In 2009, I was on a road trip cruising in an old mini-van up route 395 in California. The road is like the state’s forgotten spine, tucked in a desolate valley between two jagged, soaring branches of the Sierra Nevadas. I was 19 at the time, exploring the country I was born in, and I had missed a turn. Back then, I was using a paper atlas to find my way. In the dark the night before I had zoomed passed a road that would have taken me into the Sequoia National Forest and eventually connected with interstate 5 and a clear shot to San Francisco. Instead of turning back, I decided to continue on to the next road cutting across the mountains, some 150 miles to the north. As I gripped the wheel, I still remember the exhilarating tingle of possibility. That’s the beauty of the American road trip: the freedom. It’s supposed to be a metaphor for the country as a whole.

Driving the nearly deserted road, I remember watching a fighter jet make passes over the soaring peaks that surrounded me. That’s when I saw it: a wooden sign with Manzanar written in block letters. The name jogged my memory, but I couldn’t place it. On an impulse, I swung the van to the left and pulled into a Japanese internment camp from World War II. It was haunting–the barbed wire; the sentry towers; the remnants of long, low housing barracks. I had stumbled upon a relic of one of the most shameful episodes in my country’s history. If I had blinked, I wouldn’t have even known it was there.

The name was familiar because I had read a novel in a high school literature course about the internment of Japanese. But growing up I had no friends, or even classmates, of Japanese ancestry. I knew no one whose families had experienced that history. So for me it was abstract, remote, pretty much like it had never happened. It wasn’t until I stood at the base of the stark white obelisk commemorating the lives of more than 135 people who died inside the camp’s barbed wire fence that I felt the magnitude of the injustice. There was something about the windswept valley and silent towering mountains at its back, the utter sense of isolation and abandonment, that drove the point home: as a nation we had failed, and the consequences for more than one hundred thousand people were irreversible.

Coincidently, I was recently listening to an interview with George Takei, the actor made famous by his role as Hikaru Sulu in Star Trek. Takei was born in Los Angeles, California in 1937. At the age of five he was forced to move with his family to an internment camp in Arkansas. Reflecting on the experience, he said, “I came to understand how the career that I’d chosen played a part in putting us into those prison camps. It was all those stereotypes… of how Asians were depicted, as either comic servants or the evil villain.” In other words, the systematic dehumanization of Japanese Americans in the culture at large paved the way for the public, and even President Roosevelt, to support such a policy.

Friday, January 27th was Holocaust Remembrance Day, a solemn commemoration of the worst abdication of humanity in the 20th century. I was first assigned to read a Holocaust memoir in 7th grade. When I finished, I continued to read as many more as I could find. The horrors they contained probed at a dark, disturbing question: How could an entire people be sentenced to death simply for belonging to a particular religious group? The words “Never Again” meant something to me: Never again should any people face discrimination due to the arbitrary assignments of birth–nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion.

Friday, January 27th was also the day Donald Trump signed his executive order on refugees and immigration. All refugees are now barred from entering the United States for 120 days. The resettlement of Syrian refugees is suspended indefinitely. And, people from seven predominantly Muslim countries are barred entry for 90 days. If there was any doubt about the intention of this move to discriminate against Muslims, it was cleared up by Rudolph Giuliani, who helped draft the measure. In an interview on Fox News, Giuliani confirmed that this was the embodiment of Trump’s famously promised Muslim ban. “He called me up, he said ‘put a commission together, show me the right way to do it, legally,’” Giuliani said. The resulting executive order also contains neutrally constructed language that, in its application, will privilege Christian refugees over Muslims when refugee admissions resume.

When I rolled over in my bed on Saturday morning to check the time and saw the news alert on my phone, I couldn’t fall back to sleep. As a journalist, I have spent the past four years of my life living in predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Overwhelmingly, I have been treated with respect, kindness and hospitality.

I have also spent the past year and a half reporting about refugees. The word is not an abstract category of people for me. It is a 72 year old man named Bashir, whose house in Syria was destroyed by a tank shell, living in a field with his family for months after the Greek-Macedonian border was closed last year. It is the father I met in southern Turkey who sold the home he worked his entire life to build so he could send his children to Europe to get an education, knowing that it would be years before he saw them again. It is the young, hijab-wearing woman from Damascus who fights tirelessly everyday to improve the conditions of other refugees and often wakes up at night screaming from the memories of terror that visit her in her dreams. It is my friend Robeen from Homs who loves soccer and invited me into his tent at the port in Athens to share a meal. These people, and millions of others like them, did extraordinary things to escape war and persecution. They already faced extreme odds in their chances of obtaining a better future, especially in the United States, which has only resettled around 15,000 Syrian refugees since the war began six years ago. This executive order only makes the situation practically and symbolically worse.

Like the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, it was made possible by the systematic dehumanization of Muslims in American culture. Now, we have a president who is turning that dehumanization into policy with the support of a large enough portion of the population for it to actually happen, despite the resistance of thousands in the streets.

There are steps between exclusion, registry, internment and extermination, but the fundamental logic is the same: A category of people is discriminated against based on the arbitrary assignments of their birth. Our state has now taken action to sanction and advance that discrimination. We have entered the spectrum. Once inside, the dividing lines only separate the severity of the crimes our country is prepared to commit.

As I lay in bed reading the news and watching live feeds on Facebook of protesters gathered at airports, I thought back on the exhilarating feeling of freedom I had on that road trip in 2009. My thoughts then wandered to the scores of people detained in U.S. airports and the untold numbers of others who don’t just want to move, but need to move, and now can’t. I thought about the barbed wire fences and sentry towers at Manzanar and the talk of a Muslim registry and mass deportations looming on the horizon. And a terrifying question entered my mind: How far is our country willing to go?

— — —

Eric Reidy is an investigative journalist based in Beirut, Lebanon. His reporting has taken him around the Mediterranean covering numerous topics in nearly a dozen countries with an extensive focus on migration and refugees. In 2016, he was a finalist in for a National Magazine Award and for the Kurt Schork Memorial Award for International Journalism for his work on Ghost Boat — an investigative series published by Medium about the disappearance of 243 refugees in the Mediterranean Sea.

As the stories of tragedy around the refugee crisis have become the new status quo, it’s easy to lose perspective on how much has changed in a short period of time.

The weekend of June 28, 2014—when the Ghost Boat disappeared—was an exceptionally busy one. The Italian navy mission, Mare Nostrum, had saved more than 5,000 lives in fewer than 48 hours. The sea was finally calm after a stretch of bad weather, and the warehouses run by Libya’s people smugglers were overflowing with their cargo: thousands of human beings fleeing war, repression and economic desperation.

According to family members of the Ghost Boat passengers who spoke with their relatives at that time, departure from Libya was continuously delayed due to stormy weather at sea. When it finally cleared, the smugglers wasted no time piling people onto rickety, overcrowded boats, using physical force to fill them far beyond capacity before pointing them towards Italy and sending them on their way.

The people sent out to sea that day came from all over. Some were fleeing Syria’s civil war, already three years old at that point. Others, like most of the Ghost Boat passengers, had escaped from the grip of Eritrea’s military dictatorship. Then there were those who had fled Somalia, crippled by decades of brutal fighting, while the various conflicts in Sudan had driven others from their homes. On top of this was another contingent: West Africans trying to escape extreme poverty in favor of economic opportunity in Europe.

That weekend’s surge was part of a record-setting summer. More than 200,000 people crossed the Mediterranean in 2014, and nearly all of them left from Libya headed for Italy. The previous high, set in 2011, was less than half that number.

But by the beginning of 2015 things were starting to change — and accelerate. Egypt and Algeria ended visa-free entry for Syrians, ending a major escape routes for those who would previously fly from Damascus, slip across borders and head for the Libyan coast. At the same time, Libya’s post-revolution transition spiralled further out of control into an ever more dangerous, confusing and intractable civil war. People were being pushed towards the east.

