of his missing son we would scour the sea and shoreline littered with deflated dinghies and heaps of discarded fluorescent orange life jackets for a full two hours.
Throughout that time, I couldn’t help thinking of that same interminable two hours that Ali and his children had spent in the water that night after the overcrowded rubber boat in which they had crossed from the Turkish side had foundered and sank spilling all on board into the waves.
In such a situation the fake, makeshift ‘lifejackets’ filled with plastic bubble wrap stitched together in backstreet shops in ports like Bodrum and costing refugees a few hundred Turkish Lira a time, are worse that useless.
Those who traffick and smuggle refugees here as elsewhere know no pity, only profit.
In what must have felt like an age, Ali saw his eldest son Hassan set off to swim toward shore, but during that time too he watched helplessly as his youngest boy Hussein only six-years-old drifted off in the night sea.
As if this was not horror enough to contend with, later after struggling onto the beach frozen and exhausted with his two daughters, nine-year old Hawra and youngest child four-year-old Zainab, he would have to confront the fact that the ordeal had proved too much for the toddler who died shortly afterwards.
As befitting Muslim custom, Zainab was buried almost immediately, her final resting place a grave far from her home in Iraq and distant too from the new home she hoped to find with her grandmother in Switzerland.
“My baby, I need to go,” was all Ali said in broken English by way of unnecessary explanation as we stepped on board the motor launch on what was to be a fruitless quest to find any clue as to the fate of his son Hussein.
“It’s not that he expects to find the boy, just that he feels a sense of guilt that he couldn’t save him and cannot leave without at least looking for Hussein’s body before he can continue on his journey to Switzerland,” said Yussef Walid, who accompanied us aboard the boat as a translator.
Himself an Assyrian Christian from the beleaguered Iraqi city of Mosul, Yussef now lives in the Norwegian town of Hammerfest from where like many other Europeans he has travelled to help work as a volunteer in Kos helping refugees fleeing the Middle East’s turmoil and wars.
I too had come on a journey. With the help of the humanitarian agency Mercy Corps whose European headquarters are based in Edinburgh
I wanted to see for myself what is being done to help those ousted by violence from their homes inside Syria and understand more about the plight of others who have chosen to stay in Turkey.
I wanted also to get some idea of the hardships faced by the thousands like Ali Chadan who brave the smugglers and winter Aegean in their exodus towards sanctuary in Europe.
It was to be a journey that would take me from the Turkey-Syria border town of Gaziantep down through the Turkish port cities of Izmir and Bodrum. It would also find me crossing that same stretch of the Aegean that Ali Chadan and thousands of others like him have traversed in the hope of reaching safety and a new, safe existence in Europe.
What follows is in its way just a few snapshot cameos of the refugees, aid workers, humanitarian programmes, volunteers and others that I came across caught up in this human tragedy which the Sunday Herald will explore in more depth in the weeks ahead.
But it was during this last week of course that Syria’s humanitarian crisis was thrown once again into sharp focus with the news that France like Russia would escalate airstrikes against the Islamic State (IS) group in the country following the terror attacks in Paris.
With this bombardment already underway the UK government has indicated that it too might follow suit by extending its own airstrikes from Iraq to Syria.
Combined with the onset of winter weather and the demand for food and relief aid that comes with it, this say aid workers is a seriously troubling development.
Mercy Corps itself has one of the biggest aid programmes for those displaced or made refugees by the war in Syria that includes a cross border programme run out of the city of Gaziantep.
It was there that I met Dalia Al-Awqati, Director of Programmes in North Syria for Mercy Corps, as local Syrian staff helped load trucks with winterisation kits and food rations bound for the war zone.
“This is material that helps support hundreds of thousands of people in Syria every month,” explained Al-Awqati, as around us everything from blankets, mattresses, kitchen sets and solar lanterns were stacked inside the vehicles.
Delivering such aid cross border is of course both a complex and politically sensitive operation and not without its dangers.
“For us to be able to operate inside Syria means we have to deal with all the actors that are available and on the ground and that means working with local communities and with armed groups,” says Al-Awqati.
Asked if this included Islamic State (IS) she points out that the brutal terrorist organisation is just one of many armed opposition groups (AOG’s) with which Mercy Corps has to negotiate.
“This of course is something that is very much managed at a local level it includes a lot of community engagement, and this engagement stands at the very core of fundamental humanitarian principles for Mercy Corps which is neutrality and impartiality,” insists Al-Awqati.
Anything that requires the agency to waive these principles she stresses would make it impossible for the organisation to function on the ground.
Such work of course is immensely dangerous and as Director of Programmes Al-Awqati says that no one outside Syria can ever fully understand the hazards that Mercy Corps local staff face daily in their work.
“The danger is multifaceted, it is conflict in all its forms, it is advances by different groups, advances by IS and by the regime it is also airstrikes by the Syrian Air Force and now the Russians.”
As we talked that afternoon the Paris atrocities were only days away and little did we know then that the level of airstrikes was set to rise considerably with all the implication this has for the humanitarian operation inside Syria.
While Turkey’s border with Syria remains officially closed this will not stop the anticipated waves of refugees expected to flee the bombs that drop from these latest sorties.
Many of these people will however only travel as far as Turkey.
