‘They said they’d kill us. We had to get out’

Jane Bradley meets families who fled war zones – only to be trapped in refugee camps

Scity,” she says, her eyes filling with tears. “I want to go home. I want to go to Iraq,”

Shakila, 17, is one of around 200 refugees living in the Bujanovac camp in southern Serbia.

More than 7,300 refugees are trapped in the Baltic nation – unable to move onwards into western Europe since the border with Hungary was closed over a year ago.

She is here with her parents, 20-year-old brother and 16-year-old sister. She says she still does not understand why her family decided six months ago that they had to leave their home, where she had friends and her school life. They are protecting her from the truth, she believes.

“They know something,” she says. “I told my mother I didn’t want to go and she started crying and said: ‘I am going for you, not for myself ’.”

Shakila’s father was involved in Kurdish opposition politics in Iran, where she lived until she was a toddler.

She remembers a moment during the family’s treacherous journey of almost 2,000 miles when they were packed by people smugglers into a van in the middle of a forest.

“In that moment, my dad was crying,” she remembers. “I was so scared. I was hugging my sister. That was only the second time I saw my dad cry.”

All the refugees, bar none, have been forced to pay people smugglers thousands of pounds – for most, their life’s savings – to get them to Serbia. All have stories about the horrific conditions they endured on what has become known as “the Journey” from the Middle East to the outermost borders of Europe, which involves treacherous boat trips in overcrowded dinghies and arduous hikes across mountainous regions lasting for days.

All hope they will be able to progress to claim asylum in western Europe.

Khalid Mortazazata, an Iranian high school English teacher, tells of his family’s treatment at the hands of the Bulgarian mafia, who stripped him, his wife and two young children to their underwear and left them at the side of the road in freezing temperatures.

Khalid himself is no stranger to being a refugee. As a teenager, the 38-year-old universityeducated Kurd had been forced to flee Iran due to his father’s involvement in the opposition PDKI party – to settle in Iraq, where he lived peacefully for the next 20 years.

He met his wife, Abdulla, and the pair had two children, Danyal, seven, and Roza, four.

Life was good for the family. Then political tensions began to increase. “They said they were against us and they would kill us,” he said. “That was when we decided to go. We did it for the kiddies.”

After paying smugglers $11,500 (£9,000), the family travelled across the Middle East.

But it was in Bulgaria – a member nation of the European Union – that they ran into the worst problems. Smugglers packed them into a minivan to transport them to the Serbian border but less than half an hour later they were caught by the local mafia – who he believes was working with some of the smugglers – and stripped to their underwear.

“They took the clothes from all of the children, men and women,” he remembers. “They took everything. Our mobiles, clothes, shoes and bags.

“One of them wanted to put his hand on the breast of my wife – they were searching for money and mobiles. But my wife reacted to them and they broke her hand.

“They had a gun which they put to the head of each of us. They had knives. They said: ‘If you do anything we will kill you’.

“To save our kids, we said we wouldn’t do anything. That night we spent without clothes, just underwear. It was very cold, it was September.”

He adds: “It was one of the most terrible nights in my life. The children were crying and shaking in the cold weather. When I remember that night, I never wish that it happened in anybody’s life, not just me.”

Eventually a smuggler in Sofia sent a car to pick them up and they later continued their journey to the Serbian border, where they were picked up by local police. “The police were very kind,” he says. He still believes that leaving Iraq was the right – and only – decision.“i just want to be safe,” says Khalid simply. “I had no economic problems in Iraq.” He has a certificate from the United Nations’ refugee arm, UNCHR, instructing that he should be “protected from forcible return” to a country where he could be in danger. His sister is settled in Germany and his brother lives in London. Both left years before the refugee crisis began in earnest and were able to straightforwardly claim asylum in Europe due to their father’s political history.

Yet, like the thousands of other refugees in Serbia, Khalid has to wait his turn for his number to be called to the Hungarian border, where only a handful of refugees a day are being allowed through. Even some of those who are granted the chance of an interview with border officials are still turned back.

“We can live our lives normally here,” he says of the camp where he is a community leader and has started teaching English to other residents. “It is good. But it is not our aim to spend our lives here [in a refugee camp]. We don’t complain about our situation but it is not what we want.”

Since we met, Khalid has travelled again – smuggling his family over the border to Romania, where he is now in a camp near the northern city of Baia Mare – and hopes that the fact the country is an EU nation will allow him to eventually be granted permission to travel on to Germany, to allow him to live with his sister. “It is better here,” he says. “In Serbia, it was like we were in prison because we could not move around, but here we can visit other cities.” Refugees living at the Bujanovac camp are lucky: most families have their own room, packed tightly with bunk-beds. Food is provided on a regular basis in a canteen by staff from a local organisation, Philanthropy, a project which is funded