In 2014, fewer than 35,000 people reached Europe by crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Greece. As Libya became less accessible and more dangerous, Syrians began heading for the new, shorter and comparatively less deadly route. Four years of civil war had driven 3.8 million people from the country.

The vast majority initially sought refuge in countries bordering Syria — Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan. But as the refugees put pressure on already limited social services, drained government finances, drove up prices and stoked fears of a spillover, the already-tepid welcome they received from their host countries turned frosty.

By 2015, war weariness and intense fighting inside Syria also drove hundreds of thousands more from their homes. By the end of the year, half of Syria’s pre-war population was either internally displaced or had fled the country as refugees.

Many of those headed directly to the eastern Mediterranean route between Turkey and Greece. They were joined by people fleeing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and conflicts and economic destitution in South Asia.

At first, the numbers increased steadily. Around 13,000 took the eastern route in April; 18,000 in May and 31,000 in June. And then, right around the time we launched the Ghost Boat investigation, they took off, skyrocketing to a staggering 211,000 people in October. That was more migrants in a single month than the combined total in all of the Mediterranean the previous year.

Women, children, men and families — some in wheelchairs or pregnant, others sporting still fresh wounds from the war that had driven them from their homes — disembarked by the thousands from overcrowded rubber boats on the idyllic beaches of the Greek Isles. Carrying their few possessions on their backs, more than 850,000 people set off to try and walk to safety and find the possibility of a future in northern Europe.

But, of course, there were the deaths.

The death rate in the eastern Mediterranean was proportionally low compared to the route between Libya and Italy. But the higher numbers of travellers meant that many lives were lost. Even though the distance that boats had to travel was often only around 10 miles, 806 people drowned in the sapphire blue waters of the Aegean. And when photographs began circulating of the lifeless body of three year old Alan Kurdi face down on a Turkish beach, the dangers involved in the journey were tragically underscored.

The events in the eastern Mediterranean overshadowed what was happening between Libya and Italy. Business there more or less proceeded as usual. More than 150,000 people crossed the central Mediterranean in 2015. Unlike the Aegean, the central route wasn’t dominated by a single nationality. But Eritreans, like the Ghost Boat passengers, continued to account for a sizeable number of the arrivals.

As the chaos in Libya continued, however, the country became an increasingly dangerous point of transit. Kidnappings, sexual assault, beatings, detention in abhorrent conditions, extortion and forced labor were already the norm for refugees and sub-Saharan Africans. But as the Islamic militant group ISIS gained a stronger foothold in Libya, it began kidnapping Eritreans—and particularly targeting Christian asylum seekers.

In August, the propaganda wing of ISIS released a video showing the beheading of dozens of Eritrean and Ethiopian Christians on a beach. When I met Eritrean asylum seekers at a transit shelter in Rome last November, several of them told stories of being captured and abused by the group.

Despite the danger, people from countries in East and West Africa continue to flock to Libya. Earlier this year, Interpol released a report saying that Libya has as many as 800,000 asylum seekers and migrants waiting to cross the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, another route from Egypt is reportedly becoming more popular, especially among Eritreans and others who want to avoid the danger and chaos in Libya.

The eastern Mediterranean route, on the other hand, has continued to be anything but normal. Tens of thousands of people were crossing the Aegean every week at the beginning of 2016, braving harsh winter weather. The influx prompted a rightwing backlash in European states, stemming from fears of terrorism and the idea that Europe‘s’ social fabric would be altered by the predominantly Muslim newcomers.

The initial welcome that had been extended, particularly by Germany, quickly ran out. As populist and ultra-nationalist parties gained ground in elections across the continent, the European Commission pushed for the closure of the Balkan route that led from Greece to northern Europe.

On March 8, after more than 1 million people had crossed the Aegean in just 14 months, the route snapped shut. Macedonia closed its southern border, stranding around 54,000 in Greece. Conditions in the informal refugee camps that sprang up were abysmal. Cases of cholera broke out among the more than 10,000 people camping in a muddy field in the Greek border town of Idomeni, and a picture spread on social media of the amniotic fluid being being washed off a newborn baby in a puddle of rainwater.

The following week, the EU signed a controversial deal with Turkey that called for all people arriving in the Greek Islands to be sent back. Refugees were no longer allowed to board ferries to mainland Greece, and those stuck on the islands were gradually rounded up and placed in overcrowded, open air detention centers to await deportation to Turkey.

Since mid-May, when a Greek appeals panel ruled that Turkey is not a safe third country for refugees, the fate of the deal — and the people stranded in Greece — has been thrust into a state of uncertainty. Still, the number of people crossing in the eastern Mediterranean has dropped precipitously. Fewer than 1,500 people made the journey in May. So far, there are no signs of Syrians, Iraqis or Afghans redirecting their route to Europe back through Libya.

As all of this has been happening, the tragedies have continued to mount. Since January 2014, nearly 10,000 people have drowned in the Mediterranean.

Amid this panoply of suffering, the Ghost Boat still stands out as a unique kind of tragedy. It’s the only known incident where we still have no information about the fate of the people involved.

In other cases, there are bodies that remain at the bottom of the sea or that are interred in distant graveyards without being identified. But, at least it is clear that there was a shipwreck that took place.

Despite all of the unanswered questions that we are still grappling with, one thing is clear. As long as thousands of people continue to risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean in search of safety, the potential for other ghost boats will persist and the tragedy will inevitably go on.

Everything Changes, But Nothing Changes At All was originally published in Ghost Boat on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When the Ghost Boat disappeared in 2014, stories about masses of people dying at sea were still new. More than 200,000 crossed the Mediterranean Sea that year, stuffed into overcrowded, rickety old fishing boats and small inflatable dinghies—and at least 3,280 of them died. It was shocking.

Three years into the crisis, though, these stories have sadly become commonplace. The week in May in which over 1,000 people died might have been the worst in a year, but these tragedies have rapidly become just more grim moments in a steady stream of reports. Now the number of people who have drowned in the Mediterranean since 2014 is rapidly approaching 10,000, and there is no end in sight.

The Ghost Boat, which was known about by a handful of people but untracked by anybody, has become just one incident in a much larger procession of suffering that trudges on and on and on and on. And the gutpunch that used to be delivered by each new headline has faded into a consistent background murmur. As numbness sets in, you have to ask: Why is this still happening?

Last year, the European Union decided not to run a robust search and rescue mission in the Mediterranean. Saving people’s lives, many lawmakers argued, created an unintentional pull factor that encouraged migrants to attempt the dangerous sea crossing from Libya to Italy.

But a series of wrecks last April—1,200 people died when two ships went down—showed that this didn’t stand up to scrutiny. Desperate people were willing to risk their lives, regardless of European policy. Now ships from an EU-funded mission, the Italian Navy and Coast Guard and NGOs are all patrolling the central Mediterranean. And, after the deployment expanded early last summer, the death rate dropped.

So what accounts for the spike again this summer? Is something wrong? Could it be improved?

The frustrating answer, according to AmnestyInternational researcher and search and rescue specialist Matteo de Bellis, is… not really.

Little has changed in terms of the search and rescue assets deployed in the Mediterranean in the past six months. “This makes it difficult to understand why so many deaths have been reported in recent weeks,” said De Bellis—who I had previously spoken to in Episode 7.

Summer time is usually a busy time for migration, with calmer seas and warmer weather making basic conditions a little less dangerous. Moving ships and staff closer to the danger zone, improving coordination between the various missions, and deploying more vessels on good weather days (when traffic is heavier) could potentially prevent some deaths, he said. But even with improvements, however, people will keep dying.

The Italian Coast Guard often fields 10 to 12 emergency calls per day. When the weather improves and the number of boats crossing the Mediterranean surges, that number can leap to over 20.

The question, according to De Bellis, is how they can effectively respond when there are that many incidents in a single day.