For contrary to the general perception among some people in Europe many Syrian refugees have no intention of journeying any further, firm in the belief that they are best placed to return to their homeland when peace returns.
Short of the bullets and bombs though, living conditions in Turkey for these urban refugees are scarcely much better than they were in Syria.
In the dilapidated neighbourhood of Mevlana that sits incongruously within the up market tourist haven of Izmir on Turkey’s Aegean coast, Syrian refugee families can be found living in disused shop fronts and tumbledown outhouses.
Turkish landlords, who in some instances have even charged rent for premises that were scheduled for demolition, ruthlessly exploit many refugee families.
Emira has been living in a shop front in Mevlana with her husband and four children for over a year now and is worried about the coming winter months.
“My target has always been to pay the rent then water and electricity and not be evicted,” she tells me as we sit in the single room she has partitioned using curtains to offer some privacy.
For the basic utilities of rent, electricity and water, Emira pays 300TL, (about £70) 370TL and 100TL respectively, the electricity charge being so high because it is a shop.
These outgoing costs she has to manage with no remaining savings and on the little her husband can get from any occasional work for which Syrians are paid a rate considerably less than their Turkish counterparts. It’s a far cry from the happy pre-war days in Syria when her husband had his own business as a cobbler and the family had their own house.
These days just finding enough to eat is an immense problem with the family surviving on leftovers from their Turkish neighbours’ and sometimes only bread and tomato paste.
The tainted water supply too causes them problems with respiratory infections and rashes common among the children.
What about things like clothing for the children I ask, to which Emira replies that what I see them wearing is all that they possess.
It is the youngsters especially for whom life is very tough here. Since the outbreak of the war in Syria Emira’s eldest daughter Istaa who is ten-years-old has only had one year of schooling and the others no tuition at all since becoming refugees in Turkey.
As we talk I notice that one of the children has drawn a crayon picture of a man and woman surrounded by the shape of a heart. It hangs on the wall alongside another heart shape ornamental cushion on which the words I LOVE YOU are embroidered.
The drawing is the work of Istaa, who says it is a picture of her mum and dad. When I ask if I can take a photograph of it and raise my camera, the little girl runs to hide behind the curtain, tears in her eyes and afraid of being in the picture for fear that it might get into the hands of “Bashar” Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Only the gentle persuasion of her mother enables her to pose with her wonderful drawing.
“She has nightmares and cries whenever she sees images on the news from Syria,” explains her mother Emira.
Clearly suffering from trauma, Istaa like her brother and sisters rarely ventures outside; instead they have become virtual prisoners incarcerated indoors here in Turkey in much the same way as they were in Syria because of the war.
Here though it is not the danger posed by snipers, rockets and barrel bombs dropped from helicopters that keep them from going out, but the bullying by Turkish children and the far more sinister threat of being preyed upon by criminal gangs.
According to activists from local solidarity groups trying to help Syrian refugees, this includes the drugging and kidnapping of young girls most likely for the burgeoning sex trafficking trade in Turkey for which refugees have become targets.
Emira and her sister who lives nearby told of how one 12 year-old girl had already disappeared permanently from the surrounding streets while another two aged 8 and 13 were taken by young Turkish men and drugged before later being dumped back in the neighbourhood.
With refugee families facing such dire conditions in these urban areas, Mercy Corps is working with local partners in making an urgent assessment of needs as winter takes its grip.
Stoves for heating, charcoal, carpets and blankets and food will all be needed to see these vulnerable families through the winter.
Tragic enough as the war and its impact has been on so many ordinary people here on both sides of the border, it seems the refugees vulnerability knows no bounds.
For those that make it through Turkey on to the shores looking out over the Aegean towards Kos and other Greek islands their European dream must seem tantalizingly close.
Sitting overlooking the stretch of water the crossing of which refugees pay smugglers upwards of $1300 a person for passage, I spoke with veteran aid worker Rae McGrath Director of Mercy Corps for Turkey and North Syria.
“You look across at Kos and your probably think you could swim there, but if there are forty five of you forced into as small inflatable boat with an underpowered engine then that is one of the most deadly stretches of water in the world today,” observes McGrath who has worked the world’s humanitarian crises for going on three decades.
Today he firmly believes that while Mercy Corps cross border role is more vital than ever as is its work with some of the poorest refugees who have settled in Turkey, there is also another role pressing for its attention.
“A lot of people have drowned here and a lot of people are going to drown here and it’s our job to do what we can for those refugees who are rescued from the Aegean or who get robbed and can’t leave for Europe.” This McGrath sees as a logical extension of the organisation’s humanitarian duty.
I put it to him that many ordinary people reading this article will want to help and given this willingness how best can they go about doing so?
“What I’m going to say is somewhat different than I would normally say because normally I would say you can go on to the Mercy Corps website and help us fund this work,” he replied.
“I would still say you should do that, but genuinely what people have to do is search inside their own souls, their own hearts, their own beliefs and realise that the Syrian and many other refugees making their way to Europe right now are not coming to steal our way of life but rather they want to share a hopeful life with us,” says McGrath, pausing for a moment before adding a final thought.
“And if we really are a caring people, if we really are human, we have to open our hearts to them and welcome them.”