During the week of the recent tragedies, there were almost 8,000 arrivals in Italy — a high, but unsurprising number considering the good weather conditions. “Every year we see departures picking up starting from April and then reaching a peak in May, June, July, August, and September. We should expect arrival crossings in the region of 20,000 to 25,000 per month every month during the summer,” De Bellis told me.

More efficient search and rescue efforts make a difference, but he suggests that—ultimately—they are not the answer.

“As long as we see tens of thousands of people crossing irregularly… we [will] continue to see incidents and a very heavy death toll,” De Bellis said. “We need to reduce the number of people that feel they have no other option than traveling that way. This can be done by European governments through the offer of safe and legal routes to people seeking to get to Europe.”

But there has been little progress on a political solution. It’s been almost two years now since the Ghost Boat disappeared, and with no new policies forthcoming history appears doomed to repeat itself. The difference, perhaps, is that we have become desensitized to the human cost: the situation has become the new normal.

Onward.

A Very Heavy Toll was originally published in Ghost Boat on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The arrest of an alleged people smuggler has caused a bizarre controversy.

Medhanie Yehdego Mered—aka The General—is a smuggling kingpin. According to Italian police, this 35-year-old Eritrean is responsible for sending more than 10,000 people across the Mediterranean Sea from Libya to Italy, while reaping a vast profit and laughing at the fate of those who perish on his dangerously overcrowded boats.

In the highest profile case of its kind, he was extradited from Sudan to Italy to stand trial for his crimes.

Medhanie’s arrest in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, followed a year-long wiretapping investigation by Italian prosecutors and Britain’s National Crime Agency, the NCA. It was celebrated as the capture of one of the highest ranking people smugglers in central Africa and Libya and as a serious blow to the ability of people smuggling networks to operate with impunity.

But then things got strange.

Just hours after the news broke of his extradition, reports began to emerge that — maybe — Italian and British police had gotten the wrong man.

Our partner in the Ghost Boat investigation, Swedish Eritrean journalist and activist Meron Estefanos, was at the center of the unfolding controversy. She spoke with more than 20 people, including the sister of the man who was extradited, and they all said it was a case of mistaken identity.

The shackled man with a mop of curly hair seen emerging from an airplane in the picture circulated by the Italian police was not ‘The General,” according to Meron’s sources. Instead, it was a 27-year-old Eritrean refugee named Medhanie Tesfamariam Berhe, also known as Kidane.

“When the Italian media released the video clip of the man they arrested, my phone started ringing like crazy from people from all over the world,” she told me. “Everyone started telling me that the Italians have a wrong guy, I then started contacting refugees who were smuggled by the real Medhanie and they confirmed to me that it was not the smuggler who smuggled them.”

How exactly the mixup could have happened is a mystery at the moment. The NCA told reporters that “this is a complex multi-partner operation and it is too soon to speculate about these claims” and that it is “confident in its intelligence gathering process” — but Italian and British police are apparently investigating whether they did, in fact, arrest the wrong person.

The General is not the smuggler responsible for the Ghost Boat. In fact, he is a rival of Ibrahim and Jamal, the men who are responsible for it. But the confusion surrounding the case underscores just how hard it is to track down and verify information in the clandestine, chaotic and dangerous world of people smuggling.

This is something that we have become all too familiar with over nine months of trying to find the Ghost Boat. Whether it’s been trying to follow up on reports from the Libyan Red Crescent and International Organization for Migration, looking into leads from the transcripts of wiretapped phone calls or chasing information on the ground in Libya, our investigation has constantly trudged through murky waters full of conflicting information and non-functioning bureaucracies.

The unfolding Medhanie extradition saga is a reminder of just how difficult it is to navigate the world of people smugglers. And perhaps it sheds some light on why, nearly two years after the disappearance, we still have so little concrete information about the fate of the Ghost Boat and it’s passengers.

Onward.

Sent to our 2,112 followers.

Did Italy Just Catch The Wrong Man? was originally published in Ghost Boat on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is stop five on my series for Refugees Deeply:

Route Mediterranean 1 : 2 : 3 : 4 : 5

QUSAI, A BROAD-SHOULDERED 19-year-old with deeply guarded eyes, stands outside a large, green tent in a field. The wind-rumpled structure has a sign over its entrance made out of handcrafted wooden letters that read “Idomeni Cultural Center.”

The tent is home to a newly started educational project for the approximately 11,000 residents of the informal Idomeni refugee camps. These camps, near the Greek border with Macedonia, are stark reminders of Europe’s neglect in addressing the refugee question.

Qusai is lining up to find the schedule of upcoming English and German courses. “Arabic won’t help us in Europe. So I want to learn a language that will help me with my future,” he said.

Idomeni is home to roughly one-fifth of the 50,000 people stranded in Greece, a country that usually serves as a stepping stone on the road into the heart of Europe. The switch from a transit country to a forced destination, epitomized by the camp here, came about following Macedonia’s unilateral decision in March to close its border with Greece.

A small village of 150 residents, mostly pensioners living in quiet retirement, Idomeni became host to the desperate travelers. While volunteers struggle to meet the needs of these communities, refugees stranded by E.U. policy are growing increasingly desperate.

Qusai, a Palestinian from Yarmouk camp in the southern suburbs of Damascus, the Syrian capital, has been living in a small tent in Idomeni since the middle of February. Initially, he was waiting for his turn to cross the border into Macedonia and continue on to western Europe. But, when the border closed on March 8 he found himself stranded with around 15,000 other people. The open field was their only option for an abode.

His temporary home abuts a double fence topped with coils of razor wire. Macedonian soldiers with weapons slung over their shoulders patrol a thin strip of sand between the fences. A heavy tractor follows behind them, erasing their footprints so the sand can capture the evidence of new crossings.

After the forward movement of asylum seekers was blocked in February, the tents in the field in Idomeni multiplied like wild flowers. By the time of my visit the season was still in full bloom.

The population of the camp has dwindled, but only slightly, in the weeks since the settlement sprang up along a set of railroad tracks leading to the border. Many people cling to hopes that the border will open at some point.

Others stay here because they don’t trust the formal refugee camps set up as alternatives under the authority of the Greek military. Most of these people have little choice other than to believe that the situation will change.

The E.U.–Turkey deal that came into effect on March 20 has only complicated matters. The agreement calls for the deportation of refugees and migrants from Greece back to Turkey. The E.U. is supposed to resettle one Syrian from Turkey for every Syrian who is returned. The fate of non-Syrians under the deal is unclear.

At the same time, international law mandates that everyone is entitled to apply for asylum in Greece. But accurate information about how to make a claim or how long the process will take is scarce, and the rules are abstract and filled with loopholes that are difficult to comprehend. What will happen with applications that are made and the future of deportations remains to be seen.

Despite the confusion and difficult living conditions, Qusai is staying put. “We sold our house to pay for me to get here. I can’t go back. It’s impossible,” he said. “I left because I wanted to study … I just want to bring my brothers, sisters and family [somewhere safe].”

As the wait for a solution to the stalemate on the border has dragged on for months, there is a growing demand for projects catering to the needs of a longer-term population.

The cultural center is one such attempt. “We saw that the food was provided, the clothes were provided, but there was no education and no activities … the only activity people do here is wait in line,” Maisda Turki, a 39-year-old volunteer from Barcelona with Syrian roots, said about the inspiration for the project.

Education is in high demand for Syrian refugees. The five-year civil war has interrupted countless school and university educations, and educational resources are scarce in countries bordering Syria, such as Lebanon and Turkey, which host an overwhelming majority of the nearly 5 million Syrian refugees registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). “We spoke with some children and other people in the camp, and they told us that for five years they haven’t been to school,” Maisda said.

Organized by independent volunteers, the center offers a mix of language courses, basic school subjects and recreational activities for children and adults. The volunteers are working with more than two dozen teachers living in Idomeni who are interested in collaborating on the project. But the center’s capacity is limited compared to the size of the population it is trying to serve, and volunteers come and go over short periods of time, making continuity difficult. The courses are a temporary measure that can’t substitute for a formal education.

Everything in idomeni, in fact, has an air of semi-permanence. The Greek government is pushing to clear the site and move people to official camps, but there isn’t enough room yet in those camps for everyone. The uncertainty surrounding how long people will be here makes it difficult to plan and implement projects. “We don’t know if [the refugees] are going to go tomorrow or in one month, but while they’re here they need these activities,” Maisda said.

Despite the looming scenario of relocation, volunteers have set up other activities, including breastfeeding workshops and women’s groups. But the work has become significantly more difficult. “People are getting stressed out and tired. There’s been a lot of anger directed at some of our distribution points,” Phoebe Ramsey, a 28-year-old volunteer from Canada, said.

Phoebe has been volunteering in Greece since December 2015, first on the islands and now in Idomeni. She’s witnessed the change in people’s attitudes as they’ve gotten stuck and have languished in difficult conditions for months without adequate information.

Interpersonal and domestic violence are on the rise in Idomeni, according to Phoebe. Mental-health issues and the effects of trauma are starting to manifest themselves. Refugees lash out at volunteers because they are confused and angry, she said. There are no authority figures in the camp. So some refugees displace their frustration on the volunteers.

The camp bristles with an angry, angst-riddled energy that often spills over into protests and futile attempts to break through the border fence. Macedonian guards respond on occasion by showering the camp with teargas and shooting rubber bullets at demonstrators.

There’s no personal space in Idomeni. Living conditions are cramped and unsanitary, the air is choked with thick, plastic-smelling smoke from ubiquitous cooking fires, while water trickles into people’s tents when it rains, soaking their blankets and meager belongings. On sunny days, there’s no respite from the scorching heat. It’s an extreme and stressful environment for people who have already fled from war and oppression.

Volunteers are ill-equipped to handle it. “Now we are kind of humanitarian aid workers, but we don’t have the education or experience to do that,” Phoebe said. “It’s starting to get more and more complicated.”

Conditions in the camp are understandably weighing on the people staying there and also the volunteers who have chosen to be there.

Bashir, a 72-year-old Syrian Kurd from Qamishli, has been living in Idomeni since the middle of February. He’s here with his wife, two daughters and a nephew. Another daughter, 21, was separated from the family during their chaotic escape to the Lebanese border after their house was destroyed by a tank shell.

The 21-year-old daughter is now living with a distant relative in Damascus while her family is stuck in Idomeni. “I speak with her and she cries. She says, ‘Mom, Dad why did you leave me?’” Bashir told me. He has seven other children who are already in Europe. They are all educated with university degrees.

Bashir, a dignified man with graying hair and a neat mustache, did not foresee such dire conditions. He fled to save his own life and to give his three youngest daughters opportunities for their futures. Insistent on continuing the traditions of Syrian hospitality, he presented me with small gifts and invited me to a meal of rice and chicken cooked over an open fire.

After months on the border, he has grown despondent.

“We don’t have money or anything else. Where are we supposed to go?” he asks. “Where are the human rights? If there was such thing as human rights, we wouldn’t be treated like this.” The two daughters who are with him, bright girls with strong personalities, cry at night in their tents because of the situation.

Bashir doesn’t know if or how he can apply for asylum or what other options exist. He doesn’t want to go to the government camps because he thinks they will become closed detention centers, like the camps on the Greek islands. His time in Idomeni has been a humiliation. “If I died in Syria it would have been better than living here like this,” he said, sitting next to a low cooking fire emitting black smoke.

With no clear information, people in Idomeni are left to wait for eventual eviction followed by relocation to the official camps. But the situation in the official camps is not much better. Food, sanitation and basic resources in some of them are lacking, as the cash-strapped Greek government is awaiting financial aid from Europe. Even in the good camps, people are left with little to do other than while away their time waiting for an uncertain future.

Being forced to stay in one place without having arrived at a final destination is very bad for the mental health of people who escaped war and other traumatic experiences, according to Essam Daoud.

Essam is a Palestinian doctor from Haifa who started an organization called Humanity Crew with his wife, Maria. The organization provides psychological and social support in Arabic to refugees, addressing a long-term need. “[But] it’s a problem they haven’t … reached their goal,” Essam said.

While people are in flight, their survival mechanisms kick in, guarding them against the full weight of the trauma they’ve experienced, Essam explained. When they stop in one place, the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other psychological effects stemming from their experiences start to manifest. It’s difficult to treat these when people are still in an unstable situation. “It’s better not to start an intervention than to start it and not finish,” Essam told me.

Effective psychological treatment requires a stable setting. Still, Humanity Crew is starting to set up programs for children in some of the official camps that combine education and psychological support. “It’s providing education, it’s providing mental health and it’s providing the most important thing: normalcy,” Essam said of the program that his organization runs.

But the situation in Greece is anything but normal. The difficult living conditions and lack of clear information about the future have made it nearly impossible for volunteers to address people’s needs effectively. Without a place to call home where they can start rebuilding their lives, the people stranded in Greece are left to languish, awaiting a long-term solution that has yet to arrive.

This article was developed in partnership with Refugees Deeply, and you can find the original here. For important news about the global migration crisis, you can sign up to the Refugees Deeply email list.

This is stop four on my series for Refugees Deeply:

Route Mediterranean 1 : 2 : 3 : 4 : 5

LESVOS, GREECE — “I’m fine. My situation is not,” Tasif Ali told me in April, while standing on a beach on the Greek island of Lesvos.

Tasif is a lanky 20-year-old from Pakistan with a generous mop of black hair, a strong nose and a missing front tooth that he might have lost during his journey. When I met him, he was living in an unofficial camp organized by a volunteer group called the Open Borders Kitchen.

At the beginning of March, he crossed the Aegean Sea in an overcrowded rubber dinghy arranged by smugglers on the Turkish coast with the dream of reaching Western Europe. But his hopes of continuing on were dashed on March 8 when Macedonian authorities closed their border with Greece to refugees and migrants. More than 50,000 people were stranded in the Hellenic Republic due to the closure.

After a long and expensive journey, during which he was kidnapped, beaten and held for ransom, Tasif is now stuck. Along with thousands of others, he faces detention and deportation under a recent agreement between the EU and Turkey aimed at stemming the flow of people across the Aegean into Europe. Tasif was right. His situation was not good.

Earlier in the day, two ferries chugged out to sea from the port of Mytilene, the island’s capital, clearly visible from where Tasif was standing. They carried the first 136 people, almost exclusively South Asians, to be deported from Greece back to Turkey.

Under the E.U.-Turkey agreement, people stranded in Greece have the right to apply for asylum. But even if they qualify, their claims can be rejected and they can still be deported under the premise that Turkey provides protection for asylum seekers that is equivalent to what they would receive in Europe.

Human rights organizations have heavily criticized the agreement and the claim that Turkey is a “safe country” for refugees. Several days before the deal went into effect, Amnesty International released a report documenting the forced return from Turkey of around 100 Syrians per day since mid-January. At the end of March, Amnesty also documented the forced return of around 30 asylum seekers to Afghanistan.

The agreement has also solidified a kind of hierarchy among asylum seekers. Syrians are widely viewed as legitimate refugees, as a guard outside of the Moria detention center, based five miles north of Mytilene, said to me. Others, particularly those from South Asia and North Africa, are seen as economic migrants piggybacking on the legitimate flight of Syrians. “There is no war in Pakistan,” as the guard said.

This perception heavily influences the approval process of asylum claims. “Where you’re from depends a great deal on the success of the claim,” said Daniel Szabo, a communication officer with the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

But people from countries other than Syria are not just making their way to Europe for economic reasons, according to Szabo. “Some of these people are in very vulnerable situations, but don’t fall into that refugee category,” he said. The fate of these people — people like Tasif — under the E.U.-Turkey agreement is entirely unclear.

“I’m not coming here for money. I’m coming here to save my life,” Tasif said as people milled around the Open Borders Kitchen camp and the fading daylight cast long shadows of small tents camped across the ground. Like most of the Pakistanis in the camp, Tasif is from the Punjab region of Pakistan.

An ongoing series of border skirmishes with India that began in 2014 left dozens dead in the area, while flooding of the Chenab River killed hundreds and displaced over 100,000 in the past two years. To add to the climactic displacement, terrorist attacks in Pakistan have caused more than 300 civilian deaths since January 2015. The combined effect of these events led Tasif to seek a safer and more secure life in Europe. But the clandestine journey to get here was far from straightforward.

Along the way, Tasif put himself at the mercy of smugglers. After traveling from the Pakistani port of Karachi to Iran, his handlers put him on a bus. “There was no food. No water,” Tasif said. But it turned out that hunger and thirst were the least of his woes.

Tasif was kidnapped by the very people who were helping him flee.

“They said give us $2,000, and we will release you,” Tasif told me. The men beat him on the head and back with sticks and forced him to call his family for ransom money, but Tasif’s family couldn’t pay. Finally, two men in the group were able to come up with the ransom, a total of $4,000 dollars. Tasif and the others were allowed to continue their journey. The difficulties, however, didn’t end there.

Crossing the border from Iran into Turkey took 12 hours of walking across challenging terrain. During the trek, security forces opened fire on the group. Having narrowly escaped the gunshots,Tasif took a bus to Istanbul and then on to Izmir, Turkey’s third largest city and main portal for human smuggling. After spending less than seven days in Turkey, he boarded a rubber dinghy with 77 people and headed out to sea. “It’s capacity was written clearly, ‘For 18 people only,’” Tasif said incredulously.

“After I reached here the Greek Navy said: ‘Welcome to Europe.’ But, where is [the] welcome to Europe?” Tasif asked, sweeping his hand across the crowded, makeshift camp on the beach.

The trip took Tasif a month and cost him a little bit over $5,000. “I sold my home in Pakistan to get here,” Tasif, the eldest of six siblings, told me. “If I go back, I won’t have money and I won’t have a home.”

The evening I spoke with Tasif, there was a sense that the organization that held the Open Borders Kitchen camp together over several months of refugee arrivals was starting to fray. The dumpsters were overflowing. People were moving around with a frenetic energy. The packing pallets stacked at the entrance indicated that the place was being slowly dismantled.

Earlier in the day, the police came and informed the roughly 500 residents, mostly from South Asia and North Africa, that they would be evicted in two days. Everyone would be taken to Moria, an official refugee camp and registration point that has been turned into a detention center under the E.U.-Turkey agreement. From there, the expectation was that it would only be a matter of time before the people living in the Open Borders Kitchen camp were deported.

“Not safe Moria. Not safe Turkey. Not safe Pakistan,” Tasif said when I asked him about the future. “Many people say they will commit suicide if they go to Turkey. I will not go. Turkey is not safe for me. We wish to go to another country in Europe.”

The talk of suicide was not just hyperbole. There have been at least three attempts inside Moria, a former prison that is over capacity by about 1,000 people and surrounded with high fences topped with spools of razor wire, according to media reports and the United Nations’ refugee agency UNHCR. Frustrations in the camp, without enough tents to house everyone and lack of adequate sanitation given the overcrowding, recently boiled over into riots.

Tasif’s agitation is shared by others awaiting eviction. “We’re waiting here for the people to come and take us to Turkey,” Nabil, a dejected looking Algerian sitting with two friends at the entrance of the Open Borders Kitchen camp, told me. “If there was anything in Algeria, I would have stayed there. There’s nothing there.” The official unemployment rate for youth in Algeria is almost 30 percent.

Rumors were flying in the camp, and accurate information was difficult to come by. Nobody actually knew what was going to happen or when. “Do you know when the police will come?” Nabil asked, a flicker of hope flashing across his face.

The Open Borders Kitchen did not close immediately. But, on April 21, Greek police came early in the morning and placed the remaining residents of the camp on buses bound for Moria. The informal venue that had fed tens of thousands transiting through the island was closed.

People in Moria, and elsewhere in Greece, have now entered an indeterminate period of waiting. After 346 people were deported during the first week of April, returns to Turkey have slowed to a trickle because of heavy criticism from human rights organizations. “The first round of European Union-sanctioned deportations … was rushed, chaotic and violated the rights of those deported,” Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a press statement.

Logistical challenges have also impeded the returns. There are a large number of people applying for asylum in Greece. The E.U. promised to send experts to help process the claims, but most of the support has yet to arrive.

There are further concerns about non-Syrians deported to Turkey under the agreement. Syrians are automatically granted “Temporary Protection” status, but the fate of individuals from other nationalities is unclear. Turkey does not have a status that gives legal rights or protection to vulnerable people who are not considered refugees, according to Wenzel Michalski, HRW’s director for Germany.

Instead of allowing people to stay in the country, Turkey is seeking to send them back to their countries of origin as quickly as possible. On April 15, Turkey signed a readmission agreement with Pakistan to help expedite this process and is negotiating readmission agreements with a number of other countries.

Adding to the uncertainty for those facing deportation, nothing is known about the treatment or conditions of the people who have already been sent back to Turkey. “All these people disappeared inside a detention center in Turkey,” Michalski said over the phone. International and human rights organizations have been denied access to the facility where they are being held. “They’re behind walls and fences and nobody has seen them,” he said.

Barring any changes in the implementation of the E.U.-Turkey agreement, for Tasif — and other people facing likely deportation from Greece — this is the future that awaits.

This article was developed in partnership with Refugees Deeply, and you can find the original here. For important news about the global migration crisis, you can sign up to the Refugees Deeply email list.

This is stop three on my series for Refugees Deeply:

Route Mediterranean 1 : 2 : 3 : 4 : 5

TORBALI, TURKEY — As in any small agricultural town, cars in Torbali share the road with tractors, driven by men with weathered skin and rough hands, pulling gurneys of seedlings and produce.

But in this Turkish district about 30 miles (50km) from the western port of Izmir, many of the farmhands are refugees. Having fled Syria’s unceasing war, they are living here and working illegally.

Around 10 minutes by car from the town center, a road starts behind an old factory and runs along the edge of a field then hooks sharply to the right, leading up a hill toward the faded white facades of a defunct apartment complex. On either side of the road are rows and rows of white tents. The balconies of the apartments at the top of the ascent are hidden behind a patchwork of multicolored clothes drying in the sun.

Set against a backdrop of rolling, pine-covered hills, this place is home to around 1,500 people, all Syrian refugees, who are squatting on the land. “We came here from the camps in the south,” says Abu Khalid, one of the encampment residents. This is not his real name — like all Syrians in this article, he agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity.

Abu Khalid is a deeply tanned man with an impressive mustache and several missing teeth. He makes himself at home, inviting me to do the same.

“We came here to work because there was no work there,” he says, referring to the official camps in the south.

There are 2.75 million registered Syrian refugees in Turkey. About 90 percent of them live outside the 25 official camps in Turkey’s southeast.

The refugees in Torbali are mostly from northeastern Syria; places like Raqqa and Deir Ezzor that are now under the control of the so-called Islamic State. Before Abu Khalid and the others living here fled the war they were already among Syria’s poor. As generational herders, they barely made a living in the arid countryside.

”We would make milk, we would make cheese and sell it in the market,” Abu Khalid says.

The prospect of escaping to Europe in search of greater security and opportunity is not a thought that crossed their minds, despite being an hour from Turkey’s main smuggling port of Izmir. The journey across the Aegean Sea, made by more than 1 million refugees since January 2015, costs between $500 and $1200, depending on the season. The price is too steep for Abu Khalid and the other residents to afford. In recent weeks, in any case, the E.U.-Turkey deal that is being credited with bringing about a steep decline in the number of people landing on the Greek islands has nearly closed down that option.

With Europe out of reach and war raging back home, Abu Khalid and the other residents of this informal encampment are stuck in Turkey for the foreseeable future. Their lives provide a snapshot of the conditions faced by the poorest of Syrians who have sought refuge in Turkey: the lack of educational resources for their children, their exploitation as laborers and their precarious living situation.

The first thing that sticks out in the encampment is the number of children. They swarm around the taxi and press their faces against the window, making it hard to open the door. Easily outnumbering the adults in the encampment, the crowd of children is overwhelming. “Not a single one of them is in school,” says Abu Ayad, a stocky, balding man with a deeply wrinkled forehead.

More than 400,000 Syrian children of school age are not receiving any formal education in Turkey, according to a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report. Since September 2014, Syrian children have been able to attend Turkish public schools. But attendance rates have remained low due to language barriers, lack of information about the policy, issues with social integration and the economic destitution of this particular demographic of Syrians.

In Torbali, education is not even an option. “There is no school available for those who would like to go,” says Stephanie Kim Gee, a fellow at HRW who recently visited Torbali.

The alternative to education here is either whiling away time or working on the farms nearby.

Tareq is one of the children who labors in the fields. His 14-year-old body is a contradiction. His stunted growth makes him look younger than his age but he has the muscular forearms, dry, cracked hands, windbeaten face and eyes of someone beyond his years. We sit in the shade of a tree practicing counting in English with several other boys. It’s been at least two years since Tareq, or any of these children, attended school.

Instead, when they reach 14 or 15 years of age they try to find work like the older men. “I pick leeks in the field nearby,” Tareq says. But the work is inconsistent because the supply of laborers outstrips the demand and often depends on the season’s yield. Pay is around 35 Turkish lira ($12) per day for 12–14 hours of work.

Minimum wage in Turkey is 1,300 Turkish lira ($455) per month, or 43 Turkish lira ($15) per day. The hunger threshold for a family of four is 1,450 Turkish lira ($508).

Despite the long, grueling hours, the men and boys are often unable to make ends meet for their families. The maths simply does not add up.

Abu Khalid, Abu Ayad and two other men sit on the floor inside one of the buildings. They recline on cheap, imitation oriental rugs, resting their elbows on permanently darkened pillows, sipping tea. They speak optimistically about a new law enacted in January granting Syrians legal access to the labor market.

But so far, fewer than 0.1 percent of Syrians in Turkey have received work permits. The process requires employers to apply for the permits on behalf of the workers. And many Syrians are employed in textile work and factories precisely because employers can get away with less than the minimum wage.

Having legal employment status would be a big improvement, but seasonal agricultural work is regulated by a separate set of laws in Turkey. “Particularly for this group of … workers, these are the last people who will see any benefit from [the new labor law],” Gee says.

Without legal status, exploitation of the Syrian workers in Torbali is rampant. “Even when I do find work, I usually don’t get paid my full salary,” Tareq says. Often the employers or middlemen who arrange the employment keep a cut of the workers’ salaries for themselves or withhold the entire amounts.

“Employers hold so much power over these people and can withhold wages as much as they want and there’s nothing these people can do,” Gee says.

The room in which Abu Khalid and Abu Ayad sit is sparse. Other than the carpets, the walls are covered in cement and scrawled over with English and Arabic letters. Outside it’s sunny and warm. But in here the air is heavy with a dampness that makes the bones ache.

Conversation shifts to a recent visit from the police. “They came with a piece of paper written in Turkish and said it was an order that we had to move the tents. It’s OK for us to stay in the buildings, but there’s not enough room for everyone inside,” Abu Khalid says. “Where will people go?”

The municipality in Torbali informally allows the refugees to squat on this land, but it’s a precarious arrangement. The residents worry that with one misstep or change of heart from the authorities they could be forced back to the camps in the south. Because of the language barrier, the refugees do not always grasp the details of this ad hoc arrangement.

Most of the people here are registered with the government, which means they have access to basic health services. “Women who are pregnant give birth in the hospital,” Abu Khalid says. But no other services from the state or from international organizations exist, except for some medical visits by a small volunteer team.

The refugees buy their electricity and drinking water from one of the farmers at the bottom of the hill. This cost is their biggest burden. “Mostly, we want better access to electricity and water,” Abu Khalid says, adding that housing for everyone to live in would also be nice.

Sustenance comes primarily from bread and tea. Sacks of flour cost 75 lira ($26), or about two days’ wages. Abu Khalid shares a living space with 15 people from his extended family. “We finish a sack of flour in two days,” he says. Only two of his sons can find work.

Still, the people living here are comparatively content because there is safety, something they lacked in Syria.

“We were regular citizens. The regime, ISIS, all the sides dropped bombs on us and killed [many of] us. No one cared,” Abu Ayad says, with his elbow resting on a pillow and his fingers playing with the rim of his tea glass.

Despite the exploitation and hardships, Abu Ayad, Abu Khalid and the others were planning to stay in Torbali as long as their Turkish hosts would have them. “We’re staying here. There’s no other place for us to go,” Abu Ayad says. “Our country is destroyed.”

But that welcome apparently wore out. Mohamed, a frequent volunteer at the encampment, went to visit on April 19 and found it empty. “It was like war or something. Everything disappeared,” he says over the phone.

There were four or five men who were gathering the last of the belongings and setting fire to anything they couldn’t bring with them. Several days before, the Turkish police arrived at the camp and gave people the choice to leave on their own or be forced back to the camps in the south.

Conditions in the informal encampment had been improving, according to Mohamed. The residents had organized themselves and started a small school for around 40 of the children. Volunteer organizations were supporting the school, providing medical care and working to diversify the diet. “The situation was becoming better … but it all went away,” Mohamed says.

The people who were living here are now dispersed around Turkey. “They’ll just have to go somewhere else and start again from scratch,” Mohamed says.

Several times displaced and leading a forced nomadic life, families like those of Abu Ayad and Abu Khalid are further impoverished, with their children lacking the routine and grounding needed for their general development.

This article was developed in partnership with Refugees Deeply, and you can find the original here. For important news about the global migration crisis, you can sign up to the Refugees Deeply email list.

This is stop two on my series for Refugees Deeply:

Route Mediterranean 1 : 2 : 3 : 4 : 5

MERSIN, Turkey — Leila Ahmad still wears her wedding ring, a shiny silver band on the third finger of her left hand. At 37, she is the mother of four children — and a widow.

A Palestinian refugee from the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel in 1967, Leila was married to a Syrian. As the civil war in Syria neared its fifth year, her oldest daughter, 17, began her final year of high school. But before she could graduate, the family was forced to flee.

Leila’s husband was detained by the Syrian regime. The family knew nothing of his whereabouts or fate until they received a photograph.

Leila’s second daughter, 15, hands me a phone with two images of her father on the screen. In one he stands outdoors beaming, his body silhouetted against the sun. The next image reveals a close-up of his face with him lying on a cement floor. His mouth hangs open, his eyes are frozen and his skin paled by a deathly blue hue.

That was five months ago and the only closure the family had regarding his death.

Now, Leila and her children are in Mersin, Turkey, a southern port city about 185 miles (300km) from the border with Syria. They share a room with 11 other people, all mothers and children. The dormitory they live in is run by a U.S.-based charity started by a Syrian engineer. “Without this center, we’d be sleeping in the street,” Leila said.

“If they give us the basic support, we’ll stay here,” Leila said of the Turkish government. But her family receives no support from the government or international organizations. Even though she would take up any menial job to provide for her family, Leila isn’t able to find work. “I don’t want to travel [further] … I’m very afraid of migrating because you see people drowning at sea, but I don’t have a choice,” she said.

But even that option may soon cease to exist. With the E.U.–Turkey deal deterring refugees from attempting to travel to Greece, Syrians have few options other than to remain in Turkey. Due to uncertainty about their legal status and difficulties with integrating because of language barriers, Leila and other Syrians in Mersin find it hard to imagine a future here.

Mersin, a city of around 1 million, hosts some 300,000 Syrian refugees. During the early years of the Syrian conflict, middle-class Syrians relocated here, contributing to its reputation as “the best place to be Syrian in Turkey,” according to Mohammed Rabie Zein, a 43-year-old businessman from Latakia. Zein helped found an NGO called the Syrian Social Gathering (SSG) four years ago. SSG has been a vital link between the Syrian community in Mersin and the Turkish authorities in providing educational, health, legal and social support to refugees. But the organization has financial difficulties and the staff has been working for six months without pay.

Aid and support are dwindling at all levels. Many of those who came to Mersin with money and resources are now struggling.

“If the same services were available here as in Europe, no Syrian would leave Turkey,” said Hussein al-Ibrahim, a 48-year-old judge from Manbij in Aleppo. He fled his home in January 2014 when it was overrun by the so-called Islamic State.

Like all Syrian refugees, al-Ibrahim is in Turkey under a “ temporary protection ” regime that allows him to be here legally and have access to certain services, like free healthcare. But, like other Syrians in Mersin, he said he received very little support.

“When refugees reach Europe, they are given housing and a simple salary until they can take care of themselves,” al-Ibrahim said. “This is why people go to Europe. They just want to survive.” None of this basic support exists in Turkey. Even food aid, clothes and blankets are in short supply in Mersin, and it’s difficult to find work.

In January, Turkey introduced a new regulation allowing people in the country under the temporary protection regime to apply for work after six months of residency. This is “an example to other countries on how refugees should be received,” UNHCR spokesperson Selin Unal said. Previously, it was almost impossible for refugees to be legally employed.

Less than 0.1 percent of the total Syrian refugee population in Turkey qualifies for work permits, according to a Turkish government report shared with aid workers in late March. This amounts to just 2,000 out of the 2.5 million registered refugees.

“The situation here for us is unstable. If they give us refugee status we will have rights, but under temporary protection our rights are unclear,” said Mohamed Arabo, a 46-year-old lawyer from Afren in Aleppo, expressing a common sentiment among Syrians in Mersin. Highly qualified, he simply wants to continue working as a lawyer. But the system makes those like Arabo, who arrive with intellectual and financial resources, equally desperate. While they wait for an opportunity to restart their lives they slide into poverty.

Most Syrians in Mersin work illegally, making them vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. Language is a major barrier. European countries offer courses as part of an integration process. In Mersin, a few Arabic language schools teach a modified Syrian curriculum plus Turkish. Private institutions and NGOs, like SSG, offer courses, too, but there is no systematic program. Of roughly 35,000 school-age children in Mersin, only around 17,000 are actually enrolled, according to SSG statistics. Language is one of the main reasons for the low enrollment rate.

Among those who do continue their studies, some learn the language and try to earn a degree here with the hope of finding employment after graduation. But many parents send their children to Europe, along the dangerous route across the Aegean Sea, so they have the opportunity to graduate from high school and attend university.

Three of al-Ibrahim’s five children are in Germany. “The most important thing they went there for is education. Nothing else matters. If we didn’t send them there, they wouldn’t have a future,” he said.

Al-Ibrahim spent a total of $13,000 to have his children smuggled out of Turkey. “I sold my house to pay for them to reach Europe. I spent 20 years building that house just to sell it like that,” he said, raising his hand and snapping his fingers.

“When I left, I thought I would just stay for two or three months and go back to Syria.” Now, with his resources nearly exhausted, al-Ibrahim struggles to pay rent from month to month. Two of his three sons are adults, and the other is nearly 18, so making it to Europe through family reunification seems like a long shot. Building a future in Mersin, with all of the uncertainties, seems equally unlikely.

With the borders closing and no possibility of returning home, al-Ibrahim feels stuck. “I regret I didn’t go with them,” he said.

With the E.U.-Turkey deal returning Syrians to Turkey, the situation is set to become even more precarious as more refugees compete for a limited number of illegal jobs. With mounting accusations against the Turkish government of turning away Syrian refugees, it remains to be seen if those already in Turkey will outstay their “temporary” welcome.

This article was developed in partnership with Refugees Deeply, and you can find the original here. For important news about the global migration crisis, you can sign up to the Refugees Deeply email list.

Top image: The E.U. — Turkey deal involves mass returns of migrants and asylum seekers, including Syrians from Greece to camps in Turkey. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

This is stop one on my series for Refugees Deeply:

Route Mediterranean 1 : 2 : 3 : 4 : 5

TRIPOLI, Lebanon — The only ferry from Tripoli, Lebanon to the southern Turkish city of Mersin slipped out of port laden with tractor-trailers. There were no passengers on this Saturday night. Tripoli’s wharf was sparsely populated with about a dozen fishermen spread out along its length, untangling their nets as the sun dipped toward the horizon. The odd family strolled along munching on cooked corn or boiled fava beans hawked from a handful of colorful pushcarts.

Tripoli’s port has been unusually quiet. From midsummer last year till the beginning of January, the sleepy pace of life in this Levantine city was interrupted by the thousands of Syrians who crowded the port that had become their only point of escape from civil war at home and dire living conditions in Lebanon.

“To get to my work I pass the port everyday,” Khouloud al-Ali, a Tripoli resident, told me. “If you passed through here at night or during the day or in the afternoon … I don’t know how to even give a number of the Syrian families who were trying to get to Turkey and Europe.”

In August last year, the number of Syrians transiting through Lebanon to Turkey surged. “There were between 3,000 and 5,000 leaving every week,” Lisa Abou Khaled, a UNHCR spokesperson, said. Some of the 1.5 million Syrian refugees living in Lebanon and a number of Lebanese formed this exodus. Deteriorating conditions in Lebanon and no realistic hopes of returning home after five years of war spurred their departure.

The ultimate destination for most of these people was Europe — via dangerous journeys across the Aegean Sea to the Greek islands, where 850,000 asylum seekers landed last year. With 3,771 recorded deaths, 2015 was the deadliest year for migrants and refugees crossing the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe, according to the IOM. Tripoli’s port and Beirut’s airport were early stepping stones along this treacherous trail.

But on January 8, Turkey, home to nearly 3 million Syrian refugees, implemented new regulations requiring Syrians transiting through a third country to have a visa. Before, they could enter the country from anywhere with just a passport.

The move that stemmed the flow of people through Lebanon was followed by the closing of the Greek–Macedonian border in early March and the brokering of the E.U. and Turkey deal that is returning refugees who reached Greece after March 20 back to Turkey.

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has expressed concern over these recent developments, saying they make it even more difficult for people fleeing armed conflict to reach safety. In Lebanon, the increasing restrictions on movement have left Syrians in dismal conditions with little hope of escape.

Bab al-Tabaneh, one of Lebanon’s most infamous, conflict-riddled neighborhoods, a mere 15-minute car ride from Tripoli’s port, has become home to desperate refugees with meager means and few options. I met Sihem Nadaf, a tall, 40-year-old Syrian woman in an oddly shaped cinderblock courtyard in Tabaneh. Her calm face and demeanor were betrayed by the shakiness of her hands. Behind her, a faded wooden door concealed the dark, musty room that she shares with her husband and her sister-in-law and her family. Her brother is dead.

Nadaf fled her home in Homs three years ago after being shot in the leg. The area she lived in was under siege. Desperate for food, she tried to travel to an area under the control of the Syrian regime to buy bread. As she approached a checkpoint, regime troops opened fire and she was wounded in the leg. “I left Syria to escape the war, but ended up in a place where there is also fighting,” says Nadaf.

For Nadaf, there is no safety in Lebanon. The recent history of Tabaneh, where she lives, has been punctuated by periods of high tension and periodic clashes with the neighboring quarter of Jabal Mohsen. Separated by a thoroughfare called Syria Street, the neighborhoods are also deeply divided by their respective loyalties to parties involved in the Syrian conflict.

In predominantly Sunni Tabaneh, gunmen with sympathies for Islamist militias fighting against the regime in Syria, including the al-Qaida-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra, hold sway. On the other side of the divide, militias in the majority Alawite community of Jabal Mohsen support the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, a member of the same sect.

In October 2014, a string of clashes and bombings escalated into all-out fighting, the most intense spillover of violence from Syria into Lebanon to date. For three days, the Lebanese army battled Islamist-affiliated gunmen for control of Bab al-Tabaneh, leaving much of the neighborhood in ruins before the gunmen were defeated. In areas where the fighting was most intense, the freshly painted facades of reconstructed apartment blocks stick out against a backdrop of skeletal, bullet-riddled flats. Tripoli, a mere 50 miles (80km) from its sibling city Homs in Syria and 30 miles (50km) from Tartus by water, is too close for comfort for these refugees.

Narrow, intertwining alleys that make up the old souk at the heart of Bab al-Tabaneh lead to Nadaf’s house. When gun battles raged on the other side of the wall, fighters would use entrances on both sides of the courtyard to move without being detected by the army. “This house is not safe … the gunmen will come through the house again,” Nadaf says. “The people always say that there will be more fighting.”

Security is just one of several difficulties that Nadaf is facing. Rent is high. It has been difficult to find work. She is afraid to move around Tripoli without the right papers. Lebanon’s expensive and complicated residency system requires Syrians to have a Lebanese sponsor. “The situation is very bad … It’s hard to live,” she says.

In another part of Tabaneh, 32-year-old Manahel Awaj from Idlib sits on a threadbare carpet on the cement floor of a converted storefront that currently serves as her home. Four of her 11 children are gathered around her, and others flit in and out doing chores and playing in the street. Her youngest son, five and a half months old, is asleep wrapped in a blanket, in a baby carrier behind her.

UNHCR provides aid for five of the children. She receives nothing for the others. Only two of the children are in school, and her oldest girls, aged 13 and 14, work 16-hour days cleaning old shoes to be resold in the market. “They have pain in their hands and legs. They’re all thin and malnourished,” she says gesturing toward the kids, who are visibly gaunt. Her husband tries to work as a day laborer. Jobs are hard to find, unsteady and underpaid.

To make matters even worse, her youngest son was born with medical conditions that required multiple hospital trips. To afford the medical care her husband took out a loan about $1,300. The family cannot afford to pay it back. “We are living in very bad conditions here,” Awaj says.

“These are not just our conditions. These are the conditions of all Syrian refugees in Lebanon,” Nadaf said.

While Tabaneh might be a particularly precarious setting, Nadaf’s statement rings true for a majority of Syrian refugees in Lebanon. More than 70 percent are now living below the national poverty line, according to Leila Abou Khaled, UNHCR’s spokesperson in Lebanon. In 2014, the number was 50 percent. Like Awaj’s family, 90 percent are now in debt.

Khouloud al-Ali, the Tripoli resident I met at the port, is the director of a youth center in Tabaneh operated by a Lebanese NGO called the Rene Moawad Foundation. Many of the children in the center’s programs are Syrians who fled conflict. Through her work, al-Ali has regularly witnessed the economic and social hardships that the refugees living in the neighborhood and other parts of Lebanon face.

“We’ve seen more kids working on the streets. We’ve seen women begging. We’ve seen children out of schools,” she says.

Syrian children selling packets of tissues, gum or cheap flowers, and mothers cradling infants with outstretched hands have become ubiquitous features on urban streets throughout Lebanon.

Multiple Syrian families live in small apartments or converted spaces across the country, but especially in Tabaneh. Those who cannot afford rent live in abandoned buildings, often in extremely unhygienic conditions that lead to health issues and contagious diseases. With little separation between the cohabiting spaces of adults and children, boys and girls, strangers and family members, sexual harassment and assault have become prevalent, says al-Ali.

It’s also difficult for Syrian refugees to access medical care, she adds, because of the costs. She recalls visiting a woman who was seven months pregnant and had not seen a doctor. The woman didn’t know where and how she would give birth.

The difficulties of basic sustenance in Lebanon were the driving reason for people leaving for Europe from Tripoli last year. But, the majority of Syrian refugees, like Awaj and Nadaf, are too poor to make the journey. “Most of the families who were transiting were middle-income families,” people with passports and money or assets such as houses that they sold to afford the cost of travel, said Abou Khaled.

Now, with the new visa restrictions, leaving the country is nearly impossible for anyone. They must either wait for the war to end or hope for resettlement through a UNHCR program.

Resettlement is a slow process, and there aren’t enough spots available in receiving countries to keep up with the need. With only 6,285 people resettled from Lebanon in 2014, reaching a third country legally seems like a distant possibility for Lebanon’s Syrian refugees. “I don’t know a single family that has been resettled,” al-Ali says.

Without enough money and the closing borders, people like Nadaf, Awaj and their families are stuck in a cruel and indefinite limbo.

This article was developed in partnership with Refugees Deeply, and you can find the original here. For important news about the global migration crisis, you can sign up to the Refugees Deeply email list.

Top image: (left) Bullet holes on the walls of a home in Bab al-Tabaneh with buildings in the rival neighborhood of Jabal Mohsen visible in the background. (Preethi Nallu)
(right) The other side of the same home in Tabaneh faces a dilapidated building with Syrian refugees. (Preethi Nallu)

I recently received a piece of information that has added a new wrinkle to our search for the Ghost Boat — and I’m not sure what to do with it. So I’m here to ask for your advice.

About two months ago, I was contacted by a family member of one of the 243 missing people with a piece of information that demanded investigation. They said there had been fresh contact with somebody who was missing.

A woman in Eritrea, I was told, had received a phone call from her brother, who was meant to be on the boat when it left Libya. The call only lasted about 20 seconds, but she recognized his voice immediately — and in the short moment they had, he told her he was still in Libya, apparently being held in some form of captivity, and that other people from the group were there as well.

As you can imagine, the call raised hopes among family members that the missing people might be alive.

So what to do next?

The problem is that we need to verify or disprove this lead. And that’s going to be tough.

Firstly, Libya is a dark spot on the map. Even with the talented reporter Mohamed Lagha chasing information on the ground, it has been difficult to dig up concrete evidence about the Ghost Boat because of the chaos in the country.

And our investigation has conditioned us to be skeptical of stories we hear about phone calls. After all, when we first started working on this project, there was another similar clue that gave us hope of finding the missing refugees: a family member who had received a phone call from a Tunisian number, apparently from somebody who claimed to have seen the Ghost Boat passengers in prison in Tunisia.

We tracked down the origin of that story in Episode Four and, unfortunately, it was a tragic tale of miscommunication, heightened expectations and disappointment. In the end, the phone call wasn’t what anyone thought — in fact, it was just a dead end.

But even with our previous experience, there’s enough here that we have to take it seriously. The problem is that even though the existence of the phone call is a clue, it doesn’t give us anything to follow up on. It was made from an internet number that, as far as we can determine, is untraceable. There was no mention of location, aside from being in Libya—a country that is 900 miles from side to side, and has a population of 6 million. There were no mentions of other names, or places, or distinctive descriptions that might give us a clue of where to start asking questions.

We’re left with a crumb, but there’s no trail to follow.

Quite honestly, we don’t know exactly what to do. That’s why we are turning to you.

First, it’s important that you’re informed about the twists and turns. But second, we need any help we can get on this one. We are looking for ideas about how to follow up on this new trail.

Do you have any suggestions of how to advance or verify this phone call?

How Can We Trace This Mysterious Phone Call? was originally published in Ghost Boat on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.